#85 Good Old Neon- David Foster Wallace
Another round of O.Henry (award winner) Friday, this one is
from my favorite author David Foster Wallace. DFW was included in the annual
Prize Stories collection three times, this one is from the 2002 O.Henry awards.
Good Old Neon is the mental stream of a troubled man going
through psycho-analysis. We learn early on that he will commit suicide so there
isn’t much hope in this story, but there is intrigue. It reads like a lecture
in an Ethics seminar discussing the philosophy of a paradox, the fraudulent
paradox in fact. Can you fake being a fraud? If you could, wouldn’t that
automatically make you a fraud?
“…I’d been fraudulent even in my pursuit of ways to achieve
genuine and uncalculating integrity.”
“I just couldn’t see myself talking pills to try to be less
of a fraud.”
“how frustrating it was to get just good enough to know what
getting really good at it would be like but not being able to get that good.”
It has always been DFW’s strength to tap into the manner in
which we think:
“I know that you know as well as I do how fast thoughts and
associations can fly through your head.”
We can have a thousands of thoughts go through our head at
any one moment and somehow, DFW will find a way to verbalize it, make it real,
and have it make sense.
“This is another paradox, that many of the most important
impressions and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your
head so fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different
from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they
have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another-word
English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a
whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second’s flash of
thoughts and connections, etc.”
“…and yet we all seem to go around trying to use [spoken
language] to try to convey to other people what we’re thinking…deep down
everyone knows it’s a charade…”
Speaking of paradoxes and DFW’s mathematical mind, did you
know that “the very smallest number that can’t be described in under twenty-two
syllables” can be described by using that previous sentence containing
twenty-one syllables. I thought that was a fun aside that was thrown in.
The ultimate paradox about this piece is that by reading
someone’s self-awareness about his own fraudulence, really about the
fraudulence in all of the human psyche, we’re reading about as truthful a thing
as I can imagine.
Of course knowing that DFW was destroyed by his own mental
problems, it is also heartbreaking to imagine that this was a glimpse of his
own torment. And hearing DFW use a narrator to talk about his own suicide is
unspeakably sad. Like what he says in here about the horror of knowing that his
analyst isn’t smart enough to help him, all he wanted was somebody smart enough
to disprove the logic of his own fraudulent paradox. With a mind like DFW,
there simply wasn’t anyone out there smart enough to out-logic a genius.
Notable Passage: “The reality is that dying isn’t bad, but
it takes forever. And that forever is no time at all."
Rating: Once again…Not Rate-able…it is unfair to compare DFW
to anyone else. To do so I’d have to develop a whole new system. He ruins the curve…so lets just say he gets a
perfect score and move on.
