A Supposedly Posthumous Fun ...... by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

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Traditional bakery rack and modern bookcase; property of the author.

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The Wrap Up (No Pun Intent Dared)

ED: Thank you, Mayfair. We appreciate your continued support and we’re sure the customers appreciate the ever escalating diversity you continue to bring to the needs of the expanding, electronic book market. David, many people have a problem with your “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.” In it one of the hideous men states that he knew he was in love with her only after her telling him of her submission to a serial rapist-killer. It seems to me that this could have easily predicted to have been expected to be controversial long before the first brassiere got burned. I can’t help but consider the possibility that you might have been seeking to upset your readers.

DFW: adjusted his head hanky and said the following in a very condescending tone, that being sufficient to permanently maim a monography maven of a lesser order. I could easily answer that by saying that the passage was metaphorical, and obviously represented Christianity; indeed a sainted Christian martyr willing to be fed to the lions rather than deny her faith. Yet, that wouldn’t be entirely true. Were I to again take the excusable cantankerous route I might also say that I’ve written a billion words and everyone focuses on these two pages, and it’s getting personally boring in its well-travelled, fruitless

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maneuver apparently intended to portray some sort of interviewer moral superiority or a safely calculated redundancy. With my nice guy hat on today, let me try to explain. She relayed this information to me long after the event had transpired. She was no longer in any danger. Initially I was impressed with what I thought to be her ability to quickly devise a plan which would result in him letting her live. Later, the idea of true Christianity came to light.

ED: With the advent of serial killer proliferation, I do find it disturbing that anyone would concoct a scenario in which it sounds as if the victim asked for it. Even on other levels it smacks of “blame the victim.”

DFW: Again, this was no concoction. This was a real person; and she did not and it was never stated that “she asked for it.”

ED: This “plan” if any, may have been naïve and a mistake.

DFW: It worked. This “granola cruncher” was strictly a one-night-stand from my point of view, and I was likely the same from hers. I won’t present it as nice or something with more meaning. She was basically an attractive, young “hippie” I met at a festival. I found her preferable to the prospect of having

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to speak with a representative from the New Age Group or the Women’s Lib squadron.

ED: That cuteness must have presented a feeling of you having exploited her.

DFW: Back a bit I did emphasize that I was not a nice guy. But, call it exploitation, call it an attraction to cuteness, call it not wanting to hear an old gripe with “issues.” Call it whatever offends you the least. And don’t worry. I’m well aware of how this sounds and can easily imagine the judgments you’re likely forming. I’d rather be forthright than observe the pleasantries of euphemism. I will extend you the compliment of not pretending to worry whether you understand what I’m referring to about my difficulty in not feeling impatience or contempt at the blatant self-contradiction in the way in which you know from the start that there will be the requisite enthusiasms duly registered for global warming and cute clubbed baby seals, creative meditation, feel-good psychology, holistic healing, rabid distrust of what is viewed as authority without evidently once stopping to consider the rigid authoritarianism implicit in the equally rigid uniformity of their own. As someone who academically worked himself through both college and two years of postgraduate school I have to confess to an affinity for the

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rich kids in torn jeans whose way of protesting apartheid is to boycott South African pot. The smug naïveté, the condescension in the “compassion” they feel for those “trapped” in mainstream American lifestyle choices is absurdly humorous. That they never consider that it’s the “correctness” and prudence displayed which clearly shows that they have become the quintessence of everything about the culture they say they oppose; the narcissism, the materialism, the complacency, and the unexamined conformity; or the incongruity that the merry teleology of this impending “New Age” is exactly the same cultural “advancement”

that Manifest Destiny, the Reich, the dialectic of the proletariat, or the Cultural Revolution were. And it never even occurs to them that their certainty that they are different is one of the factors which make them all the same.

ED: I stand duly chastised by the master, just like Hal. I’ll also dare note that your evaluation of the human condition is a nice attempted segue out of “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.”

