The philosophical underpinnings of David Foster Wallace's fiction. - By James Ryerson - Slate Magazine

David Foster Wallace reads David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress

"I am my world" is what Wallace had in mind when he spoke of "the loss of the whole external world" in the Tractatus. There is no difference, ultimately, for Wittgenstein between solipsism and realism (solipsism "coincides with pure realism," he writes). For Wallace, this was a harrowing equation, the dark emotional takeaway of the Tractatus's severe anti-metaphysics. This was also, for Wallace, what Markson had rendered imaginatively in his novel. Without ever raising these ideas explicitly, Markson had conveyed them with a special kind of clarity. Wittgenstein's Mistress, by echoing the Tractatus's brusque, dreamlike sentences and placing Kate in a cold, lonely, self-as-world cosmos, had managed, as Wallace put it, to "capture the flavor both of solipsism and of Wittgenstein." What's more, Wallace felt Markson had done something that even Wittgenstein hadn't been able to do: he humanized the intellectual problem, communicating "the consequences, for persons, of the practice of theory; the difference, say, between espousing 'solipsism' as a metaphysical 'position' & waking up one fine morning after a personal loss to find your grief apocalyptic, literally millennial, leaving you the last and only living thing on earth." That was something only fiction, not philosophy, could do.

Here Wallace not only finds the essence of storytelling but discovers the limits of logic. If you can explore your premise through example you rescue logic from inertness and humanize the narrative. The novel of ideas requires an energizing force - an emotional wallop - to make itself live in the imagination.

David Foster Wallace's Personal Files - Newsweek

The well-read DFW:

The archive also corrects Wallace’s reputation as one of the most abstruse of writers. Wallace’s notes to himself in Tolstoy’s essay “What Is Art?” strip back layers of received critical opinion and show a writer who is eager, above all, to connect. When Tolstoy throws down his decisive thunderbolt against art for aesthetics’ sake—“it is upon this capacity of man to receive another man’s expression of feeling and experience those feelings himself, that the activity of art is based”—Wallace underlines it emphatically, adding “Art as Empathy” in the margin (while the 9-year-old nods, somewhere, inside).

Chekhov's genius will always elude us | Dan Rebellato | Culture | guardian.co.uk

Chekhov as contemporary hero/obsession:

But also, I think, Chekhov is a mystery. There are some playwrights who are so busily present in their work that it's like you have the author beside you murmuring comments on the action. Chekhov is different; what does he think of his characters? Does he admire them or pity them? Ask us to examine or ridicule? It's never obvious. Chekhov's characters tend to let their mouths run away with them (Gayev in The Cherry Orchard fills a silence with an idiotic hymn of praise to a bookcase that, even as he's saying it, he must regret). It's almost as if Chekhov lets silences form in his play, which his characters nervously fill and thus reveal themselves.

I have not read him as deeply as I should have done by now. But the idea of silences interests me.

Coleridge "imagination and Fancy" - Literature Network Forums

A useful summary of Coleridge's theory of the imagination.

The distinction made by Coleridge between Fancy and the Imagination rested on the fact that Fancy was concerned with the mechanical operations of the mind, those which are responsible for the passive accumulation of data and the storage of such data in the memory. Imagination, on the other hand, described the "mysterious power," which extracted from such data, "hidden ideas and meaning." It also determined "the various operations of constructive and inventive genius."

Engell has demonstrated that Coleridge's division of the imagination into the "primary" and "secondary" draws a distinction between creative acts that are unconscious and those that are intentional and deliberate. "The Primary Imagination" was for Coleridge, the "necessary imagination" as it "automatically balances and fuses the innate capacities and powers of the mind with the external presence of the objective world that the mind receives through the senses." It represents man's ability to learn from nature. The over arching property of the primary imagination was that it was common to all people. The Secondary imagination, on the other hand, represents a superior faculty which could only be associated with artistic genius. It was this aspect of the imagination, one which could break down what was perceived in order to recreate by an autonomous willful act of the mind that has no analog in the natural world—which Coleridge associated with art and poetry. A key and defining attribute of the secondary imagination was a free and deliberate will; "superior voluntary controul. . .co-existing with the conscious will." The secondary imagination, once activated by the will, "dissolves, dissipates in order to recreate."

And...

