The David Foster Wallace Experience

My purpose in grabbing "Consider the Lobster, And Other Essays" off the sale rack was to see if I'd be into this whole thing and willing to tackle "Infinite Jest" (a considerable investment) at some point in the near future.  Thanks to snippets of hearsay, I'd always been intimidated by Foster Wallace's writing and presumed it was exceedingly cerebral, etc etc.  But he's actually funny!  See:

This is probably the place for your SNOOT reviewer openly to concede that a certain number of traditional prescriptive rules really are stupid and the people who insist on them ... are that very most contemptible and dangerous kind of SNOOT, the SNOOT Who Is Wrong.
(p.100, Authority and American Usage)

Though the above-cited funniness is buried in the midst of one of the denser essays.  There were two particularly brilliant essays:  "Up, Simba" and "Host" that I will enthusiastically endorse to anyone who will listen to me.

In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about.
(p.187, Up, Simba)

... The single biggest reason why left-wing talk radio experiments ... are not likely to succeed, at least not on a national level, is that their potential audience is just not dissatisfied enough with today's mainstream news sources to feel that they have to patronize a special type of media to get the unbiased truth.
(p.316, Host)

It's these moments of  'WHY, YES!' clarity, combined with weird humor and amazing linguistic gymnastics ("Dostoevskynalia") that made me fall in love with David Foster Wallace.  And he writes like this about everything!  Lobsters, Kafka, 9/11, the dictionary, porn, whatever!  The total high of gleefully connecting with a new author is countered in this case with the fact that he's dead now and I missed all his book talks and I really feel that no one else is currently writing like this.  Some parts of Dave Eggers, Franzen at the end of "The Corrections" maybe, and definitely not Jonathan Safran Foer.

Well.  Looking forward to settling in with "Infinite Jest" at least.

Ebert & Didion

(Pet peeve:  being unable to find a library book that is allegedly on the shelf.  If I had a nickel for every time this has happened to me, I'd be able to cover all my overdue charges.)

Read Roger Ebert's autobiography "Life Itself" and Joan Didion's "After Henry."  I've been an Ebert fan since I started reading his reviews in the local newspaper years ago, and he has a fantastic blog here:  Roger Ebert's Journal.  Joan Didion I kept hearing about because of her now-popular "Year of Magical Thinking" -- a book that I have no interest in reading.  I wasn't able to get my hands on "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" (see above pet peeve), thus a second-rate settling.  

Didion does this thing where she leaves out certain punctuation, so it's a tad difficult to separate phrases and distracting when I need to reread a sentence several times.  Aside from that, I got a hoot out of her political essays.  Who knew 1988 was repeating itself this very year?  She quotes a NYTimes article: "Mr. Dukakis is no longer the candidate of 'inevitability' but the candidate of order" (p.79).  Mitt Romney, anyone?  I also loved her perspective on Bush the first: "That George Bush might have thrived in Texas not in spite of being but precisely because he was a member of the Northeastern elite was a shading that had no part in the narrative" (p.68).  Also mostly this (p.113-114):

I remembered each other member of this class as older and wiser than I had hope of ever being ... not only older and wiser but more experienced, more independent, more interesting, more possessed of an exotic past: marriages and the breaking up of marriages, money and the lack of it, sex and politics and the Adriatic seen at dawn: not only the stuff of grown-up life itself but, more poignantly to me at the time, the very stuff that might be transubstituted into five short stories.

Exactly how I felt the first time I sat down in Contemporary Drama at college.  And would probably still feel if I plopped down at particular workshops/salons/cafes today, even if I happen to see the Adriatic at dawn.  I am perpetually in awe of people with exotic experiences, real or perceived.

Ebert was great for introducing Sherman Paul and Studs Terkel (starting "Will the Circle be Unbroken?").  And if I ever get around to Milton, I'm to look up George Williamson from the University of Chicago.  Ebert is also a big Werner Herzog fan, and reading this made me want to go rent out every single Herzog movie.  Random fact:  Roger Ebert wrote "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" -- WHAT? 

From "Life Itself," the passage I enjoyed the most was actually cited from another of his books, "Two Weeks in the Midday Sun":

Suddenly I was filled with an enormous happiness, such a feeling as comes not even once a year, and focused all my attention inward on a momentous feeling of joy, on the sense that in this moment everything is in harmony.  I sat very still.  I was alone at a table in a square where no one I knew was likely to come, in a land where I did not speak the language, in a place where, for the moment, I could not be found.

Lost in Translation: Barnes & Noble Edition

I finally plodded through the last couple chapters of "Dead Souls" by Gogol, wondering why every few pages an editor would note that portions of the manuscript were missing.  Turns out the entire Book II of Dead Souls was so bad that Gogol tried to burn all of it.  I don't blame him.  Later in his life, with the success of Book I hanging over him, Gogol became somewhat of a religious fanatic and wanted to write a second part that would show Tchichikov's moral redemption.  However, as Nabokov notes in "Lectures on Russian Literature": "Tchichikov's swindles are but the phantoms and parodies of crime, so that no 'real' retribution is possible without a distortion of the whole idea" (p.53).  Thus Book II ends up being an exercise in bland preaching, rather than a lively continuation of Book I.

Side note:  What the heck is with these Russian writers and bizarre end-of-life manias?  Dostoevsky had gambling, Tolstoy wanted to become a wandering ascetic, and now Gogol.

