Bear baiting

Lately everyone and her sister has been talking again about David Foster Wallace, aka DFW, a, probably, ka some other things too, what with Infinite Summer in the soon to be unavoidably real offing (and me still a third of the way through Bleak House, when I even stir myself to pick it up—which is not to say that when it remains unpicked-up, anything strikingly more worthwhile is happening with me), and so I, one who has read very little of his output but was swayed by the many testimonials to his, like, rigorous honesty as a writer that popped up after he died, having on Tuesday read Consider the Lobster, read on Wednesday a not insignificant portion of the title essay from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, much expanded, one assumes, from its original appearance.

And aside from the odd insistence on never writing "with" or "without" but writing, instead, "w/" or "w/o", respectively, which does not really make the prose read more swiftly but, if anything, seems like a weird token gesture to considerations of word, or at least character, count[1], aside from all the footnotes, which may not be as annoying as they are occasionally made out to be but are also not the best part, by a long mile, something they are also occasionally made out to be, I noticed and was perturbed by a third tic, whose capacity to perturb I locate in its actually being objectionable rather than my actually objecting to it. I mean of course: the occasional prefacing of a comment by the expression of skepticism that it will make it past the editors of the magazine in which the piece is to appear.

Suppose you are reading the magazine piece in the magazine and not in the collection in which it was later republished, unexpurgated. Then, of course, if the offending bit was not let in by the editors, it would be extremely surprising if the comment on the offending bit's unlikelihood to be let in were itself let in, so we can assume that both things do not get in (which happened with A Supposedly Fun Thing…; at one point Wallace predicts that his ruminations on Death and the Ocean will get cut, and indeed they got cut, and indeed his prediction got cut). In this case, of course, the reader is ignorant that anything happened here in the first place. Perhaps the text is included just to tweak the editors and make them feel censorious as they snip snip snip (you freak the squares you can, not the squares you'd like to). On the other hand, perhaps both the predicted-to-offend bit and the prediction of offense get in, as happened with footnote six of Consider the Lobster. What is the reader to make of this forlorn expression of hopelessness? After all the note did survive the editing process. Are we supposed to praise the editors for not shrinking from … Wallace's discomfort with who he was? Or what? In the case of this piece, if they were the sort to shrink, none of it would have appeared. But if the bit really is such that lesser editors would shrink from including it, do we really need this pointed out to us? I submit that we do not.

The situation when one comes across this sort of thing when reading the essay in the essay collection, where there is no question of a magazine editor's having had its way with it, is even stranger. Why is it there? Are we supposed to have a knowing chuckle about it? Yes, ha-ha, this is precisely the sort of thing that callow Americans who read their David Foster Wallace in magazines couldn't handle! How above them I, reading him in a BOOK, am! Surely not; that would be too easy. And it is, anyway, not true, since these things are not always cut.

Is this supposed to be some sort of post-modern hooha, the intrusion of the author as author, in the form of his worries about his text, into the text itself? Well, all I can say about that is it takes you worryingly close to writing poetry that is so terrible it threatens to make people drop out of school in protest. And, also, that it's a cheap technique; it's so easy to just put your concern in the text itself. That isn't a working out, or a working with, your concern regarding your attempt to write Something Honest, it's just saying to the world: Hey, I'm trying to write Something Honest over here! And it is obviously something that someone who was not really concerned with honesty at all could also do; another reason why these curlicues of sincerity are somewhat ridiculous. Better just to say what you want to say; it's not that there's no need to insert into the text your concerns about it in explicit, unmistakeable form, as that there's no way to. And the attempts to do so tacky: credit-grubbing.

[1] Naturally the shortening effect is swamped by all the footnotes.

Comments

[Matt F]

I don't mind this habit of his all that much, but I know what you mean. I can think of two things he might have been trying to do with it, though.

First, it's a way of separating the writer (DFW) from the editorial/institutional side of things (Gourmet Magazine, e.g.), which otherwise can sometimes get conflated (Economist-style), thus establishing his outsider bona fides and building a rapport with the readers.

Second, he was a really insecure and self-conscious guy (as can be seen in this Charlie Rose interview). It strikes me as totally plausible that those are just self-deprecating prefaces for the sections he's particularly concerned will be of no interest to anyone but himself.

[A White Bear]

What do you want from me?

You know what I will say, which is that you really should read Infinite Jest and you will not find that these quibbles of yours persist. Really, read it, Benjamin. It will give you pleasure.

Also, why is it that little bitches never like other little bitches they meet, a-coming through the rye? No one complains about piddly shit as much as you and Mr. David Foster Wallace. You should be together forever.

[ben]

IJ is a novel, so the one quibble in particular would be somewhat out of place.

All I want from you: respect and recognition. That's all.