A supossedly fun thing I'll never do again

Wallace, David Foster. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments . New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1997.

.

David Foster Wallace absolutely has a deep and abiding relationship with the language. Unfortunately, at least to me, he comes off as very masturbatory. Very. There are writers with just as much love for the language who leave the reader satisfied—they are making love to me (the reader) with their words: Joan Didion comes to mind. Maxine Hong-Kingston is another example. It is clear to me that Wallace is in love with his ability to use the language in a self-gratifying sort of way. Once I came to this realization (on about pg 11) I began to struggle. He frustrated me, as he seems to have every reviewer I have read. Then it dawned on me that the author here didn’t care about my reaction: except for my acknowledgment that he could write. That he was smarter, more articulate, intrinsically better, somehow. Ok, fine, Slug you can write. You have to wonder about a man who tells you his nickname is slug.

The question of audience cannot be overlooked when one considers Foster’s work. What I want from a writer is to invite me into a world they are creating – I want to be there with them. It doesn’t matter to me if it is Creative Nonfiction, fiction, sci-fi-fantasy—even poetry. In my own writing that’s my goal: to have the reader be there with me, whether I am writing about bar musicians in Ireland, drug addiction, family dysfunction, the importance of Eliza Haywood and Mary Hayes to the early feminist movement in eighteenth century Britain, the importance of Petrosky and Bartholomae to modern Composition programs, or even chickens chasing me around the yard; I want my reader there with me; seeing feeling, tasting owning what I am saying. Without drawing the reader in it really doesn’t matter what my point is the reader won’t care.

Wallace often writes about stuff I really don’t care about, at least in A Supposedly Fun Thing. Minutia. The TV shows in “E Unibus Plurium” were a blur. I watch about six hours of TV a month—and that’s usually CNN, as opposed to the six hours Mr. Wallace insists that the average American watches. And I am not a David Lynch fan; Twin Peaks confused me, as do the mathematical qualities of tennis. I have been to my share of state fairs and in a very East-Coast-feminist sort of way feel obligated to remind carnies that most women do not like the attention received from greasy-stoned-ogling men.

I enjoyed the short essay on deconstruction with reference to Derrida/Foucault/Barthes and Hix. I don’t know who he is and didn’t bother to Google him. I actually like Roland Barthes. Perhaps this essay appealed to me because it fell squarely into my comfort zone: academia, literary theory; edu-babble. I don’t understand why it is included in the collection; it is clearly an academic piece and, for me at least, the most powerful statement in the essay could be directed at DFW himself, “Wish Hix’s editor had helped him delete gestures that seem directed at thesis committees rather than paying customers.” (142) In the margin I have scrawled, like this entire essay?

His prejudicial commentary begins early on and from the start (in State Fair essay) it made me uncomfortable. Us and them—or more accurately me, David Wallace and them, the rest of humanity. White people in places black people simply would not go. There are Jews and WASPS. K-mart people. It made me uncomfortable. Not because I believe I don’t have an us/them thing in my own reality, I do, we all do. This to me was an under-current throughout the text. There is us, the white folks, the MFA-ers, the always-better-than-you-socially-intellectually-politically-ethically-morally-in-every-way-possible and you, the other.

David Foster Wallace writes, more than once, in this text about society’s inside jokes and I think he would be pleased if people didn’t get what he was saying that would reinforce his othering. We should congratulate ourselves when we get it. Well, I got it and his text left me feeling like I had been walking through the “Happy Hollow” of the Illinois State Fair for the Carnies are very masturbatory and really don’t care if they offend me either. In fact, all the better if they do. Wallace left me feeling like I had spent a day with Carnies, who in their own way, are very good at what they do. And now I desperately need a shower.

Finally, I think it is likely that David Foster Wallace is a genius. Bully for him. I have read the work of many geniuses and come away profoundly moved by their ability to manipulate the language and force me to stretch my brain just far enough to try to keep up with their thought process and vocabulary: Marlowe, the Pearl Poet, Jeffery Hill, and Alexander Pope, to name but a few. Jonathan Swift’s Battle of the Books is about fifty pages of brilliant-I’m-smarter-than-you writing that is difficult to put down. William Shakespeare used 54,000 different words in his work and yet one never feels looked down upon when reading Romeo and Juliet or Much Ado. It would never cross my mind that Shakespeare was not a genius –far above the likes of Wallace. David Foster Wallace is a flash in the literary pan—it is writers who eloquently invite the reader into their world, the writers who insist we exercise our brains along the way who endure. I am selling my copy to the used book store.