I Intro
The first time I read a story by David Foster Wallace, I hated it. It was a translation of "Suicide as a sort of Present" translated into Swedish for a 2002 issue of the literary magazine 00-tal. Although reading it later in English somewhat redeemed the story for me (its tone was now less satirical, it seemed, and more genuine), I still think of it as a minor story in Wallace's oeuvre, with its almost fairytale-like narration interspersed with self-help lingo. It's a story that explores internal fraudulence without the emotional heft of several other stories that were also in "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men", like The Depressed Person or Adult World I & II or even the interviews themselves.
So when I got Infinite Jest, I didn't expect to like it. In fact, I mainly bought it so I could glibly dismiss it in front of hipster friends. Then I started reading it and the magic happened.
The opening scene, with Hal wanting to communicate, wanting desperately to be understood, to be recognised as being "in there" saying things like
I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk and talk. Let's talk about anything. I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption. I could interface you guys right under the table (...) I'm not just a creatus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function.
while all that's being heard are "Subanimalistic noises and sounds." , that discrepancy is one of the most basic human failings: the inability to communicate, to express that which lies too deep to be simplified into words, and Wallace makes an extreme example out of poor Hal, who lies there on the floor, his "forehead pressed into parquet [he] never knew could be so cold." He tries to explain
"I am not what you see and hear."
Distant sirens. A crude half nelson. Forms at the door. A young Hispanic woman holds her palm against her mouth, looking.
"I'm not," I say.
As strong as that beginning was for me, articulating that common feeling - the clarity of thought obstructed by the clumsiness of expression - the next section, describing the addict Erdedy's wait for the 200 grams of "unusually good marijuana", is the one that had me sold on Wallace as a major writer. The real deal. Instantly, you are thrown inside the head of this man who is an addict, who is aware of being an addict and who is aware that he is aware. A trait of David Foster Wallace's characters is this almost crippling self-consciousness, where for a character to say something as simple as, say, I love you, they first have to preface that statement with their awareness of the fact that they've read Umberto Eco's essay on the three words, how it is impossible to say it in postmodern society where those words are being used by Barbara Cartland every day and the only way to say it is ironically but there is nothing ironic about a real, genuine feeling although yes that feeling could in of itself be a blend of social conditioning and chemical imbalance, and they know that the three words don't mean anything because they've read Barthes's "A Lover's Discource", in French in fact so as to not lose any of the nuance, but yes, in spite of all that: I love you.
That is the internal life of a David Foster Wallace character. Not a fun place to be, but a recogniseable landscape. Eerily familiar in fact. One of the main pleasures of reading Wallace is when he gets the structure of his never-ending sentences just right and you feel yourself reading the same way that you think. It really is quite a feat. This is something completely different to the Joyceian stream of consciousness which merely mimics thought but is, in the end, as artificial a description of the inner voice as a thought rendered in direct speech. Because, to take Joyce's most famous instance of stream of consciousness, Molly's thoughts are supposedly rendered verbatim rather than described, you lose some of the verisimilitude of thought since we rarely, if ever, think exclusively in words. Wallace is not trying to mimic internal thought-processes, it is rather an emulation taking place here. He doesn't always make it work, but when it does and you're parsing the sentences correctly, there has never been an author that so successfully describes the inner voice.
II Oblivion
I moved countries shortly after starting Infinite Jest (3 countries in 6 months, in fact) and didn't take it with me, so I had not finished it and, to be honest, after those initial passages there is a lot of stuff to get through before it gets good again (the Wardine section, for instance with its faux-ebonics) so it wasn't until I read this interview in Salon that I got interested in finding some of his other stuff. When Laura Miller asks him about AA teaching people fairly deep things through clichés, Wallace answers:
It seems to me that the intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this country is one of the things that's gutted our generation. All the things that my parents said to me, like "It's really important not to lie." OK, check, got it. I nod at that but I really don't feel it. Until I get to be about 30 and I realize that if I lie to you, I also can't trust you. I feel that I'm in pain, I'm nervous, I'm lonely and I can't figure out why. Then I realize, "Oh, perhaps the way to deal with this is really not to lie." The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting -- which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff -- can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can't, that seems to me to be important. That seems to me like something our generation needs to feel.
This was an answer that resonated with me immediately. I had been trying to find a reason not to lie, because it seems that if you set aside morality, lying can be something quite useful and saves you from having to deal with a lot of awful things. It had never occurred to me that a reason not to do it was that it makes you lonely. And so it was time for me to read Oblivion which had just come out in paperback and so was available in Dubai's somewhat dismal Magrudy bookshop (these were pre-Kinokuniya days).
