an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 12, May - December 2015,
ISSN 1552-5112
The Violence
of Rhetoric and David Foster Wallace’s Hideous Men
“To recognize the Other is therefore to come
to him across the world of possessed things, but at the same time to establish,
by gift, community and universality.
Language is universal because it is the very passage from the individual
to the general, because it offers things which are mine to the Other. To speak
is to make the world common, to create commonplaces” (Levinas, Totality and
Infinity).
By now, it is a critical commonplace that David
Foster Wallace’s work prioritizes the establishment of an intimate, sincere
relationship with the reader. We see
this all over his oeuvre, including in “E Unibus Pluram,” “Westward the Course
of Empire Goes Its Way,” various interviews, especially the Larry McCaffery
interview of 1991, and, most recently, the bio-pic The End of the Tour.
However, this agenda is not just ethical but also aesthetic; one that,
following Lewis Hyde’s championing of eros in the art transaction, often presents
tropes, or figures “erotic,” sexual relationships in his narratives as
correlatives for the author-reader relationship, where the writer is gendered
as male and the reader as female.[1] This tendency
is especially noticeable in the “Brief Interviews” sequence that provides the
title for Brief Interviews with Hideous
Men (1999). In these narratives, the
“hideous” men’s seduction strategies, psychological rationalizations, and
gender objectification become subtly and accretively associated with postmodern,
rhetorically manipulative writing that takes no interest in the reader except
as a mirrored other to perform before and benefit from.
A central
concern in his depiction of the relationships in Brief Interviews consists precisely in this lack of appreciation
and respect for the Other. Except for
the final Interview, all the others describe relationships—if “relationships”
is even the apt word—from which trust, loyalty, and love have been removed, and
replaced - from the male’s side, with manipulation, cynicism, and
self-conscious performance, and, from the female side, with incredulity,
despair, and victimization. Like the
postmodern writers whose influence Wallace resists, such as John Barth or Mark
Lerner, these men employ strategies and tactics to make themselves appear
erudite and hip, in order to impress or seduce their audience.[2]
A similar concern for the
lack of appreciation for the singularity of the Other occupies the center of Emmanuel
Levinas’ philosophy, which displaces phenomenology and ontology from their
status as “first philosophies,” replacing them with the ethical encounter. Following the example of Levinas and others,
most notably Derrida, many contemporary literary theorists, among them J.
Hillis Miller, Simon Critchley, Andrew Gibson, Dorothy Hale, and Derek
Attridge, have foregrounded this concern for the Other, to develop a mode of
analysis that returns ethical issues into literary discussions, a move that has
been described as “the new ethics” or “the ethical turn in literature.”
Derek Attridge in particular has demonstrated
the possibilities of invoking the language of the Levinasian-Derridean
discourse in his work on such authors as Beckett and Coetzee. By adapting the philosophical theories of
Levinas and the literary methods of Attridge to the Brief Interviews sequence, this essay demonstrates that what is
most hideous about the hideous men in the interviews and the postmodern writers
they imitate is their narcissistic disinterest in the Other. Finally, Brief Interview #20, the book’s
terminal and most famous Interview, is analyzed to articulate how, in adopting
an Ethics of the Other, it corrects the
other Interviews, and lays out a framework for how Wallace proposes we overcome
the immense distance between Self and Other—by writing sincerely and honestly,
and by reading with empathy and respect for what is unique and singular about
those we encounter in our lives and in our reading. Before reviewing these interviews, this paper
first explores the origins and objectives of Levinasian philosophy and
contemporary New Ethics.
