Philosophy of Desire
The Ancient Wisdom of Mandy De Sandra’s David Foster Wallace’s Footnotes F’ed Me in the Butt
CHARLENE ELSBY, PH.D.
It would be difficult to name another contemporary author whose facility of expression reveals so much ancient lore and metaphysics as our beloved Gnostic goddess Mandy De Sandra.
Whether it is her purpose to entertain, to educate, or to titillate, what abounds in De Sandra’s pornographic tale is wisdom beyond the rationalism of our contemporary age.
David Foster Wallace’s Footnotes F’ed Me in the Butt is, indeed, a Chaos Magick spell.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE’S FOOTNOTES F’ED ME IN THE BUTT
Before I get into the nuances of the text, allow me to speculate a moment on the character of Mandy De Sandra and her relationship to Christoph Paul. For my own comprehension, I find it helpful to consider Mandy in relation to some other ancient and mystical women. The doctrine of metempsychosis, attributed to the Orphic religion and preserved by the Pythagorean cult of vegetarian mathematicians, would explain how Mandy’s spirit might exist to Paul as one of his previous incarnations. The soul of Pythagoras is said to have lived through many lives prior to his own, and in one obscure fragment by Dicaearchus, these previous lives are listed and include a beautiful prostitute named Alco, who incarnated Pythagoras’s soul in the life most proximate to his.[1] Mandy’s references to the demiurge are sure to remind us of Plato’s creation story of the Timaeus, in which it is told that the demiurge organized the matter of the universe, creating daemons who, in turn, created (in a much more haphazard fashion), the imperfect world of chaotic motions in which we reside.
Perhaps Mandy is one of those daemons.
But perhaps she is more of a daimonion (the diminutive form of demon), the kind which resides in the soul of Socrates and whom Socrates claims steers his decision-making—inherent to Paul’s psyche but arising only when her wisdom is required.[2]
Strongest of all is, I believe, the resemblance between Mandy De Sandra and Diotima of Mantinea, the character to whom Socrates attributes his beliefs on the nature of love in Plato’s Symposium. Like Mandy, Diotima has been thought to be a fictional character; however, the argument in favor of such an interpretation is immediately suspect. Those who maintain that Diotima is fictional do so only because she is a woman, and while they are happy to accept Plato’s texts as indisputable evidence of other historical persons (men), they refuse to do so in the case of Diotima, because Plato represents Diotima as a wise prophetess, and these interpreters do not believe that women could be so smart.[1] Mandy’s resemblance to Diotima, an Ancient Greek prophetess who bestows wisdom upon Socrates, is evident both in the content of her ideas, and how those ideas are bestowed upon mankind through the medium of men—Diotima is to Socrates as Mandy is to Paul.
The Diotima theory, I believe, is supported also by the fact that De Sandra’s text as a whole bears a strong resemblance to Plato’s Symposium. De Sandra’s protagonist, Tyler, is a modern-day Alcibiades, a beautiful young man who seeks wisdom from those older and uglier than he. (It was a standard practice in the time of Plato that a young man who was at least old enough to grow a beard would be courted by an older man, who would provide the younger man with access to knowledge and to social connections. In exchange, the younger man, the “beloved” would provide the older man, the “lover” with his beauty.) David Foster Wallace’s Footnotes F’ed Me in the Butt, like the Symposium, takes place during a gathering of male intellectuals whose purpose is to discuss lofty ideas. The topic of Plato’s symposium is Eros or erotic love, an evident theme in De Sandra’s text as well.
In De Sandra’s text as well as the Symposium, there is somewhat of a disagreement about whom should benefit from the beauty of the younger male—Alcibiades in one case and Tyler in the other. Alcibiades intends to romance Socrates, while he in turn is courted by Agathon. De Sandra’s Tyler is already dating Jeff when he is seduced by Thomas, and in this relation fulfills the model of “lover-beloved” espoused by Socrates, when Tyler is f’ed in the butt by the footnotes of David Foster Wallace and becomes the vessel for the transmission of their wisdom.
