In the preceding argument, I chose as my introduction a song from Dirty Projectors. While the choice might appear somewhat arbitrary, particularly when put in alignment with all the other philosophers cited, it was not in the least random. (Especially when the task at hand is to determine re-cognizable qualities of insight and profundity, to institute legitimate sources of them.) The choice was to linger on a song that would have otherwise camouflaged among the many ballads that pile up in charts and music libraries, that flow through playlists–one of those songs which, for many of us, comprise an anonymous source of energy in our days. I have discussed music with others, yes. But I have never met another fan of Dirty Projectors, nor have I discussed their music before. And so the chords and melodies become an unexamined companion, as I often listen to music while working.
And so Dirty Projectors becomes exemplary of that flow of words and affect that characterizes much of modern life. Instagram informs @Eb_Scrooge that @TinyTim has posted for the first time in a while. Facebook sends a notification to Marx that there have been new posts in the Young Hegelians group. On his walk home, ear-buddèd Romeo hears not the night-lark’s crooning, but the plaintive cry of a popstar’s heartbreak.
For many students and remote/office workers, or for anyone who works in retail, there exists a strong dissociation between one’s activities and the music one listens to when completing them. In a Macy’s within some Middle-American mall, Britney sings “…Baby One More Time;” a perfume saleswoman earns a commission whose joy is embittered as she remembers sleepless nights when her father got drunk and her mother cried; the man repairing the escalator pretends not to hear the effeminate song, catches and stops himself humming the tune, as he contemplates an affair which could accommodate a BDSM fetish in ways that his contented-but-plain marriage does not.
For my students, who swirl in this pool of Spears & Co. signifiers as so many pre-individuated souls in Limbo’s embryonic sea, the themes on which to write remain largely open. Anything could be chosen, as any topic is equally viable. There is at play the same naivety behind a sophomore’s writing as a Hallmark beatitude. With neither memory nor experience, one can be content to contradict oneself, can be confident in one’s guesses. However, at a certain point one hears the same chords, the same phrases repeated on the radio.
The realm of thought, too, becomes monotonous: one hears the same arguments which can be neatly filed and boxed in their own categories–Platonic, Augustinian, Viconian, Hegelian, Marxist, Keynesian, neoliberal, etc. While grading, I need read only the first paragraph to know the evidence on which a writer will rely, the counterpoints ignored. When one succeeds, one’s arguments are often correct, one’s metaphors poignant, for reasons that one cannot yet fathom. Many of my students still struggle, as I once did, to hear a missed comma. Indeed, to notice another’s error in punctuation requires a faculty of “close reading,” however one comes to possess that faculty. Close/deep/slow readings have visible absences, because they make absences visible, are able to trace the empty space between words and sentences. In this way, my perceptions are beyond that of my students; my senses are intensified, not dulled, by age.
So the urge to read closely, then, is an urge to escape from sophomoric patterns, to achieve universality or at least appreciate unicity where it would otherwise be missed. And it is precisely this method of close reading which makes Arendt’s pearl metaphor relevant, and which justifies Gadamer’s claim that hermeneutists “understand a writer better than he [sic] understood himself.” (For certain kinds of readers, the pronoun “he” alone is able to signify a writer’s perspective far more than the average page would.) When one reads closely, the desire is to enliven oneself–such that beauty could be found even in the banal, such that even the most repetitive pop-star chorus could echo, in an instant, eons of human desire. But, the notion that some images are pearls, that some texts are more e-vocative than others, would seem to suggest that there are only certain environments which lend themselves to close reading. In other words, in the space of ideality, there are metaphors, events, concepts which form highly trafficked nodes, others which are dead ends.
In many cases, readers are bored, in want of beauty, of adventure–they are living their lives in dead-end nodes. (They are trapped at the bottom-of-the-barrel, the cul-de-sac; they got the ass-of-the-bag, drew the short straw.) Yet the question must be posed whether readers’ methods are attuned to their goals, whether adventure would be better sought beyond the confines of a lettered page. As a reader/aesthete/literato, one assumes responsibility for one’s boredom: “If only I were a better reader of the world, and therefore a better writer, then I would be able to escape my ennui.” Each eye, each moment, carries the universe entire. We only experience the numbness, the pain, because we fail to reach towards the beautiful.
