Both Flesh and Not: Essays

by David Foster Wallace

  The real Minoan-type crisis, though, comes about halfway through the novel, when Petros achieves an important “intermediate result” in his progress toward the Conjecture—a “deep, pioneering theorem… which opened new vistas in the Theory of Numbers”—and has to decide what to do. Petros’s internal debate about whether to publish the result (which is really a Hyde-vs.-Minos argument about membership in a community) is probably the novel’s best moment:

  Undoubtedly, its publication would secure him recognition in the mathematical world much greater than that achieved by his method for solving differential equations. In fact, it would probably catapult him to the first ranks of the small but select international community of number theorists, practically on the same level as its great stars….

  By making his discovery public, he would also be opening the way into the [Goldbach] problem to other mathematicians who would build on it by discovering new results and expand the limits of the field in a way a lone researcher, however brilliant, could scarcely hope. The results they would achieve would, in turn, aid him in his pursuit of the proof to the Conjecture. In other words… he would be acquiring a legion of assistants in his work. Unfortunately, there was another side to this coin: one of the new unpaid (also unasked for) assistants might conceivably stumble upon a better way to apply his theorem and manage, God forbid, to prove Goldbach’s Conjecture before him….

  He didn’t have to deliberate long. The danger far outweighed the benefit. He wouldn’t publish.

  From here on, the die is cast. And because he is not a king, it is not his community but Petros himself who receives the inevitable punishment for this “hoarding of the general benefit.”31 What happens is that “his” unpublished result is independently discovered by another mathematician, a development Petros finds out about only years later, from Hardy, who “expressed his amazement that Petros had not been aware of this, since its publication had caused a sensation in the circles of number theorists and brought great acclaim to its young author.”32

  As UPGC’s plot unfolds, this sort of Aesopian, reap-just-what-you-sow punishment gets inflicted on Petros again and again, worsening as each ego-blow increases his alienation and paranoia and sends him deeper into a kind of professional solipsism. Far more than any supposed misreading of Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem, it is this solipsism that leads to Petros’s “failure”—as both a mathematician and a person—and he ends up rather like Milton’s Satan, not just alone but Alone, sustaining himself on the sort of megalomaniacal self-pity that creative people everywhere know and dread: “I, Petros Papachristos, never having published anything of value, will go down in mathematical history—or rather will not go down in it—as having achieved nothing. This suits me fine, you know. I have no regrets. Mediocrity would never have satisfied me. To an ersatz, footnote kind of immortality, I prefer… total obscurity!” Despite the confused and confusing math-labyrinth it’s hidden inside, the embedded story of Petros’s fall is a kind of monstrous gem, one in whose facets readers of many different backgrounds and tastes might see parts of themselves reflected. Apparent implication: if math can be art, so sometimes can genre.

