MEGAN GERMAN

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The survivor, the one who has passed through the catastrophe and can tell us what it is like. The survivor is a kind of living “black box,” a source of final knowledge and authority (Berger, p. 571).

 

 

“Contemporary literature” is a broad term encompassing modern works that challenge the conventions of past literary periods. Since the 2000s, global events such as 9/11 and the rapid rise of technology have reshaped the human condition, arguably renouncing human’s innate sense of being. As society progresses, collective problems increase beyond individual control, leaving us with nothing to do but worry. Through the short stories ‘Good Old Neon’ and ‘The Suffering Channel’ in David Foster Wallace’s collection Oblivion: Stories (2004), and My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) by Ottessa Moshfegh, I will analyse how contemporary literature responds to personal crisis through characters’ hyper-intellectualized mindsets, which leads to unstable coping mechanisms when faced with modern burdens. It is through these mindsets readers view how solipsism, the theory that the self is all that is known to exist, is affected by modernity to generate the Lacanian psychoanalytic theory of the ‘eruption of the Real’, which Claudia Breger describes as ‘the identity of the object’ (Breger, p. 83). This asserts the Real as a constant, however, after a traumatic event, the objective nature of the Real changes, causing an imbalance in stability.

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David Foster Wallace is a renowned contemporary writer who explores themes of grief and identity within a consumerist world. His short story ‘Good Old Neon’ (‘GON’) is about Neal, a man who struggles with what he calls the ‘fraudulence paradox’. This paradox causes an overanalyses of his intentions and how others perceive him. Hyper-intellectualism leads Neal to be pedantically worried about his ‘authentic’ self, which he deems non-existent. Neal’s belief in his phoniness causes a state of complete self-absorption, in which he cannot see past his recursive self-awareness spiralling into a cycle of internal questioning that separates him from others. At the end of the short story, he takes his life and continues narrating from beyond the grave, acknowledging the futility of his obsessive thoughts and how much of what he worried about had little impact on how others viewed him or the world at large.

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Similarly, in ‘The Suffering Channel’ (‘TSC’), Wallace explores the values of a consumeristic society. The story centres on Skip Atwater, a journalist at Style, who is writing a piece on Midwest artist Brint Moltke: a man who produces intricate statues through his excrement. The article is set to publish on September 10, 2001—one day before the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, which happens to be where Style’s offices are held. Published in 2004, David Foster Wallace uses readers’ post-9/11 perspectives to question the meaning of the content we consume, and how we use extremes to escape confronting psychological discomfort. The title itself refers to a fictional television channel that broadcasts human suffering as entertainment, blurring the lines between reality and spectacle. This idea is supported by Žižek in his article ‘The Ongoing “Soft Revolution”’ when he says ‘we are no longer dealing with the persons interacting, but with the multiplicity of intensities’ (p. 293). In this article he explains how humans have become so desensitized to content, in his instance pornography, that they need to create something even greater, that being the genre of hardcore pornography. While the Suffering Channel has no sexual implications behind the creation of the art, Wallace is responding to this ‘multiplicity of intensity’ with an added layer of voyeuristic detachment. The impact is that other humans watch heightened suffering to escape their own using the illusion of empathy to avoid dealing with the self.

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Ottessa Moshfegh explores similar themes in My Year of Rest and Relaxation (R&R). In it, the unnamed narrator, a wealthy, conventionally attractive, deeply depressed woman, undertakes a year-long drug-induced hibernation beginning in the summer of 2000. Orphaned and emotionally numb, she cuts off almost all contact with the outside world. Her only constant connections are her supposed best friend Reva and her drug-prescribing psychiatrist Dr Tuttle, who cares more about selling than helping. The ending of the novel concludes with September 11, 2001 (unlike ‘TSC’, which ends before the attack) as the narrator is fully ‘awakened’ from her year off and watches assumed Reva jump from a Twin Tower. The final line, ‘There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake’ (Moshfegh, p. 289), suggests possible redemption from modernity in the face of tragedy, and a return to emotional reality. These three texts explore the disintegration of self through internal crisis. Though characters differ in circumstance, each expresses a condition of hyper-consciousness and an overwhelming desire to escape it. It is through this essay which I will be dissecting the works that ultimately prove how contemporary literature verbalises the constant anxieties contemporary readers have held for over twenty years.

