Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

Seventeen – BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN: THE DIFFICULT GIFTS OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort thedisturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’spurpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her ownskull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable partof being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art foris an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more likea sort of “generalization” of suffering. Does this make sense? We all sufferalone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fictioncan allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might thenalso more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.But now realize that TV and popular film and most kinds of “low” art-which just means art whose primary aim is to make money-is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to thereality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas“serious” art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is moreapt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access itspleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-productof hard work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art audience, especially ayoung one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurableand to make that pleasure effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction.That’s not good. The problem isn’t that today’s readership is “dumb,” I don’tthink. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture’s trained it to be sort oflazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today’sreaders both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard.

– DAVID FOSTER WALL ACE [65]

0. DIFFICULT GIFTS

David Foster Wallace was clever about gifts: our inability to give freely or to accept what is freely given. A farmer can’t give away an old tiller for free; he has to charge five bucks before someone will come and take it. A depressed person wants to receive attention but can’t bring herself to give it. Normal social relations are only preserved because “one never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.” In these stories, the act of giving is in crisis; the logic of the market seeps into every aspect of life.

These tales are found in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, a collection that was itself the response to two enormous gifts. The first was practical: the awarding of the MacArthur. [66] A gift on that scale frees a writer from the harsh logic of the literary market, and maybe also from that bind Wallace himself defined as postindustrial: the need always to be liked. The second gift was more difficult; it was Wallace’s own talent, the bedrock of which was a formidable intellect. That he ended up a fiction writer at all speaks to the radical way Wallace saw his own gifts-not as a natural resource to be exploited but as a suspicious facility to be interrogated. Certainly that unusual triune skill set-encyclopedic knowledge, mathematical prowess, complex dialectical thought-would have had an easier passage to approval within the academic world from which he hailed than in the literary world he joined. Instead, in his twenties, Wallace chose the path of most resistance. He turned from a career in math and philosophy to pursue a vocation in what he called “morally passionate, passionately moral fiction.” For the next twenty years, the two sides of that chiasmus would be in constant tension. On the one side, his writing sought the emotive force of fiction; on the other, its formal, philosophical possibilities. These elements attracted him equally but his virtuosity (and his training) was in the latter, and there was always the risk that the philosophy would overwhelm the passion. But Wallace was clever enough to realize that cleverness alone wasn’t enough (“I’ll catch myself thinking up gags or trying formal stunt-pilotry and see that none of this stuff is really in the service of the story itself; it’s serving the rather darker purpose of communicating to the reader ‘Hey! Look at me! Have a look at what a good writer I am! Like me!’ ”) He battled to share his gifts rather than simply display them, seeming to seek the solution in a principle of self-mortification. What do you do with a great gift? You give it away:

I’ve gotten convinced that there’s something kind of timelessly vital and sacred about good writing. This thing doesn’t have that much to do with talent, even glittering talent…Talent’s just an instrument. It’s like having a pen that works instead of one that doesn’t. I’m not saying I’m able to work consistently out of the premise, but it seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art’s heart’s purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It’s got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved. I know this doesn’t sound hip at all… But it seems like one of the things really great fiction-writers do-from Carver to Chekhov to Flannery O’Connor, or like the Tolstoy of “The Death of Ivan Ilych” or the Pynchon of Gravity’s Rainbow-is “give” the reader something. The reader walks away from the real art heavier than she came into it. Fuller. All the attention and engagement and work you need to get from the reader can’t be for your benefit; it’s got to be for hers. What’s poisonous about the cultural environment today is that it makes this so scary to try to carry out.

When Wallace wrote he offered everything he had to his readers, including the kitchen sink. His cultish fans were always ready and willing to come away from his work a little heavier-it was his complexity that they loved. For many of us, though, what Wallace had to give looked simply too heavy, too much like hard work. And while Brief Interviews had its passionate defenders, I remember that the pair of reviews it received in the New York Times were bad (in both senses), opening with paragraphs of nervous ridicule:

How to describe David Foster Wallace’s new collection of stories? You might say it’s like being a therapist and being forced to listen to one narcissistic patient after the next prattle on-and on and on-about their neuroses and their explanations for those neuroses and the rationaliza tions behind the explanations for those neuroses. Or you might say it’s like being locked in a room with a bunch of speed freaks babbling to themselves nonstop on a Benzedrine-fueled high as they clip their toenails or cut the split ends out of their hair.

You know the old story about how if you set a billion monkeys to work on a billion typewriters, one of them would eventually compose the complete works of Shakespeare? David Foster Wallace often writes the way I imagine that billionth monkey would: in mad cadenzas of simian gibberish that break suddenly into glorious soliloquies, then plunge again into nonsense.

Perhaps it was easy, when you read Wallace, to distrust “the agenda of the consciousness behind the text.” Did he truly want to give you a gift? Or only to demonstrate his own? For why should we be expected to tease out references to De Chirico and logotherapy, or know what happens during an eclipse, or what polymerase does, or the many nuances of the word prone? Why go through the pain if this is to be all we get in return: “Discursive portraits of relentlessly self-absorbed whiners, set down in an unappetizing mix of psychobabble, scholarly jargon and stream-of-consciousness riffs”? It’s my recollection that this sort of thing had become, in the early noughties, the common “line” on Wallace, especially in England; something to say whether you’d actually read him or not. Postmodern type? Swallowed a dictionary? Bad reviews serve many purposes, not least of which is the gift of freedom: they release you from the obligation of having to read the book.

At the time of writing, Brief Interviews marks its tenth anniversary and its author is no longer with us. Now might be the time to think of the literary gift economy the other way around. To do this we have to recognize that a difficult gift like Brief Interviews merits the equally difficult gift of our close attention and effort. For this reason, the newspaper review was never going to be an easy fit for Wallace. He can’t be read and understood and enjoyed at that speed any more than I can get the hang of the Goldberg Variations over a weekend. His reader needs to think of herself as a musician, spreading the sheet music-the gift of the work-over the music stand, electing to play. First there is practice, then competency at the instrument, then spending time with the sheet music, then playing it over and over.

Of course, the arguments that might be employed w/r/t reading in this way are deeply unreasonable, entirely experiential, and impossible to objectively defend. [67] In the end, all that can be said is that the difficult gift is its own defense, the deep rewarding pleasure of which is something you can only know by undergoing it. To appreciate Wallace, you need to really read him-and then you need to reread him. For this reason-among many others-he was my favorite living writer, and I wrote this piece to remember him by, which, in my case, is best done by reading him once again.

1. BREAKING THE RHYTHM THAT EXCLUDES THINKING

The story “Forever Overhead” is Brief Interviews at its most open, and for many readers, its most beautiful. Wallace disliked it, thinking it juvenilia-maybe it was its very openness he suspected. So many of the dense themes of the book are here laid out with an unexpected directness. At first glance, it’s simple: a boy on his thirteenth birthday in an “old public pool on the western edge of Tucson,” resolving to try the diving tank for the first time. The voice is as blank as a video game, as an instruction manual, [68] and yet, within it, Wallace finds something tender: “Get out now and go past your parents, who are sunning and reading, not looking up. Forget your towel. Stopping for the towel means talking and talking means thinking. You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking. Go right by, toward the tank at the deep end.” To this he then adds a layer of complication: a sparsely punctuated, synesthetic compression, like a painter placing another shade atop his base. A remembered wet dream does not yet know its own name, it is “spasms of a deep sweet hurt”; the pool is “five-o’clock warm,” its distinctive odor “a flower with chemical petals.” The noise of the radio overhead is “jangle flat and tinny thin,” and a dive is “a white that plumes and falls” until once more “blue clean comes up in the middle of the white.” Throughout, the expected verb-is-is generally omitted: sensations present themselves directly on the page, as they present themselves to the boy. The unmediated sensory overload of puberty overlaps here with a dream of language: that words might become things, that there would exist no false gap between the verbal representation of something and the something itself. [69]

Then, with the base coat down, and the wash laid on top, comes another layer. Concrete details so finely rendered they seem to have been drawn from the well of our own memories: your sister’s swim cap with the “raised rubber flowers… limp old pink petals” and the “thin cruel hint of very dark Pepsi in paper cups”; that SN CK BAR with the letter missing and the concrete deck “rough and hot against your bleached feet.” Isn’t everything just as you remember it? The big lady in front of you on the ladder: “Her suit is full of her. The backs of her thighs are squeezed by the suit and look like cheese. The legs have abrupt little squiggles of cold blue shattered vein under the white skin.” The ladder itself: “The rungs are very thin. It’s unexpected. Thin round iron rungs laced in slick wet Safe-T felt.” And now, fueled by nostalgia, by the pressing in of times past, the concrete seems to mix with the existential: “Each of your footprints is thinner and fainter. Each shrinks behind you on the hot stone and disappears.” And again, on that ladder: “You have real weight… The ground wants you back.” Haven’t you been in this terrible queue? Aren’t you in it now? A queue from which there is no exit, in which everyone looks bored and “seems by himself,” in which all dive freely and yet have no real freedom, for “it is a machine that moves only forward.”