  —2000

  oscitancy—the act of yawning osculate—to kiss osier—willow trees w/rodlike twigs used in basketry; or one of these twigs osnaburg—heavy coarse cotton fabric used for grain sacks, upholstery, drapes outland—out lying areas of a country, the provinces paleo—prefix meaning ancient, old, primitive: paleontrope? palliate—lessen severity, relieve symptoms palmary (adj.)—outstanding, great palmette—stylized palm leaf used as decoration in classical moldings, reliefs, vase paintings parallax—apparent change in the direction of an object caused by change in the ob-server’s position & new line of sight paraphilia—unhealthy sexual perversion parbuckle—sling for raising or lowering objects vertically pareve—kosher w/r/t diet parfleche—untanned animal hide soaked in lye to get hair off and then dried on a stretcher; a shield made of this material parget—plaster, roughcast, used to coat walls and insides of chimneys parhelion—bright spot appearing on either side of sun, or luminous ring or halo parol (n.)—oral utterance; (adj.) legal by word of mouth, not written partlet—collared ruffled covering for neck and shoulders… big w/Elizabethan women pas de deux—dance for two, especially in ballet pase—one-handed bullfighting maneuver pash—a romantic infatuation (icky British syllabic) pasquinade—lampoon posted in public (used of tabloids: “story of O.J.’s trial served up in lurid pasquinade”) pastern—part of dog or horse’s foot between hoof and fetlock pastille—small medicated or flavored tablet patelliform—shaped like a dish or cup or pan patelliphobia—fear of bowls, cups, basins, and tubs patois—regional dialect pavane—slow, courtly dance of 1500s and 1600s pa [0s basiwky—shrewd or cunning in humorous manner (mostly British) pawl—hinged or pivoted device adapted to fit into the notch of a ratchet wheel to impart forward motion or prevent backward motion peau de soie—soft silk or satin fabric with dull finish peculate—to embezzle peen (v.)—to hammer or bend w/peen (“the windshield peened with rain”) pelerine—short classy woman’s cape w/points on collar pelisse—long robe or cloak w/fur trim or all fur pellagra—disease from lack of niacin: skin eruptions, stomach trouble; pellagrous; pellagrin = person with pellagra pendent (adj.)—hanging down; awaiting settlement; pending peonage—system in which debtors are bound in servitude to creditors until debt is paid pepo—fruit of watermelon, squash, pumpkin, w/hard rind and flattened seeds perciatelli—thick spaghetti perfuse—to cover or coat with liquid, color, light peritrichous—having a band of cilia around the mouth as certain protozoans: “a woman with a perit richous mustache” perorate—conclude speech formally; speak at great grandiloquent length pettitoes—pig feet as food phlox—Midwestern flowered plant piaffer—horse trick where horse trots in place w/legs rising very high pima cotton—good lightweight cotton

  THE BEST OF THE PROSE POEM

  Physical dimensions of The Best of The Prose Poem: An International Journal anthology in cm: 15 × 22.5 × 2.

  Weight of anthology in grams: 419.

  Total # of words in anthology: 85,667.

  Total # of words devoted to actual prose poems: 69,986.

  Rain Taxi’s length-limit for review of Best of The P.P.: 1,000 words.

  Form of review: indexical/statistical/schematic.

  Official name of this new, transgeneric critical form: the Indexical Book Review.

  Tactical reason for review form: The words preceding each item’s colon technically constitute neither subjective complement nor appositive nor really any recognized grammatical unit at all; hence none of these antecolonic words should count against R.T.’s rigid 1,000-word limit.

  Other, better-known and/or currently fashionable transgeneric literary forms: the Nonfiction Novel, the Prose Poem, the Lyric Essay, etc.

  Basic aesthetic/ideological raison d’être of the above forms: to comment on, complicate, subvert, defamiliarize, transgress against, or otherwise fuck with received ideas of genre, category, and (especially) formal conventions/constraints. (See by analogy the historical progression rhymed accentual-syllabic verse → blank verse → vers libre, etc.)

  Big paradox/oxymoron behind this raison and the current trendiness of transgeneric forms: In fact, these putatively “transgressive” forms depend heavily on received ideas of genre, category, and formal conventions, since without such an established context there’s nothing much to transgress against. Transgeneric forms are therefore most viable—most interesting, least fatuous—during eras when literary genres themselves are relatively stable and their conventions well-established and -codified and no one seems much disposed to fuck with them. And ours is not such an era.

  From eminent prose poet Russell Edson’s definition of “Prose Poem” in a famous essay on the form called “Portrait of the Writer as a Fat Man: Some Subjective Ideas or Notions on the Care and Feeding of Prose Poems”: “A poetry freed from the definition of poetry, and a prose free of the necessities of fictio
n; a personal form disciplined not by other literature but by unhappiness; thus a way to be happy.”

  From C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon’s A Handbook to Literature, Sixth Edition’s definition of “Prose Poem”: “A poem printed as prose, with both margins justified.”

  Obvious but crucial distinction: between a prose poem as an individual artwork and the Prose Poem as an actual literary genre.

  Signs that some person/persons are trying to elevate a certain transgressive literary form or hybrid into an actual genre: Literary journals start having special issues devoted to the form, then whole new journals exclusively devoted to the form spring up (often with the form’s name somewhere in their titles), and various “Best of” anthologies from these new journals begin hitting the market. A critical literature starts to assemble itself around the form, much of that criticism consisting in apologiae, encomiums, and (paradoxically) definitions, codifications, and lists of formal characteristics (→ conventions). Some writers start identifying themselves professionally as practitioners of the form. Finally, the form begins to get treated as a separate/special category for the purposes of book publishing, prizes and awards, academic appointments, etc.