 

Mary Ellen Kondrat, acclaimed sociologist in social work, defines different forms of awareness which for the purpose of this essay will be comparing how Wallace and Moshfegh explore these different perceptions of self. Kondrat says there are three layers:

a) simple conscious awareness (awareness of whatever is being experienced), (b) reflective awareness (awareness of a self who is experiencing something), and (c) reflexive awareness (the self’s awareness of how his/her awareness is constituted in direct experience) (p. 452).

 

Kondrat’s model offers a useful framework for analysing how Wallace’s and Moshfegh’s characters perceive themselves. Kondrat notes that humans are never able to see their true selves, rather distorted mirrored images of self. This is comparable to the camera feedback mentioned at the end of ‘The Suffering Channel’ where ‘video capture of camera’s own monitor causes what is known in the industry as feedback glare’ (Wallace, p. 329). The camera feedback creates a similar illusion to the two mirrors facing each other, creating an infinite stream of lagged pictures that can never capture the true form of the first. Like the authenticity paradox in ‘GON’, when humans over-intellectualize everything, we see infinite versions of our lagged selves on repeat, never perceiving authentically. So, when humans are worried about how they appear, Wallace is perhaps implying not to worry, as it creates stress and anxiety through distorted memories. When humans are lusting after what we deem lust-worthy, we become subjective in our views: ‘the eye viewing the object is on the side of the subject, while the gaze is on the side of the object’ (Žižek, p. 35). We are never able to grasp the object of desire, simply because the concept then becomes undesirable. Upon his moment of death, Neal acknowledges the beauty of the world, saying ‘the fields’ insects are almost deafening. If the corn’s high like this and you watch as the sun sets’ (Wallace, p. 177). When reflecting upon his death post-mortem, none of what Neal was apprehensive about for so long even mattered. He avows, ‘Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you’ (p. 179). His unhappiness is irrelevant in death because he realizes his suffering was caused by his own fruition, hoping something better would come along. His mind-made reality erupted upon death, forcing him to become the objective gazer. While Neal claims people will never see the ‘real you’, I would argue he is only half-true, that it is not others who fail to see the true self, but rather ourselves.

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What makes ‘GON’ compelling is its ability to express this idea through its lack of written explanation. With a statement like, ‘For one thing, it was intensely mental and would take an enormous amount of time to put into words, plus it would come off as somewhat cliché’ (Wallace, p. 174), Neal is constantly expressing his inability to intellectualize his feelings without making them sound ‘cliché’. He has convinced himself that his emotions are more complex than others, creating an inhibited self-expression and causing feelings of fraudulence. I believe his distorted perception of self which is mirrored in an infinite realm of endless reflection misses Kondrat’s second stage of consciousness: Reflective consciousness, which emphasizes the distinction between the ‘I’ (the analyser) and the ‘me’ (the self being reflected on). Neal is aware of his feelings (simple consciousness) and believes he understands his motive of actions (reflexive consciousness) but because he is missing that crucial step between points A to C, he wrongfully perceives his actions as fraudulent, leading to his suffering, creating what I believe to be an extreme case of imposter syndrome harbouring an inability to cope.

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Now let’s compare the narrator in R&R to this theory. The narrator arguably exists in a state of simple consciousness, which ends up being the very consciousness she wants to escape. She does not want to perceive the outside world, or herself, rejecting reflective and reflexive thought. Still, she describes herself in disturbingly detached terms: ‘I was fashion candy. Hip décor. I was the bitch who sat behind a desk and ignored you when you walked into the gallery’ (Moshfegh, p. 36-37). These reflections appear to be made from a future standpoint, calling her reliability as a narrator into question. If she is recounting her ‘rest’ year from an ‘awakened’ perspective, we are receiving only a retrospective, perhaps distorted, version of her consciousness. Her anti-intellectualism is itself a product of solipsistic overthinking—a paradox that mirrors Wallace’s protagonists. Before her year of solitude, the narrator is a nihilistic character, resulting from a product of her upbringing. Even the concept of pets was considered either too burdensome or too pointless, so much so that even a pet fish, as Greenberg says, in his essay on the novel, ‘becomes a lesson in philosophical nihilism, the confined life of the fish serving as a metaphor for the pointlessness of human existence’ (Greenberg, p. 195). When Reva calls the narrator ‘a cold fish’ (Moshfegh, p. 8), this further incentivizes her to feed into a worldview in which all existence, including her own, feels meaningless.

