Zadie Smith - Changing My Mind - Occasional Essays

[75]Whom he called crank turners: “When you talk about Nabokov and Coover, you’re talking about real geniuses, the writers who weathered real shock and invented this stuff in contemporary fiction. But after the pioneers always come the crank turners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank, and little pellets of metafiction come out the other end.”

[76]We’ll come to the second.

[77] OED: abreaction; Psychoanalysis . The relief of anxiety by the expression and release of a previously repressed emotion, through reliving the experience that caused it; an instance of this.

[78]And does not sit with Wallace’s respect and interest in AA, an organization he researched during the writing of Infinite Jest: “I went to a couple of meetings with these guys and thought that it was tremendously powerful… For me there was a real repulsion at the beginning. “One Day at a Time,” right?… But apparently part of addiction is that you need the substance so bad that when they take it away from you, you want to die… Something as banal and reductive as “one Day at a Time” enabled these people to walk through hell… That struck me.”

That AA is by its nature a communal activity, however, which places therapeutic emphasis on a “buddy system,” is also worth noting.

[79]An argument recently challenged by the American professor of linguistics Dan Everett, whose paper “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã,” caused an almighty brouhaha among the sort of people who get all brouhaha-ed about linguistics. In the paper he claimed to have found a tribe in the rainforest of northwestern Brazil-the Pirahã-whose language does not use recursion and is, in fact, finite. The New Yorker had an interesting article about all this, “The Interpreter,” in the April 16, 2007 issue.

[80]From the OED: “Pica-A tendency or craving to eat substances other than normal food, occurring during childhood or pregnancy, or as a symptom of disease.” This is Wallace’s way of describing someone chewing her own fingernails.

[81]When still a child, the depressed person’s divorced parents had battled each other over who was to pay for her (i.e., the depressed person’s) orthodontics. The writer Mary Karr informs me that this detail wasn’t accidental; it was lifted from Elizabeth Wurtzel’s memoir, Prozac Nation .

[82]In the acknowledgments of Brief Interviews Wallace thanks the MacArthur and Lannan foundations, The Paris Review , and “The Staff and Management of Denny’s 24-Hour Family Restaurant, Bloomington IL.”

[83]He makes the same point, at greater length, in an interview with Salon: “It seems to me that the intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this country is one of the things that’s gutted our generation. All the things that my parents said to me, like ‘It’s really important not to lie.’ OK, check, got it. I nod at that but I really don’t feel it. Until I get to be about 30 and I realize that if I lie to you, I also can’t trust you. I feel that I’m in pain, I’m nervous, I’m lonely and I can’t figure out why. Then I realize, ‘Oh, perhaps the way to deal with this is really not to lie.’ The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting-which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff-can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can’t, that seems to me to be important. That seems to me like something our generation needs to feel.”

[84]We now know that his last, unfinished novel, The Pale King , attends to the specialized language of IRS tax inspectors.

[85]Hard-core Wallace nerds call themselves howling fantods.

[86]I have omitted, for the sake of brevity, six footnotes Wallace includes in this paragraph.

[87](Though at this point, who am I kidding?)

[88]The Guggehein Fellowships are grants awarded anually to those “who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.”

[89]All three having in common the idea that the business of ethics properly concerns good relations between people rather than the individual’s relation toward some ultimate goal, or end. For Kant, all people are ends in themselves; for Weil they are sacred in themselves. For Rawls they are communal individuals whose differences are to be respected and yet not counted as relevant when it comes to justice, which must concern itself with fairness. In Rawls’s view, if we were to choose the principles of a just society, we would have to be placed under a “veil of ignorance” in which we knew nothing of one another’s (or our own) personal qualities, that is, race, talents, religion, wealth, class, gender-an awesome idea that reminds me of Wallace at his most parabolic. Let’s say it’s your job to choose the “role of women” in this society, a society in which you’re going to live. But as you make the decision you don’t know if you yourself are to be a woman or not. So decide!

[90]From Weil’s essay “Human Personality.”

[91]But it won Wallace his sole literary prize: the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from The Paris Review .