David Foster Wallace me deja siempre la misma impresión: un escritor, al menos en sus artículos periodísticos, con insoportables pretensiones de superioridad moral.

Hoy leo un artículo de Katie Roipe sobre el ataque de Wallace a la visión sexual de sus predecesores literarios.

…Wallace goes on to attack Updike and, in passing, Roth and Mailer for being narcissists. But does this mean that the new generation of novelists is not narcissistic? I would suspect, narcissism being about as common among male novelists as brown eyes in the general public, that it does not. It means that we are simply witnessing the flowering of a new narcissism: boys too busy gazing at themselves in the mirror to think much about girls, boys lost in the beautiful vanity of “I was warm and wanted her to be warm,” or the noble purity of being just a tiny bit repelled by the crude advances of the desiring world.

El apocamiento del posmoderno revela cierto puritanismo, sugiere Roipe. No podría estar más de acuerdo. Hay cierta voluntad de domesticar y suprimir las energías más oscuras de la creación, como si el arte debiera mostrarnos solamente el lado luminoso de las cosas.

Finalmente anota Roipe en su artículo:

Compared with the new purity, the self-conscious paralysis, the self-regarding ambivalence, Updike’s notion of sex as an “imaginative quest” has a certain vanished grandeur. The fluidity of Updike’s Tarbox, with its boozy volleyball games and adulterous couples copulating al fresco, has disappeared into the Starbucks lattes and minivans of our current suburbs, and our towns and cities are more solid, our marriages safer; we have landed upon a more conservative time. Why, then, should we be bothered by our literary lions’ continuing obsession with sex? Why should it threaten our insistent modern cynicism, our stern belief that sex is no cure for what David Foster Wallace called “ontological despair”? Why don’t we look at these older writers, who want to defeat death with sex, with the same fondness as we do the inventors of the first, failed airplanes, who stood on the tarmac with their unwieldy, impossible machines, and looked up at the sky?

Si he de tomar partido por alguien, me quedo con la energía y la turbulencia de Roth, de Mailer, de Updike. Que es los mismo que decir, me quedo con la inagotable energía de Bret Easton Ellis, de Bellow, de Faulkner.

Me pregunto de que será síntoma el hecho de que los hijos sean más conservadores que sus mayores. ¿Hasta donde alcanza la fuerza hasta agotar el músculo y encogerse en una mueca avergonzada? ¿Será la timidez y flaccidez el signo de los (nuevos) tiempos?

Tantas preguntas al final de otro año postmoderno.