emotion and irony in contemporary fiction

"What I'm mostly trying to talk about is what it feels like emotionally to be 34 in this country."

This is from a DFW interview from Spring 1997 that can be found here and it pretty much sums up what is going on and what has to be done in serious contemporary fiction, i.e. the turning-away from postmodern irony and the turning toward emotional truth. You can see it in DFWs work, most recently in The unfinished Pale King, you can see it in Alan Ball's Six Feet Under, it is what Bret Easton Ellis did in Lunar Park, what Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was all about, as well as Foer's Everything Is Illuminated and also recent TV-shows as Bored to Death - although sometimes they hide it very well -, it is what Terrence Malick does and what Jonathan Franzen's Freedom tries to do. Also Running With Scissors comes to mind, and quite strongly though, i.e. the movie version, I haven't read the memoir. And this is what an LA Times critic had to say about it :

"Murphy, who created the creepy, funny, lunatic "Nip/Tuck," is a master of mordant and macabre camp. But here he loses his teeth, seeming to lack any ironic distance from material that practically begs for it."

The critic herself doesn't seem to lack the ironic distance that she is actually begging for, though. I don't know where to find it right now, but Jonathan Franzen said it in one of the myriad of interviews he gave in the wake of Freedom. He said that in The Corrections he used irony also and especially to distance himself from certain ideas and emotions presented in the novel. You can basically say anything you want with irony and then easily back out of it if people disagree with you, thus you don't have to stand your ground on very intimate issues, issues that are and feel way too personal to let anyone attack or make fun of them. He said that he wrote a wholeheartedly unironic novel with Freedom, that he eschewed former techniques of irony to get closer to the emotional core of what he wanted to say. And that he is quite aware that exactly that makes him so much more vulnerable if people dislike his work because now the work is much closer to what being Jonathan Franzen really is like. Closer to the emotional truth that is Jonathan Franzen. But people might misread that for sentimentality and naiveté.

Here is something I found in an IRC chat transcript with DFW* shortly after the release of Infinite Jest (and if you are too young to actually have been in one yourself or are now like, my age, and want to get a nice pretty nostalgic trip into the early times of the internet and 90's chat-rooms, you have to read the whole thing (if it doesn't redirect you, click on the Impatient? link). This is pre-facebook stuff. There were actually online chat-rooms BEFORE the internet. Grab yourself a cup of coffee or your beverage-of-cozy-choice and travel into 1996's cyberspace):

"The worst thing about irony for me is that it attenuates emotion" and

"I don't think irony's meant to synergize with anything as heartfelt as sadness. I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect the speaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental."

Irony can be a lot of fun, no doubt. And as Dave puts it, we can't escape it because we breathe the stuff everyday. And that makes it actually hard to snap out of it sometimes. (Is the transition to this paragraph too rough? I had a hard time coming up with a coherent one after the quotes.) And I think that is exactly what happened to the LA Times critic a couple lines above. She sees the lack of ironic distance and wants her ironical borders restored immediately to not have to look too closely at something that intends to produce exactly this: a close emotional relationship with its audience. It is precisely not about irony, not about safe distance, not about making fun of everything. It is about emotion. And in the case of this critic, and a lot of others, I fear, about the misreading as being naive and sentimental.

*almost all DFW-related sources are found and taken from The Howling Fantods.

The cre(m)ation of Dave Eggers and Bret Easton Ellis

The little m devours everything in flames. Both are highly energetic processes and thus Dave Eggers seems to be burning on both ends in his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. He uses the cremation of his parents to fuel his life and writing process, infused with their ashes. And what he does seems a pretty good waste of my time. I don't find this work heartbreaking at all but often emotionally true in it's plain and accurate descriptions of Eggers's cognitive processes. And there, what many seem to recognize as his genius, is the place where his meta-meta-reflections tell us about the feedback and repercussions between his heart and brain which are so good because everyone can easily relate to them. But it gets a bit tiresome after a while. The effect of his paranoid episodes - both with the worst and best outcomes -, while true and thus amusing and comforting, easily wears off after a couple of hundred pages and leaves little more than the stale aftertaste of show-offy writing techniques. But nevertheless this is a pretty good read.

Back to the ashes: Bret Easton Ellis did a similar thing with his own memoir, which is what I like to call Lunar Park. It is all about rising from the ashes of his father and creating his beautiful art out of the remains of this cremation. The next to last paragraph of Lunar Park is all about the ashes and how they form and seep into his life, his childhood memories, his anxieties, his desires, moods and, of course, his writing. The ashes going through the very pages of this book, creating new words and thus worlds and his life, which is, after all, a literary one.

I wonder if there's any other book or work of art that deals that explicitly with the process of its creation through the process of cremation of life. I mean literally. Because it's a nice and beautiful image that the ashes fall onto the white (or black) page and produce the letters which constitute its texture and meaning.