DFW
At the behest of my MA candidates, this summer I compiled a 10 page list of “Suggested Readings in English Prose” from the 18th century to the present day.
The Chinese, unsurprisingly, have a somewhat better idea of Anglo-American Lit. than 99.99 % of Westerners have of Chinese Lit. (Quick: How many Chinese writers can you name? If you can name five—from 5000 B.C. to the present day—congratulations, you’re in the 99th percentile.) However, what the Chinese have heard of represents only a fraction of a fraction…Pride & Prejudice, Jane Eyre, The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, and the like…typically read in bastardized translation (all Chinese translations can safely be assumed to be “bastardized” until demonstrably proven otherwise) or kiddie-lit abridgements. So even after a year’s worth reading has opened their eyes a bit, my students still hardly know where to begin. The list is intended to help them puzzle out the choices at their disposal in inexpensive Wordsworth editions down at Wangfujing, and to broaden their horizon a little beyond “the usual suspects.”
I bring this up only because on this list I ended up noting in red type a handful of authors from each period that I consider personal favorites, and one of them, David Foster Wallace, died yesterday, by his own hand. Not that I expect them to either find or read DFW here—he’s a challenging writer even for native speakers to tackle: as thorny, dense, and deliberately difficul
t as a Melville or a Joyce—but I thought that as long as I was making a list, the best living writers should be at least be mentioned.
It’s a curious thing, perhaps, to consider an author a “favorite” when one has, in point of fact, read only 1.5 of his works; but when one of those works is Infinite Jest—1,079 pages of pitch-perfect comedy and threnody—it’s a given. Very few novels stay with one 10 years after the fact; that one has. It’s not for everybody—many can’t get past the idea of all that reading-time only to have the rug of any climax or dénouement pulled out from under one’s feet—but I know of no other novel so fully relevant to the world in which we live.
Indeed, a bright student asked me the other day why I have such a fondness for the great Victorian novelists, and, though at a loss for a cogent answer at the time, I subsequently thought it through, and decided it’s because of the catholicity of their vision and their ambition—their attempt to capture an entire world in prose. And this is what DFW, at the height of his powers, accomplished. His voice captured the Zeitgeist of my generation. And despite the dark currents of much of his writing (he is as eloquent as anyone has ever been on monotony and despair) it’s both frightening and dismaying to me that he wouldn’t have chosen to see life’s “jest” through to the end.
