A Wave That Will Not Come

          Joan Didion will turn 76 on December 5, 2010.  She and her husband were still married when he died, at the age of 71, in 2003.  Her daughter died in 2005. From The White Album, 1979.

IN THE ISLANDS

1969: I had better tell you where I am, and why.  I am sitting in a high-ceilinged room in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu watching the long translucent curtains billow in the trade wind and trying to put my life back together.  My husband is here, and our daughter, age three.  She is blond and barefoot, a child of paradise in a frangipani lei, and she does not understand why she cannot go to the beach.  She cannot go to the beach because there has been an earthquake in the Aleutians, 7.5 on the Richter scale, and a tidal wave is expected.  In two or three minutes the wave, if there is one, will hit Midway Island, and we are awaiting word from Midway.  My husband watches the television screen.  I watch the curtains, and imagine the swell of the water.

            The bulletin, when it comes, is a distinct anticlimax: Midway reports no unusual wave action.  My husband switches off the television set and stares out the window.  I avoid his eyes, and brush the baby’s hair.  In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices.  We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.

            I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind.  I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people.  You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor.  Quite often during the past several years I have felt myself a sleepwalker, moving through the world unconscious of the moment’s high issues,  oblivious to its data, alert only to the stuff of bad dreams, the children burning in the locked car in the supermarket parking lot, the bike boys stripping down stolen cars on the captive cripple’s ranch, the freeway sniper who feels “real bad” about picking off the family of five, the hustlers, the insane, the cunning Okie faces that turn up in military investigations, the sullen lurkers in doorways, the lost children, all the ignorant armies jostling in the night.  Acquaintances read The New York Times, and try to tell me the news of the world.  I listen to call-in shows.

            You will perceive that such a view of the world presents difficulties.  I have trouble making certain connections.  I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point.  The point itself seems increasingly obscure.  I came into adult life equipped with basically an essentially romantic ethic, holding always before me the examples of Axel Heyst in Victory and Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove and Charlotte Rittenmayer in The Wild Palms and a few dozen others like them, believing as they did that salvation lay in extreme and doomed commitments, promises made and somehow kept outside the range of normal social experience.  I still believe that, but I have trouble reconciling salvation with those ignorant armies camped in my mind.  I could indulge here in a little idle generalization, could lay off my own state of profound emotional shock on the larger cultural breakdown, could talk fast about convulsions in the society and alienation and anomie and maybe even assassination, but that would be just one more stylish shell game.  I am not the society in microcosm.  I am a thirty-four-year-old woman with long straight hair and an old bikini bathing suit and bad nerves sitting on an island in the Pacific waiting for a tidal wave that will not come.

            We spend, my husband and I and the baby, a restorative week in paradise.  We are each the other’s model of consideration, tact, restraint at the very edge of the precipice.  He refrains from noticing when I am staring at nothing, and in turn I refrain from dwelling at length upon a newspaper story about a couple who apparently threw their infant and then themselves into the boiling crater of a live volcano on Maui.  We also refrain from mentioning any kicked-down doors, hospitalized psychotics, and chronic anxieties or packed suitcases.  We lie in the sun, drive out through the cane to Waimea Bay.  We breakfast on the terrace, and gray-haired women smile benevolently at us.  I smile back.  Happy families are all alike on the terrace of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu.  My husband comes in from Kalakaua Avenue one morning and tells me he has seen a six-foot-two drag queen we know in Los Angeles.  Our acquaintance was shopping, my husband reports, for a fishnet bikini and did not speak.  We both laugh.  I am reminded that we laugh at the same things, and read him this complaint from a very old issue of Honolulu magazine I picked up in someone’s office: “When President Johnson recently came to Honolulu, the morning paper’s banner read something like ‘PICKETS TO GREET PRESIDENT.’  Would it not have been just as newsworthy to say ‘WARM ALOHA TO GREET PRESIDENT’?”  At the end of the week I tell my husband I am going to try harder to make things matter.  My husband says that he has heard that before, but the air is warm and the baby has another frangipani lei and there is no rancor in his voice.  Maybe it can be all right, I say.  Maybe, he says.

Struggling with Gossip Girl

The most frustrating thing about Gossip Girl (The CW, 2007—present) is how Gossip Girl’s narration slips from plausible reportage to unbelievable omniscience—sometimes she’s a blogger, other times she hovers invisible in the private space around one or two people.  She is whimsically, nonsensically both character and (a very poor attempt at a pure) omniscient narrator.  From the very beginning of How Fiction Works by James Wood, 2008.

