Zadie Smith - Changing My Mind - Occasional Essays

It’s tempting to read the interviews as an attack on therapy per se, but “therapy is a false religion” is rather a dull drum to beat, [78]and if it were only this, why not hear from the therapists themselves, instead of the patients? It’s not therapy’s fundamental principles that find themselves interrogated here (after all, the self-diagnosis of Hideous Man #48 is not incorrect: it’s right to say he ties up women because his mother’s idea of punishment was physical restraint). More significant is this idea of a looped discourse, of a language meant to heal the self that ends up referring only to the self. In Brief Interviews, the language of therapy is not alone in doing this: in Wallace’s world there exists a whole bunch of ways to get lost in the self. In the bleak joke of B.I. #2, we listen in as a serial monogamist wields the intimate language of “relationships” against his own girlfriend, precisely to protect himself against a “relationship”:

Can you believe that I’m honestly trying to respect you by warning you about me, in a way? That I’m trying to be honest instead of dishonest? That I’ve decided the best way to head off this pattern where you get hurt and feel abandoned and I feel like shit is to try and be honest for once? Even if I should have done it sooner? Even when I admit it’s maybe possible that you might even interpret what I’m saying now as dishonest, as trying somehow to maybe freak you out enough so that you’ll move back in and I can get out of this? Which I don’t think I’m doing, but to be totally honest I can’t be a hundred percent sure? To risk that with you? Do you understand? That I’m trying as hard as I can to love you? That I’m terrified I can’t love? That I’m afraid maybe I’m just constitutionally incapable of doing anything other than pursuing and seducing and then running, plunging in and reversing, never being honest with anybody? That I’ll never be a closer? That I might be a psychopath? Can you imagine what it takes to tell you this?

Again interrogation turns outward, toward the reader. What have we become when we “understand” ourselves so well all our questions are rhetorical? What is confession worth if what we want from it is not absolution but admiration for having confessed?

Wallace took a big risk with these free-floating “interviews”: by refusing to anchor them in a third-person narrative, he placed their hideousness front and center, and left the reader to navigate her way through alone, without authorial guidance. It’s not surprising that many readers conflated the hostility of these men with authorial sadism. But this is where it becomes vital to acknowledge the unity of the book Brief Interviews- this is not a random collection of short stories. The “interviews” themselves, dotted throughout the whole, work like words in a longer sentence, all segments of which need to be articulated if the sentence is to make any sense. The story “Think” is a fine example of this kind of counterpoint. Here a potentially hideous man, about to be seduced by “the younger sister of his wife’s college roommate” suddenly experiences “a type of revelation.” As she comes toward him, half naked, with “a slight smile, slight and smoky, media-taught,” he feels the sudden urge to kneel. He looks at her: “Her expression is from page 18 of the Victoria’s Secret catalogue.” He puts his hands together. She crosses her arms and utters “a three word question”-which we will assume is What the fuck? “It’s not what you think I’m afraid of,” he replies. But we are not told what he thinks, or what she thinks he thinks, or what he thinks she thinks he thinks. The narrator only comments thus: “She could try, for just a moment to imagine what is happening in his head… Even for an instant to try putting herself in his place.” This task, though, is left to us. So here goes: the girl thinks he’s afraid of the sin, of the marital betrayal, because that’s the kind of thing it usually is on TV. He thinks she thinks this-and he’s right. But the man himself is afraid of something else; of this “media-taught” situation, of the falsity, of living a cliché, and he has a sudden urge to feel like a human being, which is to say, humbled, and really connected, both to the person standing naked before him and to the world. (“And what if she joined him on the floor,” read the final lines, “just like this, clasped in supplication: just this way.”) Solipsism is here countered with humility; the “self alone” prays for a relation.

The popular view of Wallace was of a coolly cerebral writer who feared fiction’s emotional connection. But that’s not what he was afraid of. His stories have it the other way around: they are terrified of the possibility of no emotional connection. This is what his men truly have in common, far more than misogyny: they know the words for everything and the meaning of nothing . Which is a strange idea for fiction to explore, given that fiction has a vocational commitment to the idea that language is where we find truth. For Wallace, though, the most profound truths existed in a different realm: “I think that God has particular languages,” he said once, “and one of them is music and one of them is mathematics.” Certainly in Brief Interviews our everyday human language always falls short, even in its apparent clarity, especially in its clarity. The curious thing about these men is how they use their verbosity as a kind of armor, an elaborate screen to be placed between the world and the self. In B.I. #42, a man tries to come to terms with the fact his father was a lifelong toilet attendant in a public bathroom. Speaking of his case, he utilizes dozens of fancy words for excretions ( flatus, egestion, extrusion, feculence, lientery, transnudation ) yet his own basic emotions are not available to him:

“Yes and do I admire the fortitude of this humblest of working men? The stoicism? The Old World grit? To stand there all those years, never one sick day, serving? Or do I despise him, you’re wondering, feel disgust, contempt for any man who’d stand effaced in that miasma and dispense towels for coins?”

Q.

“… ”

Q.

“What were the two choices again?”

In B.I. #59, a boy, inspired by the TV show Bewitched has a masturbatory fantasy of “freezing” real life with a wave of his hand so that he might have sex in public while all around him are “paused.” But with a mania for the consistency of propositions, he is forced to expand upon the fantasy’s “first premise or aksioma ” in an infinite direction. First he needs only to freeze the room he’s in, but then what of the building? So then the building, and then the country, and then the continent, and then the planet, each stage necessitating the next until:

In order not to betray the fantasy’s First Premise through causing incongruities in the scientifically catalogued measurements of the Solar Day and the Synodic Period, the earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun must itself be halted by my supernatural hand’s gesture, an orbit whose plane…

But I’ll stop there. There are times when reading Wallace feels unbearable, and the weight of things stacked against the reader insurmountable: missing context, rhetorical complication, awful people, grotesque or absurd subject matter, language that is-at the same time!-childishly scatological and annoyingly obscure. And if one is used to the consolation of “character,” well then Wallace is truly a dead end. His stories simply don’t investigate character; they don’t intend to. Instead they’re turned outward, toward us. It’s our character that’s being investigated. But this is not quite metafiction. The metafictionist used recursion to highlight the mediating narrative voice; to say essentially “I am water, and you are swimming through me .” Recursion, for the metafictionist, means: looping back, recurring, in infinite regressions. This is not neutral, it is being written, I am writing it, but who am ‘I’? Et cetera. What’s “recursive” about Wallace’s short stories is not Wallace’s narrative voice but the way these stories run, like verbal versions of mathematical procedures, in which at least one of the steps of the procedure involves rerunning the whole procedure. And it’s we who run them. Wallace places us inside the process of recursion, and this is why reading him is so often emotionally and intellectually exhausting.