Freedom is Overrated: Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace

The characters in Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom have lots of freedom, but their experience seems to teach them that freedom is overrated. Take Patty Berglund reflecting on her own misery:

By almost any standard, she led a luxurious life. She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. (p. 181)

In discussing this passage Ross Douthat argues that this sort of problem makes Franzen’s characters so contemptably bourgeois that they are not really worth writing about:

David Foster Wallace, Dante, and the Stars

At one point in his Kenyon College Commencement Speech (embedded above; transcript here) David Foster Wallace describes in brilliantly vivid detail the frustrations of standing in line in a supermarket. Our default setting, he says is to burn with impotent rage against the dreariness, misery, and stupidity of the situation. But this is not the only option:

Political Order

Matthew Peterson has posted some trenchant objections to a post of mine on the American Revolution. The main point of my post was a contrast between the way political order is viewed in the modern social imaginary vs. the way it was “imagined” in ancient and medieval societies. While in the modern social imaginary (and in modern political theory) political order is not seen as something good in itself, but only as an instrument to the realization of other goods, in the ancient/medieval imaginary political order was seen as something in itself good. St Thomas (as I read him) sees order as the primary intrinsic common good of political society.

Melancholy vs. Depression

In trying to explain the changes in the “conditions of belief” from the pre-modern to the modern (secular) age Charles Taylor makes a distinction between what he calls the “porous self” of pre-modernity and the “buffered self” of modernity. He distinguishes them in terms of the locus of “meaning;” for the buffered self “meaning” exists only in the mind not in external reality, whereas for the porous self meaning is already there in reality and can impinge on us from without. To clarify the distinction Taylor brings up an intriguing example– different views of melancholy:

The Only Thing Worth Writing About

This year’s Big American Novel is the long-awaited, unfinished book that David Foster Wallace had been working on up to his death in 2008. The Pale King is about the dull lives of IRS bureaucrats, and, as DFW wrote in one of the notes appended to the manuscript (p.545), it has two “broad arcs”: the first arc has to do with boredom and paying attention and the differences between people and machines; the second has to do with with being an individual vs. being part of something larger, civics. Both of these arcs are closely related to the central theme of pretty much all of Wallace’s writing.

The Beautiful Game

 

Having a cold makes one aware of the disjunct between the way one’s mortal body actually is, and the way one would rather expect it to be given the longings of one’s immortal soul; it reminds one to hope for the resurrection. David Foster Wallace touches on this in one of his tennis essays, "Federer as Religious Experience."  The beauty of tennis, Wallace argues, has to do with reconciling us to having a body. Great tennis players show us the wonder of a body which responds exactly to the will and thus, “catalyze our awareness of how glorious it is to touch and perceive, move through space, interact with matter.”

In another tennis essay, “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness” David Foster Wallace submits that tennis is the most beautiful sport. He doesn’t give much justification for this position, and it seems to me that he is wrong. Not for nothing, surely is football (soccer) called, “the Beautiful Game.” There is a brilliant essay by Brian Phillips, who edits what is perhaps the most beautiful of football blogs, which uses DFW’s definition of tennis’s beauty to prove the point:

There’s a case to be made, of course, that soccer is uniquely adapted for the creation of Federer Moments. Unlike tennis, which augments the player’s physical capabilities with a racket, soccer takes an essential physical tool—the hands—away from the player and forces him to compete in a state of artificial clumsiness. Soccer thus emphasizes the limits of the body and the difficulty of realizing intention. When a player does something amazing, we’re apt to see it not as a superhuman feat (he made the ball travel 150mph!), but as a human victory over what’s essentially an everyday difficulty. If the crisis of having a body is that it’s resistant to our will, soccer exaggerates the crisis, moves what you want to do even further away from what you can do, then gives us athletes who do what they want to anyway. That may be why moments of beauty in soccer, compared to those in other sports, nearly always feel like consolations.

In his Federer article DFW points to the fact that the kind of beauty that we are dealing with is close to the glory of the battlefield:

in men’s sports no one ever talks about beauty or grace or the body. Men may profess their “love” of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war…

In a wonderful lament on the contrast between the heroic society of Homer and our own pusillanimous shop-keeper civilization Tom Howard points to the lack of any locus of glory in the modern world. Someone has posted a comment to Howard’s article suggesting sport as that locus, but of course the fact that the primary locus of beauty, glory, courage etc. in our age is “professional” sports – i.e. a highly profitable late capitalist commodity run on sound commercial principles – just supports the point which Prof. Howard has so forcefully made.

Mario Incandenza, the Embarrassment of the Real, and the (Non-) Reality of Evil

I have just finished David Foster Wallace’s brilliant, disturbing, terrifying, sad, funny, and very, very, long novel Infinite Jest. It follows what seems like hundreds of characters in an elite tennis academy, a drug rehabilitation center, various Quebecois terrorist cells, etc. in the near future. The amazing thing is the way Wallace takes you into the various characters and gives you, so to speak, the flavor of their lives. He has an amazing ear for spoken language, for the way people actually talk, with all its hesitation and grammatical inconsistency, and through that he is able to show what it is like to live in our world. Above all he shows with terrifying clarity what it is to live “having no hope, and without God in the world” (Eph 2:12), what it is to be enslaved to the idols of the visible world, and what concrete form the simulacra gentium take in late capitalist America. And that is why a lot of it is really disturbing. In fact sometimes I found myself thinking it was to much; there are some things which it is simply better not to know. Felix Genn, the great bishop of Münster, once interpreted Rev 2:24 (“as many as have not this teaching, which know not the deep things of Satan, as they say; I cast upon you none other burden”) to mean that there are certain things which it is better not to look into. It is better to look at evil from a distance, to see it from a perspective from which its nothingness is most apparent–Tolkien is the master of the literary portrayal of evil in this mode. No one who reads Tolkien can doubt the clarity of his view of evil comes from remarkable personal innocence. Reading DFW on the other hand one has the sense that one is dealing with someone who has eaten way to much poisoned fruit… So, I abandoned Infinite Jest several times, but I kept on coming back to it.