In our hygienic age of “mental health,” there is an abundance of snake-oil salesmen, those for whom a smile comes with little reason, who are happy to sell their “easy fixes.” Meditate. Breathe in. Slow. Breath out. Love yourself. I give to all this humdrum my utmost humbuggery: a deep, throaty and phlegmatic blegh.
Because “close reading” is often presented as a remedy to our inadequacy, a cure too-good-to-be-true, I find myself questioning the legitimacy of the institutionalized reader. Is the close reader to knowledge what the multi-level-marketer of essential oils is to spirituality?
What does it mean to read closely?
To call one form of reading “slow,” and another “fast,” assumes a specific kind of temporality not identifiable as clock-time. But both “slow” and “fast” forms of reading occur in the same universe; so to speak, one cognitive foot must always come after another. But I can easily imagine that there are speeds to conversation–the frequency at which calls and responses are volleyed–and so, too, there must be speeds in narration. The difference in temporality must itself correspond with the divergence between a quotidian and a profound observation. (To use technical terms, passive thinking is often paratactic, while concentration leads to syntax.) The literary image or statement, because it is pro- or e-vocative (lit. calls forth, calls out), is able to make thoughts come quickly. To quicken the soul, to excite or arouse it–this is the task of the close reader, this is the being of joy.
As a literary example for these complex temporalities, Joyce’s Ulysses takes place in a single day, but takes well beyond that to read. (And even longer if one is to read it well!)! So when a Redditor asks whether people would want time to freeze, would want the world around them to pause so long as they are reading, this Redditor is–consciously or not–asking whether people would like to live forever, whether people prefer their lives written by hands human or daimonic.
What is reading? An impossible question. At least for now. So let’s settle for answering what it means to read slowly. I assume that we have at stake a difference between the meditative experience of good theory and the narrative experience of good fiction. My experience with fiction is that it has fewer answers than does the philosophy I have elected to read, and that the speed of a narrative will ultimately be determined by how many answers it has. When a question is unable to be answered, we proceed with a new one. The couch is green. He walked funny. The dog is sad.
The literary quality behind an act of reading/writing is found in the persistence to its questioning. But why the couch? Why is it green? How was it made? Language becomes more “literary” the fewer its digressions. The challenge is to make a story engaging with as little plot as possible. (Cf. Vonnegut and Beckett)
The matter is somewhat explicated if we take the following metaphor, the city of Fedora, from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: “In the center of Fedora, that gray stone metropolis, stands a metal building with a crystal globe in every room. Looking into each globe, you see a blue city, the model of a different Fedora. These are the forms the city could have taken if, for one reason or another, it had not become what we see today. In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it an ideal city, but while he constructed his miniature model, Fedora was already no longer the same as before, and what had been until yesterday a possible future became only a toy in a glass globe.” When I first read Invisible Cities, I was struck by this image of a crystal city, shattered into fractals, branching off into endless tessellations; I thought about the extent to which each story, before it can reach its culmination, is forced to begin anew. And so we must assume that the event of reading/thinking/creating is to stick with something–to ward off the dispersal, the forgetfulness of time, the accumulation of lost dreams. We must assume also that this reading is taxing, such that there are many more genius thoughts than there are those with the confidence, resources or time to write them down.
Let’s stick with this question. How do I write a philosophical or “slow” narrative, what happens when I use writing as a means for introspection? Example: I pose to myself as a prompt for writing: “what is it to forgive, and should we do it?” I then find/imagine a series of illustrative examples. I think what it means to forgive by cataloguing every possible scenario of forgiveness. In other words, I can either [1] write an infinitely long, dense story about a single act of forgiveness–or, fitting Proust’s multiplication of eyes, [2] I can write a near-infinite number of stories about innumerable instances of forgiveness.
