Only the Lonely

 

ONLY THE LONELY: Loneliness, the fuel of American fiction, as explored in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

 

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest covers a lot of space in the universe of human consciousness, but loneliness is its domicile.  Specifically the empty brand of loneliness that comes after the failed pursuit of happiness.  It is Hal’s loneliness at the University interview in Arizona.  His untethered alienation.  Erdedy waiting for his weed to be delivered, watching the dark insect with the shiny case.  Hal at 10 talking to his Dad who’s disguised as a professional conversationalist.  The medical attaché and the cartridge.  Orin sweating his outline onto his bed, awaking soaked in his condo.  Hal getting high by himself with his one-hitter in the underground pump room at the Enfield Tennis Academy, exhaling into an industrial exhaust fan.  James Incandenza, the withdrawn only child, a suicide.  Hal, alone, finding his father’s suicide remains, his cooked head and Hal’s initial impression upon entering the kitchen — That something smelled delicious!   The young tennis machines at Enfield and the isolating mental grind of the game, the scarred addicts at Ennet House and their different but equally-felt nightmares, separation from family and loved ones.  The addicts feeling that singular loneliness that comes from the abandonment felt when the substance goes from best friend to deceptive enemy.  Madame Psychosis, a voice through the radio, and then dead air. The end of a party when everyone has left.   And then the longing.  The loneliness of being powerless inside an addiction.  The loneliness of compulsively thinking only of oneself, and what terrible things might come.

And then the examining of the modes of escape, the different levels, like Pemulis analyzing how Schacht ingests the occasional chemical that way grownups who sometimes forget to finish their cocktails drink liquor: to make a tense but fundamentally OK interior life interestingly different but no more, no element of relief; a kind of tourism  as opposed to the way those who feel a true need to ingest chemicals form their lives around substances with an esoteric jargon dedicated to all aspects of the chemicals – form, delivery methods, effects, results.

Interest in David Foster Wallace and Infinite Jest has been high, by fiction standards, since publication of the novel in 1996.  I submit the interest is due to Wallace’s ability to write about the paradox of human consciousness in such a relatable way, effectively communicating with readers inside their collective heads (his and the reader’s) about the catch-22 of the human condition, the gift of existence versus the trap of the human mind – that realization of being locked in a box of mysteries locked from the outside, the walls of the trap only dissolved by religion, philosophy, escape (including through vices), surrender.  For those who cannot accept formal religion or philosophy, there is only escape or surrender.

Wallace acknowledged the old proverb about the brain being a wonderful servant but terrible master.  He understood that diving deeper and deeper into thinking and contemplation was something else to fear, or to surrender to, or to accept or not accept. So many ways to exist in the box of mysteries, surrendering to the double-bind in some way, or escaping its confines through spirituality, meditation, philosophical cogitation, chemicals, pain, ecstasy.  What Wallace gave, and continues to give, to his bewitched readers is the willingness to address the problems of the bind head-on, biting on a leather strap through a sea of necessary words (and vast wildernesses of unnecessary details and minutia which damages the accessibility of his explorations, not infrequently).  Sometimes Wallace arguably strayed into the weeds of details, an obsessive-compulsive need to address everything down to each identifiable ingredient.  He told Christopher Lydon in an interview for The Connection that part of the design of Infinite Jest was to make it difficult and challenging while also making it fun enough that readers would be willing to do the hard work in the places where required.  He seems to have succeeded in that quest based on sales of over a million copies worldwide and the many devotees who write unsolicited examinations of the work, like this one.  Readers attracted to Wallace’s work, like Infinite Jest, are those compelled to keep diving into the dark depths with Wallace, swimming through cold, dark water, hoping it eventually leads to a warm fountainhead.  Searching that goes on, and on, and on, never consciously ending.  Compulsion.  Not like the destructive compulsion the Boston A.A. aimed to release Don Gately from through the meetings and following the steps, but a powerful, consuming drive nonetheless.

