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Wallace:2004af ~ http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/books/review/07WALLACE.html

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'Borges': Writer on the Couch By DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Published: November 7, 2004 THERE'S an unhappy paradox about literary biographies. The majority of readers who will be interested in a writer's bio, especially one as long and exhaustive as Edwin Williamson's ''Borges: A Life,'' will be admirers of the writer's work. They will therefore usually be idealizers of that writer and perpetrators (consciously or not) of the intentional fallacy. Part of the appeal of the writer's work for these fans will be the distinctive stamp of that writer's personality, predilections, style, particular tics and obsessions -- the sense that these stories were written by this author and could have been done by no other.* And yet it often seems that the person we encounter in the literary biography could not possibly have written the works we admire. And the more intimate and thorough the bio, the stronger this feeling usually is. In the present case, the Jorge Luis Borges who emerges in Williamson's book -- a vain, timid, pompous mama's boy, given for much of his life to dithery romantic obsessions -- is about as different as one can get from the limpid, witty, pansophical, profoundly adult writer we know from his stories. Rightly or no, anyone who reveres Borges as one of the best and most important fiction writers of the last century will resist this dissonance, and will look, as a way to explain and mitigate it, for obvious defects in Williamson's life study. The book won't disappoint them. Edwin Williamson is an Oxford don and esteemed Hispanist whose ''Penguin History of Latin America'' is a small masterpiece of lucidity and triage. It is therefore unsurprising that his ''Borges'' starts strong, with a fascinating sketch of Argentine history and the Borges family's place within it. For Williamson, the great conflict in the Argentine national character is that between the ''sword'' of civilizing European liberalism and the ''dagger'' of romantic gaucho individualism, and he argues that Borges's life and work can be properly understood only in reference to this conflict, particularly as it plays out in his childhood. In the 19th century, grandfathers on both sides of his family distinguished themselves in important battles for South American independence from Spain and the establishment of a centralized Argentine government, and Borges's mother was obsessed with the family's historical glory. Borges's father, a man stunted by the heroic paternal shadow in which he lived, evidently did things like give his son an actual dagger to use on bullies at school, and later sent him to a brothel for devirgination. The young Borges failed both these ''tests,'' the scars of which marked him forever and show up all over the place in his fiction, Williamson thinks. It is in these claims about personal stuff encoded in the writer's art that the book's real defect lies. In fairness, it's just a pronounced case of a syndrome that seems common to literary biographies, so common that it might point to a design flaw in the whole enterprise. The big problem with ''Borges: A Life'' is that Williamson is an atrocious reader of Borges's work; his interpretations amount to a simplistic, dishonest kind of psychological criticism. You can see why this problem might be intrinsic to the genre. A biographer wants his story to be not only interesting but literarily valuable.** In order to ensure this, the bio has to make the writer's personal life and psychic travails seem vital to his work. The idea is that we can't correctly interpret a piece of verbal art unless we know the personal and/or psychological circumstances surrounding its creation. That this is simply assumed as an axiom by many biographers is one problem; another is that the approach works a lot better on some writers than on others. It works well on Kafka -- Borges's only modern equal as an allegorist, with whom he's often compared -- because Kafka's fictions are expressionist, projective, and personal; they make artistic sense only as manifestations of Kafka's psyche. But Borges's stories are very different. They are designed primarily as metaphysical arguments; they are dense, self-enclosed, with their own deviant logics. Above all, they are meant to be impersonal, to transcend individual consciousness -- ''to be incorporated,'' as Borges puts it, ''like the fables of Theseus or Ahasuerus, into the general memory of the species and even transcend the fame of their creator or the extinction of the language in which they were written.'' One reason for this is that Borges is a mystic, or at least a sort of radical Neoplatonist -- human thought, behavior and history are all the product of one big Mind, or are elements of an immense cabalistic Book that includes its own decoding. Biography-wise, then, we have a strange situation in which Borges's individual personality and circumstances matter only insofar as they lead him to create artworks in which such personal facts are held to be unreal. "'Borges: A Life,'' which is strongest in its treatments of Argentine history and politics, is at its very worst when Williamson is discussing specific pieces in light of Borges's personal life. Unfortunately, he discusses just about everything Borges ever wrote. Williamson's critical thesis is clear: ''Bereft of a key to their autobiographical context, no one could have grasped the vivid significance these pieces actually had for their author.'' And in case after case, the resultant readings are shallow, forced and distorted -- as indeed they must be if the biographer's project is to be justified. Random example: ''The Wait,'' a marvelous short-short that appears in the 1949 story collection ''The Aleph,'' takes the form of a layered homage to Hemingway, gangster movies and the Buenos Aires underworld. An Argentine mobster, in hiding from another mobster and living under the pursuer's name, dreams so often of his killers' appearance in his bedroom that, when the assassins finally come for him, he ''gestured at them to wait, and he turned over and faced the wall, as though going back to sleep. Did he do that to awaken the pity of the men that killed him, or because it's easier to endure a terrifying event than to imagine it, wait for it endlessly -- or (and this is perhaps the most likely possibility) so that his murderers would become a dream, as they had already been so many times, in that same place, at that same hour?'' The distant interrogative ending -- a Borges trademark -- becomes an inquisition into dreams, reality, guilt, augury and mortal terror. For Williamson, though, the real key to the story's significance appears to be that ''Borges had failed to win the love of Estela Canto. . . . With Estela gone, there seemed nothing to live for,'' and he represents the story's ending all and only as a depressed whimper: ''When his killers finally track him down, he just rolls over meekly to face the wall and resigns himself to the inevitable.'' It is not merely that Williamson reads every last thing in Borges's oeuvre as a correlative of the author's emotional state. It is that he tends to reduce all of Borges's psychic conflicts and personal problems to the pursuit of women. Williamson's theory here involves two big elements: Borges's inability to stand up to his domineering mother, and his belief, codified in a starry-eyed reading of Dante, that ''it was the love of a woman that alone could deliver him from the hellish unreality he shared with his father and inspire him to write a masterpiece that would justify his life.'' Story after story is thus interpreted by Williamson as a coded dispatch on Borges's amorous career, which career turns out to be sad, timorous, puerile, moony and (like most people's) extremely boring. The formula is applied equally to famous pieces, such as '' 'The Aleph' (1945), whose autobiographical subtext alludes to his thwarted love for Norah Lange,'' and to lesser-known stories like ''The Zahir'': ''The torments described by Borges in this story . . . are, of course, displaced confessions of the extremity of his plight. Estela [Canto, who'd just broken up with him] was to have been the 'new Beatrice,' inspiring him to create a work that would be 'the Rose without purpose, the Platonic, intemporal Rose,' but here he was again, sunk in the unreality of the labyrinthine self, with no prospect now of contemplating the mystic Rose of love.'' Thin though this kind of explication is, it's preferable to the reverse process by which Williamson sometimes presents Borges's stories and poems as ''evidence'' that he was in emotional extremities. Williamson's claim, for instance, that in 1934, ''after his definitive rejection by Norah Lange, Borges . . . came to the brink of killing himself'' is based entirely on two tiny pieces of contemporaneous fiction in which the protagonists struggle with suicide. Not only is this a bizarre way to read and reason -- was the Flaubert who wrote ''Madame Bovary'' eo ipso suicidal? -- but Williamson seems to believe that it licenses him to make all sorts of dubious, humiliating claims about Borges's interior life: ''A poem called 'The Cyclical Night' . . . which he published in La Nacion on October 6, reveals him to be in the throes of a personal crisis''; ''In the extracts from this unfinished poem . . . we can see that the reason for wishing to commit suicide was literary failure, stemming ultimately from sexual self-doubt.'' Bluck. Again, it is primarily because of Borges's short stories that anyone will care enough to read about his life. And while Williamson spends a lot of time detailing the explosive success that Borges enjoyed in middle age, after the 1961 International Publishers' Prize (shared with Samuel Beckett) introduced his work to audiences in the United States and Europe, there is little in his book about just why Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is an important enough fiction writer to deserve such a microscopic bio. The truth, briefly stated, is that Borges is arguably the great bridge between modernism and post-modernism in world literature. He is modernist in that his fiction shows a first-rate human mind stripped of all foundations in religious or ideological certainty -- a mind turned thus wholly in on itself. His stories are inbent and hermetic, with the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything. And the mind of those stories is nearly always a mind that lives in and through books. This is because Borges the writer is, fundamentally, a reader. The dense, obscure allusiveness of his fiction is not a tic, or even really a style; and it is no accident that his best stories are often fake essays, or reviews of fictitious books, or have texts at their plots' centers, or have as protagonists Homer or Dante or Averroes. Whether for seminal artistic reasons or neurotic personal ones or both, Borges collapses reader and writer into a new kind of aesthetic agent, one who makes stories out of stories, one for whom reading is essentially -- consciously -- a creative act. This is not, however, because Borges is a metafictionist or a cleverly disguised critic. It is because he knows that there's finally no difference -- that murderer and victim, detective and fugitive, performer and audience are the same. Obviously, this has postmodern implications (hence the pontine claim above), but Borges's is really a mystical insight, and a profound one. It's also frightening, since the line between monism and solipsism is thin and porous, more to do with spirit than with mind per se. And, as an artistic program, this kind of collapse/transcendence of individual identity is also paradoxical, requiring a grotesque self-obsession combined with an almost total effacement of self and personality. Tics and obsessions aside, what makes a Borges story Borgesian is the odd, ineluctable sense you get that no one and everyone did it. This is why, for instance, it is so irksome to see Williamson describe ''The Immortal'' and ''The Writing of the God'' -- two of the greatest, most scalp-crinkling mystical stories ever, next to which the epiphanies of Joyce or redemptions of O'Connor seem pallid and crude -- as respective products of Borges's ''many-layered distress'' and ''indifference to his fate'' after various idealized girlfriends dump him. Stuff like this misses the whole point. Even if Williamson's claims are true, the stories so completely transcend their motive cause that the biographical facts become, in the deepest and most literal way, irrelevant. *Of course, Borges's famous ''Pierre Menard, Author of the 'Quixote' '' makes sport of this very conviction, just as his later ''Borges and I'' anticipates and refutes the whole idea of a literary biography. The fact that his fiction is always several steps ahead of its interpreters is one of the things that make Borges so great, and so modern. **Actually, these two agendas dovetail, since the only reason anybody's interested in a writer's life is because of his literary importance. (Think about it -- the personal lives of most people who spend 14 hours a day sitting there alone, reading and writing, are not going to be thrill rides to hear about.) This is part of what gives Borges's stories their mythic, precognitive quality (all cultures' earliest, most vital metaphysics is mythopoetic), which quality in turn helps explain how they can be at once so abstract and so moving. The biography is probably most valuable in its account of Borges's political evolution. A common bit of literary gossip about Borges is that the reason he wasn't awarded a Nobel Prize was his supposed support for Argentina's ghastly authoritarian juntas of the 1960's and 70's. From Williamson, though, we learn that Borges's politics were actually far more complex and tragic. The child of an old liberal family, and an unabashed leftist in his youth, Borges was one of the first and bravest public opponents of European fascism and the rightist nationalism it spawned in Argentina. What changed him was Peron, whose creepy right-wing populist dictatorship aroused such loathing in Borges that he allied himself with the repressively anti-Peron Revolucion Libertadora. Borges's situation following Peron's first ouster in 1955 is full of unsettling parallels for American readers. Because Peronism still had great popularity with Argentina's working poor, the exiled dictator retained enormous political power, and would have won any democratic national election held in the 1950's. This placed believers in liberal democracy (such as J. L. Borges) in the same sort of bind that the United States faced in South Vietnam a few years later -- how do you promote democracy when you know that a majority of people will, if given the chance, vote for an end to democratic voting? In essence, Borges decided that the Argentine masses had been so hoodwinked by Peron and his wife that a return to democracy was possible only after the nation had been cleansed of Peronism. Williamson's analysis of the slippery slope this decision put Borges on, and his account of the hatchet job that Argentina's leftists did on Borges's political reputation in retaliation for his defection (such that by 1967, when the writer came to Harvard to lecture, the students practically expected him to have epaulettes and a riding crop), make for his book's best chapters. Be warned that much of the mom-based psychologizing seems right out of ''Oprah'': e.g., ''However, by urging her son to realize the ambitions she had defined for herself, she unwittingly induced a sense of unworthiness in him that became the chief obstacle to his self-assertion.'' Williamson's chapters on Borges's sudden world fame will be of special interest to those American readers who weren't yet alive or reading in the mid-1960's. I was lucky enough to discover Borges as a child, but only because I happened to find ''Labyrinths,'' an early English-language collection of his most famous stories, on my father's bookshelves in 1974. I believed that the book was there only because of my parents' unusually fine taste and discernment -- which verily they do possess -- but what I didn't know was that by 1974 ''Labyrinths'' was also on tens of thousands of other homes' shelves in this country, that Borges had actually been a sensation on the order of Tolkien and Gibran among hip readers of the previous decade. Labyrinths, mirrors, dreams, doubles -- so many of the elements that appear over and over in Borges's fiction are symbols of the psyche turned inward. DAVID FOSTER WALLACE'S most recent books are ``Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity'' and ``Oblivion: Stories.''
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Keywords: General; Book Review; Williamson, Edwin; Borges, Jorge Luis; Borges: A Life (Book)_Book reviews; Books_Book reviews

Stern:us ~ http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/iaminhere.htm

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Interview:2003rk ~ http://www.welt.de/data/2003/01/03/29500.html?search=david+foster+wallace&searchHILI=1

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Howling Fantods provides the following link as an attempted translation: http://translate.google.com/translate?sourceid=navclient&hl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ewelt%2Ede%2Fdata%2F2003%2F01%2F03%2F29500%2Ehtml%3Fsearch%3Ddavid%2Bfoster%2Bwallace%26searchHILI%3D1

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Lauder:2001wn ~ http://proquest.umi.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/pqdweb?did=727331801&Fmt=7&clientId=8991&RQT=309&VName=PQD

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In his novel, Infinite Jest , David Foster Wallace suggests a vision of identity and subjectivity that is predicated upon the idea of confinement. For Wallace, the subject is in a constant state of struggle to escape the very things that form its identity and status as a subject. The self is something that must be surpassed or transcended; it is to be forgotten or escaped. Wallace's text is thus filled with characters who have fanatically devoted themselves to some pastime or pursuit in order to effect a self-forgetting. Wallace, however, identifies a fundamental paradox that underlies this attempt at escape. All the pursuits that are meant to provide an escape from the self serve only to reemphasize the primacy of the self. This is so because an act of "surrendering" to such a pursuit is still an act of will and thus serves to reassert the self even as it claims to deny it. Wallace's text thus poses an important question about freedom. His characters are on a continual quest for freedom from something (themselves) that cannot be evaded. Wallace seems to suggest a particularly bleak outlook for the possibility of freedom, but there are moments in his text where he suggests that some kind of freedom is possible. Using the work of Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben, this paper will explore Wallace's vision of subjectivity and identity and attempt to identify a space of freedom within the framework Wallace has laid out. *The title of this paper is taken from Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977) 30, qtd. in Butler: 33.
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Wallace:1999bc ~

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Sheppard:1996aq ~

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Source: Time, Feb 19, 1996 v147 n8 p70(1). Title: 712,000 typos! (David Foster Wallace corrects typing errors in original proof of his latest novel 'Infinite Jest,' and gives reason for writing it)(Brief Article) Author: R.Z. Sheppard Subjects: Authors - Behavior People: Wallace, David Foster - Behavior Electronic Collection: A17958325 RN: A17958325 Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1996 WHEN POET AND CRITIC RANDALL JARRELL DEfined the novel as a long narrative that tends to have something wrong with it, he did not mean printer's errors. But that was precisely what concerned David Foster Wallace when he read the proofs of his 1,079-page Infinite Jest. "There were about 712,000 typos, and I freaked," says the 33-year-old author from his home in Bloomington, Illinois, where he is an associate professor of English at Illinois State. All but one of the mistakes were fixed--a line adjustment that no one but the author could have picked up. All the more reason to think the correction sheet that accompanied review copies was a gag. Wrong. Wallace may look like a carefree Frisbee player with his ponytail and head hankie, but he has the soul of an old-fashioned inkstained wretch. As an undergraduate at Amherst, he specialized in mathematical logic and played on the tennis team until, as he puts it, "I wanted to be in the library all the time, and the coach was not amused." Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), was a mind stretcher that suggested the influence of Thomas Pynchon and others. His second offering was a short-story collection, Girl with Curious Hair, published in 1989. It was the year Infinite Jest began taking shape. "In a time of unprecedented comfort and pleasure and ease, there was a real sort of sadness about the country," Wallace recalls. "I wanted to do something about it, about America and what our children might think of us. That's one reason for setting the book 18 years ahead." The literary scene's latest word warrior battles one vice. "I have a terrible time with nicotine," he admits. For his lungs' sake, Wallace alternates between smoking and chewing tobacco, with a caveat: "I made a deal with myself that if I ever fired up a cigarette with chewing tobacco in my mouth, I was going to check into a hospital." Good idea, but not until after the book tour. -- End --
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Keywords: General; Writers_Behavior; Brief Article; Wallace, David Foster_Behavior; Authors_Behavior; Behavior

:1998qu ~

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Wallace:1998ts ~

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COPYRIGHT 1998 Ploughshares, Inc. When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked, She laughed very hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces. The man who'd introduced them didn't much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one.
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Keywords: Academic; Short stories

Dowling:2005tz ~

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Weissman:1999st ~ http://www.laweekly.com/ink/99/23/wls-weissman.php

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A Sleek and Brilliant Monster David Foster Wallace comes clean by Benjamin Weissman (Art by Michael Kupperman) David Foster Wallace is one badass fiction writer. His tractor-trailer-size novel Infinite Jest is one of the most important books of the last 10 years. And his book of essays A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again took the art of the personal essay to a new level. His new book of stories, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (Little Brown, late May), is another supersonic delight, a full-scale harassment of the short-story form. It is a dense, slippery type of fiction where complexities of a psychosexual nature run wild. In late April, at 9 a.m., I phoned this most significant writer: L.A. Weekly: Your essays are exceptionally daring, like there's no place you mentally won't go --- your consciousness bubbles up these peculiar things, and then you set about . . . David Foster Wallace: It would help if you put inflection in your voice. [Laughs.] What are you reading this from? A notepad. I don't quite understand what's so daring about it, but I will of course nod and smile. You pursue elaborate arguments in micro detail, whether it's a cruise ship, on a David Lynch set, or at the porn awards. Please talk about frankness, honesty, the balls to venture into the embarrassing. Wow. Questions like that are incredibly intimidating because there's no way the answer is going to be as well constructed and loquacious as the question, so it would actually be in your interest to make the questions clumsier and less literary. But they are clumsy, and I don't even know what loquacious means. My experience of doing nonfiction is that every once in a while I'll get an assignment that interests me, but it's extremely vague. They're like, "Just go and kind of notice everything you can, and then try and come up with an essay about it." The micro detail that readers enjoy from me often feels like a function of simple, pure anxiety --- I'm going to miss the crucial thing that will make this readable for somebody else. The honesty thing --- I don't think this nonfiction is really as honest as people think it is. A certain amount of it is spent developing a kind of persona or narrative voice that will have qualities that the reader will like and find engaging, and one of them is this kind of blushing, kicking the ground, gosh-golly I really don't want to say this but I really will. I don't know that it's dishonest. It's kind of manipulative the same way constructing a narrator in first-person fiction is. The only really substantive differences in genres have to do with the expectations of the readers. Almost all the techniques are the same. Cool. This leads to the next question pretty well. There's a stylistic difference in your fiction and nonfiction. In nonfiction, you seem very straight ahead, a rational machine devouring a subject. In your novels and stories it's a leap into the void, a trippy embrace of abstraction. My experience with nonfiction is that's not really what I do. I consider myself mostly a fiction writer. Nonfiction isn't super scary to me, except in the oh-God-I'm-not-going-to-have-enough-material-to-make-an-essay [moments]. There may be a sort of machinelike quality to it only because I don't really have any ideology about how it ought to be done. I don't even feel like I have a style in fiction. I feel like I do all kinds of different stuff. I come out of the nonprofit-press, pseudo-intellectual side of fiction. The stuff I do may look kind of avant-garde or experimental from the point of view of major-press publishing, the same way [Mark] Leyner's does or [William T.] Vollmann's does. In a weird way, we're kind of like indie bands that have been picked up by major studios. You know what I mean? Yes sir. I am with you and I agree. For anybody who thinks that what I do is weird, abstract and intellectual, they should go read some John Barth or some Stephen Dixon, oh Christ, some Curtis White at Fiction Collective, or Ron Sukenick, or some of the Oulipo Group, the French guys. It's funny, Illinois State University (where I teach) is the headquarters of Dalkey Archive Press and Fiction Collective, and I'm almost the house realist there. They almost think of me as a quaint New Yorkerish, sort of Cheeverish figure. That's a nice misunderstanding. It's very strange. I feel kind of biracial. Mainstream publishers think I'm Mr. Weirdo, and the true weirdoes know for a fact I'm very white bread. The state of American fiction feels tricky. Readers seem less adventurous, less willing to pick up a book for its stylistic charms. They seem hungry for subject and content. Meta-fiction is having a hard time right now, unlike in the '70s when it thrived. Plus in the last year we saw Burroughs, Kathy Acker, John Hawkes, William Gaddis die. Sort of like the end of an era. Wow, you kind of told a whole story there. All I can do, you know, is go `Zoinks!' I don't consider myself doing meta-fiction. It's another thing that I think keeps me from being an avant-gardist. Are you serious? I was born in '62. The postmodern heyday in America was kind of my childhood. My parents were reading that stuff. I began to write in the age of minimalism and the short-story renaissance, the early to mid-'80s. It sure didn't seem like a postmodern, meta-fictional heyday to me. I'm also somebody who does fairly strange, difficult stuff, and found that not only was a major publisher willing to publish it, they were willing to put their publicity machine to work on it as well. My personal experience is that people are a lot friendlier to the kind of stuff that I do than your question would seem to suggest. Hey, you're a sleek, brilliant monster, and readers love you. I'm just saying it's tricky material. Cool fiction has to make it over a lot of hurdles. As a fan of demented fiction, I wish there was more. Probably the astute answer and the one that's the safest: Fiction and poetry have always gone against the current, and right now the current is easy pleasure. And the pleasures available with greater intensity and less effort --- television, movies, record stuff --- are getting more and more sophisticated. Fiction and poetry that are difficult and challenging are apt to find a smaller and smaller audience as the culture gets less and less eager to do work. It's not commercial versus literary so much as how much work does this stuff require. I'm rather shocked that the kind of stuff we do has as large an audience as it does. You're famous. You've bashed through. You've been embraced by a huge American audience. They're willing to be adventurous with you. From where I'm sitting I have no idea whether that's true or not. How do you define fame? It seems to me, given how much we like to bitch and moan about how unadventurous readers are, there's an awful lot of borderline weird, difficult younger writers whofound support at major publishing houses. I don't know how to account for that, because I do agree that, culturally, times are hostile to difficult stuff. I've read essays where it's suggested that people like Leyner and me and Vollmann started out as real avant-gardists and then kind of sold out. Yeah, I know a lot of writers who pat themselves on the back for publishing exclusively in tiny periodicals. They piss on anyone from the neighborhood who's branched out. It's so stupid and shortsighted. There are things about it that are stupid, trust me, and there are things about it that are true. I was on the edges of the fictional brat pack in the '80s, and I watched a few writers become stars. They dated movie stars, were written about in gossip columns. They really became celebrities, and as far as I can see, it ruined them. Not just rhetorically but artistically. Have you received any unusual fan mail? I have what William Hurt in The Big Chill referred to as a "small, deeply disturbed following." There's a fly in the room; it's moral fiction. Excuse me? Never mind. Is this a reference to John Gardner? Yes, that big, fat bullyish morality trip he pulled on American writers in his book On Moral Fiction. It's never seemed to go away. Should it? Yes, fly swatter please. One reason why I'm not really popular with the avant-garde crowd anymore is that I think I buy more of Gardner's premise than a lot of other people do, particularly when there are venues of entertainment that are more powerful, and less work-intensive than fiction, which means that fiction needs to carve out its niche. There's got to be some stuff that art-fiction and poetry and essays offer that The Matrix doesn't offer. I still buy something that I learned as a freshman in college, which is that one of the really neato-keano things about fiction is that it's an artificial enabler of empathy. If you're a character in a story, chances are I get to know you better. Vollmann has a neat phrase for it --- "It allows us to leap over the wall of self." That's aesthetically significant, and it also seems to be morally significant, assuming we agree on a vague, general meaning of the word moral. How to be a real human being instead of just a very sophisticated animal. Benjamin Weissman is the author of the story collection Dear Dead Person (Serpent's Tail). David Foster Wallace will read from his work at Skylight Books Monday, June 7, at 7 p.m.; and at the Skirball Cultural Center on Tuesday, June 8, at 7:30 p.m.
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Wallace1997 ~

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Title essay also republished in the collection Sail Away:Stories of Escaping to Sea, Gideon Bosker and Lena Lencek, eds., Marlowe and Co., 2001 -------- This explains a couple ASFTINDA acknowledgements: http://rockcritics.com/interview/glennkenny.html Jim was going through the inventory and he came upon a piece that had been commissioned two editors before him--David Foster Wallace's essay on David Lynch, centered around Wallace's visit to the set of Lost Highway. It had been assigned by Susan Lyne, it had come in, in gargantuan form, and Kristen van Ogtrop took a stab at reducing its mass. Premiere had published very long articles before, but this one flummoxed a lot of people, particularly on account of the footnotes. In any case, Kristen was on her way out--not because of the Pecker thing, she had got a more genial (I presume) gig at Home and Garden or some such title--and Jim was aware that I had actually read all of Infinite Jest, so he handed me this massive manuscript and had me look over Kristen's cuts, and then told me to contact Wallace and "mollify" him about the massive cuts and, having done so, commence with a line edit. This, in the event that anyone is even remotely interested, is why Kristen is nicknamed "The Blunt Machete" and I am dubbed "The Mollifier" on the acknowledgements page of Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. In any case, the mollifying went pretty well and Dave and I had a really good time working on that piece, as we also would, up to a point, working on the piece he wrote for the September '98 issue of the magazine under a dual pseudonym about the AVN awards. In any case, "David Lynch Keeps His Head" (Sept. 96 issue) proved to be a pretty big deal--got nominated for an ASME award and all that--and I think that convinced Jim to put me on staff, which he did in January of '97. Found at http://pullquote.typepad.com/pullquote/2005/06/david_lynch_los.html -- Bill Stilwell - http://www.marginalia.org/ bill.stilwell@gmail.com

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Wayne:is ~ http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/Frontdew.htm

