A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

by Dave Eggers

Wednesday, June 11, 2003

Okay, now I have more to say.

Something I realized is that keeping my own web log helps me to do fewer things with more intensity. I don't have experiences so that I can write about them. I write about them in order to savor them again. To give them their due. Knowing that I may be recording an experience makes me slow down and pay attention. And taking the time to write means that I cannot cram as many things into a day as I might have otherwise. In his chapter, "Philosophy and Fiction" in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus says:

Creating is living doubly.... Creation is a great mime.... [Art] marks both the death of an experience and its multiplication.... [The work of art] cannot be the end, the meaning, and the consolation of life. Creating or not creating changes nothing. The absurd creator does not prize his work. He could repudiate it. He does sometimes repudiate it.

Eggers, on the other hand, seems to accumulate experiences in order to write about them. He acknowledges that his book is uneven. It focuses on the "intense" tramas of his and other people's lives, creating a picture of a life lived on the edge. He gives Shalini's coma and John's suicide attempts much more importance in the book than they actually had in his real life. Well, okay, an author doesn't want to be boring. But I think that what is interesting in writing is not always what is being recorded but how. Where's the light? How does it make us see? As elusive as truth is, there's got to be some attempt to penetrate it. Otherwise, you're just screaming for attention. You might as well be The National Enquirer. Perfectly entertaining, but ultimately forgettable.

Tuesday, June 10, 2003

Well, finally finished reading this book and finally have something to say about it. Actually, I bookmarked pages all along the way but didn't feel like writing anything until now. The book just wasn't heartbreaking or staggering enough to compel me to write immediately.

My overall response is ambivalence. Maybe that's the desired response to a book like this. I am irritated by Dave Eggers' cloying self-absorption. Yes, the cancer deaths of both of his parents in the same year are terrible, and I really want to sympathize with him and do to an extent. But the utter narcisism of his story leaves me cold. Said narcisism is meant to be justified by the fact that it is openly acknowledged by the author, demonstrating the author's self-awareness. But what the author fails to see is that this very self-awareness is simply more narcisism. He is so deeply plunged into the story of the Dave Eggers self, that his story, which could have broad resonance, often feels small and mean.

That said, Eggers is a really clever writer, and I often found myself laughing out loud in public places. "It is okay for me to have sex with the sexologist while Shalini is in a coma. How could we say no?" And I guess my laughter indicates that I actually did identify with much of what he was saying, as disconcerting as that was. Disconcerting because I could recognize my own worries, obsessions, self-involvement, my own meanness; could relate to the things that repulsed me. At first, I wanted to go along with Eggers. I wanted the success of this book to justify my own journalizing. I thought, "If he can put all the spewage of his mind down on paper, why can't I?" But as I continued to read, the thought became, "Oh, dear. This is not how I sound, is it? Do I sound this whiny and self-obsessed?" Here he is agonizing over whether or not he has properly scattered his mother's ashes:

How lame this is, how small, terrible. Or maybe it is beautiful. I can't decide if what I am doing is beautiful and noble and right, or small and disgusting.... Is this white trash? That's what it is!.... Oh this is so plain, disgraceful, pathetic --

Or beautiful and loving and glorious! Yes, beautiful and loving and glorious!

But even if so, even if this is right and beautiful.... I am doing something both beautiful but gruesome because I am destroying its beauty by knowing that it might be beautiful, know that if I know I am doing something beautiful, that it's no longer beautiful. I fear that even if it is beautiful in the abstract, that my doing it knowing that it's beautiful and worse, knowing that I will very soon be documenting it, that in my pocket is a tape recorder brought for just that purpose -- that all this makes this act of potential beauty somehow gruesome. I am a monster. My poor mother. She would do this without the thinking, without the thinking about thinking --

With a little more distance, with a little more compassion, he might have been able to take one more step back and realize that thinking about thinking is just an ordinary thing that people do. It's simply what people do. But he can't give himself a break. He attributes to his thoughts and actions way too much power and importance. He wants to be a monster. He can't stand the idea of being just like everyone else. Really, what's the difference between a monster and a god?

