In 2005, novelist David Foster Wallace was invited to give a commencement speech to the graduates of Kenyon College. Captivating, inquisitive, and in no way didactic, Wallace unveiled to them the oncoming drudgery of adult life and all its routines—certainly nothing an ambitious twenty-two year old wants to hear. But Wallace offered an alternative to mental and emotional atrophy. The liberal arts degree, he said, not only teaches us how to think but encourages to “exercise some control over how and what we think.” We have the ability to experience the hellish monotony of daily life as “not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars.” “Please,” he added, “don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice.” In truth the most startling thing about Wallace’s lecture was its lack of lecturing, even when pleading for us to be compassionate. We believed that Wallace couldn’t lecture or moralize. He was a novelist, after all, and isn’t it the novelist’s task to show us the world as it is rather than the world as it should be?

The Pale King—Wallace’s unfinished posthumous novel published by Little, Brown last month—has gone on to receive what to any living author would be nerve-damaging attention, and the consensus is unanimous. The novel, says Laura Miller of Salon, “seems intended to plumb the meaning of boredom, a phenomenon usually defined by its meaninglessness.” In The New York Review of Books, Jonathan Raban informs us that Wallace’s “unresolved ambition to find meaning in ordinary, adult lives, to explore boredom and frustration as a necessary and interesting human condition, has great vitality in these pages.” Hopelessly scarce are the reviews that don’t mention the pervasive and almost prayer-like presence of boredom and routine. In the book—itself an undeniable extension of the philosophy unpacked in his Kenyon speech—Wallace’s characters become so entrenched in the tedium of their jobs at the IRS Regional Examination Center that their experiences border on revelation. Lane Dean Jr., at his Tingle table in an enormous room full of other examiners, becomes so bored that for the first time in his life he contemplates suicide, after which he begins to feel the presence of “phantoms”: “hallucinations that can afflict rote examiners at a certain threshold of concentrated boredom.” Dean’s particular phantom launches into an etymological discussion of the word “boredom,” concluding with a quote from Kierkegaard: “Strange that boredom, in itself so staid and solid, should have such power to set in motion.” Here boredom is a transformative process—a moment of awareness. Here our lives are enriched by a strange suffering and self-sacrifice. Coupled with the commencement speech, even the most brilliant of novelists in Wallace’s position would find himself powerless to wash the philosophy from his hands.

Everyone agrees that The Pale King enshrines boredom. What has been glossed over, however, is how fiercely and unrepentantly American these pages are. Yes, the book expounds upon the marvels of boredom and the “heroic” nature of doing a quiet but necessary task without audience or recognition, but juxtaposed are endless descriptions of bureaucracies, American culture at its most dysfunctional, and even extended Platonian dialogues about the decline of American society, complete with terms that never fail to surface in today’s news: “liberal individualism,” “corporations,” “conservatives,” “founding fathers,” “consumer capitalism,” etc. “Americans are crazy,” one character remarks to another: “We infantilize ourselves. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens—parts of something larger to which we have profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights but not our responsibilities.” The selfishness described here again harkens back to Wallace’s speech, in which he revealed that our “natural, hardwired default setting” is to be “deeply and literally self-centered.” This is of course explored much further in The Pale King. Framed within the tax metaphor (and it is a rich, wonderful metaphor), the examiner Chris Fogle reminds us of “basic economic law”: “In taxation, the result is that the taxpayer will always do whatever the law allows him to do in order to minimize his taxes. This is simple human nature.” Elsewhere, recruit David Cusk is concentrating all his energy on trying to prevent an attack of “shattering public sweats.” Ultimately, Cusk realizes that “the hot spotlight he felt on him did not exist,” after which he feels “solid and confident.” Again that strange morality, as though there’s a lesson to be learned or some improvement to be made, trading a solipsistic view for an awareness beyond oneself.

