I’m working through Haruki Murakami’s Wind Up Bird Chronicles for the first time. Strike that. Let’s not oversell it; I’m a few pages into WUBC. Flipping past the numerous reviews of the recent 1Q84 impressed upon me two things: 1. Murakami is a genius, etc. 2 1Q84 was probably not a great introduction to his work*.
*On the other hand, I sometimes perversely wonder whether the best way to be introduced to a great master is through their least-regarded work. There’s always the chance that the experience will be so bad it will turn you off forever, but if it doesn’t then every new work is better than the last.
And really, it’s far too early for me to be giving any sort of opinions on the work. I’m literally like 10 pages in. One thing I can say is that I’m enjoying the similarities between Murakami’s work and that of one of my current favorite writers, David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet)*.
*Murakami’s such a well known and beloved figure that it’s probably meaningless to say that any writer is “familiar” with his work, but I would put money down on the fact that Mitchell–who has set several of his works in Japan–has consciously modeled his style on him.
One of the thing that I’m sensing about Murakami is that he, like Mitchell, likes to play with the idea of characters that are both completely specific and completely symbolic. These characters are just slightly larger than life, but not so much as to disrupt a sense of reality. This frees the writer to write in a style that’s a little more plot-centric while remaining in the realm of literary fiction without becoming banal. It’s the strategy that ties Murakami’s pop-culture references and hints at magic realism, and Mitchell’s polyvocality and postmodernism together. Characters that are complete archetypes, that in a less ambitious work would be stock, are given weight by the knowledge that all of their actions carry subtext, and that for all the emphasis on narrative and plot there is another story also being explored.
Thornton Wilder, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright, is the most famous alumnus of The Thacher School, my alma mater. There is some competition; we’ve had some very successful businessmen graduate, and Howard Hughes attended for a year, but in the humanities Wilder stands alone.
I’ve recently been thinking about him, and picturing him during his school years and what life must have been like for him because he popped up in a biography I’ve been reading, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade, by Justin Spring. That (pretty awesome) title shows the broad strokes, so to speak, of Spring’s life. He was from middle of nowhere, Ohio, and leveraged his social skills and high intelligence to lead a remarkably unique life. He was a professor of English and writer of both literary and pulp erotic fiction. He was a lover of celebrity culture, hooking up with his first celebrity, the film star Rudolph Valentino, at the tender age of 19. He also loved having sex on the street with scores of working men*, and the detailed notes that he took of his sexual history from age 14 formed some of Alfred Kinsey’s initial data sets for his academic investigation of homosexuality. As if that wasn’t enough, he loved tattoos and tattoo culture, ending up near the end of his life as the official tattoo artist of the Hell’s Angels.
*As a younger gay person, can I just say, shit was wack before AIDS.
He also had a many-years sexual affair with Thorton Wilder. The Spring book is filled with plenty of lurid detail:
Thornton went about sex almost as if he were looking the other way, doing something else, and nothing happened that could be prosecuted anywhere, unless frottage can be called a crime. There was never even any kissing. On top of me, and after ninety seconds and a dozen strokes against my belly he ejaculated. At this he sprang from our bed of roses and exclaimed in his rapid way: “Didntyoucome? Didntyoucome.”
No. I didn’t
There’s also an implication of a core sadness on the part of Wilder. Steward writes, “…he could never forthrightly discuss anything sexual; for him the act itself was quite literally unspeakable.” In a conversation with Gertrude Stein, a mutual friend of Wilder and Steward, Stein asked Steward whether Wilder had told him that Stein and Alice Toklas were lesbians. Steward responded that Wilder “said yes he supposed in the beginning but that it was all over now.” Stein responded, “How could he know. He doesn’t even know what love is. And that’s just like Thornie.”