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Wallace:1998cl ~

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Source: Esquire, July 1998 v130 n1 p76(10). Title: Adult world (1).(short story) Author: David Foster Wallace Subjects: Short stories Magazine Collection: 94D1619 Electronic Collection: A20989781 RN: A20989781 Full Text COPYRIGHT 1998 The Hearst Corporation PART ONE. THE EVER-CHANGING STATUS OF THE YEN For the first three years, the young wife worried that their lovemaking together was somehow hard on this thingie. The rawness and tenderness and spanked pink of the head of his thingie. The slight wince when he'd first enter her down there. The vague hot-penny taste of rawness when she took his thingie in her mouth -- she seldom took him in her mouth. however; there was something about it that she felt he did not quite like. For the first three to three and a half years of their marriage together, this wife, being young (and full of herself (she realized only later), believed it was something about her. The problem. She worried that there was something wrong with her. With her technique in making love. Or maybe that some unusual roughness or thickness or hitch down there was hard on his thingie, and hurt it. She was aware that she liked to press her pubic bone and the base of her button against him and grind when they made love together, sometimes. She ground against him as gently as she could herself to remember to, but she was aware that she often did it as she was moving towards having her sexual climax and sometimes forgot herself, and afterwards she was often worried that she had selfishly forgotten about his thingie and might have been too hard on it. They were a young couple and had no children, though sometimes they talked about having children, and about all the irrevocable changes and responsibilities that this would commit them to. The wife's method of contraception was a diaphragm until she began to worry that something about the design of its rim or the way she inserted or wore it might be wrong and hurt him, might add to whatever it was about their lovemaking together that seemed hard on him. She searched his face when he entered her; she remembered to keep her eyes open and watched for the slight wince that may or may not (she realized only later, when she had some mature perspective) have actually been pleasure, may have been the same kind of revelational pleasure of coming together as close as two married bodies could come together and feeling the warmth and closeness it so hard to keep her eye and senses alert to whatever she might be doing wrong. In those early years, the wife felt that she was totally happy with the reality of their sexlife together. The husband was a great lover, and his attentiveness and sweetness and skill drove her almost mad with pleasure, the wife felt. The only negative part was her irrational worry that something was wrong with her or that she was doing something wrong that kept him from enjoying their sexlife together as much as she did. She worried that the husband was too considerate and unselfish to risk hurting her feelings by taking about whatever was wrong. He had never complained about being sore or raw, or of slightly wincing when he first entered her, or said anything other than that he loved her and totally loved her down there more than he could say. He said that she was indescribably soft and warm and sweet down there and that entering her was indescribably great. He said she drove him half insane with passion and love when she ground against him as she was getting ready to have her sexual climax. He said nothing but generous and reassuring things about their sexlife together. He always whispered compliments to her after they had made love, and held her, and considerately regathered the bedcovers around her legs as the wife's sexual heartrate slowed and she began to feel chilly. She loved to feel her legs still tremble slightly under the cocoon of bedclothes he gently regathered around her. They also developed the intimacy of him always getting her Virginia Slims and lighting one for her after they had made love together. The young wife felt that the husband was a simply wonderful lovemaking partner, considerate and attentive and unselfish and virile and sweet, better than she probably deserved; and as he slept, or if he arose in the middle of the night to check on foreign markets and turned on the light in the master bathroom adjoining their bedroom and inadvertently woke her (she slept lightly in those early years, she realized later), the wife's worries as she lay awake in their bed were all about herself. Sometimes she touched herself down there while she lay awake, but it wasn't in a pleasurable way. The husband slept on his side, facing away. He had a hard time sleeping, due to career stress, and could only fall asleep in one position. Sometimes she watched him sleep. Their master bedroom had a nightlight down near the baseboard. When he arose in the night, she believed it was to check the status of the yen. Insomnia could cause him to drive all the way downtown to the firm in the middle of the night. There were the rupiah and the won and the that to be monitored and checked, also. He was in charge of the weekly chore of grocery shopping, which he habitually also performed late at night. Amazingly (she realized only later, after she had had an epiphany and had rapidly matured), it had never occurred to her to check on anything. She loved it when he gave oral sex but worried that he didn't like it as much when she reciprocated and took him in her mouth. He almost always stopped her after a short time, saying it made him want to be inside her down there instead of in her mouth. She felt that there must be something wrong with her oral sex technique that made him not like it as much as she did, or hurt him. He had gone all the way to his sexual climax in her mouth only twice in their marriage together, and both times had taken practically forever. Both times took so long that her neck was stiff the next day, and she worried that he hadn't liked it even though he had said he wouldn't even describe in words how much he liked it. She once gathered her nerve together and drove out to Adult World and bought a Dildo, but only to practice her oral sex technique on. She was inexperienced in this, she knew. The slight tension or distraction she thought she felt in him when she moved down the bed and took the husband's thingie in her mouth could have been nothing but her own selfish imagination; the whole problem could be in her head, she worried. She had been tense and uncomfortable at Adult World. Except for the cashier, she had been the only female in the store, and the cashier had given her a look that she didn't think was very appropriate or professionally courteous at all, and the young wife had taken the plastic bag with the Dildo to her car and driven out of the crowded parking lot so fast that she was afraid her tires might have squealed. The husband never slept in the nude; he wore clean briefs and a T-shirt. She sometimes had dreams in which they were driving together and every other vehicle on the road was an ambulance. The husband never said anything about oral sex together except that he loved her and that she drove him mad with passion when she took him in her mouth. But when she took him in her mouth and flattened her tongue to suppress the well-known Gag Reflex and moved her head up and down as far down as her ability allowed, making a ring of her thumb and first finger to stimulate the part of his shaft she could not fit in her mouth, giving him oral sex, the wife always sensed a tension in him; she always thought she could detect a slight rigidity in the muscles of his abdomen and legs and worried that he was tense or distracted. His thingie often tasted raw and/or sore, and she was concerned that her teeth or saliva might be stinging him and subtracting from his pleasure. She worried about her technique at it, and practiced in secret. Sometimes, during oral sex in their love-making together, she thought it felt as if he was trying to have his sexual climax quickly so as to have the oral sex be over ASAP and that that that was why he couldn't for so long. She tried making pleased, excited sounds with her mouth full of his thingie; then, lying awake later, she sometimes worried that the sounds she had made had perhaps sounded strangled or distressing and had only added to his tension. This immature, inexperienced, emotionally labile young wife lay alone in their bed very late on the night of their third wedding anniversary. The husband, whose career was high-stress and caused insomnia and frequent awakenings, had arisen and gone into the master bathroom and then downstairs to his study, then later she had heard the sound of his car. The Dildo, which she kept hidden at the bottom of her sachet drawer, was so inhuman and impersonal and tasted so horrid that she had to all but force herself to practice with it. Sometimes he drove to his office in the middle of the night to check the overseas markets in more depth; trade never ceased somewhere in the world's many currencies. More and more often she lay awake in bed and worried. She had become woozy at their special anniversary dinner and had nearly spoiled their evening together. Sometimes, when she had him in her mouth, she became almost overwhelmed with fear that the husband wasn't enjoying it, and would have an overwhelming desire to bring him to his sexual climax in order to have some kind of selfish "proof" that he enjoyed being in her mouth, and would sometimes forget herself and the techniques she had practiced and begin bobbing her head almost frantically and moving her fist frantically up and down around his thingie, sometimes actually sucking at his thingie's little hole, exerting actual suction, and she worried that she chafed or bent or hurt him when she did this. She worried that the husband could unconsciously sense her anxiety about whether he enjoyed having his thingie in her mouth and that it actually was this that prevented him from enjoying oral sex together as much as she enjoyed it. Sometimes she berated herself for her insecurities -- the husband was under enough stress already, due to his career. She felt that her fear was selfish, and worried that the husband could sense her fear and selfishness and that this drove a wedge into their intimacy together. There was also the riyal to be checked at night, the dirham, the Burmese kyat. Australia used the dollar but it was a different kind of dollar and had to be monitored. Taiwan, Singapore, Zimbabwe, Liberia, New Zealand: all deployed dollars of fluctuant value. The determinants of the ever-changing status of the yen were very complex. The husband's promotion had resulted in the new career title Stochastic Currency Analyst; his business cards and stationery all included the title. There were complex equations. The husband's mastery of the computer's financial programs and currency software were already legendary at the firm, a colleague had told her during a party while the husband was using the bathroom again. She worried that whatever the problem with her was, it felt impossible to sort out rationally in her mind to any degree. There was no way to talk about it with him -- there was no way the wife could think of to even start such a conversation. She would sometimes clear her throat in the special way that meant she had something on her mind, but then her mind froze. If she asked him whether there was anything wrong with her, he would believe she was asking for reassurance and would automatically reassure her -- she knew him. His professional specialty was the yen, but other currencies impacted the yen and had to be continually analyzed. Hong Kong's dollar was also different and impacted the status of the yen. Sometimes at night she worried she might be crazy. She had ruined a previous intimate relationship with irrational feelings and fears, she knew. Almost in spite of herself, she later returned to the same Adult World store and bought an X-rated videotape, storing it in its box in the same hiding place as the Dildo, determined to study and compare the sex techniques of the women in the video. Sometimes when he was asleep on his side at night, the wife would arise and walk around to the other side of the bed and kneel on the floor and watch the husband in the dim glow of their nightlight, study his sleeping face, as if hoping to discover there some unspoken thing that would help her stop worrying and feel more sure that their sexlife together pleased him as much as it pleased her. The X-rated videotape had explicit color photos of women giving their partners oral sex right there on the box. Stochastic meant random or conjectural or containing numerous variables that all had to be monitored closely; the husband joked sometimes that it meant being paid to drive yourself insane. Adult World, which had one side of marital aids and three sides of X-rated features, as well as a small dark hall leading to something else in the rear and a monitor playing an explicit X-rated scene right there above the cash register, smelled horrid in a way that reminded the young wife of absolutely nothing else in her experience. She later wrapped the Dildo in several plastic bags and put it out in the trash on the night before Trash Day. The only significant thing she felt she learned from studying the videotape was that the men often seemed to like to look down at the women when the women had them in their mouth and to see their thingie going in and out of the woman's mouth. She believed that this might very well explain the husband's abdominal muscles tensing when she took him in her mouth -- he could be straining to raise up slightly to see it -- and she began to debate with herself whether her hair might be too long to allow him to see his thingie go in and out of her mouth during oral sex, and began to debate whether or not to get her hair cut short. She was relieved that she had no worries about being less attractive or sexual than the actresses in the X-rated videotape: these women had gross measurements and obvious implants (as well as their own share of slight asymmetries, she noted), as well as dyed, bleached, and badly damaged hair that didn't look touchable or strokable at all. Most notably, the women's eyes were hard and empty -- you could just tell they weren't experiencing any intimacy or pleasure and didn't care if their partners were pleased. Sometimes the husband would arise at night and use the master bathroom and then go out to his workshop off the garage and try to unwind for an hour or two with his hobby of furniture refinishing. Adult World was all the way out on the other side of town, in a tacky district of fast food and auto dealerships off the expressway; neither time she had hurried out of the parking lot did the wife see any cars she recognized. The husband had explained before their wedding that he'd slept in clean briefs and a T-shirt ever since he was a child -- he was simply not comfortable sleeping in the nude. She had recurring bad dreams, and he would hold her and speak reassuringly until she was able to get back to sleep. The stakes of the Foreign Currency Came were high, and his study downstairs remained locked when not in use. She began to consider psychotherapy. Insomnia actually referred not to difficulty fallling asleep but to early and irrevocable awakening, he had explained. Not once in the first three and a half years of their marriage together did she ask her husband why his thingie was hurt or sore, or what she might do differently, or what the cause was. It simply felt impossible to do this. (The memory of this paralyzed feeling would astound her later in life, when she was a very different person.) Asleep, her husband sometimes looked to her like a child on its side sleeping, curled all tightly into itself, a fist to its face, the face flushed and its expression so concentrated it appeared almost angry. She would kneel next to the bed at a slight angle to the husband so that the weak light of the baseboard's nightlight fell onto his face and watch his face and worry about why, irrationally, it felt impossible to simply ask him. She had no idea why he put up with her or what he saw in her. She loved him very much. On the evening of their third wedding anniversary, the young wife had fainted in the special restaurant he had taken her to to celebrate. One minute she was trying to swallow her sorbet and looking at the husband over the candle and the next she was looking up at him as he knelt above her asking what was wrong, his face smooshy and distorted like the reflection of a face in a spoon. She was frightened and embarassed. The bad dreams at night were brief and upsetting and seemed always to concern either the husband or his car in ways she could not pin down. Never once had she checked a Discover statement. It had never even occurred to her to inquire why the husband insisted on doing all the grocery shopping alone late at night; she had felt only shame at the way his generosity highlighted her own irrational selfishness. When, later (long after the galvanic dream, the call, the question, the tears, and her epiphany at the window), she reflected on the towing self-absorption of her naivete in those years, the wife always felt a mixture of contempt and compassion for the child she had been. She had never been what one would call a stupid person. Both times at Adult World, she had paid with cash. The credit cards were in the husband's name. The way she finally decided that something was wrong with her was this: either something was really wrong with her, or something was wrong with her for irrationally worrying so much about whether something was wrong with her. The logic of this seemed airtight. She lay at night and held the worry in her mind and turned it this way and that and watched it make reflections of itself inside itself like a fine diamond. The young wife had had only one other lover before meeting her husband. She was inexperienced and knew it. She suspected that her brief strange bad dreams might be her inexperienced Ego trying, unconsciously, to shift the anxiety onto the husband, to protect itself from the knowledge that something was wrong with her and made her sexually hurtful or unpleasing. Things had ended badly with her first lover, she was well aware. The padlock on the door of the workshop off the garage was not unreasonable: power tools and refinished antiques were valuable assets. In one of the bad dreams, she and the husband lay together after lovemaking, snuggling contentedly, and the husband lit a Virginia Slims and then refused to give it to her, holding it before her while it burned itself down. In another, they again lay contentedly after lovemaking together, and he asked her if it had been as good for him as it had been for her. The door to his study was the only other door that stayed locked; the study contained a lot of sophisticated computer and telecommunications equipment, giving the husband access to up-to-the-minute information on foreign currency market activity. In another of the bad dreams, the husband sneezed and then kept sneezing, over and over and over again, and nothing she did could help or make it stop. In another, she herself was the husband and was entering the wife sexually, ranging above the wife in the Missionary Position, and he (that is, the wife, dreaming) felt the wife grind her pubis uncontrollably against him and start to have her sexual climax, and then he began thrusting faster in a calculated way and making pleased male sounds in a calculating way and then feigned having his own sexual climax, calculatingly making the sounds and facial expressions of having his climax but withholding it, the climax, then afterwards going into the master bathroom and making horrid faces at himself in the mirror while he climaxed into the toilet. The status of some foreign currencies could fluctuate violently over the course of a single night, the husband had explained. Whenever she woke from a bad dream, he always woke up, too, and held her and asked what was the matter and lit a cigarette for her or stroked her side very attentively and reassured her that everything was all right. Then he would arise from bed, since he was now awake, and go downstairs to check the status of the yen. The wife liked to sleep in the nude after lovemaking together, but the husband almost always put his clean briefs back on before using the bathroom or turning away onto his side to sleep. The wife would lie awake and try not to spoil something so wonderful by driving herself crazy with worry. She worried that her tongue was rough and pulpy from smoking and might abrade his thingie, or that unbeknownst to her her teeth were scraping his thingie when she took the husband in her mouth for oral sex. She worried that her new haircut was too short and made her face look chubby. She worried about her breasts. She worried about the way her husband's face seemed to her to look when they made love together. Another bad dream, which recurred more than once, involved the downtown street the husband's firm was on, a view of the empty street late at night, in a light rain, and the husband's car with its special license plate she'd surprised him with at Christmas driving very slowly up the street towards the firm and then passing the firm without stopping and proceeding off down the wet street to some other destination. The wife worried about the fact that this dream her so much -- there was nothing in the scene of the dream to explain the creepy feeling it gave her -- and about the way she could not seem to bring herself to talk openly to him about any of the dreams. She feared that she would feel somehow as if she were accusing him. She could not explain this feeling, and it gnawed at her. Nor could she think of any way to ask the husband about exploring the idea of psychotherapy -- she knew he would generously agree at once, but he would be concerned, and the wife dreaded the feeling of being unable to explain in any rational way to ease his concern. She felt alone and trapped in her worry; she was lonely in it. During their lovemaking together, the husband's face sometimes wore what seemed (to her) less an expression of pleasure than of intense concentration, as if he were about to sneeze and trying not to. Early in the fourth year of their marriage together, the wife felt herself becoming obsessed with the irrational suspicion that her husband was sexually climaxing into the master bathroom's toilet at night. She examined the toilet's rim and the bathroom trash basket closely almost every day, pretending to clean, feeling increasingly out of control. The old trouble with swallowing sometimes returned. She felt herself becoming obsessed with the suspicion that her husband took no genuine pleasure in their lovemaking together but was concentrated only on making her feel pleasure, forcing her to feel pleasure and passion; lying, awake at night, she feared that he took some kind of twisted pleasure in imposing pleasure on her. And yet, just educated enough to be full of doubts (and of herself) at this innocent time, the young wife also believed that these irrational suspicions and obsessions could be merely her own youthful, self-centered Ego displacing its inadequacies and fears of sustained intimacy onto the innocent husband; and she was desperate not to spoil their relationship with insane displaced suspicions, like the way she had failed and wrecked the relationship with her previous lover because of irrational worries. And so the wife fought with all her strength against her callow, inexperienced mind (she thought), convinced that any real problem lay in her own selfish imagination and/or her inadequate sexual persona. She fought against the worry she felt about the way, nearly always, when she had moved down his body in the bed and taken him in her mouth, the husband would nearly always (it seemed then), after waiting with tense and rigid abdominal muscles for what felt somehow like the minimum considerate amount of time with his thingie in her mouth, would always reach gently down and pull her gently but firmly back up his body to kiss her passionately and enter her from below, gazing into her eyes with a very concentrated expression as she sat astride him, she sitting always slightly hunched out of embarrassment at the asymmetry of her breasts. The way he would exhale sharply in either passion or possibly displeasure and reach down and pull the wife up and slide his thingie inside her in one smooth motion, the gasp sharp as if involuntary, as if trying to convince her that merely having his thingie in her mouth drove him crazy with desire to be all the way up inside her down there, he said, and to have her, he said, "right up close" against him instead of "so far away" down his body. This nearly always made her feel somehow uneasy as she sat astride him, hunched and bobbing and with his hands on her hips and sometimes forgetting herself and grinding down with her pubic bone against his pubis, fearful that the grinding plus her weight on him could cause injury but often for-getting herself and bearing down and grinding against him with less and less caution, sometimes even arching her back and thrusting out her breasts to be touched, until the moment he nearly always -- nine times out of ten, on average -- gave another gasp of either passion or impatience and rotated slightly onto his side with his hands on her hips, rolling her gently but firmly over with him until she was beneath him and he ranged over her and either still had his thingie deep in her or else reentered her smoothly from above; he was very smooth and graceful in these movements and never hurt her changing positions and rarely had to reenter, but it caused the wife some worry, afterward, that he almost never came to his sexual climax (if indeed he ever really did come to his climax) from beneath her, that as he felt his climax building inside himself he seemed to feel an obsessive need to rotate and be inside her from above, from the familiar Missionary Position of male dominance, and although it made his thingie feel even more deeply inside her down there, which the wife enjoyed very much, she worried that the husband's need to have her beneath him at the sexual climax indicated that something she did when sitting astride him and moving either hurt him or denied him the sort of intense pleasure that would lead to his sexual climax; and so the wife to her distress sometimes found herself preoccupied with worry even as they finished and she began to have another small aftershock of climax while grinding gently against him from below and searching his face for evidence of a truly genuine climax there and sometimes crying out in pleasure beneath him in a voice that sounded, she sometimes thought, less and less like her own. The sexual relationship the wife had had prior to meeting her husband had occurred when she was a very young woman -- hardly more than a child, she realized later. It had been a committed, monogamous relationship with a man whom she had felt very close to and who was a wonderful lover, passionate and giving and very skilled (she had felt) in sexual technique, who was very vocal and affectionate during lovemaking, and attentive, and had loved to be in her mouth for oral sex, and had never seemed hurt or sore or distracted when she forgot herself and ground against him, and always closed his eyes in passionate pleasure when he began to move uncontrollably into his sexual climax, and whom she had (at that young age) felt that she loved and loved being with and could easily imagine marrying and being in a committed relationship with forever ... all until she had begun, late in the first year of their relationship together, to suffer from irrational suspicions that her lover was imagining making love with other women during his lovemaking with her. The fact that the lover closed his eyes when he experienced intense pleasure, which at first had made her feel sexually secure and pleased, began to worry her a great deal, and the suspicion that he was imagining being inside of other women when