best david foster wallace essay

8 David Foster Wallace Essays You Can Read Online

If you've talked to me for more than five minutes, you probably know that I'm a huge fan of author and essayist David Foster Wallace . In my opinion, he's one of the most fascinating writers and thinkers that has ever lived, and he possessed an almost supernatural ability to articulate the human experience.

Listen, you don't have to be a pretentious white dude to fall for DFW. I know that stigma is out there, but it's just not true. David Foster Wallace's writing will appeal to anyone who likes to think deeply about the human experience. He really likes to dig into the meat of a moment — from describing state fair roller coaster rides to examining the mind of a detoxing addict. His explorations of the human consciousness are incredibly astute, and I've always felt as thought DFW was actually mapping out my own consciousness.

Contrary to what some may think, the way to become a DFW fan is not to immediately read Infinite Jest . I love Infinite Jest. It's one of my favorite books of all-time. But it is also over 1,000 pages long and extremely difficult to read. It took me seven months to read it for the first time. That's a lot to ask of yourself as a reader.

My recommendation is to start with David Foster Wallace's essays . They are pure gold. I discovered DFW when I was in college, and I would spend hours skiving off my homework to read anything I could get my hands on. Most of what I read I got for free on the Internet.

So, here's your guide to David Foster Wallace on the web. Once you've blown through these, pick up a copy of Consider the Lobster or A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again .

1. "This is Water" Commencement Speech

Technically this is a speech, but it will seriously revolutionize the way you think about the world and how you interact with it. You can listen to Wallace deliver it at Kenyon College , or you can read this transcript . Or, hey, do both.

2. "Consider the Lobster"

This is a classic. When he goes to the Maine Lobster Festival to do a report for Gourmet , DFW ends up taking his readers along for a deep, cerebral ride. Asking questions like "Do lobsters feel pain?" Wallace turns the whole celebration into a profound breakdown on the meaning of consciousness. (Don't forget to read the footnotes!)

2. "Ticket to the Fair"

Another episode of Wallace turning journalism into something more. Harper 's sent DFW to report on the state fair, and he emerged with this masterpiece. The Harper's subtitle says it all: "Wherein our reporter gorges himself on corn dogs, gapes at terrifying rides, savors the odor of pigs, exchanges unpleasantries with tattooed carnies, and admires the loveliness of cows."

3. "Federer as Religious Experience"

DFW was obviously obsessed with tennis, but you don't have to like or know anything about the sport to be drawn in by his writing. In this essay, originally published in the sports section of The New York Times , Wallace delivers a profile on Roger Federer that soon turns into a discussion of beauty with regard to athleticism. It's hypnotizing to read.

4. "Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise"

Later published as "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" in the collection of the same name, this essay is the result of Harper's sending Wallace on a luxury cruise. Wallace describes how the cruise sends him into a depressive spiral, detailing the oddities that make up the strange atmosphere of an environment designed for ultimate "fun."

5. "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction"

This is definitely in the running for my favorite DFW essay. (It's so hard to choose.) Fiction writers! Television! Voyeurism! Loneliness! Basically everything I love comes together in this piece as Wallace dives into a deep exploration of how humans find ways to look at each other. Though it's a little long, it's endlessly fascinating.

6. "String Theory"

"You are invited to try to imagine what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something. At anything. I have tried to imagine; it's hard."

Originally published in Esquire , this article takes you deep into the intricate world of professional tennis. Wallace uses tennis (and specifically tennis player Michael Joyce) as a vehicle to explore the ideas of success, identity, and what it means to be a professional athlete.

7. "9/11: The View from the Midwest"

Written in the days following 9/11, this article details DFW and his community's struggle to come to terms with the attack.

8. "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage "

If you're a language nerd like me, you'll really dig this one. A self-proclaimed "snoot" about grammar, Wallace dives into the world of dictionaries, exploring all of the implications of how language is used, how we understand and define grammar, and how the "Democratic Spirit" fits into the tumultuous realms of English.

Images: cocoparisienne /Pixabay; werner22brigette /Pixabay; StartupStockPhotos /Pixabay; PublicDomainPIctures /Pixabay

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30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the Web

in e-books , Literature | February 22nd, 2012 10 Comments

Image by Steve Rhodes, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

We start­ed the week expect­ing to pub­lish one David Fos­ter Wal­lace post . Then, because of the 50th birth­day cel­e­bra­tion, it turned into two . And now three. We spent some time track­ing down free DFW sto­ries and essays avail­able on the web, and they’re all now list­ed in our col­lec­tion,  800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices . But we did­n’t want them to escape your atten­tion. So here they are — 23 pieces pub­lished by David Fos­ter Wal­lace between 1989 and 2011, most­ly in major U.S. pub­li­ca­tions like The New York­er , Harper’s , The Atlantic , and The Paris Review . Enjoy, and don’t miss our oth­er col­lec­tions of free writ­ings by Philip K. Dick and Neil Gaiman .

