THE MEANING OF LIFE: Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, #20 by David Foster Wallace: an analysis

 Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

David Foster Wallace. 

B.I. #20 12-96 

New Haven, CT 

[story within a story: man picks up a "hippie chick" and when she shares with him a story of how she saved herself from dying at the hands of a psychotic killer through vulnerability and not defenses, he is transformed.

1. narrator's relationship to the hippie chick

2. hippie chick's relationship to her psychotic attacker.

Many parallels and comparisons are drawn and made.]

"...she was going to become just another grisly discovery for some amateur botanist a few day hence unless she could focus her way into the sort of profound soul connection that would make it difficult for the fellow to murder her...I just decided to presume that focus was her obscure denomination's euphemism for prayer."

"And that this was my first hint of sadness or melancholy, as I listened with increasing attention to the anecdote, that the qualities I found myself admiring in her narration of the anecdote were some of the same qualities about her I'd been contemptuous of when I'd first picked her up in the park."

[correlation of the woman's effect on her attacker and her effect on the man who picked her up at the park (she is 'picked up' both times). narrator's initial stereotyping of her in a dismissive way was a defense mechanism which she now dismantles with her chosen vulnerability in the encounter with the psychotic killer. she is literally "disarming" to both of them.]

"...the death not of some abstract other person but your own personal death, and at the hands of someone whose reasons have absolutely nothing to do with you or the content of your character..."

[easily a death which is among the most difficult to accept for people-- violent, cruel, senseless, and especially-- random. the psychotic's rage is not even directed at the victim, who is just a stand-in for the 'mother']

"despite the terror she is somehow able to think quickly on her feet and thinks it through and determines that her only chance of surviving this encounter is to establish a quote connection with the quote soul of the sexual psychopath..."

"That her objective is to focus very intently on the psychotic mulatto as an ensouled and beautiful albeit tormented person in his own right instead of merely as a threat to her or a force of evil or the incarnation of her personal death."

"...she says she believes that sufficient love and focus can penetrate even psychosis and evil and establish a quote soul connection...and that if the mulatto can be brought to feel even a minim of this alleged soul-connection there is some chance that he'll be unable to follow through with actually killing her."

[the hippie chick, who holds esoteric beliefs about the power of love, decides to put them to the test in her encounter with the psychotic.]

"...since sexual psychopaths are well known to depersonalize their victims...namely that they do not see them as human beings at all but merely as objects of the psychopath's own needs and intentions."

"She wills herself to keep her gaze directly on him at all times...she visualizes her focus piercing through the mulatto's veil of psychosis and penetrating various strata of rage and terror and delusion to touch the beauty and nobility of the generic human soul beneath all the psychosis, forcing a nascent, compassion-based connection between their souls...and quietly tells him what she saw in his soul, which she insisted was the truth..."

"...he regards rape and murder as his only viable means of establishing some kind of meaningful connection with his victims..."

"It is his twisted way of having a, quote, relationship...the sexual psychotic is able to forge a sort of quote unquote connection via his ability to make her feel intense fear and pain, while his exultant sensation of total Godlike control over her--...--this allows him some margin of safety in the relationship."

[both the psychosis that developed in the personality under attack and the later expression of the psychosis are Defense Mechanisms. the narrator draws a comparison here between  his own need to seduce and abandon women he judges to be frivolous, frothy, unserious, as he judges the hippie chick to be, and the psychotic's need to be in total control over his victim.]

"...that it addressed the psychotic's core weakness, his grotesque shyness as it were, the terror that any conventional, soul-exposing connection with another human being will threaten him with engulfment and/or obliteration, in other words that he will become the victim...and thus that the connection he so desperately craves will not expose or engulf or obliterate him."

[as the narrator analyzes the psychotic's defenses, he identifies with him, consciously or unconsciously, and becomes increasingly plagued with a profound grief and feeling of loss at the realization that he was as incapable of intimacy as the psychotic. there is NO DOUBT this is an autobiographical story. DFW had deep unresolved issues regarding his mother, he was known to be a womanizer, he manifested a lot of violent rage and dysfunction in his relationship with Mary Karr, and i think he must have longed for the ideal mother he never had: an unconditionally loving, sensuous, accepting, safe hippie chick type female whom he could trust enough to become vulnerable with, who would never violate his vulnerability. i believe he finally found that with his wife, appropriately named Karen GREEN.]

"And that an all too obvious part of the reason for his cold and mercenary and maybe somewhat victimizing behaviour is that the potential profundity of the very connection he has worked so hard to make her feel terrifies him."

[he can't be vulnerable in sex, even as he strives to bring out the vulnerability in his partner. by using the word terrifies, he draws a direct comparison of his fears to those of the psychotic.]

MIRROR:

One side: narrator picks up a hippie chick at an outdoor concert for casual sex. 

Other side: psychotic individual picks up a hippie chick who is hitchhiking, intending to torture, rape, and kill her.

                               

[the only difference between these two scenarios is one of degree]

"The psychotic's relation to her [the mother] is one of both terrified hatred and terror and desperate pining need. He finds this conflict unendurable and must thus symbolically resolve it through psychotic sex crimes."

[the redundant use of the word 'terror' indicates how deep an issue this was for DFW who, as you well know, suffered from extreme anxiety and depression.]

"...she was surprised to find herself feeling no longer paralyzing terror for herself but a nearly heartbreaking sadness for him, the psychotic mulatto..."