Much has been said about the morality of novels. Lovers of literature, we recoil at the agonizing simplicity of the word: morality. There’s nothing complex about it—nothing nuanced or emblematic of every human heart’s dichotomies. Morals are dangerously equated with messages, and as Nadine Gordimer reminded us in a November interview with The Guardian, “If you are writing with a direct cause in mind, you are writing propaganda. It’s fatal for a fiction writer.” Wallace, Raban states in his review, “loved ambiguity and teasing irony, but when it came to morals he had a deep fundamentalist streak in his makeup, a disconcertingly innocent thirst for the ‘capital-T Truth.’” Since his death in 2008 Wallace has become one of America’s most beloved and respected contemporary authors. The number of books, articles, and even websites dedicated to “Wallace studies” grows tirelessly larger every day. His popularity is beyond doubt and so too is the importance that readers place on his work. Yet there’s something resonant in Raban’s statement that Wallace is some kind of moral fundamentalist. The thematic undercurrents of The Pale King are so simplistic that it’s almost wholesome—and why does this terrify those of us who pride ourselves on “getting” great works of literature? It’s almost as if we renounced morals long ago as something both utopian and fantastic in the way of fairytales.

Considering our nation’s love for Wallace there is an important question that we must ask ourselves: What does it mean for us to have an affinity for a moral novelist? Do the people of the United States have some lesson to be learned from his fiction? Are we, even in our rebellious godless and let’s say nihilistic adolescence as a culture, still yearning for meaning in our lives? Do we, as the unnamed character in The Pale King states, have “profound responsibilities?” In the first of the Federalist Papers (mentioned multiple times in this novel), Alexander Hamilton informs us of our moment to decide “whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice.” In Wallace’s view, that reflection and choice was the key to living a successful life not only on a personal level but a societal level, insisting that choosing to consider the lives of others—the world beyond oneself—would lead us all to live more compassionate lives. The same character goes on to say that “We abdicate our civic responsibilities to the government and expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality.” If The Pale King, alongside the Kenyon speech, was Wallace’s plea to take that morality back from the automated bureaucracy that governs us, how can our most passionate and high-minded readers stay so hopelessly in love with his work, no matter how repellant the term “moral novelist” sounds to us? In its abstract idea there’s nothing literary about asking people to be selfless, but Wallace has made it literary. Is that what it ultimately took—for it to be literary? Do we as complex and even jaded readers need to encounter our moral lessons in something overwhelming like Wallace’s fiction? Did it really take a byzantine, monolithic, and even maximalist novel for us to think about what it means to have empathy for one another? On the precipice of our nation’s financial bankruptcy, do we need characters like Chris Fogle to instill in us a hunger for faith in altruism—for a choice to think beyond the self and perhaps stop doing everything we can to minimize our individual tax contributions? Amongst all this dispassion and almost crippling apathy, is it possible for us to choose to think about how legislation affects the other Americans around us? Was Wallace foolishly optimistic or exceptionally humanistic? Are morals still a myth?

Wallace, to the chagrin of his admirers, is not here to defend any vicious accusations of morality, nor answer any philosophical questions. All we have left is his work, the value of which depends entirely on how we choose to view it.

In Plato’s Symposium, the poet Aristophanes proposes his theory on the origin of love. Man, he explains, was not always divided into two sexes. In the beginning we had four legs, four arms, and two sets of eyes, and we rolled about on the surface of the earth perfectly happy. Knowing nothing of suffering, we soon grew restless and over-confident. It wasn’t long before we made an attack on the gods themselves. In response, Zeus cut us in two “as you might divide an egg with a hair” and we were left two halves of one perfect being, constantly in search of our other half.

Since then love has been our obsession. Why do we fall in love? Why does love bring so much pain? What can we do to prevent love from destroying us? Unfortunately, as Anne Carson outlines in her philosphical essay, Eros the Bittersweet, we will never understand it. It is something beyond us—something just within our fingertips but always taking that one extra step to elude us. In the end we begin to realize that this is perhaps for the best—that it is maybe more fortunate than we realize. In terms of desire, the wanter and the wanted never come together. “To catch beauty,” Carson explains in the preface:

would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

Eros is a stunning book. Carson delves through literatures both ancient and modern, both literary and philosophical, to underscore what she believes to be the primary characteristic of desire: its contradictory impossibility. The lyric poet Sappho, she explains, summed it up in one word: γλυκόπικρος, or “sweetbitter”—an experience of simultaneous pleasure and pain. From there, Carson leaves no facet of love left unexamined, unpacking ancient theories of desire with crisp and cutting translations, an overwhelming knowledge of classical literature, and an insatiable thirst to define what love means to us. The result is an endlessly fascinating treatise that feels very much like the act of falling in love itself.

