Form or Content? - Some Thoughts - David Foster Wallace

Reading an essay by Pavic (thanks Sid) and chatting with Sid on form and content got me thinking more about it. This is a very old argument and I am not going to take sides here. So why this post? The past 2 days, I have been thinking of some stories which mix both of them, with more emphasis on form. So I thought I would put my thoughts on some of them, starting with this story 'The Soul Is Not A Smithy' by David Foster Wallace. (From the collection 'Oblivion')


The main story line here is this, a substitute school teacher has a mental breakdown while taking a class and holds the entire class room as hostage. Mixed with is the story imagined by a student, who is completely in a world of his own, unaware of what is going on around him and the serious situation in which he has been trapped. He is creating a story in his mind and is in that world. This student could be any one of us, after all, most of us would have, at some of time, tuned out of the class and started living in a world that we create for ourselves. But that is beside the point here. Now, this is not a case of story within story or a single story fragmenting into multiple ones, rather this is a much rare case in fiction where 2 stories are happening simultaneously, in the same time line, with 2 people in the same place and who are bound to each other (teacher-student).It's like seeing two different scenes in a split screen, but as a reader, we read them only one after the other and for us there is a time lag, however small it may be. As the teacher's mental breakdown descends into a madness, the student's imagined story too lurches towards an end.


At some point, I found myself caring more for the story imagined by the student than the actual real time happenings and stopped for a minute. But I thought again, hang on, what is reality and imagination here? Both the stories are fiction here by the same author and so where did the boundary of real story and imagined story come here for me. I think, this is where the author came into play, messing with my mind and blurring the boundary of fiction and reality. Even as the story ended with the student's imagined story left hanging, I was left thinking about it equally as the main story. The main story does not end on a happy note anyway.


The narrative technique, strings along the user. For instance, while reading the student's imagination, you want to know what is happening in the simultaneous timeline and vice versa and as such is a good narrative technique for holding the interest of the user. It may be seem as a gimmick, but it sure requires a certain talent to write without ending up looking like a clumsy idiotic work. For instance, the teacher never says anything directly to the students, he  justs starts writing the words 'Kill Them' again and again in the board. This is more chilling than if we had actually told them directly to the students. Just think about the impact it would have on a classroom when they see their teacher writing this.


I also feel that the narrative technique is not just a simple gimmick. The story could very well be told as a linear one, but I doubt if the impact it had would have been the same. The student's imagined story is also a very dark one and one can infer that he is already a troubled kid. Maybe the story that the kid imagines, is his way of detaching from the problems he has in his life, with this imaginary world being his refuge. The teacher unfortunately does not seem to have this ability. What happens in the class room serves to push him over the edge that he was tottering on. (This is borne out by the epilogue which tells what happened after the incident). The end of childhood for a kid, who is in his own world of creation is bought out implicitly and more poignantly than if it had been a linear story. One also feels for the teacher. Why did he have the breakdown and did what he did. The reason is never told. That he is a substitute teacher, makes us think several things, maybe his job was about to be terminated, he did not have any other job in the offing, or some another completely different problem.
I wouldn't say this is a great story, but one that tries (again as usual with DFW), to push the boundaries of the manner of writing a little bit more.

Blindness - Jose Saramago- The Frailty of societies

All countries/societies, whether they be democratic, autocratic have one thing in common. A shared belief in having an ordered/civil society, where by and large things proceed normally and in a civilized manner. But just scratch the surface and we get to see the frailty inherent everywhere and the incompetence of most governments that run these societies. All our false sense of security and stability, requires just a tiny push to come tumbling down. Jose Saramago's Blindness is one such novel that exposes this. However it also shows the other side where some people respond with grace under extreme duress.


Saramago places his entire novel on the hypothetical question of what would happen if many people in a society suddenly become blind. How would the people and the powers to be react. As the novel opens, many people in an unnamed country are struck by a sudden epidemic of blindness. This blindness does not make everything dark, as is generally said, but a milky whiteness as experienced by the people who are affected by it. No character in the novel are named, which is just as  well, since the same could happen to anyone of us and as such the names of such characters do not serve much purpose. As the epidemic spreads, the government panics and comes upon a solution (?) to sort this out. All the affected people are moved to a center and the government sort of washes it's hands of it.


The main characters here are a Doctor and his wife, who by some random chance is not affected by the epidemic. However she goes with her husband to the place all the affected people are re-located to. It is more of a jail, with access to the outside world completely cut off and food being brought everyday by soldiers. The people grouped together by this try to form a familial unit to survive. But the environment inside is horrific. The living conditions and general hygiene degrade to a great extent and people have to live in complete filth. The group of soldiers assigned to control them and keep watch over them too are scared of the epidemic and do not show much interest. In fact, in a case of paranoia, one of the soldiers shoots down an inmate of the center, in a fit of rage. In such a scenario, just imagine a group of people who cannot see suddenly and have been just shunted into a place. They just would not know how to cope with this without any outside help. In a way the hell inside could be a mirror to the same degradation that would be happening outside, since the epidemic would still be spreading.  (As a reader, however we would not know this at this point of the novel, only later, so this is just my afterthought). The doctor's wife tries to help as much as possible, but it is a losing cause only. 


This is just the beginning of their problems. A small group among those affected forms a gang and takes control of access to the food being delivered to them. They form a sort of mafia and start bullying the others. For the women in the center, their nightmare has not yet begun yet. The gang wants some women delivered to them for satisfy their lust in exchange for the food being delivered equally among all. This is again a mirror for what happens in any society, where women have to bear more suffering than men in case of any calamity/wars etc. Haven't we read about women being raped, kidnapped during wars between even small gangs. However much we improve technologically,  our based and primitive instincts are never fully gone and are just lurking beneath the surface. Things come to such a pass, that with the help of the doctors wife, the inmates rebel against the gang and break out of the center. During this the center burns down too. The doctor's wife leads the others out of the center and into the outside world. 


What is seen outside is much worse or at-least as bad as inside the center. There has been complete breakdown of society everywhere. Places are abandoned, looted. No one knows what has happened to the government or if such a thing still exists and is functioning. The outside world is like a post-apocalyptic one and the people are like zombies. People live in abandoned buildings, sleeping wherever they and eating whatever they can find.  With the help of the doctor's wife, the escapees from the center try to form a cohesive unit, when suddenly people start getting their eyesight back. The epidemic leaves as inexplicably as it came. The novel ends here. 


The ending may seem abrupt to some and to of no purpose than to end the novel. I did not feel this way. To me, the epidemic was just a trope used by Saramago to illustrate how unstable we are and how closer to the primitive are we in our mindset than we actually care to know. The trope serves that purpose and as such the epidemic suddenly going off did not strike me as odd.
Saramago's style is different and special in the sense that he eschews most separators like quotation, commas, periods etc. To add to this, he uses long sentences. All these serve to give an impression of a person sitting around a fire and telling a story orally. For all his political leanings, Saramago is a humanist and story teller first and this novel is a perfect blend of both. He does not just give a bleak vision of our societies, but with the character of the doctor's wife, he also shows us that there are still people who can withstand the vagaries of life without losing the basic moral compass that guides us. One is never explicitly told why goes with her husband and suffers all the degradation. Is it love, that's just a fancy word for it. For some to suffer so much when she could basically have taken a chance and got out,  it must be something inherently great with the person. I distilled the novel as the following 'One can believe in the goodness of man, but he should not be surprised by the evil in the same man'
This is a very good read and highly recommended.