Wallace looked into the future to a time when the brain can be implanted with electronic means to stimulate the variants of pleasure centers of a user who is able to access ecstasy at the flip of a switch without ever leaving home.  No need for interaction with other human beings.  Bug eyed, drooling, moaning, trembling, incontinent, dehydrated.  Not working, not consuming, not interacting or taking part in community life.  There is a fear of isolation buoying the characters along.  The Moms’ distaste for being alone so great due to a lonely childhood, her office has no door.

If Infinite Jest is a dark comedy of loneliness, Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a melancholic love song (think Suzanne Vega’s Caramel) to this feeling of missing something, or someone.  In McCullers’ thin mute, John Singer, we find what has to be one of the loneliest figures in literature.  Singer is a hub of loneliness holding a centripetal pull on the other major characters of the luscious lament.  Dr. Copeland, Portia, Mick, Jake Blount, and even Biff Brannon, an observer of all the loneliness in an attempt to fight his own.  All these characters feeling the only solution to their loneliness in the company of the mute Singer.  They feel he understands and in that understanding temporarily cures their loneliness.

We see Singer first experience loneliness when his dear friend, roommate and fellow mute Spiros Antonapoulos, is taken away from him and institutionalized.  He wrote to his friend, The way I need you is a loneliness I cannot bear.  Soon I will come again.  My vacation is not due for six months more but I think I can arrange it before then.  I think I will have to.  I am not meant to be alone and without you who understand.   Visits to his friend in the institution are rare.  But Singer bears his loneliness until Antonapoulos dies.  It is then Singer feels he has lost the only person who would ever listen to him, who could ever understand him.  He cannot endure it.

The core of loneliness as explored in the book is both the longing to be in the physical presence of someone else, and also the feeling of being unable to connect with anyone.   The feeling of loneliness even in a crowd.

Biff Brannon, the café/tavern owner, sat back and watched it all.  He kept his place, the New York Café, open all night to fight his own loneliness.  In this role of observer, he seems more disconnected and less susceptible to loneliness than the others.  But in moments of quiet reflection, loneliness presents as a terror to Biff.

From the closing section of the book:

What was the reason for keeping the place open all through the night when every other café in the town was closed?  He was often asked that question and could never speak the answer out in words.  Not money.  Sometimes a party would come for beer and scrambled eggs and spend five or ten dollars.  But that was rare.  Mostly they came one at a time and ordered little and stayed long.  And on some nights, between the hours of twelve and five o’clock, not a customer would enter.  There was no profit in it – that was plain.

But he would never close up for the night – not as long as he stayed in the business.  Night was the time. There were those he would never have seen otherwise.  A few came regularly several times a week.  Others had come into the place only once, had drunk a Coca-Cola, and never returned.

Reading fiction is great artillery for fighting loneliness.  The connection with the writer, with even the imagined characters.  A place where the subject can be explored intimately and yes, alone.  A time when loneliness can become a comfort, when explored through other lenses of understanding.  A fueling of the soul.  David Foster Wallace understood.  Carson McCullers understood.

 

McCullers

Fiction as Man and Man as Fiction

               AUTOBIOGRAPHY: A Self-Recorded Fiction can be found in John Barth’s 1968 collection Lost in the Funhouse.  It is a philosophical imagining of a piece of fiction having the human qualities of shame, hope, fear, and disappointment as held in the complicated relationship between parent and child, and concurrently an exploration of those complicated feelings of humanity through this metaphorical literary technique.  Barth speaks of the creator’s difficulty accepting his progeny’s inevitable reflection of his shortcomings:

               What fathers can’t forgive is that their offspring receive and sow broadcast their      shortcomings.

                Barth also writes of the progeny’s lack of confidence and feeling that things have not turned out well, and that tides are not likely to change — reckonings embedded by the damaging, dissatisfied father:

                Well, well, being well into my life as it’s been called I see well how it’ll end, unless in some meaningless surprise.  If anything dramatic were going to happen to make me successfuller . .  agreeabler . . . endurabler . . . it should’ve happened by now, we will agree.  A change for the better, still isn’t unthinkable; miracles can be cited.  But the odds against a wireless deus ex machina aren’t encouraging.

