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Miscellaneous, Week 1
The Author’s Forward and the truth in fiction
04.28.11 | Genno Kane | Permalink | 1 Comment

What gets me about David Foster Wallace is how he gets into your head: “That’s what I was thinking! Only better. OK, that’s what I thought about thinking. Make that ‘had a thought that could have led to, given a very generous estimation of my intellectual horsepower.’ ” A concept that seems to be crying out for a word of its own, no? Partception, maybe? Dimtuition? Anyway.

My favorite part of The Pale King so far is the Author’s Forward. I’m a sucker for fiction that messes with your head about the relationships among authors, characters and readers — two of my favorite novels are Don Quixote and Pale Fire. If I were smarter, I probably could write a whole post about the fact that the author’s “forward” purports to starts on page 79 of the narrative but in fact appears on page 62. (#inyourfacemetafiction) (#Iknowyoudon’tblogwithhashtags #andbutwhynot)

But it’s Wallace, so, of course, nested in this thing that very pleasantly messes with your head is something that insists on very pleasantly messing with the thing that just messed with your head: his (or “David Wallace’s,” or his by means of the character “David Wallace,” or the author’s as “the author’s” — #stopme #fortheloveofGod) decision not only to tell you that what you’re reading is a “memoir,” but to discuss with you his motives for writing it as a “memoir,” and what that says about truth, fiction and you.

Take this passage:

“One disadvantage of addressing you here directly and in person in the cultural present of 2005 is the fact that as both you and I know, there is no longer any kind of clear line between personal and public, or rather between private vs. performative. Among obvious examples are web logs, reality television, cell-phone cameras, chat rooms … not to mention the dramatically increased popularity of the memoir as a literary genre.”

First things first: I enjoy reading people’s accounts of their lives as much as much as does the next person who hasn’t had the life of say, Malcolm X. I also understand the place of the lyrical, meditative little memoir that doesn’t change the course of world events but stays with you; as far as I can tell, it helps to be French if you want to write this sort of thing (#jenesaisquoi). And I totally get the democratic appeal of the idea that everyone has a story to tell, a life that deserves attention. The New York Times Book Review can declare that the fact “that you had parents and a childhood does not of itself qualify you to write a memoir,” and I might want to put that on a T-shirt, but I can’t dismiss people feeling touched or helped by others’ experiences precisely because they aren’t extraordinary.

I can even appreciate the place _ a place I picture like the literary equivalent of a cunningly laid out studio apartment _ of “memoirs” in which the writer has the premise, and maybe even the advance, before the experience (#premoirs). I’ve got no inherent beef with people setting out to spend a year in Botswana/skydiving school/the lotos position/a basement listening to P-Funk so they can write about it. All I’d ask of them is the same question I’d ask of virtually any book: Is this an unusual, important or interesting story that tells a truth about life, and is this the best way to tell it?

Obviously, the idea that a memoir is guaranteeing you a truth about life has been exploded into a million little pieces. (There’s a litany of famous fudgers, dating back centuries, in this excellent New Yorker review of a history of the memoir genre.) It’s worth noting that James Frey has said he couldn’t get a publisher for “A Million Little Pieces” when he pitched it as fiction, so it was recast as a memoir — a (#presumably) true story about the publishing game that is stranger than fiction, indeed. Frey would eventually say he plumped up his actual experiences because he “wanted the stories in the book to ebb and flow, to have dramatic arcs, to have the tension that all great stories require.” Then there’s the intriguing, and tragic, theme that runs through the remarks of several memoirists caught faking: that the life story they made up was the one they wanted to believe or even convinced themselves was true.

So, for what it’s worth, I don’t think Wallace is really trying to get us to accept the Author’s Forward as an entirely “true” story. I think he’s trying to use the device of “truth” to make a point about the enduring ability of fiction to illuminate the truths that life doesn’t quite live up to. (A better way to put this, courtesy of rock singer-songwriter Stew: “Life is a mistake that only art can correct.”)

Consider that The Pale King is all about attention and making conscious choices about directing it. And that the Author’s Forward is certainly an attention-grabber, abruptly blurring the borders between “personal and public, personal and public, or rather between private vs. performative” even as it’s describing them. It seems to me he’s saying that even readers of a book about paying attention could stand to be conscious about where they’re paying it, on what terms and why.
Week 1
When you were inside them; they ceased to be clouds at all
04.27.11 | Aaron Riccio | Permalink | Comment?

If we are what we eat, then we are also what we read (or devour, in the case of David Foster Wallace), and so it is that §1, which only seems to be a simple (but rich) list of descriptions, dictates what we can expect of The Pale King, and what we can expect The Pale King to do to us. This opening is a shell-game of perspectives, far more than “coins of sunlight” sparkling on a “tobacco-brown river.” It is, almost immediately, a series of contradictions, for while it is a “very old land” shaped with “quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs,” it is also a place with a singular moment in which “an arrow of starlings [fire] from the windbreak’s thatch,” and a place newly anointed with “dew that stays where it is and steams all day.” It is an “untilled” place, but it is processed enough to look like “flannel plains.”

