A Rhetorical Exercise in Memory of David Foster Wallace[1]
(Written for Students)
“…and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.”
-Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
O’Brien’s words stick with me, and it hasn’t been but a few months since one of my favorite writers, D.F. Wallace, took his own life in response to how the world (for him) was not. Since this will be my last issue of the Pub, it seems like a good time to consider the question of why people write and read and teach serious literature.
It’s tempting to think of novels, poems, stories, and the rest of it as merely ornamental: just decoration, just snob amusement, “just art.” By this view, what matters instead is work, emotions, the stuff of Real Life. Why waste time on stories when reality is so much more important, urgent, and unavoidable? Why study literature when one’s personal tastes run more to competition, concerts, fashion, fishing, or whatever you please?
This latter question would make sense if literature amounted only to entertainment. It’s true, of course, that some genres tend that way—lots of stories are just for fun, and there is no reason to insist on that kind of fun more than on any other. A thrilling novel is no more inherently valuable than the thrill you get from watching football or playing video games, if that’s your thing.[2] There really is no accounting for taste, nor should there be.
But some writing offers more than (only) entertainment, amusement, and diversion; we call these stories “literature” to mark the difference. Yes, the term is a value judgment. Arguing the criteria for this judgment is beyond the scope of this essay; it’s enough, here, to recognize that there is such a distinction and that some stories rise to the faith of its expectations.[3]
So what is literature for, and how does it justify the time it seems to take away from life and life’s urgent concerns? For an answer I’ll offer two apparently technical but really very human terms: subjectivity and representation.
Subjectivity is the sad fact of human boundaries. As human beings we are limited by perspective and by time: we live as ourselves and only as ourselves, in our own place and period, and with each breath the self comes a step closer to the point at which no more experience is possible.[4] Remarkably, though, and almost miraculously, literature realizes at least a partial escape from these boundary limits. Whatever else it does, literature communicates the experience of human life as other selves and in other places and times. Nothing else offers such a direct glimpse of what it means to be[5] a person other than oneself. No other human creation is so fully concerned with representing the subjective experience of being alive and engaged with times and places other than the one at which we sit reading.[6]
“Representing the subjective experience of others;” that’s the key to this whole thing. Literature has two sides: from the reader’s position, it is the art of active engagement with other selves. That self may be the writer, writing in her personal voice, or it may be any variety of characters, selves existing only as language and through reading. Aside from the diary or the memoir, there is no writing that addressed to the self from the self; there is always an Other involved.[7] To read literature is necessarily to get beyond the boundaries of one’s own subjectivity. It’s a way around what there’s no way out of.
Literature’s other side is the writer’s work, the creation of this experience of other life. This is representation—that is, a presentation again, a version in language of something that, although it may be entirely new (just as every child born to the world is entirely new) nevertheless partakes (just as every child etc.) of what we share, what we know, and where we all reside.
Of course all art presents or represents: a photograph or a film shows what something looks like or how some people might act; a painting or a sculpture gives an interpreted vision; music produces new feelings in the moment of listening and remembering.[8] All of this is invaluable. My special plea for literature is this: that it requires a reader’s engagement with the thoughts and feelings of others in language, and language has the peculiar quality of creating its meaning not through the senses but through imagination and reason. Words themselves are sense-neutral. We experience stories not as something apprehended by the eye or ear, but as meaning unfolding inside of us.[9]
You can think of representation as a kind of simulation.[10] We twenty-first-century types are familiar with simulation almost from childhood. Science experiments, meteorology, computer games—these are all instances where something real or potentially real (operations of nature, tornadoes, battles between orcs and elves) are played out by rules and models intended to explain how and why things happen as they do (or would). The point is to understand, and we judge any simulation by how it helps us do so. We come to ignore the Ouija Board and trust the weatherman. [11] We learn about the methods, and we judge.
Literature is the same, but what it simulates is human experience.[12] Where a science experiment uses laws of chemistry and physics, where a computer game uses maps and mathematics, a poem or a story uses language. Every literary word is a choice made to represent what it means to be a particular person in a particular situation.[13] While other modes of simulation (lab work, weather reports, Halo 3) crunch out objective results, or at least results presented as objective, literature depends on the ability of a reader to experience the representation through the lens of her own relationship to language. The best that any literature can do is always limited by that relationship.[14] A science experiment produces information about the world. Literature offers a new relationship to it. Indeed, it insists on it.
