David Foster Wallace: ‘A voyage into our economic realm’ or ‘How to understand Business through Fiction’
Once you listened to D.F.W.'s reflections in his essays and arguments you come to understand step by step the realistic force of a fictional style today. D.F.W.' writing responds to specific features of our "lifeworld", often comes as a kind of voyage into the economic realm of the American Society of the 90' and thereby reconfigures and shake the cultural self awareness of his readers. The prominent staging of media-topics in his work is more than affirmative or a neo-postmodern technique. Imaging the televisual realm is a response, "an effort to impose some sort of accountability on the state of affairs in which more Americans get their news from television than from newspapers and in which more Americans every evening watch Wheel of Fortune than all three network news programs combined."1
The disfiguration and adaption of many televisual aspects in his works is part of a fictional technique that is more powerful than a brute realistic try to collect data of what people do today. What D.F.W. calls Image-Fiction has a reflective surplus, that takes into account a state of affairs of our cultural realm, that already blinds us and leaves us with a naïve realism. Let's listen to D.F.W. himself.
"Image-Fiction is a natural adaptation of the hoary techniques of literary Realism to a '90s world whose defining boundaries have been deformed by electric signal. For one of realistic fiction's big jobs used to be to afford easements across borders, to help readers leap over the walls of self and locale and show us unseen or -dreamed-of people and cultures and ways to be. Realism made the strange familiar. Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a Soviet-satellite newscast of the Berlin Walls fall-i.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar-it's not a surprise that some of today's most ambitious Realist fiction is going about trying to make the familiar strange. In so doing, in demanding fictional access behind lenses and screens and headlines and reimagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago, and appearance, Image-Fiction is paradoxically trying to restore what's taken for "real" to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights."2
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1. David Foster Wallace, A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again, Abacus 2009 (reprint), p. 51
2. p. 51-52