Reality Hunger (51 page)

One is not important, except insofar as one’s example can serve to elucidate a more widespread human trait and make readers feel a little less lonely and freakish.

“It must go further still: that soul must become its own betrayer, its own deliverer, the one activity, the mirror turn lamp”—which could and should serve as epigraph to Alphonse Daudet’s
In the Land of Pain
, Pessoa’s
The Book of Disquiet
, Michel Leiris’s
Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility
, Joe Brainard’s
I Remember
, Grégoire Bouillier’s
The Mystery Guest
.

Andy Kaufman went way beyond blurring the distinction between performer and persona, past the point where you wondered what separated the actor from the character; you wondered if he himself knew anymore where the boundaries were drawn. What did he get out of such performances? The joy of not telling the audience how to react, giving that decision—or maybe just the illusion of such decision making—back to the audience. Afterward, he typically stayed in character when among fellow performers, who resented being treated like civilians. On his ABC special, the vertical hold kept rolling, which the network hated because it didn’t want viewers to think there was anything wrong with their TV sets when in fact the problem was by design.

In Lorrie Moore’s story “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” the putatively fictional account of a writer whose toddler is diagnosed with cancer, characters are named only by the roles they play: Mother, Husband, Baby, Surgeon, Radiologist, Oncologist. The Mother discusses the possibility—the Husband emphasizes the financial necessity—of writing about the experience. When the story was published as fiction in the
New
Yorker
, it was accompanied by a photo of Moore and a caption: “No, I can’t. Not this! I write fiction. This isn’t fiction.” About the story, Moore has said, “It’s fiction. Things didn’t happen exactly that way; I reimagined everything. And that’s what fiction does. Fiction can come from real-life events and still be fiction.” The Mother is a writer and teacher who is already writing each scene as she experiences it. If this isn’t a story about Moore and her baby, what is it about? The deep ambivalence writers have about using their personal lives to make a living. Even as the Mother agonizes about taking notes, she’s diligently observing the environment, gathering data about cancer that will both help her child and (bonus!) make the story she’ll write a better one. God, embodied as the manager of Marshall Field’s, informs the Mother that “to know the narrative in advance is to turn yourself into a machine. What makes humans human is precisely that they do not know the future.” The writer, of course, writing the story, does know what the ending will be, has planned it, lived through it. And the Mother also knows the future. Leaving the hospital with the baby, the Husband expresses gratitude for the people they’ve met, and the Mother responds, “For as long as I live, I never want to see any of these people again.” Actually, the Mother will see these people, over and over again: she’ll spend a great deal of time and effort re-creating them; writing the story, she ensures that these people will always be with her. The last two lines of the story are “These are the notes. Now, where is the money?” If the Mother is angry at the world for paying to read such a story, she’s also angry at herself for profiting not only from her own life and pain but from that of her family and all the families who shared their time in the pediatric oncology ward with her. She’s angry that she can’t leave these people behind, or the
worry behind, or the fundamental truth that a part of living, of breathing, of surviving, is to exploit our human relationships in order to live.

The source of my crush on Sarah Silverman? Her willingness to say unsettling things about herself, position herself as a fuck-me/fuck-you figure, a bad-good girl, a JAP who takes her JAPiness and pushes it until it becomes the culture’s grotesquerie: “I was raped by a doctor—which is, you know, so bittersweet for a Jewish girl.” “I don’t care if you think I’m racist; I only care if you think I’m thin.” “Obviously, I’m not trying to belittle the events of September eleventh; they were devastating, they were beyond devastating, and I don’t want to say especially for these people or especially for these people, but especially for me, because it happened to be the same exact day that I found out that the soy chai latte was, like, 900 calories.”

A Hero of Our Time
, gentlemen, is in fact a portrait, but not of an individual; it is the aggregate of the vices of our whole generation in their fullest expression.

The man who writes about himself and his time is the man who writes about all people and all time.

Was Keats a confessional poet? When he talks about youth that grows “pale and specter-thin, and dies,” he’s talking about his kid brother Tom, who died of tuberculosis. But he’s talking
about more than that. The word
confessional
implies the need to purge oneself and to receive forgiveness for one’s life. I don’t think that’s what confessional poetry is about at all. I think it’s a poetry that comes out of the stuff of the poet’s personal life, but he’s trying to render this experience in more general and inclusive, or what used to be called
universal
, terms. He’s presenting himself as a representative human being. He’s saying, “This is what happens to us as human beings in this flawed and difficult world, where joy is rare.” Sylvia Plath is certainly one of the outstanding “confessional” poets, but when Plath entitles a poem “Lady Lazarus,” she’s trying to connect herself to the whole tradition of pain and death and resurrection. She’s not presenting herself as Sylvia Plath but as part of a larger pattern.

This is the wager, isn’t it? It’s by remaining faithful to the contingencies and peculiarities of your own experience and the vagaries of your own nature that you stand the greatest chance of conveying something universal.