Monthly Archives: April 2009

After the usual hyper-observational riffs on the Maine Lobster Festival, DFW asks the question that sets the piece apart from most food/gourmet journalism: “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” (243) This seems to be the most salient question, and is often referred to in books reviews that attempt to summarize “Consider The Lobster” or point out what makes it special. But DFW goes on to ask a set of related questions: “Is the previous question irksomely PC or sentimental? What does “all right” even mean in this context? Is the whole thing just a matter of personal choice?” (243)

The last of the related question seems to engage in ethical theory: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals “thinks that the morality of lobster-boiling is not just a matter of individual conscience”. This led me to wonder what the immorality of boiling the lobsters consists in–that there is something intrinsically wrong in the act–as well as whether this vague sense of moral discomfort has to do more with how squeamish it makes us feel (individual conscience). The latter prompts (at least) two further questions: 1) Why does it makes us squeamish to think about what goes on when we boil lobsters? Is it because we feel pain and can therefore imagine how torturous it would be by projecting ourselves to be in a similar scenario? 2) What if someone is simply quite unperturbed and possesses an extremely limited capacity for such squeamishness? What if a lengthy explication on animal rights and the neural make-up of lobsters is met with a blank countenance and a “so what”? Thinking such a person to be morally regrettable would seem to blame the person for having a limited capacity for such moral squeamishness, but can someone be blamed for such a thing?

One of the reasons for abstaining from inflicting harm on others and to treat all other humans as ends in themselves rather than as means to an end is that we all share the capacity for rational thought. It is this rational nature that distinguishes us from animals. The importance of this fundamental similarity is that it provides us with a reason to treat others as we would want others to treat ourselves. Our rational nature affords us dignity and thereby forms the basis on which all human actions have to take as the supreme limiting condition. But I don’t think most of us would consider a lobster rational. What then, would the Archimedan point be, that would enable us to convince a blank-faced-shrug-of-the shoulders-lobster-afiocionado that there is indeed something morally repugnant about boiling a lobster in a pot? Or is there nothing intrinsically wrong about the act itself? Is it that all we can do is to express our distaste for such as act, which would then render PETA and the like sententious and even self-righteous for thinking something subjective to be objective, and wanting to impose (forcefully) what is essentially nothing more than an opinion on others?

“Authority and American Usage” was to me, one of the funniest stories in Consider The Lobster. The snoot of a character that we are presented with was comical in the way he expressed his love for language. Statements such as his dislike for “people who use dialogue as a verb” made him look as a very nit-picky character who is obsessed with using language correctly. We get the sense that he is snobby, and even though he was funny, he was also an unlike able character because he made me feel like he was talking down to me. On the other hand, there was also a great respect for someone who cared so much about language, and using it properly.

The splurge David Foster Wallace gives in pages 108 and 109 about SWE (standard written/white language) was one of the best aspects of this essay. While giving a talk to students he states his purpose in his course and the need for good writing. Wallace says that “–it’s not that you’re a bad writers, it’s that you haven’t learned the special rules of the dialect they want you to write in.” Who is “they” though? Professors teaching English? Dictionary makers? The fact of the matter is that there is a Standard Written Way of writing, it’s why we have professors grade our papers and mark down it down for syntax, diction, etc. And if we do not follow the standards of swe then we fail (or at the very least get a 0 on a Spanish paper for 5 mistakes on accents).

I was outraged by some of the things he was saying, and I did think to myself how can he say that these are the way things are that we have to conform, especially when in past works we have read Wallace has said that in order to get out of the loop writers are in now they have to write about what they truly think, not what writers think the public will like. But right after that he says something that made me forgive Wallace.

“This reviewer’s own humble opinion is that some of the cultural and political realities of American life are themselves racially insensitive and elitist and offensive and unfair, and that pussyfooting around these realities with euphemistic doublespeak is not only hypocritical but toxic to the project of ever really changing them” (109).

