Mapping Meaning, the Journal (Issue No. 1)

David Foster Wallace, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the
vapidity of the bottomless, postmodern machine.
Clark Nielson
“Long ago, there was something in me,” he
said. “That thing will come back no more.”
Dexter mourns the loss of the ability to
mourn. The loss of innocence that registers
with Wallace in “The View from Mrs.
Thompson’s House.” The golden pedestal,
so carefully crafted by Dexter, collapses
beneath a fictitious love. This love story
echoes Fitzgerald’s own relationship with his
wife Zelda, a legitimate “Southern Bell.” Zelda
originally refused to marry the middle-class
Fitzgerald. Like Gatsby, Fitzgerald buckled
down and started to win fame and money
with his writing. He won back his girl. Zelda
eventually accepted the hand of the new and
rising star; queue one of the most publicly
distasteful and by all accounts deranged
relationships of the 20th century. Fitzgerald
got what he wanted, and was left with the
glitter:
“Because desire just cheats you. It’s
like a sunbeam skipping here and
there about a room. It stops and gilds
some inconsequential object, and we
poor fools try to grasp it—but when
we do the sunbeam moves on to
something else, and you’ve got the
inconsequential part, but the glitter
that made you want it is gone.”
9
My aunt has every edition of the Best
American Short Stories, series on a shelf in her
basement. I picked up the 1988 edition at
random a few weeks ago. The argumentative
nature of the introduction contrasted
the often neutral to boring level these
introductions uphold. This introduction,
written by Mark Helprin, startled me in its
relevance three decades later. Helprin attacks
the minimalist school of fiction and effectively
paints this enemy as “mice treading through
lion territory” with an “unwillingness to deal
with life other than obliquely” that is not
subtlety but cowardice. These writers make
an industry of ridicule, he claims, and he asks
of their characters:
Why do they always live in filthy unkempt
apartments filled with ugly bric-a-brac,
where everyone smokes, drinks, stays up
all night, and is addicted to coffee? Why
do they seem to exist as if there were no
landscape, as if they lived in tunnels? Is
this why they are never sunburned?
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway
traded correspondence throughout their
careers. Hemingway adhered to the stoically
masculine, “if you can cut a word or phrase,
and still have a story, cut it,” policy that
makes his writing easily recognizable. His
writing is the definition of minimalism.
Fitzgerald’s writing is a little less taut.
But Helprin is not referring to Hemingway’s
minimalism in his argument. Fitzgerald and
Hemingway didn’t cut or reduce human
conflicts in their stories the way that
Helprin claims minimalist writing does.
They wore their sufferings unashamed on
their sleeves, and never danced around
tragedy. Hemingway’s, Farewell to Arms, and
Fitzgerald’s short stories terminate with a
numbing note of loss after teasing beauty.
Issue N o 1
47