at "the margins of our literary culture" (elitism, pt. 2)

"Both [David Foster Wallace and John Barth]," writes Dwight Garner in today's NYT Book Review, "employed a fierce and often satirical intelligence, and both had an abiding fondness for metafictional fripperies like footnotes and disclaimers. Barth has, over the decades, been pushed more to the margins of our literary culture. But there was a time, in the 1960s, when he occupied part of the book world’s red-hot center. Barth even placed a novel on the Times best-seller list."

The last statement implies such amazement and disbelief that it seems worth a brief comment. The occasion of Garner's meditation here seems to be the coincidence of Sven Birkerts's review of Barth's new book of stories and the appearance of Infinite Jest on the paperback bestseller list ("the first time one of [Wallace's] books has made the Times list," notes Garner).

We might read Garner's statement as suggesting that Barth's absence from the "red-hot center" is due to a dearth of recent books, though Barth continues to publish regularly both novels and collections of stories. We also might read Garner's statement as suggesting that, despite such literary successors as David Foster Wallace, Barth's work has for whatever reason become seen as culturally irrelevant. (A conservative novelist and book reviewer who recently visited the college campus at which I work read a passage from his novel in which a bookstore employee, described in terms of his tattoos, piercings, and slackerish attitude, is mocked for heavily annotating a thousand-page tome which the novelist visitor acknowledged was intended to be Infinite Jest, so I gather that for many Wallace's work, like tattoos and piercings and presumably slackers in general, has been relegated to some dustbin of cheap 1990s nostalgia from which the dull writers of 2008 might draw for easy laughter in their insipid, unambitious fictions. If Wallace is viewed in this way, I can't imagine that Barth's body of work even registers.) But given that nearly every eulogy of Wallace that appeared in the aftermath of his suicide appended an apology for not finishing or not having read Infinite Jest—despite wanting to, or really, really intending to—I wonder what the ultimate cultural relevance of all these recently sold copies of that novel will be, or how many of them will be read from the first page to the last, or whether those that will be read will be read as fiction instead of as a view into a troubled personality.

Garner quotes from Robert Scholes's "ecstatic" review of Giles Goat-Boy, the Barth book that did appear on the bestseller list, noting that this assessment of Barth's work "may put you in mind of the late, great Wallace":

Barth makes few concessions to the dull or the uneducated—to the "plain reader." He demands a fancy reader, in fact. To those with the right intellectual and emotional equipment, he is prepared to deliver more in the way of both plain and fancy literary refreshment than any novelist writing today. His audience must be that same audience whose capacities have been extended and prepared by Joyce, Proust, Mann, and Faulkner.

Perhaps it's only me, but I cannot imagine, in 2008, any review that appears in any major print book review suggesting that a book requires its audience to be thus "extended" or "prepared," or that any audience large enough to purchase a book in such numbers as to register on the NYT Bestseller List is in fact equipped in the ways Scholes expects a fair number of readers to have been equipped in 1966. (Even the idea of finding "refreshment" in a novel seems odd; these days we read novels to escape.) If Wallace's books have failed to sell in the quantities necessary to appear on the bestseller list until his suicide, I do not like the implications for our reading culture. (I regret that our readings—and published reviews—of books these days too often begin with how we might relate the books to our own lives, and that we seem to find books most interesting when we think they act as mirrors.)

In this week where the most prominent uses of public language have been "you betcha" and "darn it" (and in which this language redeemed a national political candidate in the view of many observers), and in an era where public expressions of intelligence, thoughtfulness, or consideration too often bring charges of elitism and the vast constellation of associations that word has acquired over the last forty years, it is beyond obvious that books such as Barth's—or Wallace's—do not, and will not, register in our collective national consciousness; it is a wonder that any books do. To modify Garner's phrasing, we might say that thoughtfulness (not to mention adventurousness) has, over the decades, been pushed more to the margins of our literary culture as well.