Author: Daryl L. L. Houston

All That

Daryl L. L. Houston11 Comments

The New Yorker this week published online an excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King that has stirred quite a bit of discussion on the wallace-l mailing list, most of it centering, as the fragment does, on religious feeling. As an atheist myself, I have a tendency to think/wish/hope that smart people I admire are also atheists. It’s strange, I know, but why not hope for an extension of affinities into that area of thought and feeling? Although I don’t feel as if I really need (as in emotionally need) external validation of my position, it’s still neat to share a viewpoint with people you admire. It’s not really clear what Wallace’s beliefs with respect to religion were, though. We know from various sources that he went to church but wasn’t raised religious. He certainly seemed, in Infinite Jest, to acknowledge that there was value in recognizing a higher power. Yet he wasn’t the evangelical sort by any stretch of the imagination, and it’s pretty easy, from where I sit, to imagine that he valued the cultural and communal bits of religion while relying more on secular thought for his personal ethics. We’ll probably never know exactly where he stood in real life. In the new fragment, entitled “All That,” he seems to be pretty open to religion and to a sort of spiritualism.

Here I’ll begin to talk about the story, so if you haven’t read it yet and are anti-spoiler, you might want to mosey on along.

The narrator gives accounts of two events in his life that were instrumental in helping him form a religious sensibility. The first, in which his parents convinced him that a toy truck was endowed with a sort of magic, speaks (I think) to the idea of faith and how the not knowing via evidence that what you have faith in is true is a part of what makes it special. How sad it would be, he suggests, to actually trap the tooth fairy. And, by extension, how disappointing it would be, I suppose, to  finally find empirical evidence of God. A belief system constructed around the idea of faith becomes meaningless when faith is no longer a necessity. Magic tricks aren’t as fun to watch once you know how they’re done. Faith, which people like me see as a flaw of religion, may in fact be one of the points and joys of religion.

The second formative event centers on the narrator’s recollection of a movie’s plot and how it differs from his father’s recollection. The difference has less to do with faith than with actions. I guess it has something of love thy neighbor in it. More on that in a moment.

At the heart of both episodes is a sort of duality. The narrator says the following about differing perceptions:

Possibly, though, another cause for the sadness was that I realized, on some level, that my parents, when they watched me trying to devise schemes for observing the drum’s rotation, were wholly wrong about what they were seeing—that the world they saw and suffered over was wholly different from the childhood world in which I existed.

Later, we have the father and son’s vastly different recollections of the movie. And within the movie itself, we’re told of a prevailing sentiment and a sentiment (on the part of the narrator within the movie) at odds with it. In all cases, given the same objective inputs, opposite subjective conclusions are reached. There’s a failure to align perceptions.

Interestingly, our narrator hears voices as a child whose speakers do inhabit the same space he does. Their perceptions agree with his in a way that, he figures, biological adults’ perceptions can’t, and the voices are a source of real fits of ecstasy (as in rolling on the floor, capital-E Ecstasy) on the boy’s part. Of that ecstasy, we learn the following:

[M]y father (who clearly “enjoyed” me and my eccentricities) once laughingly told my mother that he thought I might suffer from a type of benign psychosis called “antiparanoia,” in which I seemed to believe that I was the object of an intricate universal conspiracy to make me so happy I could hardly stand it.

I suppose there are certain resonances of this fragment with parts of Infinite Jest. There’s the infantilization of rolling around on the floor, being stroked lovingly by his mother, being more or less cradled in the father’s lap, and of course this idea of being the center of a happiness conspiracy. But the first of Wallace’s works that sprang to mind when I read the fragment was “Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away from it All” (the state fair essay), in which Wallace writes the following:

One of the few things I still miss from my Midwest childhood was this weird, deluded but unshakable conviction that everything around me existed all and only For Me. Am I the only one who had this queer deep sense as a kid? — that everything exterior to me existed only insofar as it affected me somehow? — that all things were somehow, via some occult adult activity, specially arranged for my benefit? Does anybody else identify with this memory? The child leaves a room, and now everything in that room, once he’s no longer there to see it, melts away into some void of potential or else (my personal childhood theory) is trundled away by occult adults and stored until the child’s reentry into the room recalls it all back into animate service. Was this nuts? It was radically self-centered, of course, this conviction, and more than a little paranoid. Plus the responsibility it conferred: if the whole of the world dissolved and resolved each time I blinked, what if my eyes didn’t open?

Maybe what I really miss now is the fact that a child’s radical delusive self-centeredness doesn’t cause him conflict or pain. His is the sort of regally innocent solipsism of like Bishop Berkeley’s God: all things are nothing until his sight calls them forth from the void: his stimulation is the world’s very being. And this is maybe why a little kid so fears the dark: it’s not the possible presence of unseen fanged things in the dark, but rather the actual absence of everything his blindness has now erased. For me, at least, pace my folks’ indulgent smiles, this was my true reason for needing a nightlight: it kept the world turning.

Back to the story at hand, we begin with the narrator making discoveries about faith and about his own agency. But there’s a sort of inversion from what Wallace writes about in the essay excerpted above: the world (or the cement mixer’s drum) revolves (he believes) only when the boy isn’t looking at it vs. the world existing only when Wallace, as a child, was looking at it.

In the essay, Wallace writes specifically of solipsism, of being trapped more or less within yourself. I am in here. In the fragment, I think he’s writing about getting outside yourself. It’s not that the world stops when you close your eyes to it but that no matter how hard you try, you can’t really see or understand certain forces external to your direct experience. So a certain amount or sort of faith becomes useful. Wallace first gives us something of a thought experiment with the toy cement mixer, but in the movie scenario, he gives us a more complex situation to ponder. The conflict in that scenario is whether it’s nobler to protect your own or to protect others from your own. It’s a very complex question within context, for you have to consider the broader war itself, the particular roles of the participants in question within that context, the particular moods of and recent influences on all participants, and so on. But if we’re a little more reductive about it, I think we can boil the scenario down a bit and understand it as a consideration of the other vs. the self (another duality), with Wallace suggesting that reaching out to protect the other — getting outside your self — may sometimes be the nobler path.

The narrator views the movie’s lieutenant’s last noble act (as the narrator remembers it, that is) with a sort of ecstasy that calls to mind the ecstasy he felt as a younger child when listening to the voices in his head. But this ecstasy is the result of external forces rather than of internal agreeable voices and so shows a sort of development outward from in here.

There’s a lot I’m still trying to unpack about this fragment, and I’m not at all satisfied with what I’ve written above as an interpretive essay. There’s some big connection I feel like I’m missing. But it’s a start.

A couple of other things have come up on the list. For example, why did the narrator’s parents screw with him with the whole magic thing, especially if they’re devout atheists who you wouldn’t think would want to promote superstition? I think the simple answer is that sometimes parents just say silly things because it’s fun to joke around. Every morning that I drive my daughter and a neighbor to kindergarten, I ask if I should speed up and jump the railroad tracks (it’s a big hump and would cause a lot of damage to my vehicle if I jumped it). When they scream gleefully that I should, I slap my thigh and lament that I thought of it too late, that there’s simply not enough runway to get adequate speed. Remind me tomorrow, I tell them. Ever since my children were old enough to understand and respond to language, I’ve presented them with goofy scenarios and waited for them to correct me. Parents just do this sort of thing. In the fragment, it does seem that the parents play an active role in perpetuating the magical thinking, but the germination of the thing doesn’t seem all that out of the ordinary. And sometimes you just want your kids to work things out for themselves. We do the whole Santa thing, but when my kids start thinking critically about it and questioning the stories, we’ll encourage it obliquely so that they arrive at appropriate conclusions without being force fed the truth.I can’t help thinking that Wallace is saying something else about faith here. There’s plenty of magical thinking involved in faith. You can never really know for sure that God’s there behind the scenes making stuff happen, and maybe the harder you look, the more likely you are to determine that God’s not really there — that the drum isn’t spinning after all. If we think of it this way, then the parents almost become God surrogates, providing information about the truck (or about reality) but requiring that the child work out on his own whatever his beliefs about the truck are. The narrator doesn’t understand why his parents have made a puzzle of this for him any more than people understand why God isn’t more obvious about his existence and plan, and yet the fact that it’s a puzzle has turned out to be valuable to the narrator. Faith, as I suggested above, may be one of the joys of religion.

Another issue that came up on the list was the narrator’s statements that he wasn’t very articulate and the fact that he is actually pretty articulate. Whether it points to insecurity or to false modesty or to real modesty I’m not sure. It certainly seems like one of those framing or narrative tricks that Wallace has used before to remind us that what we’re reading is mediated.

Not discussed as yet on wallace-l is the Catholicism present in the story. It’s minor, but the boy mentions going to Mass with neighbors. Given my last paragraph, I’m having trouble not saying something about the mediation inherent in that religion, though I don’t think Wallace is really doing anything with that here. But the ecstasy, in association with the presence of Catholicism, calls to mind the various references to The Ecstasy of St. Teresa in Infinite Jest, and I wonder if more couldn’t be mined out of this material. In the gruesome ecstasy scene in IJ, there’s actually quite a bit more Catholic subtext than is apparent to a recent or non-Catholic (do a little research on the titles of the magazines named in the scene, if you’re curious), and that makes me all the more curious about the reference to Catholicism in this fragment.

Checking in

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

I haven’t written in a while and thought I’d check in. I read Dracula along with everybody else but didn’t blog a whole lot of it. Everybody I was reading (admittedly not so many people) seemed to undertake it kind of half-heartedly. Here’s hoping that the upcoming read of 2666 will have a bit more life. I secretly suspect that it takes a book as full of heart and truth and pain and sadness of the sort most of us can identify with on some level to provoke the sort of reaction the initial installment of Infinite Summer did. Guess we’ll see whether or not 2666 is such a book. I predict that it’ll provoke a lot more discussion than Dracula did but that it’ll lack the sort of emotional intensity that Infinite Jest had for many. I read 2666 shortly after it was released in English and so don’t anticipate taking it on again so soon, though I may lob the occasional comment out there (precisely what I said about the Infinite Jest read, by the way). After reading 2666, I got The Savage Detectives, which I had heard was even better, but I put it down 200 pages from the end, after suffering through lots of repetition and boredom. I haven’t reshelved it altogether just yet, but I think it’ll be a while before I pick it back up. In the lead-up to 2666, I sort of hope to hear some people chime in about Bolano’s other work.

Speaking of which, he’s got some fragments in this month’s Harper’s from an upcoming book, Antwerp, and had a few poems in Poetry in November 2008. If you want Bolano online, Matt Bucher, of wallace-l fame and publisher of Greg Carlisle’s Elegant Complexity, maintains a Bolano blog and the very low volume bolano-l mailing list.

On November 20, I went to New York to attend the Footnotes conference on new directions in David Foster Wallace’s work. It was very cool, and I wish I hadn’t been so tired from travel that I literally nodded my way through a bunch of very interesting papers. I met Infinite Summer bloggers Ray Gunn, Pete Mandik, and @naptimewriting, along with Matt Bucher and Nick Maniatis, who made guest appearances at the Infinite Summer mothership. Here’s hoping more of these conferences spring up (and ones a little closer to home for me).

I read Pynchon’s Vineland in the last few weeks. Loved it at first but got distracted and loved it less as it went on. It wasn’t terribly hard, and it felt like Pynchon, but I didn’t think they payoff was that great. Since it wasn’t terribly hard or long, I don’t regret the time I spent on it. Last night, I started reading Barth’s Chimera, and it’s so far delightful. I started Look Homeward Angel a couple of months ago but have put it aside for now. It was pretty engaging, but I’m just not in the mood. What’re you reading? Will you be doing 2666? If so, do you want to write here? Current zombies, please speak up, so that I can include you among any potential bloggers and not overpopulate the space.

Blithering Idiots

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

I’ve read a couple of posts expressing frustration with how the menfolk in Dracula handle Mina after they resolve to take care of Dracula themselves. It’s absurd, really, another of those “what were you thinking?” things not, in ways, terribly unlike what we saw from Harker in the book’s opening and from Seward and Van Helsing when handling Lucy’s case. Reading what amounts to banishment of Mina from the inner circle (and straight to bed) specifically calls to mind the repeated mishandling of Lucy’s case. Whether the men’s view of the women would be viewed as sexist in today’s world or not, you’d think they’d have learned not to stick the desirable girl alone in her room with a vampire aprowl.

Even granting the differences in society and decorum over the last hundred years, it all begins to feel a bit heavy handed, doesn’t it? The cultural reference that came to mind for me as the incompetence built and built was the Keystone Cops. It began to occur to me that when behavior persists in seeming absurd, perhaps it is done for a good reason. Perhaps, that is, Stoker aimed not merely to write a story in which the men grossly mishandled the situation at hand, but that he sought to do so in such a way that the mishandling became parodic or satirical. Well, when writers do this, they tend to be writing about things external to the story. Take Swift, for example, to whom I’ve suggested Stoker may owe a hat tip. The petty Lilliputian and Brobdingnagian politicians had specific referents external to Gulliver’s story, after all.

As I’ve said before, I don’t know enough about Irish history to say anything with much authority about it. But the notes to my edition suggest that Stoker treats of the landlord conflict in Ireland that persisted through the 19th century. And that conflict could be expressed simplistically as the removal of autonomy from one people by another that thinks that, by virtue of its place in society, it is somehow entitled to or well-equipped to control the other. Or: A bunch of rich white dudes telling other people at a societal disadvantage (e.g. women) where to go and what to do.

Of course, with respect to the landlord conflict, it’s easy to see the aristocratic blood-sucking Dracula as representative of the landlords and his poor victims as the poor people they mistreated. But what about these other gentlemen? The notes to my edition point I think too enthusiastically to certain things that suggest that both Harker and Van Helsing are Dracula’s doppelgangers (think, for example, of the mirror scene early in the book, in which Harker looks in the mirror expecting to see Dracula but sees only himself). I’m really not at all convinced that the twinhood is all that pronounced. Still, for the sake of providing a more complex allegory, it’s not unreasonable for Stoker to have given both his good guys and his bad guy characteristics or behaviors resonant with those of the Irish landlords.

Again, I don’t know the history well enough to make any bold assertions about Stoker’s attempt to write an allegory about the landlord conflict, but I did get the sense as I moved forward in the story that the men’s behavior was too idiotic to be taken entirely at face value. I’m inclined to give Stoker some credit for trying to say something in artful or nuanced ways rather than simply writing him off as a ham-handed chronicler of the society of his day. Is that fair or is it over-permissive, I wonder?

Baseball

Daryl L. L. Houston1 Comment

Like Joan, I’m pretty far ahead of the daily milestones, so I haven’t by any means dropped out of the reading, though I’ve clearly sort of dropped out of the writing for Infinite Summer this time around. Maybe I’ll come around soon. I brought my book into the office tonight with the intention of scanning my margin notes through chapter 11 and putting together a post, but I simply don’t feel like it. I guess part of it’s because I put a lot of myself into not only Infinite Summer but a side writing project associated with Wallace’s work over the summer, so I’m kind of needing a break from what sometimes feels like the obligation of a deadline. Part of it also is that I missed watching a whole lot of baseball this summer. Nobody held a gun to my head, of course, and it was a good tradeoff, since the first installment of IS was a great pleasure for me. And don’t get me wrong — I’m enjoying reading Dracula (it doesn’t really speak to me as Wallace’s work does, but it’s neat to read the work that has informed the culture). But Dracula‘s no Infinite Jest, and baseball season is winding down. Oh, my Cubbies are long since out of the running, and I was bummed to see the Cards fall to doper Manny and the Dodgers last night, but the Yankees are still around to root against (I guess I’m cheering for the Phillies to take it ultimately now), and then there’ll be the 5-month drought. So baseball is trumping writing about Dracula right now. But I’m here, and I’m reading, and I’m reading a couple of blogs about it, and if anything moves me to write, you bet I will.

Temptation

Daryl L. L. Houston4 Comments

I was struck at the conclusion of chapter V that Lucy Westerna is approached by three tempters, much as Harker was approached by (and aroused by) three temptresses. As with Harker’s temptresses, I found myself wondering if Lucy’s weren’t in collusion. That is, the three suitors know one another apparently rather well. I found myself wondering whether the victorious of the three hadn’t engaged his friends to tempt Lucy as a test of her devotion to him. Similarly, one of Harker’s seductrixes was differentiated in some way (was she a blonde and the other two brunettes?). I’m not in a position just yet to make anything of it, but this pair of trios is something I’ll be keeping my eyes open for in the weeks ahead.

A Very Peculiar Man

Daryl L. L. Houston8 Comments

Toward the end of chapter two, noting that he hasn’t yet seen the Count eat or drink, Harker remarks that Dracula is a very peculiar man. You said it, Bub. Parts of the first two chapters read to me the way the beginning of the movie Scream unfolds. Like the teenagers in the movie, Harker ignores many signs that things may be amiss. And, one assumes, things will wind up going as badly for Harker as for the teenagers. But there is a difference in what’s behind their attitudes, I think. The teenagers are carefree, daring, rash, and enjoying the gift of perceived immortality afforded to the youthful. Whether Harker is merely naive or is guilty of a rather less endearing tendency to write off the natives of the country he’s in as simple and superstitious I’m not entirely sure. Perhaps he’s both, for a tendency to underestimate people can itself be in a way naive.

In any case, it’s a little funny to read. Here’s my condensed treatment of Harker’s observations:

How strange: The landlord suddenly won’t speak to me about the Count even though it’s just achingly obvious that he can communicate adequately with me. Meh, it’s probably nothing.

What’s with the hysterical old lady with the crucifix?

Wonder why the coach driver and the landlady are whispering together about devils and hell and witches and looking at me frantically. Weirdos.

Wow, this coach driver sure is in a hurry. Sure wish he’d let me down to pee. And what’s with the blessings and gifts the other passengers are giving me?

My new driver sure has some crazy teeth.

Goddamn wolves!

Why are we driving around in circles? And what about these blue flames?

Those wolves sure seem to like my driver with the crazy teeth.

I think I blacked out for a while there. Anyway, we seem to be at the castle, but my driver just took off and left me here in the dark. Guess I’ll just wait here calmly.

This Dracula guy seems kind of dead.

Oh, and he sure has some crazy teeth and seems to love those wolves.

Dracula disappeared mysteriously for an hour, and when he came back, my dinner was ready. Oddly, there seem to be no servants at all.

I’m starting to feel a little lonely and creeped out.

Hey, Dracula seems not to have a reflection, and he grabbed my throat when he saw blood from where I cut myself shaving. Asshole. It’s ok, though — when he touched the crucifix that crazy old lady gave me, he backed off.

I still haven’t seen the Count eat or drink. He must be a very peculiar man!

Think I’ll have a look around. Wait a minute… this place feels a little like a prison. Wonder if something fishy’s going on here.

Did Stoker make Harker deliberately dim, I wonder, or is this a clumsy attempt to layer suspense in one detail at a time?

The Grapes of Wrath

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I am apparently incapable of giving a post a title that is not the title of a famous work by another author. Is there a support group for this?

I found myself thinking tonight about the Irish allegory that my edition of Dracula says lurks under the surface of the story, and all the poorness and starvation and suffering of 19th-century Irish potato farmers, when all of a sudden, The Grapes of Wrath popped into my head. It’s been a long time since I read Steinbeck’s novel, but the gist as I recall it is that farmers during the dust bowl era who couldn’t make a go of it on their own land moved westward and have a horrific time of it, rather like the Irish potato farmers Stoker must have had in mind as he wrote about his blood-sucking absentee landlord type figure.

And then that final dramatic scene of The Grapes of Wrath flashed into the foreground for me. I suppose I’ll be spoiling Steinbeck’s book here for any who haven’t read it, though I’ll try to be a little oblique about it. That final scene is a similar sort of cannibalism to what we see (or will see, I presume) in Dracula and less directly in “A Modest Proposal,” isn’t it? Yet, for all the uproar over its being indecent or pornography or whatever some prudes have made that final scene out to be, it’s the most wholesome sort of parasitism. It’s the free offering of the self rather than a sort of rape; it’s the other side of the coin from what Swift and (I gather) Stoker were writing in opposition to, in which the well-off feed on the poor by force. Steinbeck shows us the poor helping the poorer, and what a triumphant thing that is! How validating of the human spirit at its best when confronting the human condition at its worst.

This makes me think of a post I wrote while reading Infinite Jest in which I noted that Wallace was exposing so much sadness and brokenness for which, I feared, there was perhaps no remedy. I begin to harbor a suspicion that works like Swift’s and Stoker’s may be demonstrative of a problem without providing any sort of real hope or solution. I don’t suppose Steinbeck provided any sort of solution either, but in The Grapes of Wrath, he does offer a glimmer of hope. Perhaps for the next installment of Infinite Summer, we should read something marked by unbridled hope, if only to cleanse the palate for 2666, which has its share and then some of despair.

A Modest Proposal

Daryl L. L. Houston3 Comments

I don’t have an immodest proposal of my own that I’m wryly naming “A Modest Proposal” in a knowing nod to the 18th-century work of satire of the same name. It just turns out that Swift’s piece came to mind as I was reading the end notes to my edition of Dracula. I cringe to admit that my knowledge of Irish history is woefully incomplete. As I understand it in a nutshell, England feared invasions from France or Spain across Ireland during the 17th and 18th centuries and thus figured it was pretty important to control Ireland (here’s my source for pretty much all the history herein). At the same time, Henry VIII was excommunicated from the Catholic church and so sought to convert Ireland to Protestantism, resulting presumably in much of what still fuels unrest in Ireland today. Later, Cromwell more or less conquered Ireland, and those loyal to him were rewarded with land. A landlord system emerged, the Irish Catholics relegated to the status of tenants. Much of this happened during Swift’s lifetime (1667 – 1745), and in his famous 1729 essay, he satirically proposed that Ireland’s poor tenants escape poverty by selling their children to the rich for food.

Bram Stoker was born about 100 years after Swift’s death, at just about the time Ireland’s potato crop was destroyed by famine. As the potato was the primary means of life for poor tenants, the famine cast them into even greater poverty (some 750,000 died of starvation or disease), and a question of responsibility for the tenants arose. Were they on their own or did the English landlords bear some responsibility for their fate? Many landlords adopted the former position and profited from the famine by driving their tenants off the land. Over the ensuing decades, factions and organizations arose that ultimately led to the reinstatement of some protection from unfair rents along with rights to repurchase for tenants.

My copy of Dracula has the following note early in chapter one:

Transylvania means “land beyond the forest.” It may be taken as a play on the phrase “beyond the pale,” which originally referred to all areas of Stoker’s homeland, Ireland, not under direct British administrative control, the so-called English Pale. Transylvania was a region of the Balkans that was a part of Hungary at the time Dracula was written. This fact is important for what we might call the Irish allegory of Dracula, Stoker’s use of Transylvania as a shadowy analogue of his own homeland. Hungary had achieved a form of independence from the Austrian Empire that Stoker and many other moderate Irish nationalists advocated for Ireland. The “devolution” of Hungary became an oft-proposed model for Irish “Home Rule.”

A number of other notes attached to the first chapter underscore the idea that Dracula is shadowed by Irish history, and I surely wouldn’t have guessed as much if not for the notes. I wonder if it’s a coincidence that Stoker wrote (I assume for now based on pop cultural references, which may be dangerous) of a sort of cannibalism with respect to the state of affairs in Ireland, as Swift had done 150 years before.

Angels and Demons

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

Not too long before Infinite Summer started up, I ordered books by two authors I figured I was overdue to read. The first was Cormac McCarthy, whose Suttree is set in Knoxville, where I happen to live. I read that one during the last couple of weeks of Infinite Jest (and enjoyed it; will be reading more McCarthy for sure). I hadn’t really known about McCarthy until fairly recently, which fact I suppose I should be a little embarrassed about.

The other author I had known about for a long time. Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel is set in a fictional town based on Asheville, NC, just a hop over the mountains from where I live. Further, Wolfe studied at UNC Chapel Hill, where I happen also to have studied. He’s kind of a big deal around those parts, yet I never managed to read more than one chapter from his signature novel (and that one from deep in the book, excerpted for a Southern literature class), or anything else he wrote. I always meant to but just never was in the frame of mind for what I figured would be a coming-of-age type novel set in a South I had grown up in and found uninteresting and perhaps unworthy of reading about.

As I get older, a sense of place, and more specifically of my own place — the place where my people are from — is more and more important to me, and I suddenly find myself yearning to read about the places I once took to be prosaic and probably a little backward. And so, having gotten a taste of Knoxville in McCarthy’s novel, I’ve now moved eastward and back in time (on both the literary calendar and the calendar of my own geographical migration) to Asheville, where I’ll read about the angel Wolfe borrowed from Milton (a particular interest of mine while studying yet farther east in Chapel Hill) at the same time I’m reading about the demons we’re all being treated to this Halloween month courtesy of Bram Stoker.

What else are you reading alongside Dracula?

Disorientation

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

Do you remember that opening piece in The Scarlet Letter during junior year of high school about the custom house and how you weren’t (or I wasn’t, at least) sure whether it was part of the book or whether it was an introduction that could be skipped? And then how what little bit of it you may have read was stilted and old and dessicated and more or less did not have a place in your sixteen-year-old head? Although I’ve long since learned to understand and even enjoy that sort of prose, it’s been a while since I’ve read a novel written more than 50 years ago, and reading the brief introductory note about the supposed provenance of the documents that make up Dracula reminded me of that earlier disorientation. While the prose of the opening chapter is hardly opaque, it does (understandably) read like something old, and this observation made one thing very clear: Reading Dracula is going to be a very different experience from reading Infinite Jest.

That difference is going to be driven by two sorts of cultural disorientation, the first grounded in real or immediate familiarity with things and the second grounded in simulated familiarity with things. For example, although the world Wallace wrote about was set in the future at the time of its writing, it depicted a landscape we could mostly identify with. People spoke more or less as we do and engaged with technology and in culture behaviors akin to those we engage with and in. While we may not have known intimately what life at a tennis academy was like, we’ve been to basketball or summer camp or watched others at such camps in plausibly realistic depictions on TV. While we may not have been to any AA meetings, they are enough a part of our recent culture that we have no trouble absorbing Wallace’s presentation of them almost as if we are ourselves sitting in a folding chair shrouded in cigarette smoke and trying really hard to Identify with whoever’s speaking.

But the opening of Dracula is very much unfamiliar territory. The speaker is in a place strange to him and stranger to us, having arrived there by train (and while there are trains today, how many of us take transcontinental rides on them, really? And how different must his late-19th-century train be from the ones we’ve ridden?). There’s strange food, strange people, strange geography, a horse-drawn coach mounted not as a matter of novelty but because it’s a real mode of practical transportation. I suppose we’ve seen enough of these sorts of things on the screen to feel as if they’re familiar, but that familiarity is manufactured and quite possibly mostly wrong.

In the first post about Dracula at the Infinite Summer blog, scholar Elizabeth Miller warns against allowing preconceptions about the novel informed by pop culture to color our reading. This of course is another challenge of reading the book. When I first encountered words spoken (actually written) by Dracula, I couldn’t help but hear them spoken more or less as Sesame Street’s Count speaks. And though I never saw the fairly recent (ie, some time in the last 10 or 15 years) screen adaptation of Stoker’s book, I do have a mental image from the previews of a tall pale guy with a weird butt hairdo, and that image flashes across my mind’s movie screen while I’m reading, whether or not I will it not to. Working around this manufactured familiarity with the book’s namesake to get at what’s actually on the page is going to be one of the big challenges for me for this read, I think.

Wallace wrote, in e pluribus unam, about how inescapably young fiction writers were influenced by television and particulary the irony of its self-reference. This installment of Infinite Summer may prove an exercise in trying to escape the influence of electronic media from the reader’s perspective.