Statistics is therefore its own kind of narration, whose narrative style approaches that of the latter option: an anthology of stories too many to be read. Humanities scholars, as a result of insecurity/envy/defense, like to assert the necessity of the prior kind of reading, and to assert also that this kind of reading is particular to their discipline. And it very well may be, but it remains to be seen how many scholars in the humanities are able to achieve the desired level of diagnostic insight. The quality of reading/writing will be assured by the capacity either to move thought at great speed, or to barely move at all. When fiction or statistics or philosophy falls somewhere between these narrative extremes, it dies. One either needs enough speed to mete one’s impatience, or enough patience to mete the slowness of one’s life.
We may therefore assume that good philosophy is unwilling to change its questions, despite an innate predilection among people to do so. Hence the slowness. Socrates is a gadfly, unable to live as others do; but, more importantly, unable to accept their explanations as readily as one might hope. The philosopher says “not yet” when others attempt to table the conversation. Sadly, this discussion of good philosophy as cognitive immobility then leads us to psychoanalytic concerns, including the possible melancholy of thought. We might ask ourselves what is wrong with the close reader, who is in need of pearls, who feels the urge to “understand a writer better than he understood himself.” The one who undergoes existential despair may seek desperately to answer an impossible question, even as others are able to call the question impractical; in other words, to note its absolute inutility. But what is “utility”?
When I take a well-meaning friend’s advice to heart, when I attempt to take the external position, to cross-examine my despair, to question my urge for “close reading,” it offers lucidity as its defense. (“Life is a misery, and they’re just too dumb to see it.” – Schopenhauer et. al.)
Similarly, in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Kristeva writes that the depressive affect is an a-symbolia, an unwillingness to transfer from one signifier to the next. (We might also wonder whether a-symbolia is another name for one’s relation-to-being when occupying a dead-end in the space of ideas, where there are no symbols, no evocations, no thoughts demanded.) Kristeva’s theory recalls us to Freud’s claim that there exists a repetition-compulsion, such that, when grief is unable to be sufficiently worked through, one will consistently exhibit the same cyclical behaviors, the same rituals linked to our inadequately processed traumas. As a result, the depressive demonstrates an inability to accept change, to move on–but, this may simply just be a result of absented energy, of lethargy.
So my stubbornness in close reading is an a-symbolia, because it makes me unable to bracket a question, nor to consider a question sufficiently answered. I am reminded of a claim often made by well-meaning parents and educators: “gratitude is contributive to happiness.” The gratitude-happiness equation is seemingly never posed ironically, is never aware of its circular logic: that it is easy to be happy when you have things-for-which-to-be-grateful, and easy to be grateful when you have things-that-make-you-happy. Gratitude thereby becomes imposed as an imperative on the person who has things, but does not have things-that-make-them-happy. The depressive fails at this impossible task, and the onlooker is liberated to deliver the ol’ told-you-so. Answers are offered, but the depressive’s asymbolia renders such answers inadequate (or the inadequacy of such answers leaves us with asymbolia).
When Heidegger notes the similarities between the German terms denken [to think] and danken [to thank], he does so under the presumption that we reach towards the beautiful in our thoughts, that our memories draw us fondly to our gifts. But thoughts are not just gracious memories; thinking may rather be performed precisely once thanking becomes impossible.
Let’s unpack what we mean by “thanking.” As Heidegger notes, both thinking and thanking are linked etymologically to the nouns for soul and spirit, as well as the verbs pertaining to gathering. And so our interiority becomes linked to our capacity to hold together past, present and future–as an identity links the “I am I”–in a dwelling, a home. Similarly, Heidegger compares the soul’s relationship to thought with the hand’s relationship to its tools. Both thinking and thanking are modes of holding; gratitude is often expressed with a hug, friendship with a handshake–those who profess an easy spirituality often say we need to learn to embrace life. Both thinking and thanking therefore refer to modes of holding. To retain (re + tenere) in memory is to hold back, just as to inhabit (in + habeo) is to hold within. If thanking is the retention, then thinking must be the reaching out. Thinking therefore invokes an insatiable loneliness of being. We are incomplete, coming from complere which means “to fill.” Our un-fullfillment lies in our urge to touch and be touched.
