Tending Gardens in Brains, Inc.

by Joel Winkelman

I was talking to a student recently who was working through, for the first time, what it meant to have a creative hero knocked from his pedestal. I’d like to say that through our conversation, we uncovered some novel dimension of this recurring problem. I can’t speak for the student, but I know I didn’t reach any new conclusions or insights.

Of course, I have these conversations all the time. Since I write about and teach old books, I am always making arguments for reading things from the ancient past. In my political theory courses, the freshest books we read are from the 1950s--by now almost unimaginable. I make arguments for reading texts that are connected to some of the world’s great, sweeping currents of misery. They are (or can be reasonably interpreted as) defenses of slavery, colonialism, misogyny, and all manner of ascriptive hierarchies. Having this conversation is part of my job, is what I’m saying.

When talking to my student about how we think about books and their authors, the metaphor I thought of was that of tending a garden. Perennial flowers require some maintenance. Sometimes they have to be pruned back or transplanted. Sometimes they have to be removed. Sometimes all it takes is some companion plants to reveal new dimensions of the garden as a whole. But we should be cautious about making a decision based on one season’s flowering.

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In the years that I have been tending my own metaphorical garden, I’ve removed and rearranged things many times. Some things have attracted diseases, or have overrun the garden. Those have to go. In trying to explain this metaphor, I made the argument for continuing to engage those works that made an impression on you, and to try and understand who you were when that work first made that impression: what was the nature of your connection with the work? Does that connection still matter? If not, can you identify a more mature connection with it?

Before I realized that I was thinking of books this way, I had already developed an intuitive understanding of this process. But I have seldom had an occasion to reflect systematically on it. At least until recently, when I published an essay on a writer who has become, in the parlance of our times, “problematic.” While writing it, I began to wonder whether everything becomes problematic at a certain point.

In her recent book Pure Colour, Sheila Heti has written about books reaching an awkward age, when they are “twenty years too old, yet not quite old enough.” It is one of the gifts of the profession of those of us who teach college that we can revisit these books and think about them systematically over the course of many years. Although working at a liberal arts college means being outside of the main trends of academic research, there is also a freedom to nurture uncommon interests and idiosyncratic concerns. And a community of people with whom to share them.

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The essay that made me think about my relationship with a “problematic” writer was about the political writing of the novelist David Foster Wallace. I had written the first draft of the paper nearly 10 years before publishing it. In the meantime, I had other papers to publish, and a book manuscript to finish. What’s more, I didn’t really know how to frame it for publication in my field. At the end of every semester, I would open the draft and tinker here and there with the ungainly draft, then put it away.

I started reading Wallace in the 1990s, at the urging of a high school teacher. For a long time, I didn’t reflect on the circumstances that led to her sharing with me his collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Over the long course of tinkering on this paper, I had a chance to revisit and reflect on my interest in Wallace and keep abreast of the changing circumstances of his reception. I think the two are related.

 Over the course of tinkering with this draft and reflecting on my relationship with Wallace, I started to re-interpret the circumstances that led me to him. I was introduced to Wallace by a teacher whose relationship with me was inappropriate. She didn’t molest me or engage in any sexual contact, but she did disclose to me, a 16 year-old boy, the two of us alone in her classroom, that she had recently dreamed about me and proceeded to describe the dream in sufficient detail to make me uncomfortable. At other times she held me after class to tell me that she lived in my neighborhood and indeed which house was hers, and how often her husband traveled for work. Remembering this episode as a teacher myself makes me feel retrospectively chilled.

My point is simply that I have come to think that for me, David Foster Wallace was part of some strange cerebral and erotic power play, and that I understand, in my own way, the gleeful way some people now argue for abandoning his writing. For my part, continually revisiting his work has been an opportunity to reconstruct and reflect on that experience, and to try and separate the writing itself from my experience.

 In tinkering with the essay over the last decade, I also found myself reading and re-reading Wallace’s fiction. There is something thrilling in the way his writing turns from absurd slapstick, to maximalist circumlocution, and then becomes suddenly intimate and private.

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Some of the vernacular is starting to show its age; some of the jokes aren’t funny anymore. But most of it still works, and can still reveal new things with each reading. One of my favorite of his stories is “Mr. Squishy,” from his 2004 collection, Oblivion. To the extent that it makes sense to speak of Wallace studies, the story gets almost no attention in the field. You can find a few amateur-expert readings online and probably an asymptotically redundant spectrum of discussion-board threads.

I think there’s good reasons for the lack of attention. When I was talking to my partner about the story, she interrupted me to say, “I’ve heard you tell me about this a million times. I think what’s interesting is the writing because it sounds like it isn’t really a story.” And yet, the writing itself isn’t very interesting either. It is, frankly, boring. It’s full of abbreviations and acronyms, and its exposition is disjointed and hard to follow. In other words: reading it feels like work.

