Twelve Steps

In the 1980’s it seemed that many people had some familiarity with the famous Twelve-Step program promulgated by Alcoholic Anonymous. It was used to recover from addictions of all kinds, as well as to help those who were in a family system with an addict. I was no exception, spending the late years of that decade going to the meetings of an Al-Anon group in Walnut Creek.

My then husband had been experimenting with drugs from his teenage years, but it was really alcohol, its easy availability and the fact that his mother was a savage alcoholic, that undid him. He began going to AA meetings, though he was quite capable of going to four of them in a day and still drink.

I did not know what I was up against. I had always thought that the unconditional love I brought from a Christian upbringing could save him. Al-Anon recommended “tough love,” which requires a person to take responsibility for his actions. In the end, my husband’s problems turned out to have more to do with him than with me, but I was certainly at the affect of them for quite a while.

The group meetings of Al-Anon were a revelation to me. The intention was that those who were feeling lonely and frustrated from living with an addict, and often trying to hide or cover this up, speak, showing each other that they were not alone. The patterns they shared emerged from talk at the meetings. I had no idea, for instance, how much I was trying to control the situation, how much I was invested in rescuing my husband, who enjoyed being out of control in order to be saved. Listening to other people’s stories, I was able to discern the pattern of victim, rescuer, persecutor that gets set up when someone’s brain has decided it needs alcohol and will do anything to get it.

The Twelve Steps, Twelve Traditions and the Al-Anon slogans, all of which are also associated with AA meetings, are meant to assist in changing these patterns. I found anonymity, the insistence that none of us know each other’s last names or what status we had in the working world, helped to take the group directly into discussion of intimate dynamics and subverted any attempt to hold yourself above others in the group.

The Twelve Traditions were read at the beginning of each meeting, reminding us that Al-Anon was not a professional group, that it was self-governing and self-supporting. It had no opinions on outside issues and did no promotion. The Twelve Steps involved turning one’s affairs over to a higher authority, as one understood it, making a moral inventory of one’s defects, humbly asking for help and making amends where possible. The program was seen as “work” and slogans were used to help when you found yourself in a compromising situation: “One day at a time,” “Let go and let God,” “Together we can make it,” and the serenity prayer, “God grant me the Serenity to Accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can and Wisdom to know the difference.”

Twelve Step programs were the obvious antidote to the collective binge of personal exploration and selfish indulgence my generation got itself into. Few people were completely immune. David Foster Wallace was a little younger than we were, but in his book Infinite Jest, published in 1996 and hailed as “a momentous literary event,” he showed exactly how much the culture was addicted to “television, drugs, loneliness.”

Infinite Jest is a long, complicated work, but Elaine Blair sees its moral center as Don Gately, who is based on Big Craig, a supervisor at the halfway house were David Foster Wallace resided while he overcame his own addictions. He writes: “The palsied newcomers who totter in desperate and miserable enough to Hang In and keep coming and start feebly to scratch beneath the unlikely insipid surface of [AA] … then get united by a second common experience. The shocking discovery that the thing actually does seem to work.”

“That clichés contain truth might not seem like a startling observation in itself, but it’s a startling thing for a novelist of the first order to make a point of telling us—especially this particular novelist,” writes Blair. “He is not, of course, celebrating clichés in general; he is issuing a corrective, one meant mainly to address the biases—the fixed ideas—of his own generation of readers: don’t be too quick to dismiss what sounds obvious, familiar, or unsophisticated.”

The New Rebels

It is impossible to read literary critique today without running into the ghost of David Foster Wallace, acknowledged as the most energizing, polarizing and influential voice of his generation. While I cannot read his work, as I managed to escape the zeitgeist from which he writes by being a bit older, avoiding television and not going to graduate school in English, I have begun to think he is onto something and points the way out of a slough in which many people, not just writers, have bogged down.

In his 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram,” Wallace says: “The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels … who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. … The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’”

The corner which Wallace was trying to turn can be understood as the difference between sincerity and authenticity, as described by Lionel Trilling [Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. 1972]. Ensuring the truth of oneself to others was a salient characteristic of Western culture for 400 years, suggests Trilling. But in the 20th century, the ideal became one of authenticity. Though Trilling goes into great detail, roughly, in his terms, sincerity places emphasis on communication with others, whereas authenticity sees truth as something inward, personal and hidden, with a goal of self-expression rather than other-directed communication.

For most of my life, assessment of inner truth, or authenticity, has been the criterion by which literature, politics and people have been judged. But Orlando Patterson, a respected Jamaican-born sociologist, describes what happens to public discourse when individual insistence on inner truth trumps tolerance and civility. Divisive identity politics and prejudices are upheld, among other things. [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/opinion/26patterson.html]

Several critics have pointed out that Wallace may have wanted to “eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue,” but that he could not overcome his own ironic ambivalence. In his novels, he tries to be “at once unassailably sophisticated and doggedly down to earth.” [A.O. Scott] David Foster Wallace did not want to lose what had been gained by our relentless focus on authenticity. I think of him when I run into the young hipster culture. As some have told me, “hipster” can be defined, but the person defining it is never referring to himself. Wallace would be pleased to find, as he believed, that “cynicism and naïveté need not be mutually exclusive”.

Both sincerity and authenticity reflect wholeness to the inner self. But I don’t think this is just a semantic tempest in a teapot. In public life, we must begin to behave with civility and tolerance while negotiating the authentic beliefs each of us hold dear. We must trust each other’s cordial gestures to have been offered sincerely and find common ground upon which we can all stand as humans.

In art, I would love to see work which opens to the world validated. Works which value the senses and allow the spirit present in things to emerge. Works of observation celebrating and exploring life itself. I think we’ve seen enough of the dark interiors of various people’s minds! We know now that the observer affects what he sees and thus, we must triangulate through many works to get a clear picture of truth. But why not? It is the work of being human.

David Foster Wallace was demonstrably trying to step back from pure self expression toward an ethos which valued the other, the reader, in his work. At present, I do not see widespread movement to what has been called “the new sincerity.” But I do identify with his idea of the new rebels. I quite expect yawns and rolled eyes where my writing is concerned, and I am more interested in what the reader needs than in self-expression. My characters are offered sincerely, in a spirit of civility and tolerance, finding common cause with the 90% of humanity that we all share, rather than in the narrow, hidden aspects in which we differ.