This complicity between thinking and thanking as gathering forces may be made further evident if we look to Aristotle’s hylomorphic definition of the senses. All sense relies on a movement that is parallel within both the sensed object and the organs of perception. Therefore, by attaching ourselves to objects in our external worlds we alter our interior composition. When we reach out, when we hold something, we want it to change us. Our incompletion necessitates inter-pretation, we need to denude ourselves of the garments that restrict us, need to get to the heart of the matter. There is therefore in this notion of close reading an assumption that beauty glimmers and hides within our environs; the desire to achieve gratitude is to draw these glimmers within us, to fold ourselves into the great flow of being. There is assumed, then, a beauty that is always accessible: there is always a correct play no matter the inequitable hands of fortune; there is always a correctly balanced, equanimous pose; liberation is always-already evident, one needs only the intelligence to look between the lines of one’s cage.
Notably, Heidegger professed his optimism on the denken-danken relationship later in his life. In these lectures on denken-danken, he claims that forgiveness is among the most thought-provoking phenomena of our contemporary world, a claim which is both understandable and loathsome given that it comes in the aftermath of WWII and his participation in the Nazi regime. The cynic mutters: “Easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.” Anxiety affects those concerned for the future; forgiveness comes to those who cannot muster up the effort to maintain a guilty conscience for their pasts. The old give up the resistance to optimism that is so often virulent in one’s adolescence. Is gratitude thereby earned in aged wisdom, or is the youthful fight just given up? The intellectual public seems to side more with the young Candide than the elder Pangloss.
In literary culture, the melancholic’s stubbornness, a pessimistic obstinacy, becomes paradigmatic for profundity of thought. (Just as Pangloss is representative of poor judgment.) Think back to Melville, to Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to.” Or, to Dante’s Purgatorio IV, where we encounter Belacqua’s supreme sloth, as he rests in a fetal position for all eternity: “O Brother, what’s the use of climbing?” Deeply moved by this passage, Beckett made several failed attempts at portraying Dante’s character in his own prose. We might therefore see in Beckett the very struggle of asymbolia, placed within a matrix of repetition: “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
These lines from Beckett’s Worstward, Ho have been used to furnish a kind of cynical optimism. As human beings we cannot but fail; thankfully, we even fail at failing. Fail better. However, it is dubious whether we can make of Beckett’s “Fail better” a mantra, a path for moving forward. One need only look at the cyclicality of Beckett’s prose. “Ever tried. Ever failed.” Beckett’s point is that all there has ever been is being, and yet nobody has ever succeeded in saying what precisely being is. The act of writing therefore seems ridiculously narcissistic and fruitless. Hence despair. (If only we could think once, and think more closely, more slowly, more deeply, could think the thing in full. Then we wouldn’t keep repeating ourselves.)
Belacqua’s asymbolia becomes easier to comprehend when we remember that sloth can be translated into more medieval terms either as acedia or as disperazione. In Giotto’s depiction of the virtues and vices, sloth is not one of the seven deadly sins; in its place, we find the vice of despair contrasted to the virtue of hope. Giotto paints despair as a figure who has hanged herself, her eyes down and to the left; hope, in contrast, is a winged angel looking up and to the right, whence she receives her crown. So slothful inactivity is associated with the prediction of a negative outcome for one’s actions; or, at least, the absence of a positive vision. (Suicides are trapped within the dark woods of Inferno.XIII, beyond which they cannot see.) Yet, raised as a good-but-questioning-Catholic I ask: what are the other virtues–temperance and prudence–without a pinch of despair? Similarly, is Waiting for Godot a statement of atheism, insofar as it asserts that divinity is not there; or, is it an act of piety, for it acknowledges the not-yet of divinity?
