by Ken Kesey, 1962
My encounter with Kesey was long overdue. One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest has been on the To Read list for as long I as can remember, at least since my freshman year of college and, given my long association with flower parents, probably longer. And in spite of the fact that I didn't read Kesey then, and have always found myself far too busy to read him since, he has ended up exercising a profound influence on the course of my life. The ways in which this happened are complex and oblique: for example, Kesey was a personal friend of a certain Professor F., and it so happened that Professor F. was the man who exposed me to literature in the first semester of my first year of college, a heady, vulnerable time, a time of peak sensitivity and maximal openness to the rapture of experience, lived or read. Some kernel of Keseyian sympathy must have been born in Composition 101. But there was more to it, for Professor F. also served as both mentor and taskmaster to my bosom buddy S., and it was in this mentoring capacity that F. (and by extension Kesey) exercised his real influence, for whichever spiritual or intellectual heights S. would climb, there too would be Cocodrilo, huffing and puffing at his side and gasping in the heady views of The World Below. And even before meeting Professor F., the literarily precocious S. had been a Kesey fan, had read all his stuff, sympathized with the drug culture, plumped for the dropouts and derelicts and dispossessed, and generally led a life in which success was assured as long as failure was achieved early. This conviction has dogged my tracks for many a year.
So it should come as no surprise that in reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I felt a strange sense of homecoming. The book is a delight to read, and reminded me of the heady days of undergraduate literary decadence, when to read was to indulge in the worst excesses of pleasure, scholarly neglect, and self-indulgence. The characters (caricatures, really) are huge, vivid, and marvelous, and the lines of conflict are drawn cleanly over the class and gender concepts burned deep in my sympathies by the machista upbringing of a boy-heavy household. McMurphy is a man’s man, hairy as an ape, smarter, stronger, and more likeable than anyone in the ward, while Nurse Ratchet is a perfect ogress, power-hungry, manipulative, vindictive, and cruel. The patients are lovable victims of a warped institution that advocates its own power and control over those of its interns, and the eventual defeat/triumph of McMurphy and his disciples is as gratifying as it is obvious.
In some sense, the book is too easy: everyone is either likable or detestable, and the usual muddied middle ground where most of us pass our lives is passed over in favor of cruder archetypes. But in his broad and sometime cavalier passage through this microcosm of society, Kesey touches on themes that are dear to me: the meaning of sanity, the struggle for freedom, the importance of community. It is important to remember that not every text can or should attempt to fulfill every function: this is a black comedy, and it succeeds in raising exactly the sort of powerful, laughter backed elation that only comedy can hope for.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Oblivion
by David Foster Wallace, 2004
Technical thinking and technical speaking are two very different things. Technical thinking is creative play with consequence, the delicate fusion of concepts whose very precision makes them hard to join and even harder to fashion. Technical speaking, on the other hand, involves a lot of numbers and acronyms and long words with Latinate endings. The fruits of technical thinking can usually be expressed with very non-technical language: even the most arcane mathematical theorem can often be explained in simple words, and if economies of space and expression recommend the use of variables, there variables can be clearly defined, intelligently applied, and suggestively qualified by a few well placed words. When these words themselves become number and symbol heavy, the intelligibility of the technical thought usually suffers as a consequence.
I found David Foster Wallace unreadable. He uses technical language in ways I consider superfluous, inelegant, and distracting. Worse: I think he uses technical language to snow the general reader into believing that what he has to say is ‘technological’, or ‘scientific’, and thus, in accordance with some weird cultural norm, true, relevant, and important. But though science certainly plays a fundamental role in any broad assessment of the human condition, there is a huge difference between the aesthetic, moral, and spiritual dimensions of living with technology, and the easy attacks on attention that attend bad writing. When I read scientific paper, what I feel has to do with the content, not the language.
Here’s an example Mr. Wallace in action: in his story Mister Squishy, we find that the frosting was injected with a ‘high pressure confectionery needle into the 26x13mm hollow ellipse in each Felony’s center (a center which in for example Hostess Inc.’s products was packed with what amounted to a sucrotic whipped lard), resulting in double doses of an ultrarich and near-restaurant-grade frosting whose central pocket…seemed even richer, denser, sweeter, and more felonious than the exterior icing, icing that in most rivals’ Field tests’ IRPs and GRDS was declared consumers’ favorite part. (Hostess’s lead agenc y Chiat/Day I.B.’s 1991-2 double blind Behavior series’ videotapes recorded over 45% of younger consumers actually peeling off Ho Hos’ matte icing in great dry jagged flakes and eating it solo, leaving the low-end cake itself to sit ossifying on their tables’ Lazy Susans, film clips of which had reportedly been part of R.S.B.’s initial pitch to Mister Squishy’s parent company’s Subsidiary Product Development Boys.)’