Coleridge explained this property of the "Imagination" as "ESEMPLASTIC," to "shape into one" and to "convey a new sense." Coleridge in the tenth chapter of Biographia Literaria described this ability of the imagination as "Esemplastic." Noting that esemplastic was a word he borrowed from the Greek "to shape," Coleridge explained that it referred to the imagination's ability to "shape into one, having to convey a new sense." He felt such a term was necessary as "it would aid the recollection of my meaning and prevent it being confounded with the usual import of the word imagination." Biographia Literaria, vol. 1, p. 86 

If you really want to use a pretentious-sounding term, try esemplastic. Derived from Greek words meaning "into" and "one" and "mold," and coined by Coleridge in 1817, the word means "having the function of molding into unity; unifying." The picture derived from the word is of someone, probably a poet, taking images and words and feelings from a number of realms of human endeavor and thought and bringing them all together into a poem s/he writes. This requires a huge effort of the imagination, which we might call the "esemplastic power of the poetic imagination." A decade after its first appearance a writer could remark, "Nor I trust will Coleridge's favorite word esemplastic..ever become current."

Not only did the subject subsume the object it can also be argued that Imagination subsumed the role of Fancy within the creative work. Thus while Coleridge argued that the poet relied on both Fancy and Imagination when inventing a poem, and that the poet should seek a balance of these two faculties, (Coleridge, Biographia Literari, vol 1, p. 194) the "active" and "transformative" powers of the Imagination negated the contribution of, and representation of Fancy. In Coleridge's system, the Imagination is ultimately the only faculty which contributed to the creative process.

Go Into The Story: David Milch: "The Writer's Voice" (Part 5)

Go Into The Story concludes Milch week with this discussion of St. Paul. For Milch, Paul was a writer who struggled with alienation and guilt and suffering. He became a great religious figure only because he first became a poet. Which is to say, that they are the same thing. Born from the desire to connect with the world around you:

Let me hasten to say I’m not comparing myself to St. Paul. But I know what it is to do what you never dreamed of doing, what you never thought you’d be capable of doing. The utter mystification that you experience. “How did I get here? How did this happen?” Let me read from Paul’s Epistles. He doesn’t seem like a murderer: “We know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal. Sold under sin. I do not understand my own actions, for I do not do what I want. But I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it but sin which dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want but the evil I don’t want is what I do.”

Let’s think a little bit just for a second about writing, when for any reason you don’t do it, and if you do do it, you don’t do the writing you want to do, and if you do the writing you thought you wanted to do it turns out that you didn’t do it the way you wanted to do it, or you gave it to the wrong person, or the person you gave it to didn’t handle it the way you wanted . . . It’s a mystery. It’s all a mystery to us.

----

But consider what that was like for him to have his works rejected like that. And when he went out, he said, “All right, so you want me in Rome. You want me working in Rome?” And they said, “Yeah, work in Rome.” And he did. That’s where he died. So all of us can tell our war stories of isolation and humiliation and vacillation in commitment to the faith, which for us is, in this very secular context, the enterprise of fellowship. What I would have you understand is that if you keep coming—you know, Franz Kafka was every bit as crazy as Paul, but he kept coming—and if you sink your roots deep and if you keep coming, you can find an accommodation for anything.

You think you’ve got problems with self-esteem? One day Gregor Samsa woke and discovered he was a bug. So you got problems with self-esteem, now let’s see if you can write. And, ah, that story, The Metamorphosis, is the most beautiful domestic comedy. It’s not about being a bug; it’s about how a family lives with a bug. To paraphrase Yeats, the ladder starts in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. And that ladder, if you keep climbing, will take you out. Here’s the last that Paul wrote:

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have all faiths so as to move mountains, but have not love, I’m nothing. If I give away all I have but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful. It is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice of wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. As per prophecy, it will pass away. As per tongues, they will cease. As per knowledge, it will pass away, for our knowledge is imperfect, and our prophecy is imperfect. But when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see as in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall understand fully, even as I had been fully understood. So faith, hope, and love abide. But the greatest of these is love.”

Now that came to Paul because he kept showing up. After he wrote that, he made a lot of mistakes. And he failed to be fully human a lot of times. But the words abide. And that the words abide perfectly is the little bit of God that we touch, in the same way that when we see our children, you will live outside yourself. As you experience the voices—whether they’re punitive, whether they’re meek, whether they’re shrill, whether they’re placid—understand that love accepts them all. Love redeems them all.