Of course it is possible to ignore all of this. Why bother? This is the question where we started. So I have offered two points: subjectivity and representation. But even given these two heavy-duty ideas, why put time into the reading of stories, a practice that requires quite a bit of mental effort in addition to falling pretty low on the sexy whiz-bang technology scale? Why not just drive and shop and anything-but-read? Why not settle for what’s in front of you?
My answer is that literature offers you the gift of wider life. Every day (as I keep dolefully reminding you here) reminds us of the sad fact of human limitation.[15] Literature sidesteps the limitations of perspective. In a peculiar way, it provides you with experience of life that you don’t have and—no matter how far you travel, how much you spend, how well you are connected—can never have. In literature there is a plenitude of this. Stories are artificial; they concern what’s real. The writer meets the reader, and then something transcends both. Provisionally, yes; partially, yes. But there it is, and nowhere else.
If that sounds too airy, think of it this way: literature shows life as it might be, and as it should or (with a mission here) shouldn’t be. O’Brien’s words stick with me. He’s talking about the paradoxical beauty of war, but he is also talking about stories, and about stories as the only medium available to try to communicate that “hard, aching love” which so elevates and frustrates him. This is literature. It comes to teach about the life you live, but also to awaken you to lives that others live, or could. (Is there a better definition of love?) It comes simply to say (they that have ears, let them hear) that you might have more life, and have it more abundantly. And isn’t that enough?
I ask you. Really.[16]
[1] (1962-2008, R.I.P., a lot of people’s favorite writer.)
[2] I play computer games myself, if you’re wondering. Some of them are awesome, but they’re just not literature yet (although some stuff from Bioware may be getting close).
[3] Currently it is fashionable to eschew value judgments as somehow unfair or distasteful. This attitude proceeds from an inability to differentiate judgment from prejudice. Prejudice is the particular form of stupidity that fails to recognize appropriate criteria for evaluation, but judgment—informed judgment—has always and rightly been considered the highest human faculty. You have read Pride and Prejudice. (Haven’t you?)
It must be added that rejection of value judgments is itself a value judgment, albeit a wrong one.
[4] I’m not trying to be a downer here, but there it is.
[5] That is, to be subjectively, not just to look at or listen to another but to feel and think as another feels and thinks.
[6] This paragraph calls for consideration of story-media beyond traditional written literature: movies, for instance. As much as the present author love good movies, the argument must be made that film is (usually) limited by two elements: time and the visual. The visual medium appeals to the eye in a way that language does not, and for the most part the eye is naively biased towards the beautiful and the exceptional. Also, few people have the patience for movies running more than two or three hours, limiting what can be said and shown. Finally, the economics of movie production and distribution work against anything that isn’t popular and pleasing, two qualities that truth often lacks, alas.
[7] In fact, it has been argued that the act of writing produces its own Other, the reader, and that (therefore) even a diary writer is not writing to himself. However personal, the self who writes is never identical with the self who reads.
[8] Here I’m talking about the reception side of all these arts. Listening to music or watching dance (e.g.) are not the same as playing music or doing dancing. The creation of those arts lies beyond the scope of this essay, just as they lie beyond my competence.
[9] Think of this way: we look at a picture, and it may show us many things; we look through language, and to some degree must show things to ourselves. The corollary is that it is possible to passively watch, but it is not possible to passively read.
[10] Or vice-versa, really, but that doesn’t matter here.
[11] Just as we come to trust some authors more than others.
[12] No doubt there is some good reason for the root shared by experience and experiment. Look it up.
[13] And this representation, by the way, doesn’t depend on realism—it can just as fanciful as any computer game, so long as the aim is to involve the reader in subjective experience in some fully human way (as opposed to involving the player in, say, merely the tactics of spellcasting). (This is the difference between Tolkien and World of Warcraft.)
[14] This, by the way is the point of English classes. The true topic (I could say subject, but that is obviously a freighted word at this point) of English class is not literature per se, or even language, but the student’s relationship to these. It’s impossible to “learn” the “content” of an English class in the way you can learn, say, Physics. If a student refuses to read well and to try to write well, it’s not that the content didn’t get learned. Rather, the content (the student’s relationship to language and literature) simply never came into existence at all. An unopened book is hollow.
[15] Unless, of course, you’re not paying attention, in which case, go play! You won’t have long.
[16] P. Rob (Springside, 2002-2009)
Seriously, I hope all is well.
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