Mr. Wallace seems to delight in dwelling on precisely those elements of fact that I don’t care about. Measured against Kafka’s criterion that a book should be an ‘ice axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul,’ Oblivion seems a dull, lightweight, and fragile instrument. I did not finish this book, and don’t intend to: perhaps I am denying myself a great pleasure, or failing to recognize the genius of Wallace’s art, but first impressions are just as crucial for books as for job candidates, and I foresee no earthly circumstance that could induce me to pick up this text again. Perhaps the best thing I can say about this collection is that it is aptly titled--would that Wallace had stopped there.
Technical thinking and technical speaking are two very different things. Technical thinking is creative play with consequence, the delicate fusion of concepts whose very precision makes them hard to join and even harder to fashion. Technical speaking, on the other hand, involves a lot of numbers and acronyms and long words with Latinate endings. The fruits of technical thinking can usually be expressed with very non-technical language: even the most arcane mathematical theorem can often be explained in simple words, and if economies of space and expression recommend the use of variables, there variables can be clearly defined, intelligently applied, and suggestively qualified by a few well placed words. When these words themselves become number and symbol heavy, the intelligibility of the technical thought usually suffers as a consequence.
I found David Foster Wallace unreadable. He uses technical language in ways I consider superfluous, inelegant, and distracting. Worse: I think he uses technical language to snow the general reader into believing that what he has to say is ‘technological’, or ‘scientific’, and thus, in accordance with some weird cultural norm, true, relevant, and important. But though science certainly plays a fundamental role in any broad assessment of the human condition, there is a huge difference between the aesthetic, moral, and spiritual dimensions of living with technology, and the easy attacks on attention that attend bad writing. When I read scientific paper, what I feel has to do with the content, not the language.
Here’s an example Mr. Wallace in action: in his story Mister Squishy, we find that the frosting was injected with a ‘high pressure confectionery needle into the 26x13mm hollow ellipse in each Felony’s center (a center which in for example Hostess Inc.’s products was packed with what amounted to a sucrotic whipped lard), resulting in double doses of an ultrarich and near-restaurant-grade frosting whose central pocket…seemed even richer, denser, sweeter, and more felonious than the exterior icing, icing that in most rivals’ Field tests’ IRPs and GRDS was declared consumers’ favorite part. (Hostess’s lead agenc y Chiat/Day I.B.’s 1991-2 double blind Behavior series’ videotapes recorded over 45% of younger consumers actually peeling off Ho Hos’ matte icing in great dry jagged flakes and eating it solo, leaving the low-end cake itself to sit ossifying on their tables’ Lazy Susans, film clips of which had reportedly been part of R.S.B.’s initial pitch to Mister Squishy’s parent company’s Subsidiary Product Development Boys.)’
Mr. Wallace seems to delight in dwelling on precisely those elements of fact that I don’t care about. Measured against Kafka’s criterion that a book should be an ‘ice axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul,’ Oblivion seems a dull, lightweight, and fragile instrument. I did not finish this book, and don’t intend to: perhaps I am denying myself a great pleasure, or failing to recognize the genius of Wallace’s art, but first impressions are just as crucial for books as for job candidates, and I foresee no earthly circumstance that could induce me to pick up this text again. Perhaps the best thing I can say about this collection is that it is aptly titled--would that Wallace had stopped there.
Dubliners
James Joyce, 1914
On a first reading, Joyce’s stories seem to end with strange abruptness, as if halfway through the story the man got tired and decided to tell no more. Understanding why Joyce chose to end his stories exactly where ended them is an exercise in narrative dissection, and illuminates not just Joyce’s motives as a chronicler of the human condition, but also some of the basic structural elements that form the backbone of the story genre.
The Sisters is a wispy little tale of a defrocked priest and his relation to a boy I take to be young Joyce. The boy narrates the story, and in some ways the tale is the story of how the boy comes to terms with the priest’s death, though the epiphany, when it comes, is both the priest’s realization that faith has failed, and the boy’s realization of the social and psychological distortions that accompanied that failure. None of this is stated: the priest’s breakdown is related by one of his spinster sister’s, who may or may not be aware of how it relates to a crisis of faith, and the boy’s reaction to the news is never revealed. “She stopped suddenly as if to listen. I too listened, but there was no sound in the house: and I knew that the old priest was lying still in his coffin, solemn and truculent in death, an idle chalice on his breast.” But this act of knowing has something willful about it: it is an affirmation of the facts, over the superstitious listening of the aunt, who knows that the priest is dead but is still checked from speaking honestly by some deep impulse towards caution, and impulse so deep it extends throughout her life and on into the very heart of death. And we know that boy, young, inexperienced, and naïve as he is, sees this, for this is where he stops the tale: “Eliza resumed: ---Wide-awake and laughing-like to himself…so then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think that there was something gone wrong with him…..” End of story. What more need be said? Just as the priest recognized religion as an elaborate compromise with the basic emptiness of worldly existence, so the boy has understood that the aunts have compromised with some core honesty, and are thus reduced to speaking in whispers and holding to forms they no longer believe in but are powerless to change.