                The feeling this story left me with is that we keep plenty of distractions in play to keep thoughts off the ending; to keep from being consumed by anxiety over not knowing or understanding the ending; true of life and writing fiction, more so life.  This doesn’t mean we need to ignore the ending, or that there is not some value in worrying about purpose and whether we will ever attain what we seek, if we even have an idea of what that is.  It instead means we distract ourselves by paying attention to the smallest wonders in front of us every day in an effort to break free of self-consciousness.

We should not waste time always feeling there is something else we should be doing, or by worrying about the sins of our fathers, or their lowered expectations of us.  These feelings will cause us to always give short shrift to whatever is in front of us, which will in turn make it impossible to ever fully enjoy anything.  This is all easy to say, but so much work to effectuate; probably not something even the most disciplined or enlightened could ever realize permanently.  And like us, a story, once it has left its creator, is free to become whatever it shall, something different to each reader, possibly something new to the same reader upon each re-reading.  A life of its own, not belonging to its creator any longer once released into the world.

Acceptance of imperfections is not a blessing but a necessity.  Acceptance doesn’t mean happiness or contentment.  Unhappiness within and a desire to improve our souls is reason to get out of bed each day, and reason for a story, if a story could have such feelings, to want to keep being cogitated by different forms of consciousness, born anew each time with never the exact same meaning.  Persistence.  Stubbornness in existence.  As Barth ends the story:

                 Nonsense, I’ll mutter to the end, one word after another, string the rascals out, mad or not, heard or not, my last words will be my last words

There is no period at the end of the story, and thus, there is no acceptance of an ending.  No preoccupation with ending; only a resolve that it will come and when it does, it will be what it is.  And without preoccupation, it may be perfected.

We Belong Together

You’re always going to fear appropriating someone else’s something else when creating, but that’s just one of myriad fears that conspire to discourage creativity.  You have to create in the face of everything.  That’s where the beauty of doing it resides, in not letting fear and negativity extinguish the flame searching for meaning, drawn to the compulsive oxygen of the audience, where everything is completed, and all is made one.  It’s a sublime symbiosis between the creator and those of us who love art.  As Pat Benatar sang in “We Belong,” a song written by the late David Eric Lowen and Dan Navarro:

We belong to the light, we belong to the thunder,

We belong to the sound of the words, we’ve both fallen under,

Whatever we deny or embrace, for worse or for better,

We belong, we belong, we belong together.

 

Todd Haynes’ Carol

I saw Todd Haynes’ Carol this afternoon, a bitterly cold day, snow falling softly as I left the theater, apropos for a film set in the winter of 1952-53, featuring one of the most beautiful snow scenes I’ve ever seen, Rooney Mara’s Therese taking photographs of Cate Blanchett’s Carol in the midst of falling snow.  Whatever else may be said about the film, such that it is a statement regarding the taboo of lesbian relationships in the early fifties, it is essentially a love story told tenderly and patiently, advancing the notion of the implacability of deeply-felt attraction enduring and overcoming all obstructions of trepidation and deterrents of risk aversion and guilt.

Through much of the film, Therese’s and Carol’s feelings for one another are sublimated in the forms of kind gestures – a returned pair of gloves, Christmas gifts, a hand on the shoulder – that stoke the building affection and passion between them.  When they finally give in to the visceral magnetism, their love is thwarted by the surveillance of a private investigator Carol’s estranged husband has hired to build a case of moral turpitude against her for use in the custody battle for their young daughter.  Fearing her relationship with Therese will result in her never seeing her daughter, and seeing the guilt her situation has caused Therese, Carol withdraws from the relationship as soon as it’s been consummated, leaving both Therese and Carol in emotional isolation and ruin.

A beautifully filmed movie with an emotionally affecting musical score, it is the evocative performances of Blanchett as the elegant and experienced Carol and Mara as the young, diffident and yearning Therese that give the film the rich pathos unique to the suffering of unfulfilled longing.  There are many shots with the characters observing one another, and the audience observing the characters, through glass, sometimes opaque.  Possibly Haynes’ intent is to suggest that no matter the power of the connection we feel to another human being, in the end we can never fully perfect the union, always separated by our individual consciousness; by the world.