Metabellatristics and the Obsequious Writer

*
Maybe it's because I've gotten tired of the fluttering, unedited pages of barely legible scribblings covering my bedroom walls. Maybe I'm tired of interrogating my characters and finding their personalities to still be about as rich as a Saltine cracker. Perhaps I'm tired of thinking of [CK]** as this tri-fold amorphous blob of interests, themes, and overarching questions.
*Upon googling the word "obsequious" for images, found this one, attached to one DJ Obsequious. Who, you ask? "Think about an orifice. Now think about the stimulation of that orifice. Imagine the blissful pleasure induced from such stimuli. Now you know what it's like to experience a mix by DJ Obsequious." (http://8tracks.com/obsequious) Do yourself a favor. Get obsequious.
**Cicada Killers

Whatever it is, I find myself drawn to some pretty extreme examples of inventive 20th century fiction, particularly David Foster Wallace, William Burroughs, and Donald Barthelme. These guys, my lovable tortured alpha male running crew, represent the dino-myte successes and epic William Tell Overture failures of the novel in the wake of WWII.

Who is SM?

One of the greatest parts of my albeit part-time job at the Maryland Institute College of Art is my access to such campus resources as the library.  I wandered through the most eclectic collection of fiction I've ever seen, opting to round out my paltry knowledge of Bill Burroughs. I've read Naked Lunch, as is my contractual obligation as a self-proclaimed renegade bohemian madwoman. I've seen the movie A Man Within or whatever it's called, that biography that's on Netflix Instant Watch. I'm fascinated with his persona as he floats through the novels of Kerouac and most recently Patti Smith's Just Kids autobio. I'm intensely amused with his use of the orgone box to achieve equilibrium during junk sickness. So I picked up his 1964 novel Nova Express, I guess the third in his cut-up cycle. It's written in halting prose, words or phrases separated by hyphens, often degenerating into Morse Code collections of dashes and dots.

Please note: I have no idea what it means other than perhaps a commentary on humans/machines, moreover I have no idea why it excites me. It also bores me. But I suppose it's my previous faith in his ability to use strange words and phrases to evoke nothing other than the feeling of strangeness itself. I am more comfortable with absurdity, I guess. Unlikely that I would employ the same method in [CK], cutting up the phrases and bits of dialogue and fitting them together piecemeal, mostly because I'm afraid I would begin to think of the project as exactly the kind of self-conscious, perhaps even narcissistic aesthetic goal, designed to alienate and project false superiority.

Orgone box.

A couple decades later, Barthelme blew minds that thought they couldn't be anymore blown. I read The Dead Father in one of my favorite classes in college, Postmodernism. I wrote a paper on it. Maybe I'll find it and throw it up on Jukebox sometime. Anyway, for the uninitiated,  he writes in an extremely minimalistic prose, often relying solely on dialogue (no quotes, each line tabbed and dashed like supporting points in an outline) for the dramatic action. Not unlike B.B.'s prose.

The dialogue comes in waves of repetition, echoes and variations. It's often more like listening to Bach's Inventions than reading a novel. The whole time you're imagining this guy (who looked an awful lot like Ginsberg) smirking coyly at you from the page, laughing and farting in his chair as he hums himself a merry tune at your expense. Diabolical, hilarious, worthy. To enrich my appreciation for the madman who wrote one of my now favorite novels, I also picked up his 1979 collection of stories, Great Days, which I'm still working through. Many of the stories are written in this same style, dialogue spoken in clips as if eavesdropped from the table over.

(from "The Apology")

--Sitting on the floor by the window with only part of my face in the window. He'll never come back.
--Of course he will. He'll return, open the gate with one hand, look up and see your face in the window.
--He'll never come back. Not now.
--He'll come back. New lines on his meager face. Yet with head held high.
--I was unforgivable.
--I would not argue otherwise.

For example. We speed through it, we get the general idea, we have flashes of utter profundity in the midsection, and it ends devastatingly. How else can it be described.

I've been muddling through the appropriately titled Infinite Jest now going on two years, off and on like a sometime lover who delights and frustrates and intrigues and enlightens. The pages are worn from the endless flipping you do with the like 800-page novel, which is so heavily notated and annotated and footnoted as to truly either drive you insane or drive you to try to write something exactly like it, which one should never do. DFW's prose forces brutal honestly on the reader, encourages her to take nothing for granted, to see Note 482 for a complete run-down of this or that past situation, aside, or graphic representation of tennis technique, complete pharmaceutical run-down of X Rx. I've also read his essays in Consider the Lobster which uses footnotes in the traditional, non-fictional custom of leaving NO HOLES. But especially in the case of the article "Big Red Son," about attending the Adult Video Awards, it really is to the reader's advantage that no tale be untold.