Go Into The Story: David Milch: "The Writer's Voice" (Part 4)

Go Into The Story continues their series of great Milch excerpts. Today, humility and "parenting" the material:

I’m sure that a lot of you want to know what gets you “in” [the entertainment industry]. And the answer is this: If you generate a passionate, humble connection with your work, you’re in. And the paradox is that you don’t need whatever you thought you needed, and when you don’t need it, that’s when they want you. But them wanting you is, by that time, an utter irrelevancy. When I said, “The price sometimes is terrible,” of trusting in the world, of turning over our manuscripts, of offering up our child—a sustained commitment to the enterprise that you’ve begun sometimes has a terrible, terrible price. There are all sorts of distractions and accommodations made available to us in our journey, to take a lesser path rather than absolute loyalty and devotion to the separate life of our work.

The extraordinary thing for me as a parent was that every day my child taught me more. When we had another child, it was geometrically more. You think that your heart will burst if there’s any more love. And it just keeps growing, and that’s what will happen with your engagement with material, to the extent you are able to sustain a selfless connection with it.

The process will be variable, and there will be days when it’s not so good, and there’s deep instruction in that as well. If you keep coming back in humility—without wanting to belabor the analogy—as a parent, then you can’t ever say, “Okay, that’s it.” Even if you say it, it doesn’t stop. Even if you blow town, it doesn’t stop. If you say it’s over, that’s okay, but the child still lives.

As much as one aspires to selflessness in connection with the work—and selflessness does not mean the denial of the self—whatever our heads are telling us is ultimately irrelevant to the living thing, the living breathing thing with which you have entered into a kind of parental responsibility for a little while. And then, at a certain point, it [the thing] gets up and runs away from you.

I remember the first time that happened to me. At first I was terrified, and then I thought I could fly. You’ve entered into a connection with something else, which is not limited by your selfhood.

Go Into The Story: David Milch: "The Writer's Voice" (Part 3)

Milch on separateness and time:

With our work [as writers], we oftentimes feel an impulse to attach special conditions, and some of those conditions and some of those attachments are so deep that we never submit the work at all. Which is to say that we can learn to live a life organized around justified resentment. And that the act of drinking poison and expecting the other person to expire can go on right up to the end, when we know, finally, who the one is who keels over.

Any time you want to take the easy road in dispelling the misconception that we find our final identities as separate creatures, go to a ball game and listen to the distinct special personality of the crowd as one organism. St. Paul, writing to the Corinthians, who drove him completely crazy, wrote: “Now concerning spiritual gifts, brethren, I do not want you to be uninformed. There are varieties of gifts, but the same spirit. And there are varieties of service, but the same Lord. And there are varieties of working, but it is the same God who inspires them all in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the spirit for the common good...”

----

If you persevere [in writing], I suspect those feelings [of inadequacy and fear of authority figures] would subside then reappear. But at a certain point, you’ll discover a separate phenomenon, which is that the pages exist and begin to have a certain substance, a certain heft. Perhaps you begin to generate respect for the separate existence of the material, and if the voice begins to come alive for you—and sometimes they don’t for a while—but if they do you might recall the moments of doubt. If you sustain your commitment, the amount of time that you commit to it allows various textures to enter into the material. The brief moment that we live, as we experience it, is textured by time. And if we allow our work—whatever work we do—to respect the dimension of time, then, simply, “If you stick with it, you begin to experience a different sort of truth.”

My teacher told me that the secret subject of any story worth telling is time, but you can never say its name.

When you work in a police show, when you talk to cops, when they analyze different types of wounds, they describe one set of wounds as “defensive cuts,” which are the kinds of wounds you receive when you’re trying to ward off a blow. That set of voices—the one voice that is punitive, and the other voice that simply is trying to ward off a blow by distracting the conversation (there are 50 different strategies that second voice might use) . . . I should tell those of you who experience that set of voices simply to press on. The danger for the people that we’re talking about is to identify the self with either of those voices. The separateness of the material is crucial to accept. Ultimately, that’s how you must come to experience your work. If you do that, you will feel that same, separate, larger identity that the crowd feels in the stadium. Ah, you will feel a different being. And the opportunity to feel ourselves as different beings, as larger than ourselves, is the great gift that God, or life, gives us.