We are told that Belacqua’s punishment for his sloth is the absence of buon sospiri: good sighs. Let us assume that “good sighs” refer to the relief of retiring after a hard day’s work. Languor is not offered to the lethargic. The insomniac cannot, or does not, work. So, then, just as Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” serves as a critique of all that is careless and vulgar in post-industrial society, we must use Belacqua’s “good sighs” to interrogate our contemporary corporate culture. Should we continue to work ourselves for a later reward, or are we succumbing to yet another myth of expectancy rewarded by transformation? Should we be thinking or working, reading or farming? Tough as it may be, should we be reading more “slowly”?
This dilemma of productivity is present within Ottessa Moshfegh’s recent (2018) My Year of Rest and Relaxation. When her protagonist decides to spend a year on depressants, narcotics and all sorts of soporifics, she does so because: “[s]leep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. [She] knew in [her] heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing [her] heart knew back then—that when [she]’d slept enough, [she]’d be okay. [She]’d be renewed, reborn. [She] would be a whole new person, every one of [her] cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. [Her] past life would be but a dream, and [she] could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that [she] would have accumulated in [her] year of rest and relaxation.”
The premise of this book, even more than its prose, has grabbed the attention of many an art critic. For what is the artist’s life if not an act of hibernation, a willingness to feed off others’ labor? Indeed, the art world is among the prime targets of Moshfegh’s prose. It is hard to account for one’s decision to live oneirically, whether one has a drug-induced year of rest and relaxation, or whether one receives prizes and accolades for one’s absented labor. When one thinks, one becomes dead to the world. This is as true of reading as it is of writing. Reading and writing is hardly living.
For his part, Georges Bataille goes so far as to say that literature is a kind of evil, an evil that saves us from the torture of having to make sense. Or, to put it differently, virtue is a commanding voice that impels us to prepare, to work for the future. Any successful reader or writer shuts that voice up. In the space of literature, one absents oneself, forgets one’s own future, for the sake of something that will never happen. Literature is therefore the redemptive voice which tells us: “Never put off for tomorrow what you could enjoy today.”
The task of the good reader, who attempts to find joy in this effusive now, engages in a personal act of reception, engages a silent thought. It’s like sleep. You can only ever do it for yourself, and nobody will ever know what it’s like for you. Or like death. So, in Bataille’s work on the theme of Literature and Evil, we find the strange description of Emily Bronte’s death:
“She lived in a sort of silence which, it seemed, only literature could disrupt. The morning she died, after a brief lung disease, she got up at the usual time, joined her family without uttering a word and expired before midday, without even going back to bed. She had not wanted to see a doctor.
She left behind her a short collection of poems and one of the greatest books ever written. Wuthering Heights is surely the most beautiful and most profoundly violent love story. For though Emily Brontë, despite her beauty, appears to have had no experience of love, she had an anguished knowledge of passion. She had the sort of knowledge which links love not only with clarity, but also with violence and death – because death seems to be the truth of love, just as love is the truth of death.”
The depiction of Bronte is utterly drab. It’s like someone who cannot muster up the energy even to ask for help. Someone who is so slothful, so slovenly that she drowns in her grey, stodgy oatmeal. “Joined her family without uttering a word.” There is expressed a solitude which cannot be transcended, an experience of language which cannot be spoken, but which is reserved to her private writings, the secrecy of her thought. “She had not wanted to see a doctor.” She has an utter contempt for worldly affairs, characteristic of the kind of person who would rather adventure on a page than make the tedious bodily effort of leaving one’s estate. “Despite her beauty, [she] appears to have had no experience of love…” Her thoughts are so dense, so rich, that she has become inescapable from herself.
But none of these traits or behaviors are held by Bataille to be reprehensible. Instead, Bronte drowns in slowness, in silence, because: “she had the sort of knowledge which links love not only with clarity, but also with violence and death…” We can then suppose that if she were an adventurer, a pragmatic and purposeful inhabitant of the world (or even of her familial estate), then Emily Bronte would never have fulfilled her literary acumen. And we can suppose from Bataille’s praise that this literary acumen is more worthwhile than any adventure could be. Perhaps Bataille would advise us “Stillness is the Move.” To read well one must enact the violence of rejecting others and their demands, must embrace also the stillness of death. As the desired intensity for which one attempts to achieve this enigmatic quality of “close reading,” love is thereby linked to violence and death–just as Bataille warns us.
