The important quote is here:
Serious Novels after Joyce tend to be valued and studied mainly for their formal ingenuity. Such is the modernist legacy that we now presume as a matter of course that “serious” literature will be aesthetically distanced from real lived life.
Pointing to Ippolit’s “Necessary Explanation” in The Idiot, Wallace asks:
Can you imagine any of our own major novelists allowing a character to say stuff like this (not, mind you, just as hypocritical bombast so that some ironic hero can stick a pin in it, but as part of a ten-page monologue by somebody trying to decide whether to commit suicide)? The reason you can’t is the reason he wouldn’t: such a novelist would be, by our lights, pretentious and overwrought and silly. The straight presentation of such a speech in a Serious Novel today would provoke not outrage or invective, but worse—one raised eyebrow and a very cool smile…. People would either laugh or be embarrassed for us. Given this…who is to blame for the unseriousness of our serious fiction? The culture, the laughers? But they wouldn’t (could not) laugh if a piece of morally passionate, passionately moral fiction was also ingenious and radiantly human fiction. But how to make it that?
My first urge was to say that this was true, but then I wondered if the books I have read really support it.
What have I read that's both Serious Lit and recent? By recent I suppose Joyce is a good cutoff.
We have The Fountainhead, DFW's own Infinite Jest (Though only a small part of it, as true to the joke I didn't bother to finish), Invisible Cities, a good smörgåsbord of HS required reading, like Animal Farm and Catcher in the Rye... And even among these titles the only ones that might not be considered old is IJ, which was published in the 90s, and Invisible Cities, which was published in 1972. In other words, I have no idea what passes for a Serious Novel nowadays. If it was written before I was born I probably have not bothered with it.
For a while I've noticed that I simply do not like 'modern' novels and have been struggling to understand this bias. For the most part I have assumed that the problem was in the sheer number of novels being published and the fact that the cream has not yet risen, which means the modern reader is slogging through the crap that has been only somewhat sifted out by the publishing industry. The democratization of publishing has exacerbated the problem. When I went up to Lunacon there were a number of authors peddling their small press publications. I purchased a book and found it riddled with basic grammar and copy errors before I even realized that as a story it wasn't any good.
If you go to Barnes and Noble, where the stock is more closely curated, you will still find that 99% of the titles are completely mediocre. Slogging through a minefield of duds is not my idea of a good time, and so I've stuck to what I know will at least give me something, even if it's nothing more than a stronger historical perspective or a familiarity with a title that has had an effect on literature as a whole. Even then you have duds. The Octopus was not worth my time, but the chances that I wonder why I bothered drop considerably when I go back 50 years. So, as a reader I'm not really equipped to talk about the situation of modern Lit.
I think the reason I feel so inclined to nod my head at DFW's position is that I can see the influence of the thought he is expressing in my own writing. Perhaps it's because I'm a denizen of the internet, where expressing passion is akin to being trolled, but it seems almost impossible to hit earnest without slipping into shrill. Perhaps it's because I'm an intellectual child of the 1900s that I struggle with the mores of my own time, but I would like to write something earnest and forward and true to an older aesthetic without having it feel pretentious and out of touch.
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