The difference is awareness (this is always the difference in Wallace). The boy seems to see clearly what we, all those years ago, felt only faintly. He sees that “the pool is a system of movement,” in which all experience is systematized (“There is a rhythm to it. Like breathing. Like a machine.”) and into which, as the woman in front of him dives, he must now insert himself:

Listen. It does not seem good, the way she disappears into a time that passes before she sounds. Like a stone down a well. But you think she did not think so. She was part of a rhythm that excludes thinking. And now you have made yourself part of it, too. The rhythm seems blind. Like ants. Like a machine.

You decide this needs to be thought about. It may, after all, be all right to do something scary without thinking, but not when the scariness is the not thinking itself. Not when not thinking turns out to be wrong. At some point the wrongnesses have piled up blind: pretend-boredom, weight, thin rungs, hurt feet, space cut into laddered parts that melt together only in a disappearance that takes time. The wind on the ladder not what anyone would have expected. The way the board protrudes from shadow into light and you can’t see past the end. When it all turns out to be different you should get to think. It should be required.

Now we see what the board is and feel our own predicament: sentient beings encased in these flesh envelopes, moving always in one inexorable direction (the end of which we cannot see). Bound by time. Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you. This, Sartre’s dictum, hangs over these passive people who “let their legs take them to the end” before coming down “heavy on the edge of the board and mak[ing] it throw them up and out.” Thrown into the world, condemned to be free-and hideously responsible for that freedom.

It strikes me when I reread this beautiful story how poor we are at tracing literary antecedents, how often we assume too much and miss obvious echoes. Lazily we gather writers by nations, decades and fashions; we imagine Wallace the only son of DeLillo and Pynchon. In fact, Wallace had catholic tastes, and it shouldn’t surprise us to find, along with Sartre, traces of Philip Larkin, a great favorite of his. [70] Wallace’s fear of automatism is acutely Larkinesque (“a style/ Our lives bring with them: habit for a while/Suddenly they harden into all we’ve got” [71]), as is his attention to that singular point in our lives when we realize we are closer to our end than our beginning. When Wallace writes, “At some point there has gotten to be more line behind you than in front of you,” he lends an indelible image to an existential fear, as Larkin did memorably in “The Old Fools:” “The peak that stays in view wherever we go / For them is rising ground.” Then there’s the title itself, “Forever Overhead”: a perfectly accurate description, when you think about it, of how the poems “High Windows” and “Water” close. [72] That mix of the concrete and the existential, of air and water, of the eternal submerged in the banal. And boredom was the great theme of both. But in the great theme there is a great difference. Wallace wanted to interrogate boredom as a deadly postmodern attitude, an attempt to bypass experience on the part of a people who have become habituated to a mediated reality. “It seems impossible,” the boy thinks, arranging his face in fake boredom to match the rest, “that everybody could really be this bored.” In this story, the counterweight to automatism is sensation, expressed here as human reality in its most direct and redemptive form: “Your feet are hurt from the thin rungs and have a great ability to feel.” It’s no accident that we are in a swimming pool, at fiery sunset, with a high wind blowing and the ground hot enough to remind of us of its solidity. The four elements are intended to work upon “you”; for no matter how many times this queue has formed, no matter how many people have dived before, or have watched other people dive, in life or on TV, this is you, diving now, and it should be thought about, and there should be a wonder in it. For Larkin, on the other hand, boredom was real (“Life is first boredom, then fear./Whether or not we use it, it goes” [73]), and the inexorability of time made all human effort faintly ludicrous. There is some of this despair in Wallace, too (whatever splash the divers make, the tank “heals itself” each time, as if each dive had never been), but much less than is popularly ascribed to him. Time has its horrors in Wallace but it’s also the thing that binds us most closely to the real and to one another: without it we would lose ourselves in solipsism (which, for him, was the true horror.) When the boy, in a meditative state, dares to hope that “no time is passing outside,” he is soon proven wrong:

Hey kid. They want to know. Do your plans up here involve the whole day or what exactly is the story. Hey kid are you okay.

There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.

Yet this is not experienced as a negative revelation. Indeed, the greatness of Wallace’s story lies in its indeterminacy, for the boy never quite resolves which part of his experience is the real one, the hardware of the world or the software of his consciousness:

So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time? The lie is that it’s one or the other. A still, floating bee is moving faster than it can think. From overhead the sweetness drives it crazy.

What is he jumping into, in the end? Is the tank death, experience, manhood, a baptism, the beginning, the end? Whatever it is, the boy is able to approach it without dread. He pauses to examine the “two vague black ovals” at the end of the board, over which his literary creator has taken such wonderful care:

From all the people who’ve gone before you. Your feet as you stand here are tender and dented, hurt by the rough wet surface, and you see that the two dark spots are from people’s skin. They are skin abraded from feet by the violence of the disappearance of people with real weight. More people than you can count without losing track. The weight and abrasion of their disappearance leaves little bits of soft tender feet behind, bits and shard and curls of skin that dirty and darken and tan as they lie tiny and smeared in the sun at the end of the board.

But this examination does not result in paralysis. He still dives. Where Larkin was transfixed by the accumulation of human futility, Wallace was as interested in communication as he was in finitude (the last word of the story, as the boy dives, is Hello). He was, in the broadest sense, a moralist: what mattered to him most was not the end but the quality of our communal human experience before the end, while we’re still here. What passes between us in that queue before we dive.

In 2005, Wallace gave a commencement speech at Kenyon College that begins this way:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

And ends like this:

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: “This is water. This is water.” It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.

This short piece appeared in many newspapers when he died and has recently been repackaged as a Chicken Soup for the Soul-style toilet book (sentences artificially separated from one another and left, like Zen koans, alone on the page) to be sold next to the cash register. If you believe the publicity flack, it is here that Wallace attempted to collect “all he believed about life, human nature, and lasting fulfillment into a brief talk.” Hard to think of a less appropriate portrait of this writer than as the dispenser of convenient pearls of wisdom, placed in your palm, so that you needn’t go through any struggle yourself. Wallace was the opposite of an aphorist. And the real worth of that speech (which he never published, which existed only as a transcript on the Internet) is as a diving board into his fiction, his fiction being his truest response to the difficulty of staying conscious and alive, day in and day out.

The ends of great fiction do not change, much. But the means do. A hundred years earlier, another great American writer, Henry James, wanted his readers “finely aware so as to become richly responsible.” [74] His syntactically tortuous sentences, like Wallace’s, are intended to make you aware, to break the rhythm that excludes thinking. Wallace was from that same tradition-but, a hundred years on, the ante had been raised. In 1999, it felt harder to be alive and conscious than ever. Brief Interviews pitched itself as a counterweight to the narcotic qualities of contemporary life, and then went a step further. It questioned the Jamesian notion that fine awareness leads a priori to responsibility. It suggested that too much awareness-particularly self-awareness-has allowed us to be less responsible than ever. It was meant for readers of my generation, born under the star of four interlocking revolutions, undreamed of in James’s philosophy: the ubiquity of television, the voraciousness of late capitalism, the triumph of therapeutic discourse, and philosophy’s demotion into a branch of linguistics. How to be finely aware when you are trained in passivity? How to detect real value when everything has its price? How to be responsible when you are, by definition, always the child-victim? How to be in the world when the world has collapsed into language?

2. IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK I’M AFRAID OF

If Wallace insists on awareness, his particular creed is-to use a Wallac erian word-extrorse; awareness must move always in an outward direction, away from the self. Self-awareness and self-investigation are to be treated with suspicion, even horror. In part, this was Wallace’s way of critiquing the previous literary generation’s emphasis on self-reflexive narrative personae. In interview, he recognized his debt to the great metafictionists, but he also took care to express his own separation from them, and from their pale descendants: [75]

Metafiction… helps reveal fiction as a mediated experience. Plus it reminds us that there’s always a recursive component to utterance. This was important, because language’s self-consciousness had always been there, but neither writers nor critics nor readers wanted to be reminded of it. But we ended up seeing why recursion’s dangerous, and maybe why everybody wanted to keep linguistic self-consciousness out of the show. It gets empty and solipsistic real fast. It spirals in on itself. By the mid-seventies, I think, everything useful about the mode had been exhausted… By the eighties it’d become a god-awful trap.

Solipsism here means more than hipster vanity: Wallace has both its Latin roots (solus, “alone”; ipse, “self”) and philosophical history in mind (the theory that only the self really exists or can be known). The “linguistic turn” of twentieth-century philosophy concerned and fascinated him-that wholesale swallowing of the transcendental by the analytical that left us as “selves alone” in language, with no necessary link to the world of phenomena beyond. In Wallace’s view, too many practitioners of metafiction enthusiastically embraced the big Derridean idea-“There is nothing outside the text”-without truly undergoing the melancholy consequences. For inspiration he looked instead to Wittgenstein, both as “the real architect of the postmodern trap” and the writer who best understood its tragic implications for the self:

There’s a kind of tragic fall Wittgenstein’s obsessed with all the way from the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” in 1922 to the “Philosophical Investigations” in his last years. I mean a real Book-of-Genesis type tragic fall. The loss of the whole external world.

The “Tractatus”’s picture theory of meaning presumes that the only possible relation between language and the world is denotative, referential. In order for language both to be meaningful and to have some connection to reality, words like “tree” and “house” have to be like little pictures, representations of little trees and houses. Mimesis. But nothing more. Which means we can know and speak of nothing more than little mimetic pictures. Which divides us, metaphysically and forever, from the external world. If you buy such a metaphysical schism, you’re left with only two options. One is that the individual person with her language is trapped in here, with the world out there, and never the twain shall meet. Which, even if you think language’s pictures really are mimetic, is an awful lonely proposition. And there’s no iron guarantee the pictures truly “are” mimetic, which means you’re looking at solipsism. One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.

This, the first option, [76] is where Wallace’s hideous men live. Trapped alone in language. The questions in those interviews (represented by the letter Q) are not only formally “missing” from the conversations, their respondents have internalized them. These men anticipate all questions and also their own expected answers and also the responses they have already concluded these answers will receive. In fact, all exterior referents have been swallowed up by language and loop back into the self. In this spiral, other people simply can’t exist. “You” has become just another word, encased in quote marks, and the results are hideous indeed.

Take the control freak in B.I. #48, whose only possible relationship between self and other is a verbal contract, in which you never hear from the second party. This is a man who likes to say to a woman, after a third date, and “without any discernable context or lead-in that you could point to as such”-How would you feel about my tying you up? But the casual tone is a deception, the question not even really a question:

It is important to understand that, for there even to be a third date, there must exist some sort of palpable affinity between us, something by which I can sense that they will go along. Perhaps go along {flexion of upraised fingers to signify tone quotes} is not a fortuitous phrase for it. I mean, perhaps, {flexion of upraised fingers to signify tone quotes} play. Meaning to join me in the contract and subsequent activity.

From the prim specificity of the vocabulary and syntax to this habit of encasing in “quote marks” any ambiguous moment-he’s unbearably controlling. And whatever he claims, there’s never any real sense of “play,” because there is never any way to look past the referents to the other players. Despite all his verbal prowess, we learn nothing of the women; they remain faceless, nameless, featureless, their sole distinction whether they are “hens” or “cocks”-that is, whether they will submit or not. This strange terminology (he calls it “the aptest analogy”) is borrowed from the “Australian profession known as {flexion of upraised fingers} chicken-sexing,” by which the gender of a bird is ascertained merely by looking at it and naming it: hen, hen, cock, cock, hen. Naturally, he has a gift for it: he can identify a “hen” or “cock” before they are aware of what they are themselves. But then, he has the words for everything. He understands that he is compelled to “propose and negotiate contracted rituals where power is freely given and taken and submission ritualized and control ceded and then returned of my own free will.” He controls both the meaning of the act itself (“I know what the contract is about, and it is not about seduction, conquest, intercourse, or algolgagnia”) and its psychological root cause. (“My own mother was… erratic in her dealings with, of her two twin children, most specifically me. This has bequeathed me certain psychological complexes having to do with power and, perhaps, trust.”) Not only this: he is sufficiently self-aware to know his language (another legacy of his mother, a psychiatric case worker, natch) is “annoying, pedantic jargon.” He can “read” both the women’s words and their silences (“You are, of course, aware that social silences have varied textures, and these textures communicate a great deal.”) He can even tell real shock from false:

Hence the fascinating irony that body language intended to convey shock does indeed convey shock but a very different sort of shock indeed. Namely the abreactive shock of repressed wishes bursting their strictures and penetrating consciousness, but from an external source…

This interval of shocked silence is one during which entire psychological maps are being redrawn and during this interval any gesture or affect on the subject’s part will reveal a great deal more about her than any amount of banal conversation or even clinical experimentation ever would. Reveal.

Q.

I meant woman or young woman, not {f.f} subject per se.

The little slip is telling, and the word abreactive, too. [77] Here therapy has become the monster it once wished to tame, the talking cure mere talk. And the talk turns outward; we feel we are the ones being interrogated, and that the questions are disturbing. When we relive repressed emotions as therapeutic, are we healing ourselves or tunneling deeper into the self? How do abreaction and solipsism interrelate? Does one feed the other? Is one the function of the other?

It’s tempting to read the interviews as an attack on therapy per se, but “therapy is a false religion” is rather a dull drum to beat, [78] and if it were only this, why not hear from the therapists themselves, instead of the patients? It’s not therapy’s fundamental principles that find themselves interrogated here (after all, the self-diagnosis of Hideous Man #48 is not incorrect: it’s right to say he ties up women because his mother’s idea of punishment was physical restraint). More significant is this idea of a looped discourse, of a language meant to heal the self that ends up referring only to the self. In Brief Interviews, the language of therapy is not alone in doing this: in Wallace’s world there exists a whole bunch of ways to get lost in the self. In the bleak joke of B.I. #2, we listen in as a serial monogamist wields the intimate language of “relationships” against his own girlfriend, precisely to protect himself against a “relationship”:

Can you believe that I’m honestly trying to respect you by warning you about me, in a way? That I’m trying to be honest instead of dishonest? That I’ve decided the best way to head off this pattern where you get hurt and feel abandoned and I feel like shit is to try and be honest for once? Even if I should have done it sooner? Even when I admit it’s maybe possible that you might even interpret what I’m saying now as dishonest, as trying somehow to maybe freak you out enough so that you’ll move back in and I can get out of this? Which I don’t think I’m doing, but to be totally honest I can’t be a hundred percent sure? To risk that with you? Do you understand? That I’m trying as hard as I can to love you? That I’m terrified I can’t love? That I’m afraid maybe I’m just constitutionally incapable of doing anything other than pursuing and seducing and then running, plunging in and reversing, never being honest with anybody? That I’ll never be a closer? That I might be a psychopath? Can you imagine what it takes to tell you this?

Again interrogation turns outward, toward the reader. What have we become when we “understand” ourselves so well all our questions are rhetorical? What is confession worth if what we want from it is not absolution but admiration for having confessed?