As a young
man, the Lithuanian-born Emmanuel Levinas studied under both Edmund Husserl,
the eminent founder of phenomenology, and Martin Heidegger, the equally eminent
(if morally compromised) founder of an ontological philosophy that famously
foregrounded “being-in-the-world.” Both men exercised a profound influence on
Levinas’ thought until he began formulating his own original thinking in his
doctoral thesis, Totality and Infinity,
in 1960. In both this text and
especially Otherwise than Being: Beyond
Essence (1967), Levinas develops a conception of philosophy based neither
on Husserlian phenomenology or Heideggerian ontology, but rather on the ethical
requirement to recognize one’s responsibility to the Other.[3]
Levinas
achieves his displacement of the primacy of phenomenology and ontology by
replacing it with his famous pronouncement that the ethical relation is the
first relation. Only by appreciating and
being responsible for others can we avoid falling into solipsism; the social
demands and conventions of our lives obscure our relationship to the Other, a
phenomenon Levinas describes as irresponsibility “veiled by decency.” Joshua James Shaw glosses Levinas’ meaning by
providing the following example:
Typically, I am not aware of others as others.
I live in a kind of fog composed of my
beliefs, my desires, my ambitions, my life projects. I interact
with others in this fog, but do not relate to them as unique individuals in
their own right; I relate to them as if they were actors and actresses, dramatis personae in the story I am living, the unfolding story of my world. These interactions are structured, finally,
by the social rules and etiquette of my tribe, my community’s collective “veil
of decency.” Levinas’ claim in Time and the Other is that there is
something beyond these rules and this fog.
(Shaw xxvii)
What Levinas argues is
beyond, or perhaps prior to “these rules and this fog,” is the acknowledgement
that the Other can never be reduced to the Same. This reduction of the Other to
the Same diminishes the Same by making it unaware of difference, or
singularity. As Critchley elaborates,
“ethics, for Levinas, is critique; it is the critical mise en question of the liberty, spontaneity, and cognitive emprise
of the ego that seeks to reduce all otherness to itself. The ethical is therefore the location of a
point of alterity, or what Levinas also calls ‘exteriority,’ that which cannot
be reduced to same” (5). Of the same
commitment, Andrew Gibson writes, “the ethical relation is always both
immediate and singular, a question of responsiveness and responsibility” (16).
For Levinas, these
confrontations with alterity and the responsibility that they entail often
manifest in essentially discursive or verbal exchanges. When discussing the ethical importance of
literary address, he focuses on his suspicion of rhetoric, the approbative
function of textual interruption, and the phenomenon of “Saying” as opposed to
“Said,” where the former designates an open, continuous field of meaning
between interlocutors. Rhetoric, as
Levinas envisions it, manipulates its interlocutors—under the guise of loving
them, it in fact uses them for its own purposes. In a passage that anticipates Wallace’s
lamentations about capitalist marketing stratagems and televisual culture,
Levinas explains that:
Rhetoric, absent from no discourse, and which philosophical
discourse seeks to overcome, resists discourse…It approaches the other not to
face him, but across all artifice goes unto the other, solicits his yes. But the specific nature of rhetoric (of
propaganda, flattery, diplomacy, etc.) consists in corrupting this
freedom. It is for this that it is preeminently violence, injustice—not
violence exercised on inertia (which would not be a violence), but on a
freedom, which, precisely as freedom, should be incorruptible. (Totality
and Infinity 70; emphasis added)[4]
Opposed to rhetoric, a discourse that “seeks to
overcome” and reduce Other to Same, Levinas commends an “open” style of writing
replete with self-conscious interruptions and interrogative forms that
challenge the rhetors’ corruption of freedom.
“In order to develop the idea of the ethical importance of
interruption,” Robert Eaglestone explicates, “[Levinas] specifically explores
the way in which language interrupts itself” (138). After noting that Levinas uses the
interrogative form instead of typical philosophical constative, or truth-value
conclusions, he argues “this stylistic choice, in itself, both echoes and
affirms Levinas’ philosophical trajectory—not least in this, Otherwise than Being: Beyond Essence is
‘performative.’ Unlike a statement, a
question is to be interrupted: a question starts a dialogue” (139). Levinas’ statement that ethics, not
phenomenology or ontology, is the primary relation imbricates with his concern
for the myriad subtle ways in which language and literary acts, especially when
used rhetorically, can negate the possibility of responsible encounters with
alterity.
