David Foster Wallace, from writer’s almanac

Today is the birthday of novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace (books by this author), born in Ithaca, New York (1962), author of Infinite Jest (1996), which became a best-seller even though it was more than 1,000 pages long, with 100 pages of footnotes. Wallace, who had battled devastating depression his whole life, committed suicide in 2008. His unfinished novel, The Pale King, was published in 2011.

He said: “Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. … The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years.”

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Wallace’s thoughts on postmodernism strike a chord within me.  I usually felt the same sort of despair when I went into communication lectures at UCSD. (Here is a definition of Postmodernism from Wiki) His quote on being a literary orphan is interesting. I feel like it’s talking about something deeper than just literature.

If I had the chance, I would ask Wallace why he didn’t choose his own literary parents. And that…would be an interesting conversation on nature vs. nurture.