Unfinished David Foster Wallace Novel Gets Cover and Release Date - NYTimes.com

"The Pale King", April 15, 2011:

Go Into The Story: David Milch: "The Writer's Voice" (Part 2)

GITS is doing Milch, this time on the psychology of the artist:

A psychiatrist will tell you—well, a psychiatrist won’t tell you shit. But in psychiatric terms, the psyche is differentiated into the ego sense of self, the id—which is everything that gets us jammed up—and the super ego, which is the idea of form, or structure, or the accommodation in the world for our behavior. And the super ego is the internalization of the parental voice. Now, it’s obviously an oversimplification. But in particular, a writer—for reasons we will get to in another part of this discussion—stands in a particular kind of doubleness, typically, in his or her emotional makeup, toward experience. Stands both within it comfortably, and, for whatever combination of reasons, stands outside it. That’s the cards you’re dealt. That’s what predisposes you to be a writer as well as predisposes you to be a few other things.

Often, that doubleness is caused by a traumatic association with the idea of form. Here’s a for-instance. The Irish are regarded as a great storytelling people and also as a country full of drunks. There’s a reason for both reputations. It’s a tough country—weather’s tough, they had a lot of problems. One way you learn the doubleness that is typical of the writer is that you are both within the [tavern] and you’re standing outside wondering where the next punch is coming from.

----

The second maxim that I can give you, the thing that I always try to communicate to an aspiring writer, is that no one can teach you anything that you don’t already know, and each of you has, in your heart, the capacity, when encouraged by a benign organizing presence, to identify the deepest truths of the human story.

Franzen Book Controversy: Chick Lit v. Dude Lit - The Daily Beast

Boys & Girls writing fiction, a list, including:

In Chick Lit, women write about their emotions. In Dude Lit, men use rock ‘n' roll songs as a stand-in for their feelings. The more complex the emotions, the more obscure the band. Heartbreak is symbolized by an obsession with a slow song by an aging punk rocker.

Jonathan Franzen's Freedom is an epic map of our imprisonment. - By Judith Shulevitz - Slate Magazine

I don't know if I'll ever bring myself to actually read one of Franzen's books, but this seems worth some time and thought:

What passes for freedom in America, Franzen seems to be implying, is a refusal to accept limits, to acknowledge and shoulder the burdens of one's inheritance. Certainly everyone in the novel comes to rue freedom, their own and others'. Patty notes that "all her choices and all her freedom" bring her nothing but misery and self-pity. Richard, the punk-rocker who was Walter's college roommate and becomes Patty's lover, belatedly attains the freedom that comes with stardom and nearly commits suicide; later, he achieves YouTube notoriety for a rant in which he taunts a generation that associates freedom with iPods: "We're about choosing what WE want to listen to and ignoring everything else," he tells the video camera. "Me me me, buy buy buy, party party party. Sit in your own little world, rocking, with your eyes closed." Walter, whose core political message is that we need limits to growth, sees the discourse on freedom as little more than the Republican insistence on "personal liberties":

"People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don't have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can't afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to."

Profiles: The Misfit : The New Yorker

The famed profile of David Milch from the New Yorker.

In the first of his lectures at the Writers Guild, Milch said, “No one can teach you anything that you don’t already know. And each of you has, in your heart, the capacity, when encouraged by a benign organizing presence, to identify the deepest truths of the human story.”

The Millions : Orwell and the Tea Party

How to read Orwell:

So Orwell was right to consider himself more pamphleteer than novelist. Many critics have dismissed this as a kind of false modesty, but in this case, Orwell was not merely managing expectations. Pamphlets are designed to make a specific point to a specific audience, and then to be thrown away because they can no longer serve the purpose for which they were intended. Orwell’s works are ephemeral too, in the sense that they cannot really be understood without some semblance of historical and intellectual context. It takes a lot of patience, a lot of reading, and a lot of extracurricular effort to do so, however. Obviously, many readers simply find it easier to shout down any opposite political position with Orwell’s own words – Big Brother, thoughtcrime, Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others – than to really understand what these words, in context, were supposed to represent.

