Site Presented By
Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
In "Oblivion," Wallace's long arcs of prose and the narrative sidetracks are exposed not as tortuous strivings toward some hard-won truth but as an insulation that people spin between themselves and the sharp edges of their condition. Those readers who dislike Wallace's fiction (and unfortunately, quite a few of those who like it) see him as swanning around in the finery of his intelligence. Here, at least, he is wrestling it to the ground. What the eddying subplots and the satires of glossy magazine editors and the recipes for biotoxins and the mini-exegeses on statistical sampling and the meticulous portraits of Midwestern budget hotel chains do for the characters in these stories is provide a padding around the traumas at the stories' centers, which are always some form of mortification, in both old and recent senses of the word. Mortification -- of the body, the ego or the conscience -- is oblivion's opposite, a kind of tormented knowing that destroys all peace.
Only one story in "Oblivion" is a straightforward depiction of such mortification: the scalding of a toddler and his parents' anguished and inept efforts to rescue him. It is very short, and it's nearly unendurable. It is the thing itself. It ends with the child "having learned to leave himself and watch the whole rest unfold from a point overhead, and whatever was lost never thenceforth mattered, and the child's body expanded and walked about and drew pay and lived its life untenanted, a thing among things, its self's soul so much vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and down like a yoyo." The quote gives a sense of how Wallace might write if he were aiming for conventional beautiful prose (though other lines -- "the dream's bright room was death" and a description of a flock of starlings as they "spread and contract like a great flexing hand against the downtown sky" -- do that even better) instead of conjuring up the thickets of words and ideas and stories, awkward or artful, that people use to shield themselves from and to live with what happens in "Incarnations of Burned Children."
The collection's final story, "The Suffering Channel," presents two confrontations between culture and the raw facts of bodily existence. One is the titular channel, an outfit specializing in real footage of people in agony (physical and emotional), a concept so grotesque it seems both outlandish and likely to show up on your cable provider's menu in a year or two. The other is a man who uses his bowels to shape his feces into works of art; they emerge fully formed. Some critics have dismissed the latter as an unforgivable descent into potty humor, which to be fair is partly Wallace's fault although probably not his intention. (The characters find the "pieces" genuinely beautiful and meaningful; the story just isn't very successful at making that felt.)
Each of these creations is obscene, but why? Shit and pain, the bedrock unavoidability of both, are the stuff of life itself, after all. Culture, whether it's art or entertainment or the fiction of David Foster Wallace, can deal with both, but it can't, in any viable way, literally be either one. Instead, it's what we put between ourselves and those intolerable facts, the middle ground we make between mortification and oblivion.