Wallace took a big risk with these free-floating “interviews”: by refusing to anchor them in a third-person narrative, he placed their hideousness front and center, and left the reader to navigate her way through alone, without authorial guidance. It’s not surprising that many readers conflated the hostility of these men with authorial sadism. But this is where it becomes vital to acknowledge the unity of the book Brief Interviews-this is not a random collection of short stories. The “interviews” themselves, dotted throughout the whole, work like words in a longer sentence, all segments of which need to be articulated if the sentence is to make any sense. The story “Think” is a fine example of this kind of counterpoint. Here a potentially hideous man, about to be seduced by “the younger sister of his wife’s college roommate” suddenly experiences “a type of revelation.” As she comes toward him, half naked, with “a slight smile, slight and smoky, media-taught,” he feels the sudden urge to kneel. He looks at her: “Her expression is from page 18 of the Victoria’s Secret catalogue.” He puts his hands together. She crosses her arms and utters “a three word question”-which we will assume is What the fuck? “It’s not what you think I’m afraid of,” he replies. But we are not told what he thinks, or what she thinks he thinks, or what he thinks she thinks he thinks. The narrator only comments thus: “She could try, for just a moment to imagine what is happening in his head… Even for an instant to try putting herself in his place.” This task, though, is left to us. So here goes: the girl thinks he’s afraid of the sin, of the marital betrayal, because that’s the kind of thing it usually is on TV. He thinks she thinks this-and he’s right. But the man himself is afraid of something else; of this “media-taught” situation, of the falsity, of living a cliché, and he has a sudden urge to feel like a human being, which is to say, humbled, and really connected, both to the person standing naked before him and to the world. (“And what if she joined him on the floor,” read the final lines, “just like this, clasped in supplication: just this way.”) Solipsism is here countered with humility; the “self alone” prays for a relation.

The popular view of Wallace was of a coolly cerebral writer who feared fiction’s emotional connection. But that’s not what he was afraid of. His stories have it the other way around: they are terrified of the possibility of no emotional connection. This is what his men truly have in common, far more than misogyny: they know the words for everything and the meaning of nothing. Which is a strange idea for fiction to explore, given that fiction has a vocational commitment to the idea that language is where we find truth. For Wallace, though, the most profound truths existed in a different realm: “I think that God has particular languages,” he said once, “and one of them is music and one of them is mathematics.” Certainly in Brief Interviews our everyday human language always falls short, even in its apparent clarity, especially in its clarity. The curious thing about these men is how they use their verbosity as a kind of armor, an elaborate screen to be placed between the world and the self. In B.I. #42, a man tries to come to terms with the fact his father was a lifelong toilet attendant in a public bathroom. Speaking of his case, he utilizes dozens of fancy words for excretions (flatus, egestion, extrusion, feculence, lientery, transnudation) yet his own basic emotions are not available to him:

“Yes and do I admire the fortitude of this humblest of working men? The stoicism? The Old World grit? To stand there all those years, never one sick day, serving? Or do I despise him, you’re wondering, feel disgust, contempt for any man who’d stand effaced in that miasma and dispense towels for coins?”

Q.

“… ”

Q.

“What were the two choices again?”

In B.I. #59, a boy, inspired by the TV show Bewitched has a masturbatory fantasy of “freezing” real life with a wave of his hand so that he might have sex in public while all around him are “paused.” But with a mania for the consistency of propositions, he is forced to expand upon the fantasy’s “first premise or aksioma” in an infinite direction. First he needs only to freeze the room he’s in, but then what of the building? So then the building, and then the country, and then the continent, and then the planet, each stage necessitating the next until:

In order not to betray the fantasy’s First Premise through causing incongruities in the scientifically catalogued measurements of the Solar Day and the Synodic Period, the earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun must itself be halted by my supernatural hand’s gesture, an orbit whose plane…

But I’ll stop there. There are times when reading Wallace feels unbearable, and the weight of things stacked against the reader insurmountable: missing context, rhetorical complication, awful people, grotesque or absurd subject matter, language that is-at the same time!-childishly scatological and annoyingly obscure. And if one is used to the consolation of “character,” well then Wallace is truly a dead end. His stories simply don’t investigate character; they don’t intend to. Instead they’re turned outward, toward us. It’s our character that’s being investigated. But this is not quite metafiction. The metafictionist used recursion to highlight the mediating narrative voice; to say essentially “I am water, and you are swimming through me.” Recursion, for the metafictionist, means: looping back, recurring, in infinite regressions. This is not neutral, it is being written, I am writing it, but who am ‘I’? Et cetera. What’s “recursive” about Wallace’s short stories is not Wallace’s narrative voice but the way these stories run, like verbal versions of mathematical procedures, in which at least one of the steps of the procedure involves rerunning the whole procedure. And it’s we who run them. Wallace places us inside the process of recursion, and this is why reading him is so often emotionally and intellectually exhausting.

The apotheosis of this technique is “The Depressed Person.” It’s not that the depressed person is an unforgettable character. She’s banal, typical. It’s that when you’re reading “The Depressed Person” you’re forced to run her recursive thought processes through your own head, to pursue her self-serving self-hatreds through those endless footnotes, to speak with her that absurd therapy-speak, to live with her in the suffocating solipsism of her mind. Many readers will object to this. And there are other problems, besides: sometimes in the attempt to capture a brain from the inside, Wallace aims too low, and patronizes. Much of the therapy terminology in “The Depressed Person” amounts to cheap laughs, gotten too cheaply. (“I have a grossly sentimental affection for gags,” he admitted.) Support System, Blame Game, Inner-Child-Focused Experiential Therapy Retreat Weekend… The idea that specialized language represents the fall within the tragic fall is not news and was territory already extensively covered by a slew of American writers: Thomas Pynchon, Bret Easton Ellis, A. M Homes, Douglas Coupland, et cetera. Wallace’s real innovation was his virtuosic use of the recursive sentence, a weird and wonderful beast that needs quoting at length to be appreciated:

As a schoolgirl, the depressed person had never spoken of the incident of the boy’s telephone call and the mendacious pantomime with that particular roommate-a roommate with whom the depressed person hadn’t clicked or connected at all, and whom she had resented in a bitter, cringing way that had made the depressed person despise herself, and had not made any attempt to stay in touch with after that endless sophomore second semester was finished-but she (i.e., the depressed person) had shared her agonizing memory of the incident with many of the friends in her Support System, and had also shared how bottomlessly horrible and pathetic she had felt it would have been to have been that nameless, unknown boy at the other end of the telephone, a boy trying in good faith to take an emotional risk and to reach out and try to connect with the confident roommate, unaware that he was an unwelcome burden, pathetically unaware of the silent pantomimed boredom and contempt at the telephone’s other end, and how the depressed person dreaded more than almost anything ever being in the position of being someone you had to appeal silently to someone else in the room to help you contrive an excuse to get off the telephone with.

Two simple syntactic units (“The depressed person had never spoken of the incident of the boy’s telephone call” and “The boy was pathetically unaware of the incident”) have been inserted into a third (“The depressed person dreaded being like the boy”) to make a recursive sentence in which prepositional phrases lie inside one another like Russian dolls: The depressed person, who had never spoken of the incident of the boy’s phone call of which the boy was pathetically unaware, dreaded being like the boy. (And that’s not even including the further recursion of the roommate.) In the process, the embedded “incident” is rerun in its entirety, here, and elsewhere in “The Depressed Person,” as the poor girl reflects on her “dread” and thus sets the procedure off again, running the whole story through once more. This is linguistic recursion-defined as the capacity to embed sentences in other sentences. For many linguists, notably Noam Chomsky, this form of recursion is fundamental to language; it’s recursion that permits extension without limitation and makes language a system characterized by “discrete infinity.” [79] Infinity was of course a fruitful subject for Wallace (besides Infinite Jest, in 2003 he wrote a nonfiction book about it: Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity). He had a gift for articulating our conflicted response to this strangest of ideas. For if we feel a certain horror before infinity-because it transcends human scale and is unthinkable-we also hear in it the suggestion of the sacred. As a concept, infinity seems to bear the trace of God’s language, of Larkin’s “deep blue air, that shows/Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.” Forever, overhead. In “The Depressed Person,” though, infinity is horrific: it has been turned inward and burrows wormholes in the self. The effect on the reader is powerful, unpleasant. Quite apart from being forced to share one’s own mental space with the depressed person’s infinitely dismal consciousness, to read those spiral sentences is to experience that dread of circularity embedded in the old joke about recursion (to understand recursion you must first understand recursion), as well as the existential vertigo we feel when we stand between two mirrors. One suffers to read it, but suffering is part of the point:

There’s always been a strong and distinctive American distaste for frustration and suffering… It seems distinctly Western-industrial, anyway. In most other cultures, if you hurt, if you have a symptom that’s causing you to suffer, they view this as basically healthy and natural, a sign that your nervous system knows something’s wrong. For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire’s still going. But if you just look at the number of ways that we try like hell to alleviate mere symptoms in this country-from fast-fast-fast-relief antacids to the popularity of lighthearted musicals during the Depression-you can see an almost compulsive tendency to regard pain itself as the problem.

