D.F.W.

Upon reading “Consider the Lobster” and “Brief interviews with hideous men” by David Foster Wallace (I still haven’t been on enough planes to finish “Infinite Jest” and am about halfway through it — I know, I know).

Rather than writing something that sounds like one of those soundbites on the covers of his books — “brilliant”, “hilarious”, “inventive”, better focus on just one particular quality of these books.

Preamble. I often tell people that I love art which makes me feel something I wouldn’t feel otherwise.
Music, infused with some emotion that doesn’t exist in real life, located in a different dimension than the happy — sad scale. Like Rachmaninoff’s Pâques.
A book, which makes me confront death or loss earlier or more frequently than I otherwise would have, and sort of trains me for what it will be like.
A propagandist painting, making me feel proud to be part of a force that I am actually not at all affiliated with.

DFW is taking this way too far (not entirely unlike how he’s taking everything else in his writing too far). He’s making me feel things I’m very uncomfortable admitting to myself that I’m even capable of feeling; making me feel like I’m inside the head of a person I really don’t want to be; sympathize with monsters; forcing me to listen to conversations I would have rage-quit; holding a mirror to the not prettiest parts of my face.

This is present both in “Consider the lobster” and “Brief interviews with hideous men”, but more in the latter. Let’s just say it’s a collection of fragments of writing (the word “stories” doesn’t quite fit) that are relatively diverse among many dimensions, but cluster toward being short, involving men, involving various ways one’s psyche can be messed up, and involving male/female relationships.

For example, there is a story called “The Depressed Person”, characteristically dryly describing a woman in such extreme depression that she can not function except by constantly and obsessively calling a small number of her long-distance friends. Every day, for hours and hours.

She is, of course terrified of being a burden, distracting her friends from their joyous lives, and imagining how they make faces to their loved ones while pretending to be empathetic on the phone with her, how they shudder when hearing the phone ring in the evening. Things of course get completely out of control when her therapist commits suicide. The woman is so drained from her depression that she has no capacity for empathy left in herself, zero, none, and she knows it very well. The worst part is that her “most trusted friend”, who conveniently has the most free time for her calls, is a person who has a lot of free time because she is dying.

Like, how should I feel about this? Should I feel sorry for the depressed person? Of course! But can I admit to myself that, if I was one of the friends she calls for hours, I yes, would be terrified of hearing the phone ring and I don’t know how long I would stay supportive? (the story spans about 4 years)

Can I admit that I don’t know what I would do once it would be too much for me — maybe after a few months, maybe after a few years; what kind of pathetic little excuses I would come up with to make the conversations shorter? Or would I just give up and cut off contact? Or would I keep being supportive but secretly hate her?

“Brief Interview #31” where a guy for several pages mansplains to a woman how being a great lover is not about being expert at giving pleasure, and how such people are in fact self-centered narcissists, but that rather it’s all about also being expert at receiving it and making her feel like she’s a sex goddess. The smugness of the guy’s tone is repellent, but you can’t stop listening to him the way you can’t stop looking at yellow bullshit newspapers in the checkout lane. You’re ashamed of wanting to look at them, and you shudder at the thought of being that person who would actually buy them, but you look anyways; they appeal to your base instincts and you have base instincts.

“Brief Interview #2” where for several even more excruciating pages a guy tells his girlfriend that he has this tendency to be oh so passionate in the beginning and “conquer” women and then his excitement wanes and he’s basically afraid of commitment — but he drags this on for like 10 pages, repeating the same things over and over, over and over repeating how hurting her would be “the last thing he could possibly want to do”, and how he is simply telling her, in the spirit of truthful and vulnerable honesty, how this worrisome pattern has bothered him, so that she maybe just should be aware of it, because he in all truth cares about her so much and could not possibly even think of the possibility of hiding from her this important and tragic pattern of his previous relationships of which there’ve been all too many but no, it’s not important how many there’ve been because this right here and now is what’s really important and you get the idea.

He’s awful, yes, a caricature, a liar, an egoistic asshole, not actually giving the least shit about the imaginary girlfriend’s feelings — but well now how do I myself not feel like a caricature, liar, egoistic asshole myself if I ever have to tell something equally unpleasant to a partner? Lose if I sugarcoat anything, lose if I don’t — it indeed is like a caricature of yourself that’s a little too earnest: here’s how your hypothetical “trying to not hurt their feelings” behavior would look like at 100x, good luck convincing yourself that in normal-size and with honest intentions it’d be okay.