he was inside of her became more and more of a dreadful conviction, even though she also felt that it was irrational and only in her mind and would have hurt the lover's feelings just terribly if she had said anything to him about it, until finally it became an obsession, even though there was no tangible evidence for it and she had never said anything about it; and even though she believed the whole thing was almost certainly just in her head, the obsession became so terrible and overwhelming that she began to avoid making love with him, and began having sudden irrational bursts of emotion over trivial issues in their relationship together, bursts of hysterical rage or tears that were in fact bursts of irrational worry that he was having fantasies about sexual encounters with other women. She had felt, towards the end of the relationship, as if she were totally inadequate and self-destructive and crazed, and she came away from the relationship with a terrible fear of her own mind's ability to torment her with irrational suspicions and to poison a committed relationship, and this added to the torment she felt about the obsessive worrying she was now experiencing in her sexual relationship with the husband, a relationship that had also, at first, seemed to be more close and intimate and fulfilling than she could rationally believe she deserved, knowing about herself all she believed she did. PART TWO. YEN4U She once, as an adolescent, in an Interstate rest-stop women's room, on a wall, above and to the right of vending machines for tampons and feminine hygiene products, had seen, surrounded by the coarse declamations and crudely drawn genitalia and the simple and somehow plangent obscenities inscribed there in varied anonymous hands, standing out in both color and force, a single small red felt-tip block-capital rhyme, IN DAYS OF OLD WHEN MEN WERE BOLD AND WOMEN WEREN'T INVENTED THEY ALL DRILLED HOLES IN ROADSIDE POLES AND STOOD THERE QUITE CONTENTED [,] tiny and precise and somehow -- via something about the tiny hand's precision against all that surrounding scrawl -- less coarse or bitter than somehow simply sad, and had remembered it ever since, and sometimes thought of it, for no apparent reason, in the darkness of her marriage's innocent years, although, to the best of her later recollection, the only real significance she had attached to the memory was that it was funny what stuck with you. PART THREE. ADULT WORLD Meanwhile, in the present, the immature wife fell deeper and deeper inside herself and inside her worry and became more and more unhappy. What changed everything and saved everything was the fact that she had an epiphany. She had the epiphany three years and seven months into the marriage. In secular psychodevelopmental terms, an epiphany is a sudden life-changing realization, often one that catalyzes a person's maturation. The person, in one blinding flash, "grows up," "comes of age." "Put[s] away childish things." Releases illusions gone moist and rank from a grip of years' duration. Becomes, for good or ill, a citizen of reality In reality, genuine epiphanies are vanishingly rare. In contemporary adult life, maturation and acquiescence to reality are gradual processes, incremental and often imperceptible, not unlike the formation of dental calculus. Modern usage usually deploys epiphany as a metaphor. It is only in dramatic representations, religious iconography, and the "magical thinking" of children that the achievement of true insight is compressed to a single blinding flash. What precipitated the young wife's genuine epiphany was her eventual abandonment of mentation in favor of frantic and concrete action.(*) She abruptly (within hours of deciding) telephoned the lover whom she'd formerly been in a committed relationship with, now by all accounts a successful associate manager at a local auto dealership, and implored him to meet her. Placing this call was one of the most difficult, embarrassing things the wife (whose name was Jeni) had ever done. It appeared irrational and risked seeming totally inappropriate and disloyal -- she was married, this was her former lover, they had not exchanged a word in almost five years, their relationship had ended badly. But she was in crisis -- she feared, as she put it to the ex-lover over the telephone, for the very soundness of her mind, and needed his help, and would, if necessary, beg him for it. The former lover agreed to meet Jeni for lunch at a fast food restaurant near the auto dealership the following day. The crisis that had galvanized the wife, Jeni Roberts, into action was itself precipitated by nothing more than another of her bad dreams, albeit one which comprised a kind of compendium of many of the other bad dreams she'd suffered during the early years of her marriage. The dream was not itself the epiphany, but its effect was galvanic. The husband's car slowly passes his firm and proceeds off down the street in a light rain, its YEN4U license plate receding, followed by Jeni Roberts's car. Then Jeni Roberts is driving on the heavy-flow expressway that circumscribes the town, trying desperately to catch up with the husband's car. Her wipers' beat matches that of her heart. She cannot see the car with its special personalized license plate anywhere up ahead but feels that special anxious dream-certainty that it is there. In the dream, every other vehicle on the expressway is symbolically associated with emergency and crisis -- all three lanes are filled with ambulances, police cars, paddywagons, fire engines, Highway Patrol cruisers, and emergency vehicles of every description, sirens all singing their heart-stopping arias and all their emergency lights activated and flashing in the rain so that Jeni Roberts feels as though her car is swimming in color. An ambulance directly in front of her will not let her by; it changes lanes whenever she does. The nameless anxiety of the dream is simply horrid -- the wife -- Jeni -- feels she must (wiper) must (wiper) must catch the husband's car in order to avert some kind of crisis so horrible it has no name. A river of what looks to be sodden Kleenex flows windblown along the expressway's breakdown lane; Jeni's mouth feels full of raw hot sores; it is night and wet and the whole road swims with emergency colors -- spanked pinks and slapped reds and the blue of critical asphyxia. It is when they are wet that you realize why they call Kleenex tissue, flowing by. The wipers match her urgent heart, and the ambulance still, in the dream, will not let her by; she slaps frantically at the steering wheel in desperation. In the window at the rear of the ambulance, as if in answer, appears a splayed hand pressing and slapping at the glass, a hand reaching up from some sort of emergency stretcher or gurney and opening spiderishly out to slap and press whitely against the glass in full view of Jeni Roberts's Accord's retractable halogen headlights so that she sees the distinctive ring on the ring finger of the male hand splayed bloodlessly against the glass and screams (in the dream) in recognition and cuts hard left, cutting off various other emergency vehicles, to pull abreast of the ambulance and tell it to stop because the stochastic husband she loves and must catch up to is inside supine sneezing on a stretcher slapping frantically at the rear window (such is the dream's emotional motive force that the wife actually wets the bed, she discovers on waking); and but then however as she pulls even with the ambulance and lowers her passenger window with the Accord's automatic feature in the rain and gesticulates frantically for the ambulance driver to lower his window so she can implore him to stop it's the husband (in the dream) driving the ambulance, it's his left profile at the wheel -- which the wife has always somehow been able to tell he prefers to his right profile and customarily sleeps on the right side of their bed partly with this fact in mind, though they'd never spoken openly about the husband's possible insecurities about his right profile -- and as the husband turns his face towards Jeni Roberts through the glass and lit rain as she gesticulates it seems to be both him and not him, her husband's familiar and much-loved face mangled and pulsing with blood-colored light and wearing a facial expression indescribable as anything other than Obscene. It was the look on the face that (slowly) turned to look at her from the ambulance -- a face that in the very most enuretic and disturbing way both was and was not the face of the husband she loved -- that galvanized Jeni Roberts wake and prompted her to gather her nerve together and make the frantic humiliating call to the man she had once thought seriously of marrying, an associate sales manager and probationary Rotarian whose facial asymmetry -- he had suffered a traumatic childhood accident that subsequently caused the left half of his face to develop differently from the right side of his face; his left nostril was unusually large, and gaped, and his left eye, which appeared to be almost all iris, was surrounded by concentric rings and bags of slack flesh that constantly twitched and throbbed as traumatized nerves randomly fired -- was what, Jeni had decided after the relationship foundered, had helped cause the uncontrollable suspicion that he had a secret, impenetrable part to his character that fantasized lovemaking with other women even while his healthy, perfectly symmetrical, and seemingly uninjurable thingie was inside her. The ex-lover's left eye also faced and scanned a markedly different direction than did his dextral, more normally developed eye, a feature which had somehow been advantageous to the former lover in his auto sales career, he tried to explain. Crisis notwithstanding, Jeni Roberts felt awkward and very nearly mortified with embarrassment as she and the ex-lover met and selected their meal options and sat down together in a window-side booth of molded plastic and made radically incongruous small talk while she prepared to try to ask the question that would accidentally precipitate her epiphany and a whole new less innocent and self-deluded stage of her married life. She had decaf in a disposable cup and put in six prepackaged creamers as her former sexual partner sat with his entree's Styrofoam box unopened and gazed both through the window and at her. He had a ring on his pinkiefinger, and his sportcoat was unbuttoned, and the white shirt beneath the coat bore the distinctive furrows of an oxfordcloth dress shirt that had only recently been removed from its retail packaging. The sunlight through the big window was noon-colored and made the crowded franchise feel like a greenhouse; it was hard to breathe. The associate sales manager watched as she started the tops of the creamers with her teeth to safeguard her nails and removed them and placed them in the foil ashtray and dumped the thimblefuls of creamer into the disposable cup and stirred them in with a complimentary square-tipped stirrer one after another, the look in his developmentally appropriate eye the puddly look of nostalgia. She was still profligate with the creamer. She had both a wedding band and a diamond engagement ring, and the rock wasn't cheap by a long shot. The former lover's stomach hurt and eye-flesh was ticcing especially bad because of how now they were in the dreaded last three bank days of the month and Mad Mike's Hyundai put unbelievable pressure on reps to move units in the last three days so they could go on that month's books and inflate the books for the clowns in the regional office. The young wife cleared her throat several times in her special way that the man solely responsible for the performance of all Mad Mike's reps remembered all too well, doing the dry nervous thing with her throat to communicate the fact that she recognized how inappropriate a question like this was going to appear at this juncture, with them with their unhappy history and now no longer in any way even like slightly connected, and her happily married, and that she felt embarrassed but was also in some kind of she was saying genuine crisis-type situation about something, and desperate -- the way usually only serious credit problems made people look desperate and trapped like that -- her eyes with that drowning look in them of she was begging him not to take advantage of her desperate position in any way including judgment or ridicule at her expense. Plus and how she always drank her coffee with two hands around the cup even in a hot environs like this one here. Hyundai-U.S.'s volume, margins, and financing terms were among the countless economic conditions affected by fluctuations in the value of the yen and related Pacific currencies. The young wife had spent an hour at the mirror in order to choose the shapeless blouse and slacks she wore, actually taking her contacts back out in order to wear her glasses as well, and nothing on her face in the win-dowlight but a quick dab-and-blot of gloss. The expressway's flow glittered through the window that lit up her right side with sun. The Mad Mike's lot, with its plastic pennants and a man in a wheelchair with his wife or like nurse being worked by fat Kidder in the hospital gown and arrow-through-head pros-thesis the reps all had to wear on the days Messerly was there to keep tabs, lay within the divided purview of the former lover -- who still loved her, Jeni Ann Orzolek of Marketing 204, and not his current fiancee, he realized with the sickening wince of a mortal wound reopened -- and beyond it, shimmering in the heat, the Adult World lot, with its all makes and classes of vehicle day and night, moving them through like Mike Messerly could only fantasize. (*) In this, her epiphany accorded fully with the Western tradition, in which insight is the product of lived experience rather than mere thought. -- End --
NOTES_
"Adult World (I)" is anthologized in 'The Hot Spots: The Best Erotic Writing in Modern Fiction'. It is titled "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" but it is actually p.137 to 140 of "Adult World (I)", ending with "...might have squealed."