For the depressed person pain has certainly been fetishized, pathologized: she can’t feel simple sadness, only “agony”; she’s not merely depressed, she is “in terrible and unceasing emotional pain.” Meanwhile, another kind of pain-the kind one feels for other people in their suffering-is inaccessible to her. When one of her Support System becomes terminally ill, the only pain this causes her (i.e., the depressed person) is the realization that she doesn’t really care at all, which in turn sparks in her mind the dreaded possibility that she might in fact be “a solipsistic, self-consumed, endless emotional vacuum and sponge.” She is disgusted by herself, and the disgust causes her yet more pain and pica-gnawed [80] hands, and on it goes in its terrible cycle. The last lines of the story put the snake’s tongue in its own mouth: “How was she to decide and describe-even to herself, looking inward and facing herself-what all she’d so painfully learned said about her?”

The spiral sentences, the looping syntax, the repetition, the invasion of clinical vocabulary-none of this is mere “formal stunt-pilotry.” Nor does it add up to nonsense, or “stream of consciousness” if sloppiness and incomprehensibility is meant by that term: however long they are, Wallace’s procedures are always grammatically immaculate. The point is to run a procedure-the procedure of another person’s thoughts!-through your own mind. This way you don’t merely “have” the verbal explanation. You feel it and know it:

Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate… from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still “are” human beings, now.

A lot of Brief Interviews is tough and painful: it’s doing the first half of that job. The rest of Brief Interviews is doing the other.

3. SIGNIFYING NOTHING

We’ve all got this “literary” fiction that simply monotones that we’re all becoming less and less human, that presents characters without souls or love, characters who really are exhaustively describable in terms of what brands of stuff they wear, and we all buy the books and go like “Golly, what a mordantly effective commentary on contemporary materialism!” But we already “know” U.S. culture is materialistic. This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn’t engage anybody. What’s engaging and artistically real is, taking it as axiomatic that the present is grotesquely materialistic, how is it that we as human beings still have the capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections, for stuff that doesn’t have a price? And can these capacities be made to thrive? And if so, how, and if not, why not?

One way out of this bind is to present, on the page, complex human beings. Sensitive souls, able to plumb their own emotional depths, capable of interesting thoughts despite the deadening times. How many of Roth’s and Bellow’s protagonists are academics, psychiatrists, intellectuals, or just motormouths? And when Henry James spoke of “fine awareness,” it was his contention that only characters in possession of this quality could elicit the same quality in their readers:

Their being finely aware-as Hamlet and Lear, say, are finely aware-makes absolutely the intensity of their adventure, gives the maximum of sense to what befalls them. We care, our curiosity and our sympathy care, comparatively little for what happens to the stupid, the coarse and the blind; care for it, and for the effects of it, at the most as helping to precipitate what happens to the more deeply wondering, to the really sentient.

But Wallace’s fiction cares what happens to the stupid, the coarse, and the blind. In fact, it is preoccupied by the stupid, the coarse, and the blind to a peculiar degree, as if the necessary counterpoint to the overintellectualized self is the ingenuous self. He seemed to spy in such characters-so unlike himself!-an escape from the “postmodern trap.” Take the simple fellow in “Signifying Nothing,” a young man whose very coarseness is the apparent key to his salvation. The story opens like this:

Here is a weird one for you. It was a couple of years ago, and I was 19, and getting ready to move out of my folks’ house, and get out on my own, and one day as I was getting ready, I suddenly get this memory of my father waggling his dick in my face one time when I was a little kid.

As pure event, this feels no more or less traumatic than the depressed person’s original complaint. [81] But in the young man’s case it is a wound he doesn’t even know how to worry: “I kept trying to think about why my father would do something like that, and what he could have been thinking of, like, what it could have meant.” He is without answers. In his confusion he becomes angry, but when he finally confronts his father with the memory, his form of interrogation is amusingly direct: “What the fuck was up with that?” In response his father gives him only a silent look of “total disbelief, and total disgust,” and the silence grows; an estrangement occurs; for a year the young man does not see his family. Then something strange. Without extensive analysis, without endless debate, without indulging in bouts of self-interrogation, he heals himself:

As time passed, I, little by little, got over the whole thing. I still knew that the memory of my father waggling his dick at me in the rec room was real, but, little by little, I started to realize, just because I remembered the incident, that did not mean, necessarily, my father did… Little by little, it seemed like the moral of a memory of any incident that weird is, anything is possible.

Generally, we refuse to be each other. Our own experiences feel necessarily more real than other people’s, skewed by our sense of our own absolute centrality. But this young man in his simplicity does the difficult thing: he makes a leap into otherness. This empathic imaginative leap-into his own father’s head-miraculously bypasses the depressed person’s equivalent recursive maze. This simple thought-that his father’s (non)experience of the memory might be as real to his father as the young man’s own positive memory of it is real-turns out to be revelatory. It’s another recursive sentence, but this time, instead of tunneling inward, it leads out-to the infinite unknowability of other people. Maybe the incident is, after all, the kind of narrative Macbeth described: “A tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing.”

You don’t hear the word parable much in connection with Wallace, but I don’t know why not-he wrote a lot of them. What else do you call a story like “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XI)?” A man has a dream that he is blind, and then, the next day:

I’m incredibly conscious of my eyesight and my eyes and how good it is to be able to see colors and people’s faces and to know exactly where I am, and of how fragile it all is, the human eye mechanism and the ability to see, how easily it could be lost, how I’m always seeing blind people around with canes and strange-looking faces and am always just thinking of them as interesting to spend a couple seconds looking at and never thinking they had anything to do with me or my eyes, and it’s really just a lucky coincidence that I can see instead of being one of those blind people I see on the subway.

Here “other-blindness” has been actualized. A simple route to a great revelation. And again, in “The Devil Is a Busy Man,” a country hick who can’t get anyone to take, for free, an “Old Harrow With Some Teeth A Little Rusted,” attracts avid consumers as soon as he lists it in the classifieds for five dollars:

I asked Daddy about what lesson to draw here and he said he figured it’s you don’t try and teach a pig to sing and told me to go on and rake the drive’s gravel back out of the ditch before it fucked up the drainage.

Another lesson might be: value in capitalism is measured not by real worth but by lack.

The coarse, the blind, the stupid. As effective as these parables are, there is something sentimental about them-albeit a sentiment as old as fiction itself. As city dwellers yearn for Virgil’s pastoral, so intellectuals will tend to romanticize the pure relations they imagine exist between simple people. Wallace was on guard against this as he was against everything (“Yes and do I admire the fortitude of this humblest of working men? The stoicism? The Old World grit?”), and yet still it slips through, here, as well as in the nonfiction, where we find instinctive sportsmen, service-industry workers, farmers, and all kinds of down-home folks (usually from his home state of Illinois) receiving that warmness Wallace could never quite muster for hyperreflexive intellectuals more or less like himself. [82]

But in their defense it should be said that the philosophical significance of these tales is not really that the selves involved are purer than the rest of us in their stupidity, coarseness, and blindness. It’s that they have sought-even momentarily-relationships that look outward, away from self. When the young man in “Signifying Nothing” finally reconnects with his father, it is at the birthday of his sister, in his family’s “special restaurant,” and the ice is broken not by anguished discussion or a sudden moment of personal insight but by a lame family joke shared by all. Which brings us finally to Wittgenstein’s second option, the way out of solipsism into communality:

And so he trashed everything he’d been lauded for in the “Tractatus” and wrote the “Investigations,” which is the single most comprehensive and beautiful argument against solipsism that’s ever been made. Wittgenstein argues that for language even to be possible, it must always be a function of relationships between persons (that’s why he spends so much time arguing against the possibility of a “private language”). [My italics]

The moralist in Wallace-that part of him that wanted not only to describe the wound but to heal it-invested much in this idea. He was always trying to place “relationships between persons” as the light at the end of his narrative dark tunnels; he took special care to re-create and respect the (often simple) language shared by people who feel some connection with each other. (“Get the fuck outta here” is the sentence that occasions the rapprochement in “Signifying Nothing.”) “In the day-to-day trenches of adult existence,” Wallace once claimed, “banal platitudes can have a life-or-death i mportance.” [83] Among his many gifts was this knack for truly animating platitudes, in much the same way that moral philosophers through the ages have animated abstract moral ideas through “dialogues” or narrative examples.

“Some things are best left unsaid.”

“Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.”

“You only want what you can’t have.”

What else are those three stories but complex enactments of platitudes we would otherwise ignore?