This I think is his response to acknowledging the way English exists now a days. There is a standard way of writing and it may be bias and racist and whatever else you may choose to call it, but if we ever want to change the standard of writing then we first have to acknowledge it. Which does make sense, in order to solve a problem, you have to understand what is the problem before you can go about changing it. But what Wallace doesn’t answer is HOW exactly we are supposed to go about that change. Ideas?

As I was reading this story, I couldn’t help but think “what would he say now?” Towards the end of this essay, DFW dwells upon the difficulties of a being a young voter in todays world, that is, how we as a generation are so used to being sold to, that we can’t really believe in anything anymore. This thought process is a constant theme in Wallace’s work of what’s gone wrong in today’s TV obsessed, irony saturated youth culture, that being that we don’t believe in anything anymore. So much of political campaigns is tied up in getting people to believe in a candidate, not so much to believe what they say. Reconciling that goal with today’s culture where supposedly nothing can be said with sincerity is what makes this article so interesting.

Much like after reading “E Unibus Pluram” we discussed what Wallace would say today about TV and fiction writing, what now would Wallace say about youth involvement in politics about the great Obama campaign of 2008. He dwells in “Up, Simba” about how young Americans would simply roll their eyes at the famous JFK musing; “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country!” yet we saw very little eye rolling at Obama’s Grant Park speech in November claiming “Yes we can!”

Does this mean that the cynical age is over, and we as Americans are ready to “suck it up” and believe in a politician or even just another human being again? The overarching theme I found in this essay collection is simply the Wallace yearned for the world of yesterday where people had ideals and morals and codes, and while at times it seems that we are as far away from that as ever, occasionally we can see glimpses of a simpler time. A time where people don’t role their eyes at an inspirational speech, where the media circus around a politician is there to make sure we believe in him, not just sit by as we are sold to his politics.

In short, this post is just simply here to ask exactly what you guys think Wallace would say if he wrote a similar article about Campaign 2008. Are we as Americans ready to drop the cynicism?

“I submit that this is what the real, no-bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.”

I was going to write a blog post on something we’d just read, but this sentence scared me so much that I could only really focus on what it means.   It’s a piece of the Kenyon speak that DFW made and it’s quoted in a recent article on motherjones.com, http://www.motherjones.com/media/2009/04/david-foster-wallaces-best-advice.  Sorry there are so many questions in my post.

First, I appreciate the bluntness of this statement.   Wallace lays it out like he sees it.   He’s not trying to comfort us in the least, and his statement gives an air of urgency- if we don’t “get” this liberal arts education, are we doomed for life?   Will we forever be “imperially alone”?   And conversely, is the liberal arts education the only thing that can free us from being slaves to our heads?   Sometimes it seems to me that we end up being slaves to our heads in a different, conscious way, because we learn to examine and analyze so thoroughly.   Wallace’s statement is all about consciousness and being able to step out of our comfortable ways of thinking.   But how does this make us less alone?

I’m wondering if I need to take this whole liberal arts thing more seriously.  Wallace is pretty honest and serious himself here- liberal arts just might be our savior from being trapped in our own heads forever…?  So really, this whole thing is supposed to bring me to a place where I can escape loneliness?

Throughout the course of all these readings, I have struggled to understand whether Wallace really believes we can be free.   Unalone.   Somehow connected with the rest of the world.   I see a straining and a hope for connection, and I see Wallace encourage readers to look beyond themselves.   I see Wallace analyze and criticize just what it is about people today that makes it so difficult to not feel alone.   But is there really, truly a way out of this solipsism?   Can we eliminate it just by figuring out why it’s there in the first place?

Perhaps education is a solution, but I’m unsure whether simply learning how to think differently can change our degree of loneliness.   This is what our education is “supposed” to be about, but just how successful is it?   Often it seems that Wallace comes to the conclusion that we might be trapped in this box.   How specifically do his characters end up being free from the constraints of language and selfishness?

-Choosing not to let that questioning side take hold.   In “Good Old Neon,” this David Wallace character must quiet the dark part of him that contemplates suicide.

-Finding other lines of communication.   People find connection physically, without words or language (think BOTS)

Others?

One commonality among Big Red Son, The View from Mrs. Thompson’s, Up, Simba, Host, a lot of the stories in the “Brief Interviews” parts of Brief Interviews, Michael Joyce, David Lynch, Getting Away, and a Supposedly Fun Thing and perhaps most importantly the vast majority of Infinite Jest, including just about every character’s story except James Incandenza’s, Orin Incandenza’s, Johnny Gentle’s et al., and the AFR/USOUS folks’, is that they all center around the lesser known, the marginal.   This is at once very significant and very suspicious to me.

By the marginal I mean that the real main characters in each of these stories are not those who would otherwise receive attention.   In fact, they are often the players who usher the main characters to the attention they receive.   A very clear example of this is the tech crew in Up, Simba, about which I’m ready to fight anyone who doesn’t believe they are the heart of the story.   Consider the title, consider the time Wallace spent with them on the Trail, and consider the importance he gave to their political advice.

A medium-clarity example of Wallace’s interest in the lesser known is the David Lynch piece.   The obvious counterargument that I’m fibbing or just wrong is that the David Lynch piece was assigned to Wallace by ritzy Premiere Magazine, and so there’s some obvious sense that if Lynch was in fact lesser known he wouldn’t be getting all this press coverage.   But I argue that first of all Lynch is lesser known, which is why 95% of our class had no clue who David Lynch was before reading that piece.   Second, even while Wallace was using a lot of page space to talk about Lynchian theory, what he was really focused on was the extraordinarily bizarre, not-quite-human humanity of a man who piqued Premiere’s interest (I’m guessing) not because of his dressing habits but because of what he makes come out of expensive cameras.   Wallace, while deeply interested in that element of David Lynch, was clearly also interested in what it was about Lynch that allowed him to “keep his head,” the backstage David Lynch that allowed the avant-garde, attention-grabbing director David Lynch to get his limelight.

A low-clarity example, which compared to that last example might be either medium-clarity, or I overestimated the clarity of the last example: the washroom attendant in “Brief Interviews” in Brief Interviews.   Because it’s fiction, we can’t be sure whether Wallace spent time getting into the psyche of any life-time washroom attendants, but the fact that Wallace wanted to is important on its own.   And while the washroom attendant doesn’t do the dirty work (pun intended) so that the attendees can receive the washroom spotlight (not quite sure what that would even entail), he does remain behind the scenes to help usher the attendees through the less glorious tasks in their day, allowing them to focus instead on what gets them attention.   In one sense the washroom attendant is an almost parodic(al) metonym for all the characters I listed at the beginning of this post–he suffers quietly so that others don’t have to.

The significant thing about DFW’s voice-giving to the oft voiceless is that, according to the people that mattered to him on a personal level, it came straight from his anguished heart.     A long quote from Dave’s editor Michael Pietsch in his eulogy of Wallace, all of which I think is important and as primary as a secondary source can be in understanding why Wallace might have been interested in the conventionally uninteresting:

“I don’t want to be a hidden person, or a hidden writer: it is lonely,” [Dave] said in another letter [to Pietsch].   He shied from being known in a public way, but he worked hard not to be hidden from the people he encountered in person. He wanted them to know him himself, not some caricature or idea of him.   One way David endeavored to be known was by endeavoring to know others.   His solicitousness was legendary.   In one note he asked me to remind a new mother in the office that it was time to switch from skim milk to 2% or whole milk.   He wrote thank-you notes not just to the copy editor who worked on Consider the Lobster but also to the supervisor who had assigned the job to so talented a copy ediotr, and he offered to pay a bonus out of his own pocket to the designer who wrestled down a particularly gnarly layout.”

Pietsch goes on to detail other ways in which Dave was an extraordinarily kind and solicitous man, but I think this is enough to get at what I’m trying to suggest in this post, which is quite simply that I would like to believe that David Foster Wallace did not use people like the salesmen/politician-types in Up, Simba use lines to sell a product, he treated them each as carriers of a special humanity he could only glimpse by just like, listening.