Eternal and Without Name

 

I first read Cormack McCarthy's Blood Meridian in the summer after I graduated from college. I had abandoned my dream of being a secondary education teacher and hit the job market with nothing but that world-renowned-for-employability English degree. Which is all to say I kind of had a lot going on. 

At that time, I didn't have a sense that my degree prepared me for much of anything. I couldn't see the transferable soft skills, the ability to pick up hard skills quicker than most, until I realized later in life that's exactly what I was afforded in my 4-year education.

When I approached Blood Meridian, I think I was tired of reading. I had gone through a complete revolution in my ability to read complicated texts and college awarded me lots of opportunities to do this, but post-college did not. As a result, the book challenged me; I came close to not finishing and quite a bit of it was lost on me. Picking it back up was even a struggle until I began engaging with the first chapter and the haunting, beautiful prose, and when I re-encountered, probably the most blood-chilling literary villain, Judge Holden. Then I couldn't put it down.

I've read The Road and Pretty Horses by McCarthy, his task is to bring his readers to the cusp of civilization and explore what cruelties lie behind the line. The Road is just beyond an apocalypse event, while Pretty Horses and Blood Meridian are set in the frontier west. While thematically similar, Blood Meridian stands apart as entirely more hopeless than the other two novels.

In The Road, despite the sickening and depraved things the protagonist witnesses with his small son, McCarthy seems to recognize a transcendent goodness in people that can survive civilizational collapse. So too in All the Pretty Horses, the bond the two protagonists have as friends and with their animals stands as a pillar against the violence and savagery they experience. These are not happy novels, but there is some shimmer of goodness in them.

There is no such shine on Blood Meridian. Here, McCarthy shaves his protagonist right out of the landscape; known only as the kid, he runs from home as a young teenager and embodies the frontier. McCarthy drags the Kid, and by proxy the reader, through the landscape. His writing is so beautiful it feels like you are somehow reading a breathtaking painting. Yet the depths you will witness are also vast.

On the other side of civilization, in the frontier lands newly wrenched from Mexico, there is murder, rape, pedophilia, scalping, massacre, genocide, infanticide, and any number of horrors that you cannot and frankly should not imagine. The kid falls in with a psychotic imperialist army, a serial killer, and a group of Apache hunters (scalpers), and the reader is forced to witness it all, punctuated only with "they rode on". Simple transitions stitching together horrible acts, with occasional flourishing of beautiful landscape prose. 

But civilization is coming to these parts and is personified by Judge Holden, known as the Judge. Physically gigantic, off-puttingly hairless, philosophical, and cruel. His duty in the novel seems to be to judge all that is worthy of the new world and purge the rest;

"Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth."

From his introduction, it's impossible not to be fascinated and genuinely terrified of this character. I'm not exaggerating when I say this is fiction that has the capacity to disturb in ways that are typically reserved for real-life events. This sounds hyperbolic. I'm telling you it's not.

If there is hope in McCarthy’s other novels, the Judge stomped it out of Blood Meridian. There is no hope on the horizon, only blood (heh). Holden’s neurotic documentation of every detail, the way he takes pity upon children or animals before brutalizing them, his overwhelming worldliness; the Judge is both out of place and perfect in the setting. 

My favorite part about him is as a member of the scalper gang or just around town or even talking to the kid is when he drops some deep, euro-philosophical psycho-babble that only a deeply annoying author type could produce and the slobbering frontiersmen (including the kid) that he is speaking to will respond something like “what the fuck is you talking about”. These little things amount to an experience that is not enjoyable, but is highly engaging and designed to challenge readers. Which is why it's good.

Reading is very much Back for me as a hobby and thing I enjoy doing. Blood Meridian had failed to shock me at a time when I was experiencing the burnout that I think persists in most young professionals first entering the workforce. If nothing else, it stands as a reminder that you should always revisit what challenges you in a particular moment. I’m sure I’ll give it a read a few more times.

Heavy from the Vintage

 

In the summer of 2007, my AP literature summer reading project was to read a great piece of literature, watch the/movie version, and write a comparative essay on the two. The novel I read was The Grapes of Wrath. The essay I wrote prompted the teacher of the course to have a private conversation with me about whether I was really "ready" for the class. 

At this time, I was very early in what would be a much longer exploration into real literature. Coming off young adult novels like Harry Potter, I was reading novels like The Grapes of Wrath as though they were movies. Picturing the characters portrayed by movie actors, getting enthralled by the action of the scenes. It's why I am always revisiting the classics; my first go around was not an engagement with the words on the page, only the pictures that they painted in my head. 

This is really easy to do with Steinbeck and especially with The Grapes of Wrath in particular. He is a master at painting pictures, and it is fully on display in this novel. Characters both minor and major are practically drawn on your brain in detail, as is the landscape, and he's able to do so not with copious amounts of description but rather with the small, almost insignificant components of his subject. Entire universes of characterization in mere snippets of dialogue. If I were a playwright, I would weep with envy.

The traditional components of the plot can read like a movie. The Joad family has been uprooted by ruthless capitalists who own the land and do some finance trickery to boot them. They pack up a beat-up truck and go to California on a dream in the form of a handbill promising jobs and possibilities. When they arrive, it's exploitation and Hoovervilles.

It was Moby Dick that taught me how to engage with literature as literature, not just actions but the poetry of the motions. Ironically, my first pass at Moby Dick was in that same AP Literature class. Like Moby Dick, the plot of The Grapes of Wrath zooms in and out; we're given the Joad family as a zoom in, but the story zooms out to tell the larger story, vignettes of life from other families experiencing the same thing, maybe told through the lens of a used car salesman or a waitress at a diner. It will zoom out further into philosophical flurried ruminations on the very concepts of what it means to own land.

These are some of the most beautiful passages in the book, and even perhaps that I've ever read. These do not translate well to the movie that plays in your head when you read, which explains why I probably don't remember them. But here's an example for you:

"There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And the children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates - died of malnutrition 0 because the food must rot, must be forced to rot."

At its heart, the novel is about the breakdown of social norms caused by the exploitation of our fellow humans. A truer treatise that there is nothing natural about capitalism. Today I watch our nation's own attempts to dehumanize immigrants or Palestinians because ownership requires a permanent, exploitable underclass. I think that effort fails because of novels like The Grapes of Wrath; reading books like this is becoming increasingly important. 

To Those Few Who Know

 

A podcaster I really enjoy once referred to having cool older siblings as "playing the game on easy mode", referring to high school. I have no idea how true this is; I'm older than my brothers by 10 years. However I do count myself really lucky to have had friends with cool older siblings. One of whom might be reading this now and scratching his head at the "cool" label, but can trust that to me at 16/17 there was no one I admired more.

He remains the sole inspiration for writing about every book I ever read, he was doing the same back when we were in high school. His was the first time I was ever so taken with a book review I had to rush out and buy the book. The subject of the review was the Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers.

I remember feeling a ringing truth in that review, and the first time I read the book, it rang even louder and for a long time. I have always counted it as a very formative experience to have read the novel, but with time (it's been almost two decades), it became hard to pinpoint exactly how, other than just kicking off a deep love of suffering fiction set in the south.

Having just finished for the second time, it is now abundantly clear. The book features four people with radical love in their hearts and no one to give it to. Jake, the alcoholic socialist who loves his fellow underclass, Mick whose coming of age story is all love of music and her little brother, Dr. Copeland the black doctor with fierce love of his people, and Biff, who kinda sucks honestly but loves children and sees in them endless hope.

While the cast is very lovable themselves, they struggle to articulate the love they hold to the people around them. This seems largely due to the fact that the South is an incredibly hostile place. Everyone is constantly beset by racism, violence, alcoholism, exploitation, and perhaps the most crushing of all; not being taken seriously by the stupidest people imaginable.

And McCullers can walk (drag) you through the frustration with the characters. You are very present as Doctor Copeland learns the atrocities committed against his son by racist cops, you feel Mick's starvation and fear for her siblings, Jake's sobbing bar fights, Biff's...weirdness. The great irony is that while no one quite understands these people, McCullers is making damn sure the reader understands.

The glue holding all of these people together is a deaf/mute resident of the town, Mr. Singer. The reader alone knows Mr. Singer's painful story, but to everyone else, he's their lone confidant. Mainly because he is kind and unassuming, he does not speak and only listens. His experience of the other characters mirrors the reader's as heaps of their soul is piled into him week over week.

On the second reading, I'm reminded of the power in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Whether it's scorched earth socialism and racial justice from Jake and Dr. Copeland (who comically hate each other despite both being avowed Marxists because of a disagreement on tactics, classic American leftists!) or the quieter moments of deep personal growth amidst despair that Biff and Mick undergo, it all packs heat. 

It's one of the novels you finish and look around and wonder how nobody walking around in your life seems to have just been affected in the way you were. And like the characters in the novel, today it seems impossible to translate that feeling to anyone. Maybe that was always the point.

The Real House Guys of St. Petersburg

 

Books like Crime and Punishment make me genuinely despair that Americans don't read anymore. When I was in high school, I was a disaffected youth; didn't apply myself, didn't feel I had a real identity, and was just perpetually angry about something I could never put my finger on. As a side note, I think young men experience this all over American suburbs and today it's called "the male loneliness epidemic". 

Then a friend of mine handed me a book by Fyodor Dostoevsky and said "Here, read. Open your mind". My interaction with reading at that moment in time was books read in school and Harry Potter. The book I was handed was Notes from Underground. I can't profess to have understood the book well, but I could resonate with the anger, the helplessness, the desire to both hide and shine. I was obsessed with Dostoevsky from that point forward. 

I next read Crime and Punishment, and while I enjoyed it, I unfortunately took all the wrong lessons. Raskolnikov seemed cool. I liked the idea of being a vain, smart guy. 

(Hope everyone I knew at that time can forgive me for being insufferable, it was high school. I've read a lot since then, and that's far from who I am today.)

At any rate, Crime and Punishment is just a parade of men who are massive pieces of shit., socially isolated men. There are womanizers, charlatans, life-ruining alcoholic fathers, murderers, and pedophiles. All of them leaving behind a trail of disabused women. And leading the parade is Raskolnikov, a murderer who fancies himself Napoleon because he killed an old pawnbroker and her sister.

In the context of the modern Male Loneliness epidemic, it's hard to really square whether it's comforting that being consumed by vice and anger in Men is an age-old problem or even more concerning. Dostoevsky is pretty hostile to the idea that one's environment causes moral decay (the character who holds this view, Lebeziantnikov, is hilariously lampooned, although despite his foolishness might actually be one of the few decent guys in the novel), he seems to believe there is something dark in the heart of every man that needs taming.

And while I think he's wrong, his characters are painted with such vivid dimensions in order to demonstrate his point, I almost don't care. From the way they look, their mannerisms, their convictions, or lack of, it's so well constructed and entertaining. The clashes the characters have are brutally real; they oscillate between awkward and painful to heartwarming and life-affirming. 

Also, the book is funny as hell. It's witty and clever and Dostoevsky can stick it to his constructed assholes in satisfying ways that avoids cartoonishness.

I would explain plot elements to my wife, and she coined the phrase "the real house guys of St. Petersburg". It really is that fun. All of the above is why I think it is tragic that classics like this, with books in general, have fallen out of style. There really is a rich experience and modern parallels to be seen here. If a pissed off high school me hadn't resonated with the deep anger in this book and make me seek out social interaction I'd be a totally different man. I wish more young people could experience the same.

This is a Community Spiel

I have a very literarily inclined friend who, when I told I was rereading Infinite Jest this year, told me to keep him abreast of my thoughts. He was curious how it held up in one's thirties, so much of the novel seems connected to his twenties. I shared a lot of these concerns going into the book for the second time. 

That said, the first time I read the book, about 10 years ago, I remember it made an impact. I was in my mid-twenties then; I had just started a career and was navigating post-college adulthood.  But I also remember Infinite Jest being almost too ridiculous, and I didn't resonate as much with the themes of addiction or social isolation.  My introduction to DFW was actually the Pale King, which I would actually argue is better suited for that stage of your life, even as incomplete as it is (so is your life in your mid-twenties).

Having re-read the book now at 35 I can say that The Infinite Jest is not only the perfect book to read in your thirties, it's actually the perfect book to read in the ridiculousness of now.

At 35 I feel the power of technology has largely been focused on ravaging my attention span and social battery life. My family and I are beset by a constant barrage of hedonism: food designed to be overly addictive, portable screens designed to be maximumally engaged with, a market economy built around, as Bo Burnham once astutely put it; "colonizing your attention span and every second of your life". 

Inifinite Jest is set in a not-so-distant future and focuses on a couple of congruent plot lines that revolve around the aftermath of an estranged Tennis Academy owning filmmaker creating an Entertainment Cartridge so entertaining that it renders the viewer (literally) terminally addicted to viewing it. The novel explores both the mico/personal/familial level and the macro/geopolitical level of such a creation. This might seem like a hamfisted comment on technology, and it is, but the more dystopian your society gets, the more obvious dystopian literature becomes.

David Foster Wallace could not, in 1996 when he wrote Infinite Jest, predict the age of big data or smartphones or Instagram Reels. It's impossible to stress how little it matters that he got the exact technologies correct and how unbelievably impressive it is that he was able to capture what it's capable of. 

Instead of predicting streaming, the world of Infinite Jest has entertainment cartridges that people plug into their massive telephone screens to port in a broadcast. It's remarkably similar to streaming on a smartphone for something written in 1996. 

The Entertainment is the name of the cartridge that forcibly addicts its viewers. I think the reason DFW gets away with the thematic obviousness is that the book loves to fuck with you in its form. Like the fact that it's 1100 pages long and has 200 pages of footnotes that make you flip away from the main text on a side quest. DFW knows the reader is a distracted animal. Sometimes, he likes to punish you with a highly technical, chemistry term heavy history of DMT, other times, he likes to bash you in the head with an obvious truth like you're seven years old. All of these things make finishing the book an accomplishment. 

There are other modern things it's worth noting only for the fun of it. Telephone calls in the world of Infinite Jest have been replaced by video calls, leading to people with sickening self-consciousness all the time. Sounds familiar? There is a footnote on grocery delivery services where you order groceries off your phone. There is a passage about a counter-culture to standing and bearing live witness to things. Again, the overall capture from the technology here is the effects on people, but it is funny when he gets the actual existence of the technology right as well. 

In the midst of reading, I would come across things like this video of a teacher talking about how all the kids in her class "behave like addicts" because they're given a neverending feed of dopamine from their cellphones and then go through withdrawals in school: https://www.instagram.com/teachermisery/reel/DHwe2f8SeLL/  

These things really hit home after DFW hits you with the real societal ramifications to overstimulation, to isolating large swaths of the (if not the entire) population in their "customized screens...a floating no-space world of personal spectation". 10 years ago I remember feeling the macro-societal plot in the Infinite Jest too cartoonish, but a decade later, our former-reality star president is threatening to buy Greenland and to annex Canada - which is a literal plot point in this book! There is a new organization run by a billionaire and named after a cryptocurrency scam that is gutting the public sector with reckless abandon right now. Suddenly, Infinite Jest's fictional government department of "Unspecificed Services" is no longer ridiculous. 

It could be that our infinite distractibility drives isolation; it's easier to be in front of your little viewing monitor perfectly calibrated to cater to the chemistry in your brain than to deal with people, even loved ones. This feeling should be immeasurably recognizable in anyone who comes home after a long day at work and reaches for their smartphone or video game controller rather than interacting with their family. 

It is then that the intense isolation brings the dark irony to life. The more isolated we become the less we care about the people around us and what happens to them. We are living in the societal implication of all of this, which is why Infinite Jest feels so important now. All of this is In The Book.

DFW does offer an answer too, but as is usually the case with great fiction authors (see my review on Ministry for the Future), it misses the mark.  Weaved throughout Inifinite Jest is "a community spiel"; whether it's the Tennis Academy boys and their tight friendships getting them through the grueling sports and academia regimen or the addicts in the book's halfway house finding community and getting clean through AA. The only way to seemingly beat back the hedonistic onslaught is to ground yourself in the people around you despite how difficult and arduous it is. 

Do not get me wrong; this is a beautiful message and one that everyone should take seriously and try to emulate. This is important. But there is a distinct lack of villains in Infinite Jest. Things like hyper-powerful drugs, addictive technologies and foods seem just immutable, like they just exist in the world from out of nowhere. Outside the book, the villains abound. Capitalism and the profit-seekers the system breeds are the ones who are unleashing these things. Social media companies employ some of the greatest scientific minds to figure out how to attract your eyes to the screen; scientists at huge food and drug conglomerates are figuring out how to make you maximally addicted to their product. Even now that weed is legal, its potency and desirability are being worked on. Vapes, porn, junk food, social media, energy drinks, the addictiveness of these things is visited upon us for a profit and it is truly ruining our lives, planet, culture, and probably the fabric of society.  

Not only does DFW explicitly leave these things out of a book that would seem to have plenty of room for them, but he also gives several explications as to why he is doing so explicitly. The most forward is when several characters attend an AA meeting and someone speaking tries to give an explanation as to why they are an addict, why they have the "disease";

"the talk's tone of self pity itself is less offensive than the subcurrent of explanation, an appeal to exterior Cause that can slide, in the addictive mind, so insidiously into Excuse that any causattribution is in Boston AA feared, shunned, punished by empathetic distress. The Why of the disease is a labyrinth it is strongly suggested all boycott the Boston AA in here that protects against a return to Out There is not about explaining what caused your disease. It's about a goofily simple practical recipe for how to remember you've got the disease day by day and how to treat the disease day by day, how to keep the seductive ghost of a bliss long absconded from baiting you and hooking you."

This is repeatedly implied, but the other favorite is the group that protagonist Hal stumbles upon thinking he is going to an AA meeting; the group is really one that entirely focuses on the reasons for one's afflictions. I would spoil the portrayal of the people in this meeting, but let's just say DFW is not kind to this idea and what it does to a person. 

There is almost a Petersonian, Rules-to-Life aspect to that belief. That it doesn't actually matter where any of our problems come from and only matters how you get through it. This doesn't necessarily diminish the importance of DFW's work; I would give the advice inherent in this book to anyone freely, and in fact, try to live it in my own life. However, I think it is important to both understand where these afflictions derive and take an activist approach to dismantling the forces that are raining them down. Even if it is only in artistic expression. 

So in the end, yes, if you're in your thirties and alive right now, Inifinite Jest holds up. In fact you would be doing yourself a favor by forcing yourself to read it. I feel like DFW wrote this book knowing every person who finished it is a victory over The Entertainment as it exists in the real world. That's two wins for me. 

 For pure DFW philosophical literary magic, turn to Page 203.