Something To Do With Paying Attention Review

Published: 2024-12-17

Tagged: readings review

This novella, extracted from David Foster Wallace's last, unfinished work, takes the form a speech. The featureless speaker tells the story--to whom, it's never said--of his joining the Internal Revenue Service. But really, it's Wallace talking about finding meaning and escaping today's fashionable flavor of nihilism.

Right at the outset, the speaker describes a familiar situation:

I was like a piece of paper on the street in the wind, thinking, 'Now I think I'll blow this way, now I think I'll blow that way.' My essential response to everything was 'Whatever'

Like many others in the early 2000's, I caught a case of little-n nihilism--the kind that has nothing great or profound to it. (Just perfect for a teenager). It's nothing but all-encompassing resignation. Definitely not rebellion. Rebellion means taking something seriously enough to oppose it. But for little-n nihilist me, existence oscillated between a wry joke and bored frustration.

I feel no pride in that. It's a stupid, painful, and destructive way to be. But like some embarrassing disease of the digestive system, it refused to leave me be.

Thanks to luck more than anything, I'm doing alright now. Guess it was meeting the right people and noticing the right opportunities. But it never fully left me. When it flares up on my bad days, it colors everything--the world, its people, myself too--as silly and meaningless.

DFW evokes similar emotions by leaning on postmodern storytelling techniques: jumping forward and back in time; embarking on convoluted digressions; and having the narrator be deeply personal but also wholly unreliabile.

The narrator talks about his multiple attempts at college, bumping around from one major and institution to another. Prominently featured is the group of little-n nihilists he hangs out with. They play cute games, like observing a rotating sign so that when it stops for the day, they decide whether to study or go drinking depending on which way the sign is facing. A wide spectrum of drugs is also present--from weed to weight loss aids stolen from busy parents.

His parents exist as if to add emphasis to the meaningless void the speaker floats in. The father, "...was both high-strung and tightly controlled, a type-A personality but with a dominant super-ego (...) He almost never permitted himself any kind of open or prominent facial expression. But he was not a calm person. He did not speak or act in a nervous way, but there was a vibe of intense tension about him--I can remember him seeming to give off a slight hum when at rest."

In turn the mother, "...co-owned a small feminist bookstore, which I knew my father resented having helped finance through the divorce settlement. And I can remember once sitting on their [mother & her girlfriend's] Wrigleyville apartment's beanbag chairs, passing around one of their large, amateurishly rolled doobersteins--which was the hip, wastoid term of a joint at the time (...) and listening to my mother and Joyce recount very vivid, detailed memories from their early childhoods, and both of them laughing and crying and stroking one another's hair in emotional support..."

They together act as background--except for once--in the sequence of events that delivers the speaker from nihilism and into the safe embrace of the IRS. But that sequence includes events ranging from the death of a family member to noticing a scrap of newspaper lying on the floor with an IRS recruitment ad. There is no singular turning point. No cinematic climax. No epic music.

Through techniques such as this, DFW molds the story into the shape of real life. In real life, people are constantly muddling through, going from one confusing situation to another. All of it adds up to any sense at all only thanks to our gift of hindsight. However, unlike others who employ similar devices to stir up obscuring dust, Wallace uses them to gently direct readers towards clarity and maybe even a sense of meaning.

The way I understand it, he says that we people get so easily swept up by narratives others produce at us. Think: ideology, religion, family drama, the media. Stories as broad as continents and as long as centuries, whose immense attentional gravity pulls ceaselessly at our attention. And thanks to technology, they can reach us from our own pockets at the gentles touch of boredom.

But Wallace points to our own story and the present moment in it. That's all there really is, because that's all that a person can subjectively experience. It's also the only moment to choose what happens next--but to do that, one needs to pay attention. Otherwise, they'll keep blowing in the wind.