Most of the other stories follow the same mold: they sketch a tale, inevitably set in turn of the century Dublin, in precise and transparent language, and end at the moment of epiphany, which often seems the middle of the story. An Encounter is about two young boys who skip school and meet a pederast. Araby is about first love, missed opportunity, self-respect, and the dynamics of power. The idea that we choose our own form of suffering is the ostensible content of Eveline, which chronicles the tale of young woman who balks at eloping with her lover, in spite of the fact that holding the course at home entails certain doom. Two Gallants, which Joyce apparently felt to be one of the best stories in the collection, recounts the petty depredations of two penniless young men as they dream of respectability and stability while preying on a young servant woman for money. It reveals the dehumanizing dimensions of urban poverty, and the corrupting influences of Dublin. The Boarding House is about a tyrannical beancounter of a woman who has driven her husband to drink and dupes a poor chap into marrying her dowry-less, unsophisticated, and drab young daughter. Both A Little Cloud and Counterparts illuminate the connection between domestic violence and professional dissatisfaction, while Clay tells the story of a women whose life has been squandered in the relentless attempt to meet other people’s expectations. A Painful Case details the solitude, despair, and subsequent alcoholism of a woman whose attempts to connect with a fellow citizen shatter on the man’s basic boorishness. Ivy Day in the Committee Room is a political tale, or a tale about Dublin style politics, at least, and perhaps the story I least understand in the collection. The talented but petty Ms. Kearney, whose insistence on “getting her own” leads to her humdrum marriage, her social marginalization, and eventually the ruin of her daughter’s artistic career, is the subject of A Mother. Grace is a strange story about a drunk whose friends attempt to rehabilitate him by dragging him to a church retreat. In the process, the spiritual bankruptcy of the advice givers, both in the circle of friends and in the church, becomes apparent.
The final story, The Dead, is fowl of altogether another feather. Not only is it much longer than any of the preceding stories, it enters a kind of interiority that the sheer brevity of its predecessors can’t allow. Gabriel is the first fully rounded character in Dubliner’s, we see him not just at the moment of epiphany, but before and after as well, context which richens and refines the awakening. As with the other stories, however, the Dead is ultimately an indictment on Irish culture, its characters are sleepwalkers, compromisers, boors, rejects, and failures. There is a hint of nobility that runs through all this humanity, there is a sense that at root is something good, ‘the magnificent hospitality of the Irish’ as evidenced in the lavishness of the aunts, Gretta’s passion and sensitivity, Garbiel’s basic decency and competence. But all are corrupted, either by having settled or having chosen the wrong path or having spent too damn much time in Ireland. The recurring image of the snow suggests Ireland is ripe to be buried.
Dubliners is the third book by Joyce that I have read, having begun with Portrait and then moved directly to the monster that is Ulysses. Though an argument could made that the works of Joyce are best read in the order in which they were produced, the advantage of coming to the lucidity of the stories last is they immediately and profoundly open up the more obscure later works. They illuminate not just Joyce’s power as a storyteller, but also the limits of what Joyce could achieve within a conventional narrative framework. As Frank Conner notes, it is telling that Joyce never again wrote a short story. The move into the interior that we see at the very end of Dubliners, the emotional, symbolic, and psychological richness of The Dead, would prove too tempting, and Joyce would limit himself from then on to the sprawling, open forms of his last works as he sought to set down on paper the words that would ‘forge the conscience of his race’.
On a first reading, Joyce’s stories seem to end with strange abruptness, as if halfway through the story the man got tired and decided to tell no more. Understanding why Joyce chose to end his stories exactly where ended them is an exercise in narrative dissection, and illuminates not just Joyce’s motives as a chronicler of the human condition, but also some of the basic structural elements that form the backbone of the story genre.