On the one hand, yes, you have to understand Orwell in his context, but as a writer he is a quote machine whose novels are otherwise shallow and flat. Effective, positive propaganda, but not exactly art.

The Idea of the Writer: December 13, 2007 WGA Theater

Defining Imagination:

In the Biographia Literaria, which I commend to your attention --

He was a junky, Coleridge, and that was before they had Metamucil. He was afflicted with horrible constipation and the measures that he had to take were not pretty.

-- Coleridge made an effort to distinguish between "fancy" and "imagination" as a principle of association. Now, this is very, very important because if you give up the Outline, which is logic. If you take a step back and think of what we're doing here, you are watching me associate as a principle of organization in our communion with each other. I'm associating one experience with another experience. I'm reacting to you. 

An imaginative association, Coleridge would suggest, is what we are doing now which is that available to us on the basis of this shared experience is an understanding of the substance of the experience. That is, how the artist gains access to the imagination of his audience through the vision of, and the vitalizing of, the bringing to life of experiences to which the viewer can relate on the basis of the operations of the imagination of the storyteller. Not because there's a prior expectation that, "OK, at the end of the first act: judges chambers! dnn-dnn dnn-dnn!" But as a vital exchange of energy. That's the way the universe works. OK?

A fanciful association, and this is the danger, the burden of inauthenticity that those of us who work without Outlines must bear, in the achievement of the act of imagination and that is fancy.

Now I kinda tried to plant, just the way I did with the "urine" when we were talking about "principles of association" and this gentleman said, "Oh, I was thinking of Coleridge and you said,'Coleridge'." And I suggest that that is not an accident but that the substance of what I was suggesting was bringing to mind an imaginative association from this gentleman's past where had he encountered those ideas before. So that's not an accident, nor is it a fanciful connection. It is an imaginative connection. That's what art does. We are creating art together here. The audience is always a participant with the artist in the creation of the art by apprehending it in faith. Which is why I urge you not to watch Law and Order, which is an exercise in logic.

A fanciful association is a private association.

(Around the 15 minute mark of the linked video).

The List is the Origin of Culture

Umberto Eco:

The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order -- not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists -- the shopping list, the will, the menu -- that are also cultural achievements in their own right.

Screenplay for Old Men

Cormac McCarthy interviewed:

JH: Didn't you start "No Country for Old Men" as a screenplay?
CM: Yeah, I wrote it. I showed it to a few people and they didn't seem to be interested. In fact, they said, "That will never work." Years later I got it out and turned it into a novel. Didn't take long. I was at the Academy Awards with the Coens. They had a table full of awards before the evening was over, sitting there like beer cans. One of the first awards that they got was for Best Screenplay, and Ethan came back and he said to me, "Well, I didn't do anything, but I'm keeping it."

He has many more interesting things to say than this, but that was the only moment where I could say, "I knew it!"

Advice from a Famous Writer

Things a good writing instructor will tell you:

Don’t ever use the word ‘soul,’ if possible. Never quote dialogue you can summarize. Avoid describing crowd scenes but especially party scenes.

On the English Language:

In her class, I learned that while I had spoken English all of my life, there was actually very little I knew about it. English was born from low German, a language that was good for categorization, and had filled itself in with words from Latin and Anglo Saxon words, and was now in the process of eating things from Asian languages. Latinates were polysyllabic, and Anglo Saxon words were short, with perhaps two syllables at best. A good writer made use of both to vary sentence rhythms.

Passive Voice:

The passive voice in particular was a crisis. “Was” only told you that something existed—this was not enough. And on this topic, I remember one of her fugues almost exactly:

You want vivid writing. How do we get vivid writing? Verbs, first. Precise verbs. All of the action on the page, everything that happens, happens in the verbs. The passive voice needs gerunds to make anything happen. But too many gerunds together on the page makes for tinnitus: Running, sitting, speaking, laughing, inginginginging. No. Don’t do it. The verbs tell a reader whether something happened once or continually, what is in motion, what is at rest. Gerunds are lazy, you don’t have to make a decision and soon, everything is happening at the same time, pell-mell, chaos. Don’t do that. Also, bad verb choices mean adverbs. More often than not, you don’t need them. Did he run quickly or did he sprint? Did he walk slowly or did he stroll or saunter?

