Notes on Wes Craven, David Foster Wallace & Metafiction
This is one of those topics I’ve been meaning to write about for years—and something I’ve thought about for over a decade. One thing I intend to do is get these subjects out of my head sooner. I don’t need to write a 3000-word longread about David Foster Wallace and Wes Craven. I can write something simpler, quicker, getting my initial thoughts out there and then, if I so choose, writing more about it in the future.
There are other topics in this same oeuvre. Things I am attempting to determine how and when I write about. Yes, there’s my piles of fiction, but even ignoring that unfinished writing (which will always be a pile, with more unfinished appearing as things leave my realm and enter into the realm of readers), there are still all the unpublished blog posts, unwritten ones, the takes and the opinions and the research projects I intend to share into the universe.
Here are a few things I haven’t written yet:
A series of articles on the fourth installments of major film franchises
A fan theory about Billy Joel’s “The Piano Man”
A consideration of Taylor Swift and Rob Schneider
My reaction to The Batman
Some notes on whether or not Kermit the Frog is responsible for 9/11
Something about how the new The Batman is the funniest Batman yet, which may or may not be separate from general notes about The Batman
The question of whether the new name of Facebook—Meta—is a threat to the concept of metafiction
And yes, within this list is something about the relationship between Wes Craven and David Foster Wallace.
Part of what slowed me down in writing about the relationship between Wes Craven and David Foster Wallace, two deceased men who wrote a lot of really good stuff in their lives, is the question of whether I also need to tie such an article into Mark Zuckerberg’s co-opting of the word meta.
But when I tried to write about Wes Craven and David Foster Wallace, it began with a line half remembered from a story or essay I couldn’t locate. I remembered David Foster Wallace saying something to the effect, when breaking the fourth wall of one of his short pieces, of metafiction being so overdone in the 1990s that even Wes Craven is doing it. I thought it might be The Depressed Person, a story I did not like but which I remember breaking the fourth wall in an exhausting amount of footnotes.
When I attempted to google “wes craven david foster wallace” and “which david foster wallace short story mentions wes craven” or, alternatively, “which david foster wallace essay mentions wes craven”, I never found what I was looking for. The only thing I repeatedly found was references to Nightmare on Elm Street XXII: The Senescence, a film that exists only in Infinite Jest and, it turns out, another example of DFW mocking the legacy of Craven.
I eventually tweeted about this, something I didn’t necessarily want to do but—because no one ever wants to tweet something about David Foster Wallace—I couldn’t find the answer on Google. No one helped me on Twitter, probably because everyone who follows me has “David Foster Wallace” muted. I had to even check to see if I had it muted and it was preventing me from seeing helpful answers.
Here’s what I tweeted:
Finally, I returned to Google and I did google my way to the answer, when Twitter proved also unuseful. I had to leave the first page of Google to find the answer and found it in Ronald B. Richardson’s 2010 blog post “The Danger of Meta: Centre George Pompidou and David Foster Wallace’s ‘Octet’’
Lucky for me, Richardson not only identified the short story I had in mind—”Octet”, from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men—but he also included in his blog post the entire line I’d been trying to remember:
Here’s another stab at #6’ within the text itself — which in the late 1990s, when even Wes Craven is cashing in on metafictional self-reference, might come off lame and tired and facile, and also runs the risk of compromising the queer urgency about whatever it is you feel you want to the pieces to interrogate in whoever’s reading them. This is an urgency that you, the fiction writer, feel very . . . well, urgently, and want the reader to feel too — which is to say that by no means do you want a reader to come away thinking that the cycle is just a cute formal exercise in interrogative structure and S.O.P. metatext.
DFW is smashing a lot of ideas into this paragraph, but the biggest—the one that has haunted me since I read it in probably 2006 or 2007—is this idea that Craven was “cashing in on metafictional self-reference” and that Craven’s 1990s works could be considered “lame and tired and facile”.
The first question I had to ask, that I still don't know the answer to, is whether DFW was referencing Wes Craven’s Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (from 1994) or Wes Craven’s Scream (from 1996). Or, more likely, both.
I’m writing about this now for a few reasons: a) it bothers me that David Foster Wallace was dismissive of Wes Craven and comparing himself to Craven in a way that feels smug and self-serving and superior to Craven’s works b) it bothers me, in general, that Wes Craven isn’t considered to be the true master of metafiction, having possibly created more metafictional works in his lifetime than any other artist c) even if I didn’t realize it at the time, watching Scream in as a twelve year old was my first brush with metafiction, but, being as it was also my first brush with horror, I didn’t really understand the metafictional elements d) and, finally, I just watched Wes Craven’s New Nightmare for the first time.
Wes Craven as Wes Craven in Wes Craven’s Wes Craven’s New Nightmare
Over the last few weeks, I’ve watched Scream 5, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, in that order.
And I am now convinced more than ever of the point I made above: Wes Craven is the ultimate metafictionalist and David Foster Wallace had no right besmirching him. Craven wasn’t cashing in. He was innovating and advancing the art of metafiction and bringing it to the world what one could argue was metafiction’s global debut.
Like a lot of things I write about, I may write more about this in the future. Especially as I may make to make a deeper, stronger argument about why Wes Craven was better at the metafictional self-referencing works than David Foster Wallace ever could’ve been.