David Foster Wallace: Nothing Shining?

Their discussion of David Foster Wallace seems to contradict most of what authors Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly go on to establish in the remainder of their book ALL THINGS SHINING (continued from yesterday's post). Is it because DFW resists their definition of finding all things shining, or that his work is presented as incomplete, and thus the argument can't find an ending? Rather than try to reason myself into a position on this, I'm just going to write straight for the thicket and then acknowledge how I got there.

Dreyfus and Kelly make two points about DFW's work as a salve on the conscience of a person who has lately not been able to see the "all things shining," or fight through the secular modern world to find some sort of ethical base or guidance to act:

One, that THE PALE KING advocates a sort of sublime boredom through which to numb the conscious mind and through that attain a sort of haloriffic euphoria in the repetition and dullness of completing a necessary task. (But they didn't use haloriffic.) I already have my problems with this interpretation of THE PALE KING, as stated.

The other, that the same kind of studied monotony can be applied in stressful situations to achieve a deep caring, based on his Kenyon College graduation speech "This Is Water." What's not clearly differentiated is that these are startlingly different approaches to the same problem. The passages of THE PALE KING and INFINITE JEST emphasize the numbness specifically, the kind of emotional white-noise-making that takes place. (Don Gately is held up as a hero in this department... and that's all I'm going to say about that in case people who haven't finished INFINITE JEST have followed me thus far.) "This Is Water" is about acknowledging that unconsciousness in which we are all swimming, which emotionally feels like the opposite of numbness. Maybe it was just the passages used?

What piece am I missing here? And then I really start to lose them when they compare that numbness to Elizabeth Gilbert at the beginning of EAT, PRAY, LOVE and Gilbert's idea that a writer shouldn't have to be "personally and individually responsible for [her] work," which the authors deem "Renaissance" and I deem -- well, who else is going to be responsible for it, if not for you? I could have used another chapter on that just to virulently disagree with it. And the authors don't make the logical back-contrast from that statement (uncited... can't remember if it was from EAT, PRAY, LOVE or not) to the idea of whether James Incandenza was ultimately responsible for the effects of The Entertainment, or if it was out of his hands once he created it, which if not crucial to the plot of INFINITE JEST is not really handled in the book as far as I can remember. Certainly no one gets as far as blaming him for the tape because no one who knows what it does comes back from that brink. Which doesn't make him blameless. (I can't even conjecture where DFW would stand on that. I just bring it up as a logical point of return.)

Also, and not that I'm Maxwellina Perkins all of a sudden, but when most of ALL THINGS SHINING runs chronologically through Western literature it's a bizarre (and obviously deliberate) choice to put this chapter up front, when it would better fit after MOBY-DICK... but then it kind of destroys that chapter's transition into the glorification of communal experience at the end, which is fodder for a whole other post (or rant) and hence here I shall stop.

When all is clear and bright

Soon after I opened ALL THINGS SHINING I was scribbling notes to myself, and not all of those notes were complimentary. To the authors' contention that the absence of a rigid theological framework similar to the one medieval Europeans lived with was leading people today to feel that there was nothing of meaning left and nothing special, I countered with "Or maybe they're just depressed?" To their use of the term "the gods," as in, "the gods have departed us," I wanted to know: Whose gods? Which one or ones? And how would that discussion of "the gods" square with monotheists of today, who are probably already put off by the use of the plural?

But that's what I liked about this book: It kept losing me in thickets of philosophical inquiry and then reeling me back in, and part of my enjoyment derived from getting lost in those thickets.

The authors theorize that the meaning we no longer find by forming part of The Great Chain Of Being or participating actively in religion, we can find either directly in works of art (like books), through our interactions with them, or modeled in those works a potential way to live. Or as they themselves put it:

"The job of a work of art is to disclose a world, give meaning, and reveal truth. In this sense, works of art working can be thought of as sacred. They give meaning to people's lives and people guide their lives by them, so people treat them as divine. They venerate them like gods and make shrines devoted to them. That is what happened to the ODYSSEY, the ORESTEIA, and the DIVINE COMEDY." 

In each chapter they treat a few works and what they might say about various civilizations' approaches to "the sacred": how to find it and how they interacted with it. In ancient Greece, for example, they argue that the notion of a private emotional experience was outside most people's expectations for their lives and their religious practices (in contrast to the Protestant ideal of someone reading the Bible for himself and praying alone). So in a sense, the decisions made by characters in "Iphigenia in Aulis" or by Helen of Troy in the lead-up to the Trojan War have to be couched in an understanding of what those decisions set in larger motion, not the ethics of the individual in doing so.

(Also, this book really made me want to read THE DIVINE COMEDY, and I didn't know that that would happen.)

To Dreyfus and Kelly's point about modeling ways to live, the authors write about MOBY DICK in a way I wish someone had made me read the first time I encountered it because I completely bought into their explanation of what happens at the end and how it synthesizes with Melville's opinion of his work. Essentially, their reading of the novel casts Ishmael in a sort of metaphysical battle between the transcendent religious experience he believes he's looking for, and the smaller, everyday joys of fellowship and work with his shipmates over which that casts a long shadow. (Paraphrased completely.) Rereading MOBY DICK a few years ago I was looking for an interpretation that made this much sense, but never found it. Until now!

Similarly to the beginning, ALL THINGS SHINING's conclusion lost me at the beginning in its notion of the true communal experience of our age, but it eventually found me again. I have more to say about the David Foster Wallace chapter but I'll save that for tomorrow's post. I racked up over a week in library late fees wrestling with this book, but it was worth it.