by
Matt Bucher
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This idea, that by being self-conscious about the way one observes and describes the everyday— the concrete and virtual environments of late 20th-century consumer capitalist society might constitute an ethical process is a long way from Lukács's idea that the only valid kind of fiction is that which recreates in narrative form the movement and action of social change. However, it is an idea that is central to understanding Wallace's descriptions and his fictional project in general. Rather than aiming to change the material conditions of that society (or to show in fiction the action of that change), in Wallace's fiction, the inner drama of the observer and how it relates to external reality actually constitutes those material conditions. Importantly, this is true not only of subjective characters and narrators within Wallace's fiction, but of the reader as well, who must negotiate the complex and richly layered nature of his descriptions.
certainly somewhat different from my own project but maybe relevant to what im trying to do with luke's arc
Thompson addresses Wallace's markings in his copy of Tolstoy's What Is Art? that highlight a passage in which Tolstoy says: "but [art] is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity."3l Thompson writes that this represents what Wallace sought to bring about in his own culture as a way to counteract its "solipsism and loneliness" through art. [...]
Against epiphany's overuse in the contemporary short story landscape, as well as its logic of "personal fulfillment," I broadly suggest that in his short fiction Wallace consistently seeks to shed the epiphany of the calcification and stagnation it's come to have in short fiction, redeploying it as a radical site of connection between author and reader. In reimagining the epiphany concept as a space to interrogate his own readers' capacity for feeling or emotional clarity, Wallace's short fiction comes to challenge not only the solipsism of the more popular domestic or psychological fiction in which the epiphany concept is most commonly applied. [...]
ahhh hmmm
[...] Whether one choose maximalist cleverness of minimalist epiphany-mongering, the deadening result, that lack of "something real," remains the same. If truly meaningful fiction, as Wallace suggests to McCaffery, "locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness," and if fiction's great promise is to reveal our lingering capacity despite all our invitations to solipsism to still be able to make "genuine connections," then the banal commonness of the epiphanic mode "perverts the giving, helps render what is supposed to be a revelation a transaction." [...]
[...] Ultimately, what these asides hint at is the wholly transformative power of the epiphany to come, the one that will make Jeni "a very different person," one who will presumably no longer be subject to the obsessive narcissism of the young wife, her attempts at caring for her husband only flimsy masks for her own intensely navel-gazing self-interest. Only after her epiphany will she be able to look back "on the towering self-absorption of her naivete in those years" with "a mixture of contempt and compassion for the utter child she had been."
on adult world
In his book on Dostoevsky, Bakhtin wrote that "character interests Dostoevsky as a specific point of view on the world and on himself. As a semantic and evaluative position on himself and on the reality that surrounds him": this view of character, which goes beyond the notion of a container of a list of traits, may provide an interesting key to explore how Wallace's formal and linguistic choices, most notably, the interplay of focalization and narrating instances and the employment of deixis, reveal his way of staging the semantic (and evaluative) skeleton of being in the postindustrial world he and his characters live in; the focus on these choices in which follows is not narratological for its own sake but - hopefully - paves the way for a deeper understanding of readers' experiencing Wallace's text and their own being in the world.
Looking down made something go easier in Danny. When he first came to New York, he and his friends tried to find a name for the relationship they craved between themselves and the universe. But the English language came up short: perspective, vision, knowledge, wisdom—those words were all too heavy or too light. So Danny and his friends made up a name: alto. True alto worked two ways: you saw but also you could be seen, you knew and were known. Two-way recognition. Standing on the castle wall, Danny felt alto—the word was still with him after all these years, even though the friends were long gone. Grown up, probably.
Danny used to get a weird feeling, overhearing this stuff when he came in the house and his mom was talking on the phone to one of his aunts about Howie. Dirt on his cleats after winning a game, his girlfriend Shannon Shank, who had the best tits on the pom squad and maybe the whole school all set to give him a blow job in his bedroom because she always did that when he won, and thank God he won a lot. Hiya, Mom. That square of purple blue almost night outside the kitchen window. Shit, it hurt Danny to remember this stuff, the smell of his mom’s tuna casserole. He’d liked hearing those things about Howie because it reminded him of who he was, Danny King, suchagoodboy, that’s what everyone said and what they’d always said but still Danny liked hearing it again, knowing it again. He couldn’t hear it enough.
not super interested in the content of the paragraph itself except for that purple blue imagery
But that wasn’t Danny’s line, that was Howie’s. He was heading into memory number two, I might as well tell you that straight up, because how I’m supposed to get him in and out of all these memories in a smooth way so nobody notices all the coming and going I don’t know. Rafe went first with the flashlight, then Howie. Danny came last. They were all pretty punchy, Howie because his cousins had singled him out to sneak away from the picnic, Danny because there was no bigger thrill in the world than being Rafe’s partner in crime, and Rafe—well, the beautiful thing about Rafe was you never knew why he did anything.
this is the first time the narrator interjects i think
Bottom line: Danny didn’t know why he’d come all this way to Howie’s castle. Why did I take a writing class? I thought it was to get away from my roommate, Davis, but I’m starting to think there was another reason under that.
You? Who the hell are you? That’s what someone must be saying right about now. Well, I’m the guy talking. Someone’s always doing the talking, just a lot of times you don’t know who it is or what their reasons are. My teacher, Holly, told me that.
I started the class with a bad attitude. For the second meeting I wrote a story about a guy who fucks his writing teacher in a broom closet until the door flies open and all the brooms and mops and buckets come crashing out and their bare asses are shining in the light and they both get busted. It got a lot of laughs while I was reading it, but when I stopped reading the room went quiet.