(no subject)

[proximoception]

Murakami's the heavy favorite (over Munro) to win this year's Nobel.

On the strength of 1Q84.

What the fuck?

Seriously - while I'm eternally mad at people who make high claims for There Will Be Blood or Donnie Darko these make perfect sense next to the total madness of even a vaguely positive assessment of that book.

Comments

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

Can you say more? I'm very interested in this particular reaction to his work.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

"Wounded narcissism," one of Bloom's favorite Freudianisms, often makes me think of Wallace. Narcissists are amusing to passersby because they're both transparent and fantastical - they buy their own bullshit, don't care about consistency. Wounded ones suspect they can't get away with assuming the importance of their every word, so there's always a leak they're trying to patch up. They have enough empathy to realize they're mockable, without having enough to not tiresomely engage in every conceivable tactic to avoid our possibly mocking them, to control every possible perspective on them so they can feel they're the prize child.

Wallace is the pinnacle because he even knows he's doing that, proudly builds self-lashings into his display. The effect is something like: admire how aware I am of everything that's wrong with me. Even worse, he knows he's supposed to be universalizing, as a writer, so he absorbs you into his self-castigation: here's what's wrong with both and all of us. I.e. admire how well I'm attacking you, and how I'm allowed to because I'm attacking me too. Which would be fine if he were right about the rest of us. But he's not. We're mostly not aggressive verbalizers fed by a constant rage that not everybody loves us.

At times he seems to even know THAT, and be mad about it. Even worse than an egregious, self-interested display is one that randomly falters in self-doubt. This most commonly manifests not as "pity me" talk but as a certain kind of humor attempt that reminds me of South Park: slanderous attacks on enemy positions / ways of being whose over-the-top violence is supposed to excuse the hate - since no one can mean what you just said you get to say it. Your very acting out proves you have a sense of humor.

It's quite possible that the perpetual mental motion created by the primal injury allows him to create staggeringly great works of art, or that on some level we're all like Wallace (though we sure as hell don't sound like it). I'll never know because he trips pretty much all my warning sensors from sentence 1.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

This is even better than I hoped. The one thing I would disagree about -- the narrator in a lot of Wallace sounds exactly like many of the manic, college educated people of my age that I know. That voice says things sometimes exactly as I feel but better than I could say them. When I picked up Infinite Jest when the paperback came out in 1997 or whatever, I couldn't believe it. That has worn off as I have read more and grown up some. But I still hear the voice every day in people I encounter. Like the majority of people. Where we differ maybe because I agree with everything you wrote.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Come to think of it there were one or two Wallace-y people in most of my grad classes. Mostly dudes.

Maybe worse in the Northeastern elite schools, where the stiff competition terrifies you into projecting that you already know everything?

I try not to think what I was like at twenty. Probably pretty awful. But probably not in that particular way.