It’s hard for me to think of the man without thinking of the boy he must have been. The Thacher School, through development and the simple passage of time, has become an excellent place to send your kids by any metric. But at the time that Wilder was in school, it was still very much a wild place, located in an out-of-the-way, dusty, small town. It was a rough place, with an emphasis on working with one’s hands. The photo to the left is the school roughhouse, where the (all male, at the time) students would play and horse around. All in all, it seems a very rough and tumble place for a sensitive and bookish kid like Wilder. His Wikipedia page coyly states that “he did not fit in and was teased by classmates as overly intellectual.” An anonymous quotation from a classmate remembers, “We left him alone, just left him alone. And he would retire at the library, his hideaway, learning to distance himself from humiliation and indifference.” He did not graduate from Thacher.
Knowing his sexual orientation, it’s hard for me to not read between the lines and speculate about other sorts of friction between Wilder and his classmates. Is “overly intellectual” code for something else? Of course, there is no way to know. Codes of silence bound both Wilder and his classmates. But when I’m in a reflective mood, I wonder what it means that I had such a good experience at a place that was perhaps so cruel to Wilder.
2. reading between the lines
Mrs. Soames: Well, naturally I didn’t want to say a word about it in front of those others (looks off rear L.), but now we’re alone–really, it’s the worst scandal that ever was in this town!
Mrs. Gibbs: What?
Mrs. Soames: Simon Stimson!
….
Dr. Gibbs: I guess I know more about Simon Stimson’s affairs than anybody in this town. Some people ain’t made for small town life.
–Our Town
I once participated in a discussion at Ta-Nehisi Coate’s blog about homosexuality in literature, and how, because homosexuality was not written about in English until relatively recently, gay culture borrows a lot from works that were probably not written with gay subtext. I used my pet theory that the central relationship in The Sun Also Rises is actually about the relationship between a gay man (Jake) and his beard (Brett). This requires a bit of willful ignorance (we have to make the metaphorical language about impotence as a further metaphor for homosexuality), but really does add another level of menace and drama when considering Jake’s relationship with Cohn and Romero. Anyway, commenter k___bee responded:
That’s really instructive. I think I mostly thought of gay subtext in older literature as something one had to search for – like “there have always been queer people and same-sex romances, where are they hiding in literature?”
But of course it’s going to be an obvious interpretation of some works of art if you’re gay – whereas straight people like me might have to really squint in order to see what’s jumping out at some gay readers.
Another example of characters with a gay subtext that I pick up on is found in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town. One of the characters that peoples the small town of Grover’s Corners is Simon Stimson, the organist and choir director of the town’s church. There’s an aura of tragedy around Stimson; townsfolk attend his choir rehearsals but speak about him in whispers, and finally the Stage Manager shows us to his grave, telling us that he died early of alcoholism. The character represents the dark side of small town living, the repression, the lack of opportunity, the smallness and the small mindedness. It’s clear that his alcoholism and frequent drunkenness is enough of a dark secret to scandalize the town, but again it’s hard for me not to read more into it.
The gay church organist is, within gay circles, a stock figure. He’s the person that is too bound by environment and family ties to move away, and has found the one place in that environment in which he can be most like himself. Wilder has a tremendous amount of compassion for this character, and I really see it as a reflection of himself, the Thornton Wilder that grew up in a small town, the Thornton Wilder that couldn’t get out. And maybe that’s all that Thacher was, a small pond with a fish that was too big, that didn’t fit, that didn’t fit in.
Adam Kirsch has written one monster review in The New Republic of The Pale King, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, both by David Foster Wallace, and Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, by David Lipsky.
It’s a meandering review, and while its conclusion is not particularly unusual (“One of the many things to mourn about Wallace’s death is that we will never get to know the writer he was striving to become.”), there are many intriguing observations along the way:
This argument is translated into fictional terms in the early story “My Appearance,” from Wallace’s collection The Girl with Curious Hair, which appeared in 1989. The story concerns a middle-aged, moderately successful TV actress who is making an appearance on David Letterman’s talk show. Her challenge is to find a way to communicate sincerely in the face of Letterman’s sneering irony, which to Wallace is the epitome of TV-bred cynicism. A friend tells her that the only way to cope is to out-Letterman Letterman: “Laugh in a way that’s somehow deadpan. Act as if you knew from birth that everything is clichéd and hyped and empty and absurd, and that that’s just where the fun is.”
