Changing my mind: occasional essays - By Zadie Smith Page 0,130

“Fruitful Union” and “SoftSci” sitting there in your “desktop” (or whatever interface they’re using in 2068), and yet still you’re leaving your virtual sex toy alone and instead checking that you’re in tip top genetic condition and padding out your “genetic résumé” as if you were about to go and try and have actual procreative sex with someone! (And can we assume that in the future “J. McInerney” has become a fictional brand—et seq; “and what follows”—made possible by a frightening omnivorous literary computer program that takes literary styles and reproduces them long after the authors are in their graves?)

Look: that language fantasias of this kind are übergeeky and laborious can’t seriously be denied. The other story of this type, “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko,” retells the Tristan and Iseult story in the corporate entertainment offices of a futuristic/classical L.A. in futuristic-classical language—

Awakening this in fugues and paroxysms, Agon M. Nar did there upon consult mediated Oracles, offer leveraged tribute to images of Nielsen & Stasis, & sacrifice two whole humidors of Davidoff 9 Deluxes upon the offering-pyre of Emmé, Winged Goddess of Victory. There was much market research.

—and has been known to try the patience of even the hardiest howling fantod.85 But what they signify, these stories—that words are worlds, that no language is neutral—is also serious and beautiful. Using extreme linguistic specialization to create little worlds was another, far more complicated way of saying THIS IS WATER, of reminding us that wherever we have language, we have the artificial conditions, limits, and possibilities of our existence. Of course, there is a writing that ignores this; that thinks of its own language as classical and universal and nonspecific; that experiences any trace of the contemporary as a kind of stain (no brand names, no modern words) and calls itself realism even if its characters speak no differently from those in a novel thirty years ago, or sixty. Wallace felt he couldn’t ignore the ambient noise of the contemporary, for the simple reason that it is everywhere. It is the water we swim in:I’ve always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fighting with my professors about it in grad school. The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things. The whole way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral. I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water 100 years ago. It’s just the texture of the world I live in.

You had to fight to make this case in the 1990s, and writers like Wallace fought it in the face of a certain amount of critical ridicule and the general sense that it couldn’t be literature with a capital L if it let the trashy language of the contemporary in. Ten years later, few writers feel the need to defend this use of contemporary “texture,” and for the generation who grew up on Wallace, specialized language use amounts to realism of the first order: it’s the water they grew up swimming in.

But you can also think about water too much. You can forget how to swim. You can develop an extreme self-consciousness w/r/t form, and when this happens in Wallace’s work, we can clearly watch metafiction reclaiming him, almost eating him alive. In the story “Adult World,” a tale of extreme self-consciousness (a paranoid wife fears that the way she makes love with her husband is “somehow hard on his thingie”) devolves into an acute case of narrative self-consciousness, which concludes with the story falling apart. One half is written, but the other half is entirely deconstructed, offered only in the form of a writer’s schematic notes, unfinished, unfilled in. I remember how thrilled I was when I first read it—I thought it delicious that such a pyrotechnical stylist would be sufficiently honest to reveal the mechanical levers behind the Wizard of Oz facade. Ten years later I reread it and feel that the shock of the backstage glimpse is just that, a shock, and that it wears off and does not satisfy as the full story might