Two simple syntactic units (“The depressed person had never spoken of the incident of the boy’s telephone call” and “The boy was pathetically unaware of the incident”) have been inserted into a third (“The depressed person dreaded being like the boy”) to make a recursive sentence in which prepositional phrases lie inside one another like Russian dolls:
The depressed person, who had never spoken of the incident of the boy’s phone call of which the boy was pathetically unaware, dreaded being like the boy
. (And that’s not even including the further recursion of the roommate.) In the process, the embedded “incident” is rerun in its entirety, here, and elsewhere in “The Depressed Person,” as the poor girl reflects on her “dread” and thus sets the procedure off again, running the whole story through once more. This is
linguistic
recursion—defined as the capacity to embed sentences in other sentences. For many linguists, notably Noam Chomsky, this form of recursion is fundamental to language; it’s recursion that permits extension without limitation and makes language a system characterized by “discrete infinity.”
79
Infinity was of course a fruitful subject for Wallace (besides
Infinite Jest
, in 2003 he wrote a nonfiction book about it:
Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity
). He had a gift for articulating our conflicted response to this strangest of ideas. For if we feel a certain horror before infinity—because it transcends human scale and is unthinkable—we also hear in it the suggestion of the sacred. As a concept, infinity seems to bear the trace of God’s language, of Larkin’s “deep blue air, that shows/Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.” Forever, overhead. In “The Depressed Person,” though, infinity is horrific: it has been turned inward and burrows wormholes in the self. The effect on the reader is powerful, unpleasant. Quite apart from being forced to share one’s own mental space with the depressed person’s infinitely dismal consciousness, to read those spiral sentences is to experience that dread of circularity embedded in the old joke about recursion (
to understand recursion you must first understand recursion
), as well as the existential vertigo we feel when we stand between two mirrors. One suffers to read it, but suffering is part of the point:
There’s always been a strong and distinctive American distaste for frustration and suffering. . . . 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.
For the depressed person pain has certainly been fetishized, pathologized: she can’t feel simple sadness, only “agony”; she’s not merely depressed, she is “in terrible and unceasing emotional pain.” Meanwhile, another kind of pain—the kind one feels for other people in
their
suffering—is inaccessible to her. When one of her Support System becomes terminally ill, the only pain this causes her (i.e., the depressed person) is the realization
that she doesn’t really care at all,
which in turn sparks in her mind the dreaded possibility that she might in fact be “a solipsistic, self-consumed, endless emotional vacuum and sponge.” She is disgusted by herself, and the disgust causes her yet more pain and pica-gnawed
80
hands, and on it goes in its terrible cycle. The last lines of the story put the snake’s tongue in its own mouth: “How was she to decide and describe—even to herself, looking inward and facing herself—what all she’d so painfully learned said about her?”
The spiral sentences, the looping syntax, the repetition, the invasion of clinical vocabulary—none of this is mere “formal stunt-pilotry.” Nor does it add up to nonsense, or “stream of consciousness” if sloppiness and incomprehensibility is meant by that term: however long they are, Wallace’s procedures are always grammatically immaculate. The point is to run a procedure—the procedure of another person’s thoughts!—through your own mind. This way you don’t merely “have” the verbal explanation. You feel it and know it:
Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate . . . 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.
A lot of
Brief Interviews
is tough and painful: it’s doing the first half of that job. The rest of
Brief Interviews
is doing the other.
3. SIGNIFYING NOTHING
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?
One way out of this bind is to present, on the page, complex human beings. Sensitive souls, able to plumb their own emotional depths, capable of interesting thoughts despite the deadening times. How many of Roth’s and Bellow’s protagonists are academics, psychiatrists, intellectuals, or just motormouths? And when Henry James spoke of “fine awareness,” it was his contention that only characters in possession of this quality could elicit the same quality in their readers:
Their being finely aware—as Hamlet and Lear, say, are finely aware—
makes
absolutely the intensity of their adventure, gives the maximum of sense to what befalls them. We care, our curiosity and our sympathy care, comparatively little for what happens to the stupid, the coarse and the blind; care for it, and for the effects of it, at the most as helping to precipitate what happens to the more deeply wondering, to the really sentient.
But Wallace’s fiction cares what happens to the stupid, the coarse, and the blind. In fact, it is preoccupied by the stupid, the coarse, and the blind to a peculiar degree, as if the necessary counterpoint to the overintellectualized self is the ingenuous self. He seemed to spy in such characters—so unlike himself!—an escape from the “postmodern trap.” Take the simple fellow in “Signifying Nothing,” a young man whose very coarseness is the apparent key to his salvation. The story opens like this:
Here is a weird one for you. It was a couple of years ago, and I was 19, and getting ready to move out of my folks’ house, and get out on my own, and one day as I was getting ready, I suddenly get this memory of my father waggling his dick in my face one time when I was a little kid.
As pure event, this feels no more or less traumatic than the depressed person’s original complaint.
