A Salingerian Reading of David Foster Wallace's “Good Old Neon”

Good Old Holden: A Salingerian Reading of David Foster Wallace’s “Good Old Neon” Undergraduate Research Thesis Presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with research distinction in English Literature in the undergraduate colleges of The Ohio State University By Samuel Emerson Bodary The Ohio State University May 2016 Project Advisors: Dr. Matthew Cariello and Dr. David Brewer, Department of English Bodary 1 I. Introduction In the world of literary fiction, there are few superstar authors who grow to become icons in popular culture. This is a symptom of the medium. More likely celebrities, like film or television actors, are tied to their physical appearance as part of their craft. With authors, we read the texts they produce, only seeing them indirectly through their work. However, from time to time, some authors achieve this superstar status. Their works can permeate the societal consciousness and inspire curiosity about the person behind the words. In these special cases, the author becomes a somewhat deified figure. Often this person, accustomed to the quiet voyeurism that effective fiction demands of its author, responds adversely to this kind of notoriety. Instead of being the invisible observer of human interaction, they become the subject of their initial object: a sculptor prodded by her own model. J. D. Salinger provides one example of literary celebrity. The Catcher in the Rye has emerged as the novel of a generation growing up in the aftermath of the Second World War. The public raised his status to that of a folk legend, a mysterious recluse whose stories of adolescence, grief, and social fraudulence reverberated throughout the country. Holden Caulfield became connected to John Lennon in an unforgettable tragedy. His writings infiltrated the classroom and lecture hall, overcoming broad initial bans, and the writer himself drew deeper into seclusion in sleepy Cornish, New Hampshire. His work continues to sell, cementing its place in culture with each and every printing. He actively opposed this kind of universal renown and popularity when living, giving very few interviews and rarely publishing, leading to his final 45 years of public silence. His absence leaves a hole in the world of American fiction that itself speaks as an echo. Scholars like Myles Weber even attempted a critical reading of Salinger’s silence as its own text in 2005, writing that such authors, “have no right not to speak,” and are Bodary 2 “helpless… to block close textual analyses of the nonexistent works” through which their devoted readers believe they communicate (Weber 121). Once a writer reaches this status in culture, all of their actions become fodder for discussion and debate. Intense interest in the author as icon inevitably leads to ad-hominem analysis that often supersedes the text itself. David Foster Wallace inspires similar fandom. His treatment of depression, addiction, and the loneliness of modern society resonates with an entirely new generation of readers. Now writing in a world of omnipresent entertainment and global connection, Wallace deals with familiar themes superimposed on a dissimilar backdrop. His readers, too, found a deep connection to him, leading to the advent of “Wallace Studies” in universities across the country. In the preface to their 2013 collection of Wallace criticism, Marshall Boswell and Stephen Burn state that “much of the ground-clearing work on Wallace fiction has also been completed: Wallace… has been read in terms of Wittgenstein, Buber, film theory environmentalism, changing conceptions of the encyclopedic, and so on” (Companion x). Academics have put Wallace’s texts through their paces, but interest has not stopped at the university. Bloggers and members of his devoted “howling fantods” craft in-depth analyses of his texts removed from the ivory tower. A biopic starring Jason Segal enjoyed a wide theatrical release just this past year. Wallace’s premature death in 2008 only heightened public interest in him as a pop culture. Both of these authors now are subject to posthumous publication. Wallace’s final novel, The Pale King, was published in its unfinished state in 2011, painstakingly stitched together by longtime editor Michael Pietsch. More works may potentially emerge, but as Boswell and Burn claim, “[they] will surely be little more than adjuncts to a fictional project that is now already complete” (Companion x). These predictions are unlikely to keep loyal fans from waiting with baited breath. Following Salinger’s recent death, a handful of works from his years of silence are Bodary 3 also promised to emerge in the next five years, expanding on his Glass family saga, and elaborating on the adored and reviled Holden Caulfield. The introduction of new works from an undisputedly canonical American author are guaranteed to refresh Salinger criticism and pull it into a more contemporary U. S. context, bridging the gap from the postwar years to today. This impending renewal of interest will surely make waves from English departments to bookstores all across