/lit/ - Literature

>having an imperative order as your name

nice meme

The demise of the late David Foster Wallace has been greeted with an exaggerated outburst of chest-beating (often by writers whose own fictions stick doggedly to the well-worn pathways), but I can't help but feel that this has as much to do with his suicide as his prose. (After all, if, as Ballard said, "For a writer death is always a career move," then to be a felo de se is to exit dramatically, and pursued by bears.) No, the dominant school of fiction, still more so in Britain than in the States, remains character-driven and narrative ratcheted, and whatever the changing nature of its cast and content – the underclass of Irvine Welsh, the denizens of Rushdie's fables and those of other postcolonial Booker shoo-ins – it remains unperturbed by the idea that modernity simply cannot be accommodated in such securely cosy forms. To write "jolly good reads" with a beginning, a middle and an end – including almost mandatory redemption for a previously morally vacillating protagonist – is the very stuff of books, just as it's the stuff of life on this right, tight little island.

If I had the time and the space I'd expatiate on the fiendish parallels between this literary anachronism and the anachronism of our political system, and how the shadow play of our public life and the cardboard cut-out of our beloved fictions have an almost exact synchrony, but suffice it to note that the rather more enthusiastic embrace of so-called "postmodernism" by the British – in their shit architecture still more than their novels – represents, in my view, a determination to vault over all the quicksand of the 20th century, in order to gain the seemingly safer ground provided by a cut-and-paste job on the styles and modes that antedated it.