Like most storytellers who use mystery as a structural device and not a thematic device, Lynch is way better at deepening and complicating mysteries than he is at wrapping them up. And [Twin Peaks]’ second season showed that he was aware of this and that it was making him really nervous. By its thirtieth episode, the show had degenerated into tics and shticks and mannerisms and red herrings, and part of the explanation for this was that Lynch was trying to divert our attention from the fact that he really had no idea how to wrap the central murder case up.
Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? “Sure.” Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, “then” what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.
I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of “generalization” of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.
I strongly suspect a big part of real art fiction’s job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us first to face what’s dreadful, what we want to deny.
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9 responses to “David Foster Wallace on David Lynch, Irony, and Preaching”
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LOVE this!!!
Real irony presupposes a deeply held conviction about what "ought" to be. There is nothing to play against if this unspoken standard is absent. Irony also presupposes a fallen world, and that human "sincerity" is a pathetic response to what ails us. This is why Jesus,Flannery O'Connor, and Bob Dylan love irony so much, and why Joan Baez and Methodist preachers can't stand it.
Wow. I just realized that I really need to read some DFW!
Hmm, this could explain why my two favorite authors have been Dostoevsky and Kafka. I agree with Michael Cooper's comment that real irony is predicated on the understanding that things ought to be a certian way and without that "ought" irony not only becomes reflexive it stops being irony and becomes the ironic pose.
At the risk of a digression this distinction accounts for why some "spoof" movies fail and others succeed. Some of the best send-ups of genre films are the ones that have done the work to be self-contained exponents of the genre on its own serious (or not) terms. Ergo Hot Fuzz is a great spoof because everything is there to make it a straight hommage. And, perhaps as important, the film demonstrates a firm sense of what ought to be the role of the police and why police corruption and action movie tropes aren't enough. It helps that Simon Pegg plays his part so spectacularly straight his character doesn't actually know he's in an action movie. 🙂
I love DFW (the man, not the airport). With more thinkers like him, maybe we can start talking about why God chose a story to get Himself across…"myth became fact"
I think this nails why I couldn’t make it through Twin Peaks. It just went further and further in, until it was nothing but juicing melodrama out of the characters. A lot of artists are great at eloquently and beautifully bemoaning the human condition and societal evils. This is a beautiful and necessary role, but it makes them into lawgivers. Part of the repulsion of the flesh with the cross is that it does offer a solution, a real answer, and it isn’t ironic. What a great piece of writing!
Also, I love DFW airport too. I’ve seen worse!