Cosmopoetica

[CC licensed image by darkpatator]

Eighteen months ago– a day after his suicide– I packed up every David Foster Wallace authored book, every journal, magazine, and photocopied piece of ephemera he appeared in, and everything else I could find with his byline and hid it all in a closet.

A few days ago– on what would have been Wallace’s 48th birthday– I told a friend how I still hadn’t been able to re-read anything Wallace had written. “Open that box. Like, now,” she said. And since I trust this friend, I did. I went back to the first words of Wallace’s I ever read, the short story “Everything is Green.” I immediately noticed the coincidence of the narrator’s age:

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“You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness, both of which are like sub-dreads of our dread of being trapped inside a self (a psychic self, not just a physical self), has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I’m going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me. I’m not sure I could give you a steeple-fingered theoretical justification, but I strongly suspect a big part of real art fiction’s job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us first to face what’s dreadful, what we want to deny.”

–David Foster Wallace

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I’m sitting in exactly the same spot I was exactly one year ago when I heard the news that David Foster Wallace was dead. A touch of frost this morning weighs down the blotted yellow leaves that are already barely hanging on to the trees. Fall up north is brief and intense: berries burst and rot almost overnight, green plants shrivel, we chill and shiver beneath a clear blue sky and a sun we’re turning away from no matter our desires.

My first news of DFW’s suicide came via a Twitter conversation. I thought it was a bad joke. Then I checked my email and there were a half-dozen notes from friends, the first what could have been a cryptic inquiry I still can’t answer, reproduced in full:

“I just heard. Are you OK?”

Confirmation. I felt at that moment the disbelieving and absurd near-swoon of tragedy-as-it-happens. The surreal moment I imagine a person has when they realize their plane is crashing, that is their child’s body in the table, they did just topple the stool that was keeping the slack in their noose. Knowing that it has already happened even as it’s happening. Inevitable, irretrievable, irredeemable.

Fall: tourist season over, the sidewalk and parking lot dotted with unswept cigarette butts and random scraps of paper bearing notes important and forgotten. The Fall: idealism drowned in irony; correspondence possible only through impossibly idealized memory. Am I OK? Is it possible to be OK? Will I ever be OK?

Not long after he died I stumbled across a picture online of DFW looking up toward the sky and laughing. He looked like my Grandma Ruthie in the only picture I’ve kept of her, kneeling on the stony bank of a river somewhere, laughing at the sky as her dog tries to lick her face. I only remember Ruthie when she was physically crippled by MS. The picture I’ve kept of her is technically a reflection of her physical body… but in my world it’s a clear reflection of who she was, something that was never lost to the world’s worst ravaging. And so the picture of Wallace, which revealed something essential about who he was, something that was never lost for me even if, in the end, it was lost to him, when he fretted that he was no longer sure he was the person he needed to be to write what he wanted to. I’ve never found that picture again.

Almost a year ago I packed up everything I had related to David Foster Wallace: every book he wrote, every magazine and journal with his byline somewhere inside. I couldn’t look at them, much less read them. It’s been a year and they remain hidden away. Thinking of that too-small stack of words makes me nervous, reminds me of the Sartre style nausea in my belly that remains like a low-grade fever. In Sartre’s novel Antoine was able to come to terms with his existence and the contingence of meaning and find his place in the world. The only place I can find for myself hardly exists, a vague eddy in a dark and blurry field tinged with anger and a despair that slowly silences me thought by thought and word by word.

I only knew David Foster Wallace through his own words and the words written about him. I’m unsure that it’s possible to know anyone through anything other than language in all its guises and disguises. That lack of surety is my last bit of hope… and an increasing length of rope. I constantly wonder how, if someone with Wallace’s gifts couldn’t come to terms with his Dasein, there is any chance for me? I’d like to take solace that we’re all in this thing together, that we must engage in the Sisyphean task of living together, giving and taking what we can along the way, regardless of the end or repetition. But I feel too emaciated—nothing to give and no way to receive what might be given—to put much into the climb.

Our obsessions choose us… and I shared too many with David Foster Wallace. I miss the hope his life implied and his work—because of my intense connection to it—imparted to me.