• “9/11: The View From the Mid­west” (Rolling Stone, Octo­ber 25, 2001)
• “All That” (New York­er, Decem­ber 14, 2009)
• “An Inter­val” (New York­er, Jan­u­ary 30, 1995)
• “Asset” (New York­er, Jan­u­ary 30, 1995)
• “Back­bone” An Excerpt from The Pale King (New York­er, March 7, 2011)
• “Big Red Son” from Con­sid­er the Lob­ster & Oth­er Essays
• “Brief Inter­views with Hideous Men” (The Paris Review, Fall 1997)
• “Con­sid­er the Lob­ster” (Gourmet, August 2004)
• “David Lynch Keeps His Head” (Pre­miere, 1996)
• “Every­thing is Green” (Harpers, Sep­tem­ber 1989)
• “E Unibus Plu­ram: Tele­vi­sion and U.S. Fic­tion” (The Review of Con­tem­po­rary Fic­tion, June 22, 1993)
• “Fed­er­er as Reli­gious Expe­ri­ence” (New York Times, August 20, 2006)
• “Good Peo­ple” (New York­er, Feb­ru­ary 5, 2007)
• “Host” (The Atlantic, April 2005)
• “Incar­na­tions of Burned Chil­dren” (Esquire, April 21, 2009)
• “Laugh­ing with Kaf­ka” (Harper’s, Jan­u­ary 1998)
• “Lit­tle Expres­sion­less Ani­mals” (The Paris Review, Spring 1988)
• “On Life and Work” (Keny­on Col­lege Com­mence­ment address, 2005)
• “Order and Flux in Northamp­ton”   (Con­junc­tions, 1991)
• “Rab­bit Res­ur­rect­ed” (Harper’s, August 1992)
• “ Sev­er­al Birds” (New York­er, June 17, 1994)
• “Ship­ping Out: On the (near­ly lethal) com­forts of a lux­u­ry cruise” (Harper’s, Jan­u­ary 1996)
• “Ten­nis, trigonom­e­try, tor­na­does A Mid­west­ern boy­hood”   (Harper’s, Decem­ber 1991)
• “Tense Present: Democ­ra­cy, Eng­lish, and the wars over usage” (Harper’s, April 2001)
• “The Awak­en­ing of My Inter­est in Annu­lar Sys­tems” (Harper’s, Sep­tem­ber 1993)
• “The Com­pli­ance Branch” (Harper’s, Feb­ru­ary 2008)
• “The Depressed Per­son” (Harper’s, Jan­u­ary 1998)
• “The String The­o­ry” (Esquire, July 1996)
• “The Weasel, Twelve Mon­keys And The Shrub” (Rolling Stone, April 2000)
• “Tick­et to the Fair” (Harper’s, July 1994)
• “Wig­gle Room” (New York­er, March 9, 2009)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Philip K. Dick: Down­load 13 Great Sci­ence Fic­tion Sto­ries

Neil Gaiman’s Free Short Sto­ries

Read 17 Short Sto­ries From Nobel Prize-Win­ning Writer Alice Munro Free Online

10 Free Sto­ries by George Saun­ders, Author of Tenth of Decem­ber , “The Best Book You’ll Read This Year”

by OC | Permalink | Comments (10) |

Related posts:

Comments (10), 10 comments so far.

I got anoth­er free DFW essay for you: Big Red Son http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/books_9780316156110_ChapterExcerpt(1) .htm

Thanks very much. I added it to the list.

Appre­ci­ate it, Dan

Thanks very much for this infor­ma­tion regard­ing essays and sto­ries

Hi Dan. It’s a bit late for this, but I just remem­bered anoth­er link you might want to add. You can hear DFW giv­ing the full unabridged Keny­on com­mence­ment speech (which you link to in your list) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5THXa_H_N8 (it’s in 2 parts). Or down­load the full audio from http://www.mediafire.com/?file41t3kfml6q6 Thanks for all your hard work!

This is excel­lent, thanks so much. Will these links be up per­ma­nent­ly? I want to avoid the trou­ble of down­load­ing the stuff I don’t have time to get to now.

Just thought I’d men­tion that ‘Lit­tle Expres­sion­less Ani­mals” cuts off about 2/3rds of the way through, requir­ing you to pur­chase the issue ($40) for the chance to read the rest.

Kind of a bum­mer.

Don’t for­get “Tra­cy Austin Serves Up a Bub­bly Life Sto­ry” (review of Tra­cy Austin’s Beyond Cen­ter Court: My Sto­ry): http://www.mendeley.com/research/tracy-austin-serves-up-bubbly-life-story-review-tracy-austins-beyond-center-court-story

Also, just to let you know, the link to “Big Red Son” is bro­ken.

There’s also a ton of oth­er here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace_bibliography

You can add “Good Old Neon” to your list if you like:

http://kalamazoo.coop/sites/default/files/Good%20Old%20Neon.pdf

There’s a bunch of arti­cles with bro­ken links, notably those from Harper’s Mag­a­zine. Has any­body saved them and would be so kind to share them?

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25 great articles and essays by david foster wallace, life and love, this is water, hail the returning dragon, clothed in new fire, words and writing, tense present, deciderization 2007, laughing with kafka, the nature of the fun, fictional futures and the conspicuously young, e unibus pluram: television and u.s. fiction, what words really mean, films, music and the media, david lynch keeps his head, signifying rappers, big red son, see also..., 150 great articles and essays.

Shipping Out

Ticket to the fair, consider the lobster, the string theory, federer as religious experience, tennis, trigonometry, tornadoes, the weasel, twelve monkeys and the shrub, 9/11: the view from the midwest, just asking, a supposedly fun thing i'll never do again, consider the lobster and other essays.

