1. On one of the early pages of Infinite Jest, Wallace uses the old-fashioned word “twitter”.32 This of course triggered a number of jokes in the forums (and on Twitter, of course) that DFW had even predicted social networking. Ha ha.
Except today I’m not so sure he didn’t.
2. There is an almost unbearable (for the author) amount of time between the day the manuscript is “finished” and the day it is published. I’m not sure when Wallace handed in the complete manuscript to Little Brown, but with a book as big as Infinite Jest–both in terms of heft and hype–you could easily expect a couple of birthdays to pass through the edits and the copyedits and the sales efforts and the marketing push. This period can be pretty anxious for writers, and one of the fears that can obsess a novelist during this time is that some part of his book he thinks particularly clever or original is going to be preempted by a similar plot or character or conceit in another book, film, or TV show. Or real life, even. When you spend years working on the same project everything about it, no matter how innovative, begins to feel obvious and banal to you. If you hear an author pull out that old cliché about worrying he’ll be “exposed as a fraud” it’s a good bet somebody interviewed him after he could no longer make changes to a manuscript but before his novel had actually been published.
3. I was reading the Madame Psychosis section and this bit caused me to stop for a sec:
There’s no telling what’ll be up on a given night. If there’s one even remotely consistent theme it’s maybe film and film-cartridges. Early and (mostly Italian) neorealist and (mostly German) expressionist celluloid film. Never New Wave. Thumbs-up on Peterson/Broughton and Dali/ Buñuel and -down on Deren/Hammid. Passionate about Antonioni’s slower stuff and some Russian guy named Tarkovsky. Sometimes Ozu and Bresson. Odd affection for the hoary dramaturgy of one Sir Herbert Tree. Bizarre Kaelesque admiration for goremeisters Peckinpah, De Palma, Tarantino. Positively poisonous on the subject of Fellini’s 8 1/2. Exceptionally conversant w/r/t avant-garde celluloid and avant- and apres-garde digital cartridges, anti-confluential cinema, Brutalism, Found Drama, etc.
I thought, rather casually, “How did Tarantino get in there?”
Not because he doesn’t belong. In 2009 (or in the Y.D.A.U.) you would nod at that reference without giving it a thought. But when Pulp Fiction came out in the fall of 1994, Infinite Jest was less than 18 months away from publication, and the manuscript had to have been more or less complete. Before the sensation of that film, Tarantino was certainly on many lists of young directors to watch, but he wasn’t on anybody’s auteur radar yet.
So I’m assuming Tarantino’s name was probably a late addition to the manuscript. Probably no more meaningful than Wallace wanting his references to be as updated as possible. 33
4. I’m not exactly sure what Wallace thought of Tarantino, but shortly after the publication of Infinite Jest, Wallace wrote a profile of film director David Lynch. 34 I remember reading it at the time (and especially DFW’s hilarious rant about his personal dislike for the actor Balthazar Getty) because I’m a big Lynch fan. In it Wallace talks about the unacknowledged debt Tarantino owes to Lynch.
Tarantino has made as much of a career out of ripping off Lynch as he has out of converting French New Wave film into commercially palatable U.S. paste….In a way, what Tarantino has done with the French New Wave and with Lynch is what Pat Boone did with rhythm and blues: He’s found (ingeniously) a way to take what is ragged and distinctive and menacing about their work and homogenize it, churn it until it’s smooth and cool and hygienic enough for mass consumption. Reservoir Dogs, for example, with its comically banal lunch chatter, creepily otiose code names, and intrusive soundtrack of campy pop from decades past, is a Lynch movie made commercial, i.e., fast, linear, and with what was idiosyncratically surreal now made fashionably (i.e., “hiply”) surreal….Or consider the granddaddy of in-your-ribs Blue Velvet references: the scene in Reservoir Dogs in which Michael Madsen, dancing to a cheesy ’70s Top 40 tune, cuts off a hostage’s ear-I mean, think about it.]
