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Three Aperçus: On DEADPOOL (2016), David Foster Wallace, and Beauty
by Joseph Suglia
Deadpool (2016) is capitalism with a smirking face.
David Foster Wallace was not even a bad writer.
Beauty is the one sin that the Average American of today cannot forgive.
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Aphorisms on Libertarianism, Criticism, and Psychoanalysis
Dr. Joseph Suglia
Libertarianism is conservatism that is ashamed of saying its own name.
Criticism is the stratosphere of the mind.
The whole enterprise of psychoanalysis is to turn aliens into pets.
Joseph Suglia
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A review of A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING (Dave Eggers)
by Dr. Joseph Suglia
All novels may be taxonomized into three categories: There are novels of plot, novels of character, and novels of language. A novel of plot is driven by a story that could be synopsized without damaging the novel itself. Simply read an outline of the plot, and there is no reason for you to read the novel. A novel of character creates–or should create–living-seeming, recognizably human figures. But these figures, of course, are nothing more than fabrications, nothing more than chimeras that seem to breathe and talk. A novel of language makes worlds out of words.
Dave Eggers’s A Hologram for the King (2012) is a novel of character, I suppose, but it doesn’t really work as a novel of character. Nor does it work on any other level. It must be said of this miserable little drip of a book that it fails as a plot-driven narrative, that it fails as the portrait of a character, and that it fails as a work of language.
PLOT
Eggers has the tendency to write novels that are based on American high-school standards. You Shall Know Our Velocity–a novel that is as sincere as those fraternity boys who raise money for the homeless–is based on On the Road. The Circle is based on Nineteen Eighty-Four. A Hologram for the King is based on Death of a Salesman and En attendant Godot (the epigraph is from Beckett’s play: “It is not every day that we are needed”). En attendant Godot is about the stupidities of faith, the stupidities of eschatology, and the infinitely postponed arrival (or non-arrival) of the Messiah. And yet Egger’s Messiah arrives! If Eggers wanted a classic about the degradations of growing old on which to model his tale, he should have turned to Bellow. Henderson the Rain King, anyone?
Alan Clay is a semi-employed fifty-four-year-old former bicycle manufacturer who is contracted by Reliant, a major IT company, to introduce King Abdullah to a holographic projection system. The inaction takes place in King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC), Saudi Arabia. Every day, Alan and his enviably young colleagues wait in the desert for the arrival of King Abdullah.
Novels do not need to be realistic, but they ought to be convincing, and the question of probability comes up more than a few times. If Alan is indeed “superfluous to the forward progress of the world” [75], why is he employed by the largest IT company of that same world and promised $500,000 if he succeeds in persuading King Abdullah to purchase the holographic projection system?
The novel is a novel about late arrivals, and Alan and his “Other” are forever arriving late to the party: Alan is too late to save his neighbor Charlie Fallon from self-drowning, Alan wakes up late on the day of his scheduled meeting with King Abdullah, Alan is “too late” (read: “too old”) to be sexually potent, King Abdullah himself arrives late, etc. I would advise prospective readers to never arrive.
CHARACTER
As synaesthetes know, everything has a color. Eggers’s washout is not exactly an iridescent character. He is relentlessly grey.
A character should be, to paraphrase the Hegel of Die Phänomenologie des Geistes, an assemblage of Alsos. That is: A character should not be one thing. A character should not be simple. A character should not be one-sided. A character should be this AND ALSO that AND ALSO that. Each of these traits should contradict one another. Since human beings are complexly self-contradictory, why should characters not be, as well?
Regrettably, Eggers’s main character is flatter than a Fruit Roll-Up. Alan is a never-was and has never been anything besides a never-was.
While waiting for King Abdullah, Alan meets (guess who!) two sexually prepossessing young women: a gorgeous blonde Dutch consultant named Henne and a Saudi physician named Zahra Hakem who is intrigued by the knob-like excrescence on the back of his neck. At one stage, Alan imagines that his cyst has sexual powers. I could imagine the entire novel centering on the sexuality of Alan’s cyst, but no, that would have been too daring. This is a Dave Eggers novel, after all.
Each appointment leads to a sexual disappointment. Henne offers Alan sexual release in the bathtub of her hotel room, but Alan prefers the “purity” and “simplicity” [177] of the bath water instead. Dr. Zahra swims topless with Alan (this, apparently, is done all of the time in Islamic countries), but her toplessness does not lead to a toplessness-inspired act of sexual release.
Eggers simply cannot let his ageing protagonist be sexually uninteresting to women. Even though the novel pretends to be an allegory about the downfall of America in an age of globalism, it is really an all-American wish-fulfillment fantasy. Are we credulous enough to believe that the generously breasted blonde Dutch consultant is sexually desperate? And that Dr. Zahra lusts after Alan’s knobby cyst? Apparently, Eggers thinks that we are.
LANGUAGE
Eggers is more of a summarizer than he is a dramatizer. He tells more than he shows. An example (from the novel’s opening salvo):
[Alan] had not planned well. He had not had courage when he needed it. / His decisions had been short sighted [sic]. / The decisions of his peers had been short sighted [sic]. / These decisions had been foolish and expedient. / But he hadn’t known at the time that his decisions were short sighted [sic], foolish or expedient. He and his peers did not know that they were making decisions that would leave them, leave Alan, as he now was–virtually broke, nearly unemployed, the proprietor of a one-man consulting firm run out of his home office [4].