Still, there is something not quite convincing in their optimism. They seem to me to offer more of a willed solution than an instinctive or deeply felt one. This isn’t a bad thing: it contributes to their compelling ambivalence. And it’s an ambivalence that finds a mirror in Wallace’s own doubts w/r/t the optimism any of us should draw from Wittgenstein’s “second option”:

So he makes language dependent on human community, but unfortunately we’re still stuck with the idea that there is this world of referents out there that we can never really join or know because we’re stuck in here, in language, even if we’re at least all in here together. This eliminated solipsism, but not the horror. Because we’re still stuck. The “Investigation” ’s line is that the fundamental problem of language is, quote, “I don’t know my way about.” If I were separate from language, if I could somehow detach from it and climb up and look down on it, get the lay of the land so to speak, I could study it “objectively,” take it apart, deconstruct it, know its opera-tions and boundaries and deficiencies. But that’s not how things are. I’m “in” it. We’re “in” language. Wittgenstein’s not Heidegger. It’s not that language “is” us, but we’re still “in” it, inescapably, the same way we’re in like Kant’s space-time. Wittgenstein’s conclusions seem completely sound to me, always have. And if there’s one thing that consistently bugs me writing-wise, it’s that I don’t feel I really “do” know my way around inside language-I never seem to get the kind of clarity and concision I want.

One way, though, of knowing your “way about” would be to focus on the specialized islands of language within the system, and when Wallace does this he achieves the clarity and concision he wanted. It’s a little perverse, in fact, how profoundly he was attracted, as a fiction writer, to exactly those forms of linguistic specialization he philosophically abhorred. Stories that attend to the language of computers, the language of therapists, the language of carpet salesman, the language of corporate life, the language of academics-Wallace truly dazzles when he lands on a discourse and masters all its permutations. [84] In “Datum Centurio,” a six-page marvel of linguistic fantasy, we meet with Leckie & Webster’s Connotationally Gender-Specific Lexicon of Contemporary Usage, which, if we pay close attention to the small type of the fake copyright page, we gather to be a futuristic dictionary from the year 2096. It is a dictionary that comes with “11.2gb of Contextual, Etymological, Historical, Usage and Gender-Specific Connotational notes,” which is “Hot Text Keyed” and available on DVD (this last being the one detail that makes me smile in the wrong way, and think fondly of 1993). There is even the suggestion of a plug-in one plugs into one’s body (“Available Also with Lavish Illustrative Support in All 5 Major Sense-Media”). Wallace has opened this dictionary for us at the Ds. We are defining the word date, in its romantic sense:

date³ (dat) n. {20C English, from Middle English, from Old French, from Medieval Latin data, feminine past participle of dare, to give.}

1.Informal. (see also soft date) a. Consequent to the successful application for a License to Parent (KEY at PROCREATIVITY; at BREED/(v); at PARENT/ (v); at OFFSPRING, SOFT), the process of voluntarily submitting one’s nucleotide configurations and other Procreativity Designators to an agency empowered by law to identify an optimal female neuroge netic complement for the purposes of Procreative Genital Interface.

This being quite different from a “hard date,” which involves the use of a Virtual Female Sensory Array (slang term: “telediddler”) for the purposes of Simulated Genital Interface. The fun Wallace has with all this is the fun of a man who loved words and adored dictionaries, those sacred sites where his beloved words could be kept pristine and each given their deserved attention. As it was with Borges, a dictionary was, for Wallace, a universe: every etymological root, every usage note, every obsolete meaning was of interest to him. And for good reason: if you believe that what we are able to say marks the limit of what we are able to think and be, the dictionary is our most important human document. The usage note he invents for the word date in the year 2096 is a case in point:

date31.a USAGE/CONTEXTUAL NOTE: “You are too old by far to be the type of man who checks his replicase levels before breakfast and has high-baud macros for places like Fruitful Union P.G.I Coding or SoftSci Deoxyribonucleic Intercode Systems in his Mo.Sys deck, and yet here you are, parking the heads on your VFSA telediddler and checking your replicase levels and padding your gen-resume like a randy freshman, preparing for what appears to all the world like an attempt at a soft date.” (McInerney et seq {via OmniLit TRF Matrix}2068).

A Polaroid of a society-a miniaturized sci-fi novel! To enjoy it, though, you have to unpack it, and to do this most readers will need their own OED and a medical dictionary. Here goes: You’re too old to be checking your supply of the enzymes-that-catalyze-the-synthesis-of-ribonucleic-molecules (which molecules carry instructions from your DNA which in turn control the synthesis of your proteins); way too old to have, in your possession, high data-per-second programming instructions for such imaginary futuristic genetic reproduction companies as “Fruitful Union” and “SoftSci” sitting there in your “desktop” (or whatever interface they’re using in 2068), and yet still you’re leaving your virtual sex toy alone and instead checking that you’re in tip top genetic condition and padding out your “genetic résumé” as if you were about to go and try and have actual procreative sex with someone! (And can we assume that in the future “J. McInerney” has become a fictional brand-et seq; “and what follows”-made possible by a frightening omnivorous literary computer program that takes literary styles and reproduces them long after the authors are in their graves?)

Look: that language fantasias of this kind are übergeeky and laborious can’t seriously be denied. The other story of this type, “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko,” retells the Tristan and Iseult story in the corporate entertainment offices of a futuristic/classical L.A. in futuristic-classical language-

Awakening this in fugues and paroxysms, Agon M. Nar did there upon consult mediated Oracles, offer leveraged tribute to images of Nielsen & Stasis, & sacrifice two whole humidors of Davidoff 9 Deluxes upon the offering-pyre of Emmé, Winged Goddess of Victory. There was much market research.

– and has been known to try the patience of even the hardiest howling fantod. [85] But what they signify, these stories-that words are worlds, that no language is neutral-is also serious and beautiful. Using extreme linguistic specialization to create little worlds was another, far more complicated way of saying THIS IS WATER, of reminding us that wherever we have language, we have the artificial conditions, limits, and possibilities of our existence. Of course, there is a writing that ignores this; that thinks of its own language as classical and universal and nonspecific; that experiences any trace of the contemporary as a kind of stain (no brand names, no modern words) and calls itself realism even if its characters speak no differently from those in a novel thirty years ago, or sixty. Wallace felt he couldn’t ignore the ambient noise of the contemporary, for the simple reason that it is everywhere. It is the water we swim in:

I’ve always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fighting with my professors about it in grad school. The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things. The whole way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral. I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water 100 years ago. It’s just the texture of the world I live in.

You had to fight to make this case in the 1990s, and writers like Wallace fought it in the face of a certain amount of critical ridicule and the general sense that it couldn’t be literature with a capital L if it let the trashy language of the contemporary in. Ten years later, few writers feel the need to defend this use of contemporary “texture,” and for the generation who grew up on Wallace, specialized language use amounts to realism of the first order: it’s the water they grew up swimming in.

But you can also think about water too much. You can forget how to swim. You can develop an extreme self-consciousness w/r/t form, and when this happens in Wallace’s work, we can clearly watch metafiction reclaiming him, almost eating him alive. In the story “Adult World,” a tale of extreme self-consciousness (a paranoid wife fears that the way she makes love with her husband is “somehow hard on his thingie”) devolves into an acute case of narrative self-consciousness, which concludes with the story falling apart. One half is written, but the other half is entirely deconstructed, offered only in the form of a writer’s schematic notes, unfinished, unfilled in. I remember how thrilled I was when I first read it-I thought it delicious that such a pyrotechnical stylist would be sufficiently honest to reveal the mechanical levers behind the Wizard of Oz facade. Ten years later I reread it and feel that the shock of the backstage glimpse is just that, a shock, and that it wears off and does not satisfy as the full story might have. “Octet,” an attempted “cycle of very short belletristic pieces” that are “supposed to compose a certain sort of ‘interrogation’ of the person reading them,” is another piece that suddenly falls apart (he only manages four of the eight), though in a far more astonishing fashion. As Wallace abandons his story cycle he tells us why: they “don’t interrogate or palpate” the reader as he’d wanted them to. What follows is an extremely manipulative breaking of the fourth wall, which, at the same time, claims to come from a place of urgent sincerity. Just like one of his own hideous men, Wallace assumes our consciousness; he parrots all our responses before we have them (he knows it looks manipulative, he knows this sounds like metafiction, and yes, he knows we know he knows.) He won’t stop, he hounds us relentlessly even through the footnotes, trying desperately to convince his readers that it’s not what we think he’s afraid of (which is failure). He knows, too, that “this 100%-honest-naked-interrogation-of-reader tactic” is an incredibly costly one, for him, for you, for your relationship with this book-hell, with David Foster Wallace, period. It’s my guess that how you feel about “Octet” will make or break you as a reader of Wallace, because what he’s really asking is for you to have faith in something he cannot possibly ever finally determine in language: “the agenda of the consciousness behind the text.” His urgency, his sincerity, his apparent desperation to “connect” with his reader in a genuine way-these are things you either believe in or don’t. Some writers want sympathetic readers; some want readers with a sense of humor; some want their readers at the political barricades, fired up and ready to go. Strange to say it, but Wallace wanted faithful readers. The last line of “Octet”?

