Johnson and Wallace: Acid Attackers or Reconstructive Surgeons?

This episode is part of a series of responses to Episode 2.8 of the Genealogies of Modernity podcast.

The episode “The Enemy of Morality is Not Modernity, It’s Me” argues that Samuel Johnson and David Foster Wallace approached their satires and moral commentary from different first principles. Johnson suffered enormously throughout his life and knew that failure and affliction were an unavoidable part of human life, so he pulled his punches short. He lodged his criticism from a position of charity, not contempt; any derision he voiced masked his more fundamental affirmation of the good, the true, and the beautiful, and the human responsibility to rise to virtue. Wallace could not as easily pivot from censure to ethical assertion because he sympathized with the aim of the postmodern project, which he characterized as hurling a “beaker of acid in the face of the culture.” Although he lamented that this project had created an atmosphere of “congenital skepticism” in which all moral pronouncements sounded priggish, his work nonetheless fostered this cultural mood. Thus, when it came to offering positive moral commentary, he could not shake the anxiety that his claims had no objective validity but were just alternative perspectives.

From William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–1793)

The metaphor of satire as an acid attack is telling, and it goes back at least to William Blake, who used etching acid to create the engravings for his famous satirical prints. The engraver’s wager, I suggest, is the same as the satirist’s: he bets that he can shield the material he doesn’t want dissolved from the acid’s corrosion and that he can avoid accidentally disfiguring himself in the operation. Some, such as critic Northrop Frye, imagine satire as a process of comminution, of pulverizing something into its constitutive elements to recombine the base materials into a new structure. As producers Kirsten Hall Herlin and Ryan McDermott warn, however, satirists’ intentions and effects may differ substantially.

Wallace’s discomfort with unqualified moral prescriptions and frustration at his era’s impotent cynicism reminds me of William Faulkner’s Nobel laureate address in 1950. In that speech, Faulkner complains that modern writers could not address “problems of the spirit” because their readers lived with the omnipresent terror of nuclear incineration. Nevertheless, he urged young writers to relearn the “old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed.” Wallace never could approach anything close to this moral certitude, and his assertions died a slow death of a thousand caveats. For instance, he argues in his Kenyon College commencement address that the platitude that a liberal arts education is supposed to teach students “how to think” is “capital-T” true. In the next breath, however, he sabotages that affirmation with a disclaimer: the only thing that is capital-T true is that humans can frame their experiences to determine the meaning they construct out of them. He tries to build an absolute moral structure on a perspectivalist foundation.

For any satire to work, its author must assume two things: that there is an objective standard against which a given activity can be accurately construed as grotesque or absurd and that the audience shares definitions with the author about what counts as immoral, ludicrous, and so on. But humans rarely agree on these definitions, which is why satires fail. This is the reason that satires go out of date swiftly and that readers make more interpretive mistakes with them than with other genres. Furthermore, if satirists are indiscriminate in their attacks, they accidentally foster a cynical mood in which everything seems absurd, hamstringing their efforts to denounce a particular vice. The efficacy of the satiric mode tempts its practitioners to believe that they will be equally successful in the construction of a replacement for that which they have smashed. All too often, they learn that building is harder than demolition, and preservation is hardest of all.

Portrait of Johnson by John Opie, 1807

The producers are right, then, to juxtapose Johnson’s objectivist satire and moral commentary with Wallace’s perspectivalist moralizing. The semblance of their methods belies the divergence in their premises. Wallace could not evade the sense that his sentiments were mere sentimentality; although sentiment may empower someone to behave virtuously once or twice, eventually the well runs dry. As Kirsten Hall Herlin says, “Truth is no substitute for style, but style without truth will founder.” Johnson’s belief in the transcendent gave weight to his moral pronouncements and gravity to his satires, whereas Wallace wanted people to bootstrap their way to ethical behavior by constructing meaning out of thin air. This is why he could never come to grips with his position as moral sage.

If I may be permitted to psychologize, I surmise that Wallace knew that life could only be an infinite jest if it were either a divine comedy or a nihilist nightmare. Saints may scoff at their sufferings as they strain toward glory, and nihilists may snicker at the absurdity of existence. But the constructivist has no warrant to suggest that we should invent sacred games to orient our moral compasses. Wallace can chastise narcissists and invite them to sacrifice for others “over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.” Still, the ultimate rationale for this sacrifice is centered on the Self, not the weight of glory that hangs upon the Other. We must control our attention because if we don’t, we will stumble through life dead. We must suffer the banalities of modern life and sacrifice for the idiots who inhabit our world because that will make us truly free. In the end, Wallace could not avoid placing himself at the center of his own ethical system, and he was, as he presciently predicted, “totally hosed” when he found himself stripped of the agency to appease the “terrible master.” Faking it till you make it only works if you believe that there really is somewhere to make it to, where, upon arrival, all manner of things shall be well.

Daniel Zimmerman just completed his PhD in English at the University of Virginia, where he wrote on images of the Eucharist in medieval and early modern drama. Now, he directs the Abbey for Church of the Lamb in Penn Laird, VA, overseeing the regenerative agriculture, property development and beautification, events, and businesses the church operates to further its mission.