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Wallace’s characters tend to lean towards nihilism in both of his stories, despite introducing the ‘celebrity paradox’, which is the belief that corresponds to solipsism. The most obvious example is in ‘TSC’ where he references Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran’s ‘Consciousness is nature’s nightmare’, comparing awareness to a curse. Cioran is discussed to be the ‘20th Century Nietzsche’ as their philosophies align with the notion that humans are natural sufferers. Wallace argues that through the hyper consciousness, humans are constantly learning and developing into a state of total suffering because of the dreadfulness in the modern world. Such is the case for Atwater’s desperate need for validation after a personality critique, despite being one of the top men at Style and being able to type on two different keyboards at once. Furthermore, we follow Neal in ‘GON’ through his stream of consciousness and view his overthinking tendency leading to his existentialist belief he is not good enough, despite his seemingly successful life. As Wallace seems to argue, the hyper-awareness forced by modernity through media overload, constant comparison, and endless internal reflection, makes it hard to ground oneself. Perhaps our brains are so developed that living in ignorance is no longer an option unless we choose to hibernate ourselves, like in R&R. Perhaps escaping from crisis is only achievable through total disconnection (if one is so privileged to do so). It is fear of the unknown to those who assume they know everything which stops contemporary individuals from emotionally connecting and accepting each other.​

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Packaged with a personal crisis is an ability, or inability, to cope. Each character in these texts has suffered from some form of trauma: death, abuse, guilt, and terrorism. It is the author's quest to contemplate the mechanisms explored and recognise escapist tactics used to process the events that happened. Whether it be a fictional problem through the lens of a character, or a historically significant event, such as 9/11, there tends to be a pattern in humanity coping through these instances. This may be shown through fear of being alone, drug use, or, more positively, creative outlets. What Wallace hypothesized in the 2010 published David Lipsky’s memoir, ‘technology is just gonna get better and better…and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money’ (Wallace quoted in Lipsky, p. 86). Let’s examine this quote relative to ‘TSC’.

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The story is named after the television channel that broadcasts dark uncomfortable snuff-like material. This is the world where The Suffering Channel exists, a world where pain is commodified. The art of Brint Moltke— ‘literally shit’ (Wallace, p. 238)— is transformed into content for a program that showcases extreme human suffering. Viewers crave the snuff as their ordinary life is no longer stimulating. The irony comes from the pain and suffering being orchestrated into a spectacle, as well as the impending suffering readers know is to come for these people. Behind the scenes of The Suffering Channel, wanna-be-famous Mrs Moltke is set to explain her husband’s art and childhood trauma, while ‘the artist’s face and grimace [is] captured by the special camera hidden’ (Wallace, p. 328). The emotionally conservative Moltke’s pain is manipulated by everyone surrounding him, as they are attempting (and succeeding) at capitalizing on it. The trauma is real, but the presentation is a performance. These characters’ relatability is not who they are, but how readers engulf them. While they are at times insufferable characters, their struggles mirror our own. We too have felt overwhelmed by life and wish that we could stop time and take a year off from living in a sleep-induced haze. We too have felt like frauds in everyday life. We seek external validation from an indifferent world. It is that escapist dream that forces us to cope with the challenges of everyday life that contemporary society has set out.

