you know that one about: i write to comfort the uncomfortable and make the comfortable uncomfortable? i used to think it was a pretty good one, but now i think it’s monstrously arrogant.
obviously it’s not necessarily arrogant to comfort, or presume to comfort, someone, nor is it necessarily arrogant to make, or presume to make, someone uncomfortable (i say not necessarily, because it can be all presumption, particularly when this someone is an abstraction), but it’s really just plain arrogant to appoint yourself arbiter of who, beyond people you come into contact with on a daily basis (and even then you might be on shaky ground), needs to be made comfortable or uncomfortable.
there’s nothing inherently wrong with arrogance (i personally think the literary world could use some more of it), but most of the time people who use the comfortable/uncomfortable line present it as though it comes out of pure compassion, which is where the monstrously part comes in, because it sets the one who says it up as some kind of secular prophet, the problem being that he or she has no ground to stand on, philosophically, sociologically, or in common practice.
once when i was in grad school i answered “me” when someone asked who i wrote for. the person who asked said that was masturbatory, and i said anything else was just masturbating to porn. i really believed that back then, and on a fundamental level i do now (though it’s probably more like a sears catalog than porn), but these days i do try to write to people, if not for, and i chalk it up to a leap into the absurd.
but i don’t try to convince myself that i’m sitting in your third eye kissing on your tear ducts.
so you’ve probably guessed by now that while i wasn’t posting anything here i was doing a lot of thinking about david foster wallace. i probably wrote and talked half of a monograph about him (thanks, in particular, to kyle beachy, who let me send long, ranting emails to him, and came back with smart, but more importantly wise, responses, which was nice considering he doesn’t really know me), but didn’t want to do the writing and talking publicly, partially because i didn’t do it systematically and partially because i don’t get the impression that anyone in the dfw industry wants to hear my take on him (this is one way of deciding who needs to be made comfortable or uncomfortable).
but let me admit that i finally concluded that, as brilliant and important as i still find his work, there is something adolescent, arrogant (in the way i described above), and unwise about his program. i first noticed it while reading brief interviews with hideous men (which is, oddly, my favorite of his books), but it was when i read that terrible kenyon speech (which, seriously y’all, let it disappear — you’re not doing his legacy any favors) that i finally had to think it through.
so i’m gonna hold off on reading the pale king.
but look — i picked up bret easton ellis’s imperial bedrooms when borders was going out of business.
are you starting to see what i’ve been setting your punk ass up for?
check ya dolla bill son -- there it is.
i want to talk about imperial bedrooms and also lunar park someday so i can explain what’s wrong with you, but first i want to admit publicly to being a bret easton ellis fan, actually to thinking he’s a very important writer, and in order to talk about his later work, i have to dispel the early myths. think of it as revising the origin story.
the consensus version is that ellis’s early work owes its style to joan didion’s play it as it lays, but that it’s all surface and nihilism. this is from david foster wallace’s notorious attack on him:
Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?
(i didn’t have to look far for that quote, because biblioklept posted it, in a long and thoughtful piece that i completely disagreed with, today. i really like biblioklept. does anyone know who writes it?)
i assume that quote was in reference to american psycho. you know, that book that begins with the phrase “Abandon all hope ye who enter here”?
it’s funny, there’s another book that uses that phrase. it was written by this italian guy who wanted to settle scores by sending all his political enemies to hell. also, demons fling shit at people. some people claim to like it, but no one reads his other books.
also, abandoning all hope equals despair etymologically. sometimes it seems like there’s a kind of competition for who gets to write about despair, and it’s a competition that i don’t know the rules of. but i’m more worried about why nobody has ever pointed out how unfounded wallace’s rant was.
“fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is” might be very bad (though i’m not willing to say it couldn’t possibly be good), but where’s the evidence that that’s what ellis does?
maybe we’ll talk about american psycho another day, too, but for now we’re going all the way back to the year 1985.
less than zero is the one where andrew mccarthy and robert downey jr do drugs, but in the book version robert downey jr doesn’t die, and instead there’s even more drugs, a snuff film, gang rape, etc.
you know what nihilists are — they believe in nothing. but i don’t think ellis is a nihilist, and i don’t think, as some of ellis’s defenders have insisted, that the moral code of his work can only be found in the negative space.
throughout less than zero, clay, the narrator, notices a billboard that reads “disappear here.” the great gatsby also has a billboard, an advertisement for an eye doctor named t.j. eckleburg. a lot of people, people who read books and whatnot, think the eye thing could be a symbol for god staring down at the moral decay of the jazz age, or so my eleventh grade english teacher told me.
the great gatsby is about this guy who’s rich but not a blue-blood, who falls in love with a blue-blooded lady and it all ends in a tragic car crash. not far from the billboard, actually.
in less than zero, everybody is rich but not a blue blood, there are tons of car crashes (not part of the action — there are just frequent descriptions of wrecks in canyons), and it ends a lot like it started. except t.j. eckleburg isn’t watching because you can disappear here.
also, you could read gatsby as though nick carraway, the narrator, is probably gay but closeted. clay (the maybe too symbolically-named narrator of less than zero) is joylessly omnisexual but doesn’t need to hide it, the sex or the joylessness. and if the similarities weren’t enough to beat you over the head, at the end of less than zero a tacky rich girl rolls up in a fancy car with a vanity plate that reads gabstoy. presumably her name is gabby?
your english teacher was mostly wrong about gatsby (whether or not mine was right about eckleburg). it’s not very jazzy and the love story is not very convincing. but it’s depiction of postwar disillusionment and class conflict was hot shit, as was the prose. what i mean is, fitzgerald had something to say and he said it beautifully; it’s just not what everybody says he was saying.
likewise, david foster wallace, or whoever told you about ellis, was wrong.
there’s a flipside to that whole comfortable/uncomfortable thing. it flatters the listener/reader. no one ever thinks they’re the ones who should be uncomfortable. ellis is trying to convince you otherwise.