[the hippie chick, in her willingness to recognize the humanity latent in the psychotic,  is freed from fear for herself and able to feel compassion for her victimizer. it is the pity of one who knows where to find the water, for a soul dying of thirst in the desert.]

"She says by this time she could feel very clearly that her acerose focus' connective powers were being aided by spiritual resources far greater than her own...she could feel the soul-connection holding and even strengthening...she could hear the conflict and disorientation in the sex offenders footsteps..."

[we see a REVERSAL in the roles of perpetrator/victim. as a result of the hippie chick's beliefs and access to a Higher Power, and of her ability to draw on compassion, it is now the psychotic who experiences all the fear that was meant for her.]

"...using all her energy and focus to sustain the feeling of connection with his conflicted despair.  She says now she felt terror but not her own."

[the psychotic vomits. he is vulnerable.]

"[all things around her]...were all made of precisely the same thing and were connected by something far deeper and more elemental than what we limitedly call quote unquote love...and that she could feel the psychotic fellow feeling the truth of this at the same time she did and she could feel the plummeting terror and infantile conflict this feeling of connection aroused in his souls and stated again...that she too could feel this terror, not her own but his..."

[she experiences that all is One, including her attacker. the empathetic connection is complete, she transcends the limitations of her humanity. victim comforts perpetrator.]

"...she claiming it took her no effort of will to hold him as he wept and gibbered as he raped her and stroking the back of his head and whispering small little consolatory syllables in a soothing maternal singsong."

"...it struck me that this behaviour of hers during the rape was an unintentional but tactically ingenious way to in a way prevent it, or transfigure it, the rape, to transcend its being a vicious attack or violation, since if a woman as a rapist comes at her and savagely mounts her can somehow choose to give herself, sincerely and compassionately, she cannot be truly violated or raped, no? That...she was now giving herself instead of being quote taken by force, and that in this ingenious way, without resisting in any way, she had denied the rapist the ability to dominate and take." 

[THE SECRET OF LIFE: WHEN WE DEHUMANIZE OTHERS WE DEHUMANIZE OURSELVES; WHEN WE CHOOSE VULNERABILITY OVER DEFENSES, WE CAN TRANSCEND VICTIMIZATION AND BECOME FREE. SHE MADE IT HER OWN CHOICE TO LOVE THE LATENT HUMANITY OF AN INHUMAN PERSONALITY AND IN DOING SO, SHE WON, SHE OVERCAME, SHE TRANSCENDED.]

"...the mystic approaches the hot-dog stand and tells the vendor Make me one with everything."

"I felt more and more sad."

[the narrator is devastated by the realization he had never experienced true intimacy with anyone.]

"His eyes were holes in the world. She felt almost heartbroken, she said, as she realized that her focus and connection were inflicting far more pain on the psychotic than he could ever have inflicted upon her." 

"I began in the dark of our room to feel terrible sadness and fear. I felt as though there had been far more genuine emotion and connection in that anti-rape she suffered than in any of the so-called lovemaking I spent my time pursuing."

"Imagine being able to console someone as he weeps over what he's doing to you as you console him."

[THE SECRET OF LIFE: BY MAKING THE CHOICE NOT TO DEMONIZE OTHERS, EVEN IF THEY BEHAVE DEMONICALLY TOWARDS YOU, YOU HAVE THE POWER TO ENABLE THEIR HUMANITY TO EMERGE.]

"I realized I had never loved anyone."

[COMING OUT OF DENIAL IS THE FIRST STEP.]

"And sadder and sadder that it had not once...not once occurred to me before what an empty way this was to come at women, then. Not evil or predatory or sexist-- empty. To gaze and not to see, to eat and not be full."

 

[Biblical: those who have ears, but cannot hear; who have eyes but cannot see. narrator describes the grief and abandonment he always experienced in the moment of his partner's climax; that he has been left alone, left behind, rejected.]

"I felt certain that the psychotic had driven off somewhere to kill himself"

[narrator becomes the psychotic rapist; he identifies with the emptiness of the psychotic so completely, that he is suicidal...to glimpse a heaven that one failed to recognize in time enough to become part of it. despair.]

"The story's emotional impact on me was profound and unprecedented and I will not even try to explain it to you. She said she wept because she had realized that as she stood hitchhiking her religion's spiritual forces had guided the psychotic to her, that he had served as an instrument of growth in her faith and capacity to focus and alter energy fields by the action of her compassion...She learned more about love that day with the sex offender than at any other stage in her spiritual journey, she said."

[SIGNIFICANT: for the first time the narrator doesn't put quotation marks around the word "love." he moves from cynicism and defenses to vulnerability and belief, things he had never allowed himself to experience prior to meeting the hippie chick. in her sharing her story with him, she effects a transformation in the narrator no less than the one she effects in the psychotic. for DFW, cynicism was perhaps the biggest obstacle to his sobriety through a twelve-step program. surrender is required and very brilliant people like him find it difficult to believe or to trust. what he used to condescend to and gently or not so gently, chide, he now embraces, completely. this story, above all, is a story of conversion.]

"I was moved, changed-- believe what you will. My mind seemed to be moving at the quote speed of light. I was so sad...Nothing else mattered. She had all my attention. I'd fallen in love with her. I believed she could save me."

[THE HIPPIE CHICK, who symbolizes unconditional love or Divine Love, BECOMES THE NARRATOR'S HIGHER POWER. WHEN SOULS WHICH SEEK BEAUTY AND TRUTH ENCOUNTER IT, THEY GIVE THEMSELVES TO IT COMPLETELY.]

                     THE BEGINNING