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5 David Foster Wallace Essays You Should Read Before Seeing The End of the Tour

By Lauren Larson

The End of the Tour could have been terrible; Jason Segel plays David Foster Wallace, and Jesse Eisenberg plays the douchey journalist charged with profiling him. But The End of the Tour is not terrible. It turns out Jason Segel is great at acting, and Jesse Eisenberg is great at being a douchebag.

So you’re really excited to see Segel put How I Met Your Mother behind him at last, but you’re harboring a dark secret: You’ve never read anything by David Foster Wallace. You lie and say you "found Infinite Jest and The Pale King positively resplendent." You say things like, “I admire Wallace’s fiction, but I much prefer his essays.” It’s alright. Everyone does it. Lying about having read David Foster Wallace is an American tradition. Like making up words to describe wine.

You'll like The End of the Tour whether you're a Wallace disciple or a flailing literary newborn, but a little primer never hurts. Here are five nuggets of Wallace brilliance that you can read before The End of the Tour comes out on July 31. Go forth, young man, and ooze pretension.

Ticket to the Fair

In 1993, a year before Infinite Jest was published, Wallace headed back to his native Illinois on assignment from Harper’s , to write about the Illinois State Fair. Ticket to the Fair is Wallace at his most readable. He’s just wandering around describing the height of Americana, like so:

The horses' faces are long and somehow suggestive of coffins. The racers are lanky, velvet over bone. The draft and show horses are mammoth and spotlessly groomed, and more or less odorless: the acrid smell in here is just the horses' pee: All their muscles are beautiful; the hides enhance them. They make farty noises when they sigh, heads hanging over the short doors. They're not for petting, though.

Read it here.

Consider the Lobster

The titular essay of Wallace’s collection Consider the Lobster began as a story for Gourmet . Following the tradition of sending Wallace to a mega-American event (see above) Gourmet sent Wallace to the Maine Lobster Festival. Every sentence of the essay is solid gold, and you will learn more about lobsters and life than you ever thought possible. As with all of Wallace’s writing, one must never skip the footnotes. Case in point, this tiny drama in note 11:

The short version regarding why we were back at the airport after already arriving the previous night involves lost luggage and a miscommunication about where and what the local National Car Rental franchise was—Dick came out personally to the airport and got us, out of no evident motive but kindness. (He also talked nonstop the entire way, with a very distinctive speaking style that can be described only as manically laconic; the truth is that I now know more about this man than I do about some members of my own family.)

9/11: The View From the Midwest

With the totally unnecessary caveat that this 2001 essay in Rolling Stone was “written very fast and in what probably qualifies as shock,” Wallace really, really effectively describes how most of the country experienced 9/11, or the Horror. A somber, great read, with little moments like this:

Mrs. T. has coffee on, but another sign of Crisis is that if you want some you have to get it yourself – usually it just sort of appears.

Roger Federer as Religious Experience

In 2008, when Roger Federer as Religious Experience ran in the Times , Federer mania was at its peak and Wallace was on the scene to explain it. Further proof that Wallace could write about literally anything in a nuanced way:

Nadal and Federer now warm each other up for precisely five minutes; the umpire keeps time. There’s a very definite order and etiquette to these pro warm-ups, which is something that television has decided you’re not interested in seeing.

Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise

Shipping Out , originally published in Harper’s in 1996, is the cornerstone of Wallace’s collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again . Many writers have tried and failed to describe the misery of luxury cruises as well as Wallace does. (Though an honorable mention goes to Tina Fey’s honeymoon in Bossypants .) Enjoy this tour of every neurotic man’s personal hell:

For the first two nights, who’s feeling seasick and who’s not and who’s not now but was a little while ago or isn’t feeling it yet but thinks it’s maybe coming on, etc. is a big topic of conversation at Table 64 in the Five-Star Caravelle Restaurant. Discussing nausea and vomiting while eating intricately prepared gourmet foods doesn’t seem to bother anybody.

Oh, to be blessed with a seat at Table 64. Read more here.

Related: John Jeremiah Sullivan Reviews The Pale King

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Illustration by Martin O’Neill/Cutitout

The Last Essay I Need to Write about David Foster Wallace

Mary k. holland on closing the “open question” of wallace’s misogyny.

Feature photo by Steve Rhodes .

David Foster Wallace’s work has long been celebrated for audaciously reorienting fiction toward empathy, sincerity, and human connection after decades of (supposedly) bleak postmodern assertions that all had become nearly impossible. Linguistically rich and structurally innovative, his work is also thematically compelling, mounting brilliant critiques of liberal humanism’s masked oppressions, the soul-killing dangers of technology and American narcissism, and the increasing impotence of our culture of irony.

Wallace spoke and wrote movingly about our need to cultivate self-awareness in order to more fully see and respect others, and created formal methods that construct the reader-writer relationship with such piercing intimacy that his fans and critics feel they know and love him. A year after his death by suicide, as popular and critical attention to him and his work began to build into the industry of Wallace studies that exists today, he was first outed as a misogynist who stalked, manipulated, and physically attacked women.