A year ago today David Foster Wallace hung himself but it feels like yesterday. Or this morning. Again the sun rises with little warmth and there’s a sterile smell in the air… the impending etherization of winter. And as always I try to write about something and someone else and end up writing about myself instead, fogging up this side of the inverted, soundproof glass.

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[image by caese]

In Borges I keep seeing the roots of Pynchon… particularly in stories like "The Babylon Lottery" and "The Library of Babel." Consider this passage from "The Babylon Lottery":

The Company, with divine modesty, eludes all publicity. Its agents, as is only natural, are secret. The orders which it is continually sending out do not differ from those lavishly issued by impostors. Besides, who can ever boast of being a mere impostor? The inebriate who improvises an absurd mandate, the dreamer who suddenly aways to choke the woman who lies beside him to death, do they not both, perhaps, carry out a secret decision by the Company?

If Pynchon didn’t have this story buried somewhere in his psyche when he wrote The Crying of Lot 49, he should have!

The enigma posed by the Library of Babel seems to be (in part) that which is being addressed by some post-avant and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry:

One of these books, which my father saw in a hexagon of the circuit number fifteen ninety-four, was composed of the letters MCV perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another, very much consulted in this zone, is a mere labyrinth of letters, but on the next-to-the-last page, one may read O Time your pyramids. As is well known: for one reasonable line or one straightforward note there are leagues of insensate cacophony, of verbal farragoes and incoherencies. (I know of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and compare it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one’s hands… They admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but they maintain that this application is accidental and that books in themselves mean nothing. This opinion, we shall see, is not altogether false.

And then a bit later in the same story:

It is pointless to observe that the best book in the numerous hexagons under my administration is entitled Combed Clap of Thunder; or that another is called The Plastic Cramp; and still another Axaxaxas Mlö. Such propositions as are contained in these titles, at first sight incoherent, doubtless yield a cryptographic or allegorical justification. Since they are verbal, these justifications already figure, ex hypothesi, in the Library.

I love and am terrified by this line, again from "The Library of Babel":

…the certainty that everything has been already written nullifies or makes phantoms of us all.

This is exactly how I feel.

In a way I know is important but am unable to articulate, David Foster Wallace is clearly connected to Borges. Where Borges articulated an idea of the infinite and the related, intertwined and tangled problem of time, where Borges rode the waves of his intuitive understanding of the endless paradox of no origin and no destination (or all origin and all destination), where Borges found something comical and comi-tragic and happily absurd– even admirable– about the infinite and the infinite-regress and the inevitable solipsism… Wallace wrote from within the infinite, painfully self-aware, with increasing desperation and a hopeless idealism that couldn’t be cornered or buried deep enough no matter what he tried to do or what his head knew…

Read "The Library of Babel" and "Funes the Memorious" and "The Babylon Lottery" and see what you think.

It’s beautiful and terrible that the experience of reading Borges I am having at this moment (everything that happens to us happens in the now) can’t really be shared with anyone. I can tell one of my few friends capable– by virtue of their experience and interests and particular place in life– of empathizing and understanding to go read "The Library of Babel" right now but it is exceedingly unlikely anything will come of it. In fact, such an attempt might be subtly (or not so subtly) harmful, undermining in some small way that friend’s confidence and attachment…

ut nihil non issdem verbis redderatur auditum

Translated:

so that nothing heard is not repeated (retold) in the same words…

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In an interesting (to people like me) bit of analysis, Andrew Seal writes about Infinite Jest:

Specialized knowledges pervade the book—tennis, recreational drug use, optics, burglary, even punting (surely the most narrowly specialized position in football). But one of the more (in)famous elements of “research” in the novel is the filmography Wallace includes in endnote 24. In the age of IMDb, we might be apt to forget that the filmography is (or was) actually a highly specialized and intensely laborious feat of archival research, but the almost eight-and-a-half pages of James O. Incandenza’s collected works should surely remind us that a filmography is actually the product of research, and not Googling.