Wallace was writing for an audience totally insulated against a Tolkienesque approach to literature: the post-modern avant-garde. In the above video he explains that he uses the techniques of post-modern literature to address ‘traditional human verities’ about spirituality and community and other ideas which the avant-garde would find very passé. I mentioned below that this presents him with certain problems. The basic paradox (and he was very much aware of this) is that the formal techniques that he employs were developed partly to mock the very idea of ‘traditional verities;’ post-modern literature is largely about seeing through the pretenses of supposed ‘truth,’ its ironic tone is aimed at exposing the hidden power-structures and manipulation that underlie supposed ‘verities.’ 

The most innocent character (in a Tolkienesque way) in Infinite Jest is Mario Incandenza, the severely handicapped second son of the Tennis Academy’s founder. Wallace is describes how Mario is puzzled by the way post-modern irony makes it embarrassing to talk about “real stuff:”

Mario’d fallen in love with the first Madam Psychosis [radio] programs because he felt like he was listening to someone sad read out loud from yellow letters she’d taken out of a shoebox on a rainy P.M., stuff about heartbreak and people you love dying and U.S. woe, stuff that was real. The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T.A. [the tennis academy] over the age of about Kent Blott finds stuff that is really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed. It’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn’t happy. (p. 592).

In contrast at the drug rehab center, Ennet house, Mario finds that people have no problem talking about ‘real stuff:’

Mario’s felt good both times in Ennet house Ennet’s House because it’s very real; people are crying and and making noise and getting less unhappy, and once he heard somebody say God with a straight face and nobody looked at them or looked down or smiled in any sort of way where you could tell that they were worried inside. (591)

The drug addicts have come to the end of their tether and they are desperate enough to shed their disguises. And that is why Wallace goes into the gruesome details of their predicament; he shows how their addictions are simply more evident versions of the same enslavement to idols that the cool tennis academy people are stuck in. I hope to discuss the central topic of idolatry more in future posts, but I want to end with Wallace’s amazing ability to enter into Mario’s innocent view of evil. Here is a wonderful passage which shows Mario’s experiential grasp of evil-as-privation-of-due-good. Mario is thinking about his brilliant but no-longer innocent brother Hal: 

He can’t tell if Hal is sad. He is having a harder and harder time reading Hal’s mind or whether he’s in good spirits. This worries him. He used to be able to sort of pre-verbally know in his stomach generally where Hal was and what he was doing, even if Hal was far away and playing or if Mario was away, and now he can’t anymore. Feel it. This worries him and feels like when you’ve lost something important in a dream and you can’t even remember what it was but it’s important. Mario loves Hal so much it makes his heart beat hard. He doesn’t have to wonder if the difference now is him or his brother because Mario never changes. (590)

Tolkien and the Common Good

Tom Shippey’s book J.R.R. Tolkien: Author Century is largely an apologetic work; it is a defense of Tolkien against literary critics who despise him as a romantic escapist whose mock archaic epics are unworthy of being mentioned in the same breath as the psychological explorations of “modernist” fiction. Shippey argues that is is in fact the “modern” which out of touch with reality and the “archaic” which is real. One argument that he brings for this has to do with the contrast between the private and the public:

Nevertheless, although [Tolkien’s concern] is not with the private and the personal (the themes of the ‘modernist’ novel), but with the public and the political, it should be obvious that to all but the sheltered classes of this century, the most important events in private lives (and even more, in deaths) have often been public and political. It is those who turn away from that thought, prefer to remain in what Graves called the ‘drawing room’ areas of literary tradition, who are in ‘flight from reality’. (p.xxxi)

Shippey should go farther though. That the “public” does touch what is most important in human lives is not just a consequence of its habit of ending them, but more importantly it follows from the primacy of the common good: the most important human goods are not private goods. Tolkien himself saw this quite clearly. In a lecture some years ago my father made this point:

We meet Frodo immersed in the ordinary life of a Hobbit. Step by step he discovers the significance of the ring he inherited from Bilbo. The ring is not a local matter. It touches the lives of all in Middle-earth. The quest on which this discovery sends him brings him into contact with concerns that are much larger than those that had moved him in the Shire. His quest is not a merely personal quest. It cannot be understood in terms of pop-psychology as a quest of finding himself. What he finds is much larger than himself and he understands himself more and more as a part of that larger whole. […] Frodo’s quest is therefore defined by a great and noble common good, a political good. This transition of Frodo from a private individual with a small radius of life to one who loves the common good of the kingdom established in Middle-earth is one of the most beautiful events in The Lord of the Rings. It corresponds to the rhythm of increase found at the beginning of the Silmarillion, at the very root of Middle-earth. A small story is suddenly enlarged into a story that has greatness, splendor and glory.

And there is another piece of evidence that the primacy of the common good is pretty much the hermeneutic key to the universe, as anyone who has read Charles De Koninck’s sapiential book on that principle will agree.

(Of course, not every author who is interested in the ‘public’ in Shippey’s sense uses an ‘archaic’ style. David Foster Wallace’s work, for example, turned a lot on the contrast between private and common good, but uses the most ‘advanced’ technique, and that presents him with certain difficulties…)