Brief Conversations with Lee Konstantinou

My interview with Lee Konstantinou on the book of essays about DFW that he co-edited, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ran at Bookforum on Friday.

Bookforum: Apropos of the points you raised, we should definitely talk about Wallace as a “post-ironic” author. Fiction that transcended irony was one of the white whales that Wallace famously hunted—some have even argued that this was what stymied him after Infinite Jest and during the writing of The Pale King. In your essay for Legacy, you contend that “Octet” from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and “Good Old Neon” from Oblivion are successful attempts at this kind of post-ironic writing. These stories push the reader into an actual engagement with Wallace himself. I would wholeheartedly agree that belief is central to a post-ironic form of writing; do you see indications that this will be part of Wallace’s legacy?

Lee Konstantinou: Some background: I’m currently working on a book organized around different countercultural figures or character types—the hipster, the punk, the coolhunter—and what’s lost in reading my Legacy of David Foster Wallace essay in isolation is that Wallace is just one part of a broader argument I’m making about U.S. literary culture in the 1990s and 2000s. In naming the figure I associate with Wallace “the believer,” I am very self-consciously alluding to The Believer magazine; I had not just Wallace but the whole McSweeney’s network in mind. The sorts of questions these writers seem to be asking is: What does it mean to be a believer, especially of a secular variety? What exactly do we believe in today? What are the barriers and challenges to formulating belief?

Of course we believe all sorts of things, whether it’s in the existence of God or in the existence of Australia (for those of us who haven’t visited), or, at a minimum, in our own existence. Wallace’s terror that we are trapped in an infinitely dense hot dot of solipsism may seem like a philosophically uninteresting problem when taken literally. And yet for a certain elite set of largely U.S.-centered artists, even if these artists pragmatically acted as believers in order to get through the day—one presumes they paid their taxes, whether or not they believed in the reality of the U.S. government—there was a sense that the postmodern tradition was bankrupt. The need to believe in something, to overcome incredulity, was stronger than ever. And yet, it just wouldn’t do to simply write what I described above as “mainline realism,” since conventional renditions of reality were necessarily falsifications often manufactured by powerful interests. Under these conditions, what do you do?

So if the conventions of realism are not to be believed, and yet if anti-conventional postmodernism has become lifeless though wildly popular in centers of symbolic power and control, what do I do as a writer aspiring to be awake to my own practices? Even more troubling, how do I communicate with a reader?

This is the problem “Octet” and “Good Old Neon” address. What interesting writers are pursuing similar questions today? Obviously, the folk orbiting Dave Eggers’s various enterprises share some of these concerns, and Eggers himself; I’m a fan of Chris Bachelder and Alex Shakar, both of who come up with answers different than Wallace’s. It’s not a perfect book, but I like Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper, which performs a similar inversion of metafiction. I think Zadie Smith is increasingly working in a postironic vein, with mixed results, though On Beauty has grown on me over the years.

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