The Moralists: David Foster Wallace & Samuel Johnson

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

Readers of fiction—whether we think of ourselves as simple seekers after a good yarn or as more complexly engaged participants in literary history—all come to stories with some built-in desires. That’s also true of all appreciators of fiction, in its various forms in TV and film. It’s no more or less true than it was in 1993, when David Foster Wallace wrote his generation-defining essay “E Unibus Pluram:[1] Television and U.S. Fiction.”

But readers, far more than viewers, are overcoming significant cultural opposition to carve out time for their pursuit. This is more intensely the case in our moment than it already was in Wallace’s. Compared to the glowing screen, the printed page asks more effort and yields less spectacle. In the time of streaming and wi-fi—a time broadly predicted by Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest, with its imagined culture of InterLace video cartridges, mask-wearing teleconferences, and obsessively addictive “Entertainments”—you must have a particularly strong desire, or set of desires, to persist as a reader of texts and keep swimming up that stream. (No one depicted in Infinite Jest seems to read especially much, except for those characters who find themselves in one way or another on extreme social margins.)

Portrait of Johnson by Joshua Reynolds (1772)

If David Foster Wallace stands athwart postmodernity, yelling slow down, so too does Samuel Johnson stand athwart modernity, yelling at least define your terms. The two writers are placed in literary history like bookends: Johnson (1709–1784) at literary modernity’s inception and Wallace (1962–2008) at its moment of self-immolation.

Writing from London, Johnson was most active in the decades before and around the American Revolution. Though his career precedes the period of capital-M Modernism in literature, which many would place as having arisen around the First World War or just before, Johnson is most properly thought of, in philosophical terms, as a modern: one who defines himself and his work less by relation to a tradition than by relation to a particular time and place. Though we can locate Johnson philosophically within the currents of the Enlightenment, whether or not that tracks meaningfully to what could be called philosophical modernism is open to debate—a debate I don’t propose to open up just now.  

Wallace’s relationship to time and tradition is characteristically far more inward looking and self-conscious. His literary career in America not only postdates literary modernism, which begins to slide into postmodernism as early as the beginning of the 1960s, but he claims that his work postdates postmodernism. Wallace sees himself participating in, returning to, and restoring an older tradition of “single-entendre,” or sincere narrative, while also consuming and encompassing the metafictional trickery he learned in his antitraditional MFA training. Both in his blazon-bearing short story “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” and in “E Unibus Pluram,” Wallace not only calls for an end to postmodernism, he claims to be that end, or at least its herald and forerunner—the St. John the Baptist to its Jesus (who in Wallace’s mind is, arguably, Don DeLillo). Wallace wants to pinpoint a new literary movement, though he doesn’t call it a movement. Instead he talks in terms of a “new realism,” which his followers expanded to encompass a “New Sincerity.” He famously writes that he wants to see fiction leave behind poses, postures, gestures, and fashionable masks of blasé detachment and corrosive irony. He wants it to return to the lines of deep human desire. He says this will be the preoccupation of literature’s “next real rebels” in whose vanguard Wallace himself marches.

Johnson’s ambitions may have been no less great than Wallace’s, but his projects, on however grand a scale, tended to be more modest in their self-evaluation. Also unlike Wallace, Johnson didn’t resist being cast in the role of moralist; Johnson welcomed that role, even enjoyed himself in it. It quite literally became his bread and butter. Certainly, Johnson managed to write successful fiction in the moralist mode. Though we might be prone to find Rasselas didactic today, for its time it represented a remarkably subtle, complex, and novel blending of aphorism and narrative.

I simply want to suggest that the roles of moral spokesman for a united people and bridge builder between Christian and secular styles of rational thought worked so well for Johnson because these roles integrated Johnson into his intellectual community in ways most men like himself—short on formal education, material resources, and connections in high places—might not otherwise have achieved. By bringing together apparently disparate functions of art and entertainment, and by calling on the literary story to “instruct and delight” at one and the same time, Johnson found that the desires of storytellers and story hearers could be mutually, even pleasantly, met at the same time and in the same way.

Alexander Lyubavin, Creative Commons 2.0

Wallace, by contrast, wrote to and for a literary culture that largely still considered itself postmodern—therefore, too sophisticated to need any edifying or enlightening it didn’t already possess in the form of the ability to unmask pretense. For Wallace, identifying too strongly as a moralist could easily have ruptured his relationship with a large part of his reading community—frustrating those sensitive and proud, yet embattled, readers of Infinite Jest who resisted such great social and entropic inducements to put down the three-and-change-pound book and turn on the TV; readers who fought through and won out against a shallow satisfaction-seeking culture and then crowned Wallace as the champion who empowered them to do it. These readers, I’m tempted to speculate, might have desired a certain kind of experience from any future Wallace story: one that would feed not necessarily their moral or ethical sense, but rather their sense of selves as deep people, savvy choosers, and connoisseurs.

So what happened to Wallace’s work when he turned away from an obsession with the sense of self to an obsession with the sense of wider societal meaning? It’s hard to pin down a specific passage that fully articulates the motive for this turn. Yet the subtext of many of Wallace’s later works—several stories, his essay “The Nature of the Fun” in Both Flesh and Not, and above all his novella Something to Do With Paying Attention—often seems to vibrate with the sense that he would lose the attention and the sympathy of his imagined reader if he were to suddenly change his tack from obsessive, maximalist self-observation to something at once more communal and more mature. He seems to have felt this change as a move that both he and his readers desperately needed to make. However, he also seems to have felt that, if he were to decide not to deliver the known experience, but instead give readers something that might be less to their taste—even if he greatly desired to do just that—his readers would likely reject it. The nature of storytelling and of the storyteller hadn’t changed since Samuel Johnson found success through moralizing. Yet if Wallace’s unspoken but implicit intuition was correct, the desires of the hearers had changed dramatically.

If this change in desire, this shift in a common sense of selfhood, can be truly said to have happened between 1784 and 2008, then how and why it happened is a story for another time—and a story neither Wallace nor Johnson can tell us in full. But it is one we would do well to investigate more deeply, if only because it’s also a story about our own inner lives.

Katy Carl is the editor in chief of Dappled Things, a quarterly journal of ideas, art, and Catholic faith. She is the author of Fragile Objects, As Earth without Water, and Praying the Great O Antiphons: My Soul Magnifies the Lord

[1] It’s important for readers to know that this Latin phrase, meaning “out of one, many,” inverts the Latin phrase found on much U.S. currency, E Pluribus Unam, meaning “out of many, one.” Wallace wants to make the point that there’s a subtly subversive deception at the heart of televisual culture’s promises to inform, unite, and nourish the viewing American public. Instead, he believes TV deludes, divides, and fragments its consumers in the very act of telling them that it is doing the opposite. One can only imagine what he would have said about social media.