Seven Steps Back

(photographs by yours truly)

fresh-magazine:

Συνέντευξη στον Γιάννη Φαρσάρη, Φωτογραφία: Παναγιώτης Γαβριήλογλου

Μια δημιουργική Ηρακλειώτισσα με οξύ συγγραφικό βλέμμα και πάθος για τις λέξεις, διανύει την δική της διαδρομή στην Αθήνα. Στην προσωπική συνέντευξη που μας παραχώρησε, εξομολογείται την αγωνία της και καταθέτει την άποψή της για ενδιαφέροντα θέματα που αφορούν τη λογοτεχνία και την περιπέτεια της συγγραφής.

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Shibuya, by Moominsean

At times, his writing and the stories he chooses to tell feel like the protective rituals of a severe OCD sufferer. The thing with Wallace is that reading him demands, or else incites, the use of the word ever, as in §46 is one of the best pieces of dialogue ever constructed on paper. He systematically does strange things to the English language but at the same time glorifies it, things that are aggressive but not devoid of sexual desire, a kind of low-grade, quasi-consented rape. As if the language is a Kogal picked up in Shibuya and paid for with a Gucci scarf, taken to a love hotel and then bound up Kinbaku-like. Extreme example: “The station’s flagpole’s flag’s rope’s pulleys and joists clinked dully in the wind”. The trouble is that the same parts that can be classified as truly stellar writing, truly stellar understanding, to use §46’s central word, is that his writing also incites the use of the word horrible or horrific. Its nature is unclear, or I am too squeamish, to even begin to try and describe his so-good-it’s-positively-extraterrestrial-or-maybe-even-siliconic-in-origin prose. Since as a person he is now unknowable to anyone who didn’t know him when he was alive (and to most of the people who did, par for the course for all but the more transparent or simple human beings, and my guess is he was far from being one), I can’t really say that this was the experience of the person himself: was he a stellar human being, but also horrible in an undertow kind of way, in the same rip-current way the reasons for dread aren’t immediately obvious in his writing? Some of them inhabit single words or sentences buried in the text, and others are thinly spread across the whole of it, the neurotic clarity too deeply painful and the necrotic rhythms of affect too scabrous for any reader to attempt an accurate re-enactment of (bar the suicidals, obviously).

―

People (that is, critics) talk (that is, write) about how Wallace was “kind” and “aware” and other warm and fuzzy words that they use with a kind of caution, gingerly in the way a novice bomb squad tech will handle heavy duty explosives. Wallace was not “kind” or “aware”. These are just words that try inadequately to mask the real horror of what Wallace was: an alien, cold intelligence, a foreign symphony composed of depression and computing power of awesome grade, sprinkled with a few frugal sub-routines of compassion. He imbibed the world, encrypted it with his own brand of pain, and reinstalled it seemingly unchanged, only now each part is colored with a distinct and quite transparent shade of black. Without wanting to dub Wallace as anything anti-, since his writing is the opposite of reactionary, he may well be the antipode of Borges in literature’s globe. An immense Beijing to Borges’ Buenos Aires, or maybe Borges is the empty Indian/Southern Ocean (it is still unclear, the International Hydrographic Organization has not yet made up its mind on the name) east of the Kerguelen Islands to Wallace’s dismal Illinois. Wallace’s exactitude and detail to Borges’ broad strokes. Wallace courageous and hard-working to a Borges timid and slothful in the face of the novel. Wallace emotional in the extreme without becoming trite, to Borges’ cool detachment. And don’t even get me started on the politics.

And this is why Wallace is for some people more admirable a writer than Borges. He recognized his talent, like Borges did, but, unlike Borges, he chose to go the distance, to set himself the highest goals he could think of and pursue them with dedication. It can of course be argued that this scaling-the-highest-mountains approach was a contributing factor to his death. This is pure speculation of the lowest order but his death may have been the result of more than his depression. It may also have been because of the nature of a writer vain enough to attempt to write something like IJ, ferocious enough to pull it off, and foolhardy enough to try and supersede it. This last attempt permitted his publisher to print for us the collection of drafts that comprise the Pale King, something that, and let’s just get this out of the way right now, was a financial decision by Little, Brown, an imprint of Hachette Book Group USA, or its parent company Hachette Livre, or its parent Lagardère Publishing, itself a division of Lagardère, a French company which is also active in the European defense industry and whose headquarters at 121, Avenue de Malakoff, 75016, France, is a more or less generic and unassuming building with mirror windows surrounded by grey wall and has a small plaque (compared to the magnitude of the company) with the company’s logo mounted next to the entrance; but also, I feel, as a final act of love for a writer who when read makes you feel, for a while, a little more human rather than just as a collection of various emptinesses surrounded by thin membranes of mundane experience.