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Both Wallace and Moshfegh write about 9/11 from a post-9/11 world. So, what do these two stories have to say about the relevancy of human anxiety reflecting on the event? ‘TSC’ has a publication for the story on September 10th, while R&R takes place from 2000-2001. These times and places are not selected at random. Neither author treats 9/11 as a central narrative event but as an existential build-up. As readers recognise the publication date and Style’s location in the World Trade Center, author McClanahan writes: ‘The fantasy of foresight…can only appear in hindsight’ (p. 55). This creates what Žižek refers to as a ‘paradox of the “impossible knowledge” (Žižek, p. 38). We ask ourselves what can be taken forward in a post-9/11 world, but this creates a ‘[capability] of assuming for an instant a position of pure meta-language’ (Žižek, p. 38). The crises we anticipate rarely unfold the way we expect, and hindsight bias invalidates our past self’s experience with the (im)possibility of altering actions from a futuristic perspective. There is no such thing as a pre-9/11 world unless we are reflecting upon the event from hindsight, rather memory of ‘before’ is blurred by the trauma of ‘after’.

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To cope with dying, Neal narrates his story from the afterlife (or perhaps the moment he lives in infinitely between life and death). He may be trying to convince his past self not to get into the car he uses to commit suicide, adjuring the narrative to express his desire for life. On a more meta-narrative level, David Foster Wallace’s ‘self’ insert into the story perhaps alludes to a more emotional point, where he is attempting to communicate with himself the same idea. By justifying how someone can seemingly have it all be so unhappy to then regret death, Wallace is convincing his perception of self to do the same. This is quite a dark and tragic take as Wallace later killed himself on September 12, 2008. The story evolves into an attempt for both Foster Wallace (the writer, the “I”), David Wallace (the character, the “me”), and Neal (the narrator, the subjective gazing) to cope with the seemingly meaningless of life by working to make meaning. The argument is that as life furthers from tangibility, modern humans are becoming over-developed. The attempt at escaping the ‘real’ world is to be removed from it, but as Neal feels inauthentic with himself, he has trouble identifying what he perceives to be real, unlocking his internal crisis. His Real has erupted into intangibility and requires new defence mechanisms to be created as the old ones have been outgrown.

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Forest Pyle argues, ‘the crisis declared for historical representation is not that the past does not exist, but that there is no longer access to it as a meaningful and informing past, continuous with the present’ (quoted in Noffett, p. 91). Humans no longer find use of the pre-traumatized world, as our perceptions of reality differ from before. The quote gives access to view the texts as realizations in the authors’ abilities to comment on historic trauma. In R&R the narrator experiences a sense of re-birth and comes out of her experience with a new attitude. The narrator at the start of the book states ‘I didn’t do much in my waking hours besides watch movies’ (Moshfegh, p. 3) then goes on to say, ‘This was the beauty of sleep—reality detached itself and appeared in my mind as casually as a movie’ (p. 4). The constant consumption is a defence mechanism she has developed to stop the real world from being experienced and allowing the mind to be complacent. On the last pages of the novel, she watches Reva jump, claiming herself to be fully conscious, and finally awake.

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‘TSC’ has a moment of rebirth when Wallace writes, ‘whoever was awake to see the limousine glide by could tell that whoever was in there looking out saw everything afresh, like coming out of a long coma’ (Wallace, p. 326). This is the idea of a ‘fresh’ self coming to fruition after a sudden ‘realization’. Even Neal in ‘GON’ expresses ‘How sometimes it felt like I was actually asleep and none of this was even real and someday out of nowhere I was maybe going to suddenly wake up’ (p. 156). They all want to live and for things to get magically better; however, it isn’t until they accept life that it starts to become meaningful for them. This idea is contrastingly brought up in ‘GON’, as Neal is desperately searching for something real. He is waiting for that confirmation in his validity of feeling special but senses something is in the way— a blockage of depersonalization perhaps. But as Lacanian theory has it, his Real is simply a construct which only he knows of because it is created in his head. This is why he does not want help with his authenticity paradox, as he won’t authentically solve his problem, creating a Catch-22 paradox within the original paradox.