Keywords: General; Short stories

Wallace:1998nu ~

ABSTRACT_
Source: Esquire, July 1998 v130 n1 p100(2). Title: Adult World (II).(short story) Author: DAvid Foster Wallace Subjects: Short stories Magazine Collection: 94D1643 Electronic Collection: A20989786 RN: A20989786 Full Text COPYRIGHT 1998 The Hearst Corporation SCHEMA: PART FOUR TITLE: ONE FLESH "As blindingly sudden and dramatic as a question about any man's sexual imagination is going to appear, it was not the question itself which caused Jeni Roberts's epiphany and rapid maturation, but what she found herself gazing at as she asked it." -- PT. 4 epigraph, in stylistic mode of "Adult World (I)" ([right arrow] highlights format change from dramatic/stochastic to schematic/ordered) 1a. Question Jeni Roberts asks is whether Former Lover had indeed fantasized about other women during lovemaking w/ her. 1a(1) Inserted at beginning of question is participial phrase: "After apologizing for how irrational and inappropriate it must sound after all this time ..." 1b. At some point during J.'s question, J. follows F. L.'s gaze out fast-food window & sees husband's special vanity license plate among vehicles in Adult World lot [right arrow] epiphany. Epiph unfolds more or less independently while facially asymmetric F. L. responds to J.'s question. 1c. Flat narr description of J.'s sddn pallor & inability to hold cup steady as J. undergoes suddn blndng realization that hsbnd is secret compulsive masturbator & that insomnia/yen is doubtless cover for secret trips to Adult World to view/purchase/masturbate self raw to XXX films & images & that suspicions of hsbnd's ambivalence about "sexlife together" have in fact been prescient intuitions & that hsbnd has suffered from inner deficits/psychic torment of which J.'s own self-conscious anxieties have kept her from having any real idea [point of view (1c) all objective, exterior desc only]. 2a. Mnwhile F. L. is answering J.'s question in vehement negative, tears appearing in eye: holy shit no god no, no, never, he loved her always, was never as fully "there" as when he & J. were making love. [If in J.'s p.o.v., ins. "together" after "love."] 2a(1) At emotional height of dialogue, tears streaming down 1/2 face, F. L. confesses/declares that he still loves J., has all this time, 5 yrs., in fact sometimes still thinks of J. while making love to his current fiancee, which causes him to feel guilty (& "like I'm not really there") w/ fiancee. [Transcribe F. L.'s whole answer [right arrow] emotional focus of scene is off J. while J. undergoes trauma of sddnly realizing hsbnd is secret compulsive masturbator -- avoids prblm of trying to convey epiphany in narr expo.] 2b. Coincidence [N.B.: too heavy?]: F. L. confesses that he also still sometimes secretly masturbates to memories of making love w/ J., sometimes to point of making himself raw/sore. [[right arrow] F. L.'s "confession" both reinforcing J.'s epiphany w/r/t male masturbation & providing her w/ much-needed injection of sexual esteem. (N.B. w/r/t Theme: implicit sadness of F. L. making soul-rending confession of love while J. is 1/2 distracted by trauma of (1b)'s epiphany; i.e. = further networks of misconnection, emotional asymmetry.)] 2b(1) Tone of F. L.'s confessions tremndsly moving & high-affect, & J. (even though traumatized w/r/t (1b) & (1c)'s epiphany) never once doubts the truth of what he says; feels she "really did know this man" & c. 2b(1a) Narr [not J.] notes sudden appearance of red & demonic-looking gleam in hypertrophic iris of F L.'s left ["bad"?] eye, which could be either trick of light or genuine demonic gleam [= p.o.v. change/narr intrusion]. 2c. Mnwhile F. L., interpreting J.'s pallor & digital palsy as requital/positive response to his declarations of enduring love, begs her to leave hsbnd for him, or alternatively to come directly to Holiday Inn just down the expressway & spend rest of afternoon making passionate love [[right arrow] w/ dmnc sinistral gleam & c.]. 2d. J. (still gone pale a la Dostoyevsky's Nastasya F.) acquiesces w/r/t adulterous H. I. interlude [flat = "she says, `Umm, OK'"]. F. L. buses tray w/ uneaten entree & empty cup & creamers & c., follows J. out into fast-food lot. J. waits in Accord while F. L. attempts to sneak own car out of M. M. Hyundai lot w/o Messerly or sales reps seeing him leave on high-pressure end-of-month sales day. 2d(1) J.'s precise mtvation for acquiescing to Holiday Inn interlude left opaque [entails (2d) is in p.o.v. of F. L. Comic description of F. L. trying to crawl across lot & slip into car unseen from M. M. showroom has undercurrent of creepiness [right arrow] congruence w/ subthemes of secrecy, creepy incongruity, opaque shame]. 3a. J.'s car fllws F. L.'s car down expressway toward Holiday Inn. Sudden sun-shower forces J. to activate wipers. 3b. F. L. turns into Holiday Inn lot, expects to see J.'s Accord turn in behind him. Accord does not turn in, continues down expressway. [Abrupt change in p.o.v. [right arrow] J., driving across town toward home, imagines F. L. leaping out of his car & running frantically across Holiday Inn lot in downpour to stand at edge of expressway & watch Accord recede, disappearing in traffic. J. imagines F. L.'s wet/forlorn/asymmetr image dwndlng in rear-view mirror. 3c. J., driving home, finds herself weeping for F. L. & F. L.'s dwndlng image instead of for self. Weeps for hsbnd, "... how bottomlessly lonely his secrets must make him" [p.o.v.?]. Notes this & speculates on significance of "weeping for" [= "on behalf of"?] men. Bgning (3c), J.'s speculations evince new sophistication/comprehension/ maturity. Pulls into home's driveway feeling "... queerly exultant." 3d. Narr intrusion, expo on Jeni Roberts [same flat & pedantic tone as [paragraph]s 3, 4 of "A.W. (I)" PT. 3]: While following F. L.'s car down expressway, J. hadn't "changed mind" about having adulterous sex w/ F. L.; had merely "realized it was unnecessary." Understands that she has had life-changing epiphany. Has "... bec[o]me a woman as well as a wife," etc. etc. 3d(1) J. hereafter referred to by narr as "Ms. Jeni Orzolek Roberts"; hsbnd referred to as "the secret compulsive masturbator." 4a(I) Epiloguous expo. on J.O.R. [right arrow] extension of narrative arc. "Ms. Jeni Orzolek Roberts, from that day forward, kept the memory of her lover's desperate, 1/2-wet face faithfully shaped within her," etc. Realizes hsbnd has "interior deficits" that "... ha[d] nothing to do with her as a wife[/woman]," etc. Survives this aftershock of epiphany, + various other (standard) aftershocks. [Possible mntn of psychotherapy, but in upbeat terms: psychth now "freely chosen" rather than dsprtly tried.] J.O.R. establishes separate investment portfolio w/ substantial positions in gold futures & large-cap mining stock. Quits smoking w/ help of transdermal patches. Realizes/slowly accepts that hsbnd loves his secret loneliness and "interior deficits" more than he loves her. [Possible mention of obscure Support Group for spouses of s.c.m.'s -- any such thing? "Mast-Anon"? "Co-Jack"? (N.B.: avoid easy gags).] Realizes that true wellsprings of love, security, gratification must originate within self(*); &, w/ this realization, J.O.R. joins rest of adult hmn. race, no longer "full of herself"/ "inexperienced"/"young." 4a(II) Marriage enters new, more adult phase ["honeymoon over" an easy gag?]. Never once in sbsqnt yrs of marriage do J.O.R. & hsbnd discuss his s.c.m. or interior agony/loneliness/"deficits" [hammer home fiduciary pun]. J.O.R. doesn't know whether hsbnd suspects she knows about his s.c.m. or Discover charges at Adult World; she does not care. Reflects w/ amused irony on new significance of persistent adlsc mmry. of rest-stop graffito. Hsbnd continues to arise at nite & leave master bedrm; sometimes J.O.R. hears car start as she "stirs only slightly and returns at once to sleep," etc. Ceases worrying w/r/t whether hsbnd enjoys "sexlife" w/ her; continues to love hsbnd even tho she no longer believes he's "wonderful" [/"attentive"] partner. Sex between them finds its own level; by 5th year it's every 2 weeks. The sex is "nice" -- less intense but less scary [/"lonely"]. J.O.R. ceases to search hsbnd's face during sex. 4a(II(1)) Taking "authentic responsibility for self," J.O.R. "... gradually begins exploring masturbation as a well-spring of personal pleasure," etc. Revisits A.W.; becomes almost rglr. Purchases 2nd dildo, then "Penetrator!![R]" dildo w/ vibrator, "Pink Pistollero[R] Pistol-Grip Massager," finally "Scarlet Garden MX-1000[R] Vibrator with Clitoral Suction and Fully Electrified 12 Inch Cervical Stimulator" ["$179.99 retail"]. Narr. inserts that her new dresser/vanity ensemble contains no sachet drawer. [Irony: J.O.R.'s appliances found on A.W wall labeled MARITAL AIDS (2 hvy?).] By marriage's 6th year, hsbnd frqntly away on "emergency trips to the Pacific Rim"; J.O.R. masturbating almost daily. 4a(II(1a)) Narr expo: J.O.R.'s most frequent/ pleasurable masturbation fantasy in 6th year of marriage = a faceless, hypertrophic male figure who loves but cannot seduce J.O.R. spurns all other living women & chooses instead to masturbate to fantasies of J.O.R. 4a(III) Concl. [paragraph]: 7th, 8th year: Hsbnd masturbates secretly, J.O.R. openly. Their now bimonthly sex is both "... a submission to and celebration of certain freely embraced realities." Neither appears to mind. Narr: binding them now is that deep and unspoken complicity that in adult marriage is covenant/love. "They were now married, cleaved,(**) one flesh, [a union that] afforded Jeni Roberts a cool and steady joy...." 4b. Concl [embed]: "... ready thus to begin, in a calm and mutually respectful way, to discuss having children [together]." (*) [N.B.: narr tone here mxmly flat/dry/affectless/distant -- no discernible endorsement of cliche] (**) [/"cloven"? (avoid ez gag)] -- End --
NOTES_


