Writer David Foster Wallace‘s doorstopper 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, has just been reissued in a 30th-anniversary edition, with a new foreword by Michelle Zauner. Oddly, when reading that foreword, one has to wade through a good deal of discussion of its readership’s demographic before one reads anything about the text itself. The ratio of words about the novel itself to words about the sociology of the novel’s readership is … unfavorable.
This, sadly, is to be expected, as Infinite Jest has fallen victim to an absurd and very modern phenomenon in which the obvious artistic greatness of the work itself plays second fiddle to the negative social implications of being a member of its fandom. Liking Infinite Jest or its author, after all, is the surest sign of being something called a “lit bro.”
In the internet age, in the absence of direct social interaction, we have been compelled to invent people to get mad at. For the literary world, with no more great feuds like the ones between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, or between Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman, no imagined villain has been built to such stature as the dreaded lit bro, whose signature emblem is a copy of Infinite Jest. Indeed, such an object of loathing was this chimerical creature that its adversaries either stood by or inadvertently contributed as literacy itself underwent a precipitous decline.
Maybe it is heartening that people care about this so much, even if all they do with their care is write fundamentally anti-intellectual essays and form cliquey, in-the-know shibboleths about which books you shouldn’t read. This kind of social signaling is typically associated with more popular art forms — you know, the mandatory throat-clearing before declaiming one’s appreciation for the Grateful Dead, Black Sabbath, roots reggae, or any number of works of science fiction and fantasy. “Yes,” in other words, “I know this popular thing’s fandom is uncool, but here’s why it’s still actually awesome.”
Ultimately, both the scale of the elite literary beau monde and its supposed tarnishing by an undignified readership existed almost entirely in the minds of those who ginned up this controversy. There was never a sizable quota of people reading Infinite Jest for any reason whatsoever. Yes, it eventually sold a million copies worldwide (many of these posthumously), which is impressive, but Fifty Shades of Grey outsold it by 149 million in half the time.
The British Empire spent decades worrying about the Russian threat to its interests in Asia, only to realize too late the scale of German militarization. The culturati of the 21st century made a similar mistake. It could only focus on niche and often invented irritants, like teeming hordes of mouthy male Wallace fans, not the comprehensive collapse of its entire aesthetic world. At the height of this mania, a dean of humanities at Yale University took to the Chronicle of Higher Education to announce her refusal to even read Infinite Jest, and this came during an era when publishing houses and bookstores were being rolled up left and right.
Of course, the world is a big place, and I’m prepared to imagine a particular male who evinces certain stereotypically “bro-ish” characteristics while foisting Wallace onto his paramours. But how many of them could there possibly be? Enough to even field a full-court basketball game? (A corollary to this theory would be that in fact multiple women writing for Gawker, N+1, Slate, Salon, Vice, The Cut, etc., all happened to date one terrible guy with a penchant for performatively reading Infinite Jest, and they’ve been taking their revenge out on the literary world ever since.)
Perhaps one of the weirdest aspects of this whole business was how Wallace fandom became a kind of independent signifier separate from any significance accorded to his published works. For example, a Quentin Tarantino-loving film bro is necessarily associated with certain Tarantinoesque tropes: gruesome violence, pop culture references, dialogue meant to be quoted more than spoken, and so on. This is to say that one can infer something about a person’s character and tastes from the substance and style of their preferred films. But what exactly is the relationship between the texts and the lit bro when it comes to Wallace? What are we to assume about their aesthetic preferences? Love of digressive prose? Excessive fondness for endnotes? An obsession with tennis?
No, the lit bro was understood to be an entirely self-referential phenomenon: A man reads Infinite Jest because he wishes to be recognized as the kind of man who reads it. And this is perfectly apt for an era in which, judging by the critical output, it was increasingly impossible to conceive of literature or art as something that might exist for its own sake, judged on its own merits.
And even if there was something pretentious about reading what is, admittedly, a difficult and overlong novel with a strange postmodern plot construction, well, whoever said that appreciation of art can only be accessed through pure motives? I am a great lover of jazz, but I did not know anything about jazz when I bought my first albums — I merely had a vague understanding as a pretentious 15-year-old that jazz was something cool and aspirational. I once took an elective on William Faulkner mainly because a girl I had a massive crush on persuaded me to. (No luck with the girl, but I still revere Faulkner to this day.) So it goes. Anyway, I suspect many of the online bloggers-cum-critics who so fiercely denounced the “performativeness” of the lit bro can be found swanning around New York’s galleries and museums. The Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art are venues notably unfree from their own pretenses.
Whether one is cavalierly dismissing or thoughtlessly boosting art, the result is the same: a refusal to seriously engage with it in the way it is best engaged with. For beneath all of the social signaling and status games, literature remains, and it has its own purpose. Here is Wallace himself addressing that purpose:
“A big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering… We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.“
LEPORE GRASP OF THE CONSTITUTION
The irony here is that Wallace, whatever his personal flaws, brought to his writing a high moral seriousness that can be found only in an impoverished form among subsequent critics. His fiction represented an attempt to grapple with the fact that postmodern techniques were ideal for capturing the fractured reality of the televisual, and later internet, era while being utterly unsuited for engaging with human questions of the greatest import.
All of this is to say that the Mean Girls school of cultural criticism was not exactly a golden age of aesthetic judgment. One would like to think we’ve emerged from the fever swamp of that low, dishonest decade. But, if we listen to people whose interest in books is what reading them says about us, rather than what they say, here we remain.
David Polansky is a Toronto-based writer. Find him at Strange Frequencies.
