Capital T Truth, David Foster Wallace

I came to read David Foster Wallace after his death - actually because of his death. My introduction to him was through the April 18,2011 New Yorker article by Jonathan Franzen about DFW's suicide. They were great friends. The suicide broke Franzen's heart. I was moved by the article, and found a couple of short stories by DFW on the Internet which moved me further to read Infinite Jest. Can you believe it? I read the entire 1000 page book in the three weeks allotted by my local library. (I have since purchase a copy of it.) What a writer, what a thinker. And as I discovered tonight, what a speaker.

Here are a few memorable quotations from the phenomenal 2005 commencement address he gave at Kenyon College. This version was transcribed and published by The Economist.

 I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master".

In this address, he has been slowly, logically making his points, and by the time the above conclusion is reached, it hits with a force rather than as a cliche. This next paragraph follows in sequence - there's a jaw dropper in it.

 This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

 The address ends with the following:

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime.  

He called this "The capital-T Truth: life BEFORE death". The address is not long and contains many profound ideas. It's worth a read.

A side note: Franzen claims that with his suicide, DFW was shooting not the "master", but those who loved him (family and friends) because he was incapable of accepting their gifts of love. He had capacity to give infinite love, but not to accept it. Franzen's article is long, but also is worth a read.

The Sot-Weed Factor

There are only a few books on the Time 100 list that I do not plan to read. I opted out of A Clockwork Orange (although I saw the film) and The Blood Meridian due to excessive violence. I found two other books alarming in various ways (Lolita and Naked Lunch), but managed to complete them (or nearly so) anyway. Such was not the case with The Sot-Weed Factor.

I came to The Sot-Weed Factor, by John Barth, without any prejudice. I missed the not-so-soft-porn illustration on the back cover of my used-British version of the book showing half-nude women being tied up and raped. I also missed the quote next to it from Norman Shrapnel of The Guardian:

"Here be rapes pursuits, swivings, walking of the plank, epic poems, fantastical changes of identity, deep philosophical discussions, more pursuits, more rape."

Had I seen the back cover and blurb, I would have hesitated before opening the book. As it was, I didn't get much further than the first 30-40 pages before becoming thoroughly disgusted with it. I browsed the remainder of the book and decided to give it up. I can see that some will like it -- love it, as a matter of fact. I am sure that Barth has excellent social commentary buried in those sordid pages. I wasn't interested in dumpster diving to find those pearls buried amidst the garbage. It's a matter of taste.

Barth tells the tale of an innocent named Ebenezer Cooke who is a man of high morals, high aspirations but a weak spirit. Cooke spends his free time either gambling or working on an epic poem and both interfere with his earning his keep. He is an easy mark for the miscreants of the world who continuously show up on his doorstep. Although he tries to keep his affairs from his father, an uptight American tobacco farmer who now lives in England, a series of misfortunes befall Cooke and his woes reach his father's ear. In spite of his pleas for forgiveness, he is forced to move to Maryland to manage the family tobacco business.

There is an eventful journey to Maryland and an eventful life in the sot-weed (tobacco) factory. Barth does not treat this hero any better than he did Giles, in The Giles Goat Boy. Cooke is subjected to countless indignities everywhere he turns. He tries to keep to morally high ground, but in the end, the experiences change him deeply. This is a coming-of-age story (parody) that moves in the wrong direction. The book, true to Shrapnel's review, is bawdy: filled with rapes and atrocities.  But it's a parody and all is forgiven in a parody, isn't it? Well, that may not be true, but then one doesn't have to read it, do they. In the end, I chose not to.

I am glad to be rid of the book. On to something more suitable....

Lolita - Banning Vs Condoning

Today I got the energy to finish Lolita. A few months ago when I read most of the book, I used the following ploy: I started at the beginning and read until it got disgusting. Then I moved to the last page and read sections backwards until I hit the end of the disgusting part in the middle. I thought I'd missed 20 pages, but the disgusting part was much longer than that. It was also a lot more than disgusting. But I'll get to that.

Before today, I honestly did not know what the middle part contained. When I stopped reading, Humbert Humbert had attempted to drug 12-year-old Lolita to sleep and had joined her in bed expecting to "take advantage" of her as she slept. But she kept waking up. I stopped here and turned to the last pages where he is about to be executed for murdering a man. Safe enough, I turned back further towards the middle... Humbert and Lolita meet when she is older (17?)and she tells him that he ruined her life. She is engaged, pregnant and broke and needs money. He gives her some. I read all of that, and stopped there.

I put the book down - thankfully in the dark - about what may or may not have happened in those middle pages. I noted that Humbart was a fool, that the writing was spectacular, but the material was questionable at best. Several people on a blog I follow mentioned that nothing much happens in that middle section. So I figured that Lolita made a cuckold of Humbert and scampered away unscathed. Today I discovered that "nothing much happens" means that the sex is not explicit, that is, it's not hard-core pornography. Nabokov does, in fact, write about enough details to make scenes come alive.

What a surprise. The nothing much in the middle includes him seducing her (this is statutory rape) on the morning of the sleeping pill and implying that this thirteen year old was fair game because she had had sex with a boy at summer camp. This scene was followed by a year of raping her all across the country. He cajoled her, threatened her and sometimes simply raped her. He paid her money to do "special favors" for him. And then, worried that she might use the money to run away, stole the it back from her.

Whoa.

Academically, this book may be a jewel. Nabakov poured his heart into it. I can see that. It is a treasure of wit and prose. But why would anyone recommend that the general public read it? Why would critics put it on the best-books lists? This is prurient material about children. We should not be recommending prurient material about children to the general public (or our best friends, either!). It even appears on the Radcliffe 100 best books. This is a perverse book in which horrible things happen to a beautiful, pubescent girl. Let's not glamorize this as great literature to be read by all. I don't want us to become so jaded that a book like Lolita doesn't make us squeamish any more.

One critic argued that the book is not erotic because the sexually suggestive material in the first three chapters becomes boring  and so the reader is not aroused by the later material. I am not sure if this commentator reads a lot of pornography and so found Lolita boring or if he keeps his genitals buttoned up very tight and is therefore not affected. My guess is that if it were not erotic - even slightly - it would not have sold 100,000 copies in three weeks.

Others say that Nabokov distances himself from Humbert at the end of the book and makes it clear that Humbert's behavior is despicable. What that says at best is that Nabokov is redeemed at the end, not that Humbert is. Humbert never sees himself for the monster that he is. A large amount of sexually titillating material about a child has been read by the time the reader reaches the end. It's a bit late by then to be distancing oneself.

I am not a prude. I am simply noting that this book about a foolish pedophile has prurient material about a child and we should not put it on our best-books lists. I think that someone has missed the difference between objecting to censorship (which I do) and condoning a sexual book about children (which I don't).

I did not finish reading the book. I won't bother. I hope you don't either.