IF ANYONE might remember the Charlie Sheen surge of late February and early March 2011, it could in fact be literary scholars. Sheen's rope-a-dope with addiction, including a skepticism toward Alcoholics Anonymous and belief in willpower to overthrow drugs; his range of moods; his creativity of language amidst psycho-chatter - it is not just that Sheen reflected some of the problems snuffed out in the 1996 novel "Infinite Jest," but that by indulging in self-promotion on all fronts of media, when compared to the self-conscious author David Foster Wallace, Sheen is the anti-DFW.
It would be fairly easy to view David Foster Wallace's fiction in the static and faded colors of the American 1990s. "Infinite Jest," with its pre-millennial focus on years, "Clerks"-era stonerisms, obsessions and frustrations chronicled by an expansive writing style that showcased Wallace as a new kind of genius-in-orbit, was a genre-bending work whose impact was comparative to when Radiohead's "OK Computer" broke the alternative sound barrier. Indeed, for a book so concerned with the allure and dangers of television, "Infinite Jest" first brought fiction into high definition.\n"The Pale King," published this April, is an unfinished work which presents a smattering of characters and their backgrounds and idiosyncrasies in an IRS office; the book has been cited as a development and could be placed later in Wallace's 90s oeuvre, circa Office Space, 1999.
But this historical tailoring of analysis fails with Wallace and most artists, generally. This method of historicism could be stated as such: Recent critics, looking at Wallace's texts, are able to contextualize him, that is place and understand him within a set of historical assumptions, thereby reducing his status as a transcendent, creative fiction writer. What actually happens is the opposite: Wallace, aware of the swarming phenomenon of his day, in selecting issues to write on, contextualized his critics: He determined what they would focus on, not vice versa.
Another claim typically is made about the role of philosophy in Wallace's books, especially given his background in the discipline which contributed to two undergraduate theses. Published in January 2011, the study "All Things Shining" attempted to Nietzschify Wallace, a project that would have benefited if one of the authors, Prof. Sean Kelly, Chair of Philosophy at Harvard, would have acknowledged that Wallace actually left graduate philosophy at Harvard to instead pursue fiction.
If such points can be made about the mere reception of Wallace's books, imagine what can be learned from the books themselves. A relevant topic from "The Pale King" is attention: One speaker recalls, when in college, taking medical pills - "Obetrolling" - to allow what he called "doubling," or a heightened self-awareness (sounds like a familiar scene during finals). Some have said, for Wallace, the importance was to what someone paid attention. Which might be anything, but, by definition, would foreseeably include novels.
The terms Maximalist and Minimalist are thrown around quite a bit in literary criticism. Minimalist appears to be a term indicating a streamlined, "stripped down" aesthetic, and has, accordingly, been given sparse definition
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