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The setting is a downtown Chicago skyscraper where, on the nineteenth floor, focus groups have been convened to evaluate a new snack cake branded as  Felonies! from the Mr. Squishy corporation. One of the focus group facilitators, Terry Schmidt, is conducting an “unconventionally informative” session where group members receive a peek behind the curtain at the process that produces the snack cake, from its physical production to its marketing and distribution.

Schmidt’s session is unconventional in another sense: the focus group has two ringers (dubbed “Unannounced Assistant Facilitators” or “UAFs”) whose presence ensures the unconventionally informative session. Schmidt’s role is to test and analyze the effects of giving a full access presentation about the product to the focus group. The suspense that drives this plot is the revelation that one of the UAFs is outfitted with an “emetic prosthesis” to project fake vomit once Terry Schmidt leaves them to their own deliberation.

Meanwhile, outside the building, a gathering crowd watches the movements of a figure scaling the outside of the skyscraper for unknown reasons. As the figure’s movements attract more people, these scenes develop a cinematic quality, like a disaster movie. Onlookers begin to circulate rumors, media and emergency vehicles arrive, pointing toward an ominous climax.

Is it a terrorist attack? An elaborate marketing hoax? A jumper? The climber is revealed to be wearing some sort of inflatable suit. And to the extent that this plot resolves at all, the climber inflates the suit to reveal, we are left to suppose, the Mr. Squishy brand icon. From additional details in the story, we can surmise that the inflated face will be appearing just outside the conference room window where Terry Schmidt is about to leave his focus group to their deliberations.

As the story moves toward its climactic moment, an absurd number of variously developed details and potential plotlines emerge. One strand involves Terry Schmidt developing poison at home that can be administered in the snack cakes via a hypodermic needle (perhaps it already has). We also learn that Schmidt’s focus group is itself part of a marketing plan to sell the snack cakes to savvy consumers by transforming the product’s marketing into the pitch itself. At the same time, other executives are running an elaborate experiment—presumably including the climber in the inflatable suit and the emetic prosthesis guy—to eliminate the jobs of the focus group facilitators. And all of this, from Terry Schmidt’s bioterrorist plot to the climber in the inflatable suit, may have been masterminded by a single executive as part of some elaborate scheme to neutralize an upstart rival.

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When I first read the story, I thought it was a highly developed, bleak satire of life under advanced consumer capitalism, another rehearsal of one of Wallace’s favorite themes. Everything is part of one great sales pitch. Our shared life is a commercial for the junk food that’s poisoning us.

At times, it reads like scenes from C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite in microcosm. The real decisions get made behind closed doors and the conflicts and petty grievances of the rest of the organization amount to an organized stalemate, assisting the people who really run the show. There are smoky back rooms, private meetings on sailboats. The little people are the playthings of the big shots. Indeed, in the final scene, after all the actors take their places, the villainous mastermind assumes the posture of a movie director, counting down to action.

 The story’s exterior scene invites a kind of 60s-ish New Left reading: a real Guy-Debord-and-the-Situationists kind of energy infects it. The people outside the building watching the human brand icon climb the tower reinforce the concept that there really is no outside. We watch the crowd go, emotionally, from curiosity to cynicism, from fear to disgust and finally to delight when the suit is inflated and the Mr. Squishy brand is revealed. Their reactions are conditioned, pre-ordained by capitalism’s priests, the marketing drones inside the building.

In fact, I can imagine Wallace imagining this interpretation and laughing at his future interpreters, guys who think they look good in corduroy suits, their back teeth grinding away on the stem of a Grecian briar pipe: bit characters from White Noise come-to-life, boring their students with stale observations about a set of stances toward capitalism that are literally senseless two generations deep into a world where we all carry around private electronic billboards. Consider the breadcrumbs.

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That, anyway, was my first reading, nearly 20 years ago. But now the world had changed. I had changed. Wallace’s reputation had changed.

A few things stood out in this new context. The Matryoshka Doll not-quite-a-plot seems less important than the character of Terry Schmidt, the focus group’s facilitator. He’s not comic relief, not a clown but a kind of incel terrorist. Other characters are competitive middle-managers who would do anything for their boss, anything for professional advancement, including, in one case, sexually harassing a co-worker and exposing themselves to costly personal liability and the moral injury that results from the abuse of power, the kind of injury that occasions the kind of life-changing psychological processing that tends toward religious conversion or a deliberate atrophy of the conscience.

The mastermind behind this whole sad carnival of evil doesn’t actually do anything himself. He just tells other people what to do. In other words, I thought the story was not so much The Power Elite as it was a kind of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt’s famous account of “the banality of evil,” detailing a kind of bureaucratization of monstrosity where harm is institutionalized via a blank dissociating thoughtlessness.