In her 2009 memoir, Lit , Mary Karr spends less than four pages narrating the several years in which Wallace pursued her, leading to a brief romantic relationship that ended in vicious arguments and “his pitching my coffee table at me.” Unlike her accounts of the relationship nearly a decade later, Karr’s tone here notably remains clever and humorous throughout. She also follows each disclosure of Wallace’s ferocity with a confession of her own regrettable behavior: regarding his “temper fits” she admits to “sentences I had to apologize for” and assures us—twice—that “no doubt he was richly provoked.” After describing the coffee-table incident, she notes parenthetically that “years later, we’ll accept each other’s longhand apologies for the whole debacle,” as if having a piece of furniture thrown at you makes you as guilty as having thrown it.

Three years later D.T. Max published his biography of Wallace, in which he divulged more shocking details about the relationship with Karr—that Wallace tried to buy a gun to kill her husband, that he tried to push her from a moving car—while also dropping enough details about Wallace’s sex life and professed attitudes toward women to make him sound like one of his own hideous men. Wallace called female fans at his readings “audience pussy”; wondered to Jonathan Franzen whether “his only purpose on earth was ‘to put my penis in as many vaginas as possible’”; picked up vulnerable women in his recovery groups; admitted to a “fetish for conquering young mothers,” like Orin in Infinite Jest ; and “affected not to care that some of the women were his students.”

In a 2016 anthology dedicated to the late author, one of those students, Suzanne Scanlon, published a short story about a student having a manipulative, emotionally abusive sexual affair with her professor (called “D-,” “Author,” and “a self-identified Misogynist”), using characteristic formal elements of “Octet” and “Brief Interviews” and dominated by the narrative voice popularized by David Foster Wallace.

None of these accounts had any visible impact on fans’ or readers’ love of Wallace’s writing or on critics’ readings and opinions of his work. Rather, one writer, Rebecca Rothfeld, confessed in 2013 that Max’s record of (some of) Wallace’s misogynistic acts and statements could not shake her “faith in [his] fundamental goodness, intelligence, and likeability” because his “work seemed more real to me than his behavior did.” Critic Amy Hungerford took the opposite stance in 2016, proclaiming her decision to stop reading and teaching Wallace’s work, but without mentioning his abusive treatment of women or the question of how that behavior presses us to re-read the same in his work.

Another writer, Deirdre Coyle, explained her discomfort at reading Wallace not in terms of the author’s own behavior—which she gives no sign of being aware of—but because of sexual and misogynistic violence perpetrated on her by men she sees as very much like Wallace (“Small liberal arts colleges are breeding grounds for these guys”) and in terms of patriarchy in general (“It’s hard to distinguish my reaction to Wallace from my reaction to patriarchy.” Any woman who has been violated, talked over, and condescended to by this kind of man, the kind who thinks his pseudo-feminism allows him to enlighten her about her own experiences of male oppression and sexual violation, cannot help but sympathize with Coyle.

But in rejecting Wallace because of other men’s sexual violence and misogyny in general, she shifts the argument away from questions about how these function in the fiction and how Wallace’s biography might force us to re-read that fiction, and allows for the kind of circular rebuttal that a (male) Wallace critic offered a year later: not all male readers of Wallace are misogynists; therefore, women should listen to the good ones and read more Wallace; let me tell you why.

These pre-#MeToo reactions to Karr’s and Max’s reports of Wallace’s abuse of women clarify what is at stake as readers, critics, and teachers consider this biographical information in the context of Wallace’s work. For, while Wimsatt and Beardsley’s argument against the intentional fallacy is compelling and important, its goal is to protect the sanctity of the text against the undue influence of our assumptions about the person who wrote it. Arguments defending the importance of Wallace’s beautiful empathizing fiction in spite of his abuse of women threaten to do the opposite.

Like Rothfeld, whose admiration for Wallace’s fiction renders his own misogynistic acts less “real,” David Hering argues that “the biographical revelation of unsavoury details about Wallace’s own relationships” leads to an equation between Wallace and misogyny that “does a fundamental disservice to the kind of urgent questions Wallace asks in his work about communication, empathy, and power”—as if Wallace’s real abuse of real women is not worth contemplating in comparison with his writing about how fictional men treat fictional women. Hering’s use of the euphemism “unsavoury” to describe behavior ranging from exploitation to physical attacks, like his description of Wallace’s work regarding gender as “troublesome,” illustrates another widespread problem with nearly all critical treatments of this topic so far: an unwillingness to say, or perhaps even see, that what we are talking about in the fiction and in the author’s life is gender-motivated violence, stalking, physical abuse, even, in the case of Karr’s husband, plotting to murder.

In the wake of the October 2017 resurgence of Burke’s #MeToo movement, we see a curious split between Wallace-studies critics and others in their reactions to these allegations. Not only does Hering’s response downplay the severity of Wallace’s behavior and its relevance to his work; it also asserts Hering’s “belief” that Wallace’s work “dramatize[s]” misogyny, rather than expressing it—without offering a text-based argument or pointing to the critical work that had already done this analysis and found exactly the opposite to be true.

He also relies on a technique used by memoirists, bloggers, and critics alike in their attempts to save Wallace from his own biography: he converts an example of male domination of women into a universal human dilemma, erasing the elements of gender and power entirely, by reading Wallace’s silencing of his female interviewer’s voice in Brief Interviews as “embody[ing] the richness of Wallace’s work—its focus on the difficulty and importance of communication and empathy, and its illustration of the poisonous things that happen when dialogue breaks down.” Such a reading ignores the fact that when dialogue breaks down between an entitled man and a pressured woman , the things that can happen go beyond metaphorically poisonous to physically sickening and injurious—as so many of the stories in that collection illustrate.

