Changing My Mind (43 page)

In
The Gift,
a book that meant a lot to Wallace, the cultural anthropologist Lewis Hyde examines the different modes in which cultures and individuals deal with the concept of gifts and giving. He offers a fine description of the kind of swollen self we find in “Death Is Not the End”: “The narcissist feels his gifts come from himself. He works to display himself, not to suffer change.” The father in “On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand” makes a similar judgment about his Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright son: he is appalled by his (i.e., the son’s) sense of his own “
limitless gifts
unquote” and the admiration they arouse in everyone:

To Wallace, a gift truly was an accident; a chance, a fortuitous circumstance. Born intelligent, born with perfect pitch, with mathematical ability, with a talent for tennis—in what sense are we ever the proprietors of these blessings? What rights accrue to us because of them? How could we ever claim to truly own them?

It’s very interesting to me that this attitude toward gifts should have within it a current that is strongly anti-American, being both contra “rights” and contra “ownership.” I’ve always had the sense, philosophically speaking, that Wallace’s ethical ideas were profoundly un-American: he had more in common with the philosophical current that runs from Kant’s “realm of ends” through Simone Weils “sacred humans” and on to John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance,”
⁸⁹
than the Hobbes/Smith/Locke waters from which the idea of America was drawn. Wallace’s work rejects “goal-directed” philosophies of human happiness, both because they isolate the self (the pursuit of happiness is a pursuit we undertake alone) and because this Western obsession with happiness as a goal makes people childishly “pain-averse,” allergic to the one quality that is, in Wallace’s view, the true constant of human life: “Look at utilitarianism . . . 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 . . . ” His stories repel the idea that a just society can come from the contract made between self-interested or egoistic individuals, or that it is one’s “personhood” that guarantees one a bigger slice of the pie. (The fat poet’s talents or personal merits can’t make him more worthy than anyone else.)

And in a few extreme cases, Wallace’s stories go further, lining up behind a quasi-mystic such as Weil, who, like the Buddhists, abandons “Personhood” entirely: “What is sacred in a human being is the impersonal in him. . . . Our personality is the part of us which belongs to error and sin. The whole effort of the mystic has always been to become such that there is no part left in his soul to say ‘I’.”
⁹⁰
Consequently, the statement
You have no right to hurt me
is to Weil meaningless, for rights are a concept that attaches to “personhood” and one person can always feel their “rights” to be more rightful that another’s.
What you are doing to me is not just
—this, for Weil, is the correct and sacred phrase. “The spirit of justice and truth is nothing else,” she writes, “but a certain kind of attention, which is pure love.”

Isn’t it exactly
this
“certain kind of attention” that Wallace explores in B.I. #20 (sometimes known as The Granola Cruncher)? It is the darkest story in the collection,
⁹¹
and it has an extreme setup, even by Wallace’s standards: a hippie girl, viciously raped by a psychopath, decides to create, in the middle of the act, a “soul connection” with her rapist because she “believes that sufficient love and focus can penetrate even psychosis and evil.” In the process she is able to forget herself, and focus on
his
misery—even to feel pity for him. But this all happened some time ago: when the story opens we are being retold it as an anecdote by a man who has himself heard it as anecdote:

New Haven? A recently graduated Yalie, perhaps. Definitely overeducated, supercilious, and full, initially, of bombastic opinions about the girl, whom he picked up at a festival as a “strictly one night objective,” because she had a sexy body (“Her face was a bit strange”) and because he thought it would be easy. She’s an open book to him—he feels he can read her easily:

She is an object on which to exert his superiority. A body from which his own body will take its pleasure. In the event, though, her strange postcoital anecdote unnerves and destabilizes him: she tells her story of extraordinary focus
with
extraordinary focus and he (like one of Henry James’s ideal readers) finds his own fine awareness stimulated by hers:

