“[I] never knew as much pleasure and as little contentment.”
—Anaïs Nin, Diaries, October 5, 19351
“I finally had an orgasm, and my doctor told me that it was the wrong kind.”
“Did you have the wrong kind, really? I’ve never had the wrong kind, ever. My worst one was right on the money.”
—Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979)
We began with Jean Rhys’s Sasha trudging the streets of Paris, set ironically against her peers in the “after-war generation” who were “mad for pleasure.” For modernist writers, pleasure was a problem. It was a force that seemed to have run amok in contemporary culture: in the cinema, in popular literature, and in the public’s enthusiasm for fun. While general audiences, living through a time of political and social upheaval, dazed from one war and about to enter another, embraced mass culture amusement, modernist writers took up the mantle of arduous, deliberate pleasure as a defense of language, contemplation, and the autonomy of art. As their work confirms, even as they expounded the charms of unpleasure, they were constantly aware of the attractions of “the tepid bath of nonsense,” as Huxley put it.
Cut, now, from Paris in the 1930s to the Upper West Side of Manhattan in our time, to Symphony Space, a venue known for its annual live reading of selections from Ulysses on June 16. The Bloomsday celebration, like others around the country and the globe, indicates how modernism—even high modernism—has been embraced and absorbed not just into the academy but into contemporary culture. And yet on the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday in 2004, British and American newspapers noting the event found a way to emphasize Ulysses’s reputation as the most famous unread novel of the twentieth century. The New York Times observed that Ulysses “has come to stand as the apogee of ‘elitist’ literature” because of its “byzantine difficulty.” NPR pointed out that “the difficulty of reading Ulysses is as legendary as the novel itself.” And the BBC commented that “for all its renown and notoriety, it is a book that few have read and even fewer comprehend.”2
In April 2012, Symphony Space sponsored another modernist event: a month-long festival called “Gertrude’s Paris”:
The Paris of Gertrude Stein was wild and exhilarating with the creative spirits of the time collaborating, canoodling, and conspiring, and at the center of it all—Stein’s salon. Join in our month-long celebration of this magical time of music, film, literature, and art. Come to Symphony Space, and make her world yours.3
“Gertrude’s Paris” included wine tasting, jazz performances, a fashion show, a photography exhibit, films, and a discussion of Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. However, amid all the “collaborating and canoodling,” the main works of Stein herself that were presented were accompanied by music and dancing. In the same way that Stein’s libretto for Four Saints in Three Acts was set to a distinctly nonmodernist score by Virgil Thomson and staged with Florine Stettheimer’s decorative sets, the raw, linguistically complex Stein was not center stage at “Gertrude’s Paris.” Similarly, the 2011 traveling exhibition “Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories” focused on her clothes, art collecting, and circle of famous friends: that is, more on the “pop,” visual, sybaritic Stein in keeping with the lovable, lumpy Stein of Midnight in Paris, rather than the obscure, challenging Stein on the page. Writing for The New York Review of Books, Michael Kimmelman noted the conflux of Steiniana—including “The Steins Collect,” an exhibition of Leo and Gertrude’s art collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Barbara Will’s Unlikely Collaborators: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma; and a new edition of Stein’s novel Ida—and concluded that while “Stein endures,” her novels and poems remain “unread as always.”4
Clearly, modernism is alive in and outside the academy. However, it is worth noting which parts of modernism are foregrounded and which are sidelined or minimized. While the generation that canonized modernism and New Criticism promoted it as a thorny, complicated body of work, those features are not emphasized as much in recent modernist studies, which has notably sought to integrate the vernacular modernisms of “Gertrude’s Paris” into the field. Perhaps it is inevitable that once we have mastered modernism’s maneuvers, its knots are unraveled and its edgy energy is diminished. Modernist unpleasure, a defining feature of this literature, may register most forcefully with the first-time reader who struggles with linguistic and narrative innovation. To sense this textual unpleasure is to recover what made modernism surprising, shocking, and challenging in its own time.