Yet there was, of course, no research necessary for composing this “artifact”—having no basis in reality, everything in it is a pure product of imagination. Yet Wallace never seems comfortable simply acknowledging that the imagination that produced it is his own. In just about as many ways as possible, Wallace continually disrupts the filmography with secondary or tertiary commentary to let us know that he’s looking at it from the outside too: I kept waiting for that click where the self-distancing irony would drop away and, as with Borges or Pynchon or Bolaño or even (especially) Auster, you get a real note of dread or mystery where the author seems to have been finally convinced of the reality of his artifice. Even in the last entry, which is about The Entertainment itself, there are three skeptical footnotes embedded.

And a bit later concludes:

Most of Infinite Jest, I think, does not do this approximate deconstruction act; the bulk of it is what can be defined as specialist realism—which I think is actually a broadly popular mode of writing. I don’t think very many people mind writerly ostentation by itself: there are simply far too many popular authors who are grossly ostentatious for this to be the case. And readers of all kinds are capable of showing enormous patience with heavily-detailed and at times rather tedious passages of questionable importance to the overall novel. “Specialist realism” is not terribly problematic to most readers, and is often even considered enjoyable. (Consider, here, Wallace’s enthusiasm for Tom Clancy: there is not as great a distance between the two as one might think.) This mode of writing, however, sometimes slips into a different mode of writing that is indecisively subversive—a lukewarm irony that I think turns nearly everyone off. This is present, too, in Infinite Jest, and in order to have a conversation among people who really like the book and people who can’t get through it, I think it’s necessary to begin by separating this lukewarmness from the specialist realism that actually makes the novel so captivating.

Wallace may have had very well-thought-out, very theoretically smart reasons for trying to have things both (or more) ways, for trying to be indecisive, but there are lots of things which are really theoretically well-grounded which are simply annoying. I’m sure there are folks who think that the lukewarm ironical mode is really brilliant and is actually the most brilliant thing about the novel. I’d be happy to hear those arguments, but I want to make clear that I don’t really find this lukewarmness all that much of an obstacle to enjoying the book. So please, don’t confuse me with attacking Wallace or “hysterical realism” or any of that stuff.

The interesting question is how intentional the “lukewarm irony” (not sure I like the term; I have nothing better… and I think Wallace was jesting with the list that mentions Clancy, though the point still stands, but in a way I’m not sure matters much). I guess I’m squarely straddling the fance. Is it intentional? Just about every bit of it. Could Wallace have achieved the kind of distance that Borges did? I don’t think so. I think that inability is a fundamental characteristic of the fiction because it was a fundamental characteristic of Wallace’s philosophy– of language, of story and of life.

What was fascinating about Wallace’s work– to myself and many others– was this absurdly heightened self-consciousness, which many of us share, paired with such incredible gifts, which most of us don’t. In this respect Wallace’s life might have been a train wreck. But a beautiful (why do I keep thinking of Ballard’s Crash here?) sometimes elegant one. Wallace crashed. We all do. But what a way to delve deep into what I believe to be an inescapable part of the (excuse me for this) postmodern condition! Borges would be a very different writer were he writing now. In fact, I’m not sure he could be Borges at all. And I think he’d agree, though he might– Pierre Menard style– create a better Borges than Borges himself.

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[image by naccarato]

It was pretty disconcerting to stumble upon, while reading The Guardian, a news story on the suicide–right here in tiny town–of a former faculty member at the small University I work for. And it was even more surprising to learn that the victim (or victor, because I’m honestly not sure that it isn’t a victory of a kind) was Sylvia Plath’s son! I didn’t know Nicholas Hughes at all beyond, I think, perhaps being introduced once or twice in large gatherings… but still this feels personal in a way I associate with the grief following the death of people I knew personally (or intensely and vicariously).

Beyond the abstract debate the suicide of a "celebrity" always sparks–the role mental illness in the arts, the function and effects of suicide, whether such events are relevant to art (or not), etc–it triggers in me a morbid triad of fear, longing and envy. Fear because it makes me wonder how I can make it through the endless black days ahead of me when I’m so much less gifted (equipped) than someone like David Foster Wallace and less accomplished (successful) than someone like Nicholas Hughes; longing because no matter what I do–no matter the pills I swallow, the books and poems I ingest, the art I absorb, the shrinks I talk to, the pep talks and encouragement I receive, the knowledge of the meager and damaging legacy I would leave behind–what I want, every day, and every hour most of those days, is to just mercifully have this damaged existence come to a close with as little fanfare and pain for anyone else as possible; and envy because it’s finally over for these broken souls while time just drags on for me.