So maybe he didn’t like him much. Actually, beyond these comments I don’t know what DFW thought of Tarantino, but the general critical rap against QT–that the excessive violence in his films celebrates nihilism and that the infinitely reflexive references to other movies, while fun, tend to elevate the trivial–would seem to be right in the crosshairs of Infinite Jest. The following is Wallace speaking about IJ in an interview with Bookworm’s Michael Silverblatt, also from 1996:
“So far it seems as if people think it really is sort of a book about drug addiction and recovery and, you know, intentional fallacies notwithstanding, what was really going on in my head was something more general like what you were talking about before, that there is a kind — that some of the sadness that it seems to me kind of infuses the culture right now has to do with this loss of purpose or organizing principles, something you’re willing to give yourself away to, basically. And that the addictive impulse, which is very much kind of in the cultural air right now, is interesting and powerful only because it’s a kind of obvious distortion of kind of a religious impulse or an impulse to be part of something bigger. And, you know, the stuff at the academy is kind of weird because, yeah, it’s very high-tech and it’s very “become technically better so you can achieve x, y, and z,” but also the guy who essentially runs the academy now is a fascist, and, whether it comes out or not, he’s really the only one there who to me is saying anything that’s even remotely non-horrifying, except it is horrifying because he’s a fascist. And part of the whole — part of the stuff that was rattling around in my head when I was doing this is that it seems to me that one of the scary things about sort of the nihilism of contemporary culture is that we’re really setting ourselves up for fascism. Because as we empty more and more kind of values, motivating principles, spiritual principles, almost, out of the culture, we’re creating a hunger that eventually is going to drive us to the sort of state where we may accept fascism just because — you know, the nice thing about fascists is they’ll tell you what to think, they’ll tell you what to do–they’ll tell you what’s important.”
I happen to love Tarantino, so I could be part of the problem. Which brings me to
5. The front page of this morning’s35 Chicago Trib business section is almost entirely dedicated to the story of Dave Carroll, who wrote a song about how a United Airlines baggage handler broke the neck of his guitar. Carroll posted a video on YouTube and thanks to Twitter and Facebook almost 3 million people have watched it in just a couple weeks and now United is donating a few grand in his name to charity. Certainly I’m happy for the dude. The song is pretty catchy and yay for the little guy striking a blow to humongous indifferent corporations. But airlines break shit all the time.36 One of them lost my kid’s car seat over the Fourth. This can’t be the most important business story of the day. And it’s not just this story because if I were writing this next Tuesday it would be some other online obsession of the week sprawled all over Page One and I would have already forgotten about this guy’s guitar. More and more news reporting seems to be increasingly Twitter- and Facebook-based. I’m not talking about protesters Tweeting from Iran, which is actually newsworthy, but it’s Ashton vs. CNNBRK, and an Australian TV network says Jeff Goldblum is dead because somebody tweeted it and oh my Demi got fooled by that rumor too, and look this homely British person is a surprisingly good singer, and in yet another section of today’s actual paper–the actual newsy news section even–there’s a story about lifestreamers (or lifecasters) as well as a woman who spends seven hours a day on social networking sites, a woman so addicted to social networking that she wants to Twitter as she walks down the aisle at her wedding and the more we Twitter the more the actual news is about how much we’re all Twittering, and when I think about how much time we (me too) spend on this stuff and how much of the shared experience of our culture is just completely disposable and pointless it really does make me sad and at just that moment I’m reading this book and I also come across that interview and what he says strikes me as just so true it makes my stomach hurt.
6. I don’t mean this to be an anti social networking rant. It’s not these particular tools that are to blame. If anything they are newfangled thermometers that are helping to measure our fever. I’m grateful that Facebook allows me to stay in touch with people who were once very important in my life and who would otherwise be completely absent. And I find Twitter to be incredibly useful. I was captivated with it during the Iranian protests and had great fun a few months ago using Twitter to follow the Edgar Awards37 in real time. Even this project would not be anything like what it is without Facebook and Twitter especially, and if I understand the success of Infinite Summer correctly it is about the desire of a group of people to have a shared, cultural experience that is actually kind of meaningful. There really is a void there and because we fill it too often with shit that is just disposable and endlessly self-referential and auto-deleting the maw constantly needs feeding.
The problem is not the seductive addiction of social networks or the laziness of the news media but the deepening cultural void Wallace identified 13 years ago. And right now I’m grateful that this particular book feels big enough to temporarily fill the hole.
At least until August 21 when Inglorious Basterds comes out.
Comments
44 responses to “I Pushed My Soul in a Deep Dark Hole and I Followed It In”
“The more we Twitter the more the actual news is about how much we’re all Twittering.”
