Family

Toward the end of a famous interview published in 1993, David Foster Wallace described the position of the writer who tried to set to work amid the metaphysical ruins of postmodernism:

For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you’re in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party.… the sense I get of my generation of writers… is that it’s 3:00 a.m. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody’s thrown up in the umbrella stand and we’re wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years.

(Conversations 52) Wallace’s remarks in both this interview and the essay (‘E Unibus Pluram’) that appeared alongside it have been influential on a number of counts. His critique of postmodern irony as a primarily destructive force (‘patricidal work’), and his sense that television has distorted fiction away from its moral purpose toward an anarchic ‘revel’ have been variously taken up by critics as inaugurating an attempt ‘to imagine a way to speak or write through that irony and come out with a new language that can make connections among people’ (McLaughlin 2013: 288), or as enacting a kind of literary dead reckoning, where Wallace enacts ‘his struggle to find his place in literary history’ (Cohen 2012: 72). Yet, while critics have often been eager to read this interview primarily in (the often profitable) terms of language or tone, what has been largely overlooked is Wallace’s decision to describe the move beyond postmodernism by invoking the image of the family. ¹ This oversight is surprising in part because the work that Wallace crafted in the wake of this interview had (as he noted) ‘a lot to do with the family’ (Conversations 13), but also because the family image he invoked was evidently so important to him that he revisited it in The Pale King (2011), when Chris Fogle’s father returns to discover his son and friends post-revel, ‘slumped on the davenport with our dirty feet up on his special coffee table, and the carpeting… all littered with beer cans’ (169).