That dead baby.
Why do writers write?
I toss that question around often enough, getting all existential on my students, thinking of Roger Rosenblatt’s essay
in Time, “I
Am Writing Blindly.” (Man, that one essay! Roger Rosenblatt forever in my
life!)
And then I inevitably turn to David Foster Wallace’s essay, “The
Nature of the Fun.” This, along with Rosenblatt, are right there for me. Fixtures. Haunts. DFW writes, “The best
metaphor I know of for being a fiction writer is in Don DeLillo's "Mao
II," where he describes a book-in-progress as a kind of hideously damaged
infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the writer
(dragging itself across the floor of restaurants where the writer's trying to
eat, appearing at the foot of the bed first thing in the morning, etc.),
hideously defective, hydrocephalic and noseless and flipper-armed and
incontinent and retarded and dribbling cerebo-spinal fluid out of its mouth as
it mewls and blurbles and cries out to the writer, wanting love, wanting the
very thing its hideousness guarantees it'll get: the writer's complete
attention.
“The damaged-infant trope is perfect because it
captures the mix of repulsion and love the fiction writer feels for something
he's working on. The fiction always comes out so horrifically defective, so
hideous a betrayal of all your hopes for it - a cruel and repellent caricature
of the perfection of its conception - yes, understand: grotesque because
imperfect. And yet it's yours, the infant is, it's you, and you love it and
dandle it and wipe the cerebro-spinal fluid off its slack chin with the cuff of
the only clean shirt you have left (you have only one clean shirt left because
you haven't done laundry in like three weeks because finally this one chapter
or character seems like it's finally trembling on the edge of coming together
and working and you're terrified to spend any time on anything other than
working on it because if you look away for a second you'll lose it, dooming the
whole infant to continued hideousness). And but so you love the damaged infant
and pity it and care for it; but also you hate it - hate it - because it's
deformed, repellent, because something grotesque has happened to it in the
parturition from head to page; hate it because its deformity is your deformity
(since if you were a better fiction writer your infant would of course look
like one of those babies in catalogue ads for infant wear, perfect and pink and
cerebro-spinally continent) and its every hideous incontinent breath is a
devastating indictment of you, on all levels...and so you want it dead, even as
you dote and wipe it and dandle it and sometimes even apply CPR when it seems
like its own grotesqueness has blocked its breath and it might die altogether.
“The
whole thing's all very messed up and sad, but simultaneously it's also tender
and moving and noble and cool - it's a genuine relationship, of a sort - and
even at the height of its hideousness the damaged infant somehow touches and
awakens what you suspect are some of the very best parts of you: maternal
parts, dark ones. You love your infant very much. And you want others to love
it, too, when the time finally comes for the damaged infant to go out and face
the world.”
You Want Others To Love It Too.
And so,
this passage haunting me, I came across the junkie who gives birth to her
dead baby on the welfare-hotel floor “on her side like a cow . . . all the time
throughout still compulsively loading up the glass pipe and smoking . . .” The
dead baby emerges dry “with no protective moisture and no afterbirth-material .
. . all withered and the color of strong tea, and dead, and [it] also had no
face . . .”
She is
umbilically linked to the dead baby and “she began to carry it around with her
wherever she went.”
This
dead baby. The junkie and her dead baby. The mother holds it, living in denial. An addict. It's her child, and she loves it, faceless, withered, dry.
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