My through-line “theme” to make sense of David Foster Wallace is sincerity vs. form – or perhaps, sincerity AND form, given the sense of the push-pull relationship between the two. Upon finishing Brief Interviews, have read the majority of his essay on television, and I think it is one of the key essays to making sense of what his writing is trying to get at. The television essay records the uneasy, sometimes-triumphant, sometimes-reductive reaction of the U.S. literary landscape to rapid technological developments in the latter 20th century, which culminated in the “image fiction” that sought to defamiliarize the Normal in attempt to understand, via irony and the sensational, the new normal of endless, all-day objectification of the self via television. This fiction is both successful and not, because television has already beat it to the punch: meta-irony is already passé. Form, in other words, in under great duress – from this, and from the whole scope of post-modern literary movements that undid the historically understood author-text relationship.
I think the above context is especially helpful in staging the Sincerity vs. Form concern, as it underscores the extent to which DFW is both reacting to his contemporary/legacy literature and is attempting to do something new (“Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko” is good at mocking all of this). Sincerity is passé – so what if a deliberately obtuse prose forces close reading which in turn focuses full reader attention (a rare commodity, in the television age) – and thus allows the reader to find the sincerity, through the work needed to get into the text? (Perhaps this is “Church Not Made With Hands”; the artist-as-narrator gives such a obscured, schizophrenic recounting that objectification and dismissal of character is not possible; the meaning is hidden). The form justifies the sincerity. But what if, too, the sincerity desired is not possible with the current limitations of form – and form must be broken completely, and the reader must be reached out to directly, at risk of the author seeming pathetic? (the fourth-wall break in “Octet”).
This tension runs through Brief Interviews, cross-mingled with a discussion of interpersonal relationship: the danger and inevitability of I-It relationships, the beauty but perhaps the impossibility of I-Thou relationships. Many themes here remind me, funnily enough, of Evangelion: our specific personhood, our very individuality, is inherent to loneliness – because I am not you, I can be myself. But because I am not you, I am alone. There is, in Brief Interviews, recountings of horribly sad transactional relationships (the majority of the brief interviews, primarily, but also the aging poet and his fame, or the horrible family triangle in “On His Deathbed…”); there are also moments of “I-ness” and aloneness that are beautiful, that perhaps necessitate loneliness to have meaning, even as they demand greater consciousness of our place in society: the interior coming-of-age in “Forever Overhead,” for example, the boy among the great line of people “in life” shuffling towards “their end.”
The sincerity/form and I-Thou/I-It comes to a sad and startling head in the final brief interview, where the interview form gently breaks down in small moments – the interviewer has a “chilly smile” described in the text, she is suddenly more present; she is revealed to be a “she” at all. The hideous man becomes, over the course of the interview, increasingly defeated at being able to make the interviewer understand him – he is trapped in his quote unquotes and societal therapy speak but he did really love the Granola Cruncher, even if no one believes him. His sophism fails him, but it forces him to honesty; he is alone before the reader/interviewer, but through this he has obtained more of the “sacred otherness” which he himself was shocked to find in the Granola Cruncher.
The author is also uncertain about this relationship – but specifically, the parallel of this relationship between himself and the reader: like the psychotic man, he worries that any true connection with the reader will obliterate him, will turn him into the It/the victim. This is “Octet,” after all, where the form breaks down completely and the author pleads with the reader (also a she) to trust his sincerity and not his self-awareness of his sincerity (which must translate into the form and thus makes him less sincere — feed or be food, after all). The author, in his control over the text (“the room”, per a brief interview) and the necessary extension of this to the whole world, in his self-aware mockery of therapy-speak via therapy-speak, is another hideous man. What is more honest to the reader, ultimately: the breaking down of form to desperately convey meaning? Or the acceptance that otherness – the recognition of the “Thou” – makes true understanding impossible?
(What would be more meaningful: “Adult World (II)” in prose or in its broken-down outline (of a prose piece)? The outline, here, works perfectly: the sadness of the narrator’s world shattering, her horrible “peace” and “happy ending,” are worse when offered up to the reader naked, no prose to give shelter or closure).
The reader, of course, is also all the hideous men; this is the last “Yet Another Example…”, as we are left with the twins, trapped between their mocking reflections and the obtuseness of the parents. Without the human connection the author is so desperate to establish, we – undeserving, self-centered – are also alone. Can we really blame the author’s desperation to establish connection when these are the stakes?
the last pavilion 