In The Rebel, Camus uses Wuthering Heights much like Bataille, as a depiction of love and evil, violence and care: “Heathcliff, in Wuthering Heights, would kill everybody on earth in order to possess Cathy, but it would never occur to him to say that murder is reasonable or theoretically defensible. He would commit it, and there his convictions end. This implies the power of love, and also strength of character. Since intense love is rare, murder remains an exception and preserves its aspect of infraction.” Camus is perhaps referencing this line from Heathcliff: “Catherine, you know that I could as soon forget you as my existence! Is it not sufficient for your infernal selfishness, that while you are at peace I shall writhe in the torments of hell?”
We have at hand a spirituality, an idolatry, which claims that appearances deceive. Though Bronte might appear isolated, she experiences a more powerful love than any other. Though murder might appear unacceptable, the true lover would have no option but to commit it. If the vast majority of people do not exhibit the same lethargy as Bronte, it’s because they do not have stories to write. It’s the kind of mentality that risks becoming a victim-complex, insofar as it accepts the narrative of the tortured artist, of redemptive genius. It can even reach such limits as to blur the boundaries between pain of guilt and of crime, can twist their proportions, such that one can no longer perceive the difference between abuser and abused. The tortured artist purports to be a victim, not a vampire.
Heathcliff buys into a different myth, not the myth of the tortured artist, but a similarly romantic one. He excuses an inability to be kind, to move on, with a kind of supreme love. By his own definition, he would not be a grouch, but a saint. All this because no person in the world would be adequate, no place a sufficient refuge; he would “as soon forget her as forget [his own] existence.” But we do forget. We forget even ourselves. Is that not why we write?
Influenced by Bataille, the literary theorist Maurice Blanchot describes writing as a kind of mystical, serene absence: “The work in question is writing. Kafka cuts himself off from the world in order to write, and he writes in order to die in peace. Here death, tranquil death, is represented as the wages of art; it is the aim and the justification of writing. Write to perish peacefully. Yes, but how to write? What allows one to write? We know the answer: you cannot write unless you are able to die content. The contradiction situates us back in the profundity of the experience.”
“Kafka cuts himself off from the world in order to write, and he writes in order to die in peace.” Let’s hear that again. “[S]leep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. [She] knew in [her] heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing [her] heart knew back then—that when [she]’d slept enough, [she]’d be okay. [She]’d be renewed, reborn. [She] would be a whole new person, every one of [her] cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. [Her] past life would be but a dream, and [she] could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that [she] would have accumulated in [her] year of rest and relaxation.”
So perhaps our indictment of My Year of Rest and Relaxations‘s unnamed protagonist is aimed also at the cult of writers. Much successful literary fiction of the past few decades has had a hand in eviscerating that image; much literary writing therefore reads as being afflicted by a guilt, a culpability of enabling the current system, by accepting a place in its hierarchy, and thereby accepting its estrangement and exploitations. In this regard, Mosfegh has included in her crosshairs one of her likely inspirations, David Foster Wallace; or, at least, a specific brand of male reader: ” ‘Dudes’ reading Nietzsche on the subway, reading Proust, reading David Foster Wallace, jotting down their brilliant thoughts into a black Moleskine pocket notebook.”
At this point (Infinite Jest is older than I am), Wallace is a ubiquitous reference among American literati, simultaneously praised and loathed. Praised and loathed deservedly, given Wallace’s literary ambitions, his loathsome personal history, his solipsism, and his inability to self-edit, all of which were made only partially more palatable by his own biting, articulate critiques of others who exemplified similarly narcissistic attitudes. Perhaps we may assume that Moshfegh, like Wallace, has to have a sense of irony for the narcissism in writing. Hopefully, unlike Wallace, she will not succumb to such painful bouts of despair; Wallace literally killed himself when composing The Pale King.