Because that’s the truth of me: I was born broken in a fundamental and, I fear, unfixable way. I get so tired of people talking about suicide as the "easy way" as if it’s like turning out a light. Suicide is only slightly easier than the alternative of bearing the days which stretch out until each minute sometimes feels like hours and it’s blackness ahead, behind and all around. If someone builds a 777 jumbo jet and someone else chooses to build a 767, the latter hasn’t taken the easy way out, have they? I’m sure there is some distinctly small minority of people who take their own life without thinking too much, but my experience is that people who are finally driven to that end have exactly the opposite problem– being unable to stop thinking so much.

It’s a miserable way to exist, feeling trapped like an animal in a box by forces beyond your control, while listening to a chorus of well-meaning people explaining how it’s all in your mind or how just learn to stop worrying and it will get better. I feel for those suicides leave behind. I suspect the only reason I’ve not shuffled off this mortal coil is because of my children and what I fear it would do to them… and while I know the effect will never be nil, as they get older and finally become adults of their own I don’t know that those threads of connection will always be able to bear my burdensome weight. Because if there’s another way out of the box, another way to escape from the darkened figure with the bludgeon poised that towers over me and obscures my vision, I don’t know what it is.

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I’ve just finished listening to an absolutely maddening episode of the Slate Audio Book Club:  on Infinite Jest which reaches epic heights of cluelessness. You’d think that with three reviewers–Troy Patterson, Katie Roiphe and James Surowiecki–there’d be a bit more understanding of David Foster Wallace’s book and a bit less wishing that Infinite Jest were some other kind of novel. Troy Patterson (I think– they’re not particularly good about identifying themselves or addressing each other by name… and I can’t bear to listen again to try to figure it out. It’s obvious.) is the only one you can be sure has actually read the book, but he’s way too timid in the face of Roiphe’s inanity and Surowiecki’s whingeing.

The idea that Infinite Jest is "messy," and the corollary that it cold have been a great book if the good parts were removed from all the non-essential detail and disconnected "digressions" is ridiculous. It’s like reading Whitman and complaining that he’s not Emily Dickinson or Kay Ryan. The idea that Infinite Jest is messy in the shallow sense it is used here–messy in the way my daughter’s room is messy; messy in a way that it would be an improvement to be "cleaned up"–is facile. In Infinite Jest, Wallace essentially took Joyce’s idea of stream-of-consciousness and reshaped it into a contemporary form. Where Joyce framed Ulysses on a classical foundation ripe with allusion to classical sources and history, Wallace built his novel in the post-structuralist cloud of mess media, disaffection and urban myth; where Joyce’s characters "digressed" within the concrete (and protected) environment of a single day in Dublin, exemplifying classical unity, Wallace’s characters and the narrator exist in a world with no such safety net from the ever-present danger of solipsism. If Infinite Jest is messy, it’s messy in the sense that the city and forest are both messy, in the way that sex is messy, in the way that love and friendship are messy.

Many of the stories and sections that Roiphe complains don’t contribute to her apparent desire for a book constructed on the cliched triangle of genre-style plot are, in fact, connected directly to the most central theme (if you can call it that) of the book– the Entertainment. Because most of those "irrelevant" stories are building up layers of reality using urban myth in a world where perhaps those myths aren’t myths at all. And if that’s true, then perhaps the Entertainment– another urban myth derived (at least) from Monty Python and manifest today in movies the The Ring– is real.

Roiphe complains that Wallace is guilty of constantly writing in a way that says "look at me!" But this gets it precisely wrong. What Wallace actually does is write in a way that constantly cries out to the reader–sometimes plaintively, sometimes with delight, sometimes in fear–"OH God, I can’t stop looking!" Wallace was clearly highly intelligent and hyper-analytical, unable to just disengage and passively ride the media tide and profoundly resistant to the opiate of shallow entertainment. He wanted a big picture understanding in a world where there is no longer any such thing… but where the fundamental condition that asserts that impossibility is itself open to question. These questions of humanity and beauty and unified engagement in the post- and post-post-modern (etc) eras are soul-twisting and skull-cracking… that Wallace didn’t try (or desire) to put it all into some kind of objective, dispassionate box is to his credit and our benefit… even if it may have ultimately led Wallace to his own end.