81
But in the young man’s case it is a wound he doesn’t even know how to worry: “I kept trying to think about why my father would do something like that, and what he could have been thinking of, like, what it could have meant.” He is without answers. In his confusion he becomes angry, but when he finally confronts his father with the memory, his form of interrogation is amusingly direct: “What the fuck was up with
that
?” In response his father gives him only a silent look of “total disbelief, and total disgust,” and the silence grows; an estrangement occurs; for a year the young man does not see his family. Then something strange. Without extensive analysis, without endless debate, without indulging in bouts of self-interrogation, he heals himself:
As time passed, I, little by little, got over the whole thing. I still knew that the memory of my father waggling his dick at me in the rec room was real, but, little by little, I started to realize, just because
I
remembered the incident, that did not mean, necessarily, my
father
did. . . . Little by little, it seemed like the moral of a memory of any incident that weird is, anything is possible.
Generally, we refuse to be each other. Our own experiences feel necessarily more real than other people’s, skewed by our sense of our own absolute centrality. But this young man in his simplicity does the difficult thing: he makes a leap into otherness. This empathic imaginative leap—into his own father’s head—miraculously bypasses the depressed person’s equivalent recursive maze. This simple thought—that his father’s (non)experience of the memory might be as real to his father as the young man’s own
positive
memory of it is real—turns out to be revelatory. It’s another recursive sentence, but this time, instead of tunneling inward, it leads out—to the infinite unknowability of other people. Maybe the incident is, after all, the kind of narrative Macbeth described: “A tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing.”
You don’t hear the word
parable
much in connection with Wallace, but I don’t know why not—he wrote a lot of them. What else do you call a story like “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XI)?” A man has a dream that he is blind, and then, the next day:
I’m incredibly conscious of my eyesight and my eyes and how good it is to be able to see colors and people’s faces and to know exactly where I am, and of how fragile it all is, the human eye mechanism and the ability to see, how easily it could be lost, how I’m always seeing blind people around with canes and strange-looking faces and am always just thinking of them as interesting to spend a couple seconds looking at and never thinking they had anything to do with me or my eyes, and it’s really just a lucky coincidence that I can see instead of being one of those blind people I see on the subway.
Here “other-blindness” has been actualized. A simple route to a great revelation. And again, in “The Devil Is a Busy Man,” a country hick who can’t get anyone to take, for free, an “Old Harrow With Some Teeth A Little Rusted,” attracts avid consumers as soon as he lists it in the classifieds for five dollars:
I asked Daddy about what lesson to draw here and he said he figured it’s you don’t try and teach a pig to sing and told me to go on and rake the drive’s gravel back out of the ditch before it fucked up the drainage.
Another lesson might be: value in capitalism is measured not by real worth but by lack.
The coarse, the blind, the stupid. As effective as these parables are, there is something sentimental about them—albeit a sentiment as old as fiction itself. As city dwellers yearn for Virgil’s pastoral, so intellectuals will tend to romanticize the pure relations they imagine exist between simple people. Wallace was on guard against this as he was against everything (“Yes and do I admire the fortitude of this humblest of working men? The stoicism? The Old World grit?”), and yet still it slips through, here, as well as in the nonfiction, where we find instinctive sportsmen, service-industry workers, farmers, and all kinds of down-home folks (usually from his home state of Illinois) receiving that warmness Wallace could never quite muster for hyperreflexive intellectuals more or less like himself.
82
But in their defense it should be said that the philosophical significance of these tales is not really that the selves involved are purer than the rest of us in their stupidity, coarseness, and blindness. It’s that they have sought—even momentarily—relationships that look outward, away from self. When the young man in “Signifying Nothing” finally reconnects with his father, it is at the birthday of his sister, in his family’s “special restaurant,” and the ice is broken not by anguished discussion or a sudden moment of personal insight but by a lame family joke shared by all. Which brings us finally to Wittgenstein’s second option, the way out of solipsism into communality:
And so he trashed everything he’d been lauded for in the “Tractatus” and wrote the “Investigations,” which is the single most comprehensive and beautiful argument against solipsism that’s ever been made. Wittgenstein argues that for language even to be possible, it must always be a
function of relationships between persons
(that’s why he spends so much time arguing against the possibility of a “private language”). [My italics]
The moralist in Wallace—that part of him that wanted not only to describe the wound but to heal it—invested much in this idea. He was always trying to place “relationships between persons” as the light at the end of his narrative dark tunnels; he took special care to re-create and respect the (often simple) language shared by people who feel some connection with each other. (“Get the fuck outta here” is the sentence that occasions the rapprochement in “Signifying Nothing.”) “In the day-to-day trenches of adult existence,” Wallace once claimed, “banal platitudes can have a life-or-death i mportance.”
83
Among his many gifts was this knack for truly
animating
platitudes, in much the same way that moral philosophers through the ages have animated abstract moral ideas through “dialogues” or narrative examples.
“Some things are best left unsaid.”
“Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.”
“You only want what you can’t have.”
What else are those three stories but complex enactments of platitudes we would otherwise ignore?