Samuel Beckett: The trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable)
Through Beckett, I discovered an intense and deeply cryptic depiction of what can only be called “the void.” These texts, which still wear me out whenever I return to them (I admit to never actually finishing The Unnamable) seem to reveal the entire world of human endeavor as artifice and absurdity. Everything disappears but a single, lonely voice, itself waiting to disappear. The writer Stanley Elkin once commented that, “All jokes are really about powerlessness.” In this sense, there’s no one funnier than Beckett.
Robert Coover: Pricksongs and Descants
There was a time in my life — in my early 20’s, to give a ballpark — when I was pretty sure I was through with trying to write fiction. It seemed worn out and useless to me, and I’d just begun to set my sights on other, more academic goals. Then I discovered “The Babysitter” (from Pricksongs) and flipped out. I remember thinking, You can do this?! Coover’s formal experimentation and metafictional bent changed the way I thought about writing forever, and opened the door to all things innovative (and I suspect that I will be journeying deeper into that space each year that I live).
Daniel Dennett: Consciousness Explained
In the early 90’s, this book was essentially my bible. It came with me everywhere. Dennett argues against the notion that there’s any “center of self,” and he suggests that what we call consciousness is nothing unique to our species, but is best thought of as a gray scale (i.e., some creatures are “more conscious” than others). This seemed to verify a lot of my own beliefs, and also meshed well with some of the fiction I was falling in love with, especially the work of Jorge Luis Borges. Borges’ essay, “The Nothingness of Personality” (in which he repeatedly insists that “there is no whole self”), as well as his famous little short, “Borges and I,” lent greater meaning to Dennett’s book, and the two men (Dennett and Borges) are forever, strangely linked in my mind.
William Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom!
I feel a little bit uncool, or cliché, putting Faulkner on my list. I mean, obviously Faulkner, right? But his ecstatic approach to language is inmitable and unparalleled. Absalom… manages to conflate, through the conduit of Quentin Compson, the past and present into a single fiery Now, something that seems preordained and ravenous. (The past hasn’t gone anywhere; it’s always in the same room with us.) I actually shake whenever I read this text, and the same holds true of The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner stands alone, in my mind, as the King of American Letters, and his name has taken on a magical resonance for me. I hope someone reading this understands what I mean by that.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations
I was a philosophy major as an undergraduate, and so I knew of Wittgenstein, but it wasn’t until graduate school (MFA, Sarah Lawrence, 1997) — when I satisfied my elective requirements by studying with the wonderful and brilliant Nancy Baker — that I read the primary sources. As much a work of art as a work of philosophy, the Investigations was that rare book that changed the way I saw the world. It actually cured me of a certain variety of existential suffering. Not many books can heal. I return to these pages often, and marvel anew at Wittgenstein’s intense insight into “the grammar of our propositions.” And I also marvel at Nancy, the greatest teacher I’ve ever had, who led me to a deeper understanding of the nature of philosophy (and, really, of life) than I’d ever thought was possible.
This piece originally appeared in Volume I of the student magazine The Little Jackie Paper, published in 2005.