“So decide.”

4. CHURCH NOT MADE WITH HANDS

It’s worth having faith in “Octet.” You miss something important if you throw it across the room unfinished, as I did when I first read it. Buried in the middle of it there is a sort of confession. Or as close to a nakedly honest statement as Wallace ever made w/r/t his literary intentions. He is ostensibly talking about the “semiworkable pieces” of “Octet,” but what he has to say applies to all his work:

[A]ll seem to be trying to demonstrate some sort of weird ambient sameness in different kinds of human relationships, some nameless but inescapable “price” that all human beings are faced with having to pay at some point if they ever truly want “to be with” another person instead of just using that person somehow (like for example using the person just as an audience, or as an instrument of their own selfish ends, or as some piece of moral gymnastics equipment on which they can demonstrate their virtuous character (as in people who are generous to other people only because they want to be seen as generous, and so actually secretly like it when people around them go broke or get into trouble, because it means they can rush generously in and act all helpful-everybody’s seen people like this), or as a narcissistically cathected projection of themselves, etc.), a weird and nameless but apparently unavoidable “price” that can actually sometimes equal death itself, or at least usually equals your giving up something (either a thing or a person or a precious long-held “feeling” or some certain idea of yourself and your own virtue/worth/identity) whose loss will feel, in a true and urgent way, like a kind of death, and to say that the fact that there could be (you feel) such an overwhelming and elemental sameness to such totally different situations and mise en scenes and conundra…-seems to you urgent, truly urgent, something almost worth shimmying up chimneys and shouting from roofs about. [86][87]

There is a weird ambient sameness to Wallace’s work. He was always asking essentially the same question. How do I recognize that other people are real, as I am? And the strange, quasi-mystical answer was always the same, too. You may have to give up your attachment to the “self.” I don’t mean that Wallace “preached” this moral in his work; when I think of a moralist I don’t think of a preacher. On the contrary, he was a writer who placed himself “in the hazard” of his own terms, undergoing them as real problems, both in life and on the page. For this reason, I suspect he will remain a writer who appeals, above all, to the young. It’s young people who best understand his sense of urgency, and who tend to take abstract existential questions like these seriously, as interrogations that relate directly to themselves. The struggle with ego, the struggle with the self, the struggle to allow other people to exist in their genuine “otherness”-these were aspects of Wallace’s own struggle. One way to read Brief Interviews is as a series of intimate confessions of “other blindness.” Confessions of solipsism, of misogyny, of ego, of control freakery, of cruelty, of snobbery, of sadism. Of that old Christian double bind: the wish to be seen to be good. Speaking of “The Depressed Person” he said: “That was the most painful thing I have ever done… [T]hat character is a part of me I hardly ever write about. There is a part of me that is just like that person.” And then there’s the moderately overweight careerist poet in “Death Is Not the End.” It’s about as far from an autobiographical portrait of Wallace as one can imagine, but it’s fueled with a disgust that feels somehow personal. Wallace was constitutionally hard on himself, apparently compelled to confess not only to who he was but to who he dreaded being or becoming. “The fifty-six-year-old American poet, a Nobel Laureate,” recipient of basically every award and grant literary America has to offer (except the Guggenheim [88] a fact which seems to plague him, and pops up in a footnote apropos of nothing, as if it had thrust itself to the surface of the story in subconscious fury), is “known in American literary circles as ‘the poet’s poet’ or sometimes simply ‘the Poet,’ ” and he is truly selfhood experienced in its unbearable fullness. We get a meticulous description of his self, the exact spot in which he sits (in a lounger, by a pool, in a garden), as well as his exact coordinate in relation to the sun (as if it revolved around him). In short (well, in two gigantic recursive sentences), Wallace annihilates him. God help the man who has chosen to worship himself! Whose self really is no more than the awards he has won, the prestige he has earned, the wealth he has amassed. In our last glimpse of the Poet he is surrounded by his expensive shrubbery, which is “motionless green vivid and inescapable and not like anything else in the world in either appearance and suggestion.” A footnote adds: “That is not wholly true.” Green, vivid, motionless, inescapable? Sounds like money to me.

In The Gift, a book that meant a lot to Wallace, the cultural anthropologist Lewis Hyde examines the different modes in which cultures and individuals deal with the concept of gifts and giving. He offers a fine description of the kind of swollen self we find in “Death Is Not the End”: “The narcissist feels his gifts come from himself. He works to display himself, not to suffer change.” The father in “On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand” makes a similar judgment about his Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright son: he is appalled by his (i.e., the son’s) sense of his own “limitless gifts unquote” and the admiration they arouse in everyone:

As if he actually deserved this sort of-as if it were the most natural thing in the world…-as if this sort of love were due him, itself of nature, inevitable as the sunrise, never a thought, never a moment’s doubt that he deserves it all and more. The very thought of it chokes me. How many years he took from us. Our Gift. Genitive, ablative, nominative-the accidence of “gift.”

To Wallace, a gift truly was an accident; a chance, a fortuitous circumstance. Born intelligent, born with perfect pitch, with mathematical ability, with a talent for tennis-in what sense are we ever the proprietors of these blessings? What rights accrue to us because of them? How could we ever claim to truly own them?

It’s very interesting to me that this attitude toward gifts should have within it a current that is strongly anti-American, being both contra “rights” and contra “ownership.” I’ve always had the sense, philosophically speaking, that Wallace’s ethical ideas were profoundly un-American: he had more in common with the philosophical current that runs from Kant’s “realm of ends” through Simone Weils “sacred humans” and on to John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance,” [89] than the Hobbes/Smith/Locke waters from which the idea of America was drawn. Wallace’s work rejects “goal-directed” philosophies of human happiness, both because they isolate the self (the pursuit of happiness is a pursuit we undertake alone) and because this Western obsession with happiness as a goal makes people childishly “pain-averse,” allergic to the one quality that is, in Wallace’s view, the true constant of human life: “Look at utilitarianism… and you see a whole teleology predicated on the idea that the best human life is one that maximizes the pleasure-to-pain ratio. God, I know this sounds priggish of me. All I’m saying is that it’s shortsighted to blame TV. It’s simply another symptom. TV didn’t invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression… ” His stories repel the idea that a just society can come from the contract made between self-interested or egoistic individuals, or that it is one’s “personhood” that guarantees one a bigger slice of the pie. (The fat poet’s talents or personal merits can’t make him more worthy than anyone else.)

And in a few extreme cases, Wallace’s stories go further, lining up behind a quasi-mystic such as Weil, who, like the Buddhists, abandons “Personhood” entirely: “What is sacred in a human being is the impersonal in him… Our personality is the part of us which belongs to error and sin. The whole effort of the mystic has always been to become such that there is no part left in his soul to say ‘I’.” [90] Consequently, the statement You have no right to hurt me is to Weil meaningless, for rights are a concept that attaches to “personhood” and one person can always feel their “rights” to be more rightful that another’s. What you are doing to me is not just-this, for Weil, is the correct and sacred phrase. “The spirit of justice and truth is nothing else,” she writes, “but a certain kind of attention, which is pure love.”

Isn’t it exactly this “certain kind of attention” that Wallace explores in B.I. #20 (sometimes known as The Granola Cruncher)? It is the darkest story in the collection, [91] and it has an extreme setup, even by Wallace’s standards: a hippie girl, viciously raped by a psychopath, decides to create, in the middle of the act, a “soul connection” with her rapist because she “believes that sufficient love and focus can penetrate even psychosis and evil.” In the process she is able to forget herself, and focus on his misery-even to feel pity for him. But this all happened some time ago: when the story opens we are being retold it as an anecdote by a man who has himself heard it as anecdote:

B.I. #20 12-96

NEW HAVEN CT

“And yet I did not fall in love with her until she had related the story of the unbelievably horrifying incident in which she was brutally accosted and held captive and very nearly killed.”

