What I’m reading. October ‘23.
Pastoralia - George Saunders
I first listened to Saunder’s story The Falls in Málaga’s central park. I was alternating between walking in loops, being quite ill, and collapsing on benches like this:
I’d been on a pub crawl the night before and was feeling pitiful. For me at least, intense bouts of self-pity are easily transmuted into other-facing pity. Or perhaps sentimentality. On one reading, hangovers are the time when I find it easiest to empathise with others— it is the only time I can cry just by seeing an intentionally heart-warming video. But on another— this self-pity is never really transformed into anything meaningfully other-facing, I sit, on my own, in bed, watching the videos, and feeling something more like joy through my tears.
Walking through the park, I felt outside of myself. When I saw children playing, I’d sometimes feel happy for them, an unavoidable patronly smile on my face. In this kind of mood, where the boundary between me and others felt thinner (misleadingly or not) I listened to The Falls.
By the end of the story, I was outwardly crying. The stupid, pure, obsessive, petty, saintly thought patterns of the main character felt extremely real and believable. I felt that I had come into contact with a small slice of moral purity, and it was beautiful.
I bring this up in the context of my hangover because— is this just a trick? My hungover states feel more empathetic, but they are coupled with a lack of mobility, focus and inclination. I can feel for others, but I can’t do anything for them. Perhaps, unsympathetically, I could understand this as the reason for the pleasure that comes with these states of pity. I can feel comfortable while experiencing the suffering, or moral heroism of others, while knowing that I can’t personally be compelled to lift a finger. I can observe morality as God could: without obligation.
Saunders’ writing is moral. The Falls was one of the first Saunders stories that I heard/read. But reading multiple in a row, you begin to see the patterns. Using sci-fi elements, or satirisations of existing trends, Saunders alienates us from our setting sufficiently to highlight ordinary motivations as strange. We see inside the mind of a character who doesn’t question the strangeness of the situation. Through understanding, we come to empathise with this person, who has such different motives and intentions to us. A precipitating event occurs which causes the character to make a moral decision. The decision they take shows some virtuous (or vicious) aspects, but the outcome is ambiguous. We get a strong moral feeling, but we aren’t sure what to do with it.
What’s the point of this kind of empathy? Empathy that helps you understand another mind, but only from a position of comfort and inaction, a position you will always be in while reading a book?
Consider The Lobster And Other Essays — David Foster Wallace
I’ll preface this by saying that I loved Infinite Jest. I started reading it on holiday, immediately after finishing a difficult job. I was able to devote time and focus to it— which was necessary. At other times in my life, I wouldn’t have been able to finish the book as easily as I did.
The length of the book, and the fractured nature of the narrative, meant that reading it became, by necessity, a type of experience. I mean by this that I had to conceive of myself as ‘reading infinite jest’ rather than ‘reading a novel’. A novel, generally, drives you along with its narrative. But a book as long as Infinite Jest, even if its author wasn’t trying to subvert aspects of narrative form, has to rely on another drive. The reader, conversely, has to develop a different motivation. I felt a bit lost when the book was over.
This led me to pick up DFW’s popular collection: Consider The Lobster And Other Essays. Some of the essays in the collection are fantastic. For example, I think the first piece, Big Red Son, which reports and theorises on the status and prospects of pornography as of 1998, is insightful, terrifying, and (perhaps slightly too) entertaining. DFW’s style is generally good— he often manages to seem conversational while organising his thoughts very carefully. Overall though, the main benefit of reading this collection, for me, was a starker realisation of DFW’s flaws and limitations.
In Infinite Jest, DFW speaks through many many mouths, in many dialects. While I read the book, I generally held it as an artefact, and apart from the sections where DFW seemed to be directly predicting rather than satirising future trends (an anti-video call screed for instance), I didn’t read it as written by a fallible author. This isn’t me ascribing saintly status to DFW, this is simply the mark of a good book for me; seeing a world in the pages, and only looking for the marks of construction afterwards.
Essays, on the other hand, are personal. Though the author may be conscious of writing in a voice that they relate more or less to, the reader will be tying the text to the author, to their voice. In short, I’m saying that reading this collection was pretty much the first time I felt like I was hearing directly from DFW. On several occasions, his lack of insight, or moments of real showing off, were disappointing.
Lack of insight: There are a few moments in these essays where DFW looks straight into the camera and just tells you his opinion. One is on the topic of abortion. Maybe at the time, it was presumed to be more acceptable to have a half-baked, can’t-we-all-just-get-along opinion on this issue, but now it reads pretty badly. Worse than the object-level opinion is the framing, i.e., the idea that his take is wise and worth listening to.
