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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The more you know, the greater either your malevolence or, more likely, your despair; even Socrates' maxim has become a curse. The narrator of "Good Old Neon" (another ad man) is smothering in self-awareness. "My whole life I've been a fraud," he announces, relating a history of triumphs, each one curdled by his consciousness that "all I've ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people." Admitting as much to a psychoanalyst only leads him to further spasms of self-loathing: "My confession of being a fraud and of having wasted time sparring with him over the previous weeks in order to manipulate him into seeing me as exceptional and insightful had itself been kind of manipulative."
This dilemma, in which every layer of self-knowledge is nested inside yet another layer that scrutinizes it mercilessly for inauthenticity, is a Wallace trademark. When, not surprisingly, these contortions drive the narrator of "Good Old Neon" to suicide, he is revealed to be a childhood acquaintance of "David Wallace," and the story itself an effort to imagine his inner life on the part of Wallace, who has recently "emerged from years of literally indescribable war against himself." This, of course, suggests that all of "Good Old Neon" is merely Wallace's solipsistic effort to attribute his own miseries to a man who might have killed himself for entirely other reasons.
It's easy to conclude that the suicide speaks for Wallace earlier on, when he ruminates on the inability of language to convey "the most important impressions and thoughts in a person's life" because "what goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant."
This is what Wallace has tried to do in much of his fiction, using footnotes (which his dimmer critics have interpreted as mere postmodern smart-alecking) or, in these stories, parentheses and brackets. He wants to show how a great web of inchoate feelings and trains of thought and immanent understandings of multiple situations is operating in any person at any point in time. The breadth of human consciousness can never be squeezed through the narrow aperture offered by one word at a time without distortion or oversimplification or, basically, the expenditure of lots and lots of "English." "It's interesting," says the narrator of "Good Old Neon," "if you really think about it, how clumsy and laborious it seems to be to convey even the smallest thing."
But don't assume that conveying such truths is the point of Wallace's prolixity, with all its deliberate clumsiness and overt laboring. (Perhaps it never was, or perhaps it just isn't anymore.) The proliferating sentences in "Oblivion," spinning off in tendrils of subjunctive clauses and multi-line parentheticals and often extending over several pages, are like the metastasizing digressions of the narrator of "The Soul Is Not a Smithy." He claims to be setting the record straight on a violent episode from his childhood, in which he and three classmates were allegedly held hostage by a deranged substitute teacher. He never quite gets to it, so preoccupied does he become with describing the preoccupations that distracted him from the event when it was happening. The story that he was imagining at the time (visualizing it in the panes of the schoolroom window as if they were panels in a comic book) is a pathos-drenched domestic saga of a blind girl and her lost dog, but it is stained with the boy's inklings of his own father's wretchedness, and perhaps that of the teacher as well.