The Sisters is a wispy little tale of a defrocked priest and his relation to a boy I take to be young Joyce. The boy narrates the story, and in some ways the tale is the story of how the boy comes to terms with the priest’s death, though the epiphany, when it comes, is both the priest’s realization that faith has failed, and the boy’s realization of the social and psychological distortions that accompanied that failure. None of this is stated: the priest’s breakdown is related by one of his spinster sister’s, who may or may not be aware of how it relates to a crisis of faith, and the boy’s reaction to the news is never revealed. “She stopped suddenly as if to listen. I too listened, but there was no sound in the house: and I knew that the old priest was lying still in his coffin, solemn and truculent in death, an idle chalice on his breast.” But this act of knowing has something willful about it: it is an affirmation of the facts, over the superstitious listening of the aunt, who knows that the priest is dead but is still checked from speaking honestly by some deep impulse towards caution, and impulse so deep it extends throughout her life and on into the very heart of death. And we know that boy, young, inexperienced, and naïve as he is, sees this, for this is where he stops the tale: “Eliza resumed: ---Wide-awake and laughing-like to himself…so then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think that there was something gone wrong with him…..” End of story. What more need be said? Just as the priest recognized religion as an elaborate compromise with the basic emptiness of worldly existence, so the boy has understood that the aunts have compromised with some core honesty, and are thus reduced to speaking in whispers and holding to forms they no longer believe in but are powerless to change.
Most of the other stories follow the same mold: they sketch a tale, inevitably set in turn of the century Dublin, in precise and transparent language, and end at the moment of epiphany, which often seems the middle of the story. An Encounter is about two young boys who skip school and meet a pederast. Araby is about first love, missed opportunity, self-respect, and the dynamics of power. The idea that we choose our own form of suffering is the ostensible content of Eveline, which chronicles the tale of young woman who balks at eloping with her lover, in spite of the fact that holding the course at home entails certain doom. Two Gallants, which Joyce apparently felt to be one of the best stories in the collection, recounts the petty depredations of two penniless young men as they dream of respectability and stability while preying on a young servant woman for money. It reveals the dehumanizing dimensions of urban poverty, and the corrupting influences of Dublin. The Boarding House is about a tyrannical beancounter of a woman who has driven her husband to drink and dupes a poor chap into marrying her dowry-less, unsophisticated, and drab young daughter. Both A Little Cloud and Counterparts illuminate the connection between domestic violence and professional dissatisfaction, while Clay tells the story of a women whose life has been squandered in the relentless attempt to meet other people’s expectations. A Painful Case details the solitude, despair, and subsequent alcoholism of a woman whose attempts to connect with a fellow citizen shatter on the man’s basic boorishness. Ivy Day in the Committee Room is a political tale, or a tale about Dublin style politics, at least, and perhaps the story I least understand in the collection. The talented but petty Ms. Kearney, whose insistence on “getting her own” leads to her humdrum marriage, her social marginalization, and eventually the ruin of her daughter’s artistic career, is the subject of A Mother. Grace is a strange story about a drunk whose friends attempt to rehabilitate him by dragging him to a church retreat. In the process, the spiritual bankruptcy of the advice givers, both in the circle of friends and in the church, becomes apparent.
The final story, The Dead, is fowl of altogether another feather. Not only is it much longer than any of the preceding stories, it enters a kind of interiority that the sheer brevity of its predecessors can’t allow. Gabriel is the first fully rounded character in Dubliner’s, we see him not just at the moment of epiphany, but before and after as well, context which richens and refines the awakening. As with the other stories, however, the Dead is ultimately an indictment on Irish culture, its characters are sleepwalkers, compromisers, boors, rejects, and failures. There is a hint of nobility that runs through all this humanity, there is a sense that at root is something good, ‘the magnificent hospitality of the Irish’ as evidenced in the lavishness of the aunts, Gretta’s passion and sensitivity, Garbiel’s basic decency and competence. But all are corrupted, either by having settled or having chosen the wrong path or having spent too damn much time in Ireland. The recurring image of the snow suggests Ireland is ripe to be buried.
Dubliners is the third book by Joyce that I have read, having begun with Portrait and then moved directly to the monster that is Ulysses. Though an argument could made that the works of Joyce are best read in the order in which they were produced, the advantage of coming to the lucidity of the stories last is they immediately and profoundly open up the more obscure later works. They illuminate not just Joyce’s power as a storyteller, but also the limits of what Joyce could achieve within a conventional narrative framework. As Frank Conner notes, it is telling that Joyce never again wrote a short story. The move into the interior that we see at the very end of Dubliners, the emotional, symbolic, and psychological richness of The Dead, would prove too tempting, and Joyce would limit himself from then on to the sprawling, open forms of his last works as he sought to set down on paper the words that would ‘forge the conscience of his race’.
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