Author Archives: erinlikescupcakes

This weekend I had to sing at the alumni memorial service because I’m in glee club.   After we sang, we sat up on the stage while President Oxtoby read all the names of alumni and faculty who died in the past year.   I found myself oddly surprised when he read off “David Foster Wallace,” and moved on to the next name.  

                      When Wallace died I had barely been at Pomona a month and had absolutely no connection to or knowledge of him or his work.   So it seems odd to me that now, after his death, I have a much stronger connection to this man than I ever did before.   I was surprised to hear his name in the service because he has become more alive to me throughout this semester.   He’s played a role in my thoughts that never existed before this class.   It’s really odd to me that I feel like I have become friends with this man after he is already gone.

                      But I know I have not.     I have become friends with the voice of Wallace as a writer, not Wallace the person.   I only get samples of what he is like from his authorial voice, and while I would have liked to know the man behind the words, all I can try to absorb is what he has left us in language.   I know I have to be fair and try to separate Wallace’s life from the fiction, to allow him to create without automatically assuming that everything is coming straight out of his own life.   But I do believe the reader-writer relationship Wallace has created is almost as close to human as possible for an author.   It’s not so much the experiences of characters, but his own vulnerable and relatable voice behind them.

                      Which brings me to what I think is astounding about Wallace, particularly in my experience.   Wallace’s voice somehow creates an entire person behind this work.   There is not a stone wall behind the narrator, nor an empty space.   No matter how ridiculous a narrator might be, I have always felt like Wallace is standing right there behind the words.   It might be comforting, maybe powerful?   A connection that does not leave me lonely, because while many authors might step back and try to distance themselves from the actual text, Wallace’s daring is in his willingness to become intimately close to the reader, to embarrass himself at times, and to maybe bear a little too much.

                      There is this frustration with the limits of language.   We’ve discussed it numerous times and I am always left wondering if this is really how Wallace felt. Was he just so limited that he often felt unable to communicate?   He kept writing and communicating because he knew he could attempt it better than most.  I am most thankful for this.   I find a lot of hope in Wallace’s writing.   Despite the human sadness and hopelessness that he is able to illuminate quite brilliantly, Wallace’s human voice that trusts that we will listen and listen carefully gives me a lot of hope in our abilities to trust people.

“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?

Wallace’s handle on what we, Americans, find funny.   He has the anatomy of our humor down pat.   His explanation of the painful dissection of a joke (61) just about gave me the same pain.   I would never have come up with the same explanation, yet it feels just right in its explanation of just how jokes work.

His deep understanding of the American sense of humor hasn’t failed me yet.   And I appreciate his knowledge of the everyday reader- not someone in academia or the upper-eshilons of literary analysis.   He respects our dislike for the analysis of humor.   He wants to allow us to just enjoy the humor without having to rip it apart and examine each piece to see how it works.   Rather, as he is trying to explain through Kafka’s work, there is a chance to step back and see humor at face level.   To stop looking a million layers deeper and allow Kafka’s work to be funny for what it is and what it says about us.   It’s almost as if we have been trained against reading the way that Wallace is asking us to read Kafka’s stuff.

I found that a lot of Wallace’s descriptions of Kafka’s writing ring true for his own work.   This doesn’t pertain to all the descriptions, but the parts about Kafka’s writing being “nightmarish,” with characters that are “absurd and scary and sad all at once”(63) reminded me particularly of Oblivion.   Perhaps Wallace’s humor is packed with more wit and irony, more entendre and cyncism, but I have also seen and resounded deeply with his honest characters.   They are not caricatures, just as Kafka’s authority figures are not “just hollow buffoons to be ridiculed”(63).

Wallace’s hold on language and its place in our lives also enhances his analysis of Kafka’s humor.   He notes that Kafka’s writing draws upon our intuitive leanings on particular words.   But this part got a little confusing for me when I considered the translation- surely, “take shit” is not the same phrase with the same connotations when it is translated from Russian to English.   The words Wallace suggests students look at are words that we have specific connotations with because of our experiences with language, so I’m not quite sure how the translation would work, and he only addresses this for a second.