The ground from above is “blacktop graphs,” the sky from below is “ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow” (and thereby the two never touch). From where you stand (note the second-person intrusion, the reader joining the author), things are defined and definite: “insects all business all the time.” And yet, down the road from where you find “Your shoes’ brand incised in the dew,” we have the unshaped: “The horizon trembling, shapeless.” In a moment, we will join Claude Sylvanshine en-route to Peoria via plane (§2); we shall then eavesdrop on two GS-9s in their “mindless monochrome drive up to Region HQ in Joliet” (§3); catch up on some IRS-related news (§4); flashback with Leonard Stecyk (§5), Lane A. Dean Jr. (§6), and Thomas Bondurant (§7); sit for a spell in a trailer park with Toni Ware and her mother “abroad again in endless night” (§8); and catch up with “the real author, the living human holding the pencil, not some abstract narrative persona” (§9), and in this notably un-annular way, we will stress the kicker of that opening paragraph, which states that for all that we may see, experience, or be, “We are all of us brothers.”

Anything can happen when we play with perspective in this fashion: the worms baked (and then unbaked) in the earth each day will constantly make new shapes in the ground; the “core accounting equation A = L + E can be dissolved and reshuffled into everything from E = A – L to beyond.” The word “illiterate,” repeated with the frequency of a oscillating propeller, can cease to mean anything and yet still be lovely in itself. So as we travel, let us pay closer attention to the things we do share in common with one another — the worms themselves, and not the shapes they temporarily make up — and consider the twins of entertainment and boredom that we so often use in casual conversation to connect us. Let old stalwarts like “How ’bout them Yankees?” or “Lovely weather today, no?” give way to the underlying mindlessness they represent in our “safe” interactions; as Wallace puts it: “The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not” and “The whole ball game was perspective, filtering, the choice of perception’s objects.”

So what is it that we all have in common? What it is that Wallace wants to show us as he moves from the aerial overview to a slow decent (“mainly a heightening of the specificity of what lay below”) toward a parking lot, “Each car not only parked by a different human individual but conceived, designed, assembled from parts each one of which was designed and made, transported, sold, financed, purchased, and insured by human standards, each with life stories and self-concepts that all fit together into a larger pattern of facts.” If it is the anxiety that comes with being unable to recognize ourselves (or ourselves in others, thereby leading to distrust), then let us listen to these fears; let us see them and in seeing them, be unafraid.

The unnamed GS-9 makes me worried that others will not understand me. Frederick Blumquist makes me worried that no-one will notice that I am gone. Leonard Stecyk makes me worried that I will never be good enough, and worried that, in realizing this, I will never really try to be good enough. Lane A. Dean Jr. makes me worried that I am not a good person, simply because I worry that I may not be a good person. (He worries that “He might not even know his own heart or be able to read and know himself.”) Additionally, worried that I, who have only rarely been in love, might have “no earthly idea what love is.” Worried that, like Toni Ware, I have become so accustomed to life the way it is that I have limited myself from what might or should be. Worried, like Sylvanshine, that man is nothing more than “the exact pocket of space that he displaces,” and terrified, like Wallace, that there is “some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us (whether or not we’re consciously aware of it) spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least feeling with our full attention.” But hopeful, too, in that we are all brothers, and that there is more than mere distraction. That as I stand here, in the dew-stricken pasture, affirming that everything is affixed, there lies change — or the potential for change — down the horizon, where none of us can entirely see.
Week 1
Cheery Slo-Mo
04.27.11 | Craig Smith | Permalink | Comment?

It goes without saying the difficulty in discussing a book that the author had not the opportunity to edit, or finish. Reading §9 was harrowing – he seems so optimistic, over-explaining what he considers a finished text, on the shelves, bought (he hopes) and enjoyed. But what a joy it was to read this chapter and hear DFW’s voice clear and straight.

Much of the book so far appears to have been aligned with Oblivion, both in terms of style and of content. Before The Pale King was published there were discussions about how the story The Soul Is Not A Smithy described a world with similar considerations to this novel. I think this is especially true after reading what we have read so far – besides the obvious content comparisons, §5 (‘this boy who dons the bright-orange bandolier’; pp. 29) carried the tone of this story quite closely, Leonard and Cuffie the dog appearing to face similar destinys.

To keep on with the Oblivion theme, Good Old Neon and §9 certainly appear to share the same voice, the David Wallace character, speaking of memories we can’t be sure of, motivations that break away from our immediate impressions (‘I, like so many other Americans, have suffered reverses in the volatile economy of the last few years’; pp. 81) and, considering how personal Good Old Neon felt at the time and the subsequent passing of DFW, it feels very significant that he would risk ‘cute, self-referential paradoxes’ and ‘some kind of clever metafictional titty-pincher’ [pp. 67] to have his voice resound in the novel in this way.

It must be said just how much of a joy it has been to read the first §9 and feel the exhilaration of DFW’s prose again – the beautiful nature references,

‘the panoramic vista…old-coin gray and so remarkably flat that it was as if the earth here had been stamped on with some cosmic boot’ (pp. 24)

‘the sun overhead like a peephole into hell’s own self-consuming heart’ (pp. 56)

the post-traumatic moments of being human,

‘the child’s mouth wide open and eyes looking up at the man with the camera in trust that this made sense, this was how right life occurred’ (pp.62)

‘going home to a woman who treated him like an uninteresting stranger’ (pp.45)

and the fun that can occur when language meets life

‘ – a BLOWOUT BASH – in balloon-shaped font as the caption to an illustrated explosion of good cheer and -will and no-holds-barred-let-out-all-stops FUN’ (pp. 33)

And how.

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April 2011

Posts

Miscellaneous, Week 1

The Author’s Forward and the truth in fiction

Week 1

When you were inside them; they ceased to be clouds at all

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