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How does this help characters cope with their problems of the past and current ones (of their time) such as 9/11? The narrator experiences everything in her simple consciousness and nothing beyond that—allowing her to accept all that faces her. She may not be able to make sense of the terrorism, but she accepts the non-sensical. She does not look at hindsight with malice but rather tries to accept her past and present beings. As modern life has consumed humanity, tragedy is used to escape for brief relief. It can bring together a community, as seen through Reva and her family after the death of her mother in R&R, or on a wider scale 9/11 which unified the American people, and in more recent times COVID-19. From a post-covid perspective, the pandemic was a tragedy that reformed society, like 9/11. It was people’s chance to capitalize on their own year of rest, but on the other spectrum, suicide rates skyrocketed as more people were trapped inside with nothing to do but think and consume. From tragedy comes crisis and subsequently a sense of clarity as people adapt their perception of self and reality. We are never fully able to understand these characters’ thoughts and feelings, but we can try and see where they are coming from. What Moshfegh and Wallace suggest is an awakening to confront the crisis for when it becomes inevitable.

 

All in all, ‘contemporary literature’ faces personal crises not through resolutions to large existential problems, but rather case-studying the fractured minds of individuals overwhelmed by a reality too complex to take in. Through Wallace and Moshfegh, hyper-intellectualized solipsistic states are transformed into both a symptom and response to contemporary culture and modernity’s traumas. These characters emerge from crisis through overbearing self-awareness and distorted authenticity into a reality that no longer makes sense to the innate state of being. Through Kondrat’s levels of awareness and Žižek’s affinity for Lacanian theory, we see these characters trapped in incomplete states of consciousness, resulting in the incapacity of reaching emotional clarity and external understanding.

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In a post-9/11 world, these narratives do not create a production of the tragedy, but rather the build-up to the anxiety preceding it, from a post-modernist perspective, creating a dread built up in the reader that is comparable to the fear of doom many contemporaries relate to today. In literature, societal traumas, such as 9/11 no longer simply represent a tragic terrorist attack against the American people, rather traumas transcend into anxieties and desires, grasping for the harmony that once brought civilians together. With tragedy after tragedy, and news being constantly accessible from our pockets, what makes these narratives still relevant is the innate sense of isolation and loneliness felt at large. Crisis is not always visible. Crisis is the unravelling of meaning and psychological erosion amplified by technological detachment, media saturation, and pressure to appear put together. Ultimately, these works do not offer simple solutions. Instead, these works reflect contemporary life and the attempt to survive a perceived tragedy.

                                                                

 

 

                                                                 Bibliography

 

Berger, J. (1997). Review: Trauma and Literary Theory. Contemporary Literature, [online] 38(3), pp.596–582. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/1208980.

Breger, C. (2001). The Leader’s Two Bodies: Slavoj Žižek’s Postmodern Political Theology. Diacritics, [online] 31(1), pp.73–90. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1566316 [Accessed 13 Apr. 2025].

 

Greenberg, J. (2021). Losing Track of Time. Daedalus, [online] 150(1), pp.188–203. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/48609833.

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Kondrat, M.E. (1999). Who Is the ‘Self’ in Self‐Aware: Professional Self‐Awareness from a Critical Theory Perspective. Social Service Review, 73(4), pp.451–477. doi:https://doi.org/10.1086/514441.

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Lipsky, D. and Wallace, D.F. (2010). Although of course you end up becoming yourself : a road trip with David Foster Wallace. New York: Broadway Books.

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McClanahan, A. (2009). Future’s Shock: Plausibility, Preemption, and the Fiction of 9/11. symploke, [online] 17(1-2), pp.41–62. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/symploke.17.1-2.0041?workspaceFolderId=1783b4be-4243-4dc1-aee8-f8352032f3b0&orderBy=custom_order&orderType=asc&index=5&seq=1 [Accessed 13 Apr. 2025].

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Ottessa Moshfegh (2018). My Year of Rest and Relaxation. London: Vintage.

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Wallace, D.F. (2004). Oblivion: Stories. London: Abacus, pp.141–189, 238–329.

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Žižek, S. (1989). Looking Awry. October, [online] 50, pp.30–55. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/778856.

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Žižek, S. (2004). The Ongoing ‘Soft Revolution’. Critical Inquiry, 30(2), pp.292–323. doi:https://doi.org/10.1086/421126.