Love it — this is so true and it’s one of those positive-feedback-loop phenomena that Wallace seemed so fascinated with. Cf., for instance, Cage III: Free Show in IJ, where you’ve got this endless recursive loop of people turning into eyeballs as they watch others being degraded and people being degraded as they watch others turning into eyeballs. It seems so frighteningly relevant to the “Broadcast yourself”/”What are you doing?” insanity of YouTube, Twitter and the like.
5. I know it seems trivial as far as newsworthy reports go, but it was a $1,200 instrument that he uses as his principal income generator. The airlines also admitted that they mistreated his luggage but refused to reimburse him. After 6 months of communiques from managers and directors and lackeys, he finally got fed up and vented via video. I think the results are quite impressive, and just shows to go you that some platforms such as Twitter or any other easily-spread communication hive can really get you some great results.
Agreed. I’m not saying it’s not a good cocktail party story. Or that the guitar wasn’t important to him or that his experience wasn’t frustrating. I’m just saying it’s not an important story, unless United was so moved by the song they aren’t going to lose our bags anymore. The particular example of Dave Carroll is sort of beside the point. My problem is we keep hearing a version of this same kind of story touted every single week as if the fact that someone can call attention to himself on the internet is as important as the banking crisis. And it’s not. We love to take things of no consequence and treat them as if they are the most important subject in the world until the next thing of no consequence comes along and we forget about the last thing, which has to check itself into rehab because being treated like the most important thing in the world for six days and then being almost instantly forgotten is kind of traumatic. Meanwhile things of great consequence are being largely ignored by all of us, probably because they are hard. And so the things of great consequence will be decided for us while we aren’t paying attention, if I can take the argument into vague, hyperbolic territory before running completely out of steam.
Eric, I think your post puts the guitar story in the proper perspective. I just don’t think the high priority the media (or even the self-congratulating hive) gives it is quite as rational.
Don’t have much to add but: agreed.
Yes, it is true what he says.
I wonder what causes this cultural void, as you call it. I think that is a hard question to answer, both for real life and for IJ.
Maybe he doesn’t explain the cause in IJ, just the symptoms.
Is it entertainment that causes it or do we turn to entertainment because of it (in IJ).
I think maybe Twitter and Facebook make it worse. But I see those things as adding something new and horrible on top of the things said that IJ is about in that quote. He says we are missing something to believe in but he doesn’t say we stop literally attending to other humans. There’s a bit of this in IJ because it started with TV. Emotionally, people are out of touch with each other. But if anything, the fact our relationships are being mediated or sidelined by these mediums is even worse. So I guess it’s gotten even worse.
It’s weird to read this. I was kinda worried about fascism for awhile. But I don’t think fascism comes from the absence of something to believe in. Not political fascism. I think the biggest danger of fascism in the U.S. would come from a drastic drop in our living standards or extreme disruption–e.g., if terrorists attacked the U.S. in way that truly terrified a sufficient number of people. Fascism doesn’t rise in empty vacuums, not usually. It’s usually a reaction to events.
Just checking in to see what condition my condition is in.
Wallace covers many of these same themes in his essay “E unibus pluram: television and U.S. fiction”. It’s available at: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-5495526_ITM
Complete PDF available here: http://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf
Had no idea about that Lynch article, and as a HUGE Lynch nut, you’ve just made my day.
Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs came out in ’92, was a critical and commercial success (if not a hit), and was notorious for the torture scene mentioned above. So I don’t think it need necessarily be true that the Tarantino reference was a late addition.
I agree with Lee Capps. While Pulp Fiction sent Tarantino’s career into the stratosphere, Tarantino was already a well-regarded director just on the strength of Reservoir Dogs. It’s pretty clear DFW was well read/well informed on film theory, so it’s not beyond the realm of possibility he was either influenced by the critical acclaim Reservoir Dogs had received…or perhaps he was just being ironic…or indeed, prescient about Tarantino’s future as a respected (at least in some quarters) as a fine director.
You all got to this before me. I can remember seeing Reservoir Dogs a week or so after it cam out because word of mouth was so strong. I don’t know if he was publicly working on Pulp Fiction at the time of IJ’s writing, but I would speculate that the wunderkind syndrome that Reservoir Dogs tagged Tarantino with was enough to get DFW to include him. I also can’t decide if it was a dig or a kudos to include him.
I think it was recognition of what “Reservoir Dogs” actually is. Wallace points to him as a “goremeister” and, well, that pretty aptly describes Tarantino’s work. Goremeister with an arty aesthetic.