Las Vegas 2008 AVN expo

After seeing the movie, I bought Brief Interviews with Hideous Men from Atomic Books. Again, maddeningly long footnotes and extremely verbose prose you practically have to fly through to get to the verb before you forget entirely what the subject was. Amusing since this is precisely the style of writing I am paid to discourage. But it's fiction, after all. And DFW caters to the fiction reader, who--let's be honest--is more often than not a fiction writer h-im/erself. This seems intentional, especially given his propensity to break his fourth wall, to employ a little meta, specifically when he begins tangentially rapping rhapsodical about "belletristic fiction," the work that is constructed not with content in mind as much as aesthetic. Immediately it calls to mind B.B.'s cut-up method (which he abandoned after the trilogy), and begs the essential question which ought to be asked of every work: DOES IT WORK?

We might consider how perhaps the fragmentation of the prose mirrors the fragmentation of the society which he satirizes. Too easy? Or Barthelme's super-colloquial (beyond, surpassing) lines of dramatic dialogue mirroring the obsession we have with voyeurism. A stretch? What about DFW's interlude right smack in the middle of these otherwise accessible confessional accounts, in which he proposes that You, the Reader, are hypothetically constructing a cycle of stories and having a very hard time doing so?

His recommendation? Come clean.

If all your stories give you the feeling there is something of great urgency in which there is something of urgent importance happening, he says, and your deepest desire is to ask the reader whether or not she feels this weird urgency too, just to make sure, to just know, then you better suck it up and do it.

"You'll have to ask [the reader] whether she thinks the whole ragged jerryrigged heuristic semi-octet 'works' as an organically unified belletristic whole or not. Right there while she's reading it. Again: consider this carefully. You should not deploy this tactic until you've soberly considered what it might cost. What she might think of you. Because if you go ahead and do it (i.e., ask her straight out), this whole 'interrogation' thing won't be an innocuous formal belletristic device anymore. It'll be real. You'll be bothering her, the same way a solicitor who calls on the telephone just as you're sitting down to unwind over a good dinner is bothering you" (Wallace 157).

 How gauche to come right out and ask! he says. This is the risk he's talking about: turning off the reader once and for all with a single awkwardly interrogative question. How often do we tire of that person who desperately, pathetically, asks you whether you like him or not? Equally do we tire of the coy, cool, aloof and impossibly pretentious attitude of others. Both are socially repugnant, and yet are not both in our nature? Can we pretend to be thinking any differently to some degree? Could we admit it if we did?

How you like me now?!

We return to our prosaic defendant. This smacks of absolutely shameless rampant detestable irony, no? To be condemning the very thing it is so obvious--to all parties, especially him, oh my god, TOTALLYMETA-IRONY--that he is doing? To beg the question: IS IT WORKING?? He's come to us naked, hat in hand, prepared for the worst. I haven't even gotten to the end of the section, but I already kind of wish it would come, like asking a friend to call you during what you just know will be a terrible date. (Sorry, high school newspaper boy.)

 At the same time, I also don't feel it necessary to come down on him too hard. How can you? He's eliminated the option for severe laceration, and he is aware of it. Deliberate alienation is a Creative Writing 101 no-no, and he's fucking DOING it. Why? Maybe he's bored. Bored of pedestrian language, bored of traditional prose, bored of nontraditional prose, bored of men, bored of women, and simultaneously enthralled by it all.

Truly he has found the sundae, in all its goopy fudgey glory, too delicious to turn down.

If we normally think (and we should) of the novelist as a sadistic freak hellbent on destroying our illusions of comfort, this kind of writing is totally sadomasochistic. This is a man who has tortured himself into submission before finally kicking the proverbial can--his OWN can. Not to say by ANY means that we should be reading into his every work now as a suicide note, but surely readers in the late nineties had to have thought, "This cannot last."

But I can't feel sorry for him, because words are living organisms once someone gives them life. His is prose I can trust, even as it proclaims its own failings, and urges the reader not to fall into the traps he sets along the way. I won't, but I have, and I will. I will not, yet I must, at the risk of encountering the unencounterable, or at the risk of not encountering anything (i.e. death).

DFW

This is work worth exhuming for its utterly unapologetic bravery--
I will not give up the ghost.

"When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their face. The man who'd introduced them didn't much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one" (Wallace, 0).




And but so
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