Changing My Mind (39 page)

Then, with the base coat down, and the wash laid on top, comes another layer. Concrete details so finely rendered they seem to have been drawn from the well of our own memories: your sister’s swim cap with the “raised rubber flowers . . . limp old pink petals” and the “thin cruel hint of very dark Pepsi in paper cups”; that SN CK BAR with the letter missing and the concrete deck “rough and hot against your bleached feet.” Isn’t everything just as you remember it? The big lady in front of you on the ladder: “Her suit is full of her. The backs of her thighs are squeezed by the suit and look like cheese. The legs have abrupt little squiggles of cold blue shattered vein under the white skin.” The ladder itself: “The rungs are very thin. It’s unexpected. Thin round iron rungs laced in slick wet Safe-T felt.” And now, fueled by nostalgia, by the pressing in of times past, the concrete seems to mix with the existential: “Each of your footprints is thinner and fainter. Each shrinks behind you on the hot stone and disappears.” And again, on that ladder: “You have real weight. . . . The ground wants you back.” Haven’t you been in this terrible queue? Aren’t you in it now? A queue from which there is no exit, in which everyone looks bored and “seems by himself,” in which all dive freely and yet have no real freedom, for “it is a machine that moves only forward.”

The difference is awareness (this is always the difference in Wallace). The boy seems to see clearly what we, all those years ago, felt only faintly. He sees that “the pool is a system of movement,” in which all experience is systematized (“There is a rhythm to it. Like breathing. Like a machine.”) and into which, as the woman in front of him dives, he must now insert himself:

Now we see what the board is and feel our own predicament: sentient beings encased in these flesh envelopes, moving always in one inexorable direction (the end of which we cannot see). Bound by time.
Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.
This, Sartre’s dictum, hangs over these passive people who “let their legs take them to the end” before coming down “heavy on the edge of the board and mak[ing] it throw them up and out.” Thrown into the world, condemned to be free—and hideously responsible for that freedom.

It strikes me when I reread this beautiful story how poor we are at tracing literary antecedents, how often we assume too much and miss obvious echoes. Lazily we gather writers by nations, decades and fashions; we imagine Wallace the only son of DeLillo and Pynchon. In fact, Wallace had catholic tastes, and it shouldn’t surprise us to find, along with Sartre, traces of Philip Larkin, a great favorite of his.
⁷⁰
Wallace’s fear of automatism is acutely Larkinesque (“a style/ Our lives bring with them: habit for a while/Suddenly they harden into all we’ve got”
⁷¹
), as is his attention to that singular point in our lives when we realize we are closer to our end than our beginning. When Wallace writes, “At some point there has gotten to be more line behind you than in front of you,” he lends an indelible image to an existential fear, as Larkin did memorably in “The Old Fools:” “The peak that stays in view wherever we go / For them is rising ground.” Then there’s the title itself, “Forever Overhead”: a perfectly accurate description, when you think about it, of how the poems “High Windows” and “Water” close.
⁷²
That mix of the concrete and the existential, of air and water, of the eternal submerged in the banal. And boredom was the great theme of both. But in the great theme there is a great difference. Wallace wanted to interrogate boredom as a deadly postmodern attitude, an attempt to bypass experience on the part of a people who have become habituated to a mediated reality. “It seems impossible,” the boy thinks, arranging his face in fake boredom to match the rest, “that everybody could really be this bored.” In this story, the counterweight to automatism is sensation, expressed here as human reality in its most direct and redemptive form: “Your feet are hurt from the thin rungs and have a great ability to feel.” It’s no accident that we are in a swimming pool, at fiery sunset, with a high wind blowing and the ground hot enough to remind of us of its solidity. The four elements are intended to work upon “you”; for no matter how many times this queue has formed, no matter how many people have dived before, or have watched other people dive, in life or on TV,
this is you,
diving now, and it should be thought about, and there should be a wonder in it. For Larkin, on the other hand, boredom was
real
(“Life is first boredom, then fear./Whether or not we use it, it goes”
⁷³
), and the inexorability of time made all human effort faintly ludicrous. There is some of this despair in Wallace, too (whatever splash the divers make, the tank “heals itself” each time, as if each dive had never been), but much less than is popularly ascribed to him. Time has its horrors in Wallace but it’s also the thing that binds us most closely to the real and to one another: without it we would lose ourselves in solipsism (which, for him, was the
true
horror.) When the boy, in a meditative state, dares to hope that “no time is passing outside,” he is soon proven wrong:

