My fascination with the writing and life of
Gertrude Stein goes back a way now. I’ve been thinking about what attracts me
to her writing recently, because I have a similar reaction the writings of David
Foster Wallace, even though the writing of the two, one from each end of the
twentieth century, has little in common. GS said herself that she was doing
writing that was the first real writing of the twentieth century; earlier
writing she maintained was of the nineteenth century.
In her Lectures
In America she says,
Our period was
undoubtedly the period of the cinema and series production. And each of us in
our own way are bound to express what the world in which we are living is
doing.
GS was writing a new way, a way demanded of
daily life in the world of the moment. Of course, this is a simplistic
statement about her work, but it is this element of wanting to write in a new
way to embody something of a new (twentieth century) world that for me connects
her to DFW.
As is made clear in D T Max’s biography of DFW,
Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, Wallace
constantly searched for a way to
write that embodied what he was writing about. In a world where entertainment
rules and pleasure is the end game, how do you write a novel that is not just
an “entertainment”? How do you write about boredom without being boring? How do
you move your fiction writing from clever, smart-alecky, irony to conveying
authentic experience without sentimentality? These were life and death matters
to Wallace.”
In an earlier blog I wrote about DFW’s novel, Infinite Jest that it was “an
evisceration of American-style, commercial, pleasure-based culture where there
is so much choice that choice is meaningless, in a USA where people are
over-entertained and sad and bored and lonely.” Max’s biography details
Wallace’s struggles with drugs, alcohol and depression and the ways he overcame
these from time to time. Finding a way to write that was true to experience,
that was what GS and DFW had in common, I think. That and nothing much else,
except perhaps having read extremely widely.
