| Oblivion: Stories | |
| Author: | David Foster Wallace |
| Cover Artist: | Mario J. Pulice |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Genre: | Literary fiction, postmodern literature |
| Publisher: | Little, Brown and Company |
| Pub Date: | June 8, 2004 (U.S.) |
| Media Type: | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages: | 329 |
Oblivion: Stories (2004) is a collection of short fiction by the American writer David Foster Wallace. Oblivion is Wallace's third and last short story collection and was listed as a 2004 New York Times Notable Book of the Year.[1] In the stories, Wallace explores the nature of reality, dreams, trauma, and the "dynamics of consciousness."[2] The story "Good Old Neon" was included in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2002.
The collection's writing overlapped with Wallace's last novel, The Pale King,[3] and many of the stories came from notebooks that he used to write the book and may have begun as sections of it.[4]
Wallace first suggested a new collection of stories to his editor Michael Pietsch in October 2001. Much of the editing appears to have been completed by October 2003.[5] Published in June 2004, the book sold 18,000 hardcover copies in its first year.[6]
The book was met with a "familiar duality" in its reviews, receiving a mixture of both extremely positive and negative reviews.[15] According to the review aggregator Metacritic, it received generally positive reviews from critics. Metacritic reported that the book had an average score of 68 out of 100, based on 22 reviews.[16] For Time, Joel Stein wrote that the "breathtakingly smart" stories are "epic modernism," with "big plots, absurd Beckettian humor and science-fiction-height ideas portrayed vis-a-vis slow, realistic stream of consciousness."[17] For The San Diego Union-Tribune, Jan Wildt wrote that Oblivion argues convincingly "that the short story is the 42-year-old author's true fictional metier" and that Oblivion "puts [Wallace's] stylistic idiosyncrasy to better use than any of its predecessors."[18] Laura Miller, for Salon, wrote that Wallace had "perfected a particularly subtle form of horror story" and that his "long arcs of prose and the narrative sidetracks are exposed not as tortuous strivings toward some hard-won truth but as an insulation that people spin between themselves and the sharp edges of their condition."[19] For the Los Angeles Times, Scott M. Morris wrote that with Oblivion, Wallace "has earned a place as one of America's most daring and talented young writers." Morris claimed that although some of the stories left the reader "more impressed with [Wallace's] intelligence than with the stories", with "'The Suffering Channel,' 'Mister Squishy' and 'The Soul Is Not a Smithy,' Wallace transcends mere dazzling displays and explores human emotions with sensitivity". Morris also wrote that in this collection "the high stakes of life have supplanted postmodern playfulness" and that "Wallace has laid down a marker that will be coveted by readers."[20]
Other critics gave the collection either mixed or negative reviews.[21] For n+1, Chad Harbach wrote that "apart from 'The Suffering Channel' and 'Good Old Neon', Oblivion has a casual feel." Harbach argued that "compared to the premeditated formal performances of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, his previous collection, much of Oblivion has a loose, tossed-off feel."[22] For the London Review of Books, Wyatt Mason wrote that although the stories were "a bright array of sad and moving and funny and fascinating human objects of undeniable, unusual value", they still might exhibit a "fundamental rhetorical failure" due to their difficulty. Nonetheless, Mason claimed Wallace's collection was "the most interesting and serious and accomplished shorter fiction published in the past decade".[23] For The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani suggested that the collection was dominated by "tiresome, whiny passages". She wrote that even though Wallace is a "prose magician", in Oblivion he "gives us only the tiniest tasting of his smorgasbord of talents. Instead, he all too often settles for the sort of self-indulgent prattling that bogged down his 1999 collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and the cheap brand of irony and ridicule that he once denounced in an essay as 'agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture'".[24] James Wood also panned the collection in his review for The New Republic. He claimed that "Mister Squishy" was "fundamentally unreadable" because Wallace too often "bloats his sentences with mimesis". "Above all", Wood wrote, "his immersionist's willingness to saturate his fictions in the germs that he is documenting makes them sick themselves". The collection as a whole, according to Wood, was "talented, frustrating, and finally intolerable"; each of the stories failed to "move the reader" because they "strangely reproduce the extreme coldness that they abhor."[25]
