There’s plenty on the new Eugenides elsewhere (plus I’m actually amazingly mostly on Kakutani’s side for once, so I’d urge everybody to check what she’s got to say), but there’s an aspect of his latest that’s been stuck in my head since I read it. The McNally Jackson tumblr site was the first (that I saw) to peg this—here’s what they wrote in July:
As Leonard and his female friend Madeleine approach the Cape Cod lab at which Leonard has a fellowship:
“Who took my saliva?” Leonard said, as the buildings, where they were to live for the next nine months, appeared. “Do you have my saliva? Because I can’t find mine right now.”
Which is almost identical to this, literally the lede from Frank Bruni’s 1996 profile of DFW:
Nervousness and dread frequently chase David Foster Wallace, and when they catch him, as they have now, he writhes and twitches and prattles at a breakneck clip, his incessant quips running the gamut from marvelous to mundane. ”Do you have my saliva?” he asks a companion in his cab, reflecting on the way his jitters have drained all moisture from his mouth. “Somebody took my saliva, because I don’t have it.”
Of course there are now whole levels of deliciousness regarding (New York Magazine and McNally Jackson both, in July, led the charge that’s now gotten us here): a week and a half ago NYM ran an excerpt from the WSJ’s interview with Eugenides in which he claimed it entirely coincidental that one of his characters speaks with Wallace’s exact word-for-word voice, and Eugenides is now, today, claiming in an interview with Slate that the thing’s a rumor and will eventually die down, which eventuality’s pretty hard to conceive of so long as the author refuses to address the situation like an adult (“Sure: Leonard’s got a striking number of Wallace’s traits. He was a friend and his passing left a huge impression on me and my work. Next question.”).
However: the point here is neither schadenfreude nor snark. The point here is to take just a second and recognize the massive force Wallace exerts in literature, and to consider for just a second if he’s now become something like a Literary Ghost, or Myth. Every industry, of course, has its share of ghosts and myths: in music, there’s the 27 club, plus of course the crossroads/soul-sale one, to say nothing of that mythic ghost that cuts across seemingly all enterprises, the genius, too-sensitive scene-fleer (Brian Wilson, Jeff Mangum). Film’s got its smattering of across the board weirdos (Hughes, Kubrick, Cruise, name anybody) and of course, sadly, the closeted male lead (Rock Hudson, Cary Grant), and plenty of others (flame-out child stars, live-fast-die-young types, etc).
I’ve been thinking of Wallace as a literary ghost for awhile now just because I can’t imagine how he won’t be the principal ghost who haunts lit for the next while—both stylistically, but also, more critically, as a template on the page. Chewing tobacco? Long hair? Bandana? Prickly genius? I can’t imagine the next time I’ll read of a character with those traits and not think of Wallace.
But of course Wallace is just the latest ghost or myth to be obvious and attract attention: the dominant myth or ghost for the last however long, and the ghost most likely to return once we’ve all tired of the Wallace narrative, is the Salinger/Pynchon one—the recluse, the disappeared genius (see this Lethem NYorker story from ’07 if you think this doesn’t still happen). There’s permutations of this, of course: Lish teaches once every however long, DeLillo’s not exactly a party-goer. But that does seem to be the dominant ghost: the disappeared literary genius, off by himself. This of course isn’t just fiction: Jack Gilbert is who he is as much for his great poetry as for his off-to-Greece-for-decades tendency. There’s also, of course, the classic and older models: the head-in-the-stove depressive myth (or rocks in pockets and into the sea, or in mom’s fur coat in the garage with the car going, whatever), the in-the-house-alone-forever-never-published-in-her/his-lifetime myth, etc.
I don’t have any genius insights into any of this, I simply cannot help but wonder. Wallace was a massive presence on a lot of writers; smart money’s on him showing up, in some way or another, in lots of books for the next while (as Hemingway surely showed up in books of the generation that came after him, as Salinger or Pynchon did/does). Of course, when Wallace (or whoever) comes up and the author literally won’t admit to using the myth, we certainly can have our laughs about it. But I can’t help wondering, first, what other common literary myths are peppered through other literature, and second, when we’ll see Wallace again, bandana’d, a dip plugged into his lip, still looking for his saliva.