by
Matt Bucher
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The difficulty of this task for the writer, explored in the interview with Larry McCaffery and in "E Unibus Pluram," is that it cannot succeed if the reader is passive, merely swept along by the story to a satisfying conclusion. Viewer passivity was the weapon of choice of corporate media, as Wallace saw it: "TV-type art's biggest hook is that it's figured out ways to reward passive spectation," by delivering the facsimile of a relationship without the work of a real relationship."
This is why he put such a premium on disrupting the flow of his text, to make readers aware that their work of decoding was being "mediated through a human consciousness." Frank Louis Cioffi identifies these techniques with Brecht's "alientation effects," in what is still the best analysis of the performative experience of reading one of Wallace's texts. The constant work of drawing the story together creates a "quirky, highly performative world with which the reader empathizes but from which she must also withdraw." This alienated engagement is not meant to be comfortable. The focus of Cioffi's essay is the thoroughly disturbing quality of Infinite Jest, where "scenes of exquisite horror and pain come in, as it were, under the radar, and hence make an enormous impact." [...]
[...] discomfort goes hand in hand with the therapy -- that the emotional response, in fact, is a sign the medicine is working. As Wallace's comments imply, a novel is therapeutic only to the extent it allows readers to see aspects of the world (particularly, of themselves) that they have resisted seeing -- a process that, by its nature, requires a lot of working through. This is why I reject the disempowering trope of the addicted reader [...] I have portrayed the reader as an active agent rather than the author's silent partner; if any reader steps away from a book with a changed understanding, this can only happen because that reader, rather than the author, has made the change. [...]
[...] Through encounters with character after character whose perspective has narrowed to an impossibly painful point, and through the search for a context that might redeem all that suffering, the act of reading the book becomes similar to one of the AA meetings it depicts -- through Identification and empathy, the reader can gain motivation to live a better alternative.
[...] Wallace argues that "part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering" so that we might "more easily conceive of others identifying with our own [suffering]." Second, he claims "a big part of real art fiction's job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us to first face what's dreadful, what we want to deny." Taken together, these observations suggest a dedication to empathy and receptiveness while also recognizing that pain is not just inexorable from them, but is a vital component of the discovery. [...]
mccaffery interview
[...] In his review of Adaptation, David Ulin argues for seeing Kaufman not as merely a screenplay writer but as a "great American writer ... [with] his mastery of structure, his voice and vision, his recognition of the power of the word to remake the world -- he stands with the finest writers of his generation, among them David Foster Wallace, Mona Simpson, [and] Michael Chabon." Similarly, Derek Hill, in his book about American New Wave cinema, describes Kaufman as "our pre-eminent explorer of anxiety-laden inner space, a cross between Franz Kafka and Woody Allen, with a pinch of Larry David, a dollop or two of Philip K. Dick, and a huge slathering of Samuel Beckett sprinkled with Jorge Luis Borges to top it off."
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In The Language of Pain, theorist David Biro muses about our impetus to turn inward and succumb to pain: "Pain," he explains, "silences us. So why bother trying to speak? Why not just close one's eyes ... and wait for it to pass? And for those who witness pain, why bother trying to break down the wall of private experience and attempt to share what cannot be shared?" In the pain-riddled worlds of Wallace and Kaufman, silence is undoubtedly tempting in the face of insurmountable suffering and loss. Trapped in the pain of their own melancholy, both Joel and #20 fall victim to the mistaken belief that, as Wallace discusses in his Kenyon College commencement speech, they are "the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence." So entrenched in their own needs and internal narratives about pain, Joel and #20 cannot see others as anything but mere shadows in the face of their own all-encompassing melancholy experience. [...]
[...] The Granola Cruncher, too, chooses to understand her story in her own terms. Refusing to yield to fear during and after a horrific, life-changing experience, she chooses to open herself to others despite the inevitability of pain. Although they face the very real threat of continued emotional and/or physical pain, both women resist the temptation to retreat inwards and remain willing to connect. Similarly, Wallace and Kaufman seek -- through their challenging literary and filmic texts that invite multiple readings or viewings -- to encourage the reader to do the same: to fight the urge to close one's eyes, and Biro describes, and succumb to the pain of melancholic loneliness. [...]
All the poor kids in South Pasadena lived in the Raymond Hill district. Immigrants and the POC who were not East Asian, because they also lived in the rich white areas. There were burglaries constantly, the sound of car alarms going off at all hours, police making their rounds at every odd hour. Everyone was wearing the wrong thing in this area — bad shorts and bad T-shirts, knockoff sneakers, budget gear. Everyone had bad haircuts, bad attitudes. All of us walked to and from school — this was an area for kids who had the keys to their house when they were still single digits, who barely knew their parents growing up because they worked so many jobs, who learned how to babysit when they were still babies as the siblings came in. This was the kind of area you wanted so badly to leave one day. It bred aspiration that way while the rest of South Pasadena was a wonderland everyone was a forever-citizen of; they all came back, but not the Raymond Hill kids, if we could help it. We were scared of the few white people who were our neighbors; anyone who was white who lived there had definitely done something extremely wrong in life. I made out with boys in their cars, made sure they parked uphill so my parents couldn’t somehow spy us from their bedroom window, worrying about why I was late. When it came time to leave, I went as far as possible, 3,000 miles away, and when I came back to visit, the greatest compliment I received was New York had really changed me.
[...] There were several male editors at RayGun who’d been fired from SPIN for sexual harassment, and they didn’t seem to have learned anything. But there was a power in being 19 and having so many eyes — especially their eyes — on me. I felt dangerous. I’d wear long, tight white club dresses and black platform sneakers with silver glitter face makeup — the kind of thing that would be a hit at a rave, but I felt fine wearing it to work. I made sure you could see through everything. What’s the worst that could happen? People thinking badly of me, people wanting me? It was 1997 and everything seemed mostly okay. One night my friend from high school and I went to a bar/club in L.A. called Louis XIV and an older French man took us to a private room where there were platters of coke. I had tried some at Sarah Lawrence, so it was with confidence that I took the rolled-up bill. Before the end of the night, we were with him and his friend in a dingy motel room — dingy but historic — the Saharan Motor Hotel on Sunset, which I’d always driven by and wondered about. He played music videos on a dying TV, rewinding Enrique Iglesias over and over, and eventually he began groping me. We managed to leave and laugh about it for days, zero trauma somehow, just another night where we’d skim danger but be fine. That summer, I thought I would have no future but I didn’t care because I was happy to be in that moment, the one time summer in L.A. felt good to me. Ever been so happy you wished you could die? I asked the VJ one day after he fucked me behind the Hollywood sign. He was almost my age now, and didn’t look at me when he said, Never.
I’ll start out Fanny Factoid then say it straight: L.A. is the most populous county in the nation; adjusted for the cost of housing we have the highest poverty rate; we’re the manufacturing capital of the US (used to be steel, now it’s tshirts and underpants and wut, u got a problem with that?); almost half the goods that arrive in this blighted and trinket-rich nation come through our two ports. If you want to know what the future looks like, and I mean its near-brutality, this is the place to live. Snow-capped mountains, citrus blossoms scenting the breeze, and scavenged train tracks with a bomb-blast of packaging materials for miles. Text me when you get to Union Station I’ll pick you up in front. — XOXO, Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room
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