On the topic of the self-referentiality of new media: I learned today that Facebook has a Twitter. I don’t know that I can conceive of anything that more fully embodies the recursive social zeitgeist.
a- and Twitter has a Facebook page! Fractal!
Facebook sure would have helped assuage JOI’s father’s fear of never being seen. Or you know, exacerbated it, more likely. I see some parallels between the way people consciously (mis)represent themelves on the internet and the folks in IJ who ordered Optimistically Misrepresentational Masking and Transmittable Tableau for their videophones. It’s like a totally biased selective mirror! And who can look away from the mirror once they start?
Today’s Boston Globe has an editorial on a similar topic: How legitimate news organizations are using blog comments as sources and muddying the line separating news and opinion: If You’ve Got a Comment, Keep it to Yourself”
the next time someone gives me a hard time for not having any f*cking idea who “jon & kate” are, i’m pretty sure i’m directing them to this post.
In fairness to Tarantino, though I’ve no particularly strong opinions about the man either way, the scene referred to above from Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” always reminded me of the “Singing in the Rain” scene from “A Clockwork Orange.” So, let’s not go too far in claiming Lynch was any more above repeating a scene he liked than any other director.
“Even this project would not be anything like what it is without Facebook and Twitter especially, and if I understand the success of Infinite Summer correctly it is about the desire of a group of people to have a shared, cultural experience that is actually kind of meaningful. There really is a void there and because we fill it too often with shit that is just disposable and endlessly self-referential and auto-deleting the maw constantly needs feeding.”
Bravo.
In a way we could see this coming a long time ago, when pictures of body bags returning from Vietnam on the evening news were juxtaposed, in the most jarring and tasteless fashion, with an advertisement for the latest consumer miracle product.Technology has just put the whole process into hyper-drive, while allowing for the “democratization” of the broadcast media and content generation businesses to make us all complicit.
I don’t think there has ever been a time in human history when the momentous and the mundane weren’t locked in each others embrace. After the most vicious attack by Mongol hordes, whoever was left alive eventually had to go back to attending the everyday. To me, the sadness and emptiness that DFW was on to stems from the fact that we have simultaneously lost any sense of a shared communal structure to help us compartmentalize the sacred and the profane. Whether or not this is a direct result of our “cult of the individual” and rabid pluralism is debatable. But the fact remains that we have become balkanized, with various islands of “value systems” rubbing up against one another, often in contentious and superficial ways, and without a unifying definition of that which is deserving real Worship. Infinite Jest seems to me to be presenting us with an unholy litany of pathetic attempts to fill that void. Everything from political cults to substances abuse to the ultimate “entertainment”
I couldn’t agree more with Kevin’s insightful and articulate commentary, and it is most certainly worth reflecting on both the hugely positive phenomenon of Infinite Summer, as well as what precisely it’s viral success says about the
void at the center of many good and intelligent people’s lives.
Just as a small addendum: I don’t mean to suggest that anyone who is getting into infinite summer by definition has a void at the center of their life!!There are obviously a million different reasons to be involved, and degrees of interest etc. Hope you all will give me the benefit of the doubt on that one. (From amateurhackwritersmuddlingalong.com)
Don’t have footnotes with me, so paraphrase… What are the chances that you’re the one in a million who didn’t need to be here?
In the same interview with Michael Silverblatt, Mr. Wallace spoke about the purpose of fiction and art. When he was in his 20’s he thought the purpose of fiction was to show the smarts of the author. As of 1996 he only knew that it had to with lonliness and connecting with others. He was saddened by the state of things in the 90’s and I got the impression he meant that he was missing some of the way things were in the decades that preceded it.
I know exactly how he feels, probably because my birthday is only a few months after his. We are/were the group of folks born between two very dissimilar generations. We are/were too young to be baby boomers and too old to feel completely at home with the Gen X crowd. I’m schizophrenic in my values and wants. Half the time I yearn for the emotional exhilaration of revolution, change, escape from dogma. Happiness comes from self-acceptance and the freedom to live without being controlled by others. Other times I want to surround myself with objects that give my life quality, stability and make it interesting. And I’m willing to work hard and spend hard to do it.