The primary tenet
of the generation of thinkers influenced by Levinas and Derrida is that
literature and discursive acts are often inevitably associated with ethical
matters. Beginning with such
groundbreaking works as J. Hillis Miller’s The Ethics of Reading (1986),
Simon Critchley’s The Ethics of Deconstruction (1992), Andrew
Gibson’s Postmodernity, Ethics, and the Novel : From Leavis to
Levinas (1999), and Derek Attridge’s The Singularity of Literature (2004),
this contemporary approach exploits and re-deploys
the insights of their poststructural and deconstructive predecessors to devise
a reconfigured approach to literary ethics, one that neglects traditional moral
criticism as practiced by Leavis or Arnold, for instance, in favor of a more
sophisticated conversation between writer and reader. Describing this “ethical turn,” Adam Kelly
notes two divergent approaches:
The first, drawing its orientation from
traditional Aristotelian moral theory, has focused on authors of social and
psychological nuance, most usually realists of the nineteenth century, most
notably Jane Austen and Henry James. See Booth; Miller; Nussbaum. The second
strand, which attempts to incorporate the insights of poststructural theory
into a reformulated ethics, prefers modernist and contemporary authors…whose
work foregrounds encounters of the narrative perspective with otherness, and
the failures of language and cognition to fully incorporate alterity into
discourses of power and dominance. See Attridge; Gibson; Russell Smith. (“David
Foster Wallace: The Death of the Author and Birth of a Discipline”).
In a similar vein, Attridge, remarking on
what Kelly describes as the second approach, states that “the literary event,
therefore, should be though of as an ethically charged event, one that befalls
individual readers” (The Ethics of J.M.
Coetzee xvi). In the following, I employ these approaches as a theoretical
perspective through which to interpret “Brief Interview #20,” a short but
potent masterpiece that encapsulates many of David Foster Wallace’s ideas about
empathy, respect for the Other, and the need to combat selfishness, cynicism,
and manipulation. However, before that story,
it’s necessary to briefly explore Wallace’s thoughts regarding the difficulty
of truly knowing others and the concomitant importance of “other-directed
impulses,” such as attention, awareness, and responsibility.
In 2005, David Foster Wallace
gave the Commencement Address at
The most persistent and
lethal problem, he argues, is the “default setting” (or “veil of decency” in
Levinasian terms) that, simply because I have always been at the center of my
own experience, I therefore believe myself to be most important person in the
world, and the existence of others is thus judged according to whether they aid
or hinder my desires. It’s not that
these attitudes are “evil or sinful,” Wallace caveats: “it is just that they are unconscious. They are “default settings” resulting in the
“the freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the
center of creation” (Kenyon).
However, Wallace advises, there
are different ways of approaching and processing these situations. The important thing to realize is that we
have a choice, a difficult choice, but a choice, to decide if we want to think
about the things he lists above—which leave us feeling frustrated, angry, hurt,
injured—or we can climb to a different height to survey the situation, one
which uses awareness, compassion, and empathy to imagine that the screaming
lady in front of you at the supermarket has sat up for days with a husband
dying of cancer, or helped your spouse through an act of bureaucratic
kindness. Of course, Wallace admits,
“…none of this is likely, but it’s also not
impossible…[and] if you’ve really learned to think, how to pay attention, then
you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to
experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer hell-type situation as not only
meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the
stars—compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things (Kenyon; emphasis
added). Like the social “veils of decency” that Levinas condemns for
rationalizing our inability to be responsible to the Other, Wallace’s “default
setting” of existential primacy and superiority leads to exactly the same
thing, unless it be checked by the power of attention, compassion, imagination,
and sincerity.[5]
A consideration, then, of
Wallace’s concern with, on the one hand, the vital importance of being aware
and empathetic of Others, and, on the other hand, his acknowledgment of how
immense and almost intergalactic the distance between Us and Them, Same and
Other, sometimes appears to be, leads one to appreciate how much effort he puts
into his work to overcome this problem.