Oblivion didn't get the best reviews. The stories seemed too cold, too distant to most reviewers (Laura Miller and the Review of Contemporary Fiction excepted). Walter Kim said this in the New York Times:
And there, perhaps unfairly decontextualized (to use a Wallace-type word), you have it: the ostentatiously elongated, curiously bureaucratic, stubbornly overdetermined prose style that is either -- depending on what you think about brevity being the soul of wit -- the coolest thing going in high-quality lit these days or profoundly damning evidence that American fiction is almost bankrupt and, like a desperate central government, is printing up stacks of impressively engraved, stupendously high-denomination bank notes in a bid to delay for a while its utter collapse.
James Woods wrote a scathing review in the New Republic:
The pomposity of ['Oblivion's'] narrator has disastrous results for the story. What might have been an affecting and genuinely ironic domestic tale, about a man's comic-pathetic inability to read correctly the warning signs in his marriage, becomes instead a fantastic and repellent exercise through which the reader can barely drag himself. Moreover, the hideousness of the husband's voice stacks the cards against him, precluding any possibility of sympathetic identification. 'Look at this pedantic little idiot,' Wallace seems to be saying, 'which we can tell by looking at his absurd manner of speaking.' So irony is starved to sarcasm, and sympathy to voyeurism. It is literally impossible for the reader to enter the story; Wallace has sealed all the gates.
and the Kakutani back at the New York Times wasn't much kinder:
Mr. Wallace's previous work shows that he possesses a heightened gift for what the musician Robert Plant once called the ''deep and meaningless.'' But in these pages it more often feels like the shallow and self-conscious.
Even amongst Wallace-fans, Oblivion is rarely spoken of with the same enthusiasm as the other short story collections, stories like the introductory Mister Squishy (which was published under a pseudonym in McSweeney's... who was Wallace trying to fool there?) seeming alienating with their jargon and page-long sentences. But what attracted me to these stories was the vulnerability beneath the sheen that these characters had. That they may speak in the jargon of advertisers and pretend to be these people and relish in pretending to be these people, but still remain terribly insecure and vulnerable and needy at heart.
A story rarely touched upon in the negative reviews, mainly because it goes against the points they try to make, is the heartbreaking story Incarnations of Burned Children, a 3 page 1 paragraph story of parents finding their baby horribly burned. It begins
The Daddy was around the side of the house hanging a door for the tenant when he heard the child's screams and the Mommy's voice gone high between them. He could move fast, and the back porch gave onto the kitchen, and before the screen door had banged shut behind him the Daddy had taken the scene in whole, the overturned pot on the floortile between the stove and the burner's blue jet and the floor's pool of water still streaming as its many arms extended, the toddler in his baggy diaper standing rigid with steam coming off his hair and his chest and shoulders scarlet and his eyes rolled up and mouth open very wide and seeming somehow separate from the sounds that issued, the Mommy down on one knee with the dishrag dabbing pointlessly at him and matching the screams with cries of her own, hysterical so she was almost frozen.
And it just gets worse from there. It's one of those stories that have you pause after you finish it, coming out for breath and reflection. For an author who often got slack for not investing enough into his characters, he has a tendency to be able to throw you emotionally into the deep end with just a few sentences. You may not know the characters names, or jobs, or age or what they look like or any of that stuff one tends to equate with characters, but you still feel you know these people in an intimate way.
This is especially true in the standout story of the collection Good Old Neon. This is one of those short stories that somehow manage to encapsulate something that is in the collective consciousness and dresses it in words, something that you have always known to be true but have never been able to articulate. Moments like these are Wallace wanted to achieve with his fiction: make us feel less alone.
My whole life I've been a fraud. I'm not exaggerating. Pretty much all I've ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It's a little more complicated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it's to be liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the idea.
