Can you get your reader to say, OK, I’m in a dreaming mind at the moment, and this is what the mind is dreaming? If you can do that then a photograph can work and have no evidentiary function.
Wallace has been transformed from a writer people were reluctant to take seriously, and who was deemed profoundly derivative of Pynchon, to a writer people fall over themselves to namecheck.
The metaphor of war works from the assumption that there is no consensus, that there never was agreement to begin with.
I trust the reader to be able to understand the horror and tenderness innate in a situation. My job is to write it down as clearly as I can, and without judgment. There’s a difference between voyeurism and witness.
“If the city of my birth should wish to perpetuate my name clearly but harmlessly,” Steinbeck once suggested, “let it name a bowling alley after me or a dog track or even a medium price, low-church brothel.”
I know some of them have extreme content, but to me it’s always been organic to the stories and not designed to shock for shock’s sake. To me, all my books are serious books, written with serious intent.
I find it both beautiful and sad how these great expectations can fail to pan out, and how people can still find life in the aftermath.
We identify so completely with our own suffering, then wish to visit our suffering upon others in turn. Makes one wish we could just have a nice simple fistfight and be done.
It never reached the level of aesthetic. That’s like a craps shooter talking about his skill with dice. I was just hoping to get lucky.
I didn’t want to provide my reader with the solace of a comfortable laugh. I think the best laughs are ones we feel guilty about indulging in.