  Within pages of Best of The P.P., total number of ads for, references to, and lists of other journals/ collections/ articles/ anthologies/ presses devoted to the Prose Poem: 78.

  Bio-note on anthology’s editor: “Peter Johnson is founder and editor of The Prose Poem: An International Journal. His latest books of prose poems are Pretty Happy! (White Pine Press, 1997) and Love Poems for the Millennium (Quale Press, 1998). He received an NEA for Creative Writing in 1999.”

  From bio-notes on random Best of The P.P. contributors: “Ellen McGrath Smith is a Ph.D. candidate in literature at Duquesne University, where she is completing a doctoral dissertation that deals with the American prose poem”; “Mark Vinz is the author of… a book of prose poems, Late Night Calls. He is also co-editor of The Party Train: A Collection of North American Prose Poetry, published by New Rivers Press.”

  First sentence of Peter Johnson’s Introduction to anthology: “In editing The Best of The Prose Poem: An International Journal, I feel humble and defensive at the same time.”

  Total # of pages in anthology, including editor’s Intro, prenominate p.p. ads and lists, and bio-notes on contributors: 288.

  Total # of pages devoted to actual prose poems: 227.

  Total # of prose poems in anthology: 204.

  Arrangement of constituent p.p.’s: alphabetical by author.

  Average number of words in a constituent p.p.: 342.3 (mean), 309 (median).

  Longest p.p. in anthology: John Yau’s “The Newly Renovated Opera House on Gilligan’s Island,” 1,049 words.

  Shortest p.p. in anthology: G. Chambers & R. Federman’s “A Little Request,” 53 words.

  Constituent p.p.’s that, like “The Newly Renovated Opera House on Gilligan’s Island,” have titles that turn out to be way more interesting than the poems themselves: “T. S. Eliot Was a Negro,” “That UFO That Picked on Us,” “The Big Deep Voice of God,” “The Prodiga cTemsl Son Is Spotted on the Grassy Knoll,” “Lullaby for the Elderly,” “The Leopard’s Mouth Is Dry and Cold Inside.”

  Some random relevant questions: Are the pieces in, e.g., Lydia Davis’s Break It Down or Diane Williams’s Excitability prose poems? Is Eliot’s “Hysteria” a prose poem? What about the three long prose pieces in Ashbery’s Three Poems? Are the little italicized entr’actes in Hemingway’s In Our Time prose poems? Are Kawabata’s “Palm-of-the-Hand Stories”? Is Kafka’s “A Little Fable”? What about Cormac McCarthy’s dreamy, anapestic prologue to Suttree? What about the innumerable ¶s in Faulkner that scan perfectly as iambic-pentameter sonnets? Why are so many tiny and self-consciously lyrical stories published these days as “short-shorts” or “flash fictions” and not as prose poems?

  Approximate % of Best of The P.P.’s 9-page Introduction that Peter Johnson spends talking about how fiendishly difficult he finds it to define “Prose Poem”: 75+.

  Representative excerpts from this discussion: “Just as black humor straddles the fine line between comedy and tragedy, so the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels”; “When I first began writing prose poems and consciously considering prose poetry as a distinct genre, I thought of the platypus, that lovable yet homely Tasmanian hybrid, but then came to see the weakness of that comparison. The platypus’s genetic code is predetermined. It can’t all of a sudden grow an elephant’s trunk out of its backside.”

  From Holman and Harmon’s Handbook to Literature’s definition of “Prose Poem”: “The point seems to be that a writing in prose, even the most prosaic,1 is a poem if the author says so.”

  From anthology’s bio-notes on contributors: (1) “Aloysius Bertrand (1807–1841) has sometimes been called ‘The Father of the Modern Prose Poem,’ though he never used the term to describe his own work”; (2) “Barry Silesky is the author of One Thing That Can Save Us, prose poems (called short-short fiction by Coffee House Press).”

  Of the 144 contributors to Best of The P.P., total # who are, like M. Aloysius Bertrand, now dead: 14.