And later, Wallace sucker-punched me with this description of a non-lie, something I used to dabble in quite a lot as a child:
There was a basic logical paradox that I called the 'fraudulence paradox' that I had discovered more or less on my own while taking a mathematical logic course in school. (...) The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt inside - you were a fraud. And the more of a fraud you felt like, the harder you tried to convey an impressive or likable image of yourself so that other people wouldn't find out what a hollow, fraudulent person you really were. Logically, you would think that the moment a supposedly intelligent nineteen-year-old became aware of this paradox, he'd stop being a fraud and just settle for being himself (whatever that was) because he'd figured out that being a fraud was a vicious infinite regress that ultimately resulted in being frightened, lonely, alienated, etc. But here was the other, higher-order paradox, which didn't even have a form or name - I didn't, I couldn't. Discovering the first paradox at age nineteen just brought home to me in spades what an empty, fraudulent person I'd basically been ever since at least the time I was four and lied to my stepdad because I'd realized somehow right in the middle of his asking me if I'd broken the bowl that if I said I did it but 'confessed' it in a sort of clumsy, implausible way, then he wouldn't believe me and would instead believe that my sister Fern, who's my step-parents' biological daughter, was the one who'd actually broken the antique Moser glass bowl that my stepmom had inherited from her biological grandmother and totally loved, plus it would lead or induce him to see me as a kind, good stepbrother who was so anxious to keep Fern (whom I really did like) from getting into trouble that I'd be willing to lie and take the punishment for it for her. I'm not explaining this very well. I was only four, for one thing, and the realization didn't hit me in words the way I just now put it, but rather more in terms of feelings and associations and certain mental flashes of my stepparents' faces with various expressions on them.
Here we see again the need to explain things well, the inability to put into words what inside us is "feelings and associations", the crippling self-consciousness.
Of course it doesn't always work: in "Another Pioneer" the narrator is too verbose, bordering on caricatural. It's one of those moments in Wallace's fiction where the story itself - that of a Buddha-like child in a remote village that can answer everyone's questions - it infinitely more interesting that the way it is presented - as a second-hand account of something overheard and retold by someone utterly unlikeable who has been studying far too many French theorists. To wit:
The context in which my own friend then had the narrative related to him by his acquaintance is unknown to me as anything more than 'quotidien' or 'everyday'.
It is satirical, the same way that the language used by the hideous men being interviewed in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is satirical. But the reason that a lot of people confuse these unlikeable over-verbose narrators with Wallace himself is that he lets you so close into the narration that the narrator and the author get conflated, especially when Wallace repeats the trick of this type of narrator quite often.
Wallace is not a perfect author, but even his failures are interesting. Even "Another Pioneer" stays with you and makes you wonder about the role of mediated narratives and whether it gains anything from having the story be told 'straight' (as if that in itself is possible). And even at his most intellectually distancing, you do feel there is genuine emotion behind it, that he's actually trying to communicate with us (while maybe succumbing to that fraud-like tendency to want to be liked from time to time). The final story of Oblivion, the most overtly satirical, called "the Suffering Channel" is about a man who shits out perfect pieces of art and the journalists at Style magazine who want to cover this. And also a reality TV channel showing us people suffering. While I have a problem with a lot of wink-nudge satire (for instance, I am of the opinion that the more George Saunders listened to his critics and became "satirical", the less moving his prose became. His first short story collection is one of the best thing I've ever read, but since then he keeps becoming more and more abstract.), this story works for me because it's not making fun of any of these characters. Like that movie Junebug (also about "outsider" art), it doesn't mock its characters, it feels for them. And it turns into one of the most touching pieces of 9/11 fiction published with this simple paragraph:
Ellen Bactrian's mental flow charts often contained actual boxes, Roman numerals and multiarrow graphics - that's how gifted an administrator she was. 'You're talking about something live, then.'
'With the proviso that of course it's all academic until this afternoon's tests check out.'
'But do we know for sure he'll even go for it?'
The executive intern never brushed her hair after a shower. She just gave her head two or three shakes and let it fall gloriously where it might and turned, slightly, to give Ellen Bactrian the full effect:
'Who?' She had ten weeks to live.
And the story continues, about these people working at a magazine with its offices in the World Trade Centre. It is the perfect way to describe the attacks, as something lurking in the corner, waiting to happen, about to engulf these people with their hopes and expectations and ambitions and fears into a narrative that they didn't choose, that had nothing to do with them. Like the mysterious spider-man crawling up the building of the first story Mister Squishy, there is a sense that at the horizon something is about to happen that will render all plans you may have made for yourself and your life, instantly obsolete.
III Outro
In less than two months, Wallace's final novel, the unfinished "The Pale King" will be published and, as far as anyone knows, that will be end of Wallace's output. From the excerpts published in Harper's and the New Yorker, it seems to be exploring some of the themes that began to crop up in Oblivion: one excerpt especially moved me: it was about a child whose parents lie to him and tell him that this toy cement truck he is pulling behind him has a rotating cement mixer but it will only turn when the child is not looking. It seems to be, if these excerpts are anything to go by, more an attempt at finding a solution to the solitude and loneliness described in Infinite Jest, defined in his essay E Unibus Pluram and explored to its depths in Oblivion. It seems that, much like his oft-quoted Kenyon commencement speech, he had found a way out of the morass, a way to connect to people once and for all. From the Kenyon-speech:
But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
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