On David Foster Wallace
- Planted:
David Foster Wallace is my favorite writer. It’s not the plot or subject matter that I like about his work. It’s the writing.
One of my favorite things about DFW’s writing is how he takes fuzzy or inconcrete thoughts, concepts, or feelings and somehow translates them into words. Like, take this passage from Authority and American Usage:
It is sometimes tempting to imagine that there can be such a thing as a private language. Many of us are prone to lay-philosophizing about the weird privacy of our own mental states, for example; and from the fact that when my knee hurts only I can feel it, it’s tempting to conclude that for me the word pain has a very subjective internal meaning that only I can truly understand. This line of thinking is sort of like the adolescent pot-smoker’s terror that his own inner experience is both private and unverifiable, a syndrome that is technically known as Cannabic Solipsism. Eating Chips Ahoy! and staring very intently at the television’s network PGA event, for instance, the adolescent pot-smoker is struck by the ghastly possibility that, e.g., what he sees as the color green and what other people call “the color green” may in fact not be the same color-experiences at all: the fact that both he and someone else call Pebble Beach’s fairways green and a stoplight’s GO signal green appears to guarantee only that there is a similar consistency in their color-experiences of fairways and GO lights, not that the actual subjective quality of those color-experiences is the same; it could be that what the ad. pot-smoker experiences as green everyone else actually experiences as blue, and that what we “mean” by the word blue what he “means” by green, etc. etc., until the whole line of thinking gets so vexed and exhausting that the a.-p.-s. ends up slumped crumb-strewn and paralyzed in his chair.
He does a really good job articulating the my-green-is-not-your-green phenomenon. It’s common while reading him for me to react along the lines of, "wow, yes totally, hah. So true." Bottling mundane, common human thoughts and observations into words is something I want to do with my own writing.
There are two other things I like about that passage. One is that it’s buried in a footnote. He fills footnotes with entertaining meat rather than just citations and ignorable technicalities. It can be a bit unwieldy to read multi-page footnotes, but I think it accurately reflects the way our brains work when we follow our curiosity on a Googling side quest or go off on a tangent while telling a story.
The third thing I like in that paragraph is that DFW makes up his own abbreviation: "adolescent pot-smoker" becomes "ad. pot-smoker" then the even shorter "a.-p.-s." It saves space, sure, but he is definitely not a writer who prioritizes brevity. It might be to avoid repetition, but I like to think it’s a way of letting the reader find a little easter egg to notice so that the reader feels like an insider.
I also love how he invents his own highly specific adjectives (nominalized clauses?) using liberal hyphenation, like I tried to do above with my-green-is-not-your-green. There’s a scene in Infinite Jest where Hal and his teammates are getting dressed in the locker room, and he slips in this sentence:
John Wayne is of the sock-and-a-shoe, sock-and-a-shoe school.
That’s one of my favorite all time sentences.
If you’re interested in reading DFW, I recommend The David Foster Wallace Reader which has a sampling of his novels, essays, and teaching materials. I particularly like Authority and American Usage, Good Old Neon, Consider the Lobster, Getting Away From Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All, and his teaching lessons.