One important reason for the shift in the meaning of modernism in the second half of the twentieth and the early twenty-first century is that postmodern culture has reframed some of the central tensions that motivated modernism’s ambivalence about pleasure. The perceived opposition of high and low culture driven by different kinds of pleasure is not so much of a dilemma for postmodern art—or contemporary scholarship—as it is a generative condition. Postmodernism has inherited the discourse of differential pleasures, but usually references it in a spirit of self-conscious play rather than embattled defense. Nor does the opposition between somatic and cerebral pleasure hold sway as it once did. One major event in the genealogy of pleasure after modernism was when the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s and early 1970s fueled an explosion of explicit art, literature, and utopian hedonism, and theorists such as Wilhelm Reich, Nancy Friday, and Shere Hite suggested that pleasure could be a revolutionary force.5 Friday and Hite, in particular, point to the crucial development of twentieth-century feminism. Women, who had long been cast as the ground of somatic, nonintellectual pleasure, were speaking for themselves.
Still, unpleasure remained a darkly magnetic force. The legacy of modernism’s anxiety about and hierarchization of pleasure is felt strongly in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996).6 Since his death in 2008, critics and peers have affirmed Wallace’s central place in postmodern literature and Infinite Jest, a massive novel with innumerable intersecting nonlinear narratives, has been canonized as a classic of postmodern metafiction. With its stories within stories, selfreferentiality, and Nabokovian endnote apparatus that includes graphs and sub-footnotes, the novel is a virtual encyclopedia of postmodern strategies. Throughout, Wallace’s sly critique of late capitalism and commercialism (for example, each year is sponsored by a product, and much of the action occurs during The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment) is combined with a zeal for and humor about the popular culture that it interrogates. Wallace’s fascination with technology and technophobia, his invocation and spoofing of strict ideological hierarchies, along with his criticism of capitalist commodification while also gleefully mocking its idioms, are typical of what Linda Hutcheon has called postmodernism’s “deliberate refusal to resolve contradictions.”7
One of the major themes of Infinite Jest is addiction and pleasure disorders. A prominent narrative strand that cuts across the novel’s many plots, and whose importance is indicated by its titular role, is a mysterious film by one James Orin Incandeza, Jr. called Infinite Jest. Known as “the Entertainment” or “the samizdat,” the film is “a recorded pleasure so entertaining and diverting it is lethal” (321). Once people start viewing it, it is so mesmerizing that they obsessively watch until they die. A group of radical Quebeçois separatists want to use Infinite Jest as a terrorist weapon against Americans, who, one character remarks, “would die for this chance to be fed this death of pleasure with spoons, in their warm homes, alone, unmoving” (318).
What makes “the lethal cartridge” so compelling? The brief and possibly fallacious descriptions of the film—for no one who sees it is supposed to survive that viewing—sketch a scenario in which an extraordinarily beautiful woman appears as “some kind of maternal instantiation of the archetypal figure of Death, sitting naked, corporeally gorgeous, ravishing, hugely pregnant … explaining in very simple childlike language to whomever the film’s camera represents that Death is always female, and that the female is always maternal” (788). Shot from the perspective of a child in a crib, the film shows the woman bending over the infant and uttering apologies: “I’m so sorry. I’m so very sorry. I am so, so sorry” (939). The “ultimate pleasure” here is intimately connected to the maternal body and to infantile regression, drawing not only from psychoanalytic discourse but also from the centuries-old association of the female body with pleasurable passivity and also anxiety. The samizdat calls to mind T. S. Eliot’s assertion that mass culture appeals to a “desire to return to the womb.”8
Infinite Jest alludes to other pleasure technologies, such as Reich’s orgone accumulator, the Excessive Machine in Roger Vadim’s Barbarella (1968), and David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983). Wallace explicitly connects the Entertainment to the historical discourse and science of pleasure. At one point, some of the characters in Infinite Jest discuss the discovery in the 1970s, by a neuroscientist named Olders, that “firing certain electrodes in certain parts of the lobes gave the brain intense feelings of pleasure” (470). These areas are called “p-terminals” (pleasure-terminals). Building on the data, Canadian scientists implanted electrodes in a rat’s brain and “found that if they rigged an auto-stimulation lever, the rat would press the lever to stimulate his p-terminal over and over, thousands of times an hour, over and over, ignoring food and female rats in heat, completely fixated on the lever’s stimulation, day and night, stopping only when the rat finally died of dehydration or simple fatigue” (471). The artificial stimulation of the p-terminal overrides opportunities for real carnal pleasure (“food and female rats in heat”). Wallace adds a twist to this fictionalized version of James Olds and Peter Milner’s famous rat experiments in the 1950s: when word gets out about the studies, people start lining up to volunteer for pleasure implants. “We would choose dying for this, the total pleasure of a passive goat” (474).