  Total # of contributors who have also published work in literary organ called Flash Fiction: 6.

  Total # of contributors who do/did edit literary journals, anthologies, and/or small presses: 21.

  Titles of published books listed in bio-note for anthology contributor Nin Andrews: The Book of Orgasms and Spontaneous Breasts.

  Average # of prose poems from each Best of The P.P. contributor: 1.42 (mean), 1.58 (median).

  Examples of particularly well-known or eminent contributors, with # of included p.p.’s from each: Russell Edson, 7; David Ignatow, 4; Charles Simic, 4; James Tate, 4; Robert Bly, 2; Maxine Chernoff, 2; Larry Levis, 2; Henri Michaux, 2; Stuart Dybek, 1; Bill Knott, 1; Gabriela Mistral, 1; Pablo Neruda, 1.

  Total # of above p.p.’s that seem like they’re anywhere even remotely close to their eminent contributors’ best work: 3.

  Total # of times Peter Johnson quotes or refers to Russell Edson in his Introduction: 13.

  Another typical sentence from Peter Johnson’s Intro: “To me, literary theory, like philosophy, provides few answers; instead, and most importantly, it creates an endless internal and external dialogue which forces us to constantly reevaluate our standards.”

  Highest conceivable grade that anthology’s Introduction would receive in an average university Lit./Composition class: B-.

  Total # of anthology’s 204 prose poems that are good/alive/powerful/interesting enough to persist in reader’s mind more than 60 seconds after completion: 31.

  Of these 31, # that are so great you end up not even caring what genre they’re supposed to be part of: 9.

  Of these 9, # that are by one Jon Davis, a poet whom this reviewer’d never heard of before but whose pieces in this anthology are so off-the-charts terrific that the reviewer has actually gone out and bought the one Jon Davis book mentioned in his bio-note and may very well decide to try to advertise it in this magazine, at reviewer’s own expense if necessary—that’s how good this guy is: 5.

  Of the remaining 4 great pieces here, # that are by the late David Ignatow and concern his impending death and are so totally beautiful and merciless that you can’t forget them even if you want to: 2.

  Other contributors, previously unknown to reviewer, who have good/alive/powerful/interesting pieces in anthology: Gary Fincke (“The History of Passion Will Tumble This Week”), Jennifer L. Holley (“The Rubbing”), Jay Meek (“Leaving the Roadside Motel”), Fred Muratori (“From Nothing in the Dark”), J. David Stevens (“The Sign”), Helen Tzagoloff (“Mail-Order Bride”).

  Some of the common features of the 31 pieces in anthology: (1) Even without line breaks or standard prosodic constraints, the p.p.’s seem tightly controlled; they possess both a metrical and a narrative logic. (2) Their sentences tend to be short, almo
st terse. (3) Many of the p.p.’s are subtly iambic; what meter and alliteration there is is unheavy and tends to make the piece read faster rather than slower. (4a) The pieces’ realistic imagery is concrete, its descriptions compact and associations tautly drawn. (4b) The pieces’ surreal imagery/associations never seem gratuitously weird; i.e., they end up making psychological or emotional sense given what the p.p.’s about. (5) Any puns, entendres, metapoetic allusions, or other forms of jeu d’esprit come off as relevant/serious and never seem like their main purpose is to make the writer appear clever. (6) The pieces’ tone tends to be intimate rather than formal (meaning, in other words, that the p.p.’s exploit one of the big advantages of much good prose, which is the reader’s impression of a human being actually sitting right there talking to him). (7) They all have actual narratives and/or Dramatic Situations. (8) If there’s an argument, the argument is tight, comprehensible, and if not persuasive then at least interesting. (9) The good 31 are all, without exception, moving.

  Examples of opening lines of constituent p.p.’s that have some or all of the above qualities: “Only a picture window stands between us and the full force of gusts that lift the branches of the red pine” (Thomas R. Smith’s “Windy Day at Kabekona”); “It’s of no consequence to the grass that it withers, secure in its identity” (David Ignatow’s “Proud of Myself”); “This is not an elegy because the world is full of elegies and I am tired of consoling and being consoled” (Jon Davis’s “The Bait”).