Even closer comparisons may be drawn out. In the Symposium, beauty becomes the term relating young men’s bodies and wisdom. In the lover-beloved relation, both men seek beauty. The older man seeks beauty in the form of young bodies, while the younger man seeks access to beautiful ideas. Sex and artistic creation become one through this unity, and as Tyler becomes the vessel for the wisdom of the demiurge, he becomes the personification of Diotima’s two senses of impregnation. De Sandra laments in footnote 47: “The male animal can never feel like a vessel. Could man have created art and could have spiritual prophets crated God to understand what biological creation feels like?” At the same time, Tyler does become a vessel, according to the main text, and in the sense in which Diotima relates to Socrates—that there are two senses in which men are pregnant:
Now, some people are pregnant in body, and for this reason turn more to women and pursue love in that way, providing themselves through childbirth with immortality and remembrance and happiness, as they think, for all time to come; while others are pregnant in soul—because there surely are those who are even more pregnant in their souls than in their bodies, and these are pregnant with what is fitting for a soul to bear and bring to birth. And what is fitting? Wisdom and the rest of virtue, which all poets beget, as well as all the craftsmen who are said to be creative.[2]
Tyler’s role as the vessel of the demiurge will end, once he achieves orgasm. De Sandra writes: “I have never felt so hard and horny, but a sudden overwhelming sadness fills me as I get close to orgasm. There is something inside me that is special, perfect, but it will be gone forever once I cum.” Tyler is experiencing a loss which is both an abstract loss, in the sense that one feels when one reproduces and thereby loses its uniqueness, but also a direct and deeply felt loss, the reduction of existing as a multiplicity to existing as a lonely one.
Now in order to understand the significance of Tyler’s orgasm, we have to have recourse to the ancient theory of semen and its transmission of soul. In Aristotelian biology, male semen is responsible for the transmission of soul from parent to child, whereas the female provides only the material for its growth.[3] Semen is thereby ensouled, and singularly responsible for the form and character of the offspring. The term “genetic material” is an oxymoron to Greek biology, as material is not the medium according to which genes are transmitted—it is through the father’s semen that the child acquires soul. In Aristotle’s Generation of Animals, he theorizes that the female is unable to produce semen, because she is too cold, and should therefore be thought of as an impotent male. (To be clear, the ancient Greeks didn’t speak of “genes” specifically, even though the term is Greek in origin—genetics is the study of something’s becoming.)
The parallel of physical intercourse to the transmission of knowledge appears once again, as not only semen but also voice is capable of the transmission of soul.
In Aristotle’s De Anima, he says, “Voice is a sort of ensouled sound” (my translation).[4] The literary work of art, constituted of graphic marks, aims at symbolizing vocalized sound. (According to Aristotle’s De Interpretation, written words are symbols of spoken words.) The function of language, in general, is to transmit the thoughts of one being to another through a medium capable of being ensouled. The same is accomplished when a male imbues another human with rationality through sexual reproduction. While Tyler’s scorned boyfriend Jeff scoffs, “I went to Grad school. There is nothing holy about footnotes,” his comments imply that he has been indoctrinated into the schools of rationalism and dualism plaguing the modern academy. He will be contradicted.
Mandy De Sandra’s David Foster Wallace’s Footnotes F’ed Me in the Butt not only recalls the wisdom of the ancient greeks but explicitly unifies two seemingly disparate concepts—the transmission of wisdom through words and through semen, and I believe that De Sandra’s unique contribution to this ancient wisdom is their presentation as a unity. She emphasizes the unity of body and soul by granting the footnotes of David Foster Wallace the physical capacity to fuck and to reproduce, expanding their efficacy through Tyler to become a physical embodiment of wisdom, the God of Gnosticism who overcomes Tyler’s earlier felt divide between the sexes, the embodiment of intellectual and sexual desire, and also its end. She overcomes the modern prejudice of dualism, according to which the mind and body are separate and perhaps irreconcilable, and she helps us to return to a more ancient concept of unity, where soul and body are and always have been united.
