Bro, Do You Even Lit? 

With the recent release of The End of the Tour, a biopic about David Foster Wallace starring Jason Segel, a number of opinion pieces have cropped up evaluating his relationship with Lit-Bro culture. In a recent New York Times article titled “Why Literary Chauvinists Love David Foster Wallace,” Molly Fischer describes Wallace as having become “lit-bro shorthand,” joking about a “bookish male acquaintance with a man-bun” who is “first in line to see the David Foster Wallace movie.” So what are “Lit-Bros,” and why have they come to be so closely affiliated with Wallace?

The most prominent cultural representation of the Lit-Bro is a parody Twitter account called @GuyInYourMFA. It’s written in the voice of a white male in his mid-twenties whose know-it-all attitude and loudly professed chauvinistic convictions about literature make him the most insufferable person in his MFA program. That the account has over 60,000 followers suggests that this type of guy is recognizable to more people than just those who are enrolled in fiction writing courses. A Lit-Bro is that guy in your English course: loquacious, eager to impress, and probably has some anachronistic method of carrying his books, like a briefcase. Rather than reading for enjoyment or enlightenment, Lit-Bros treat reading as a means to show off how smart and cultured they are.

Some sample tweets to illustrate his chauvinism: “I’d have a girlfriend if every girl I met didn’t think reading Jane Austen made her literary,” and “‘Who’s your favourite writer?’ I asked. ‘John Green,’ she replied. I stood up without a word and left the bar, then left the town.” His expectation of women is that despite not having such sophisticated taste as he does, they should still be impressed by his literacy: “Finished another moleskine. It’ll go where all my used notebooks go—scattered visibly in my room for girls to pick up and page through,” and “I find myself acquainted with the type of woman who appreciates my Pynchon tattoos,” highlight this quality. These tweets resonate with so many people because they reflect a pomposity and obliviousness recognizable in real guys. But why is the Lit-Bro’s taste so male-centric? If he wants to impress women with his literacy, why isn’t he bragging about reading any female writers?

The reason might be that many of the most widely acclaimed white male authors of the past 50 years—guys like Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Norman Mailer, and John Updike—occasionally seem to write as if their primary ambition is to prove how smart they are. Their writing can sometimes come across as a narcissistic endeavor: they write books that are lexically and thematically challenging, seemingly to weed out readers who aren’t willing enough—or as Lit-Bro might put it, smart enough—to put in the extra effort to read a challenging book. So when a Lit-Bro talks about how much he loves these writers, he’s subliminally bragging that he’s among that elite group of readers intelligent enough to understand their works. And because this particular group of writers is male, he reasons that female writers don’t measure up to his Lit-Bro icons. The fact that a lot of these male authors frequently wrote misogynistic characters as protagonists—Updike and Roth in particular—only strengthens the male-centrism of the Lit-Bro’s taste.

What Lit-Bros fail to understand is that great literature doesn’t need to be obtuse to be meaningful. Alice Munro’s writing is both dense and lucid without being wordy. She writes in short, declarative sentences and her work never feels overstrained. Her high level of emotional intelligence allows her to illustrate what it means to be a human being by telling about the lives of others. Munro does this in an emotionally straightforward way. The fact that she’s ignored by Lit-Bros illustrates what they’re missing. There’s a character in Munro’s story “Dolly” who is the antithesis of Lit-Bro: literarily gifted, but wary about coming across as boastful:

He is in fact a poet. He is really a poet and really a horse trainer. He has held one-term jobs at various colleges, but never so far away that he can’t keep in touch with the stables. […] When you’re busy with horses people can see that you are busy, but when you’re busy at making up a poem you look as if you’re in a state of idleness and you feel a little strange or embarrassed having to explain what’s going on.

Horse training, like other types of manual labour, tends to reliably yield physical results that serve as a testament to the efforts of the labourer. Since reading and writing are usually done in private, using literacy as a means to show off to others requires boastfully explaining what you’ve read or written. This is what makes Lit-Bros so annoying. This is why @GuyInYourMFA has Pynchon tattoos, and leaves his notebooks lying around as proof of his intelligence and capability as a writer.

As Fischer points in her New York Times article, as well as in an article she ran on Slate called “David Foster Wallace, Beloved Author of Bros,” David Foster Wallace earned most of his predominantly white male fan base with the publishing of his magnum opus Infinite Jest. The book, which appears on The Toast’s list of “Books That Literally All White Men Own,” is 1,079 pages long with almost 400 footnotes and uses words like “thigmotactic” and “pedalferrous.”  At first glance it appears like the kind of thing Lit-Bros love: a difficult book that exists for the sake of being a difficult book. Wallace, who famously described Mailer, Updike, and Roth as the “Great Male Narcissists,” had accidentally written a book that would become the essential Lit-Bro status symbol. You had to be smart to read it and you had to read it to be considered smart.

But Wallace’s affiliation with Lit-Bros is unfair and misinformed. Infinite Jest was his effort to write something completely sincere. Despite being long and stylistically challenging, the book has a more straightforward premise than people give it credit for. Through the relationships of a set of characters at a tennis academy and an addictions house, Wallace lays out a set of emotional facts of human life: parenting is difficult, suffering brings people together, perfection is unattainable, and so on. The sustained moral throughout the book is that the only way to live a fulfilling life is to dedicate your energy to helping other people. It’s a lot more sincere and less narcissistic than its affiliation with cynical Lit-Bros gives it credit for.

In this way he’s more like Munro’s poet/horse-trainer than @GuyInYourMFA. Even though he’s a grammar obsessive with a fixation on obscure, esoteric words, Wallace consistently works colloquialisms into his narrative voice, the most frequent being the conjunction “and but so” that he uses to start a lot of sentences. He uses these terms because he wants to come across as a regular guy and avoid alienating his audience. Wallace is an undisputable genius, but despite not being a normal person, his mission as a writer was to connect with normal people. Striving to connect, rather than to impress, is where Wallace’s attitude differs from that of his Lit-Bro devotees. Associating Infinite Jest with Lit-Bros because it’s complex and lengthy completely undermines the point of a book written by an incredibly empathetic author. When people look back on the past 50 years of English literature, hopefully they don’t lump Wallace in with the “Great Male Narcissists” that he criticized.