The whole word relation thing becomes interesting once again in the English Usage essay- specifically, his argument about language being inevitably public.   We naturally have private associations with words, but they only come from our association within a community.   It’s these communicative associations that seem to be important with the study of Kafka’s work.    

Maybe we already mentioned this and I totally missed it, but I was googling IJ and ran across the “poor yorick” passage in Hamlet.  We noticed the connection with the movie production company in the footnotes, but I just realized that the title of the book might be derived from this passage as well:

First off, from my first read I got the impression that the child died at the end of the story, because “by then it was too late”(116).   But reading it again, it seems that he lives despite “whatever was lost” and grows into an adult who can work and live.   But this living is “untenanted,” empty, lacking a soul.   So is the boy actually alive?   Could be that he is living physically, but when his soul left him to remove itself from the pain of the burns, it never came back again.   By this ending passage it seems that his soul is bouncing back and forth between the body and this distanced position, perhaps because this is the way the child has learned to deal with pain.

After reading some reviews of the story I became curious as to if the ending was really necessary.   This last section, beginning with “when it wouldn’t stop” and finishing out the piece, softens the overall intensity of the piece.   Somehow the pain is able to transcend with this last passage, and the story feels cheapened.   The visceral impact of the story, with everything steaming and sizzling and burning, is somehow wrapped up into this floating imagery of falling rain and the sun setting and rising.

I think DFW’s illustrating the way a child so scarred and damaged by an experience is able to survive and live without dealing with the pain.   With this idea the ending is justified, because DFW has to somehow show us how the child might possibly live.   But I felt disappointed by the ending, because it seems that after all the described trama, the poetic explanation of the child’s existence isn’t really fair.     The explanation of his transcendence doesn’t give enough weight to the pain and fear that the child must still bear.

The story becomes universal with its neutrality- the parents are only Daddy and Mommy, and the child doesn’t even receive any proper title other than the child or the toddler.   The setting’s general description allows for it to have occurred in any home in America.   The gender roles here become a little problematic- why must the mother remain helpless while the father, with his “man’s mind”(114) is the one who moves quickly into action?   The father’s frustration with the mother’s fear and inaction paints her into the role of helpless female, unable to react in a time of crisis.   I only suggest this because the universal feeling of the story might imply that this could and has happened with many mothers and fathers.

I think it was last Wednesday when we went in depth discussing AA, and what Wallace might be saying about our “pursuit of happiness.”   The whole idea of constant worship, our constant submission to some power, really stuck with me.   This is the idea that we are constantly worshipping something- be it alcohol, rehab, drugs, God, sex, math, whatever.   The idea with AA was just to transition into worshipping something else, although I’m not exactly sure what one is worshipping- recovery?   Truth?   Some kind of raw admittance that one is messed up?   Or perhaps what AA is looking for is just the acknowledgement that one is always worshipping.   Perhaps by knowing that we are always worshipping we can be more aware of just what and how we are worshipping.

 I was curious as to what DFW had said more on this topic directly, and although I think this link was already posted, I wanted to look at a piece from his Kenyon graduation address:

“Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”

The first part might reveal something about DFW’s view on religion.   He sees religion as the only form of worship that might keep us from being “eaten alive.”   But beyond this, he sees another option- one that might not even include a higher power.   If somehow we can be constantly conscious of our worship, choosing to worship rather than “gradually slipping into it.”   It is this conscious choice that can make life deliberate, because we are always aware of our aim.  

This deliberateness is what can make me see religion as beautiful.   A belief in a higher power requires us to consciously look outside of ourselves and our attempts at ruling over our lives to look to something greater.   But here DFW suggests that the real reason to choose a higher power is simply that there may be nothing else that can allow us to live.

DFW begins suggesting this alternate lifestyle, and it is difficult to define.   It doesn’t sound like it necessarily involves religion, but just an awareness and effort.   I’m unsure, however, as to how this sheer effort can completely get rid of “the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”     Where does that gnawing go once we start trying harder?   It seems that our efforts to be aware and to consciously love others can come to the very same empty gnawing as we feel in addiction.

Where does AA stand in all this?   I think it definitely leans towards a sort of awareness and change in our style of worship.   Just whether it can get rid of the gnawing completely (rather than just numbing the ache) I am not sure.