He drops all kinds of reminders of both worlds––his reference to Pierre Trudeau comes to mind. I’m not sure if he’s referring to all the birds that man flipped in front of the media or the lil’ pirouette behind the Queen’s back, but that was outrageous behavior for a head of state in the 70’s. Trudeaumania stood for the youthful rejection of authority from the “cause I said so” regime. Then in the same section he’ll give us the Dove bar, which for those old enough to remember was one of the first overpriced, indulgent products brought on the market for the ordinary consumer. At +$2 a piece, it was a crazy marketing concept. Nobody would pay that much for a ice cream bar, even if was made out of better than usual ingredients. But times, they were a changin’ and it caught on and became representative of the next generation’s lifestyle.
There is no right or wrong. The ideal is probably to pay attention to both kinds of joy. It’s hard being stuck in the middle though, like a cartoon character with one foot on each of two objects, slowly migrating apart. I think he was constantly addressing this feeling with the mismatched mosaic of small references, both nostalgic and progressive.
And maybe he would have thought Twitter and Facebook reconcile the two?
It seems to me that the sections with Schtitt and Marathe explore the themes of the book with the least obfuscation. Also, pay big attention to the JOI filmography; much linkage there. Revisit it often. The Anti-Confluential movement indeed…
Our culture has for some time been circling down a rabbit hole and rapidly approaching the point at which nothing is important, and so, by definition, everything is important. And once everything has become significant, there is no significance to anything.
I especially want to talk about the reference to fascism in the Bookworm interview that was linked to. To a certain extent, he is condoning a fascist character as sane, then warning against the threat of fascism after. I thought of his comment about American culture as zen koan on page 350 [no spoilers, promise] a section which describes AA and the 12-step process, referring specifically to the cliches associated with the movement. The text seems to present them both as koan-like mantras and as fascist commands. The fascism of AA is further exemplified by the command to submit to a higher power: “…it doesn’t yet matter what you believe or don’t believe, Just Do It they say…” [from pg. 350] though the tenets of AA certainly aid in their fascist command of the diseased individual.
Favorite post yet – thanks. I’ve often thought IJ was filled with desperate and lonely people searching for meaning. Personally I think Facebook and Twitter help more than they hurt, especially in the long run. The point of the YouTube and Twitter news stories isn’t that they’re more important than the banking crisis. It’s that for the first time a little bit of the real power is shifting to the people rather than governments and corporations. We’re a long way from home, but I believe we’ll get there. An when the people have the power to shape and participate in the world around them, they’ll have more meaning.
Zach, I haven’t gotten as far in the reading as you, but I think Wallace’s point is not to “condone” a fascist character so much as to suggest that fascism so often succeeds because it fulfills a universal human need. The fact that most of us also find fascism morally reprehensible is an irony I don’t think Wallace claims to have an answer for.
I’m not sure Wallace would agree that ceding to a higher power is necessarily fascistic (although insisting that someone else do so probably is). Again I’m not as far along, but I’m glad to have these thoughts in mind when I get there.
Also, I love that my fellow Quarantinos will come out in force at such small provocation. I still find it unlikely that Wallace would have bestowed academic immortality on Tarantino based only on Reservoir Dogs, but I will happily concede the possibility in the interest of QT nation harmony.
I don’t know. Reservoir Dogs seems like as sure a bet for film-geek immortality as Venus Williams in 1996. When he was writing the novel, she was barely in the big show, yet he cites her in the opening Year of Glad pages.
@ ZACH AND KEVIN:
I’m really glad you picked up on this. I’ve long puzzled over Wallace’s comments about Tavis being the only guy who’s saying stuff that’s non-horrifying; but it is horrifying because he’s a fascist. Perhaps my first mistake was equating Tavis with “the guy who’s running the place.” But I’ve got to assume Wallace means Tavis.
But what does Tavis say that makes him a fascist? Maybe I don’t understand the term. I’d call Tavis manipulatively pathologically honest, but I don’t see how that’s fascist. Tavis has this other side where he gets real quiet and real still and doesn’t take any shit and is frightening. But again, I don’t see how that’s fascist.
Anyway, I’d love some clarity on this.
As to the fascism that I do understand as fascism, I believe one could point quite clearly to the Disease as the novel’s primary operating fascist. The Disease coerces and controls and removes freedom; it takes over and destroys lives. Who knows what’s “in it” for the Disease, if indeed it is an outside entity; but it clearly seeks to dominate and destroy. And it is relentless. (One fun little AA quote: “Your disease is always Out There doing push-ups.” Although, it’s /IJ/’s metaphor of the Disease as a spider in your brain that really gives me the chills.)