As Zadie Smith argues, in a brilliant comparison of Henry James and
Wallace:
[James’]
syntactically torturous sentences, like Wallace’s, are intended to make you
aware, to break the rhythm that excludes thinking. Wallace was from that same tradition—but, a
hundred years on, the ante had been raised.
In 1999, it felt harder to be alive and conscious than ever. Brief
Interviews pitched itself as a counterweight to the narcotic qualities of
contemporary life, and then went a step further. It questioned the Jamesian notion that fine
awareness leads a priori to responsibility.
It suggested that too much awareness—particularly self-awareness—has
allowed us to be less responsible than ever.
It was meant for readers of my generation, born under the star of four
interlocking revolutions, undreamed of in James’ philosophy: the ubiquity of
television, the voraciousness of late capitalism, the triumph of therapeutic
discourse, and philosophy’s demotion into a branch of linguistics. How to be finely aware when you are trained
in passivity?...In part, this was Wallace’s way of critiquing the previous
literary generation’s emphasis on self-reflexive narrative personae (268).
In Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,
Wallace finds a way to explore the connections between awareness, love, and
ethics in a unique and impressive way: through the literal troping of the
author-reader relationship as a conjugal and intimate male-female
relationship. Smith’s “self-reflexive
narrative personae,” here, become both postmodern writers and serial seducers,
who are equated as same.
Published in 1999, Brief Interviews with
Hideous Men was Wallace’s first collection of fiction after the tremendous
success of Infinite Jest. A
radically experimental collection, it consists of perhaps ten microfictions, a
controversial novella entitled “The Depressed Person,” a series of direct
“interrogations” of the reader (culminating in “Octet”), and the titular Brief
Interviews, of which there are a total of 18 distributed throughout the
text. These interviews are conducted
over a four-year period by an unnamed female who questions (the reader is not
provided access to the questions, which are represented simply by “Q.”) a
succession of men about their sexually motivated exploitation and manipulation
of women.[6]
Infinite Jest’s Orin Incandenza represents a precursor
for the multifarious roster of hideous men, implying the trope may have been in
Wallace’s head as early as the 1990s.[7]
Emotionally damaged by a suffocating mother, the adult Orin finds sexual
satisfaction by serially seducing and rejecting young single mothers. His “seduction strategies” are numbered,
practiced, and expert. For example, his
standard operating procedure for breaking up with a Subject is to mail her child
an expensive toy and change his number (Infinite
Jest 46). However, his conquests are
emotionally unsuccessful—he envisions sex not as an intimate, conjugal
relationship, a conjoining, but rather a situation in which he “has won her as if from someone or something
else, something other than he, but that he has
her…that he is both offense and defense…That he is the One” (566).
Wallace elsewhere diagnoses him as a man who “can only give,
not receive, pleasure, and this makes a contemptible number of them think he is
a wonderful lover, almost a dream-type lover”; but in fact, it is not the woman
who pleases him, but rather “the Subject’s pleasure in him [that has] become
his food” (596). Ultimately, like the postmodern metafiction that Mark Nechtr
describes in “Westward the Course of Empire Goes Its Way,” Orin “is untrue, as
a lover. It cannot betray, it cannot
reveal. Itself is its only object…It’s
lovers not being lovers” (“Westward” 332).
The hideous men interviewed in Brief Interviews provide even more
exotic, imaginative, and sociopathic examples of “lovers not being lovers.” For
example, in “B. I. #36,” the interviewee explains how he has learned to love
himself after receiving counseling for various (unspecified) acts of domestic
abuse. “I’ve halted the shame spiral,”
he says; “I’ve learned forgiveness. I like myself” (Wallace, Brief, 34). In response to the interviewer’s “Q.” (which
the reader performs as “what about the women?”), he responds, “Who?” (ibid.) In
“B. I. # 40,” the interviewee explains at length how he has taken advantage of
his deformed arm, which he refers to as “The Asset,” as a ploy to make women
pity him and engage in sexual acts in order to prove they are not disgusted by
his deformity. He describes how when he
shows them the arm, which he treats with ointment-like applications to make
appear “even wetter and slimier,” they immediately start crying and pretend to
not be disgusted. By this point, he
brags, “they’re in way over their head.
