Coming to Terms: Franzen, Wallace and the question of realism

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TL;DR

A substantial critical essay from The Point using Franzen's controversial New Yorker eulogy "Farther Away" as the occasion to distinguish Franzen's "social novel" from Wallace's "novel of the self," and then to defend the latter. It is chiefly a Franzen-and-Pale King essay — Infinite Jest appears only in passing — but its interpretive core reaches the whole body of work: Baskin rejects Franzen's charge that Wallace's fiction valorizes narcissism, arguing instead that Wallace's self-fiction is almost always self-criticism aimed at escaping the self (through attention, a Kierkegaardian "leap," and finally self-forgetting) — the affirmative underside of the solipsism the novels depict as horror.

Key claims

Two Midwesterners, two philosophies. Franzen and Wallace, "the two most important American writers of their era," treated similar subjects but diverge not really on style/realism but on "philosophy … the forms of value and aspiration each offers". Franzen's "Farther Away" reduces the difference to a charge: Franzen cares about other people, Wallace "had always been a narcissistic jerk."
The novel of the self vs. the social novel. Franzen's two-kinds-of-novelist thesis: "One man (call him Jon) looks at the world and sees other people; the other man (call him Dave) sees only himself." From this Franzen concludes that "close loving relationships, which for most of us are a foundational source of meaning, have no standing in the Wallace fictional universe", and that "the island of the self is a hideous place, and Wallace lived there."
Franzen's own anti-social fiction. Baskin turns the argument: Franzen's novels (The Twenty-Seventh City, Strong Motion, Freedom) enact withdrawal from relationships and society; "the self is an island--the mainland other people", yet Franzen "seems incapable of describing life in America without denouncing it." In the "tragic realist," valid social criticism "can curdle into a seemingly endless directory of complaints."
Wallace's self-fiction is self-criticism, not valorization. In Wallace, "radical individualism" is the horror, never the ideal: Sternberg's inward eyeball in Westward, Rick Vigorous's failed communication in Broom, and — the one Infinite Jest datum — "Hal's hyper-intellectualism in Infinite Jest eventually transforms his prodigious head into a cage." The recurring danger is the "dread of being trapped inside a self."
The Pale King as antidote. Chris Fogle's conversion (the "substitute Jesuit," the Kierkegaardian "leap outward" into adulthood) reframes freedom: the limitations that matter "would not be imposed on us; our task was to generate them from within"; the book's ethic is "simple attention," and its extravagant vision, placed in the post-narrative notes, is boredom-as-threshold: "It turns out that bliss--a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious--lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom." Baskin: "happiness, in Wallace's final book, awaits those able to forget themselves completely."
Realism vs. the spiritual autobiography. Against Franzen's alignment of the social novel with health, Baskin defends the experimental "novel of the self" as "the spiritual autobiography reconfigured" (Kierkegaard, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Beckett), closing: realism "will always win for a time", but "it is those starting from farthest away that are likely to rule longest."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: In Infinite Jest, Hal's hyper-intellectual self-consciousness is a self-built prison — his prodigious head becomes a cage

Crux: cage-self-built
Stance: endorses
Evidence:
- [secondary] Baskin's reading: "Hal's hyper-intellectualism in Infinite Jest eventually transforms his prodigious head into a cage", an instance of the "dread of being trapped inside a self" that runs through Wallace's fiction and is depicted as horror, never as an ideal. [The Point, sec. "As against the corrective impulses"]
Notes: A passing IJ characterization inside a Franzen/Pale-King essay; no scene is cited, so no scene mapping is asserted. Maps also to the solipsism/communication-solipsism field — the self-cage as the negative pole the whole oeuvre works against.

THEORY: Wallace's project is anti-narcissistic — the self-fiction is a discipline of self-forgetting and attention, not (as Franzen charges) a valorization of the interesting self

Crux: this-is-water-connection
Stance: endorses
Evidence:
- [author] The Pale King's attention/bliss note ("bliss … lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom") and the Jesuit's Kierkegaardian "leap," read as the affirmative program. [The Point, sec. "such a definition of heroism"]
- [secondary] Baskin against Franzen: Wallace's fiction "was almost always a fiction of self-criticism," and its vision of the good life "is the opposite of narcissistic and individualistic". [The Point, closing sections]
Notes: Oeuvre-scoped (grounded in The Pale King and the Kenyon-address ethic), applied back onto Infinite Jest's solipsism. In-source tension recorded per the lens: Baskin concedes Wallace's "moralism and theologizing" could be "suffocating," a "fundamentalist streak" (Raban) to which "Wallace is really vulnerable" — the anti-narcissism reading is defended, not asserted as settled.

Themes

Solipsism and the trapped self; irony/sincerity and the ethics of attention; narcissism as spiritual rather than personality defect; the realism-vs-experimentalism debate as a debate about value; Franzen/Wallace as paired antipodes.

Cross-references

In the running debate over Wallace's persona (Franzen's narcissism/misogyny catalogue on one side), Baskin's rebuttal is the strongest single defense of the anti-narcissism reading.
The Hal-as-cage image belongs with the solipsism readings of Hal's collapse; the attention/self-forgetting ethic pairs with the This Is Water and AA readings.

Notable passages

Franzen's thesis, as Baskin quotes it: "close loving relationships … have no standing in the Wallace fictional universe."
Baskin on Hal: "Hal's hyper-intellectualism in Infinite Jest eventually transforms his prodigious head into a cage."
The Pale King note: "bliss … lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom."
Closing: "it is those starting from farthest away that are likely to rule longest."