the country, as seen in the 2015 release of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman. Opportunities abound for placing Salinger and Wallace in critical conversation within the larger context of American literary culture, but several explicit textual connections between the two iconic authors require exploration. The weightiest example is Wallace’s “Good Old Neon,” which engages with various Salinger texts by employing similar tone, themes, and motifs through the voice of a brilliant narrator struggling with meaning and identity. I present a close reading of the story through a Salingerian lens, informed specifically by The Catcher in the Rye and the Glass family saga, using William Weigand’s diagnosis of “banana fever” to sketch the archetypal Salinger hero. By mimicking Salinger’s tone and alluding to scattered motifs across his fiction, the text engages both structurally and thematically with Salinger throughout his published career, presenting the reader with a protagonist who stands alongside Seymour, Buddy, and Holden. Furthermore, Wallace’s movement from the postmodern world of hip detachment reflects his broader aims for a fiction that breaks through clever irony and unsentimentality to a new sincerity, manifesting in a metafictional move that mirrors Salinger’s Glass family saga. Through this comparative reading, a step can be made in placing Salinger’s works in conversation with authors who actively published during his period of seclusion, opening new potential avenues for dealing with his forthcoming posthumous texts. I also strongly advocate reading “Good Old Neon” as Wallace’s Salinger story. Bodary 4 II. Intertextuality in Wallace’s Fiction Wallace’s uncanny ability to command a variety of tones and voices has emerged as a defining trait, part of “that distinctive singular stamp” that sets seminal authors immediately apart (“Dostoevsky” 260n). Wallace describes this stamp as the way “you can just tell… that something is by Dickens, or Chekhov, or Woolf, or Salinger, or Coetzee, or Ozick,” (“Dostoevsky” 260n). Though his own writing is shot through with a dizzying degree of self- consciousness, most of his texts manage to move beyond metafictional or postmodern traditions that can stifle an emotive human core with irony and self-awareness. Marshall Boswell and Stephen Burn observe that Wallace’s texts work often by “either implicitly outlining an adroit commentary on other works, or… by explicitly functioning as a critical act” (Companion ix-x). Wallace flexes his literary muscles by manipulating his precursors, leading to new ideas and fictions. Rather than a straightforward tearing-down of previous texts, he engages and grapples with them. I find that “Good Old Neon” interfaces with Salinger in the way that Boswell and Burn describe. However, I will first outline several previously identified instances of this behavior. By exploring a variety of his strong influences, from modernism to metafiction, he synthesizes an empathetic reader-writer relationship, without sacrificing a sense of postmodern self-awareness. This intertextual engagement is most apparent in his first collection of short stories, Girl with Curious Hair. Wallace adopts a markedly different tone with each story in the collection to engage with a variety of writers and philosophies of the time. Instead of implying that he has no voice of his own, the collection flaunts his ability to manipulate tone without sacrificing his “distinctive stamp.” This tactic perhaps grew out of his undergraduate education at Amherst College, where he made money on the side by writing term papers for his peers. He notes in a Bodary 5 1998 interview how valuable this was as training for “writing in different voices and styles” because he would “get kicked out” if caught (Arden 96). By studying samples of his peers’ writing, he could effectively dupe professors by becoming a tone chameleon. He would remember thinking, “Man, I’m really good at this… I can sound kind of like anybody” (Lipsky 166). This talent surges to the forefront in Girl with Curious Hair, demonstrating his ability to bounce off of other authors without sacrificing an effective narrative. Boswell and Burn show that this trope supports the collection’s push that pop culture is “a regenerative means of communication between [Wallace] and his readers.” In other words, these intertextualities forge a stronger empathetic relationship between the two. They do not “merely seek to call attention to the ways in which our immersion in pop culture and mediated narratives alienates us from reality,” but to show how it is “our awareness of this immersion that alienates us” (Boswell 65- 67). Wallace treads carefully around the infinite regress of awareness to write stories that connect directly with readers, in spite of, or perhaps due to, their postmodern or metaficitonal detachment. By crafting these stories with a decisively intertextual slant through the use of other author’s voices and tones to place them in specific context of American literature movements, Wallace’s stories reverberate throughout his local literary landscape.

Load more