Teaching and Reading Angry Men

Next week, I’ve offered my Creative Nonfiction students three reading options, including a brilliant essay on experiencing an eclipse by nature/science writer Annie Dillard. It’s my preferred piece, of the week’s choices.

One of the essays, David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster,” I really wrestled with including.

I’m thinking out loud, here, about teaching the work of angry men, and reading about angry men.

And below that surface, I’m having a long debate with myself about the costs and benefits of engaging in conversation with angry men, which can be exhausting, especially when the anger burbles up over trivial things. I’ve had this experience in my personal life, but also with the occasional student (and in my former workplace, which still prompts the odd nightmare, colleague; yelling at work shouldn’t really be a thing).

This is my companion piece to Vladimir, I guess, which is about an explosively angry woman, although it takes a while for readers to understand just how furious the narrator is, and why.

In Jonas’s novel, the narrator has to sit through a faculty meeting where her husband, a poetry professor, is dissected, and her response is visceral: “lightning bolts of anger shot from my vagina to my extremities. I’ve always felt the origin of anger in my vagina and I’m surprised it is not mentioned more in literature.”

Class members have been given a content warning re the explicit detail about lobster boiling in DFW’s essay, which had its origins in a Gourmet Magazine travel & tourism take on an annual lobster festival.

But David Foster Wallace arrived in New England, and his fancy took flight.

It is not a travel piece.

That Gourmet published it at all is much to Ruth Reichl’s credit, as editor.

As I always provide some context, I’m giving class members a heads-up that in the literary community some consider DFW to be “problematic”; others remember him as a brilliant writer, or fabulous friend, or complicated colleague. Many still mourn him fiercely. Many are conflicted.

Mary Karr’s memoir, Lit, is nagging at me; she wrote (in passing; without seeming to dwell on it) about DFW’s fits of temper, the table he threw across the room in a rage while they were romantically involved. He was possessive and controlling, morose and mercurial.

D.T. Max’s biography goes further, as an excellent piece by Mary K. Holland on Literary Hub describes:

“Wallace tried to buy a gun to kill [Karr’s] husband” and “he tried to push her from a moving car . . . [he] called female fans at his readings “audience pussy”; wondered to Jonathan Franzen whether “his only purpose on earth was ‘to put my penis in as many vaginas as possible’”; picked up vulnerable women in his recovery groups; admitted to a “fetish for conquering young mothers,” like Orin in Infinite Jest; and “affected not to care that some of the women were his students.”

Infinite Jest, now in its 30th anniversary year, remains a Big Deal.

It landed in my DNF pile years ago. (But also: never have I ever been asked to read a single author by so many male readers, and what is up with that?)

Let’s try another bit of DFW, this one an excerpt, published in Paris Review, from DFW’s title story in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. It’s an odd project: a set of purported interviews, but with questions omitted, so we have only the responses.

Here’s one fellow, describing a woman he met and was attracted to physically, while recognizing that her “crunchy granola” essence did not appeal to him:

“Fluffiness or daffiness or intellectual flaccidity or a somehow smug-seeming naïveté. Choose whichever offends you least. And yes and don’t worry I’m aware of how all this sounds and can well imagine the judgments you’re forming from the way I’m characterizing what drew me to her but if I’m to really explain this to you as requested then I have no choice but to be brutally candid rather than observing the pseudosensitive niceties of euphemism about the way a reasonably experienced, educated man is going to view an extraordinarily good-looking girl whose life philosophy is fluffy and unconsidered and when one comes right down to it kind of contemptible. I’m going to pay you the compliment of not pretending to worry whether you understand what I’m referring to about the difficulty of not feeling impatience and even contempt—the blithe hypocrisy, the blatant self-contradiction—the way you know from the outset that there will be the requisite enthusiasms for the rain forest and spotted owl, creative meditation, feel-good psychology, macrobiosis, rabid distrust of what they consider authority without evidently once stopping to consider the rigid authoritarianism implicit in the rigid uniformity of their own quote unquote nonconformist uniform, vocabulary, attitudes.”

To me, this doesn’t really work, as prose; it feels like one of Nabokov’s more self-satisfied narrators.

But here’s the part that, for me, is so troubling that I set aside this particular book:

“#6   E——— on “How and Why I Have Come to be Totally Devoted to S——— and Have Made Her the Linchpin and Plinth of My Entire Emotional Existence”

And yet I did not fall in love with her until she had related the story of the unbelievably horrifying incident in which she was brutally accosted and held captive and raped and very nearly killed.”

That’s quite enough of that, thank you.

And I do understand that DFW may be trying to assess misogyny, to understand how it works in different contexts of masculine identity. This is an important project.

There are some very smart discussions of this book–by Zadie Smith, among others. I’m re-reading her “The Difficult Gifts of David Foster Wallace” and so here’s a snippet of Smith-on-DFW:

“Wallace is not for everyone, but he is for me. My blind spot in my own work is “the evil that men do.” I think I know a thing or two about the way people love, but I don’t know anything about hatred, psychosis, cruelty. Or maybe I don’t have the guts to admit that I do. Wallace writes brilliantly about hideous men and hideous women and the hideous culture that produces them.”

David Foster Wallace is often referred to as a “writer’s writer.” Smith’s response makes me think about her contentious New Yorker short story from a few years ago, which is about being cancelled. In the story, the prospect is oddly alluring to the narrator: it seems like a peaceful state.

But nothing about DFW’s work, his life, or the multiple, contradictory responses is in the least peaceful.

Angry men scare me. We’re in an era of noisily angry male politicians, and that’s been a lot for my nervous system to take.

As I turn to trying Infinite Jest one more time this week, because it has interesting things to say about U.S. imperialism over Canada and Mexico, I’m reminding myself: Just breathe.