New Haven? A recently graduated Yalie, perhaps. Definitely overeducated, supercilious, and full, initially, of bombastic opinions about the girl, whom he picked up at a festival as a “strictly one night objective,” because she had a sexy body (“Her face was a bit strange”) and because he thought it would be easy. She’s an open book to him-he feels he can read her easily:

What one might call a quote Granola Cruncher, or post-Hippie, New Ager, what have you… comprising the prototypical sandals, unrefined fibers, daffy arcane, emotional incontinence, flamboyantly long hair, extreme liberality on social issues… and using the, well the quote L-word itself several times without irony or even any evident awareness that the word has through tactical over-deployment become trite and requires invisible quotes around it now at the very least.

She is an object on which to exert his superiority. A body from which his own body will take its pleasure. In the event, though, her strange postcoital anecdote unnerves and destabilizes him: she tells her story of extraordinary focus with extraordinary focus and he (like one of Henry James’s ideal readers) finds his own fine awareness stimulated by hers:

I found myself hearing expressions like fear gripping her soul, unquote, less as televisual clichés or melodrama but as sincere if not particularly artful attempts to describe what it must have felt like, the feelings of shock and unreality alternating with waves of pure terror.

But there is something chilling in both his modes of processing her experience. First it is “televisual cliché”; then something so unexpectedly real he becomes desirous of her precisely because of it, seeing, perhaps, in her realness, a way of becoming real himself. But when did the real become unexpected? When did we become so inured to the real that it gathered around it this strange aura? In the age of mechanical reproduction, prophesized Walter Benjamin, a painting such as the Mona Lisa will lose its aura: the more cheap postcards we make of her, the more she will disappear. But he was wrong-it turned out the erotic logic of capital worked the other way around. Her authentic aura increased. So what happens to the authentic aura of, say, “fear” when you’ve seen a thousand women scream on TV? Wallace’s answer is frightening: we’re so deadened by the flat televisual repetition of all our human emotions, we have begun to fetishize “real” feelings, especially real pain. It’s as if we’ve stopped believing in reality-only extremity can make us feel again. And here is extremity, and the man suddenly feels. He is there with her, in her moment of “soul-connection.” So are we. “Have you ever heard of the couvade?” he asks his therapist, and in the usual nonresponse we become aware of this story’s triplicate act of empathy: ours for the girl via the man’s anecdote, his for the girl via her anecdote, the girl’s for the rapist via the experience itself. In the couvade, a man feels his wife’s pregnancy: a porous border. In this story, several borders feel porous at once. The man is able to feel the “fathomless sadness” of the rapist; we, as readers, aggressively challenged by the very setup (a woman pities her rapist?), begin by sharing the skepticism of the Yalie, but as we move toward him, he moves away from us to a place where he is capable of believing her. The anecdote has created a force field of fine awareness around it. Through the man’s attempts to appropriate it, and our own need to judge it, Wallace manages to create a sense of its sacred otherness. Evidence of one woman’s capacity for the L word, perhaps, but not something we can turn to our own devices, not a story we can own.

The Granola Cruncher is one of the few people in Brief Interviews not using another person as an example or as an object or as a piece of “moral gymnastic equipment.” She exists in a quite different moral realm from the manipulator who uses his deformed arm, his “flipper,” as bait to “catch” sympathetic women who then sleep with him, or the guy who twists Viktor Frankl’s holocaust memoir, Man’s Search for Meaning, into a perverse apologia for destroying another human being. (Frankl’s therapeutic school, logotherapy, explores the idea that selves in an extreme state of personal degradation or loss are often better able to comprehend what is really meaningful. But this, of course, does not mean you create a second holocaust in order to generate meaning.) Most of Wallace’s people refuse, even for a moment, to give up the self. They have been taught “that a self is something you just have,” like you have a car, or a house, or a bank account. But selves are not consumer items, and the journey to becoming “a fucking human being” is one that lasts as long as our lives: “The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle… Our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.” Those quotes are from a talk Wallace gave on Franz Kafka, another writer for whom he felt a deep affinity. Their connection is not obvious at the level of sentence but their deep currents run parallel: the attachment to parables, the horror of the self in its fullness (think of the cipher Georg dashing from his charismatic father in “The Judgment,” vaulting over that bridge), the dream of self-less-ness. And despite their attempts to root themselves in “relationships between persons” they both expressed a longing for the infinite, which is nothing and is nowhere and is endless. Throughout this essay, which I began writing when Wallace was alive, I have defined that longing as purely philosophical-events have shown this to be wishful thinking on my part. The story “Suicide as a Sort of Present” now inevitably resonates beyond itself, but it is also the same story it always was: a reminder that there exist desperate souls who feel that their nonexistence, in the literal sense, would be a gift to those around them. We must assume that David was one of them.

In the end, the truly sublime and frightening moments in Brief Interviews do not involve families joshing each other in Italian restaurants. When he offers his readers generous, healthy interpersonal relations as a route out of “the postmodern trap,” well, that’s the responsible moral philosopher in him. But the real mystery and magic lies in those quasi-mystical moments, portraits of extreme focus and total relinquishment. We might feel more comfortable calling this “meditation,” but I believe the right word is in fact prayer. What else is the man in “Think” doing when he falls on his knees and puts his hands together? What is the Granola Cruncher doing as the psychopath moves on top of her? What is the boy in “Forever Overhead” doing just before he dives? It’s true that this is prayer unmoored, without its usual object, God, but it is still focused, self-forgetful, and moving in an outward direction toward the unfathomable (which the mystic will argue is God). It is the L word, at work in the world. Wallace understood better than most that for the secular among us, art has become our best last hope of undergoing this experience.

“Church Not Made with Hands” is a gift of this kind. It is about extreme focus and it requires extreme focus. In its climactic scene, a priest kneels praying in front of a picture of himself praying, which feels like the ultimate DFW image, as DeLillo’s most-photographed barn holds within it something of the essential DeLillo. “Church Not Made with Hands” is my favorite gift in a book laden with them. I think that must be why I’m loathe to take it apart as I have the others. More than any other story in Brief Interviews it seals its doors tightly and the joy for each reader will come in finding the keys that fit the locks-and who’s to say your keys you will be the same as mine? Still, here are a few of mine, in case you feel like picking them up.

Giorgio de Chirico painted what he called “metaphysical town squares.” They are full of exquisite renderings of shadow.

The intense colors of a Soutine. In fact, colors generally. Count them.

In volume five of A la recherché du temps perdu, the novelist Bergotte dies while standing in a gallery, looking at Vermeer’s View of Delft. These are his last words: “That’s how I ought to have written, my last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of color, made my language precious in itself.”

Just before a partial eclipse, the wind rises. And another thing happens, too: shadow bands (also known as flying shadows) appear, making the ground look like the bottom of a swimming pool.

Solar eclipse. The Nazca Lines in Peru. “Eye in the sky.”

“The screen breaths mint”? A confessional box. A priest chewing gum.

From the OED:

Prone

a. ORIGIN. French prône, the grating or railing separating the chancel of a church from the nave, where notices were given and addresses delivered.

b. Ecclesiastical history. An exhortation or homily delivered in church. Also, prayers, exhortations, etc., attached to a sermon.

c. Adjective & adverb. Directed or sloping downward. Also loosely, descending steeply or vertically, headlong.

d. Facing downward; bending forward and downward; lying face downward or on the belly; spec. (of the hand or forelimb) with the palm downwards or backwards and the radius and ulna crossed. Later also loosely, lying flat.

From the OED:

Apse, Apsis

Astronomy: Either of the two points in the elliptical orbit of a planet or other body at which it is respectively nearest to and furthest from the primary about which it revolves. Architecture. A large semicircular or polygonal structure, often roofed with a semi-dome, situated esp. at the end of the choir, nave, or an aisle of a church.

A song by The Waterboys

C. S. Lewis. Shadowlands

A Grief Observed. Death

Acts 17:24: God dwelleth not in temples made with hands.

Acts 7:48: Howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands?

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE 1962-2008