Wallace’s depiction of a society of individuals drowning in but not enjoying pleasure offers a culmination to Rhys’s Sasha and other early twentieth-century pleasure seekers. Rhys, Huxley, Eliot, Lawrence, and other authors merely imagine cinema audiences rendered passive and narcotized. Wallace goes further in creating a vehicle of entertainment that literally kills its viewers with pleasure as they neglect everything else and give themselves over to hedonism. The modernist metaphors of intoxication and hypnosis are now a deadly addiction. This is a Freudian version of Plato’s oyster, “merely a body endowed with life,” without the exercise of reason or intellect, and a pure receptor of pleasure. It is also the ultimate regressive fantasy, akin to the sort Huxley found so revolting in Al Jolson’s “Mammy” song, and an abandonment of the intellect.
While Infinite Jest is in many ways a dystopic text and the samizdat a nightmarish invention, it is only a limit case for the kinds of questions about the philosophical and ethical implications of pleasure that Wallace often raised in his fiction and nonfiction. For example, in the first-person “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” he reports with near-Huxleyian contempt on a “mass-market Luxury Cruise” that he took for a Harper’s magazine assignment: “they’ll micromanage every iota of every pleasure-option so that not even the dreadful corrosive action of your adult consciousness and agency and dread can fuck up your fun. Your troublesome capacities for choice, error, regret, dissatisfaction, and despair will be removed from the equation.”9 The cruise line’s slogan is “Your Pleasure is Our Business”: a motto that would be equally apt for Huxley’s Brave New World, where there is “no leisure from pleasure.” The modernist dystopia, Wallace suggests, has been visited upon contemporary culture. Wallace’s father, James D. Wallace, was a philosopher whose publications include “Pleasure as an End of Action” (1966), a consideration of classical hedonism and the relationship between freedom and pleasure.10 The younger Wallace also meditates on philosophies of pleasure throughout his work. In an essay on “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” Wallace asks, “Is the real point of my life simply to undergo as little pain and as much pleasure as possible? My behavior sure seems to indicate that this is what I believe, at least a lot of the time. But isn’t this kind of a selfish way to live?”11 In interviews too, Wallace often voiced concern about how in contemporary Western culture “pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself.” He argued that “it’s impossible to spend that many slack-jawed, spittle-chinned, formative hours in front of commercial art without internalizing the idea that one of the main goals of art is simply to ‘entertain,’ give people sheer pleasure. Except to what end, this pleasure-giving?”12
Consistent with modernist views of pleasure, Wallace proposed that “mass-market” and “commercial” amusement, with their attendant “fun,” could be countered by “serious” art. When asked about television, he observed that
audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas “serious” art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art audience, especially a young one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction.13
Infinite Jest is anything but a passive descent into narrative pleasure. It bombards its readers with proliferating plots, detours, obscure lexicon, and tricky constructions. Wallace does not experiment much at the level of the word, like Joyce, or break up the sentence to the same degree that Stein, for example, does. However, Infinite Jest’s intricate narrative structures, including its rabbit hole digressions, have a highly self-conscious and self-mocking tone that demand an alert patience, discipline, and a sense of the text as both work and play. Wallace conceded that his writing expresses “a kind of hostility to the reader … sometimes in the form of sentences that are syntactically not incorrect but still a real bitch to read. Or bludgeoning the reader with data. Or devoting a lot of energy to creating expectations and then taking pleasure in disappointing them.”13 The solution to a culture of compromised pleasure, for Wallace, is aesthetic difficulty and even alienation: refusing readers the bliss of the samizdat and offering them instead a demanding cognitive experience. Language, and specifically an antagonistic writerly stance toward readers—bombarding, discomforting, bludgeoning, disappointing—is the antidote to “fun.” Wallace looks to modernist-inaugurated reading effects as a source of cultural resistance and rigor.
