Genuflect or Reflect?
McCarthy, Wallace and the influence of anxiety
Despite its obvious pretensions, literary discourse is really no different to any other kind of online fandom. It is a terrain in which only the Toho titans of text are visible. Always the same handful of names, always the same rapid back and forth of sneering attack and defense, Swift against Perry, Joyce against Hemingway. The atomic breath of high realism blasting away at pomo’s mothy wings.
Most recently, Cormac McCarthy and David Foster Wallace, two of the twentieth century’s very biggest beasts, have been lined up for a bout of this distasteful taste-making by Vincenzo Barney. The gist being that McCarthy so loathed Infinite Jest that he gave up on the modern novel altogether. And as no other novel or novelist has so influenced the current crop of writers and the merry-go-round of MFAs and journals that produced them, Wallace is fingered as the source of the weak poison that has dripped onto the national page since the mid-90s.
Literary fiction makes for an odd battleground in the culture wars. Hardly anyone writes it, reads it or makes a living from it. It isn’t particularly adaptable for television or cinema. For the most part it persists because a small number of writers, agents, publishers and readers refuse to give it up, much like opera and ballet, only without the corporate sponsorship and opening-night gowns. It’s a bastion of quiet seriousness, a reservoir of cultural capital that can’t exactly be cashed in, but which we all agree still has value.
For that reason, writers are often drafted as combatants by both left and right. And in this war, not having a pulse is an advantage. Dead writers can’t contradict or peddle pesky nuance. They exist only to be interpreted. The dead novelist most frequently commissioned on the right is Cormac McCarthy, for he is that rarest of things: a conservative writer whose artistic and intellectual contributions are unassailable—Taylor Sheridan with a Pulitzer and a National Book Award (and an unjustly denied Nobel). It goes without saying that the question of whether McCarthy really would’ve swapped out his stetson for a MAGA cap is largely irrelevant to the point being made. McCarthy represents something pure and good and holy: a serious artist who sings America’s sour, glorious story without the smallest hint of apology. In contrast, his snivelling literary inheritors are so dim they don’t even realise they are standing in his shadow.
When thinking about the debts writers owe to their forebears, Harold Bloom is an obvious reference. But Bloom’s cycle of influence, resistance and generative destruction isn’t what’s going on here. Rather than kill McCarthy, his acolytes simply revere him. He is held up as someone utterly distinct: the laureate of pump jacks, babies-on-trees and busted leather flintcraws (okay, that last one was Eli Cash). The only voice severe enough to tell America in all its hope and horror. And yet, for all their reverence, there is one notable area in which the McCarthy gang diverge from their leader: their own writing. In fact, they don’t just diverge, they betray. Because the writer they most often resemble is the one they most profess to despise: the damp bandana himself, David Foster Wallace.
Take any sentence from Barney’s piece and you’ll see Wallace’s imprint: “While it was personally edifying when Britt told me of the “drek” reaction in her Escalade, a rainbow shimmering against a thunderhead, the Catalina mountains high above us — O, those days! — it was not in the least surprising, and anyone who’s fallen out of his chair should stay down on the floor for a while and crawl around like a pig.” It’s the hyper self-aware, interruptive style of someone who has been shaped—whether they like it or not—by television and therapy and the need to seek attention. And as for the coinage of “publishing-industrial complex”, the only argument you could make against it being a Wallace-ian construct is that he’d have named it better.
Which raises two related questions: why don’t the writers who lionise McCarthy write like him, and why do they hate Wallace when his influence is so clear?
The first is relatively simple to answer. Nobody writes like McCarthy. Nobody could get away with it. He was the last of his kind, the last we would consent to (because who today has patience to be preached at?) That oracular, homiletic register belongs to another age, a time before televisions and smartphones, a time when working the land was an occupation rather than a lifestyle bit, when our livelihoods might kill or maim us rather than giving us carpal tunnel and a lingering sense of purposelessness.
The second arises from that very purposelessness. More than any other writer, David Foster Wallace alchemized (and in many cases predicted) the vapid, endlessly valent, never-ending now that has persisted since the dawn of the internet. And he did so through the combination of a pedantic, recursive style and an intellect that was just peerlessly attuned to the tiny morsels of meaning afloat in all that static. Sure, there’s the odd bit of truly abstruse vocabulary (certainly a few pages deeper than ‘poltroon’ in most editions of Roget’s), but for the most part, the trick beneath his prose is deceptive. He’s digressive and discursive, meandering like a lapsed halfway house junky on a mission, and yet he always lands. Not with the stentorian weight of a sermon, but with something supple and sly. He sounds almost friendly.
Wallace has been dead now for nearly twenty years, but his voice is still the model for most attempts to explain our paradoxical world, galloping and limp. He is still a sibling to this generation of writers, not a father figure. So why has Bloom’s crime switched from parricide to fratricide?
Bolaño is another name that often surfaces in the discourse, though for different reasons and with different inflection, as someone most of us only encounter in translation. In the fugue-like middle section of The Savage Detectives, Amadeo Salvatierra shares a bottle of mezcal and his memories of the missing writers, ending with the following reflection: “All poets, even the most avant-garde, need a father. But these poets were meant to be orphans.” In the novel the line is delivered with real pathos for the lost communion between generations. Bolaño’s Visceral Realists were orphaned by circumstance, but Vincenzo Barney and his ilk have chosen violence.
I’m certainly not going to argue that it’s easy to make a gnostic myth of the American west. Blood Meridian is an important novel, even if it doesn’t quite say the things its most ardent admirers would like it to say. But I am going to argue that this is a trick that can only be performed once. The era of the Great American Historical novel is over, bowing out with DeLillo’s Underworld, published only a year after Infinite Jest. Nuclear anxiety, cold war impotence, campus trysts, heroism and paranoia, cowboys and runaways — all gone. All that remains is the eternal now. And the eternal now makes only one demand of artists: you must create within it or appear scared of it.
But what is a writer to do if he (and I find myself gendering this sentence quite deliberately) is unable to summon that specificity, that deftness of self-interrogation, that ease with unease? If the tools given to you—the weightless irony, the matter-of-fact affect, the brutal equalizing of high and low—only enable you to add more to the now, indistinguishable from all of the now that has gone before? How do you handle the shame?
Aptly enough, the answer is Biblical. Stick the knife in your sibling and ask your father for forgiveness. McCarthy looks down approvingly. You tell him that the blade is hand-forged, ordered online from a guy who makes them in Mexico.