In some sense, it probably can't be talked about directly
For the first time since I landed in SF, sunlight floods my hotel room. The evening glow casts a pleasant light as I sit listening to this DFW interview. He squirms in his seat, never quite comfortable. There’s a question asked, hesitation on his part. A flash of anguish. Not responding directly, he instead rather jaggedly offers this:
“Let me insert one thing… most of the stuff that we think we're writing about in books is very difficult to talk about straight out. You know, question and answer. In some sense, it probably can't be talked about directly, and that's why people make up stories about it. This is all a big defense, because I feel like what I'm saying is so simple and so reductive.”
He hates what he’s saying. More than the words spoken, one cannot help but notice the way DFW’s face contorts. He seems to reel from the sincerity of his own words, as if reckoning with some painful truth for the first time. But he’s not. To know DFW as a reader is to know how deeply he understands what he’s saying, this Wittgensteinian conundrum: the irreducibility of certain truths.
Then it’s not the recognition of some heretofore unknown truth washing painfully across his face but rather the inevitability of it, despite and even in true, vindictive spite of knowing it so deeply. To see the richness of his own experience in what he’s saying only to reduce it to a Q&A response in an interview is, for him, to fall knowingly and unavoidably into the very trap he is discussing. It’s almost physically painful for him. He is, left with no other options, choosing irony, the song of a bird who has come to love its cage.
If irony isn’t the way to talk about the thing we can’t talk about directly, then what is?
I, perhaps unwittingly, had an answer as a kid. I used to read almost exclusively non-fiction. There’s still a running joke in my family about The Guinness Book of World Records, the only thing I agreed to read as a kid when my mom suggested I stare at books for fun. I liked to look at the outlandish pictures of the biggest rubber band ball ever spun or the expression on the face of the guy who made it his life’s goal to hold his breath underwater the longest. I now think also this habit was borne of a deep hunger for learning things about the world, because if you want to know true things about the world why not start with the hyperbolic, I thought. And as a side effect, if these things were interesting to me I could share them with others and be more interesting. That was my original solution: facts could be talked about directly.
Though I can’t pinpoint exactly when it happened—it was sometime in early high school—these so-called truths about the world grew stale on me. It began with Orwell. If Animal Farm and Anthem broke the seal, 1984 exploded my world open. In it I found a story about a guy Winston Smith who I deemed almost immediately unremarkable in every way. He was an ordinary guy, down to his very name, and yet his world seemed so strange to me, the surveillance and lack of freedom and the weird language that seemed to carry a power much greater than language as I had been using it my entire life. The further I read the more I was pulled into this world, and the way it functioned felt real in the way my teacher assigning the chapters felt real.
I had encountered, though I couldn’t articulate it at the time, the stories people make up about the things we can’t talk about directly. This story held deep truths, I discovered. And truth didn’t have to be some stripped down numbers and a statement about the most x or longest y in the world. Yet still, it seemed so non-intuitive to me that the best way to convey deep, important truths is through something fictional, something completely made up! One thing I knew though was Doublespeak was a hell of a lot more interesting than the dude who could hold his breath under water for the longest.
The story about the story
Orwell led me to others. From the early days, novels like Siddhartha and Frankenstein and The Great Gatsby stick out. But there were many more. Then a couple years ago a friend recommended Infinite Jest.
Infinite Jest was a lot of things to me. But if I had to strip it down to the most important, it is this. It is about the relationship between truths and stories, and what can and cannot be said, but not in the conventional sense of refusing to say things or not wanting to say them. It is about the inability to express the most fundamental things because of their irreducibility. Language is our best, and maybe only, shortcut for expressive transference, the most profound of which take on a form that must be experienced if not directly then in some powerfully proximal way. We can talk about what it’s like to fail or to fall in love, but how much of that can we really capture? In a sentence? A paragraph? A novel?
This is what Hal tried to do. Infinite Jest is the expression of his experience. We read this behemoth of a novel and feel the weight of it. It’s tragic—we think we understand, we see parts of ourselves in his struggle. But the reality is Hal will never, in his case in some literal sense, be understood—not really. But it’s also hilariously funny, Infinite Jest, in the same way, depending on how sincerely we choose to read it. And when you look at it this way, there’s almost nothing funnier than making DFW talk about Infinite Jest.
