by
Jon Baskin
View all notes
[...] Psychoanalytically speaking, the best literary works will be characterized in part by their bearing a message for their reader that is "unspeakable"; that this message is hiding in plain sight does not make it any easier to decipher.
Toril Moi, in her essay "Nothing Is Hidden", identifies this difference between the kind of criticism practiced by many in her academic discipline and philosophically therapeutic criticism: whereas the suspicious literary theorist presumes that the "text is hiding something from us," she writes, the Cavell/Wittgenstein critic presumes that "the problem is in me, in us". In other words, the artwork's value comes from showing readers something about themselves. [...]
he goes on to explain what he sees as the job of the therapeutic critic: not only to account for what is important about the work but also why readers might have missed it
At the same time that Hal's speech indicates his philosophical intelligence, it suggests the failure of philosophy to help him, therapeutically speaking. If it represents a graduate student's defense of his humanity, it also signals the poverty of the version of humanity being defended. If we as readers initially fail to see this poverty, I would propose it is because we share it.
[...] The opening scene stages the very common modern confrontation between an individual who identifies his most precious self with his inner "feelings and beliefs" and a society that treats that human being like an automaton, "bred for a function." The confrontation, Wallace suggests, is mutually reinforcing. The harder the inward-facing individual bumps up against this alienating society (it is symptomatic that as Hal gets more and more uncomfortable, one of the administrators gives the great modern-bureaucratic excuse that they are just "doing our jobs"), the farther he is encouraged to retreat from it, until there can hardly be any communication betwen what the individual conceives of as his essential self nad society at all. [...]
IJ
[...] it is not only by emphasizing simplicity and sincerity that Wallace's AA plays its central role in Infinite Jest's philosophical therapy; it is rather by advancing a picture of thought, and of philosophy, that will seem unfamiliar and perhaps initially banal to most of his readers. The idea is not to install belief in AA, or in anything else, but rather to expose the confusions and limitations of the picture of thinking to which many of Wallace's readers and characters already subscribe. Wallace uses AA not to introduce his readers to a new model of belief but to bring them to consciousness about what they already believe.
[...] The stillness and enclosedness of the poet's environment reflects an inner condition of decadent self-satisfaction, which Wallace depicts as stagnant or lifeless. Iannis Goerlandt says that "one of the points the story makes is that the end lies in this stasis, not in death itself." The story's title, "Death Is Not the End," is most naturally taken as referring to the artist's desire for immortality through art. But it is precisely this desire, Wallace implies, that causes death to come before the end. Paradoxically, the artist's desire to stand apart and transcend finitude or death will lead him to create dead or lifeless art; after all, there is only one way - as Cavell would say - to escape the human.
A solution to this problem might seem to be to deny that the judgment of others has anything to do with who we are or what we mean - that is, to decisively privilege our "inner" selves over the self that we expose to the public. But this option, sometimes associated with romanticism or modernism in the arts, is connected in Brief Interviews to the temptation to remain "forever overhead," like the decadently isolated writer in "Death Is Not the End" or the boy poised on the edge of the diving board. [...]
responding to the conundrum posed in "radically condensed history of postindustrial life"
[...] Brief Interviews presents many characters seeking to secure victory over skepticism and thereby over their dependence on other people and on the external world - a view from "forever overhead," as it were. In criticzing this aspiration - a criticism carried out not through analysis but via a representation of its practical and moral consequences - Wallace encourages just such an endless refusal of victory. [...]
I was reading a biography of Pugin. Architecture
was how Pugin avoided God.
This much is evident. When he slipped out at night
to drift down to the water he was a smoke.
He did not look up at the moon. We can be sure
that any bargain he made was intentional
especially those he bound in straps made of snow.
Yes. I think it was a response to my environment—to being misunderstood and feeling that the environment of my family was promulgating a version of life that I was at odds with and that I didn’t agree with. I think my earliest question was, Is my version the right one? Or am I wrong? Very early on I came to see writing as a place where truth could be gotten at, but also where the truth could be defended. The fact that it could be written down—said—where it could not be said, at least not by me, in the reality of my home, created a very powerful sense of duality in me.