The irony you and Kevin already pointed out is that AA employs fascist-type language and structures (12-Steps!) in the service of freeing the Disease’s victims from their addictive cages; in away freeing them from themselves. Erich Fromm made much of this in /Escape From Freedom/. So maybe that’s the koan: The Disease promises freedom and instead returns bondage; AA offers what seems like bondage and instead returns freedom.
One last thought, if I may, circling back to the Disease. What’s in it for the Disease? What benefit does it gain from capturing and demolishing human wills? I don’t have an answer, but in DFW’s “David Lynch Loses His Head” article that Kevin mentioned, DFW has a bit toward the end where he describes evil as something that “wears” various characters in “Blue Velvet” (and I always think of Frank shouting “I’ll f*** anything that moves!” and looking evil and then disappearing). Evil wears people. (I’m thinking here of Frank fondling the piece of velvet in the bar and crying while Dorothy sings. So he’s not a fundamentally bad person. He and Jeffrey aren’t all that different.)
At any rate, this idea of Evil Wearing People — not quite demonic possession, but also not quite free will — has got me reading /IJ/ through a very interesting lens this go-around.
Isn’t Schtitt the proto-fascist? While Charles ‘CT’ Tavis is the administrative boss of Enfield, Schtitt runs the tennis training side of the school, if I remember correctly.
Schtitt makes a lot more sense, Dutchguy. Thank you!
Is every kind of unfreedom fascist? There are so many ways we can lose our freedom. It stretches the meaning of the word ‘fascist’ to me to think that any kind of voluntary or involuntary embrace of something all-consuming (like Substances) or highly structured (AA) is fascism.
Then: Buddhism is fascism, gambling addiction is fascism, etc.
But I guess the word fascism is used so much maybe we’ll just have to come up with a new word.
DO NOT FOR ANY REASON GO ON TWITTER. You are 100% right about the internet and facebook and Twitter. Stay away from Twitter! If it is not too late, stay away!
It’s not just that it is socially isolating in the usual terrible internet way. It’s that it also the ultimate in short attention span thinking. And hugely addictive.
Oh God, I also forgot to say, Matt Evans, that I loved your comment and really thank you for reminding me of the ‘wearing evil’ thing. I read that article while I was waiting for IJ to arrive in the mail. And I never saw that.
It’s so brilliant and I’ll be thinking about it for a long time. So thanks.
That’s well said, Matt. I think Wallace (in the interviews and in the book) is suggesting that in order to defeat this “fascism” you need to replace it with something less destructive that somehow fulfills the same need.
Also, I think (somebody more knowledgeable please correct me if I’m wrong) but the “fascist running the academy” Wallace refers to is Schtitt, if for no other reason than his idiosyncrasies are right out of Hogan’s Heroes..
But wait. Hasn’t *everything* been made better by Obama’s election? Doesn’t everyone agree that we’re all on the edge of a renaissance of sorts? Twitter is the ultimate solipsism … but c’mon. Look at the bigger picture!
Dead on. I agree that the twitter/blog hyper-reality that has come to define our age promotes exactly the kind of alienation that DFW captures the mood of so brilliantly in IJ.
The other day, I was pondering over DFW’s use of acronyms in the novel. More specifically, I was pondering whether the acronym-frenzy serves a more profound function than simply satirizing how government/corporate/media’s usage of acronyms has become almost hyperbolic. I remembered how frustrated I was in the beginning that DFW used ONAN as an acronym before explaining what the four letters represented, and I realized that maybe this was an intentional ploy on the author’s part to make me, as a reader, feel alone in a world whose lingo had evolved so quickly that I couldn’t keep up. I held myself to the standard of the characters’ facility in acronym-ese, and didn’t consider the possibility that other readers might be having trouble keeping it all straight. Anomie!!
And twitter.* More anomie! It seems that twitter creates a constant need to dwell on one’s own public image in an inauthentic way. It’s as if we all suddenly become celebrities**, given license to obsess over how it looks if we go out for coffee versus beer versus ice cream. And somehow, this takes away from the purely private (and I’d argue, more genuine) experience of wanting coffee versus beer versus ice cream. To me, we are somehow more authentically defined by our thoughts, chosen recreations and preferences, etc., when we are not giving consideration to immediately broadcasting the things that we assume will define us in the minds of others. The fact that I am skeptical of what you’re telling me, via twitter, that you’re thinking, the fact that I will naturally doubt the authenticity of your thought-experience***, makes me feel less close to you as a human being. I’m not saying that this doesn’t happen in other spheres of life besides the internet; it’s just that the physical presence of another person reassures me that a human connection is there and is genuine. When a machine replaces a person, I can coldly psychoanalyze his/her motivations at a distance, and I no longer trust that the person who has been translated into words and pictures which have been translated into bits and pixels genuinely exists (or at least, not in the way that the profile announces). It seems like when an individual has had too much conscious agency in his/her own self-creation, he/she have given up a natural identity that results from just existing. And when I start thinking about this too much, anomie becomes solipsism, so I try not to. (Maybe I’ll get on twitter. I heard it’s very distracting.)
