Changing my mind: occasional essays - By Zadie Smith Page 0,133
they isolate the self (the pursuit of happiness is a pursuit we undertake alone) and because this Western obsession with happiness as a goal makes people childishly “pain-averse,” allergic to the one quality that is, in Wallace’s view, the true constant of human life: “Look at utilitarianism . . . and you see a whole teleology predicated on the idea that the best human life is one that maximizes the pleasure-to-pain ratio. God, I know this sounds priggish of me. All I’m saying is that it’s shortsighted to blame TV. It’s simply another symptom. TV didn’t invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression . . . ” His stories repel the idea that a just society can come from the contract made between self-interested or egoistic individuals, or that it is one’s “personhood” that guarantees one a bigger slice of the pie. (The fat poet’s talents or personal merits can’t make him more worthy than anyone else.)
And in a few extreme cases, Wallace’s stories go further, lining up behind a quasi-mystic such as Weil, who, like the Buddhists, abandons “Personhood” entirely: “What is sacred in a human being is the impersonal in him. . . . Our personality is the part of us which belongs to error and sin. The whole effort of the mystic has always been to become such that there is no part left in his soul to say ‘I’.”90 Consequently, the statement You have no right to hurt me is to Weil meaningless, for rights are a concept that attaches to “personhood” and one person can always feel their “rights” to be more rightful that another’s. What you are doing to me is not just—this, for Weil, is the correct and sacred phrase. “The spirit of justice and truth is nothing else,” she writes, “but a certain kind of attention, which is pure love.”
Isn’t it exactly this “certain kind of attention” that Wallace explores in B.I. #20 (sometimes known as The Granola Cruncher)? It is the darkest story in the collection,91 and it has an extreme setup, even by Wallace’s standards: a hippie girl, viciously raped by a psychopath, decides to create, in the middle of the act, a “soul connection” with her rapist because she “believes that sufficient love and focus can penetrate even psychosis and evil.” In the process she is able to forget herself, and focus on his misery—even to feel pity for him. But this all happened some time ago: when the story opens we are being retold it as an anecdote by a man who has himself heard it as anecdote:B.I. #20 12-96
NEW HAVEN CT
“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 very nearly killed.”
New Haven? A recently graduated Yalie, perhaps. Definitely overeducated, supercilious, and full, initially, of bombastic opinions about the girl, whom he picked up at a festival as a “strictly one night objective,” because she had a sexy body (“Her face was a bit strange”) and because he thought it would be easy. She’s an open book to him—he feels he can read her easily:What one might call a quote Granola Cruncher, or post-Hippie, New Ager, what have you . . . comprising the prototypical sandals, unrefined fibers, daffy arcane, emotional incontinence, flamboyantly long hair, extreme liberality on social issues . . . and using the, well the quote L-word itself several times without irony or even any evident awareness that the word has through tactical over-deployment become trite and requires invisible quotes around it now at the very least.
She is an object on which to exert his superiority. A body from which his own body will take its pleasure. In the event, though, her strange postcoital anecdote unnerves and destabilizes him: she tells her story of extraordinary focus with extraordinary focus and he (like one of Henry James’s ideal readers) finds his own fine awareness stimulated by hers:I found myself hearing expressions like fear gripping her soul, unquote, less as televisual clichés or melodrama but as sincere if not particularly artful attempts to describe what it must have felt like, the feelings of shock and unreality alternating with waves of pure terror.
But there is something chilling in both his modes of processing her experience. First it is “televisual cliché”; then something so unexpectedly real he becomes desirous of her precisely because of it, seeing, perhaps, in her realness,