But of course, he's fully aware of this obsessive need to be extraordinary. He's aware that it's this need that drives him and his friends to skewer celebrities between the covers of their little magazine. He says these words through the mouth of his little brother, who actually never said them:

These people have already attained, at whatever age, a degree of celebrity that you assholes will never reach, and you feel deep down, that because there is no life before or after this, that fame is, essentially, God -- all you people know that, believe it, even if you don't admit it. So [embarassing Adam Rich] when he's no longer the world-conquering celebrity, gives you power over him, the ability to embarass him, to equalize the terrible imbalance you feel about your relationship to those who project their charisma directly, not sublimated through snarky little magazines. You and everyone like you, with your Q & As or columns or Web sites -- you all want to be famous, you want to be rock stars, but you're stuck in this terrible bind, where you also want to be thought of as smart, legitimate, permanent. So you do your little thing, are read by your little coterie, while secretly seething about the Winona Ryders and Ethan Hawkes...

Once again, his self-awareness only rises to the level of criticism. Of monster-making. What is this self, this Dave Eggers, that is so pathetically terrible? That wields such awful power? If only he could go a level further and realize that the terribleness itself is just as much an illusion as greatness. In the end, what does any of it matter?

One of the themes that interests me is the constant justification of his exhibitionism. His openness about the things most people keep private. Here is a long passage from Part 6, in which he explains how he can afford to reveal all his secrets:

You have what I can afford to give you. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. This does not break me. I give you virtually everything I have. I give you all of the best things I have, and while these things are things that I like, memories that I treasure, good or bad, like the pictures of my family on my walls I can show them to you without diminishing them, I can afford to give you everything. We gasp at the wretches on afternoon shows who reveal their hideous secrets in front of millions of similarly wretched viewers, and yet... what have we taken from them, what have they given us? Nothing. We know that Janine had sex with her daughter's boyfriend, but... then what? We will die and we will have protected... what? Protected from all the world that, what, we do this or that, that our arms have made these movements and our mouths these sounds? Please. We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things... we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our pasts and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself. But it's just the opposite, more is more is more -- more bleeding, more giving. These things, details, stories, whatever, are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs for anyone to see. What does he care where it is, who sees it, this snake, and his skin? He leaves it where he molts. Hours, days or months later, we some across the snake's long-shed skin and we know something of the snake, we know that it's of this approximate girth and that approximate length, but we know very little else. Do we know where the snake is now? What the snake is thinking now? No. By now the snake could be wearing fur; the snake could be selling pencils in Hanoi. The skin is no longer his, he wore it because it grew from him, but then it dried and slipped off and he and everyone could look at it.

I agree with Eggers to a point. Yes, all those details of our lives do not define who we are. I agree that we are not the things we have done or experienced and that revealing these things does not diminish us in some way. It's nice for me to believe that. I couldn't very well continue this web site if I didn't, could I? But but but BUT... intentional self-revelation is not like a snake shedding a skin. The snake leaves it behind and doesn't look back. The snake doesn't bring it to show his friends. He doesn't write about the shed skin and obsess about it and hang pictures of it on his walls. He lets it go.

I think there is a way to write a memoir that is more skin-shedding than what Eggers has done. I think it happens when the writer is either far enough away from the experience to have some perspective or else still having the experience and writing in the moment. In the former situation, the writing can have a certain objectivity; from a distance, the writer can examine her life with compassion, almost as if she's writing about someone else. Because basically, she is. In the latter case, the writing has an immediacy that can elicit the compassion of the reader. A journal that is written as life is being lived is allowed to be more self-indulgent, as the writer stumbles about trying to make sense of the world, as the rest of us are. But Eggers' is a memoir of a person who is stuck in the past. His misfortunes are still too fresh and his mistakes and embarassments still burning. He doesn't write like a person who wants to purge his past and leave it behind. He wants to be recognized over and over and over again for what he has suffered. In fact, the final lines of the book do not bring any kind of resolution, but rather continue the plea for attention indefinitely:

...when you're all sleeping I am somewhere on some rickety scaffolding and I'm trying to get your stupid fucking attention I've been trying to show you this, just been trying to show you this -- What the fuck does it take to show you motherfuckers, what does it fucking take what do you want how much do you want because I am willing and I'll stand before you and I'll raise my arms and give you my chest and throat and wait, and I've been so old for so long, for you, for you, I want it fast and right through me -- Oh do it, do it, you motherfuckers, do it do it you fuckers finally, finally, finally.

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