Given the same platform and the same task—celebrating Wallace around what would have been his 56th birthday—critic Clare Hayes-Brady offered “Reading David Foster Wallace in 2018,” mere months after the social media flood of women’s testimonies about sexual violence had begun. It does not mention #MeToo or the public allegations that had been made about Wallace, raising the question of what “in 2018” refers to. When asked several months later “what’s changed?” in Wallace studies, after the public (but not critical) backlash had begun, Hayes-Brady falls back on the same generalizing technique used by Hering. She reframes accusations of misogyny as an entirely academic development, beneficial to Wallace studies and unrelated to #MeToo outcry against perpetrators of sexual violence (“a coincidence of timing”). She equates “flaws in his writing both technical and also moral and ethical,” as if women had been up in arms across Twitter over Wallace’s exhausting sentence structures.

When directly asked if Wallace was a misogynist, she replies “yes, but in the way everyone is, including me,” as if we neither have nor need a separate word for men who do not just live unavoidably in our misogynistic culture but also willfully perpetrate selfish, cruel, and violent acts of misogyny against women. That is, rather than responding humanely to indisputable evidence that our beloved writer was not the saint he would have liked us to think he was (and that we would have liked to believe him to be), Wallace critics—including me, in my silence at that time—refused to allow #MeToo to force the reckoning that was so clearly required. We did so by denying the relevance of his personal behavior to his fiction and to our work, or—worse—by participating in that age-old rape culture enabler: refusing to believe women’s testimony.

Those outside literary studies reacted quite differently to the renewed attention #MeToo brought to these accusations. After Junot Díaz was publicly accused on May 4, 2018, of sexually abusing women, causing immediate public protest, Mary Karr responded by reminding us on Twitter of the abuse she had reported nearly a decade earlier, prompting a series of blog articles and interviews that supported Karr by recounting the allegations made by Karr and Max. They also began to reveal the misogyny that had shaped and stifled public reception of those allegations.

Whitney Kimball pointed out that Max described Wallace’s violent treatment of Karr as beneficial to his creative output and part of what made him “fascinating”; that in praising the “quite remarkable” “craftsmanship” of one of Wallace’s letters, Max notes only in passing that the letter is Wallace’s apology for planning to buy a gun to kill Karr’s husband. Megan Garber noted the misogyny of an interviewer asking Max why “his feelings for [Karr] created such trouble for Wallace”—an example of what Kate Manne calls “himpathy,” or empathizing with a male perpetrator of sexual violence rather than the victim.

#MeToo also began to make the misogyny of Wallace’s work more visible to his readers. Devon Price describes how reading about Wallace’s abuses against women caused them to revisit Wallace’s work and see its gender violence for the first time. Tellingly, Price also realizes that one of the reasons they were depressed when they fell in love with Wallace’s work is that they were then in a physically, emotionally, and sexually abusive relationship. Price’s realization points to another common reason why readers are blind to or defensive about the misogyny in Wallace’s work and behavior, and to a key way in which the #MeToo movement can allow reading and literary studies to illuminate misogyny in synergistic ways: we are often blind to misogyny and sexual abuse, in fiction and in others’ behavior, because we are living in it unaware. And the awareness of the spectrum of sexual abuse brought by #MeToo testimonies reveals misogyny not just in the fiction that we read, but in our own lives—one revelation causing the other.

To date, no new criticism has emerged that directly considers the implications to his work of Wallace’s now widely reported misogyny and violence toward women. But the recent publication of Adrienne Miller’s memoir In the Land of Men (2020), which describes her years-long relationship with Wallace while she was literary editor at Esquire , makes a compelling, if unwitting, argument for the necessity of such biographically informed criticism. Miller documents the connection between Wallace’s life and work in excruciating detail, recounting extended scenes between them in which Wallace speaks and acts nearly identically to the misogynists of Brief Interviews , an identification he encourages by telling her that “some of the interviews were ‘actual conversations I had when I had to break up with people.’”

But though Miller lays out the “sexism” of Wallace’s fiction, especially Jest and Brief Interviews , more baldly than any of us Wallace scholars has so far, she remains, even from the vantage point of twenty years later and post-#MeToo, unable or unwilling to identify Wallace’s treatment of her as abusive or misogynistic. In fact, most shocking about the memoir is not its record of Wallace’s behavior but its methodical and steadfast refusal to acknowledge the gender violence of that behavior, and Miller’s disturbing pattern of normalizing, apologizing for, and denying it.

Ultimately, she attempts to redirect us from the question of whether her relationship with Wallace qualifies as abuse or sexual harassment by asking, “Who looks to the artist’s life for moral guidance anyway?” and “What are we to do with the art of profoundly compromised men?” But rather than neatly pivoting from Wallace’s culpability, these questions reveal important reasons why we must consider the lives of such men in conversation with their art. For these men are not merely passively “compromised” but aggressively compromis ing , in ways that our misogynistic culture obscures, and which savvy investigation of their art and lives can illuminate. And “moral” investigation is particularly indicated by the work of Wallace, who declared himself a maverick writer willing to return literature to earnestness and “love” (“Interview with David Foster Wallace” 1993), who wrote fiction that quizzes us on ethics and human value (“Octet” 1999), and who delivered a beloved commencement speech arguing the importance of recognizing one’s inherent narcissism in order to extend care to others.