They’re, like, committed into a corner of saying it can’t be that ugly
and I shouldn’t be shameful and they see it and I see to it is ugly, ugly ugly
ugly and now what do they do?
Pretend…These are not girl wonders of the brain. It breaks them down every time” (85-86)
The
most explicit connection between the hideous men’s manipulation and disrespect
for women and (bad) postmodern writing’s manipulation of the reader occurs in
“B. I. #31.” In this case,
interestingly, the interviewee is not himself unconsciously hideous, but
demonstrates awareness of male ploys, telling the anonymous interviewer about
men who consider themselves to be “Great Lovers.” These men, he counsels, need to think of
themselves as great lovers just as a mechanic needs to think of himself as a
great mechanic—in neither case is the activity for the woman or automobile, but rather only to it, and for themselves. “They think they’re being generous in bed,”
he says, but “the catch is they’re being selfish
about being generous” (32). The interviewee continues, in terms reminiscent of
the passages of “Westward” above, draw an implicit connection between
manipulative writing and manipulative relating,
explaining that to be a truly Great Lover, or Great Writer, one must open
oneself up to a response from the
Other: “This son of a bitch isn’t a lover, he’s just putting on a show. He doesn’t give a shit about you. You want to know my opinion? You want to know how to really be Great
Lover? The secret is you got to give the
little lady pleasure and be able to take it, with equal technique to both and
equal pleasure…Don’t forget it’s also about her”
(33; emphasis added).
These examples
demonstrate that what makes these men hideous is their inability to fathom the
importance of the Other as a universal, not relative, subject. Furthermore, because of this failure, they
exploit and manipulate the Subjects like objects with no unique
characteristics, as evinced by their practice of referring to the women not by
their name but as “Subjects.” Instead of responding to the singularity of each
woman, hideous men control the Subjects with false erudition, elegant lies,
psychological manipulation, and trademarked “moves”—in other words, they treat
their Subjects as dumb, as incapable of functioning on an equal level in a
relationship with them. This behavior,
and the emotional sadness and loneliness which engenders it, requires
correction, Wallace implies, and he provides it in the spectacular last
Interview in the book, “B. I. #20.”[8]
Numerous
Wallace scholars have remarked on how crucial a piece “B.
In “B. I. #20,” the interviewee’s first lines
explain to the interviewer how “I did not fall in love with [my girlfriend]
until she had related the story of the unbelievably horrifying incident in
which she was brutally accosted and held captive and nearly killed” (287). He proceeds to explain how he met this girl,
whom he describes condescendingly as a “Granola Cruncher, or Post-Hippie, New
Ager” at an outdoor concert and, “knowing her type,” concocted a story about a
vibration he felt drawing him towards her blanket on the lawn (288). This
calculated seduction succeeds, and therefore the next part of the story
involves the girl post-coitally relating an anecdote to the man while he
schemes ways to leave his apartment. As
he admits, “I should tell you that I was planning right from the outset to give
her the special false number when we exchanged numbers in the morning, which
all but a very small and cynical minority want to. Exchange numbers. A fellow
in Tad’s study group’s great-uncle or grandparents or something have a vacation
home and are never there, so when someone you’ve given the special number to
calls it simply rings and rings” (293).
While
the man plots his exit, the girl continues to relate her anecdote about being
nearly killed by a serial killer, surviving solely due to her ability to
connect and empathize with him.[10]
The precise pivot of the story occurs here, where the man admits to
feeling his “first hint of sadness, or melancholy, as I listened with
increasing attention to the anecdote” and realizes that “the qualities I found
myself admiring in her narration of the anecdote were some of the same
qualities about her I’d been contemptuous of when I’d first picked her up in
the park” (297). In response to the
interviewer’s “Q.” (which the reader performs as “what qualities?”), he
explains, “chief among them—and I mean this without irony—that she seemed,
quote, sincere…in a way that helped
me focus almost entirely on the anecdote” (297).
Around
this point in the girl’s story “B. I. #20” opens up and diverges in two
opposite directions. On the one hand,
the man learns to attend responsibly to the other by “doing justice in a creative response to the
uniqueness of a person” (Attridge, The
Singularity of Literature 129). In
this way, the man portrays how we should treat not just other human beings, but
other literary acts, or events, as well.
As he lies in bed, listening to the girl while she “[leans] with her
upper body to follow the oscillation of the fan so she’s moving in and out of a
wash of moon,” he represents the ideal reader
(295; emphasis added). By respecting the
singularity of both the girl, as a human being, and her anecdote, as a literary
act, the man endorses Attridge’s observation that “to act morally towards
another person, it hardly needs saying, requires as full an attempt at
understanding them and their situation as one is capable of” (Attridge,
138-139). Wallace, similarly, requires
readers to practice a kind of aesthetic morality
where the primary virtues are empathy and imagination. Wallace emphasizes the
man’s success at being both an ethical reader and an ethical person by having
him admit “I realized that I had never loved anyone. Isn’t that trite? Like a canned line do you see how open I’m
being here?...I knew that I loved. End
of story” (313, 318).
On the other hand, the man
stresses that it is the girl’s simple, sincere, and direct way in telling the
story that creates the possibilities for his epiphany. As he describes it, the girl, who by now in
her narrative has been taken into a desolate area and tied up by her captor,
“wills herself not to weep or plead but merely to use her penetrating focus to
attempt to feel and empathize with the sex offender’s psychosis and rage and
terror and delusion to touch the beauty and nobility of the human soul beneath”
(302). By creating this “mind-bridge,”
as it were (the phrase is Nabokov’s), the girl too acts as an ideal reader.
Furthermore, by telling her anecdote in a sincere and
direct manner, without rhetorical flourishes or tangents or metafictional
digressions, she represents the ideal writer,
a post-postmodern writer. As the man
admits, it is this simplicity of expression that attracts him. Since the girl’s narrative characteristics follow from her
personal and ideological beliefs, she is simply expressing a certain truth;
this is the opposite of the performances littered throughout the Brief Interviews collection. Again, Wallace’s interview structure, because
of the absence of any mediating or judging narrator, mandates, like Levinas’
“interruptions” and “interrogations,” that the reader determine for herself
when someone is expressing a truth
worthy of our attention or performing
some simulacrum of truth intended to get something from her. The responsibility to create meaning and
determine whom to trust is opened up to the reader.
In
“B.I. #20,” Wallace creates a narrative that functions as a supreme example of
his conception of the ethics of the author-reader relationship. Following a sequence of interviews depicting
ignorance of Levinas’ belief that the ethical is the primary relation, the
terminal interview corrects these views and proposes how to read, write, and
love. Perhaps more importantly for
Wallace’s future writing, the girl relates her anecdote directly and sincerely,
without the self-conscious narrative asides that constitute Brief Interviews, metafiction, and even
some of Wallace’s own early fiction, which he later abjured. Perhaps this was why he described this
interview as “the best of the interviews…and one I identify the most with”
(Interview).
For Wallace, the Granola Cruncher, as she has come to be known,
represents the Ideal Writer. At the time
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men was
published, Wallace had already admitted that he wanted to write in a more
“simple and direct” manner, without the syntactical flourishes, computerized
vocabulary, and penchant for footnotes that characterized much of the
superficial response to Infinite Jest. Through the next decade, his fiction swayed
greatly from attempts to mimic the Granola Cruncher to those that continued to
repeat the most idiosyncratic and electric elements of his style. However, the Granola Cruncher’s influence can
be read in various stories in Oblivion
and, most especially, in certain sections of The Pale King, particularly Chris Fogle’s and Meredith Rand’s
narratives, both of which exemplify Wallace’s ethical aesthetics that seeks to,
and succeeds in, overcoming the violence of rhetoric.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 12, May - December 2015,
ISSN 1552-5112
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Notes