“ Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? ”

David Foster Wallace, quoted in the wonderful article about his life and work in The New Yorker. [extreme spoiler warning applies. the article discusses both The Broom of the System’s and Infinite Jest’s plots at length, and includes the final lines from both novels. you have been warned.]

Now, I worry about this. I worry that this is what I am doing when I write plays, and when I write fiction. That I am simply adding noise to noise, that I am with ironic distance pointing at the world as it burns, having a good laugh and cracking a few stress-relieving jokes, but doing nothing to actually put out the fire. What a shame, what a shame that would be.

This could easily turn into a treatise on why I think it’s worth the work and time and pain and trouble and pennilessness to produce fiction in the first place. And I should probably write that someday, but I only have 46 minutes and you probably wouldn’t want to read it anyway.

In the meantime, I’ll just say that I agree. It’s not enough to point. It’s never enough to just point.