But there is something chilling in both his modes of processing her experience. First it is “televisual cliché”; then something so unexpectedly real he becomes desirous of her precisely
because
of it, seeing, perhaps, in her realness, a way of becoming real himself. But when did the real become unexpected? When did we become so inured to the real that it gathered around it this strange
aura
? In the age of mechanical reproduction, prophesized Walter Benjamin, a painting such as the
Mona Lisa
will lose its aura: the more cheap postcards we make of her, the more she will disappear. But he was wrong—it turned out the erotic logic of capital worked the other way around. Her authentic aura increased. So what happens to the authentic aura of, say, “fear” when you’ve seen a thousand women scream on TV? Wallace’s answer is frightening: we’re so deadened by the flat televisual repetition of all our human emotions, we have begun to fetishize “real” feelings,
especially
real pain. It’s as if we’ve stopped believing in reality—only extremity can make us feel again. And here is extremity, and the man suddenly
feels.
He is there with her, in her moment of “soul-connection.” So are we. “Have you ever heard of
the couvade
?” he asks his therapist, and in the usual nonresponse we become aware of this story’s triplicate act of empathy: ours for the girl via the man’s anecdote, his for the girl via
her
anecdote, the girl’s for the rapist via the experience itself. In the couvade, a man feels his wife’s pregnancy: a porous border. In this story, several borders feel porous at once. The man is able to feel the “fathomless sadness” of the rapist; we, as readers, aggressively challenged by the very setup (a woman
pities
her rapist?), begin by sharing the skepticism of the Yalie, but as we move toward him, he moves away from us to a place where he is capable of believing her. The anecdote has created a force field of fine awareness around it. Through the man’s attempts to appropriate it, and our own need to judge it, Wallace manages to create a sense of its sacred otherness. Evidence of one woman’s capacity for the L word, perhaps, but not something we can turn to our own devices, not a story we can own.

The Granola Cruncher is one of the few people in
Brief Interviews
not using another person as an example or as an object or as a piece of “moral gymnastic equipment.” She exists in a quite different moral realm from the manipulator who uses his deformed arm, his “flipper,” as bait to “catch” sympathetic women who then sleep with him, or the guy who twists Viktor Frankl’s holocaust memoir,
Man’s Search for Meaning,
into a perverse apologia for destroying another human being. (Frankl’s therapeutic school, logotherapy, explores the idea that selves in an extreme state of personal degradation or loss are often better able to comprehend what is really meaningful. But this, of course, does not mean you create a second holocaust in order to generate meaning.) Most of Wallace’s people refuse, even for a moment, to give up the self. They have been taught “that a self is something you just have,” like you have a car, or a house, or a bank account. But selves are not consumer items, and the journey to becoming “a fucking human being” is one that lasts as long as our lives: “The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. . . . Our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.” Those quotes are from a talk Wallace gave on Franz Kafka, another writer for whom he felt a deep affinity. Their connection is not obvious at the level of sentence but their deep currents run parallel: the attachment to parables, the horror of the self in its fullness (think of the cipher Georg dashing from his charismatic father in “The Judgment,” vaulting over that bridge), the dream of self-less-ness. And despite their attempts to root themselves in “relationships between persons” they both expressed a longing for the infinite, which is nothing and is nowhere and is endless. Throughout this essay, which I began writing when Wallace was alive, I have defined that longing as purely philosophical—events have shown this to be wishful thinking on my part. The story “Suicide as a Sort of Present” now inevitably resonates beyond itself, but it is also the same story it always was: a reminder that there exist desperate souls who feel that their nonexistence, in the literal sense, would be a gift to those around them. We must assume that David was one of them.

In the end, the truly sublime and frightening moments in
Brief Interviews
do not involve families joshing each other in Italian restaurants. When he offers his readers generous, healthy interpersonal relations as a route out of “the postmodern trap,” well, that’s the responsible moral philosopher in him. But the real mystery and magic lies in those quasi-mystical moments, portraits of extreme focus and total relinquishment. We might feel more comfortable calling this “meditation,” but I believe the right word is in fact
prayer.
What else is the man in “Think” doing when he falls on his knees and puts his hands together? What is the Granola Cruncher doing as the psychopath moves on top of her? What is the boy in “Forever Overhead” doing just before he dives? It’s true that this is prayer unmoored, without its usual object, God, but it is still focused, self-forgetful, and moving in an outward direction toward the unfathomable (which the mystic will argue
is
God). It is the L word, at work in the world. Wallace understood better than most that for the secular among us, art has become our best last hope of undergoing this experience.

“Church Not Made with Hands” is a gift of this kind. It is
about
extreme focus and it
requires
extreme focus. In its climactic scene, a priest kneels praying in front of a picture of himself praying, which feels like the ultimate DFW image, as DeLillo’s most-photographed barn holds within it something of the essential DeLillo. “Church Not Made with Hands” is my favorite gift in a book laden with them. I think that must be why I’m loathe to take it apart as I have the others. More than any other story in
Brief Interviews
it seals its doors tightly and the joy for each reader will come in finding the keys that fit the locks—and who’s to say your keys you will be the same as mine? Still, here are a few of mine, in case you feel like picking them up.