Yet this is not experienced as a negative revelation. Indeed, the greatness of Wallace’s story lies in its indeterminacy, for the boy never quite resolves which part of his experience is the real one, the hardware of the world or the software of his consciousness:

What is he jumping into, in the end? Is the tank death, experience, manhood, a baptism, the beginning, the end? Whatever it is, the boy is able to approach it without dread. He pauses to examine the “two vague black ovals” at the end of the board, over which his literary creator has taken such wonderful care:

But this examination does not result in paralysis. He still dives. Where Larkin was transfixed by the accumulation of human futility, Wallace was as interested in communication as he was in finitude (the last word of the story, as the boy dives, is
Hello
). He was, in the broadest sense, a moralist: what mattered to him most was not the end but the quality of our communal human experience
before
the end, while we’re still here. What passes between us in that queue
before
we dive.

In 2005, Wallace gave a commencement speech at Kenyon College that begins this way:

And ends like this:

This short piece appeared in many newspapers when he died and has recently been repackaged as a
Chicken Soup for the Soul
-style toilet book (sentences artificially separated from one another and left, like Zen koans, alone on the page) to be sold next to the cash register. If you believe the publicity flack, it is here that Wallace attempted to collect “all he believed about life, human nature, and lasting fulfillment into a brief talk.” Hard to think of a less appropriate portrait of this writer than as the dispenser of convenient pearls of wisdom, placed in your palm, so that you needn’t go through any struggle yourself. Wallace was the opposite of an aphorist. And the real worth of that speech (which he never published, which existed only as a transcript on the Internet) is as a diving board into his fiction, his fiction being his truest response to the difficulty of staying conscious and alive, day in and day out.

The ends of great fiction do not change, much. But the means do. A hundred years earlier, another great American writer, Henry James, wanted his readers “finely aware so as to become richly responsible.”
⁷⁴
His syntactically tortuous sentences, like Wallace’s, are intended to make you aware, to break the rhythm that excludes thinking. Wallace was from that same tradition—but, a hundred years on, the ante had been raised. In 1999, it felt harder to be alive and conscious than ever.
Brief Interviews
pitched itself as a counterweight to the narcotic qualities of contemporary life, and then went a step further. It questioned the Jamesian notion that fine awareness leads a priori to responsibility. It suggested that too much awareness—particularly self-awareness—has allowed us to be less responsible than ever. It was meant for readers of my generation, born under the star of four interlocking revolutions, undreamed of in James’s philosophy: the ubiquity of television, the voraciousness of late capitalism, the triumph of therapeutic discourse, and philosophy’s demotion into a branch of linguistics. How to be finely aware when you are trained in passivity? How to detect real value when everything has its price? How to be responsible when you are, by definition, always the child-victim? How to be in the world when the world has collapsed into language?

If Wallace insists on awareness, his particular creed is—to use a Wallac erian word—
extrorse;
awareness must move always in an outward direction, away from the self. Self-awareness and self-investigation are to be treated with suspicion, even horror. In part, this was Wallace’s way of critiquing the previous literary generation’s emphasis on self-reflexive narrative personae. In interview, he recognized his debt to the great metafictionists, but he also took care to express his own separation from them, and from their pale descendants:
⁷⁵

Solipsism here means more than hipster vanity: Wallace has both its Latin roots (
solus
, “alone”
; ipse
, “self”) and philosophical history in mind (the theory that only the self really exists or can be known). The “linguistic turn” of twentieth-century philosophy concerned and fascinated him—that wholesale swallowing of the transcendental by the analytical that left us as “selves alone” in language, with no necessary link to the world of phenomena beyond. In Wallace’s view, too many practitioners of metafiction enthusiastically embraced the big Derridean idea—“There is nothing outside the text”—without truly undergoing the melancholy consequences. For inspiration he looked instead to Wittgenstein, both as “the real architect of the postmodern trap” and the writer who best understood its tragic implications for the self: