Experiments in Criticism

David Foster Wallace fills his book Oblivion: Stories (2004) with double-binds.

• A character wishes to be significant while working at a job that demands his insignificance.
• A child misses a teacher’s psychotic breakdown in the classroom, but only because a more horrific daydream transfixes him.
• A tribe’s magical child can only dispense wisdom to the extent that the child does not ponder the nature of its wisdom.
• A suicidally depressed man tries to render the truth that time makes representing anything truthfully impossible.
• A husband and wife argue about whether or not the man’s snoring wakes his wife up or whether the woman dreams that the man snores and wakes up.
• Because they are both asleep, they can neither confirm nor deny reality.

Several related questions animate these double-binds:

1. What is the relationship between what we perceive and what is real?
2. Can we know the truth?
3. If we can, what truths about the world demand our attention?
4. What is more significant: unity or diversity?

In covenantal terms, the stories ask these questions:

1. Is there a reality that transcends human consciousness (i.e., God?)
2. How do you truthfully represent the reality of the world and yourself?
3. What ethical responsibility do we have to represent the world and ourselves truthfully?
4. What are the consequences for failing to represent the world and ourselves truthfully?
5. What is the legacy of truth or falsehood?

One more double-bind occurs to me. Wallace works through the nature of truth…in fiction.

I’ll write about the implications of his work over the next few weeks.

I started the new year by reading Leland Ryken’s How To Read the Bible as Literature (and Get More Out of It). The book is more of an introduction to the topic than a definitive source. Its best feature? Copious further reading lists at the end of each chapter. I’ll be checking out the following books.

• Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981).
• Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982).
• G. B. Caird, The Language and Imagery of the Bible (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1980).
• D. G. Kehl, ed., Literary Style of the Old Bible and the New (Indianapolis: Bobbs- Merrill, 1970).
• James L. Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981)
• Literary Interpretations of Biblical Narratives, vols. 1, 2, ed. Kenneth R. R. Gros Louis (Nashville: Abingdon, 1974, 1982).
• Leland Ryken, The Literature of the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1974).
• Robert C. Tannehill, The Sword of His Mouth: Forceful and Imaginative Language in  Synoptic Sayings (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975).
• The New Testament in Literary Criticism, ed. Leland Ryken (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984).

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (1864) is a propulsive novella narrated in the first-person by the Underground Man, a retired civil servant.

The novel has two sections. The first section records the Underground Man’s rantings against various elements of Russian society, particularly Utopianism. People are incapable of perfection, he argues, and are fundamentally irrational. Human beings want freedom, not because they will use it rationally, but because they want to choose their fate individually, no matter how unreasonable their choices are. The second section details the Underground Man’s shameful interactions with his military colleagues and his encounter with a prostitute named Liza. The Underground Man finds himself incapable of loving someone, much less the skills to function in contemporary society.

The novella asks a crucial ethical question: if human beings are irrational, how can they do what is right? The Underground Man can identify the moral hypocrisy of his colleagues and Russian society in general. His own tortured notes come from his sense that he, too, is a hypocrite in that he cannot live the way he should. The novel’s theme is that it is far easier to preach ethical revival than act. What the Underground Man does to Liza is unconscionable. Yet she is willing to forgive him and extend love to him.

Today, I read two selections from Alfred Hitchock’s curated collection, My Favorites in Suspense. The two illustrate the opposed content of suspense stories. “A Sentence of Death” by Thomas Walsh finds suspense in a cop seeking to correct injustice. Mann Rubin’s “A Nice Touch” finds tension in making the story’s protagonist even more unjust than the reader initially supposes.

Both stories feature a moment of recognition where a character recognizes a crucial fact about the world. The cop at the center of “Sentence” discovers he’s done his job poorly. The man at the center of “Touch” finds a way to keep sinning. “Sentence” ends with justice secured for the moment but our faith in justice shaken. The cops aren’t corrupt. They’re just incompetent. “Touch” ends with the main character unpunished. As a reader, I wasn’t happy about it. The character hasn’t escaped my judgment, and I’ve got a feeling Rubin wants to test my judgment as much as his character’s.

These stories are specifically designed to entertain, yet their value as entertainment would be non-existent if the reader had no moral conscience.

David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King (2012) is incomplete, but its best sections demonstrate the power of Wallace’s fiction.

THEME

Set in an IRS office, the novel concerns various characters attempting to find meaning in rote, often dull work. Wallace sees their dilemma as an ethical one. Characters thrive when they discover that their work concerns something larger than themselves. Their insight is not rarely religious, but it is always spiritual.

Every semester, I teach Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection Interpreter of Maladies (1999). I reread it today and found it as powerful as ever.

THEME

We destroy our communities through greed, lust, and pride. We most experience broken communities, particularly in marriage, when we communicate poorly. For Lahiri, we experience redemption when we tell or listen to stories because both build community.

PLOT

• “A Temporary Matter”: A couple must deal with the traumatic stillborn death of their child.
• “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine”: A woman remembers the way her family greeted a political exile.
• “Interpreter of Maladies”: A Bengali tour guide discovers the malady afflicting an American couple’s marriage.
• “A Real Durwan”: A Bengali community grows disenchanted with a talkative gatekeeper.
• “Sexy”: A young woman has an affair with a married Bengali man and discovers what the titular word means.
• “Mrs. Sen’s”: A young boy learns about adult loneliness when a local Indian immigrant cares for him.
• “This Blessed House”: A newly married couple react differently to the Christian artifacts hidden on their property.
• “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar”: A Bengali woman afflicted with epilepsy looks for a cure.
• “The Third and Final Continent”: A nameless Bengali immigrant finds a new home in American thanks to his landlord, a 103-year-old woman.