Which is why one shouldn’t be surprised at the deep humanity of Infinite Jest. I’ve written about this before, particularly with regards to the usually mistaken idea of simple irony that is (ironically) often used to characterize Wallace’s work, but if you aren’t seeing the intensely human engagement that drives Infinite Jest, you aren’t reading nearly well or deeply enough. You’re guilty of the same passive, shallow engagement that Infinite Jest itself is one long statement against. Or, as someone in the Book Club discussion quotes Wallace as saying when asked about the "dissatisfying" ending, perhaps Infinite Jest just isn’t for you.

To "get" Infinite Jest demands time and attention. It is, literally, the infinite jest, but stakes a claim exactly opposite the Entertainment that is at the heart of the book. All you have to do with the Entertainment is turn on the television and it does all the work for you, creating a concise, unified, deadly package. James Surowiecki’s whining that the book was so much work to get through  is a complaint from the other side of the chasm, from the land of the all-consuming, but depthless, Entertainment.  Infinite Jest is an entertainment that asks you to do more than that. It asks for sustained engagement, for which you get real, unbounded rewards. The book isn’t sewn up into a single, easy-to-digest microwave meal–which as we see in the book is its own kind of death. Troy Patterson is on the right track when he asks whether we shouldn’t call Infinite Jest something other than a "novel," if only to avoid the incredibly limited expectations of what novels are, what they can do, and how they should work that people like Roiphe and Surowiecki put on display here.

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[image by S. Casey] 

David Foster Wallace’s passing has spurred a lot of conversations that in one way or another invoke the idea of irony and his work’s relationship to it. Some of the arguments to be found in and around those discussions– and some of the hostility that DFW’s work drew from the beginning (not to mention a veritable murder of prescriptivists descending upon Alanis Morrissette like tweedy, elbow-patched crows on a field of green ESL learners)– comes from clear dissonance regarding what irony actually is and then proceeding to speak as if everyone involved is talking about the same thing at the same time.

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Monday morning I Twittered that I was digging into Ulysses, a book I read once and too-quickly many years ago, and before I knew it a few friends were joining in. We have formed some kind of rule-free, schedule-less reading group I’ve dubbed The Club of Uncertain Genius. I’m excited to have company and plan to blog my thoughts on the book as a few others are.

I’ve been planning the storming of Ulysses for a while, spending some time re-reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, The Odyssey and a passel of Yeats’ poetry as part of my preparation. I was going to read Hamlet again too, but was derailed by the stunning news of David Foster Wallace’s death. I’m still not ready to say anything more about that tragedy directly, but it did spur me a bit… what better way to honor my favorite writer than to dive into a lengthy, revolutionary novel full of allusion and literary pyrotechnics?

Incidentally, in a fortifying coincidence, I was reading an article about Wallace in The News-Gazette (where news of his death is filed as a "local" story) and saw this tonight:

Sally Foster Wallace remembers how she and her son would rise at 5 a.m. each day to read a chapter of "Ulysses" together.

"He was dazzling," she said.

Indeed.

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I’ve been enjoying pictures for sad children and came across a couple of literary-ish comics worth sharing since they reference a couple of my favorite authors and works.

First, David Foster Wallace:

[click for full comic]

Then T.S. Eliot and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:

[click for full comic]

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I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art. This seems like a poisonous lesson for a would-be artist to grow up with. And one consequence is that if the artist is excessively dependent on simply being “liked,” so that her true end isn’t in the work but in a certain audience’s good opinion, she is going to develop a terrific hostility to that audience, simply because she has given all her power away to them. It’s the familiar love-hate syndrome of seduction: “I don’t really care what it is I say, I care only that you like it. But since your good opinion is the sole arbitrator of my success and worth, you have tremendous power over me, and I fear you and hate you for it.” This dynamic isn’t exclusive to art.

Hard to believe, but I’d never read this 1993 interview with David Foster Wallace before!

[cosmopoetica, dfw, tv, television]

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