And I’ll confess that in the most egalitarian fashion I have never checked the origin of my pot and right now strongly identify with the worker ants. But, you seem unusually stirred about this issue. A minority opinion, inclusive of my own, states that this person you “loved” was not a one-night-stand; but Mary Karr. You have chosen to never speak of her and she in

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turn, just stated a one liner about the cocktail table’s broken glass. Is there anything you’d like to say to that?

DFW: You would be surprised.

ED: Might you deign to enlighten me and our audience.

DFW: With no sarcasm intended she seemed sincere. It may have been a smug naïveté, but for me was powerful and very attractive. I felt as if I was in her place. You of course realize that I am attempting to describe an eros alone which evolves to eros inclusive of love.

ED: With no sarcasm intended; no. Let’s switch to post- modern fiction again. Can you be more precise in your seemingly dismal assessment?

DFW: As presented in 2018; the genre which the clutching-at-straws post-modernists insist is not a genre has become nothing new and attempts to compensate for that through length. This would not be a criticism if not for their insistence upon their own claim for the necessity of newness. Given that, to then attempt to lionize a 1,600 page book containing pages with two words as well as pages which are left blank, with the audacity

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to say that the compilation has any more significance than a grammar school notepad is preposterous. To hear them discuss the author of such a recursion as an impending candidate for a Nobel is the “new” irony which might be its only legitimate qualification. The specific book I’m referencing may serve well as a textbook for Post-Modern 101 students, as it encompasses most of the tired tropes of the genre, including yet another writer-writing-a book story. One can’t help but laugh or regurgitate.

ED: Perhaps pizza regurgitation on the pages would be more ground breaking. Isn’t Armageddon the course you set sail for in

“Westward?”

DFW: Metafiction’s real end has always been Armageddon. Art’s reflection on itself is a terminal condition, and is one big reason why the art world saw Duchamp as an Antichrist. But I still believe the move to involution had value. It helped writers break free of some long-standing flat-earth-type taboos.

It was standing in line to happen. And for a while, stuff like

“Pale Fire” and “The Universal Baseball Association” was valuable as a meta-aesthetic breakthrough the same way Duchamp’s urinal had been valuable.

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ED: I’ve always felt that the best of the metafictionalists; Coover, for example, Nabokov, Borges, even Barth; were criticized too much for being only interested in narcissistic, self-reflexive games, whereas these devices had very real political and historical applications.

DFW: But when you talk about Nabokov and Coover, you’re talking about real geniuses, the writers who weathered real shock and invented this stuff in contemporary fiction. But after the pioneers always come the crank turners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank, and little pellets of metafiction come out the other end. The crank-turners capitalize for a while on sheer fashion, and they get their plaudits and grants and buy their IRA’s and retire to the Hamptons well out of range of the eventual blast radius.

There are some interesting parallels between post-modern crank-turners and what’s happened since post-structural theory took off here in the US and why there’s such a big backlash against post-structuralism going on now. It’s the crank-turners fault. I think the crank-turners have replaced the critic as the real angel of death as far as literary movements are concerned now.

You get some bona fide artists who come along and really divide by zero and weather some serious shit-storms of shock and

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ridicule in order to promulgate some really important ideas.

Once they triumph, though, and their ideas become legitimate and accepted, the crank-turners and wannabes come running to the machine, and out pour the gray pellets and now the whole thing’s become a hollow form, just another institution of fashion. Take a look at some of the critical-theory PhD dissertations being written now. They’re like the Man and Foucault in the mouth of a dull child. Academia and commercial culture have somehow become these gigantic mechanisms of commodification that drain the weight and color out of even the most radical new advances. It’s a surreal inversion of the death-by-neglect that used to kill off prescient art. Now prescient art suffers death-by acceptance. We love things to death, now. Then we’re pensioned off to one of the places those “others” having received an

“attractive” early retirement package endure and call paradise; while we idle away our remaining time extolling the beauty of the partially non-representational, horse painting at the entry to the local museum which houses no real horses.

A Supposedly Fun DFW Interview