Michael Weiss has a fine piece on David Foster Wallace at The Weekly Standard . The Wallace quote I am snipping here, which closes the piece, is nothing very new or groundbreaking (anymore? Rieff had him beat by at least a decade). But note the phrasing I’m putting in bold:
The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti -rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching , who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels.
Who dare — somehow — to reestablish our appropriate distance from — critical distance ?! Ah, but yes. A paradox fit for a pomocon. The fun — by which I mean the labor of the spirit — is in that somehow, of course. (And it’s interesting as a hermeneutic calisthenic to try figuring out whether Wallace is best read as associating the somehow with the backing away or the dare . . . or both.)
