date31.a USAGE/CONTEXTUAL NOTE: “You are too old by far to be the type of man who checks his replicase levels before breakfast and has high-baud macros for places like Fruitful Union P.G.I Coding or SoftSci Deoxyribonucleic Intercode Systems in his Mo.Sys deck, and yet here you are, parking the heads on your VFSA telediddler and checking your replicase levels and padding your gen-resume like a randy freshman, preparing for what appears to all the world like an attempt at a soft date.” (McInerney et seq {via OmniLit TRF Matrix}2068).
A Polaroid of a society-a miniaturized sci-fi novel! To enjoy it, though, you have to unpack it, and to do this most readers will need their own OED and a medical dictionary. Here goes: You’re too old to be checking your supply of the enzymes-that-catalyze-the-synthesis-of-ribonucleic-molecules (which molecules carry instructions from your DNA which in turn control the synthesis of your proteins); way too old to have, in your possession, high data-per-second programming instructions for such imaginary futuristic genetic reproduction companies as “Fruitful Union” and “SoftSci” sitting there in your “desktop” (or whatever interface they’re using in 2068), and yet still you’re leaving your virtual sex toy alone and instead checking that you’re in tip top genetic condition and padding out your “genetic résumé” as if you were about to go and try and have actual procreative sex with someone! (And can we assume that in the future “J. McInerney” has become a fictional brand-et seq; “and what follows”-made possible by a frightening omnivorous literary computer program that takes literary styles and reproduces them long after the authors are in their graves?)
Look: that language fantasias of this kind are übergeeky and laborious can’t seriously be denied. The other story of this type, “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko,” retells the Tristan and Iseult story in the corporate entertainment offices of a futuristic/classical L.A. in futuristic-classical language-
Awakening this in fugues and paroxysms, Agon M. Nar did there upon consult mediated Oracles, offer leveraged tribute to images of Nielsen & Stasis, & sacrifice two whole humidors of Davidoff 9 Deluxes upon the offering-pyre of Emmé, Winged Goddess of Victory. There was much market research.
– and has been known to try the patience of even the hardiest howling fantod. [85] But what they signify, these stories-that words are worlds, that no language is neutral-is also serious and beautiful. Using extreme linguistic specialization to create little worlds was another, far more complicated way of saying THIS IS WATER, of reminding us that wherever we have language, we have the artificial conditions, limits, and possibilities of our existence. Of course, there is a writing that ignores this; that thinks of its own language as classical and universal and nonspecific; that experiences any trace of the contemporary as a kind of stain (no brand names, no modern words) and calls itself realism even if its characters speak no differently from those in a novel thirty years ago, or sixty. Wallace felt he couldn’t ignore the ambient noise of the contemporary, for the simple reason that it is everywhere. It is the water we swim in:
I’ve always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fighting with my professors about it in grad school. The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things. The whole way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral. I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water 100 years ago. It’s just the texture of the world I live in.
You had to fight to make this case in the 1990s, and writers like Wallace fought it in the face of a certain amount of critical ridicule and the general sense that it couldn’t be literature with a capital L if it let the trashy language of the contemporary in. Ten years later, few writers feel the need to defend this use of contemporary “texture,” and for the generation who grew up on Wallace, specialized language use amounts to realism of the first order: it’s the water they grew up swimming in.
But you can also think about water too much. You can forget how to swim. You can develop an extreme self-consciousness w/r/t form, and when this happens in Wallace’s work, we can clearly watch metafiction reclaiming him, almost eating him alive. In the story “Adult World,” a tale of extreme self-consciousness (a paranoid wife fears that the way she makes love with her husband is “somehow hard on his thingie”) devolves into an acute case of narrative self-consciousness, which concludes with the story falling apart. One half is written, but the other half is entirely deconstructed, offered only in the form of a writer’s schematic notes, unfinished, unfilled in. I remember how thrilled I was when I first read it-I thought it delicious that such a pyrotechnical stylist would be sufficiently honest to reveal the mechanical levers behind the Wizard of Oz facade. Ten years later I reread it and feel that the shock of the backstage glimpse is just that, a shock, and that it wears off and does not satisfy as the full story might have. “Octet,” an attempted “cycle of very short belletristic pieces” that are “supposed to compose a certain sort of ‘interrogation’ of the person reading them,” is another piece that suddenly falls apart (he only manages four of the eight), though in a far more astonishing fashion. As Wallace abandons his story cycle he tells us why: they “don’t interrogate or palpate” the reader as he’d wanted them to. What follows is an extremely manipulative breaking of the fourth wall, which, at the same time, claims to come from a place of urgent sincerity. Just like one of his own hideous men, Wallace assumes our consciousness; he parrots all our responses before we have them (he knows it looks manipulative, he knows this sounds like metafiction, and yes, he knows we know he knows.) He won’t stop, he hounds us relentlessly even through the footnotes, trying desperately to convince his readers that it’s not what we think he’s afraid of (which is failure). He knows, too, that “this 100%-honest-naked-interrogation-of-reader tactic” is an incredibly costly one, for him, for you, for your relationship with this book-hell, with David Foster Wallace, period. It’s my guess that how you feel about “Octet” will make or break you as a reader of Wallace, because what he’s really asking is for you to have faith in something he cannot possibly ever finally determine in language: “the agenda of the consciousness behind the text.” His urgency, his sincerity, his apparent desperation to “connect” with his reader in a genuine way-these are things you either believe in or don’t. Some writers want sympathetic readers; some want readers with a sense of humor; some want their readers at the political barricades, fired up and ready to go. Strange to say it, but Wallace wanted faithful readers. The last line of “Octet”?