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At least that was the essay I thought I was going to write when I revisited this story a few weeks ago. But another semester has come and gone, and here I am, writing about Wallace. Arendt’s Eichmann book has been haunting me almost as long as Wallace has been. Students get bummed out and don’t know how to respond to it. As I was explaining all of this to a friend of mine he asked, “So what does the Eichmann book say about evil?” It’s a great question because there is actually no story in Arendt’s book to communicate any kind of moral lesson, tidy or untidy. In fact, it doesn’t really say anything about evil. Really reading Arendt’s book shows the futility of talking about its thesis.

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I realized that if “Mr. Squishy” could be said to be about anything, it is a story about work. It took me back to C. Wright Mills, but instead of The Power Elite, I thought of White Collar, Mills’s study of the middle-class office. Wallace’s story opens us up to thinking about the way that work makes us replaceable and interchangeable, even as white collar work requires from us the contribution of our unique personalities.

It shows, in other words, how much work molds us into individualized instances of an institutional style.

We need to bring enough of our own self to work in order to enter it into what Mills called “the personality market.” These are, of course, the sorts of asides that go through Terry Schmidt’s head “in total subjective private while Schmidt ran the Focus Group through its brief and supposedly Full-Access description of Mister Squishy’s place in the soft-confection industry” (31).

Schmidt and the other white collar workers have been asked to bring their selves to work. And so it’s easy for each of them to imagine that they are “fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful” people who “can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact of their unique and central presence in it” (30). Indeed, this is the promise of this organization of work: “making a difference,” whether in our chosen field or the world at large.

In the world of the story, the idea gets introduced early on as “the whole problem and project of descriptive statistics” (12). Motivating Terry Schmidt’s bioterrorist plot is the “shame of being so hungry to make some sort of real impact on an industry” (32). The concept of making a difference reappears as “a platitude so familiar that it was used as the mnemonic tag in low-budget Ad Council PSAs” (48). And the concept is used, in the end, to describe the story’s villain, whose face carried “the invulnerably cheerful expression of a man who had made a difference in all he’d ever tried” (56).

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I’ll admit that I’ve been thinking through this story after a semester in which I taught The Human Condition. There, Hannah Arendt writes about the equality and distinctiveness of each life. “With each birth something uniquely new comes into the world,” a novelty that “always appears in the guise of a miracle.” It is a miracle because novelty “happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability” (178). In its circuitous German style, Arendt maintains that the central mistake of modern life is the reversal of the ancient sense of when and how it was possible, let alone appropriate, to display our individuality. In modern life, we think that our private lives are the places where our truest selves can and should appear. When we do consider public life, we most often think of work. The private sphere shelters and develops our truest self so that we can bring it to work and make a difference. Or so we think.

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In reality, the white collar workplace demands a merger of our selves with the job, the transformation of a job from something we do to something we are. In “Mr. Squishy,” this smooth integration of self and work is what unites the lowly Terry Schmidt and the top dog Alan Britton. As Schmidt’s psychosis deepens, “his own face and the plump and wholly innocuous icon’s face tended to bleed in his mind into one face” (33–34). Alan Britton is described variously as “an enormous macadamia nut with a tiny little face painted on it” (62) and as having “a large smooth shiny oval head in the precise center of which were extremely tiny close-set features” (56).

Likewise outside, on the building, the job of the climbing figure is to become a living brand icon. Truly the grimmest corporate truism I’ve ever heard came from a longtime manager at a multinational agriculture firm who said the essence of work was that “everyone is needed, and no one is necessary.” Or, as the story would have it, anyone can be Mr. Squishy.

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And that has led me to reflect on my own work. I started to notice that Terry Schmidt’s role as a focus group facilitator resembles teaching. There are the cultivated mannerisms, the way he plays with his persona, whether he’s one of the group or standing outside it, and his own attempts to manage the group’s indifference to his presence. Is it so very different to lead a college seminar and a product focus group? Are we who work in a liberal arts college as doomed as the characters who function like parts of a marketing machine? Are we destined to become Mr. Squishy?

Some of us are, to be sure. But if we somehow escape this fate, I want to suggest it’s not because our work itself is so very different, but because of our attitude toward it.

It’s in developing the ability to find meaning, fulfillment, and purpose from our activities, which we keep separate from our identities. At least that’s what I told a recent graduate at a professional crossroads, back on campus to see some friends graduate. We must see ourselves as separate from our work in order to accept its gifts.

For me, those gifts consist of the chance to continue to tend my garden–-the books that I love and care for–-by teaching them and writing about them. I watch them change with the seasons, see their extravagant foliage one year and their meager fruits another.

I prune and snip, rearrange them, try to cultivate new ones, and let others go. But I remember that it is a gift that my profession gives me. I come and go from the garden. I’d rather not turn into a scarecrow, and I don’t need to be a hothouse flower. I’m just the gardener.