I laugh out loud at that notion, expressed by Michiko Kakutani, reviewing the new collection "Both Flesh and Not."
Meade asks me what's so funny, I explain, and he cites "too many notes":
"Just cut a few, and it'll be perfect!"
Back to "Both Flesh and Not" — which I just downloaded into my Kindle app. The title seems to grind into our heads that Wallace is not flesh anymore, having hung himself. Anticipating the first or second comment to this post will point that out, I'm pointing it out along with all the references to suicide that appear in the book. There are 4:
1. "What if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite everyone’s best efforts, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of terrible suicidal attack that a democratic republic cannot 100 percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting? Is this thought experiment monstrous?"
2. "It’s not just that there are [in 'Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture: A Novel of Mathematical Obsession'] long and irrelevant footnotes on, e.g., Gödel’s method of suicide, Poincaré’s theory of the unconscious, or the novel properties of the number 1,729.25." [Gödel’s method was refusing all food for a month, under the delusion his doctors were trying to poison him, which doesn't really sound like suicide, unless you believe "suicide" does not mean self-murder. ]
3 & 4. "... [Edwin] Williamson sometimes presents Borges’s stories and poems as 'evidence' that he was in emotional extremities. Williamson’s claim, for instance, that in 1934, 'after his definitive rejection by Norah Lange, Borges… came to the brink of killing himself' is based entirely on two tiny pieces of contemporaneous fiction in which the protagonists struggle with suicide. Not only is this a bizarre way to read and reason — was the Flaubert who wrote Madame Bovary eo ipso suicidal?— but Williamson seems to believe that it licenses him to make all sorts of dubious, humiliating claims about Borges’s interior life: '"The Cyclical Night," which he published in La Nación on October 6, reveals him to be in the throes of an acute personal crisis'; 'In the extracts from this unfinished poem… we can see that the reason for wishing to commit suicide was literary failure, stemming ultimately from sexual self-doubt.' Bluck."
ADDDED; I only searched for "suicide," and, reading the book, I encounter "suicidally" -- a self-regarding "suicidally" -- and the premise of my 4-point list, above, is radically undermined.
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16 comments:
Poor Jeffery Jones....caught making underage explicit photos...sex offender for life....not good for a film career.
"Well, there it is..."
A beautiful mind.
Ahh, you cut the best line. "Which notes did you have in mind?"
But writing is not composing. Wallace's work could benefit from a little pruning.
At least we won't have to read anymore of his inane fiction.
All the insane require for their art is to be appreciated while they kill themselves and the hordes rise in applause for their effort.
Tim,
What words or lines or paragraphs should be cut from Wallace's writing?
According to Wallace, "fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being", and he expressed a desire to write "morally passionate, passionately moral fiction" that could help readers "become less alone inside".
WTF, no wonder he was a depressive that killed himself.
"hanged"
Ann had drank before she wrote "hung."
thanks so much for the DFW post - and the great Bob Dylan insane "how'd you be come a star" interview... I continue to think (and think you may also) that DFW's demise had everything to do with mental illness and much less connection to the value of his work. And that it's not great that there's so much mining of the work for suicidality... it's a convenient dodge, for me, to do that rather than confront the tough critique of our culture and lives and the call for brave awareness that fills the books. (at whatever length).
I pruned it all.
no wonder he was a depressive
OK, I don't know this guy from spit, and I've never read anything that he ever wrote, and whenever anyone has mentioned him my response has been "David who?", but merely based upon his short Wikipedia bio and quote therein -- "The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't...." -- he was not a depressive. He was a nihilist. An existential-nihilist.
And the common consequence of that is depression, concluding that because life supposedly has no intrinsic meaning, it is meaningless, and then killing oneself.
Bender, everything you wrote is baloney. The line came from a graduation speech which is the opposite of nihilistic.
Thanks for the link to the entire speech. Unfortunately, it rather confirms my conclusion more than it detracts from it.
He said that the mystical stuff of "compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things" is not necessarily true. Then he says you "get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't," in effect saying that you get to choose what is true or not.
Indeed, far from "compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things" being an inherent truth, he says that the "default setting" for human beings is that they are obnoxiously self-centered. Human beings are not good and decent as a matter of their inherent nature and, hence, they have no instrinsic worth and meaning, there is no per se sacredness to human life, much less a transcendent reality to life beyond this world. "The capital-T Truth is about life before death." Rather, in order to have any good meaning, in order to want to make it "to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head," the human being must choose to create some good meaning in life, and we have to make ourselves see the good in others.
Basically what he says is that human life is inherently self-centered crap. And that belief that human life is devoid of any instrinsic good is essentially a nihilistic thought. So it is not at all suprising, thinking this way, that one would fall into despair and want to toss life into the trashbin.
The fact is most people are not Mozart, and thus could use with a bit of judicious preening in their work.
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