Wallace Shawn's 'The Fever'

One day last week, I woke up with one thing on my immediate to-do list: read The Fever by Wallace Shawn. So I did it. I bought the book at Open Books during their final weekend at the River North location. It was listed in the theater section (or was it dramatic literature?) but it's not a play in the conventional sense. There is no action, no dialogue, no characters really. Rather, it is a 67-page monologue about celebrating life and the inherent guilt that thrives in the awareness of living a privileged existence. The fever of the title strikes the narrator while traveling in a country in which they do not speak the language and in which they are forced to viscerally confront poverty and suffering, in a way which their cushy life never even thought to contemplate before hand.

I've read some of Shawn's essays in the past and the dramatic work The Designated Mourner is one of my favorite pieces of anything ever. The Fever, in fact, could be considered a precursor to The Designated Mourner, that although features three characters, they still depend on monologues and rarely interact with each other. I found The Designated Mourner to be more compelling and to go deeper than The Fever, though that may be because it came out seven years after, giving Shawn plenty of time to ruminate on identity, anxiety, man's relationship to the exterior world, and other themes that pop up in his work. In fact, I'll probably reread The Designated Mourner (soon) (again) and see if it's still as compelling (it will be).

So I read The Fever, and I read it rapidly. I read it in about in hour. And then I probably went on Twitter and read some news about suffering in the world and about trendy restaurants opening in Chicago then I probably poured myself a cup of coffee and then I made breakfast and then probably read more of the mundane on Twitter before I realized that I need to start focusing on moving apartments in a couple weeks. So I started to look up movers and getting estimates and thinking about changing my address at the post office and trying to figure out who was going to be in charge of utilities at the new apartment and getting more estimates from movers and how expensive they were then trying to coordinate with people about who can help me move and looking up UHaul trucks and I was beginning to feel a grand anxiety that drinking all that coffee may have contributed to and I usually like that anxiety and think it fuels creation but this time it made me unnerved and I started to get really really really anxious about the move and trying to figure all this shit out

and then.

And then.

And then I remember that I'd read The Fever that morning.

And had I learned nothing?

Had I learned nothing from Shawn? About my privileged place in the world? Because it should already be something that I am aware about, and while I'm aware about it, I don't always feel it. I can objectively recognize my place of privilege, but that privilege means I don't have to feel it on any constant level. There is coffee in the cupboard, there is a roof over my head, and I'm going to ride my bike to work. Moving apartments is stressful, yes, but it's not overwhelmingly high on the scale of survival. For one, how weak of a person does one have to be to breakdown so easily from such a common task? Show some resilience for fuck's sake. For two, I get to choose where I live. I have that choice because of luck, as Shawn explores in The Fever. I've chosen to leave my parents house, to pay my own bills, to buy my own shit, to manage my own money, to spend and save however indiscriminately I choose...and whenever 'choosing' or 'freedom' comes up I just have to consider the existential implications of the terms...but fuck, it's even a privilege to use my time to consider those implications, isn't it?

I'd be kidding if I said I don't enjoy the finer things that Shawn's narrator does. I don't go to operas or listen to classical music on the level they do or read as much poetry, but I go to plenty of rock shows and lit readings and take solace in the crisp bite of an IPA on my taste buds or an old-fashioned from Billy Sunday from time to time. It's really no different: it's celebrating the beauty of life. Because partaking in this beauty is celebrating culture, and celebrating culture is a way to make the world a better place. Right?

That question is the crux of The Fever. We all of us could easily help those less fortunate than ourselves. But we don't. Because ultimately, we want not only better for ourselves, but The Best. In Shawn's words:

"Was that why people brought children into the world - so that they, too, could one day roam through the streets, buying, devouring, always "the best" - the best food, the best clothes, the best everything - so that they, too, could demand "the best"? Were there not enough people in the world already who demanded the best, who insisted on the best? No, we must have more of those people, we must bring in children, and then we must gather together more treasures from all over the world, more of the best, for all these new children of ours to have, because our children should have the best, it would be our shame, our disgrace, to give them less than the best. We will stop at nothing to give them the best."

Even before Louis CK dissected the idea of always consuming "the best" (and I swear he had a bit about this but I can't find a clip anywhere), Shawn was on it. And we live this way and think that we are decent people. Because if you are reading this, something that I was able to type on a machine I didn't make, on a browser that I didn't pay for, on the Internet which I have the luck to be able to pay a monthly fee for, and you get to read it on an expensive mobile device that you didn't build but paid a company to underpay slaves to build and die for, then we are all getting away with something. Shawn knew this even before all these devices were 'house-hold items' and I would love to read his version of the play now. Maybe the fever strikes when he visits an iPhone factory or any of the cancer villages spreading across the dirty lungs of China.

We don't need John Oliver to dismantle the fashion industry or Shawn and CK to point out their own hypocrisy so that we can reflect on what we are hypocritical about: we are free to notice but never obliged to act. These are things that as privileged people we already know about. It is already inside the beaches of our minds. But it takes an earthquake or a train crash or a sunken boat or an outbreak of disease for our empathy and our desire to help humanity at a greater level to rise to the surface of our consciousness. But unless we are willing to jump into the ocean with the rest of the born unlucky, to fully wash the privilege off our skin like Queen Macbeth, the tide will reside back into the ocean and the shores of our conscious and our fevers to lay calm once again.

Wanna read The Fever? The full text has been transcribed online and can be found here.