an excellent essay at the point about david foster wallace. i mean that. in fact it would be almost perfect if the axiom it rested on were true, or at least not presented as axiomatic. but it is presented as axiomatic, and from some of the stuff i’ve been reading lately (and in some cases all my life), it is threatening to become the party line not only on david foster wallace but also on literature in general, so let me sound my barbaric yawp, ok?
Confused, alienated and inauthentic though it might be, subjective consciousness still existed—and it was still the business of the novelist to describe it.
this is the last sentence of the first paragraph of the essay. a thesis, then, if you want to get all composition class about it.
first, if the “the” before “business” were replaced with an “a,” i might be able to get behind this claim a little, but to say that it is “the business of the novelist to describe [subjective consciousness]” is reductive because it seems to suggest that “description” should be priority number one. what about prescription? and couldn’t the business of the novelist be to relate a series of events (or even just write a series of nice sentences) with descriptions of subjective consciousness rising out of that relation as an ancillary benefit? and of course, there’s an accusation implicit in that statement as well — the accusation that there are novelists who have rejected “the business of the novelist” by not describing subjective consciousness, as though that were possible.
see, the thing about subjective consciousness is, it all depends on where you locate it. a novel without a single sentient character would still describe subjective consciousness assuming it was written by a human being (and if a computer, or a million monkeys with a million typewriters, managed to produce a novel randomly, our own subjective consciousnesses as readers would project a subjective consciousness on author and text). furthermore, a novel that goes deep into the heads of its characters, you know, the kind that does the business of the novelist, also describes subjective consciousness, though not of those characters (who don’t exist, and if they did, we would be getting not a description of their subjective consciousnesses, but a description of their author’s interpretation of their subjective consciousnesses) but of its author.
everybody in the world get this through your head — every utterance, act, noise, drawing, step, fuck you, etc. produced by a human is a product of subjective consciousness, and you will never have unmuddled access to any subjective consciousness but your own, by definition, and your own access to your own may also be muddled. it’s part of the fun of it all.
all right, ok, i'm feeling you
but this isn’t the most troubling part of the thesis. the most troubling part is the word “still.” “still” implies some doubt as to whether anyone is still human. doubting the subjective consciousness of anyone is not beautiful or thoughtful or artistic — it’s neurotic and juvenile. even if your intentions are good, worrying about whether you or anyone else is human is a smokescreen. it’s also dangerous. here’s why:
you know that there are still humans because you doubt that there are still humans. in order for someone to doubt that there are still humans, there have to be humans as we’ve defined them. this was taken care of back in the early 17th century. it also never really needed taking care of. but by this method you can never prove anyone else is human. i hope, then, that you decide to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.
but the doubt itself is a smokescreen because you know fucking well we’re all still humans. your just avoiding asking or dealing with why we’re all such a bunch of assholes.
finally authenticity. the essay’s author goes on to discuss authenticity in great detail, but is really discussing several different notions of authenticity at once. a book, for example, can’t be authentic or inauthentic. it’s just a book. let me use the obvious example:
james frey’s memoirs may not actually relate any of his actual thoughts or experiences, but it’s not the book that’s inauthentic, nor is it james frey’s subjective consciousness (which nobody but james frey has access to), but just james frey as he performs himself, that is, the subjective consciousness that he describes.
now, if i wanted to write the novel of james frey’s inauthenticity, i could write a 600 pager full of henry james-style interior monologues where he struggles with whether or not to present his life as it was lived, or i could write two paragraphs, one describing what happened, another describing his idealized version of it. all of these would be equally authentic and none would be james frey’s subjective consciousness.
to bring this back to dfw and the essay on him and then to end:
the essay’s author, in contextualizing the story “the depressed person,” writes:
What the depressed person wants to do, she tells her therapist, is “somehow really truly literally ‘share’” her pain; Wallace wanted to “share” too. Great fiction, he once said, engaged its reader in a “deep, significant conversation with another consciousness …”
speaking for myself, that is, describing my own subjective consciousness to yours, i’ve never felt that the depressed person really truly literally shares anything but the symptoms of depression even if it does operate on other, more metaphorical, levels. it describes them well, and it’s annoying as hell. but i don’t feel them, nor do i feel for the depressed person. maybe i feel for anyone who has to deal with her.
but if you look elsewhere in the same collection you can find plenty of examples of a real attempt at sharing, a real connection. there are places you can feel what wallace is trying to do, even if you can never experience the subjective consciousness of wallace or his characters.