mills

My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.

My Photo Blog
Flickr / Videos
Facebook / Twitter
Email / Archive


Posts tagged david foster wallace.
“Display of superior knowledge is as great a vulgarity as display of superior wealth — greater indeed, inasmuch as knowledge should tend more definitely than wealth towards discretion and good manners.”

Henry Fowler, the lexicographer best known for A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. David Foster Wallace, in his evidently quite-flawed essay “Tense Present,” described Fowler thusly:

If Samuel Johnson is the Shakespeare of English usage, think of Henry Watson Fowler as the Eliot or Joyce. His 1926 A Dictionary of Modern English Usage is the granddaddy of modern usage guides, and its dust-dry wit and blushless imperiousness have been models for every subsequent classic in the field…

What interests me about Fowler’s claim is that I am often amused by the veneration of intelligence in the same communities that deplore the veneration of beauty or wealth, since intelligence is no less arbitrary in allotment, constructed in classification, and happenstance in appearance than those attributes. Indeed, it involves as many attendant flaws as they do, too: often, wit entails derision; brilliance, arrogance; knowledge, pedantic elitism.

Simen commented recently on the inequality of beauty, a fact which problematizes even the most pleasant utopias; those who hope to maintain in the face of the irresolvable unfairness of beauty’s inequitable distribution the plausibility of a fair society will have to claim that beauty is a fluid concept we can redefine, that it only matters because of the patriarchy or advertising, or some such idea reducing its import. I’ve long wondered what egalitarian revolutionaries propose to do about nature’s individuated and unequal distribution of attractiveness.

And what of intelligence? I believe intelligence is no more laudable than athleticism, morally; it makes one good at some things and not at others. It is not a moral virtue; it is not a mark of goodness; someone cannot be faulted for not possessing it; and Fowler is right: we should regard the display of knowledge as comparably vulgar to material ostentation.

Or is this not the case? Is there some quality to intelligence which distinguishes it from beauty, speed, height? Is there a connection, in theory or in fact, between intelligence and goodness (should there be such a thing)? Does it relate to this characteristic of mind?

Tags: psychology henry fowler david foster wallace language
“Wallace was also wary of ideas. He was perpetually on guard against the ways in which abstract thinking (especially thinking about your own thinking) can draw you away from something more genuine and real. To read his acutely self-conscious, dialectically fevered writing was often to witness the agony of cognition: how the twists and turns of thought can both hold out the promise of true understanding and become a danger to it. Wallace was especially concerned that certain theoretical paradigms — the cerebral aestheticism of modernism, the clever trickery of postmodernism — too casually dispense with what he once called “the very old traditional human verities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community.” He called for a more forthright, engaged treatment of these basic truths. Yet he himself attended to them with his own fractured, often-esoteric methods. It was a defining tension: the very conceptual tools with which he pursued life’s most desperate questions threatened to keep him forever at a distance from the connections he struggled to make.”

James Ryerson, in an essay on David Foster Wallace’s college philosophy thesis (posted by the always-astute Greg Brown). This is a brilliant point.

I like Wallace very much, but I think any honest critical appraisal of his work must admit that this tension was not necessarily one deliberately enacted (and therefore performative, artistic, or creative), but indeed one he couldn’t escape; perhaps none of us can escape it in this era. The question then becomes: was it a strength or a weakness?

I don’t think that in admitting our favorite artists have weaknesses we do them a disservice; indeed, pretending otherwise is to perpetuate a hagiographical fiction that precludes real understanding of their work. That they struggled with foundational weaknesses is what made their art purposive; it is the source of much of it, I think.

At times, I felt that Wallace was very desperately attempting to overcome through co-option the problem of how “abstract thinking” and “theoretical paradigms” negate or subsume “basic truths,” but unsuccessfully. After some of his stories, it seemed clear that this problem cannot be overcome through co-option; discussing the intrusion of ideology, intellectualism, and theory into our art by introducing them into our art to “enact” the problem is like trying to calm ourselves by discussing how nervous we are: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

I don’t know how this feature of our age can be overcome (if I did, I would be orders of magnitude smarter, and a writer); various tactics include the deliberate removal of theory from art leaving viciously irreducible corpses of prose, as in McCarthy, or the winnowing of the novel to only the most elegant shapes and sighs, as in Barnes or Kundera. I’m sure other tactics abound: lyricism, impressionism, minimalism.

But I think Wallace was right to recognize that most of these were retreats from the problem, and he was noble for choosing engagement instead; that such engagement sometimes weakened his fiction does not diminish the value of his efforts.

Tags: criticism literature philosophy david foster wallace milan kundera julian barnes cormac mccarthy

In Defense of Memory

Superfluidity made some excellent points in defense of memorization, an intellectual function made less broadly necessary by technology but perhaps not less beneficial. The post, which you should read, reminded me a bit of this quote from Nicholas Carr. Some excerpts I thought particularly good:

To take the last question first, I think that when we survey the great artistic achievements of humans, we often cannot see the history that lies hidden behind those monuments. That is to say, I believe (admittedly without tangible evidence) that much of the great poetry and painting and sculpture and music are indebted to some degree to rote memorization or rigorous work of some sort that instilled themes and patterns which became manifest in creative expression.
But, furthermore, a poem that lives in our brains will affect us differently than a poem that merely visits us from time to time. Our minds will play with that poem even when we are not watching, and it will seep deeply into us and come out in unexpected places. If you ask parents, or maybe grandparents, I think that many of them will still be able to recite a poem that they were asked to learn by heart in gradeschool. And I suspect that such a memory has been more influential than they themselves can realize.

There is no question in my mind that what we adore about the polymathic textual density of David Foster Wallace or the almost synesthesic interweaving of art forms and themes in Milan Kundera’s later works or the fearsome saturation of historical experience in William Vollmann’s novels requires easy access to massive quantities of information.

The outsourced memory relies on the interface of the database, whether it’s Google’s search form or your graduate assistant’s personality or your library’s selection. This is problematic in at least two obvious ways:

  • Creativity is as much about establishing novel or under-explored connections between phenomena as it is about constructing thought or art ex nihilo. Such connections are easier to establish if -pardon the metaphor- you have a fast, locally-hosted memorial database. To rapidly transact on facts, creative works, themes, ideas, and feelings, and form new links between them, you need to have them in your mind, not simply “available” for laborious searching online or on shelves.
  • If you depend on others for recording, compiling, selecting, and storing information, you are deferring to their editorial vision of what is important and reducing the likelihood of finding novel connections yourself; essentially, you are sharing a cultural database with many others.

I agree with Superfluidity about memory: it is undervalued both as a sort of cognitive function on part with analysis and as a means for embedding meaning deep within yourself. Aside from the perhaps dramatic point that -until age robs you of it- your memory is all you truly have, there are practical reasons why the decline of memorization is a creatively and intellectually impoverishing trend.

(Also, I like the memorize the lyrics to all the most ridiculous music in the world and feel that this is my true talent; if you would like a spoken rendition of Thirstin Howl III’s “Polo Rican,” please let me know).

Tags: literature memory philosophy milan kundera william vollmann david foster wallace