What does it mean that this artist could not produce in his life the mutually respecting empathy he all but preached in his work (or, most clearly, in his statements about it)? What does it mean that a man and a body of work that claimed feminism in theory primarily produced a stream of abusive relationships between men and women in life and art? What can we learn about the blindness of both men and women to their participation in misogyny and rape culture, despite their professions of awareness of both? How might reading Wallace’s fiction in the contexts of biographical information about him and women’s narratives about their experiences of sexual violence enable us to better understand—and interrupt—the powerful hold misogyny and rape culture have on our society, our art, and our critical practices?

_____________________________________________________________________

Excerpted from #MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture , edited by Mary K. Holland & Heather Hewett. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Bloomsbury Academic.  © 2021 by Mary K. Holland & Heather Hewett. 

Mary K. Holland

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Another Thing to Sort of Pin on David Foster Wallace

By Maud Newton

• Aug. 19, 2011

Ten years ago, David Foster Wallace admitted in “Tense Present,” one of his best and most charming essays, to being a “SNOOT,” which he defined as a “really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to look for mistakes in Safire’s column’s prose itself.” He outed himself while writing in Harper’s on Bryan A. Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage, a book, he says, that serves to confirm its author’s “SNOOTitude while undercutting it in tone.”

Ultimately, though, “Tense Present” is as much about Wallace’s own rhetorical postures as about Garner’s, so much so that Wallace might as well be talking about himself. Garner’s book is “so good and so sneaky,” Wallace contends, because it relies on a “subtle rhetorical strategy.” Its “Ethical Appeal” amounts to “a complex and sophisticated ‘Trust me,’ ” one that “requires the rhetor to convince us not just of his intellectual acuity or technical competence, but of his basic decency and fairness and sensitivity to the audience’s own hopes and fears.”

Wallace, too, strived to make ethical arguments while soothing and flattering his readers and distracting them from the fact that arguments were being made. He was inarguably one of the most interesting thinkers and distinctive stylists of the generation raised on Jacques Derrida, Strunk and White and Scooby-Doo, and his nonfiction writings, on subjects as diverse as cruises, porn, tennis and eating lobster, are a compelling, often dizzying mix of arguments and asides, of reportage and personal anecdotes, of high diction (“pleonasm”), childlike speech (“plus, worse”), slacker lingo (“totally hosed”) and legalese (“what this article hereby terms a ‘Democratic Spirit’ ”), often within the course of a single paragraph. As John Jeremiah Sullivan astutely observed in GQ , Wallace repudiated the demands of “the well-tempered magazine feature,” which “seeks to make you forget its problems, half-truths and arbitrary decisions.” Yet Wallace’s rhetoric is mannered and limited in its own way, as manipulative in its recursive self-second-guessing as any more straightforward effort to persuade.

Geoff Dyer, an essayist as idiosyncratic and perceptive as Wallace but far more economical, confessed recently in Prospect magazine that he “break[s] out in a mental rash” when forced to read Wallace. “It’s not that I dislike the extravagance, the excess, the beanie-baroque, the phat loquacity,” Dyer wrote. “They just bug the crap out of me. ” Wallace’s nonfiction abounds with qualifiers like “sort of” and “pretty much” and sincerity-infusers like “really.” An icon of porn publishing described in the essay “Big Red Son,” for example, is “hard not to sort of almost actually like.” Within a brief excerpt from that piece in The New York Times Book Review, Wallace speaks of “the whole cynical postmodern deal” and “the whole mainstream celebrity culture,” and concludes that “the whole thing sucks.” Nor is this an unrepresentative sample; “whole” appears 20 times in the essay, so frequently that it begins to seem not just sloppy and imprecise but argumentatively, even aggressively, disingenuous. At their worst these verbal tics make it impossible to evaluate his analysis; I’m constantly wishing he would either choose a more straightforward way to limit his contentions or fully commit to one of them.

Of course, Wallace’s slangy approachability was part of his appeal, and these quirks are more than compensated for by his roving intelligence and the tireless force of his writing. The trouble is that his style is also, as Dyer says, “catching, highly infectious.” And if, even from Wallace, the aw-shucks, I-could-be-wrong-here, I’m-just-a-supersincere-regular-guy-who-happens-to-have-written-a-book-on-infinity approach grates, it is vastly more exasperating in the hands of lesser thinkers. In the Internet era, Wallace’s moves have been adopted and further slackerized by a legion of opinion-mongers who not only lack his quick mind but seem not to have mastered the idea that to make an argument, you must, amid all the tap-dancing and hedging, actually lodge an argument.

Visit some blogs — personal blogs, academic blogs, blogs associated with some of our most esteemed periodicals — to see these tendencies writ large. My own archives, dating back to 2002, are no exception.

I suppose it made sense, when blogging was new, that there was some confusion about voice. Was a blog more like writing or more like speech? Soon it became a contrived and shambling hybrid of the two. The “sort ofs” and “reallys” and “ums” and “you knows” that we use in conversation were codified as the central connectors in the blogger lexicon. We weren’t just mad, we were sort of enraged; no one was merely confused, but kind of totally mystified. That music blog we liked was really pretty much the only one that, um, you know, got it. Never before had “folks” been used so relentlessly and enthusiastically as a term of general address outside church suppers, chain restaurants and family reunions. It’s fascinating and dreadful in hindsight to realize how quickly these conventions took hold and how widely they spread. And! They have sort of mutated since to liberal and often sarcastic use of question marks? And exclamation points! “Oh, hi,” people say at the start of sentences on blogs, Twitter and Tumblr these days, both acknowledging and jokily feigning surprise at the presence of the readers who have turned up there.

