"The Best Mind of His Generation"?

Ah, eulogies.  Today, as though the blogosphere weren't already groaning under their weight, we have yet another one for David Foster Wallace.  This one's from A.O. Scott in The New York Times, and it's fueled, as one friend said, by Scott's unshakable conviction that "genius has a dick, and it's pink." 

Yep, in defining DFW's generation, of which DFW is "The Best Mind," Scott limits himself to a cozy white male circle.  The salient figures of the generation are named:  Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Lethem, and Michael Chabon, along with runners-up Richard Powers, Rick Moody, and Dave Eggers--all of whom are responding to the "masterworks laid down by brave exemplars of experimentalism"--wait for it:--"William Gaddis and John Barth, Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut."  And Scott's not hallucinating DFW's Laius; he quotes Wallace as saying, "If I have an enemy, . . . a patriarch for my patricide, it's probably Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon." 

Were there no writers of color or white women writers who were important enough, enough of an influence, to cause anxiety?  Or did DFW just not bother to read them? 

Has Scott?  You wouldn't know it from the column, which is basically one long mancrush: 

He could have been a T.A. in one of my college courses, or the slightly older guy in Advanced Approaches to Interpretation who sat slightly aloof from the others and had not only mastered the abstruse and trendy texts everyone else was reading, but also skipped backward, sideways, and ahead. . . .  But he also played tennis--Mr. Wallace, in fact, had competed seriously in the sport--and could quote lyrics from bands you only pretended you'd heard of.  Without even trying, he was cooler than everyone else.

Ooooh.  Tennis.  Cool bands.  (And if there was a "slightly older" woman who'd "mastered" all that--and moved on--Scott wouldn't have noticed her.  She wasn't interested in hanging out with him anyway.) 

"Obsessive, ironical, needy:  David Foster Wallace's voice was the voice in your head," reads the pull-out quote on the front page of the Week in Review section.  (Let me just say that again:  the front page of the Week in Review section.)

"David Foster Wallace's voice was the voice in your head"?  Um, no.  Not the voice in my head, thanks very much.  I guess I'm not part of the same "unhappy collective consciousness" whose voice is "[h]yperarticulate, plaintive, self-mocking, diffident, overbearing, needy, ironical, almost pathologically self-aware" (though I've been known to act that way around the house--at least, the plaintive, overbearing, and needy parts).

I guess me and DFW were just not hanging out in the same milieu; the demons that haunt me and DFW just weren't the same.  To wit, I love this line:  "Even when his subject matter took him outside himself--into the world of lobsters, tennis players, cruise-ship vacationers, or presidential campaigners--the fundamental problems of writing remained in the foreground."  I coughed:  these are the worlds that took DFW "outside himself"?  Lobster, tennis, cruise ships, and presidential candidates?  Whew!  That's a mighty privileged world he's wrenching his attention away from himself to obsess about.  Gosh darn, fellas!

You've gotta love Scott's blitheness, too:  "He was smarter than anyone else," he asserts offhandedly.  Really? 

None of his peers were preoccupied so explicitly with how it felt to arrive on the scene as a young, male American novelist dreaming of glory, late in the 20th century and haunted by a ridiculous, poignant question:  what if it's too late?  What am I supposed to do now?
      This is a common feeling for those of us born in the 1960s (for the record, I'm four years younger than Mr. Wallace). 

Oh, wait!  I get it!  If you define  DFW as brilliant, and then say "us," "our," and "we" a whole bunch of times, then you are, by extension, also brilliant--perhaps even the Next-Best Mind of your generation.  And if you define the most important subject matter that a writer can write about as being "a young, male American novelist dreaming of glory," then the rest of us can just hang up our hats and go home, leaving the field wide open for those folks who are invested in that particular story. 

Yawn.  Can someone call a halt to the enshrinement process, the lionization?  

An esteemed Chicana writer, teaching a workshop, once referred to a short story "by John Updike or one of those güero writers."  I quietly gasped.   After my long years of graduate training in the American canon, her remark smelled alluringly like heresy.  To be so blunt about the fact that the biggest white male names in The New York Times Book Review do not define your canon--that really, you cannot be bothered to distinguish among them, as though they are unimportant, interchangeable, difficult to differentiate, perhaps a little blendy-into-each-other, a little boring?  What a nice, cold swallow of clarity.  Ahh.  Bracing.

But she knew those writers were there.  She'd read them, studied them, been forced to analyze and emulate them by her own graduate professors, been faced with their successes in the pages of the country's most hegemonic journals and magazines.  No one let her just study Chicana writers.  Shoot, there barely were any when she went to school.

In A.O. Scott's encomium, no writers outside the white, male world of privileged self-obsession exist.  And he doesn't even acknowledge that.  

Suicide is a tragedy, a sad waste.  (As you may know from this blog--and not just once--it's something that hits me hard.)  The loss of a bright talent is a shame, and it's sad that a good writer died.  It's sad that he suffered extreme emotional anguish.  It's really sad that he hanged himself and left his body for his wife to find, a choice that can be read right into the psychological narrative of suicide as a passive-aggressive act.  Sad, sad, sad.  My critique of Scott's in-group eulogy isn't to make light of the dead or their pain.

But suicide is also, as my sister-in-law Cool Julie once called it, "the ultimate chickenshit dance."  

Okay, David Foster Wallace, we're sorry you're dead.  Can we all quit dancing now?