Pg. 229 is essentially the fulcrum, the crux, the beating heart of the entire book. A description of what life actually is, of what true courage and true heroism is, the countless misconceptions and grand misinformations that help shape us into hazy and fuzzy-limited characters; that making a choice is choice-limiting and confining, but also, in a very important sense, liberating; that tedium is the true essence, the true heart of every life.

 ―

Now, take a look inside the room:

§8 describes the childhood of one of the Peoria REC’s examiners, Toni Ware, who has some issues of her own, as is revealed near the end of this collection of drafts. Her mother suffered from mental illness, maybe catatonic schizophrenia, and they traveled from trailer park to trailer park, her mother shacking up with a succession of trailer trash types who of course took advantage of Toni Ware’s prepubescent vulnerability, her still unrealized sexuality. What is interesting about this chapter is that it showcases Wallace’s linguistic chameleonism. Here he emulates, in a more or less perfect fashion, Cormac McCarthy’s comma-less and incandescent prose. You should read it, it is uncanny, he channels McCarthy, like an early 20^th cen. psychic. This chapter, all of it, could be an alternative vision of hell. Not the Christian version, replete with forked tails and cauldrons of boiling oil, but the earthly, extant ones, another one in the list of hells that people live through in the everyday. With some effort, we could triangulate the coordinates of the various appearances. Find one for example in the dictionary, an addendum scrawled on the page after the last definition (“hell-box”) and before its examples, or in houses that from the outside look no different from any other. The hells that hide beneath the diversionary caul of advertisements, sub-primetime ads for slimming creams, pointless exercise machines and crappy kitchen appliances; celebrity TV, the Oprah smile, the Letterman squint, the new talent show, the new reality show, it’s all about reality that has nothing to do with the real; great island condos, white as pebbles and towersome, immovable on the edge of a shallow azure sea; the long-limbed models who present an alternative vision of paradise you will never reach; and maybe not despite, but because of them.

Given the amount of research that he did for each book, we are inclined to believe every last bit of detail he put into the Pale King. So I initially believed that the IRS used to have Fornix punch card machines, for example, even though the name seemed suspect. Only there are no Fornix machines and probably never were. Search for Fornix and you get the vaginal fornix and the fornix of the brain. The same goes for the towns that are home to the other REC’s, like LaJunta and Rotting Flesh. These could be just stand-ins, first draft placeholders he didn’t get to change, but there is one chilling possibility. I am imagining an interview that will never be conducted, probably for a German cable channel. The host asks: “But what about the town names? What do they signify?”And Wallace blinks, looks away and smiles his shy smile. This is what he’s been waiting for. With his steady, low voice, a voice of a person who would rather fade in the background rather than stand there under the spotlights with his sweat blocked by specialized make-up: “Oh no, these aren’t fake names. These are real towns that existed up to 1986. You can look them up in Country Inns and Backroads. They did exist, but are now nothing more than ghost towns swallowed by the desert”.

And I can’t get over the fact that he inserted an esoteric nod of the head to freaky porn-hounds, on pg. 128, where he casually mentions a Mr. Seymour Booty, one of the names used in the IRS offices to throw suspect taxpayers off balance. But there exists in the real world, or at least in the porn world which isn’t all that real, a Seymore Butts, and we all know that “booty” is pornspeak for “butt” and Seymour is the normalized version of the punny Seymore. So, what I mean to ask, pop-quiz-like, is do you know of Seymore Butts (a.k.a., if you can believe it, Calico Cock, due to his psoriatic penis, a delightfully Wallacian nickname, if you ask me) and the Tushy Girls (particularly Alisha Klass, getting pounded in the ass by the huge cock of a tattooed and goateed Californian, first by a pool and then on a white couch, as young and beautiful as she will never be again, because nothing is ever pure or happy), because it is quite obvious that Wallace did. Or not. This could be just another of those coincidences.