“The word eros,” Carson states, “denotes ‘want,’ ‘lack,’ ‘desire for that which is missing.’ The lover wants what he does not have.” Who can dispute this? Going back to Aristophanes’ origin of love, she says of the lover, “The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness.” Again—we are searching for that other half. When we find what we seek, all curiosity—all desire—ceases, and there’s nothing left for us to do. The act of love in the ancient world was an act of pursuit. “Desire moves,” Carson says. “Love ‘puts the heart in my chest on wings.’” In this sense, we understand that something within us changes when we fall in love. We go through a transformation, and this is why love is so irrefutably important.

Carson broadens the sense of desire beyond sexuality: “A mood of knowledge is emitted by the spark that leaps in the lover’s soul. He feels on the verge of grasping something not grasped before.” And so desire—the pursuit of something adored—extends to the process of coming to know, or reaching out for knowledge. Knowledge is desirable. Our attitude toward love is that if we could only have our beloved—if we could only come to control him or her—we would be at peace. The same is true with knowledge: we are always on the cusp of understanding but we never quite understand. Before desire—and before knowledge—the self is whole, complete, and safe from external force. The self is invulnerable. When struck by desire, by the god Eros—the “limb-loosener,” of “sweet tears” and “bitter honey”—our self is suddenly changed, and as Carson reminds us, “Change of self is loss of self.” The metaphors for falling in love “are metaphors of war, disease, and bodily dissolution.” With exquisite clarity Carson shows us just how brutal desire can be and before long we sympathize with these ancient poets, wanting nothing more than to shut ourselves up from love forever and live on invulnerable and apathetic. We are wary of change and wary of love.

Of course it cannot be that simple. In an extended examination of Plato’s Phaedrus, Carson reveals Sokrates’ position on the matter of love—a truly radical stance at the time. Love brings madness—that goes without saying—but Sokrates believed that “erotic mania is a valuable thing in private life. It puts wings on your soul.” And what are wings but transformative elements—elements of motion? Without the placement of our soul on wings, how are we to move? Again: “Desire moves.” Things like falling in love and coming to know are maddening but necessary, are painful but key to our survival as human beings. This favored description of the poets and philosophers is central to our understanding of the importance of love, finding themselves “describing Eros in images of wings and metaphors of flying, for desire is a movement that carries yearning hearts from over here to over there, launching the mind on a story.” Love is a triangulation of now, then, and the space between—of lover, beloved, and the distance between them—of student, knowledge, and the potential journey of coming to know. Even if we never truly understand love, Carson helps us understand its necessity. Without it we would go nowhere.

‘the theologian‘ – the weekly column from backgroundbob
20.04.08

For generations people have striven to understand what their critics considered to be an myth, a ghost in the existential machine. But ghostly or not, God casts a very long shadow over the philosophy of yesteryear, and only a fool would let one truth get in the way of another. In the minds of every country’s population, God lurks just beyond the edge of sight and speaks in whispers just below the edge of hearing, peeking over our shoulders and mumbling incoherently in our ears. The world may have lost its respect for religion, but it struggles to forget its fear of God, and there is far more than a few thousand years of superstitious conditioning behind that: humanity is beset on all sides by the night, darkness made of ignorance, helplessness and an existence that ploughs right on through without any respect for their wishes. Reminders of the demons of age, pain, and fear are everywhere, is it any wonder that in every evil we see what we long more than anything to be there for us: salvation?

There are no philosophies that can explain God for you, even among the endless philosophers who will tell you they can. The difference between them and a theologian, a true theologian is that any good student of theology will never, ever try to tell you about God. Because this isn’t about him, folks: in the words of Frank Castle, “God’s going to sit this one out.” This is about us, about me and you and every other God-fearing or God-hating person out there who’s ever looked at the inside of their eyelids of a night and said, ‘God, I don’t know what you’re doing but I sure as hell hope you do.’ Because this is it, ladies and gentlemen: this is the inside of your churches, the inside of your heads and the inside of your souls. This is where spirituality meets banality, the nitty-gritty of human fears and dependancies. This is everything you’ve ever been afraid to ask but were too afraid to ask: this is Theology.