The Insufficient Impracticality of David Foster Wallace, Pt. 2

At a lavish dinner party to honor their guest, Telemachus, before her husband King Menelaus and the full complement of his Spartan aristocrats, Helen tells a sensational story. It is not a story of heroism. Rather, the most beautiful woman in the world describes how, long ago, she left Menelaus and their young child to run off with an irresistible houseguest named Paris. Yes, that Paris. The one whose alliance with Helen began the Trojan War.

An odd choice, you might have thought, for dinner party conversation in the Menelaus household.

Perhaps the most shocking feature of the scene, however—at least to us moderns—is that nobody at the party is shocked. Indeed, there is a stunning lack of moral outrage on display.

Let’s think for a minute how we would react were we us but, for some reason, at that party 3,000 years ago: Sitting at her husband’s arm, Helen casually brings up how a few years hence she’d run off with some punk prince that everyone thought was an asshole, setting off a huge and deadly 10-year-long war in which thousands had died, including, in all likelihood, close relations of the dinner guests, and which ended in the genocide of a city—”Blood ran in torrents, drenched was all the earth, / As Trojans and their alien helpers died. / Here were men lying quelled by bitter death / All up and down the city in their blood.”

Why would we be shocked? Because her husband is right there, and it’s weird for her to flaunt her infidelity? Shocking enough, I guess. But that’s not all though, right? Well it seems to be all for Dreyfus and Kelly, who only really highlight this aspect of our primness, juxtaposing the scene to a scene in Eyes Wide Shut in which Nicole Kidman’s character tells her husband about her lust for some young Naval officer “one night in the dining room,” noting how shocking this part of the movie was, before moving on. I don’t bring this up just to be nit-picky. this hesitancy on the part of the authors to acknowledge a broader perspective will be relevant later. But I’m going to leave it alone for now, and move on to the question they’re more interested in getting us to ask: Why weren’t Helen’s guests shocked?

The authors put it better than I could:

The Homeric Greeks were open to the world in a way that we, who are skilled at introspection … can barely comprehend. Instead of understanding themselves in terms of their inner experiences and beliefs, they saw themselves as being swept up into public and shareable moods. For Homer, moods are important because they illuminate a shared situation: they manifest what matters most in the moment and in doing so draw people to perform heroic and passionate deeds. The gods are crucial to setting these moods, and different gods illuminate different, and even incompatible, ways a situation can matter. The goddess to whom Helen was most attuned was Aphrodite; she illuminates a situation’s erotic possibilities and draws one to bring these out at their best… Other gods call forth other attunements.

And, “The best kind of life in Homer’s world is to be in sync with the gods.” Basically, things that inspire us to action—erotic attraction (Aphrodite), heroism in conflict (Ares), wisdom (Athena)—were seen as divine goods in themselves; and one’s responsiveness to even any one of this plurality of inspirations was what defined one’s excellence.

Richard Westall's "The Reconciliation of Helen and Paris after his Defeat by Menelaus"

Helen’s decision to bring up her (to us) sordid and ultimately cataclysmic dalliance as a fun anecdote to tell over dinner was actually excellent, pleasingly exemplifying for her Homeric guests what it is to be responsive to the gift of inspiration from Aphrodite. And a further point (unmentioned in the book), her dalliance set up perhaps the greatest intensity of divinely inspired action imaginable. In the end, the Trojan War was, through and through, a divine one. This is dangerous territory; much more than they acknowledge. It reminded me of Zizek’s observation of how Zen was used by the Japanese to understand their actions in the 30s and 40s (SLYT – relevant bit is the first three minutes). But we’ll get back to this later.

What are we to take from all this? The thing is that, like Gilbert’s (or Job’s) tornado, the gods have wills of their own that are beyond human comprehension. The very best one can be is receptive to the opportunities they present one with to be swept up. Anything more has to come from them.

Secondly, the gods are not an abstracted idea of a single, undifferentiated, perfect kind of inspiration in the imagined shadow of which all other inspirations pale. Homeric inspiration is immediate and specific. Indescribable not because its instances are too abstract for words, but because they’re too concrete for even the least abstract words to capture. They just are.

It is this way of thinking that underlies what is perhaps the most attractive of these Greeks’ traits: the dominance in them of the attitudes of gratitude and humility (I told you we’d get back to humility). Quite a contrast to our dominant attitudes of self-eviscerating compulsion and boredom.

So what happened?

A lot, it turns out:

• In the Fifth Century B.C., Aeschylus unifies the pantheon into the cultural force of reason, and then pits it against the older forgotten worldly demands of kinship and revenge. He reconciles these forces in the city of Athens itself, which he redefines as both the locus of kinship obligations AND the exemplar of rational order on earth, and wham, bang, boom, he’s invented the ideas of the Holy Nation and, through it, monotheism in one big trilogy of tragedies;
• Right at… C?… Jesus takes the Holy Nation, which he renames the Holy Spirit, bundles it up and moves it into the souls of all men and women, reorganizing sin and salvation around how we see or fail to be receptive to  the divinity embodied within ourselves and each other;
• Four-hundred or so years later, Augustine, trying to figure this agape wackness Jesus was on out, trips over Plato, dislodging God from the body (and as a corollary, any obligation to be receptive to it) which is a gross and unruly thing anyway that keeps getting erections at the darndest times (116);
• Most of a millennium after that, Dante trips over Aquinas who’d tripped over Aristotle, and, stumbling forward, knocks his girlfriend into Jesus’ old spot, knocking God (like the next domino) clear out of the world. The world is reorganized into a definite hierarchical order below but towards him;
• Three hundred more summers turn into falls and Descartes, slapping his pockets, realizes he can find no trace of God in the body, nor any evidence that His will is present as a force ordering the world. The only other place he can think of to look is the self-sufficient subjective mind (cogito) which exists in opposition to the un-divine raw materials composing everything else;
• A couple thousand more spins of the old planet and Kant realizes that if the mind is self-sufficient, then it can have no practical law other than that which it gives itself;
• From there it was just a quick but sobering hundred-and-change year hop to Nietzsche recognizing that if the mind invents the law, then the mind can just as easily uninvent it, leaving us with no obligation to be receptive to any authority at all except our own capriciousness; and finally
• Wallace, three years before tying his own noose, explaining to a Kenyon graduating class that the reason so many people who kill themselves with guns shoot themselves in the head is because they’re shooting the “terrible master.”

It’s all very fascinating and rich and occupies a big fat swath of the book, and you should buy the book and read it because my little summary list is pathetically unequal to their account.  But where I’d like to get to, and where things start to get interesting between me, Wallace, and the authors, is the authors’ answer to the question “So what now?”

Sadly, this section is still in need of some serious editing, and so I’m going to hold it until Friday Monday. Good is better than not good right?

But Friday Monday for sure, TUESDAY MORNING (I have a fully realized draft, it just needs to be shaken down a bit). Come back to find out what happens!

As of 10 a.m., Tuesday March 1st, part 3 is up!

William Adolphe Bouguereau's "Orestes Pursued by the Furies"