Keywords: General; Short stories

Jacobs:2001mk ~

ABSTRACT_
Expanded Academic: The fiction of David Foster Wallace as antidote to postmodern irony is examined, focusing on Wallace's admiration of 19th-century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who created original poetic forms within a disciplined structure. Topics include the responsibility writers owe readers and Wallace's novel, "The Infinite Jest." Proquest: David Foster Wallace's second novel, "Infinite Jest," creates a new space for American fiction by recalling past practitioners of mimesis and through adherence to aesthetic rules that recall Gerard Manley Hopkins's own exacting yet prescient aesthetic. In doing so, Wallace establishes an aesthetic that combines order with originality, and one that conveys a singular message in an unself-conscious manner.
NOTES_
PDF available at muse.jhu.edu. But I don't have access.

Keywords: Academic; Fiction_Criticism and interpretation; Postmodernism_Evaluation; Critical Essay; Wallace, David Foster_Criticism and interpretation; Hopkins, Gerard Manley_Criticism and interpretation; Infinite Jest (Book)_Criticism and interpretation; Criticism and interpretation; Evaluation

Wallace:1995zo ~

ABSTRACT_

NOTES_
Excerpt from IJ

Keywords: General; Short stories

McCaffery:1993oa ~ http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_wallace.html

ABSTRACT_
An Interview With David Foster Wallace by Larry McCaffery LARRY McCAFFERY: Your essay following this interview is going to be seen by some people as being basically an apology for television. What's your response to the familiar criticism that television fosters relationships with illusions or simulations of real people (Reagan being a kind of quintessential example)? DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: It's a try at a comprehensive diagnosis, not an apology. U.S. viewers' relationship with TV is essentially puerile and dependent, as are all relationships based on seduction. This is hardly news. But what's seldom acknowledged is how complex and ingenious TV's seductions are. It's seldom acknowledged that viewers' relationship with TV is, albeit debased, intricate and profound. It's easy for older writers just to bitch about TV's hegemony over the U.S. art market, to say the world's gone to hell in a basket and shrug and have done with it. But I think younger writers owe themselves a richer account of just why TV's become such a dominating force on people's consciousness, if only because we under forty have spent our whole conscious lives being "part" of TV's audience. LM: Television may be more complex than what most people realize, but it seems rarely to attempt to "challenge" or "disturb" its audience, as you've written me you wish to. Is it that sense of challenge and pain that makes your work more "serious" than most television shows? DFW: I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction's job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of "generalization" of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also 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 the reality 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 more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it's hard for an art audience, especially a young one that's been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurable and 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't think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture's trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today's readers both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard. LM: Who do you imagine your readership to be? DFW: I suppose it's people more or less like me, in their twenties and thirties, maybe, with enough experience or good education to have realized that the hard work serious fiction requires of a reader sometimes has a payoff. People who've been raised with U.S. commercial culture and are engaged with it and informed by it and fascinated with it but still hungry for something commercial art can't provide. Yuppies, I guess, and younger intellectuals, whatever. These are the people pretty much all the younger writers I admire--Leyner and Vollman and Daitch, Amy Homes, Jon Franzen, Lorrie Moore, Rick Powers, even McInerney and Leavitt and those guys--are writing for, I think. But, again, the last twenty years have seen big changes in how writers engage their readers, what readers need to expect from any kind of art. LM: The media seems to me to be one thing that has drastically changed this relationship. It's provided people with this television-processed culture for so long that audiences have forgotten what a relationship to serious art is all about. DFW: Well, it's too simple to just wring your hands and claim TV's ruined readers. Because the U.S.'s television culture didn't come out of a vacuum. What TV is extremely good at--and realize that this is "all it does"--is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it. And since there's always been a strong and distinctive American distaste for frustration and suffering, TV's going to avoid these like the plague in favor of something anesthetic and easy. LM: You really think this distaste is distinctly American? DFW: 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. And so pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se. Look at utilitarianism--that most English of contributions to ethics- 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. Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes. LM: Near the end of "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," there's a line about Mark that "It would take an architect who could hate enough to feel enough to love enough to perpetuate the kind of special cruelty only real lovers can inflict." Is that the kind of cruelty you feel is missing in the work of somebody like Mark Leyner? DFW: I guess I'd need to ask you what kind of cruelty you thought the narrator meant there. LM: It seems to involve the idea that if writers care enough about their audience--if they love them enough and love their art enough--they've got to be cruel in their writing practices. "Cruel" the way an army drill sergeant is when he decides to put a bunch of raw recruits through hell, knowing that the trauma you're inflicting on these guys, emotionally, physically, psychically, is just part of a process that's going to strengthen them in the end, prepare them for things they can't even imagine yet. DFW: Well, besides the question of where the fuck do "artists" get off deciding for readers what stuff the readers need to be prepared for, your idea sounds pretty Aristotelian, doesn't it? I mean, what's the purpose of creating fiction, for you? Is it essentially mimetic, to capture and order a protean reality? Or is it really supposed to be therapeutic in an Aristotelian sense? LM: I agree with what you said in "Westward" about serious art having to engage a range of experiences; it can be merely "metafictional," for example it has to deal with the world outside the page and variously so. How would you contrast your efforts in this regard versus those involved in most television or most popular fiction? DFW:This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants. When you read that quotation from "Westward" just now, it sounded to me like a covert digest of my biggest weaknesses as a writer. One is that I have a grossly sentimental affection for gags, for stuff that's nothing but funny, and which I sometimes stick in for no other reason than funniness. Another's that I have a problem sometimes with concision, communicating only what needs to be said in a brisk efficient way that doesn't call attention to itself. It'd be pathetic for me to blame the exterior for my own deficiencies, but it still seems to me that both of these problems are traceable to this schizogenic experience I had growing up, being bookish and reading a lot, on the one hand, watching grotesque amounts of TV, on the other. Because I liked to read, I probably didn't watch quite as much TV as my friends, but I still got my daily megadose, believe me. And I think it's impossible to spend that many slack-jawed, spittle-chinned, formative hours in front of commercial art without internalizing the idea that one of the main goals of art is simply to "entertain," give people sheer pleasure. Except to what end, this pleasure-giving? Because, of course, TV's "real" agenda is to be "liked," because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it's its sole raison. And sometimes when I look at my own stuff I feel like I absorbed too much of this raison. 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!" Now, to an extent there's no way to escape this altogether, because an author needs to demonstrate some sort of skill or merit so that the reader will trust her. There's some weird, delicate, I-trust-you-not-to fuck-up-on-me relationship between the reader and writer, and both have to sustain it. But there's an unignorable line between demonstrating skill and charm to gain trust for the story vs. simple showing off. It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art. 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. But I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader. LM: In your own case, how does this hostility manifest itself? DFW: Oh, not always, but sometimes in the form of sentences that are syntactically not incorrect but still a real bitch to read. Or bludgeoning the reader with data. Or devoting a lot of energy to creating expectations and then taking pleasure in disappointing them. You can see this clearly in something like Ellis's "American Psycho": it panders shamelessly to the audience's sadism for a while, but by the end it's clear that the sadism's real object is the reader herself. LM: But at least in the case of "American Psycho" I felt there was something more than just this desire to inflict pain--or that Ellis was being cruel the way you said serious artists need to be willing to be. DFW: You're just displaying the sort of cynicism that lets readers be manipulated by bad writing. I think it's a kind of black cynicism about today's world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what's always distinguished bad writing--flat characters, a narrative world that's cliched and not recognizably human, etc.--is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend "Psycho" as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it's no more than that. LM: Are you saying that writers of your generation have an obligation not only to depict our condition but also to provide the solutions to these things? DFW: I don't think I'm talking about conventionally political or social action-type solutions. That's not what fiction's about. Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, 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. Or can be. This isn't that it's fiction's duty to edify or teach, or to make us good little Christians or Republicans; I'm not trying to line up behind Tolstoy or Gardner. I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art. 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? LM: Not everyone in your generation is taking the Ellis route. Both the other writers in this issue of "RCF" seem to be doing exactly what you're talking about. So, for example, even though Vollmann's "Rainbow Stories" is a book that is in its own way as sensationalized as "American Psycho," the effort there is to depict those people not as flattened, dehumanized stereotypes but as human beings. I'd agree though, that a lot of contemporary writers today adopt this sort of flat, neutral transformation of people and events into fiction without bothering to make the effort of refocusing their imaginations on the people who still exist underneath these transformations. But Vollmann seems to be someone fighting that tendency in interesting ways. That brings us back to the issue of whether this isn't a dilemma serious writers have always faced. Other than lowered (or changed) audience expectations, what's changed to make the task of the serious writer today more difficult than it was thirty or sixty or a hundred or a thousand years ago? You might argue that the task of the serious writer is easier today because what took place in the sixties had the effect of finally demolishing the authority that mimesis had assumed. Since you guys don't have to fight that battle anymore, you're liberated to move on to other areas. DFW: This is a double-edged sword, our bequest from the early postmodernists and the post-structuralist critics. One the one hand, there's sort of an embarrassment of riches for young writers now. Most of the old cinctures and constraints that used to exist--censorship of content is a blatant example--have been driven off the field. Writers today can do more or less whatever we want. But on the other hand, since everybody can do pretty much whatever they want, without boundaries to define them or constraints to struggle against, you get this continual avant-garde rush forward without anyone bothering to speculate on the destination, the "goal" of the forward rush. The modernists and early postmodernists--all the way from Mallarmé to Coover, I guess--broke most of the rules for us, but we tend to forget what they were forced to remember: the rule-breaking has got to be for the "sake" of something. When rule-breaking, the mere "form" of renegade avant-gardism, becomes an end in itself, you end up with bad language poetry and "American Psycho" 's nipple-shocks and Alice Cooper eating shit on stage. Shock stops being a by-product of progress and becomes an end in itself. And it's bullshit. Here's an analogy. The invention of calculus was shocking because for a long time it had simply been presumed that you couldn't divide by zero. The integrity of math itself seemed to depend on the presumption. Then some genius titans came along and said, "Yeah, maybe you can't divide by zero, but what would happen if you "could"? We're going to come as close to doing it as we can, to see what happens." LM: So you get the infinitesimal calculus--"the philosophy of as if." DFW: And this purely theoretical construct wound up yielding incredibly practical results. Suddenly you could plot the area under curves and do rate-change calculations. Just about every material convenience we now enjoy is a consequence of this "as if." But what if Leibniz and Newton had wanted to divide by zero only to show jaded audiences how cool and rebellious they were? It'd never have happened, because that kind of motivation doesn't yield results. It's hollow. Dividing-as-if-by-zero was titanic and ingenuous because it was in the service of something. The math world's shock was a price they had to pay, not a payoff in itself. LM: Of course, you also have examples like Lobochevsky and Riemann, who are breaking the rules with no practical application at the time--but then later on somebody like Einstein comes along and decides that this worthless mathematical mind game that Riemann developed actually described the universe more effectively than the Euclidean game. Not that those guys were braking the rules just to break the rules, but part of that was just that: what happens if everybody has to move counter-clockwise in Monopoly. And at first it just seemed like this game, without applications. DFW: Well, the analogy breaks down because math and hard science are pyramidical. They're like building a cathedral: each generation works off the last one, both in its advance and its errors. Ideally, each piece of art's its own unique object, and its evaluation's always present-tense. You could justify the worst piece of experimental horseshit by saying "The fools may hate my stuff , but generations later I will be appreciated for my ground breaking rebellion." All the beret-wearing "artistes" I went to school with who believed that line are now writing ad copy someplace. LM: The European avant-garde believed in the transforming ability of innovative art to directly affect people's consciousness and break them out of their cocoon of habituation, etc. You'd put a urinal in a Paris museum, call it a "fountain," and wait for the riots next day. That's an area I'd say has changed things for writers (or any artist)--you can have very aesthetically radical works today using the same features of formal innovation that you'd find in the Russian Futurists or Duchamp and so forth, only now these things are on MTV or TV ads. Formal innovations as trendy image. So it loses its ability to shock or transform. DFW: These are exploitations. They're not trying to break us free of anything. They're trying to lock us tighter into certain conventions, in this case habits of consumption. So the "form" of artistic rebellion now becomes . . . LM: . . . yeah, another commodity. I agree with Fredric Jameson and others who argue that modernism and postmodernism can be seen as expressing the cultural logic of late capitalism. Lots of features of contemporary art are directly influenced by this massive acceleration of capitalist expansion into all these new realms that were previously just not accessible. You sell people a memory, reify their nostalgia and use this as a hook to sell deodorant. Hasn't this recent huge expansion of the technologies of reproduction, the integration of commodity reproduction and aesthetic reproduction, and the rise of media culture lessened the impact that aesthetic innovation can have on people's sensibilities? What's your response to this as an artist? DFW: You've got a gift for lit-speak, LM. Who wouldn't love this jargon we dress common sense in: "formal innovation is no longer transformative, having been co-opted by the forces of stabilization and post-industrial inertia," blah, blah. But this co-optation might actually be a good thing if it helped keep younger writers from being able to treat mere formal ingenuity as an end in itself. MTV-type co-optation could end up a great prophylactic against cleveritis--you know, the dreaded grad-school syndrome of like "Watch me use seventeen different points of view in this scene of a guy eating a Saltine." The real point of that shit is "Like me because I'm clever"--which of course is itself derived from commercial art's axiom about audience-affection determining art's value. What's precious about somebody like Bill Vollmann is that, even though there's a great deal of formal innovation in his fictions, it rarely seems to exist for just its own sake. It's almost always deployed to make some point (Vollmann's the most editorial young novelist going right now, and he's great at using formal ingenuity to make the editorializing a component of his narrative instead of an interruption) or to create an effect that's internal to the text. His narrator's always weirdly effaced, the writing unself-conscious, despite all the "By-the-way-Dear-reader" intrusions. In a way it's sad that Vollmann's integrity is so remarkable. Its remarkability means it's rare. I guess I don't know what to think about these explosions in the sixties you're so crazy about. It's almost like postmodernism is fiction's fall from biblical grace. Fiction became conscious of itself in a way it never had been. Here's a really pretentious bit of pop analysis for you: I think you can see Cameron's "Terminator" movies as a metaphor for all literary art after Roland Barthes, viz., the movies' premise that the Cyberdyne NORAD computer becomes conscious of itself as "conscious," as having interests and an agenda; the Cyberdyne becomes literally self-referential, and it's no accident that the result of this is nuclear war, Armageddon. LM: Isn't Armageddon the course you set sail for in "Westward"? DFW: Metafiction's real end has always been Armageddon. Art's reflection on itself is terminal, is one big reason why the art world saw Duchamp as an Antichrist. But I still believe the move to involution had value: it helped writers break free of some long-standing flat-earth-type taboos. It was standing in line to happen. And for a while, stuff like "Pale Fire" and "The Universal Baseball Association" was valuable as a meta-aesthetic breakthrough the same way Duchamp's urinal had been valuable. LM: I've always felt that the best of the metafictionalists--Coover, for example, Nabokov, Borges, even Barth--were criticized too much for being only interested in narcissistic, self-reflexive games, whereas these devices had very real political and historical applications. DFW: But when you talk about Nabokov and Coover, you're talking about real geniuses, the writers who weathered real shock and invented this stuff in contemporary fiction. But after the pioneers always come the crank turners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank, and little pellets of metafiction come out the other end. The crank-turners capitalize for a while on sheer fashion, and they get their plaudits and grants and buy their IRAs and retire to the Hamptons well out of range of the eventual blast radius. There are some interesting parallels between postmodern crank-turners and what's happened since post-structural theory took off here in the U.S., why there's such a big backlash against post-structuralism going on now. It's the crank-turners fault. I think the crank-turners replaced the critic as the real angel of death as far as literary movements are concerned, now. You get some bona fide artists who come along and really divide by zero and weather some serious shit-storms of shock and ridicule in order to promulgate some really important ideas. Once they triumph, though, and their ideas become legitimate and accepted, the crank-turners and wannabes come running to the machine, and out pour the gray pellets and now the whole thing's become a hollow form, just another institution of fashion. Take a look at some of the critical-theory Ph.D. dissertations being written now. They're like de Man and Foucault in the mouth of a dull child. Academia and commercial culture have somehow become these gigantic mechanisms of commodification that drain the weight and color out of even the most radical new advances. It's a surreal inversion of the death-by-neglect that used to kill off prescient art. Now prescient art suffers death-by acceptance. We love things to death, now. Then we retire to the Hamptons. LM: This is also tied to that expansion of capitalism blah blah blah into realms previously thought to be uncommodifiable. Hyperconsumption. I mean, whoever thought rebellion could be tamed so easily? You just record it, turn the crank, and out comes another pellet of "dangerous" art. DFW: And this accelerates the metastasis from genuine envelope puncturing to just another fifteen-minute form that gets cranked out and cranked out and cranked out. Which creates a bitch of a problem for any artist who views her task as continual envelope-puncturing, because then she falls into this insatiable hunger for the appearance of novelty: "What can I do that hasn't been done yet?" Once the first-person pronoun creeps into your agenda you're dead, art-wise. That's why fiction-writing's lonely in a way most people misunderstand. It's yourself you have to be estranged from, really, to work. LM: A phrase in one of your recent letters really struck me: "The magic of fiction is that it addresses and antagonizes the loneliness that dominates people." It's that suggestion of antagonizing the reader that seems to link your goals up with the avant-garde program--whose goals were never completely hermetic. And "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" seems to be your own meta-fictional attempt to deal with these large areas in ways that are not merely metafiction. DFW: "Aggravate" might be better than "antagonize," in the sense of aggravation as intensification. But the truth is it's hard for me to know what I really think about any of the stuff I've written. It's always tempting to sit back and make finger-steeples