Book Marks, Literary Hub's book review aggregation website, gave the collection a "Positive" rating based on 12 reviews from major book review publications. They are broken down into seven rave reviews, three positive reviews, and two mixed reviews.[26]
In 2018, Vulture.com gathered together a panel of prominent book critics to choose the 100 most important books to form the new canon for the 21st century thus far. Oblivion is one of the books that was selected.[27]
Criticism of this collection has involved attempts to discuss the collection as a whole, in relation to other work by Wallace, and as individual stories. In general, Marshall Boswell claimed that this was Wallace's "bleakest" work of fiction. In Oblivion, he "uncharacteristically" provides "no way out" of solipsism and loneliness. Boswell further suggested that the collection "repeatedly undermines many of the techniques for alleviation" from loneliness, like communicating through language, that Wallace presented in Infinite Jest. "Oblivion," he writes, "remains unique in Wallace's oeuvre in its unrelenting pessimism."[28] D.T. Max wrote that the stories in Oblivion "seem afraid of compression, as if the title were a threat that could only be defended against by the relentlessly engaged consciousness."[29]
Many critics have linked Oblivion to other works by Wallace, both fiction and nonfiction. Max asserted that many of the stories are "successors" to Brief Interviews with Hideous Men in that they "concerned themselves mostly with middle-aged, middle-class white men in middle America."[30] Others claim that Oblivion and The Pale King are companion texts. Max wrote that while this collection is "descriptive" of a lonely American society, The Pale King is "prescriptive", suggesting a "way out of the bind".[31] Boswell also claimed that The Pale King is the "compositional companion" to Oblivion. Both concern themselves with themes like the management of "entropy" and "shit, art, death." But The Pale King can ultimately be seen as a "corrective, or at least dialectical partner, to Oblivions haunted insularity." Boswell also linked Oblivion to This Is Water, in that it depicts adults "hypnotized by the constant monologues" inside their heads, as well as "Deciderization 2007", an essay that appears in Both Flesh and Not, in its occupation with entropy and sorting data and a "surfeit of information".[32] Tom Tracey observed that "The Soul Is Not a Smithy" particularly both resembles The Pale King and recalls the philosophy of This Is Water in its discussion of attention and boredom.[33]
Other critics have examined individual stories more closely. Tracey asserts that, in "The Soul Is Not a Smithy" and many of the other stories in Oblivion, Wallace seeks to "place the crucial events of each tale beyond the frame of the main exposition." Indeed, "the important actions of the narrative are seen to occur only on the extreme periphery of the narrator's awareness." Tracey suggests that the meaning and goal of this is to "call for greater attentiveness to our peripheral surroundings" and to show that "the most important events of our lives often take place on the margins of our quotidian experience." Tracey also maintains that the narrator's inattentiveness in class also depicts how "imagination can provide a psychological outlet, or refuge, from suffering."[34]
In the same essay, Tracey further develops his thoughts on the title story, "Oblivion", which raises questions about what reality is, and what is real. The story, Tracey asserts, gives an ambiguous answer, which suggests that what is real and true comes from our own decisions about what to believe. He also argues that the story is an "imaginative response" to Decartes's Meditations on First Philosophy.[35]
For The New York Times, Walter Kirn wrote that "Good Old Neon" focuses on "a philosophical conundrum: the question of whether human beings can be said to possess authentic selves or whether, like 'David Wallace,' the story's narrator, we are really just a bunch of shabby fakes cut off from our own and others' essential beings by the inadequacy of language."[36]
Oblivion has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Persian, Serbian, Greek, Chinese, Korean, German and Russian.[37] [38] [39] [40]
Oblivion was published in German as two separate books, both of which were translated in part by Marcus Igendaay and Ulrich Blumenbach. The first book, In Alter Vertrautheit, was published in 2006 and contains the stories "Mister Squishy," "Die Seele ist kein Hammerwerk" (The Soul Is Not a Smithy), "Inkarnationen gebrannter Kinder" (Incarnations of Burned Children), "Noch ein Pionier" (Another Pioneer), and "Neon in alter Vertrauheit" (Good Old Neon).[41]
The second book, Vergessenheit, was published in 2008 and contains "Der Spiegel der Natur – Eine Kritik der Philosophie" (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature), "Vergessenheit" (Oblivion), and "TV der Leiden – The Suffering Channel."[42]