Wallace dreads this kind of irony, which poisons communication and makes displays of emotion look ridiculous. He dreads it on civic grounds, of course; but he also sees cool knowingness as a deadly threat to his own literary genius, which is essentially sentimental and melodramatic. (“There’s never been a time in serious art more hostile to melodrama,” he complained to Lipsky.) That is why Wallace is exercised by the ironic self-consciousness of postmodern fiction, in much the same way that he is disturbed by David Letterman. Lost in the Funhouse can hardly be held responsible for “a great stasis and despair in U.S. culture”—for one thing, not enough people have read it. But in “Westward,” Wallace offers a novella-length attack on the metafictional gamesmanship of Barth’s story: “You want to get laid by somebody that keeps saying ‘Here I am, laying you?’ Yes? No? No. Sure you don’t. I sure don’t. It’s a cold tease. No heart. Cruel. A story ought to lead you to bed with both hands.”
In his hostility to pop-cultural irony, Wallace was (ironically, perhaps) in agreement with the best pop culture of his time. Many people have observed that Wallace’s trademark look—the bandana, lank hair, and stubble that appear in his author photos, and made him one of the most recognizable writers of his time—evoked the grunge style of Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana, whose suicide in 1994 was a mythic moment for Generation X. When Lipsky, who was profiling Wallace for Rolling Stone, asked him the obligatory questions about his taste in music, he described Cobain’s songs as “absolutely incredible. But unbelievably painful. I mean if you, you know, all the stuff that I was groping in a sorta clumsy way to say about our generation? Cobain found, Cobain found incredibly powerful upsetting ways to say the same thing.”
The famous lyrics of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—“I feel stupid and contagious/Here we are now, entertain us”—could be used as an epigraph to Wallace’s essay on television, and even more appropriately to Infinite Jest. Cobain’s sullen parody of alienation used irony to defeat irony, much as Wallace, in “Westward,” used metafiction to defeat metafiction. And the young novelists who followed in Wallace’s wake—Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, and Zadie Smith, to name the most prominent—have shared his righteous refusal of irony. They believe that literature should be positive, constructive, civically engaged, a weapon against alienation. Jonathan Franzen, who was Wallace’s close friend and has staked repeated public claims to his legacy, told The Paris Review that the two of them shared a philosophy of fiction: “The point of agreement that he and I eventually reached was the notion of loneliness: that fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance.”
The review, of which this is only one small part, is well worth reading in full for anyone interested in Wallace’s fiction or interested in the themes that he explored in that fiction.
I realized that I was going to have to sacrifice my goal of blogging about each section as I read it to the larger goal of finishing the book this summer. I’m hoping to still check in with a post every week or so. This post covers through roughly page 86.
In this section of the book, I’m starting to get a little bit of a sense of a larger-scale plot. Just glimpses at the fringes: periodic reminders that the doctor is still paralyzed before the mysterious cartridge, the emergence of some character interactions, glimpses of a metafiction.
I’m also constantly awestruck by how many variables DFW juggles in delivering his story. Sometimes the struggle of really reading the texts prevents me from truly appreciating how ambitious a project it is. It’s not just the chronological games he plays, or the vocabulary, or the large stable of characters. It’s also that he’s writing in a variety of tones, modes of writing, degrees of formality and reality. He’s almost always funny and careful, but there’s a tremendous difference between the realism of, say, the Tiny Ewell introduction and the patent absurdity of Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents. It’s actually quite the trick, that he’s able to derive humor from both patent absurdity and from closely-observed detail.
Stray Observations:
The mysterious cartridge that traps viewers into watching it forever reminds me greatly of Ice-nine from Cat’s Cradle.
Inability to communicate continues to be a theme; the novel almost contains a taxonomy of the different ways that we can fail to be understood. The death of the Canadian official in his home contains many: he is attacked by his robbers because of language barrier, he cannot get help from the person that calls at the door because of the tape across his mouth, and he cannot get help from his wife because of distance.