Now, a hard-working writer would do the grueling work of showing us Alan’s failures and shortcomings rather than telling us about Alan’s failures and shortcomings. Eggers is less of a writer than a publicist. The passage quoted above reads as if it came from a query-letter addressed to a literary agent.
Wading through the brackish waters and the fetid marshlands of Eggers’s prose is not much fun. I never once got the impression that the writer was groping for the right word. To say that Eggers’s prose style wants elegance and richness would be a gross understatement. His word choices are banal and obvious, his vocabulary is restricted, his writing style is plain, his paragraphs are dull. To describe Alan’s dispute with Banana Republic over a one-time purchase that has killed his credit-score, Eggers writes, doltishly, “Alan tried to reason with them” [138]. This sentence could not have been written any more unpoetically and is yet another instance of the lazy “telling” of an unqualified writer rather than of the laborious “showing” which is incumbent on every responsible writer of fiction.
Eggers’s writing is so bad that it is almost ghoulish.
I have heard it said of Eggers that he is a man who is “easy on the eyes,” and I have no doubt that this is true. (His lecteurial admirers have a purely phenomenal interest in the writer. That is to say, they don’t care about the writing; they are only interested in the writer qua man.) Though I am not an adroit evaluator of male beauty, I suspect that Eggers-the-Man is indeed “easy on the eyes.” It is a pity that the same could not be said of the books that he types.
Dr. Joseph Suglia
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WHY I CAN’T STAND GEORGES BATAILLE
by Dr. Joseph Suglia
I discovered Bataille at the age of eighteen. Here was a French Nietzschean who wrote strident essays and excessively explicit novels. What was there not to like? Throughout my eighteenth and nineteenth years, I read the oeuvres of Bataille, alongside the works of Heidegger, Derrida, and many others.
Around the age of twenty, my relationship with Bataille underwent a change. I could no longer stand to read his writings.
La Littérature et le Mal (1957) destroyed my love for Bataille. The book is almost unreadably silly. Bataille argues, with the most incredible casuistry, that literature and evil are the same. Literature evades collective necessity. Evil evades collective necessity. Both literature and evil evade collective necessity. Therefore, literature IS evil. However, this does not seem to imply, according to Bataille, that evil is literature.
This is a bit like saying: A duck is not a zebra. A chicken is not a zebra. Therefore, a duck is a chicken. However, a chicken is not a duck. This is the logical fallacy known as affirmative conclusion from a negative premise.
“Hegel, la Mort et le Sacrifice” (1955) troubled me, as well. I had read enough of Hegel to know that Bataille was making intellectual errors, was misinterpreting Hegel.
Bataille’s misinterpretation of Hegel may be summarized thus: Human beings sacrifice the animal parts of themselves in order to become fully human. Nowhere does this statement appear in the Gesammelte Werke of Hegel. Hegel writes instead: [Der Geist] gewinnt seine Wahrheit nur, indem er in der absoluten Zerrissenheit sich selbst findet. When he writes that the Spirit finds itself in a state of absolute shreddedness, Hegel means that the human mind exteriorizes itself as an object and restores itself from its self-exteriorization. The human mind is both itself and outside-of-itself at the same time. There is no sacrifice of the animal for the sake of the human.
In L’Érotisme (1957), Bataille’s thesis is that death and eroticism issue from the same source, and many of his arguments are unforgettably convincing. But his opening argument is both banal and irrelevant: Bataille contends that the relation between sex and death is apprehensible at the microbiological level: When the ovum is fertilized, it is demolished. The ovum “dies” in order to form the zygote.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the phenomenology of eroticism, nor does it have anything to do with the phenomenology of mortality.
Last month, I read as much as I could endure of the fragments collected in The Unfinished System of Non-Knowledge. These are the incoherent screechings of a lunatic.
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THE BLUE OF NOON: A review by Dr. Joseph Suglia
According to Georges Bataille’s autobiographical note, Le Bleu du ciel (“The Blue of the Sky”) was composed in the twilight before the occupation of Vichy France.
The descending night darkens these pages.
Dissolute journalist Henri Troppmann (“Too-Much-Man”) and his lover, Dirty give way to every impulse, to every surfacing urge, no matter how vulgar. Careening from one sex-and-death spasm to the next, they deliver themselves over to infinite possibilities of debauchery. A fly drowning in a puddle of whitish fluid (or is it the thought of his mother, a woman he must not desire?) prompts Troppmann to plunge a fork into a woman’s supple white thigh. The threat of Nazi terror incites a coupling in a boneyard.
Their only desire is to begrime whatever is elevated, to vulgarize the holy, to pollute it, to corrupt it, to bring it down into the mud.
By muddying whatever is “sacred,” they maintain the force of “the sacred.”
As a historical document, Le Bleu du ciel is eminently interesting. It offers unforgettably vivid portraits of Colette Peignot (as Dirty) and the “red nun” Simone Weil (as Lazare).
It is also the story of a man who is fascinated with fascism and the phallus, of someone who loves war, though not for teleological reasons. It is the story of a man who celebrates war on its own terms, who nihilistically affirms its limitless power of destruction.
As the night spreads, the blue of the sky disappears.
Dr. Joseph Suglia
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