A notable contrast between the ancient Greek wisdom and that of Mandy De Sandra is the attitude to homosexuality. De Sandra’s text hints at an interpretation of fluid sexuality that would appeal to the ancient Greek mindset when Tyler reports on his lascivious activities: “If I had a gag reflex I would be choking on this massive cock right now. Thank god I don’t. I take it like a man.” In Plato’s Symposium, as well, homosexuality is not only assumed to be the default sexuality of those present (so much so that there is no distinct term for “homosexuality” as opposed to “heterosexuality”), but also the manliest sexuality. In Aristophanes’ speech about love, the contemporary sexualities of gay, lesbian and hetero are explained according to the mutilation of the original form of humanity. Aristophanes describes the original human as having four arms and four legs, poking out of a central ball, and which would prove useful for speedy travel from place to place, as these humans could roll rather quickly between destinations on their many arms and legs. The rounded people were female, male or androgynous. When they were separated into two by an angry Zeus, female ball people separated into two female humans and became lesbian in sexual orientation, male ball people would become gay, and androgynous ball people, heterosexual. In all cases, the resulting beings were deeply scarred and condemned to a life of trying to reunite with their other half through sexual acts. Of the possible orientations, a male attracted to males is conceived of as the manliest, as in Tyler’s remark. Nevertheless, De Sandra’s tale intimates a sense of shame about homosexuality, and therefore diverges from the ancient wisdom. (But perhaps this is because De Sandra is dependent on Paul for the transmission of her ideas, and he is by necessity a contemporary male subject to contemporary biases.)[5]
At the end of De Sandra’s tale, Tyler approaches the beauty which all humanity seeks. As Tyler reunites with a lost love, what he encounters is not merely a beautiful body or infinite wisdom, but a unity, “I see what I saw when we first made love—a beautiful human being.” The human is, once again, the physical and the intellectual united, a place for desires of all sorts, and that which transcends the contemporary notion of divided body and soul.
Charlene Elsby, Ph.D.
[1] The prejudices that act as supporting premises to this argument is, “durrrrrrrr, I’m a sexist, durrrrrr, durrrrr” and also, “I’d do anything to maintain my sexism, even if it means that I can only apply my standards of evidence inconsistently, durrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”. See also Zeller’s argument for why the Egyptians could not have been the source of any of the wisdom professed by the ancient Greek philosophers, despite how those same ancient Greek philosophers credit the Egyptians for that wisdom.
[2] Plato, Symposium, trs. A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff from Plato: Complete Works, ed. John Cooper (Indianapolis, Hackett, 1997). Stephanus pages 208e-209a.
[3]Aristotle writes:, “Now a boy is like a woman in form, and the woman is as it were an impotent male, for it is through a certain incapacity that the female is female, being incapable of concocting the nutriment in its last stage into semen (and this is either blood or that which is analogous to it in animals which are bloodless) owing to the coldness of her nature.” Aristotle, Generation of Animals, tr. A. Platt in The Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), at 728a.
[4] Aristotle, De Anima, 420b5-6 W.D. Ross, Aristotle. De anima. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961 (repr. 1967). An alternative translation by J.A. Smith, published in the Complete Works, reads: “Voice is a kind of sound characteristic of what has soul in it.” I believe Smith has added the extra words in order to diminish the spiritual connotations of the actual text.
[5] I would be remiss, however, not to at least mention the other highly offensive prejudice inherent to this bit of ancient wisdom, which is that to love a woman is below a man’s station. Women, conceived of as less rational, would be conceived therefore as lesser—as lesser human. To love a woman would almost be tantamount to bestiality, for it would be to love an inferior being.
[1] The succession of incarnations of the soul of Pythagoras runs thusly, according to Dicaearchus: “Euphorbus, Pyrandrus, Aethalides, a beautiful prostitute named Alco, and Pythagoras.” As reported by Burkert in Walter Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, tr. Edwin L. Minar Jr. (Cambridge; Harvard UP, 1972).
[2] For more on Socrates’ daimonion, see my article, “Socrates’ Demonic Sign” published in Philosophical Approaches to Demonology, Benjamin McCraw and Robert Arp eds., (New York: Routledge, 2017).
PREORDER THE HAUNTING OF THE PARANORMAL ROMANCE AWARDS
BY CHRISTOPH PAUL & MANDY DE SANDRA
COMING FALL 2020
FROM CLASH BOOKS
A horror novel about writing, publishing, and paranormal romance.
Charlene Elsby, Ph.D.
Charlene Elsby has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from McMaster University and was recently a tenure-track professor. She is the author of HEXIS (CLASH Books, 2020), AFFECT (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2020) and ALISON (CLASH Books, 2021).