The Pomo Con

In a eulogy to David Foster Wallace in Harpers, Zadie Smith refers to "pomo relativity" as she and other esteemed commentators gush over DFW's writings. It all comes across like Keith Gessen defending global warming-- hysteria and bluff contradicted by the real world.

This is the point: to pomo thinkers, reality is what they say it is. It's all relative; i.e., made-up.

DFW produced an outpouring of verbiage and was a very sensitive guy, but he was no literary artist. He literally had nothing to say, in that the end of his thoughts was: nothing. Like the solipsistic ruminations of his character on a diving board, his art ends in a void. Is this what the public wants from its writers? Pomo lit is a dead end, a sad waste of effort. The worst period of American literature. It consist of armies of expensively trained writers who like Foster Wallace expend gargantuan numbers of words saying nothing.

THE ELITE CON
How do they get away with it? As their writings are largely incomprehensible, but LOOK impressive at first glance, readers assume they are. That the reader gets nothing from it is his own fault! (So it's thought.) Perhaps a tiny Elect does get something from it-- the pomo gang themselves. A circular argument. "WE are great because WE say we are." A swiftly-spinning spaceship rising higher and higher into the void, away from the general public.