I’m enjoying the flashes of metafiction that we get: we’ve had repeated and unrelated references to Toblerone and Byzantine erotica.
Thinking back, he was sure he’d said whatever, which in retrospect worried him because it might have sounded as if he didn’t care at all, not at all, so little that it wouldn’t matter if she forgot to get it or call, and once he’d made the decision to have marijuana in his home one more time it mattered a lot. It mattered a lot.
In the same Charlie Rose interview I embedded in my last post, DFW is asked what he thinks about the reception and accolades that Infinite Jest was getting. He responded that he was surprised that so many people focused on how funny the book was. It seemed to me like Wallace was uncomfortable by people focusing on the humor of a book that really contained his heart and soul, like a mob laughing at a statement of truth.
If there are many more sections like this, I’m not sure that he had cause to worry. This section is both deeply funny and deeply dark. As it’s basically the stream-of-consciousness ramblings of an addict (repeating the mantra, “Where was the woman who said she’d come.”), it’s extremely closely observed, DFW leads us deep into oversharing territory. As a reader, I felt a strange and conflicting mixture of identification, reactionary disgust, and amusement. There are some of the narrator’s insecurities and coping mechanisms that feel so true, or that I experience to a different degree in my own life, that I can’t help but to identify with him. That feeling is counterbalanced by the part of me that can’t imagine living the way that the man does, in a world of self-delusion completely lacking in perspective. It goes beyond a voyeuristic disgust, I actually find it somewhat scary. And to top it off, it is also witty and funny.
Given what we know of DFW’s struggles with substance abuse and alcohol addiction, and the extensive self-help library he owned, I think it’s probably safe to say that some of the emotional and behavioral truths in this section contain some reflection of Wallace himself. And so you could easily see why he would be threatened by a public that seemed to not even acknowledge the true blackness of some of his writing. Like Hal, he knew the futility of the question, “So yo then man what’s your story?”
Stray Observations
In the quotation above, the narrator of the section shows that he too, like Hal, obsesses over the potential of language to betray communication.
Throughout the chapter, the narrator refers to a small insect, possibly a manifestation of his insanity (or addiction). One of the things that I love about it is that it pops up casually, like a non sequitur.
I imagine that DFW smoked some weed in his lifetime.
First appearance of a footnote.
Other potential DFW-ian character traits: a strange mixture of optimism and pessimism. A great amount of self-knowledge, coupled with a paralysis that prevents him from acting upon that knowledge.
The idea that perhaps the best way to treat a weakness by overindulging seems to be significant to the narrator on a personal level, and also perhaps apply to the broader culture. The way that the narrator treats weed and and entertainment are strongly linked: The moment he recognized what exactly was on one cartridge he had a strong anxious feeling that there was something more entertaining on another cartridge and that he was potentially missing it. He realized that he would have plenty of time to enjoy all the cartridges, and realized intellectually that the feeling of deprived panic over missing something made no sense.
. He was from middle of nowhere, Ohio, and leveraged his social skills and high intelligence to lead a remarkably unique life. He was a professor of English and writer of both literary and pulp erotic fiction. He was a lover of celebrity culture, hooking up with his first celebrity, the film star Rudolph Valentino, at the tender age of 19. He also loved having sex on the street with scores of working men*, and the detailed notes that he took of his sexual history from age 14 formed some of Alfred Kinsey’s initial data sets for his academic investigation of homosexuality. As if that wasn’t enough, he loved tattoos and tattoo culture, ending up near the end of his life as the official tattoo artist of the Hell’s Angels.
It’s hard for me to think of the man without thinking of the boy he must have been. The Thacher School, through development and the simple passage of time, has become an excellent place to send your kids by any metric. But at the time that Wilder was in school, it was still very much a wild place, located in an out-of-the-way, dusty, small town. It was a rough place, with an emphasis on working with one’s hands. The photo to the left is the school roughhouse, where the (all male, at the time) students would play and horse around. All in all, it seems a very rough and tumble place for a sensitive and bookish kid like Wilder. His 
hammer & jack 