Wallace isn’t responsible for his imitators, much less for the stylized mess that is Gen-X-and-Y Internet syntax. The devices can be traced back to him, though, if indirectly; they were filtered through and popularized by Dave Eggers’s literary magazine and publishing empire, McSweeney’s, and Eggers’s own novels and memoirs, all of which borrowed not only Wallace’s tics but also his championing of post-ironic sincerity and his attempts to ward off criticism by embedding all possible criticisms within the writing itself. “There is no overwhelming need to read the preface,” Eggers wrote in “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”; in fact, after “the first three or four chapters” the book “is kind of uneven.”

The ur-text of this movement, though, is Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” written in 1993. It’s a call for writing that transcends irony and detachment but, itself, comes drenched in both. The essay bemoans what Wallace saw as the near-impossibility of writing inventive, self-aware fiction in a television culture. He concludes by imagining some future group of “literary ‘rebels’ ” who would be “willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs . . . [and] accusations of sentimentality, melodrama.”

In its soaring romanticism, its Orwellian fears, its I’m-just-riffing-here backtracking and its infuriating absence of question marks following interrogatories, this essay prefigures many of the worst tendencies of the Internet. As the Times critic A. O. Scott has observed , Wallace “wants to be at once earnest and ironical, sensitive and cerebral, lisible and scriptible , R&D and R&R, straight man and clown, grifter and mark.” Every assertion, consequently, comes wrapped in qualifications, if not partial refutations; a later essay, appearing in “Consider the Lobster,” is titled, “Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think.”

In a 2000 essay for Feed , Keith Gessen applauds Wallace for “trying, at last, to destroy” the oppositions between “irony and sincerity, self-consciousness and artifice.” He chastises those critics who in effect suggest that at “this late date, we might unlearn the postmodern vocabulary and recapture some pre-ironic way of being.” What we need, Gessen posits, in fiction writing at least, is someone to work “a sort of Barthelmeic magic” and “transform our language of apathy into a cri de coeur .”

How we arrived at the notion that the postmodern era is the first ever to confront the tension between sincerity and irony despite millennia of evidence to the contrary is no mystery: every generation believes its insights are unprecedented, its struggles uniquely formidable, its solutions the balm for all that ails the world. Why so many of our critics are still, after all these years, making their arguments in this inherently self-undermining voice — still trying to ward off every possible rejoinder and pre-emptively rebut every possible criticism by mixing a weird rhetorical stew of equivocation, pessimism and Elysian prophecy — is another question entirely. Perhaps even now some Wallacites would argue that we simply have yet to reach that idyllic moment at which our discourse will naturally transform into a sincere yet knowing cry from the heart. I would put it differently.

In “Generation Why?” a social-networking jeremiad published in The New York Review of Books last year, Zadie Smith reduces the motivations of the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to one: he wants to be liked. She writes, “For our self-conscious generation (and in this, I and Zuckerberg, and everyone raised on TV in the Eighties and Nineties, share a single soul), not being liked is as bad as it gets. Intolerable to be thought of badly for a minute, even for a moment.” Even if you reject, as I do, the universality of her diagnosis, Smith has pinpointed the reason so much of what passes for intellectual debate nowadays is obscured behind a veneer of folksiness and sincerity and is characterized by an unwillingness to be pinned down. Where the craving for admiration and approval predominates, intellectual rigor cannot thrive, if it survives at all.

At 20 I congratulated myself on my awareness of the subjectivity of aesthetic judgments, the arbitrariness of critical proclamations, the folly of received wisdom. I pored over the Deconstructionists and the French feminists and advocated, in complete seriousness, the overthrow of language. (Also, the patriarchy.) Then I went to law school and was forced to confront serious practical and ethical questions — Brown v. Board of Education, for instance, and Roe v. Wade — that managed not to be resolved by the insights of Derrida. Now, having entered and abandoned the practice of law and spent roughly a decade straddling legal publishing and the blogosphere, I’m increasingly drawn to directness, which precludes neither nuance nor irony. (For details, see the essays of Mark Twain, who believed that “plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities.”)

Qualifications are necessary sometimes. Anticipating and defusing opposing arguments has been a vital rhetorical strategy since at least the days of Aristotle. Satire and ridicule, when done well, are high art. But the idea is to provoke and persuade, not to soothe. And the best way to make an argument is to make it, straightforwardly, honestly, passionately, without regard to whether people will like you afterward.