Narrating

1

The house of fiction has many windows, but only two or three doors.  I can tell a story in the third person or in the first person, and perhaps in the second person singular, or in the first person plural, though successful examples of these latter two are rare indeed.  And that is it.  Anything else will probably not much resemble narration; it may be closer to poetry, or prose-poetry.

2

In reality, we are stuck with third- and first-person narration.  The common idea is that there is a contrast between reliable narration (third-person omniscience) and unreliable narration (the unreliable first person narrator, who knows less about himself than the reader eventually does).  On one side, Tolstoy, say; and on the other, Humbert Humbert or Italo Svevo’s narrator, Zeon Cosini, or Bertie Wooster.  Authorial omniscience, people assume, has had its day, much as that “vast, moth-eaten musical brocade” called religion has also had its.  W.G. Sebald once said to me, “I think that fiction writing which does not acknowledge the uncertainty of the narrator himself is a form of imposture which I find very, very difficult to take.  Any form of authorial writing where the narrator sets himself up as stagehand and director and judge and executor in a text, I find somehow unacceptable.  I cannot bear to read books of this kind.”  Sebald continued: “If you refer to Jane Austen, you refer to a world where there were standards of propriety that which were accepted by everyone.  Given that you have a world where the rules are clear and where one knows where trespassing begins, I think it is legitimate, within that context, to be a narrator who knows what the rules are and who knows the answers to certain questions.  But I think these certainties have been taken from us by the course of history, and that we do have to acknowledge our own sense of ignorance and of insufficiency in these matters and therefore try and write accordingly.”*

3

For Sebald, and for many writers like him, standard third-person omniscient narration is a kind of antique cheat.  But both sides of the division have been caricatured.

4

Actually, first-person narration is generally more reliable than unreliable; and third-person “omniscient” narration is generally more partial than omniscient.

            The first-person narrator is often highly reliable; Jane Eyre, a highly reliable first-person narrator, for instance, tells us her story from a position of belated enlightenment (years later, married to Mr. Rochester, she can now see her whole life story, rather as Mr. Rochester’s eyesight is gradually returning at the end of the novel).  Even the apparently unreliable narrator is more often than not reliably unreliable.  Think of Kazuo Ishiguro’s butler in The Remains of the Day, or of Bertie Wooster, or even of Humbert Humbert.  We know that the narrator is being unreliable because the author is alerting us, through reliable manipulation, to that narrator’s unreliability.  A process of authorial flagging is going on; the novel teaches us how to read its narrator.

            Unreliably unreliable narration is very rare, actually—about as rare as a genuinely mysterious, truly bottomless character.  The nameless narrator of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger is highly unreliable, and finally unknowable (it helps that he is insane); Dostoevsky’s narrator in Notes from the Underground is the model for Hamsun.  Italo Svevo’s Zeno Cosini may be the best example of truly unreliable narration.  He imagines that by telling us his life story he is psychoanalyzing himself (he has promised his analyst to do this).  But his self-comprehension, waved confidently before our eyes, is as comically perforated as a bullet-holed flag.

5

On the other side, omniscient narration is rarely as omniscient as it seems.  To begin with, authorial style generally has a way of making third-person omniscience seem partial and inflected.  Authorial style tends to draw our attention toward the writer, toward the artifice of the writer’s construction, and so toward the writer’s own impress.  Thus the almost comic paradox of Flaubert’s celebrated wish that the author be “impersonal,” Godlike, and removed, in contrast with the high personality of his very style, those exquisite sentences and details, which are nothing less than God’s showy signatures on every page: so much for the impersonal author.  Tolstoy comes closest to a canonical idea of authorial omniscience, and he uses with great naturalness and authority a mode of writing that Roland Barthes called “the reference code” (or sometimes “the cultural code”), whereby a writer makes confident appeal to a universal or consensual truth, or a body of shared cultural or scientific knowledge.**

6

So-called omniscience is almost impossible.  As soon as someone tells a story about a character, narrative seems to want to bend itself around that character, wants to merge with that character, to take on his or her way of thinking and speaking.  A novelist’s omniscience soon enough becomes a kind of secret sharing; this is called “free indirect style,” a term novelists have lots of different nicknames for—“close third person,” or “going into character.”

*This interview can be found in Brick magazine, issue 10.  Sebald’s German accent had a way of exaggerating the already comic, miserable, Bernhard-like pleasure he took in stressing words such as “very” and “unacceptable.”

