The spiral sentences, the looping syntax, the repetition, the invasion of clinical vocabulary-none of this is mere “formal stunt-pilotry.” Nor does it add up to nonsense, or “stream of consciousness” if sloppiness and incomprehensibility is meant by that term: however long they are, Wallace’s procedures are always grammatically immaculate. The point is to run a procedure-the procedure of another person’s thoughts!-through your own mind. This way you don’t merely “have” the verbal explanation. You feel it and know it:

Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate… from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still “are” human beings, now.

A lot of Brief Interviews is tough and painful: it’s doing the first half of that job. The rest of Brief Interviews is doing the other.

3. SIGNIFYING NOTHING

We’ve all got this “literary” fiction that simply monotones that we’re all becoming less and less human, that presents characters without souls or love, characters who really are exhaustively describable in terms of what brands of stuff they wear, and we all buy the books and go like “Golly, what a mordantly effective commentary on contemporary materialism!” But we already “know” U.S. culture is materialistic. This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn’t engage anybody. What’s engaging and artistically real is, taking it as axiomatic that the present is grotesquely materialistic, how is it that we as human beings still have the capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections, for stuff that doesn’t have a price? And can these capacities be made to thrive? And if so, how, and if not, why not?

One way out of this bind is to present, on the page, complex human beings. Sensitive souls, able to plumb their own emotional depths, capable of interesting thoughts despite the deadening times. How many of Roth’s and Bellow’s protagonists are academics, psychiatrists, intellectuals, or just motormouths? And when Henry James spoke of “fine awareness,” it was his contention that only characters in possession of this quality could elicit the same quality in their readers:

Their being finely aware-as Hamlet and Lear, say, are finely aware-makes absolutely the intensity of their adventure, gives the maximum of sense to what befalls them. We care, our curiosity and our sympathy care, comparatively little for what happens to the stupid, the coarse and the blind; care for it, and for the effects of it, at the most as helping to precipitate what happens to the more deeply wondering, to the really sentient.

But Wallace’s fiction cares what happens to the stupid, the coarse, and the blind. In fact, it is preoccupied by the stupid, the coarse, and the blind to a peculiar degree, as if the necessary counterpoint to the overintellectualized self is the ingenuous self. He seemed to spy in such characters-so unlike himself!-an escape from the “postmodern trap.” Take the simple fellow in “Signifying Nothing,” a young man whose very coarseness is the apparent key to his salvation. The story opens like this:

Here is a weird one for you. It was a couple of years ago, and I was 19, and getting ready to move out of my folks’ house, and get out on my own, and one day as I was getting ready, I suddenly get this memory of my father waggling his dick in my face one time when I was a little kid.

As pure event, this feels no more or less traumatic than the depressed person’s original complaint. [81] But in the young man’s case it is a wound he doesn’t even know how to worry: “I kept trying to think about why my father would do something like that, and what he could have been thinking of, like, what it could have meant.” He is without answers. In his confusion he becomes angry, but when he finally confronts his father with the memory, his form of interrogation is amusingly direct: “What the fuck was up with that?” In response his father gives him only a silent look of “total disbelief, and total disgust,” and the silence grows; an estrangement occurs; for a year the young man does not see his family. Then something strange. Without extensive analysis, without endless debate, without indulging in bouts of self-interrogation, he heals himself:

As time passed, I, little by little, got over the whole thing. I still knew that the memory of my father waggling his dick at me in the rec room was real, but, little by little, I started to realize, just because I remembered the incident, that did not mean, necessarily, my father did… Little by little, it seemed like the moral of a memory of any incident that weird is, anything is possible.

Generally, we refuse to be each other. Our own experiences feel necessarily more real than other people’s, skewed by our sense of our own absolute centrality. But this young man in his simplicity does the difficult thing: he makes a leap into otherness. This empathic imaginative leap-into his own father’s head-miraculously bypasses the depressed person’s equivalent recursive maze. This simple thought-that his father’s (non)experience of the memory might be as real to his father as the young man’s own positive memory of it is real-turns out to be revelatory. It’s another recursive sentence, but this time, instead of tunneling inward, it leads out-to the infinite unknowability of other people. Maybe the incident is, after all, the kind of narrative Macbeth described: “A tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing.”

You don’t hear the word parable much in connection with Wallace, but I don’t know why not-he wrote a lot of them. What else do you call a story like “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XI)?” A man has a dream that he is blind, and then, the next day:

I’m incredibly conscious of my eyesight and my eyes and how good it is to be able to see colors and people’s faces and to know exactly where I am, and of how fragile it all is, the human eye mechanism and the ability to see, how easily it could be lost, how I’m always seeing blind people around with canes and strange-looking faces and am always just thinking of them as interesting to spend a couple seconds looking at and never thinking they had anything to do with me or my eyes, and it’s really just a lucky coincidence that I can see instead of being one of those blind people I see on the subway.

Here “other-blindness” has been actualized. A simple route to a great revelation. And again, in “The Devil Is a Busy Man,” a country hick who can’t get anyone to take, for free, an “Old Harrow With Some Teeth A Little Rusted,” attracts avid consumers as soon as he lists it in the classifieds for five dollars:

I asked Daddy about what lesson to draw here and he said he figured it’s you don’t try and teach a pig to sing and told me to go on and rake the drive’s gravel back out of the ditch before it fucked up the drainage.

Another lesson might be: value in capitalism is measured not by real worth but by lack.

The coarse, the blind, the stupid. As effective as these parables are, there is something sentimental about them-albeit a sentiment as old as fiction itself. As city dwellers yearn for Virgil’s pastoral, so intellectuals will tend to romanticize the pure relations they imagine exist between simple people. Wallace was on guard against this as he was against everything (“Yes and do I admire the fortitude of this humblest of working men? The stoicism? The Old World grit?”), and yet still it slips through, here, as well as in the nonfiction, where we find instinctive sportsmen, service-industry workers, farmers, and all kinds of down-home folks (usually from his home state of Illinois) receiving that warmness Wallace could never quite muster for hyperreflexive intellectuals more or less like himself. [82]