*I don’t know if all this is actually a theme in IJ, or if I’m just projecting onto the work my own socio-cultural dissatisfaction.
**And maybe philosophers like Hegel (puke) are right that a deep-seated desire to be recognized is at the core of human nature, that true democracy is found where everyone has an equal opportunity to feel like it matters to the world that they’re wearing yellow or are watching The Office or whatever.
***Because I’m thinking that you’re thinking about what I’ll think of you as you make the decision to encapsulate your thoughts in 140 characters or less. Or maybe I’m thinking that you’re actively combing your brain for interesting thoughts to present to the world as if they would have occurred to you naturally had you been without an audience. Cynical, I know.
Twitter’s great. Just use it as you feel comfortable. Don’t sign up to follow Demi or Ashton or Kanye or whoever (no-one’s forcing you to, which is a point a lot of critics miss), and just find some interesting people. Participate a lot or a little. Right now it’s at an interesting point: it has a critical mass, enough that it’s starting to sometimes affect things in the Real World (such as in Iran) but it’s still not totally ubiquitous, boring (1) and industrialized. To me, there’s a kind of “what next?” feeling about it. How this all relates to DFW or IJ I dunno.
(1) Some may disagree (a).
(a) and some already do: bit.ly/YZFye
Twitter is just like blogging. It is thinking for public consumption.
But then is this really different from writing novels. I think what the internet does it create an insane immediacy. I don’t think the worst thing about it is that you want someone to read what you wrote.
The 140 characters is also like blogging in the sense that some people have a genuine talent for this form.
That said, Twitter is evil.
A 140-character limit requires discipline. If u want 2 say more than “OMFG Hal just colapsed lol” you have to read and refine until it fits.
I read IJ for the first time last winter and into the spring, after learning of DFW’s death. So I’m not reading along per se, but am following IS as a recent reader. That being said–IJ made a big impression on me, but I’m not sure I loved it. I think any book that is so full of what may be termed “social commentary” is going to be an ambivalent experience for me. I’m not sure that’s what I want out of my fiction. But anyway.
One of the reasons for my ambivalence is that I feel the social commentary is oftentimes based on a fallacy: that our time is uniquely damaged in ways that other times were not. This has also been referred to as the “golden age” fallacy — that there was a previous time when everything was better. I just am not sure I agree with this. Example: people decrying the downfall of civilization because of something like Twitter. Yes, it’s trivial and narcissistic. But was there a time in the past when people connected in a much more vital, profound way? I don’t think so. Okay, maybe they talked face to face instead of screen to screen, but I would wager that the conversation in the fields or the scullery was not any more profound. And maybe less so. In the past, people were often forced to relate to everything in terms of the dominant religion. It isn’t that hard to imagine how much more oppressive that would be.
I guess what I’m saying is that much of IJ’s social criticism is filtered through the eyes of a depressed person. A more optimistic view could focus on our freedoms, our diversity, our relative prosperity, our relative lack of illness compared to 500 years ago when the average lifespan was probably 30.
Like I say, IJ made a big impression on me. But I’m not sure I loved it. It is very revealing what DFW said about the purpose of fiction being to show of the author’s smarts. He implied that he had moved beyond that. But a lot of times when I read him, I feel like when I’m sitting in a meeting, and one of the underling clients says, “Can I be the first to say what I don’t like about this idea?”
Just some thoughts…
I agree. I think it is easy to be nostalgic for a time that never existed. But I’m not sure Wallace is saying that this condition is peculiar to our time. Indeed I think he would say its hard-wired.
I think it’s possible we’re making Twitter into something of a straw man here. I’m the one who brought it up, but my point wasn’t to blame Twitter (which I’m actually a fan of) for anything. I just think examining our relationship with it is one more diagnostic tool to identify the human ailment Wallace describes.