Show Don't Tell:

If you’re doing your job, the reader feels what you felt. You don’t have to tell the reader how to feel. No one likes to be told how to feel about something. And if you doubt that, just go ahead. Try and tell someone how to feel.

We were to avoid emotional language. The line goes grey when you do that, she said. Don’t tell the reader that someone was happy or sad. When you do that, the reader has nothing to see. She isn’t angry, Annie said. She throws his clothes out the window. Be specific.

Choosing Strong Verbs:

After the lecture on verbs, we counted the verbs on the page, circled them, tallied the count for each page to the side and averaged them. Can you increase the average number of verbs per page, she asked. I got this exercise from Samuel Johnson, she told us, who believed in a lively page, and used to count his verbs. Now look at them. Have you used the right verbs? Is that the precise verb for that precise thing? Remember that adverbs are a sign that you’ve used the wrong verb. Verbs control when something is happening in the mind of the reader. Think carefully—when did this happen in relation to this? And is that how you’ve described it?

Work vs. Talent:

Talent isn’t enough, she had told us. Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn to do this. It’s not rocket science, it’s habits of mind and habits of work. I started with people much more talented than me, she said, and they’re dead or in jail or not writing. The difference between myself and them is that I’m writing.

Setting Goals:

If I’ve done my job, she said in the last class, you won’t be happy with anything you write for the next 10 years. It’s not because you won’t be writing well, but because I’ve raised your standards for yourself. Don’t compare yourselves to each other. Compare yourself to Colette, or Henry James, or Edith Wharton. Compare yourselves to the classics. Shoot there.

Very Black Ink

The New Yorker has a remarkably cynical and unsympathetic portrait of Edgar Allan Poe this week. It's a two pronged attack: first dismissing Poe's gothic persona as a dodge against his own poverty and then criticizing Poe for trying to write his way out of that very dilemma:

Poe’s world was Andrew Jackson’s America, a world of banking collapse, financial panic, and grinding depression that had a particularly devastating effect on the publishing industry, where Poe sought a perch. His biography really is a series of unfortunate events. But two of those events were transatlantic financial crises: the Panic of 1819 and the Panic of 1837, the pit and the pendulum of the antebellum economy. Poe died at the end of a decade known, in Europe, as “the Hungry Forties,” and he wasn’t the only American to fall face down in the gutter during a seven-year-long depression brought on by a credit collapse. He did not live out of time. He lived in hard times, dark times, up-and-down times. Indigence cast a shadow over everything he attempted.

Having established the timeliness of the essay and the economic parallels between then and now, the article turns to Poe's stories, portraying him as a hack and a fraud:

The problem with Poe comes to this: he needed to turn his pen to profit, but he also wanted to signal, as with “Pym,” that he was lowering himself. Look! See? I’m brilliant! Even at writing dreck! In the story “How to Write a Blackwood Article” (1838), he tells of an aspiring writer of gothic tales who visits the editor of Blackwood’s Magazine, seeking instruction. “Your writer of intensities must have very black ink, and a very big pen, with a very blunt nib,” the editor advises, then offers some examples of recent successes:

Let me see. There was ‘The Dead Alive,’ a capital thing!—the record of a gentleman’s sensations when entombed before the breath was out of his body—full of taste, terror, sentiment, metaphysics, and erudition. You would have sworn that the writer had been born and brought up in a coffin. Then we had the ‘Confessions of an Opium-eater’—fine, very fine!—glorious imagination—deep philosophy—acute speculation—plenty of fire and fury, and a good spicing of the decidedly unintelligible. That was a nice bit of flummery, and went down the throats of the people delightfully. They would have it that Coleridge wrote the paper—but not so. It was composed by my pet baboon, Juniper.

Poe calibrated and recalibrated. Just how many ways can a writer insult his readers and get away with it? If you take Poe’s best horror stories at face value, they are wonderfully, flawlessly terrifying; they are also dripping with contempt.

This is unfair. Firstly, because "How To Write A Blackwood Article" is written as a parody, first of the pretensions of gothic writers who style themselves as if they were one of their own characters, and secondly of the jealous and hostile natures of editors who applaud the writer's work while wishing them a hasty death. Secondly, because it is tremendously self-aware and one can see that Poe is having a laugh at himself. And thirdly, because of its humorous tone, we are meant to see that all of Blackwood's advice is bad advice. It is anti-didactic.