**Barthes uses this term in his book S/Z (1970, translated by Richard Miller, 1974).  He means the way that nineteenth-century writers refer to commonly accepted cultural or scientific knowledge, for instance shared ideological generalities about “women.”  I extend the term to cover any kind of authorial generalization.  For instance, an example from Tolstoy: at the start of The Death of Ivan Ilyich, three of Ivan Ilyich’s friends are reading his obituary, and Tolstoy writes that each man, “as is usual in such cases, was secretly congratulating himself that it was Ivan who had died and not him.”  As is usual in such cases: the author refers with ease and wisdom to a central human truth, serenely gazing into the hearts of thee different men.

Happy Thanksgiving!

From Robert Lowell: Collected Poems, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter.  Originally published in Lord Weary's Castle (1946)

Children of Light

Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones

And fenced their gardens with the Redman’s bones;

Embarking from the Nether Land of Holland,

Pilgrims unhouseled by Geneva’s night;

They planted here the Serpent’s seeds of light;

And here the pivoting searchlights probe to shock

The riotous glass houses built on rock,

And candles gutter by an empty altar,

And light is where the landless blood of Cain

Is burning, burning the unburied grain.

CHILDREN OF LIGHT

“The children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light” (Luke 16:8).

1 “When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones” (Milton, “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont,” 4). “Stocks and stones is a little joke on Milton’s Piedmontese sonnet—it was the Catholics according to Milton who were idolators and worshipped stones” (Lowell, letter, June 26, 1967).  See also Jeremiah 2:26-27.

3 – 5 After a decade in Holland, many English Separatists (their beliefs derived from John Calvin of Geneva) sailed to Massachusetts on the Mayflower (1620); later they were called Pilgrims.

5 Serpent’s seeds: see note to “At the Indian Killer’s Grave” 5.2 (p.1022).

AT THE INDIAN KILLER’S GRAVE

5.2 the man who sowed: Like Cadmus who killed a dragon, then sowed its teeth from which an army sprang up.  The army fought until only five warriors survived; with these five Cadmus founded Thebes.

7 “Glass houses, people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones etc. of the proverb—expensive houses later built by [a] plutocratic civilization with sea-views” (Lowell, letter, June 26, 1967).

9 Cain: Cain was forced by God to wander after killing his brother Abel (Genesis 14:12-14).

Getting Stoned and Eating Chips Ahoy!

An explanation, by way of example, of why I love David Foster Wallace.  This is a footnote.  Everything here is quoted from "Authority and American Usage," an essay published in the book Consider the Lobster, 2005.

[…] you have only to accept the proposition that language is by its very nature public — i.e., that there is no such thing as a private language³² — […]

³²This proposition is in fact true, as is interpolatively demonstrated just below, and although the demonstration is persuasive it is also, as you can see from the size of this FN, lengthy and involved and rather, umm, dense, so that once again you’d maybe be better off simply granting the truth of the proposition and forging on with the main text.

INTERPOLATIVE DEMONSTRATION OF THE FACT THAT THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A PRIVATE LANGUAGE

It is sometimes tempting to imagine that there can be such a thing as a private language.  Many of us are prone to lay-philosophizing about the weird privacy of our own mental states, for example; and from the fact that when my knee hurts only I can feel it, it’s tempting to conclude that for me the word pain has a very subjective internal meaning that only I can truly understand.  This line of thinking is sort of like the adolescent pot-smoker’s terror that his own inner experience is both private and unverifiable, a syndrome that is technically known as Cannabic Solipsism.  Eating Chips Ahoy! and staring very intently at the television’s network PGA event, for instance, the adolescent pot-smoker is struck with the ghastly possibility that, e.g., what he sees as the color green and what other people call “the color green” may in fact not be the same color-experiences at all: the fact that both he and someone else call Pebble Beach’s fairways green and a stoplight’s GO signal green appears to guarantee only that there is a similar consistency in their color-experiences of fairways and GO lights, not that the actual subjective quality of those color-experiences the same; it could be that what the ad. pot-smoker experiences as green everyone else actually experiences as blue, and that what we “mean” by the word blue is what he “means” by green, etc. etc., until the whole line of thinking gets so vexed and exhausting that the a. p.-s. ends up slumped crumb-strewn and paralyzed in his chair.

            The point here is that the idea of private language, like private colors and most of the other solipsistic conceits with which this reviewer has at various times been afflicted, is both deluded and demonstrably false.