But DFW is just an example; Moshfegh tips her hat to more than a few influences. When the protagonist sees the name “Plato,” she thinks of carte postale, which is likely a hidden reference to Derrida’s The Post Card. Moshfegh makes another, indirect reference to Derrida’s philosophy with a quip about: “feminist performance art as a political deconstruction of the art world as a commercial industry…” Importantly, Derrida wrote about forgiveness, with the idea that forgiveness is not an act, but is rather the passivity of forgetfulness–a “sovereign unconditional.” Just as Derrida subverts the hierarchy of activity and passivity, Moshfegh’s protagonist is often at her kindest and most sincere when blacked-out, entirely unconscious. As Dr. Tuttle, our anti-heroin(e)’s psychiatrist, explains: “People would be so much more at ease if they acted on impulse rather than reason. That’s why drugs are so effective in curing mental illness—because they impair our judgment.”
In his works on forgiveness and hospitality, Derrida encourages us to remain open to the Other, to the person/thing/possibility/event that we do not yet understand and cannot yet predict; rather than shine a light on everything, we need to accept the darkness. Dr. Tuttle expresses this idea when she asserts that the proper term is “night vision log,” not “dream journal.” A jour is a day, but our dreams are really what we see in the dark: “night visions.” We ought, then, to keep note of what we cannot see. So perhaps we have a link between Moshfegh’s thought experiment of homeostatic hibernation and Derrida’s writings on forgiveness.
Derrida’s mentor Emanuel Levinas writes on this very theme in Totality and Infinity: “The discontinuous time of fecundity makes possible an absolute youth and recommencement…This recommencement of the instant, this triumph of the time of fecundity over the becoming of the mortal and aging being, is a pardon, the very work of time.”
We might thereby remember: “that when [she]’d slept enough, [she]’d be okay. [she]’d be renewed, reborn. [She] would be a whole new person, every one of [her] cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. [Her] past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that [she] would have accumulated in [her] year of rest and relaxation.”
When our protagonist’s plans of dormancy become temporarily deferred by her friend Reva’s sudden appearance: “[She] was both relieved and irritated when Reva showed up, the way you’d feel if someone interrupted you in the middle of suicide. Not that what [she] was doing was suicide. In fact, it was the opposite of suicide. [Her] hibernation was self-preservational. [She] thought that it was going to save [her] life.” No doubt that one would simultaneously feel both relieved and disappointed, and it is likely that the mix of relief and disappointment is felt also by the reader, who is not sure (or is not yet sure) whether the protagonist’s choice to hibernate truly is self- preservational or -destructive. Is literature redemptive or loathsome, part of a full life or an evil death? In the dilemma of sleep (Hamlet asks “what dreams may come?”), we have at hand the inadequately comprehended nexus which contains murder, suicide, abortion and euthanasia.
So with all these themes at hand, it should come as no surprise that Moshfegh ends her novel with a suicide. The protagonist wakes from her year-long nap to realize that she had been solipsistic in her slumber, had ignored her friend Reva, who–shockingly–is an important aspect of the protagonist’s life. This realization comes too late, any reunion with Reva is made impossible, because Reva works in the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. On that fateful day, Reva leaps to her death from 78 floors above the ground. It is a fitting ending, given that the widely circulated images of the attack, as well as of those who chose to jump from the building as a result of that attack, have held a traumatic grip on the American psyche. These images linger, forcing Americans to ask themselves if life is beautiful, for whom, and whether suicide might ever be warranted. Reva watches her friend’s death on television: “There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.”
The idea of falling to one’s death, eyes wide open, is highly influenced by Heideggerian existentialism. In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger writes that being-in-the-world is defined by a characteristic of thrown-ness, as if we are always falling; by virtue of our birth, we have fallen into the world, have received an uncontrollable condition. The only choice left is to be authentic, bravely true to ourselves, even in the face of death. We are left to assume that Reva, falling wide awake, has achieved that authenticity.
So all that for a return to Heidegger? Ugh. “Ever tried. Ever failed.”