But let's suppose that Blackwood is Poe's mouthpiece. If Poe is guilty of anything, it is of highlighting the desperation and artistic despair that can grow out having to sell your art for a living. When art gets mixed up with commerce, it creates a toxic brew of resentments with regard to those who control one's artistic and financial destiny. Moreover, when you're poor, everything is seen to have a price and the value of an object is what someone is willing to pay for it. Even if it's a poem or a story.

What we see in Poe's later manic depressive behavior is not contempt for the audience, but contempt for his life of poverty and compromise. Here is a guy who quite literally survived on nothing but his own wits. No inheritance, no academic post, no day job, a failed military career. That the New Yorker finds something wrong with that says more about their elitist contempt for genre writers and the struggling wannabes who aspire to live within the walled literary city than about the character of Edgar Allan Poe (when Eustace Tilly, or a Yale educated professor tries to tell you it ain't about the money or shouldn't be about the money: it's all about the money).

A more interesting essay might have described the relationship between horror fiction, pulp magazines, and the marginal lives of so many of its finest writers. How does economic despair translate into existential despair and dread? How do our daily fears and anxieties transform themselves into the all-consuming horrors of death-in-life? And finally, what does it mean when we romanticize and identify with the monstrous and the doomed, the gothic poseur, the adolescent rebel in black? Even today the goth and horror subculture is full of many Suky Snobbs' styling themselves as Senora Psyche Zenobia's.

On the other hand, there seems to be a certain tone-deafness in our response to Poe's writing if we insist in only seeing him as a victim of his times. To me, his writing is full of playfulness, sarcasm and dark humor. When he references his the fictional Mr. Blackwood's pet baboon Juniper, or fills the Gold-Bug with bad puns, or takes his knowledge of cryptography and invents the detective story, you see that he's having fun. He's enjoying himself and he's not merely some two-dimensional caricature of the gothic poet weeping at the grave of a lost love. Nor is he Emerson's "jingle-man," willing to do anything for a buck.

And that, in the end, is Poe's great revenge on his contemporaries and circumstances. His stories are fun to read. His genius was for combining all the contradictory impulses of his nature to engage the reader emotionally and intellectually through scares and clever plotting. At the same time he allows us a wink and a playful laugh: scared ya didn't I? And we share in the pleasure -- and relief -- at having survived the whole ordeal.

Deprecating with the utmost conviction his lack of talent

Novelist J.M Coetzee reads Samuel Beckett's letters with a mixture of writerly interest and biographical frustration. Yet from the fragments of the edited letters he is able to create this moment of artistic transformation, a portrait of the artist as it were:

Before he discovered Johnson, the writer whom Beckett had elected to identify with was the famously active and productive James Joyce, Shem the Penman. His own early writing, as he cheerfully admits, "stinks of Joyce." But only a handful of letters passed between Beckett and Joyce. The reason is simple: during the times when they were closest (1928–1930, 1937–1940)—times when Beckett acted as Joyce's occasional secretary and general dogsbody—they were living in the same city, Paris. Between these two periods their relations were strained and they did not communicate. The cause of the strain was Beckett's treatment of Joyce's daughter Lucia, who was infatuated with him. Though alarmed by Lucia's evident instability of mind, Beckett, much to his discredit, allowed the relationship to develop. When he finally broke it off, Nora Joyce was furious, accusing him—with some justice—of exploiting the daughter to maintain access to the father.

It was probably not a bad thing for Beckett to be expelled from this dangerous Oedipal territory. By the time he was reenlisted, in 1937, to help with the proofreading of Work in Progress (later Finnegans Wake), his attitude toward the master had become less fraught, more charitable. To McGreevy he confides:

Joyce paid me 250 fr. for about 15 hrs. work on his proofs.... He then supplemented it with an old overcoat and 5 ties! I did not refuse. It is so much simpler to be hurt than to hurt.

And again, two weeks later:

He [Joyce] was sublime last night, deprecating with the utmost conviction his lack of talent. I don't feel the danger of the association any more. He is just a very lovable human being.

The night after he wrote these words Beckett got into a scuffle with a stranger in a Paris street and was stabbed. The knife just missed his lungs; he had to spend two weeks in the hospital. The Joyces did everything they could to help their young compatriot, having him moved to a private ward, bringing him custard puddings. Reports of the assault made it into the Irish newspapers; Beckett's mother and brother traveled to Paris to be at his bedside. Among other unexpected visitors was a woman Beckett had met years earlier, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, who would in due course become his companion and then his wife.