            In the case of private language, the delusion is usually based on the belief that a word like pain or tree has the meaning it does because it is somehow “connected” to a feeling in my knee or to a picture of a tree in my head.  But as Mister L. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations proved in the 1950s, words actually have the meanings they do because of certain rules and verification tests that are imposed on us from outside our own subjectivities, viz., by the community in which we have to get along and communicate with other people.  Wittgenstein’s argument centers on the fact that a word like tree means what it does for me because of the way the community I’m part of has tacitly agreed to use tree.  What makes this observation so powerful is that Wittgenstein can prove that it holds true even if I am an angst-ridden adolescent pot-smoker who believes that there’s no way I can verify that what I mean by tree is what anybody else means by tree.  Wittgenstein’s argument is very technical but goes something like:

(1)                A word has no meaning apart from how it is actually used, and even if

(2)                “The question of whether my use agrees with others has been given up as a bad job,”* still,

(3)               The only way a word can be used meaningfully even to myself is if I use it “correctly,” with

(4)               Correctly here meaning “consistent with my own definition” (that is, if I use tree one time to mean a tree and then next time turn around and use tree to mean a golf ball and then the next time willy-nilly use tree to mean a certain brand of high-cal corporate cookie, etc., then, even in my own little solipsistic universe, tree has ceased really to “mean” anything at all), but

(5)               The criterion of consistency-with-my-own-definition is satisfiable only if there exist certain rules that are independent of any one language-user (viz., in this case, me).  Without the existence of these external rules, there is no difference between the statement “I am in fact using tree consistently with my own definition” and the statement “I happen to be under the impression that I am using tree consistently with my own definition.”  Wittgenstein’s way of putting it is:

Now how is it to be decided whether I have used the [privately defined] word consistently?  What will be the difference between my having used it consistently and its seeming to me that I have? Or has this distinction vanished?...If the distinction between ‘correct’ and ‘seems correct’ has disappeared than so has the concept correct.  It follows that the ‘rules’ of my private language are only impressions of rules.  My impression that I follow a rule does not confirm that I follow the rule, unless there can be something that will prove my impression correct.  “And that something cannot be another impression—for this would be as if someone were to buy several copies of the morning paper to assure himself that what it said was true.”

            Step (5) is the real kicker; step (5) is what shows that even if the involuted adolescent decides that he has his own special private definition of tree, he himself cannot make up the “rules of consistency” via which he confirms that he’s using tree the way he privately defined it—i.e., “The proof that I am following a rule must appeal to something independent of my impression that I am.”

            If you are thinking that all this seems not just hideously abstract but also irrelevant to the Usage Wars or to anything you have any interest in at all, I submit that you are mistaken.  If words’ and phrases’ meanings depend on transpersonal rules and these rules on community consensus,† then language is not only non-private but also irreducibly public, political, and ideological.  This means that questions about our national consensus on grammar and usage are actually bound up with every last social issue that millennial America’s about—class, race, sex, morality, tolerance, pluralism, cohesion, equality, fairness, money: you name it.

            And if you at least provisionally grant that meaning is use and language public and communication impossible without consensus and rules, you’re going to see that the Descriptivist argument is open to the objection that its ultimate aim—the abandonment of “artificial” linguistic rules and conventions—would make language itself impossible.  As in Genesis 11:1-10-grade impossible, a literal Babel.  There have to be some rules and conventions, no?  We have to agree that tree takes e’s and not u’s and denotes a large woody thing with branches and not a small plastic thing with dimples and TITLEIST on it, right?  And won’t this agreement automatically be “artificial,” since it’s human beings making it?  Once you accept that at least some artificial conventions are necessary, then you can get to the really hard and interesting questions: which conventions are necessary? and when? and where? and who gets to decide? and whence their authority to do so?  And because these are the very questions [the Descriptivists] believes Dispassionate Science can transcend, their argument appears guilty of both petitio principii and ignoratio elenchi, and can pretty much be dismissed out of hand.

               

*Because The Investigations’ prose is extremely gnomic and opaque and consists largely of Wittgenstein having weird little imaginary dialogues with himself, the quotations here are actually from Norman Malcolm’s definitive paraphrase of L.W.’s argument, in which paraphrase Dr. Malcolm uses single quotation marks for tone quotes and double quotation marks for when he’s actually quoting Wittgenstein—which, when I myself am quoting Malcolm quoting Wittgenstein’s tone quotes, makes for a rather irksome surfeit of quotation marks, admittedly; but using Malcolm’s exegesis allows this interpolative demonstration to be about 60 percent shorter than it would be of we were to grapple with Wittgenstein directly.

                †There’s a whole argument for this, but intuitively you can see that it makes sense: if the rules can’t be subjective, and if they’re not actually “out there” floating around in some kind of metaphysical hyperreality (a floating hyperreality that you can believe in if you wish, but you should know that people with beliefs like this usually get forced to take medication), then community consensus is really the only plausible explanation left.