Christopher R. Beha on the 'realist novel'
… [David Foster] Wallace was the earliest and subtlest of his contemporaries in taking on the postmodern legacy. Nearly two decades ago he was writing in the Review of Contemporary Fiction about ‘irony, irreverence and rebellion’ and how they had ‘come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant garde tries to write about’. He warned how useless these tools are ‘when it comes to constructing anything to replace’ what they have destroyed and didn’t believe the destruction itself could be undone. In the end, he took writers like Gaddis and Pynchon seriously, as Eugenides or Franzen refuse to do, and he couldn’t ignore their critiques of realism any more than he could ignore their shortcomings. The problem with realism, in Wallace’s view, was not that there was something naive about the desire to capture reality but that reality itself had changed in ways that realism couldn’t capture. Metafiction, he wrote, ‘was nothing more than a poignant hybrid of its theoretical foe, realism: if realism called it like it saw it, metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.’
Wallace didn’t believe that this self-consciousness could be put back in its box or neutralised by the prelapsarian gestures of a book like The Marriage Plot, and sought to marry the formal mechanics and self-consciousness of postmodernism with the moral and emotional engagement of realism. To some, his humanised brand of post-postmodernism looked too much like the same old stuff, and many who might have been sympathetic to his aims were turned off by the results.
The Pale King, Wallace’s posthumous novel, suggests that he was struggling towards a synthesis of the warring elements in his work. Many took his death as a sign that the effort had defeated him. If you believed that the project of reconciling postmodern methods with the classical aims of the novel had destroyed Wallace, it would be a short step to seeing the entire undertaking as doomed. Eugenides’s depiction of Leonard Bankhead seems in part a refutation of this view. Leonard is smart, but he isn’t destined for groundbreaking work. His problems begin and end with the fact of his mental illness, but it isn’t a generational sickness: it’s all in his head.
During Wallace’s lifetime, Eugenides seems to have been among those who believed that he was part of the problem: ‘The moves people make today to seem antitraditional,’ Eugenides wrote, ‘are enervated in the extreme: the footnote thing, the author appearing in the book etc. I am yawning even thinking about them.’ The ‘footnote thing’ seems a particularly pointed allusion to Wallace. Wallace’s death may have caused Eugenides to reconsider. Near the end of The Marriage Plot, Mitchell has a conversation with Leonard in which he recognises him as a kindred soul, a spiritual seeker, rather than the cad he has taken him to be. But it’s too late: Leonard is already slipping away.
One has to admire the audaciousness of all this, even if it makes one uneasy. To borrow some terms from Semiotics 211, Eugenides has written a book that is at once ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’, a book that never stops being a coming of age novel, that is forever winking through the mask but never lets it drop. He can’t be faulted for lack of ambition. He too is seeking a way forward rather than a mere retrenchment. The Marriage Plot doesn’t fail because it is ‘merely’ a realist novel, it fails because it is so often a pedestrian one. It makes every argument in favour of the tradition except the only one that matters.