In paging back through the book (which I had started more than two months ago, yikes), a bunch of "haha" and "lol" notes popped out from the margins to remind me that yes, Book I was entertaining.  Gogol has a knack for disrupting the author-reader wall and commenting directly on his characters as real people:

It is no great matter to the reader whether Tchichikov is angry with him or not, but an author ought never under any circumstances to fall out with his hero--they have still to go a long way hand in hand together...

Nabokov points out the plethora of secondary, tertiary, and even one-sentence characters that pop out from metaphors and tangents: "I find pleasure in rounding up those peripheral characters that enliven the texture of its background."  People with ridiculous names like Sysoy Pafnutevich and Makdonald Karlovitch.  "Not only people, but things too indulge in these nomenclatorial orgies."  This emphasis on characters, description, and linguistic agility reminds me of Cormac McCarthy's "Suttree"; no explicitly profound ideas, but a masterpiece of the language. Which brings me to the translation issue ...

YUCK!  Frown of disapproval for the Barnes & Noble edition as translated by Constance Garnett.  To illustrate, here's a final passage from Book I, with Nabokov's translation of the same:

B&N: "The ringing of the bells melts into music; the air, torn to shreds, whirs and rushes like the wind, everything there is on earth is flying by, and the other states and nations, with looks askance, make way for her and draw aside."

Nabokov: "The middle bell trills out in a dream its liquid soliloquy; the roaring air is torn to pieces and becomes Wind; all things on earth fly by and other nations and states gaze askance as they step aside and give her the right of way."

Bottom line is, look into what's the best translation before embarking on another Russian book.  Or any foreign-language book.

On Digging Deeper, Or Not

In regard to allusions and whether or not it's worthwhile to "understand" them:

NY Times: Grand Allusion

“If a poem catches a student’s interest at all, he or she should damned well be able to look up an unfamiliar word in the dictionary. . . . You can see what a nasty teacher I must be — but I do think students get lazier and lazier & expect to have everything done for them.” Bishop saw in her students’ resistance evidence of a bias against knowledge in favor of feeling: “They mostly seem to think that poetry — to read or to write — is a snap — one just has to feel..."

Bell Jars and Bildungsroman

This is a bell jar, and bildungsroman does not in fact refer to roman architecture but to a coming-of-age story.

In retrospect, I must not have had a typical literature class in high school because I didn't read "Pillars of the Earth," or "Catcher in the Rye," or "The Bell Jar". But it's well-known that Sylvia Plath is the novelist who killed herself by sticking her head in an oven.

Howard Moss argues (on Illness and Disclosure) that this makes a impure approach to the novel inevitable; you read it in the context of the author's situation, as an autobiography (though Plath admitted as much). It's interesting to compare Plath with Virginia Woolf, who also committed suicide--drowning--but whose literary merits overshadow her tragic/dramatic end. In Plath's case, it seems more like her death inspires curiosity about her work.

"The Bell Jar" is all about identity -- who is Esther? A coming-of-age novel about a woman in the late 1950s is bound to involve conflicting identities, and Plath takes it to the extreme. The book's been compared to "Catcher in the Rye" but really it's more like Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" where "women have their identity primarily through relationship to a man" (Bonds). Esther is powerless to act on her desires against the stifling norms of society (Wagner), and her subsequent madness has echoes of the Victorian "hysterics". The sense of entrapment which leads to her suicide attempt is darkly similar to Edna's end in "The Awakening", quoted here:

The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her, who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul's slavery for the rest of her days. But she knew a way to elude them.

And this was in 1899, so it's ridiculous that these exact feelings are mirrored so closely more than 50 years later (and probably even today in some quarters).

Esther tries on various identities and friendships but finds herself more and more isolated. Much of the literary criticism on "The Bell Jar" mentions psuedo-psychiatrist R. D. Laing, whose work on "The Divided Self" explores the inner self vs outer self. We all have public masks, but Esther's is extreme to the point of insanity. I enjoyed this essay on Esther's identity crisis, specifically the idea that Dr. Nolan's character is the "anti-model" that forces her to become herself rather than adapt another insufficient role model. Going back to Laing, he viewed mental illness as a social issue instead of a biological one, since the self is always defined by others (i.e., I am what my friends see me as, and I am also what my neighbor sees me as, and I am also what the stranger on the street sees me as, etc.). This is very Foucault-ian. That being said, according to Foucault there is no such thing as individuality, so there would only be a false resolution (you only think you're not letting others define you).

This brought up the idea of something called ontological security, which is a person's sense of order and continuity in life -- the ability to give meaning to your life. Basically, Esther doesn't have this. Ontological security can be threatened by death, but if it's lacking to begin with then perhaps death isn't so scary and it might even be a welcome escape in Esther's case. This and the quote "the world itself is the bad dream" reminded me (again) of Kirsten Dunst's character in the movie "Melancholia" (so hey, I guess a woman's sense of entrapment/depression continues in the modern era).

Personally, I didn't feel that "The Bell Jar" spoke to me as it apparently did for teenager girls in the 60s-70s. As for coming-of-age novels, I adored "Catcher in the Rye" back in my younger teens. Salinger's style of writing is so much more real to me -- and maybe because I didn't study it and missed half the metaphors, I wanted to cry when I read:

And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.