Then there’s plain weird and funny stuff. In B.I. #48 a dude uses poultry-industry metaphors and way too many air quotes to explain how he on the third date matter-of-factly asks women whether they would like to be tied up, and explores the intricate psychological dynamics of the whole dominant-submissive tying-up situation, with the trust, and the power to give up one’s power and all (it’s kinda hot actually). And then when they agree and he ties them up, then he… lies beside them and weeps and confesses to them about the childhood-trauma roots of his desire to do this. I also couldn’t help but chuckle, amongst all the poultry, at “A few chicken out part of the way through” (no air quotes). I think it’s hilarious.

[T.W. below: rape]

And then there’s two incredibly disturbing stories about rape, #46 and #20 with the main character of each story talking about it as a “transformative experience” for the victim — all the while a little too enthusiastically reminding the invisible interviewer that “of course he’s not saying” that it was in any way good or that the rapists shouldn’t be punished or anything.

In both cases at the end of the story the character breaks down and shows his nasty angry misogynistic true face; which is almost disappointing and unsubtle compared to some other stories in this book. But in the middle of these stories, it is uncomfortable not just reading about the assault itself, but it is far more uncomfortable to listen to the narrator’s “transformative experience” stuff.

In one case, the experience is about being treated like a thing, an object for which the question “is it alive” doesn’t make sense or matter, and realizing that in a sense you are a piece of stuff and you do have an object-like quality to you; and the narrator apparently finds this realization, and the realization that you can still survive after this, valuable and transformative, always stopping just short of declaring the whole experience positive and profusely distancing himself from such an idea. He also talks about Man’s Search for Meaning by the holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl and how there’s beauty in perseverance in the circumstances of holocaust. And then the story takes a twist and the narrator reveals that it is actually he himself who was this brutally raped, and you’re no longer sure if you should hate him for his “transformative experience” thing, cause if anybody has the right to even raise a topic like that, it’s someone who was raped. And then I think he reveals that he’s lying, or is he? And does that mean I should hate him again?

In the other case, it is a hitchhiker hippie woman (“granola cruncher” as described by the initially highly dismissive narrator) being assaulted by a violent psychopath driver who picked her up, and she avoids being tortured to death by him and gets away with only rape by using her new age woo to deeply and soulfully connect to the tiny glimpses of humanity inside him. The narrator then, again, stops short of declaring this beautiful.

And all the while I find myself thinking thoughts like — Am I a bad person for even continuing to read through this: wouldn’t it be more ethical or socially acceptable to rage-quit? Am I, kind of, amplifying the voices of misogynists and rape apologists by letting myself rather attentively listen to what they have to say? Am I worried of hating myself when I can’t come up with an intellectual objection to some of their morally repellent but at times “broken-clock” technically accurate rhetoric, and am faced with a choice between being intellectually dishonest vs. intellectually supporting a monster? (like, I’m sure the Holocaust was, in a sick and twisted way, a transformative experience for the survivors and some of them perhaps did gain strengths and epiphanies that can not be gained in an ordinary life — but it is repellent to focus one’s discussion of the Holocaust on that)

And what does it tell about me, that I’m worrying about what thoughts it is ethical or socially acceptable to think in my privacy of reading a book? And what if somebody knew that I’m thinking all this? And am I a coward for asking myself these questions?

And then there’s another still more uncomfortable issue. After writing the rest of this post, I read this — Men Recommend David Foster Wallace to Me — and it was like a cold shower; the phrase that struck the most was “when men exploit women’s sexual suffering for Art”.

I realize (or hope?) that DFW had the intention of condemning misogyny in “brief interviews”, and in that sense he is I guess somewhat better than just that. But then again, he himself was a notorious abuser.

But then the thing I personally found attractive about this writing, and the thing I’m here praising and amplifying, was not the condemnation, but some other stuff — ability to invoke empathy and strong feelings, quality of writing, sick humor, etc. Then I am, as a reader, treating women’s sexual suffering and misogyny in these stories as secondary to this other stuff that managed to resonate with me more. It is frankly not much better than how the characters in the rape stories treated the rape itself and its trauma as secondary to their fascination with the “transformative experience”.

I don’t know if DFW intended this and I don’t know what I should do about this myself — I can’t retroactively change how the stories made me feel or what my attention was focused on; I guess best I can do is acknowledge how my life experiences made me clueless to a lot of things, and try to have more of a clue in the future.