Showing off/ DFW’s view of his audience: DFW is often accused of showing off. On one reading, Infinite Jest is mostly him showing off; the book is a venue for him to display his impossibly impressive powers of concentration and encyclopedic intellect. In my reading, I didn’t find this to be a problem. The encyclopedic sections were funny or mind-numbing in a purposeful way, the page-long sentences and footnotes were sometimes a pain, but often kind of funny. But in his essays, the showing off, or the ego, occasionally chafed.
Take the title essay, Consider The Lobster. For a few pages near the start, Foster Wallace washes you over with background facts about the lobster: “Summer is also lobsters’ molting season — specifically early- to mid-July. Chitinous arthropods grow by molting, rather the way people have to buy bigger clothes as they age and gain weight”. He is treating you kindly— unlike in some sections of Infinite Jest, he is taking pains to make you understand. He goes on for a few more pages like this, discussing facts about lobsters which aren’t directly relevant to the essay. The way he discusses these facts is very different to the way he approaches certain others, for example: “Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything’s pain but our own; and even just the principles by which we can infer that other human beings experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy — metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics” DFW almost seems to be gatekeeping the philosophy here; he can explain some basic facts about lobsters, but when it comes to the philosophy, it is too “hardcore”. The reader wouldn’t understand. He could have expressed that there isn’t space to discuss the philosophy, or that whichever way it went wouldn’t change what he was about to say. Instead, he dangles it, and then implies that you, the reader, wouldn’t get it. It is his domain.
This is just one example. There are many passages in the essays where DFW showed off his knowledge in un-patronising ways. Where his excitement comes through, or he isn’t trying to be cool. I raise these critical points not as a total knockdown of DFW. I enjoyed the essays, and I’m sure I’ll turn to some of them again. I raise these points because they helped me see, in his shortcomings, the person behind the text.
In the essays, I found that I preferred a DFW who brought the reader along with him for an experience (such as in ‘Red Son’), claiming no particular expertise. In these cases, he could be insightful, and argue by showing.
Betraying Spinoza — Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
I’ve been trying to re-read Spinoza’s The Ethics with my friend for around a year. It is a difficult book to read slowly. Spinoza wrote the book in a geometric style, i.e. in the style of Euclid’s elements, with explicitly labelled axioms, premises, corollaries, scholia, and a whole bunch of QEDs (declarations that “Thus it is demonstrated”). In order to understand the book, especially as a modern reader who has to rely on Spinoza’s use of terms like “substance”, “mind” and “body” in order to form a working definition, it is best to read the book as a whole. I had my best experience with understanding the book when I was reading it over a few days in order to write an essay about it.
In order to get something more like this overview, which I had and then lost with time, I turned to a book my friend recommended: Betraying Spinoza. The titular betrayal refers to the approach that Goldstein takes. Spinoza’s philosophy actively downgrades the importance of particular facts about individuals, instead focusing on those parts of us which are universal and eternal— our true understanding of ourselves and the order of the universe. Goldstein subverts Spinoza’s purpose by situating his text in history, specifically Jewish history. She spends a chapter on a biography of Spinoza, and another on the history of the Marranos, Jews who had to hide their Jewishness from the Inquisition in Spain until many of them migrated to places like Spinoza’s Amsterdam, where, conversely, they were required to exhibit their Jewishness. She explores the mystery of this rationalist philosopher, who turns to reason rather than authority to provide truth, who emerged from a community deeply committed to a way of life based on tradition and canonical interpretations of texts. She lightens this mystery by describing figures from the time of Spinoza and before who broke with traditional aspects of Jewish thought in favour of knowledge based on mysticism, and unorthodox interpretations of texts. I’d recommend the book. It is brilliantly written, and fascinating even if you aren’t familiar with Spinoza’s work.
However, it made me think more about the question which haunts the book— what use should we make of the biographies of philosophers? I have often turned to biography as a way of feeling as if I am learning philosophy without the pain of actually doing so. I turned to this book for a similar reason. But it, at least in this case, has contributed to my understanding of Spinoza only in the sense of making me more enthusiastic to read him.
Biography has only directly assisted me in understanding philosophy when the philosopher in question is more explicitly biographical. For example, Iris Murdoch and Simone de Beauvoir’s thought is clearer to me after reading biographical, autobiographical and novelistic approaches to their philosophies. In both cases, these works helped me understand the non-philosophical issues that the authors were responding to, sometimes in a literary manner, and sometimes in an explicitly philosophical register. Understanding the inciting issues for the philosophy, cultural or personal, helped me read the philosophy itself. I could better understand which parts to emphasise, and the kind of alternative worldviews that the philosophy was straining against.
For Spinoza, the central mystery which biography could, in theory, assist us in is why he has a throughgoing belief that all things must have reasons (causes) for their existence, or being the way that they are. Without context, this may seem an innocuous belief. But when you see where these beliefs can lead someone, they are far less obvious. I didn’t find an answer to this question in Goldstein’s book. Perhaps that is because there isn’t one. Or perhaps, Spinoza succeeded in hiding himself.