Changing My Mind (40 page)

This, the first option,
⁷⁶
is where Wallace’s hideous men live. Trapped alone in language. The questions in those interviews (represented by the letter
Q
) are not only formally “missing” from the conversations,
their respondents have internalized them
. These men anticipate all questions and also their own expected answers and also the responses they have already concluded these answers will receive. In fact,
all
exterior referents have been swallowed up by language and loop back into the self. In this spiral, other people simply can’t exist. “You” has become just another word, encased in quote marks, and the results are hideous indeed.

Take the control freak in B.I. #48, whose only possible relationship between self and other is a verbal contract, in which you never hear from the second party. This is a man who likes to say to a woman, after a third date, and “without any discernable context or lead-in that you could point to as such”—
How would you feel about my tying you up?
But the casual tone is a deception, the question not even really a question:

From the prim specificity of the vocabulary and syntax to this habit of encasing in “quote marks” any ambiguous moment—he’s unbearably controlling. And whatever he claims, there’s never any real sense of “play,” because there is never any way to look past the referents to the other players. Despite all his verbal prowess, we learn nothing of the women; they remain faceless, nameless, featureless, their sole distinction whether they are “hens” or “cocks”—that is, whether they will submit or not. This strange terminology (he calls it “the aptest analogy”) is borrowed from the “Australian profession known as {flexion of upraised fingers}
chicken-sexing,”
by which the gender of a bird is ascertained merely by looking at it and naming it:
hen, hen, cock, cock, hen.
Naturally, he has a gift for it: he can identify a “hen” or “cock” before they are aware of what they are themselves. But then, he has the words for everything. He understands that he is compelled to “propose and negotiate contracted rituals where power is freely given and taken and submission ritualized and control ceded and then returned of my own free will.” He controls both the meaning of the act itself (“I know what the contract is about, and it is not about seduction, conquest, intercourse, or algolgagnia”) and its psychological root cause. (“My own mother was . . . erratic in her dealings with, of her two twin children, most specifically me. This has bequeathed me certain psychological complexes having to do with power and, perhaps, trust.”) Not only this: he is sufficiently self-aware to know his language (another legacy of his mother, a psychiatric case worker, natch) is “annoying, pedantic jargon.” He can “read” both the women’s words and their silences (“You are, of course, aware that social silences have varied textures, and these textures communicate a great deal.”) He can even tell real shock from false:

The little slip is telling, and the word
abreactive
, too.
⁷⁷
Here therapy has become the monster it once wished to tame, the talking cure mere talk. And the talk turns outward; we feel
we
are the ones being interrogated, and that the questions are disturbing. When we relive repressed emotions as therapeutic, are we healing ourselves or tunneling deeper into the self? How do abreaction and solipsism interrelate? Does one feed the other? Is one the
function
of the other?

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”:

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:

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:

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.

The apotheosis of this technique is “The Depressed Person.” It’s not that the depressed person is an unforgettable character. She’s banal, typical. It’s that when you’re reading “The Depressed Person” you’re forced to run her recursive thought processes through your own head, to pursue her self-serving self-hatreds through those endless footnotes, to speak with her that absurd therapy-speak, to live with her in the suffocating solipsism of her mind. Many readers will object to this. And there are other problems, besides: sometimes in the attempt to capture a brain from the inside, Wallace aims too low, and patronizes. Much of the therapy terminology in “The Depressed Person” amounts to cheap laughs, gotten too cheaply. (“I have a grossly sentimental affection for gags,” he admitted.)
Support System, Blame Game, Inner-Child-Focused Experiential Therapy Retreat Weekend . . .
The idea that specialized language represents the fall within the tragic fall is not news and was territory already extensively covered by a slew of American writers: Thomas Pynchon, Bret Easton Ellis, A. M Homes, Douglas Coupland, et cetera. Wallace’s
real
innovation was his virtuosic use of the recursive sentence, a weird and wonderful beast that needs quoting at length to be appreciated: