My apologies for this posting appearing late in the game; I thought I had posted a Dave Eggers introduction earlier in the week, but found that Blogger had eaten my homework (or something of the sort).
Dave Eggers was born in Boston in 1970, and spent his early years living in an upper middle class suburb outside of Chicago. As A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius details, Eggers was thrust into a premature adulthood by the early death of both of his parents, leaving him with responsibility for his much younger brother Toph. Viewed as the consummate Generation X author, Eggers is known for his satirical magazine Might, as well as the popular (and still extant) publication, McSweeney's. In addition to A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers has also published the novels You Shall Know Our Velocity and What is the What, in addition to the short story collection How We Are Hungry.
Alternately celebrated and denigrated for its self-consciousness and high-ironic style (the latter of which Eggers disputes vehemently) upon publication, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius remains polarizing a number of years after it appeared. In the context of our class, AHWOSG ushers in our discussion about the increasingly thin line between memoir and fiction in late twentieth/ early twenty-first century America at the time that it asks questions about the relationship between postmodernism and affect, sentimentality and techniques of formal distanciation, and the rise of the memoir as a genre that is often seen to supercede the novel (in popularity, if not always in critical praise). What do we make of the phenomenon surrounding the pubilcation of this work? What about McSweeney's, 826 Valencia, the superhero store in Brooklyn, and the Believer--disparate endeavors that have all come to rest under the Eggers brand?
At the beginning of this quarter in Narratology we covered Jekyll and Hyde and how the doom of the split personality was expressed by Jekyll not being able to talk about it. Traditionally, a problem was considered really terrible if it couldn’t be “talked through” on the psychiatrist’s couch or to a close friend or family member, so when Stevenson had one of this characters say, “It was so bad it couldn’t even be spoken of,” his readers were like, “Yeah, we’re dealing with some serious trauma.”
ReplyDeleteBut when I was researching for my Netherland paper, I came across James Woods’s term, “hysterical realism,” which has also been broken down as “maximalism.” Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work is often named as an example of this hysterical realism, and I’m interested in the connection between the extreme talking-it-out process and the not-being-able-to-talk-about-it of Jekyll and Hyde. Eggers is dealing with the more overtly traumatic experience of the deaths of both parents, but he is operating by putting everything down, recording everything, no matter how uncomfortable or intimate. And he doesn’t limit his “hysterical” prose to the topic of his parents’ deaths. He addresses, usually at length, every potential source of anxiety or discomfort. Like when he’s describing their first residence in California with its beautiful view and how hikers often reach the top of their climb only to find themselves at eye level with Dave and Toph, who are eating breakfast. Eggers thinks the hikers would probably like to sit down and enjoy their accomplishment but that it’s kind of awkward, so…
I think of this as serving the same purpose or conveying the same message as silence about a trauma. It’s as if he’s saying so much, his brain is so guarded and hyper-aware, that it stops filtering and treats everything as an enemy subject. And the result is, in a sense, both heartbreaking and staggering.
As was apparent in class yesterday, I found this book extremely problematic. I alternately laughed out loud, got angry and threw it across the room, and sat for hours engaged. I think, as we discussed, that much of this had to do with that strange mixture of privilege and "oh, the world owes me a livin', oh-de-oh-de-oh" (as my dad used to sing). While it's honest in many ways, and I think he's done a lot to foster community and give back, I still hate the idea that (to be frank and trite) another rich, privileged white man has story about the experience of trauma. This is not, of course, to say that the privileged do not experience trauma--I've often had trouble with this in my own work, because though I grew up relatively poor, and was a "victim" of assault several times over, I still feel its disingenuous to act as though money, skin, sex, age, education, etc. do not have a palliative effect. The reiteration of "I am owed," even if used ironically, has that ring of white man's burden that always makes me itch. Owed by what? Circumstance? Society? The promise of a charmed life that did not come to fruition (yet did)? I think it's the last--the anger that we repeatedly see seems to be directed in much the same fashion as those proponents of white privilege excoriate the society that "lets" people of color "take their jobs".
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