The aftermath of the assault, reported to McGreevy with some bemusement, seems to have revealed to Beckett that he was not as alone in the world as he liked to believe; even more curiously, it seemed to confirm him in his decision to make Paris his home.

In this one event Beckett is forced to confront the absurdity, randomness, and meanlingness of existence while also acknowledging the seemingly invisible interconnectedness of human relations. Life is crazy, but worth living. This contradiction becomes, perhaps, the central theme in and motivation behind his later mature work.

Pale King

There's a long piece on David Foster Wallace in The New Yorker this week, as well as an excerpt from his unfinished novel on the IRS called The Pale King. Neither work does much to support the idea that he was the greatest writer of his generation. Nor do they bolster the romantic notion that his best work was still ahead of him. Indeed, in the biographical piece he is a much more broken, doomed and marginal figure than it seemed like he was during his heyday of the late 90s and early 00s. More importantly, his mental illness and eventual suicide come to overshadow and overdetermine the nature of his writing and his writing career. Inconclusiveness and ambivalence become the thing. An obsessive attention to mental processes, the inner lives of similarly obsessed or obsessive individuals, a mimesis of attitudes and manipulations. A drilling down into the mental life of boredom and the possibility of bliss that might exist just beyond. Add to this a basic mistrust of the transformative function of art and the possibility of redemption, and what you have is a writer struggling with the constancy of failure and despair.

When Infinite Jest came out, I was still in grad school and was both over-awed by and completely jealous of the dude in the bandana who had written the next Gravity's Rainbow. If this guy was already setting the literary world on fire, what the heck was I do wasting time in Grad School? So I read the novel in a spirit of ill will and envy in between working on my graduate thesis on Pynchon and Baudrillard. The long recursive sentences were maddening. The postmodern gestures felt both over the top and empty. The satire lacked sting. The novel began with Hal's breakdown sometime in the future of the future, and then abandoned his story half way through. The book only really came alive with the AA story line that finishes the novel. The whole thing finishes off as though it is embarassed of its sincerity and sentimentality and the fact that next great novel was a cliched narrative of drug recovery. The thousand pages, postmodern arm waving, and miles of footnotes became an expression of that embarrasment. Wallace was an experiential realist and emotional idealist who could trust neither his experience of reality nor his emotions and ideals. He therefore second guessed everything, reassessed everything, reconsidered and reevaluated everything and spun this near-autistic process into long searching sentences that threatened to destroy themselves as they threaded the divide between panic and paralysis.

As an object, reading (or more likely, carrying) Infinite Jest was a badge of honor. As a work of art, it was exhausting and insufferable.

But Pynchon's contemporaries had thought the same of Gravity's Rainbow. Even going so far as to deny him the Pulitzer Prize.

And Joyce's contemporaries had bemusedly tolerated Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, without really being convinced of their merit.

So perhaps my assessment wasn't an honest one. Maybe it wasn't him, but me. Maybe, as Coleridge says, I would have to work to overcome my ignorance of his understanding. The Broom of the System, written by a much younger man comes of as pretentious and wrong headed when read after Infinite Jest. Brief Interviews With Hideous Men takes up the Wallace style with a new spirit of misanthropy and loathing. Oblivion's tales of hideous people and corporate culture are meta-post-modern and unreadable. Each new book with the exception of his non-fiction collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, became more dispirting than the last. In the end, the prospect of a new Wallace novel became itself a supposedly fun thing.

According to The New Yorker version of David Foster Wallace, the author was less an artist than someone who was struggling to write his way through the pain of mental illness. His style and technique were symptomatic of this struggle, fanciful associations that lacked the imaginative possibility of transformation and return. If anything they dug deeper and more painfully and dysfunctionally into all those emotions and anxieties that language could not control. The scholarship, footnotes, and mathematical musings become a facade of faux-intellectualism used to disguise the emotional messiness that underpinned every word.

Even now, I can't decide whether his suicide invests his work with dark meaning or completely invalidates them as works of art. I think The Pale King in its incompleteness and failed aspirations will only deepen this problem.