From one angle, Infinite Jest looks like a parody of modernist views of pleasure, but from another, it is an elaborate extension of those ideas. For Wallace, as for many modernists, the difference between serious and commercial art turned on the distinction between an experience that is learned and earned, and a kind of “fun” that comes all too easily. And yet, his work everywhere signals a hyperconsciousness about the biases that inform that position and a recognition of the inevitability and intricacy of the audience’s relationship to mass culture. In postmodernism, mass culture is not so much a guilty pleasure as it is the white noise of our time. But for some writers, like Wallace, pleasure itself as a broader category of experience remains suspect, and the role of “serious” art is still thought to be the presentation of aesthetic tension as a bulwark against trite amusement. So even though postmodernism can be irreverent about the kinds of cultural classification modernism espoused, those hierarchies still shape the way some writers understand art.
That said, we are in the midst of a major paradigm shift in pleasure. Wallace’s samizdat is about sixteen years old, and its technology—the “cartridge” that is passed from hand to hand—is already obsolete. Its materiality marks it as antiquated. Instead, we are surrounded by digital technologies that stimulate our “p-terminals” by artificial means. Pharmaceuticals such as SSRIs and Viagra, and recreational drugs such as ecstasy, have perfected chemical hedonism, and the Internet gratifies with unprecedented speed and accuracy. We live in an age of prosthetic pleasure. The modernist nightmare of bliss on demand has been realized, at least for those who can afford it. Modernism’s suspicions about pleasure were always accompanied by an anxiety about new pleasure-producing technologies: indeed, the rhetoric of machine-age sensation runs throughout these chapters. However, in postmodernism, the anxiety about technologized pleasure overtakes the anxiety about somatic pleasure.
In particular, the modernist fear that easy, accessible pleasure (of the cinema, magazines, etc.) would threaten literature and deep thought has taken a new technological form. We are reading more, but our reading practices have changed. We are reading on computer screens, where text and words, choice and manipulation, firsthand and vicarious or virtual experience are colliding in unprecedented ways. The lament for the lost art of reading and the imperiled book is stronger than ever—its rhetoric of distraction, excessive accessibility, and inauthenticity comes right out of the interwar period—but the message feels strained, for much of the time those laments appear online.14
Where does this leave us? We might think about Barthes’s “doubly perverse” reader, who “keeps the two texts in his field and in his hands the reins of pleasure and bliss,” and “enjoys the consistency of his selfhood (that is his pleasure) and seeks its loss (that is his bliss)” (14). However, we do not have to view these as parallel but nevermeeting experiences. Bliss and pleasure are not the distinct entities that Barthes postulates, nor do they so reliably produce the respective capitulation and destruction he imagines. As we have seen, modernism, even at its most aesthetically radical, participated in the kinds of pleasure it derided. The problem with pleasure arises when we conceptualize these different kinds of pleasure as mutually exclusive and their mixture as “perverse.” The fascination with what’s difficult and the satisfaction derived from doing complex tasks do not have to be jeopardized by amusement that appeals to the senses, the body, or the lax mind. There is a place for “Gertrude’s Paris” and a place for close readings of recondite texts. The challenge is to hold on to modernism’s aesthetic ambition and critical consciousness but relinquish the idea that they can only be achieved by dismissing or opting out of other experiences.
It is an exhilarating and an alarming moment. As we try to strike a balance somewhere between naïve enthusiasm and reactionary anxiety, the modernist response to pleasure—its insistence on mental vigor, critical thinking, and artistic innovation—seems more relevant than ever. Modernism’s counterintuitive negation, difficulty, and appeal to the power of unpleasure could provide a productive tension at a time when many new pleasures have unsettling implications. The modernist legacy, its essential ambivalence, continues, and let us hope that it does, for it signals not only the continuing problem with pleasure but also pleasure’s continuing potency.