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David Foster Wallace’s Perfect Game

By John Jeremiah Sullivan

“Tennis” is a wonderful word in the sense that it never really existed. That is, although the game is French to the core—not one but two of France’s early kings died at the tennis courts, and the Republic was born on one, with the Tennis Court Oath—the French never called it that, tennis. They called it  jeu de paume , the “game of the palm,” or “handball,” if we want to be less awkwardly literal about it. (Originally they had played it with the bare hand, then came gloves, then paddles, then rackets.) When the French would go to serve, they often said,  Tenez !, the French word for “take it,” meaning “coming at you, heads up.” We preserve this custom of warning the opponent in our less lyrical way by stating the score just before we toss up the ball. It was the Italians who, having overheard the French make these sounds, began calling the game “ten-ez” by association. A lovely detail in that it suggests a scene, a Florentine ear at the fence or the entryway, listening. They often built those early courts in the forest, in clearings. The call in the air. Easy to think of Benjy in “The Sound and the Fury,” hearing the golfers shout “Caddy!” and assuming they mean his sister, only here the word moves between languages, out of France via the transnational culture of the aristocratic court and into Italy. There it enters European literature around the thirteen-fifties, the time of Petrarch’s “Phisicke Against Fortune.” In considering the anxiety that consumes so much of human experience, he writes, “And what is the cause hereof, but only our own lightness & daintiness: for we seem to be good for nothing else, but to be tossed hither & thither like a Tennise bal, being creatures of very short life, of infinite carefulness, & yet ignorant unto what shore to sail with our ship.”

A metaphor for human existence, then, and for fate: “We are merely the stars’ tennis-balls,” in John Webster’s “Duchess of Malfi,” “struck and banded / Which way please them.” That is one tradition. In another, tennis becomes a symbol of frivolity, of a different kind of “lightness.” Grown men playing with balls. The history of the game’s being used that way is twined up with an anecdote from the reign of Henry V, the powerful young king who had once been Shakespeare’s reckless Prince Hal. According to one early chronicler, “The Dauphin, thinking King Henry to be given to such plays and light follies . . . sent to him a tun of tennis-balls.” King Henry’s imagined reply at the battle of Agincourt was rendered into verse, probably by the poet-monk John Lydgate, around 1536:

Some hard tennis balls I have hither brought Of marble and iron made full round. I swear, by Jesu that me dear bought, They shall beat the walls to the ground.

That story flowers into a couplet of Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” circa 1599. The package from the Dauphin arrives. Henry’s uncle, the Duke of Exeter, takes it. “What treasure, uncle?” the king asks. “Tennis-balls, my liege,” Exeter answers. “And we understand him well,” Henry says (a line meant to echo an earlier one, said under very different circumstances, Hal’s equally famous “I know you all and will awhile uphold”):

How he comes o’er us with our wilder days Not measuring what use we made of them.

A more eccentric instance of tennis-as-metaphor pops up in Shakespeare’s “Pericles,” where the tennis court is compared with the ocean. It occurs in the part of the play that scholars now believe was written by a tavern-keeper named George Wilkins. Pericles has just been tossed half dead onto the Greek shore and is discovered by three fishermen. He says,

A man whom both the waters and the wind, In that vast tennis-court, hath made the ball For them to play upon, entreats you pity him.

These lines may cause some modern readers to recall David Foster Wallace’s “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” an essay about learning to play the game in the central Midwest, where extreme winds are an almost constant factor, but where Wallace succeeded, he tells us, in part because of a “weird robotic detachment” from the “unfairnesses of wind and weather.”

David Foster Wallace wrote about tennis because life gave it to him—he had played the game well at the junior level—and because he was a writer who in his own way made use of wilder days, turning relentlessly in his work to the stuff of his own experience. But the fact of the game in his biography came before any thought of its use as material. At least I assume that’s the case. It can be amazing how early in life some writers figure out what they are and start to see their lives as stories that can be controlled. It is perhaps not far-fetched to imagine Wallace’s noticing early on that tennis is a good sport for literary types and purposes. It draws the obsessive and brooding. It is perhaps the most isolating of games. Even boxers have a corner, but in professional tennis it is a rules violation for your coach to communicate with you beyond polite encouragement, and spectators are asked to keep silent while you play. Your opponent is far away, or, if near, is indifferently hostile. It may be as close as we come to physical chess, or a kind of chess in which the mind and body are at one in attacking essentially mathematical problems. So, a good game not just for writers but for philosophers, too. The perfect game for Wallace.

He wrote about it in fiction, essays, journalism, and reviews; it may be his most consistent theme at the surface level. Wallace himself drew attention, consciously or not, to both his love for the game and its relevance to how he saw the world. He knew something, too, about the contemporary literature of the sport. The close attention to both physics and physical detail that energizes the opening of his 1996  Esquire _  piece on a then-young Michael Joyce (a promising power baseliner who became a sought-after coach and helped Maria Sharapova win two of her Grand Slam titles) echoes clearly the first lines of John McPhee’s “Levels of the Game”  _(one of the few tennis books I can think of that give as much pleasure as the one you’re holding): “Arthur Ashe, his feet apart, his knees slightly bent, lifts a tennis ball into the air. The toss is high and forward. If the ball were allowed to drop, it would, in Ashe’s words, ‘make a parabola.’ ”

For me, the cumulative effect of Wallace’s tennis-themed nonfiction is a bit like being presented with a mirror, one of those segmented mirrors they build and position in space, only this one is pointed at a writer’s mind. The game he writes about is one that, like language, emphasizes the closed system, makes a fetish of it (“Out!”). He seems both to exult and to be trapped in its rules, its cruelties. He loves the game but yearns to transcend it. As always in Wallace’s writing, Wittgenstein is the philosopher who most haunts the approach, the Wittgenstein who told us that reality is inseparable from language (“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”), and that language is inseparable from game (both being at root “part of an activity, a form of life”).

From such a description a reader might conclude that the writer under discussion was dry and abstract, and in the end only using the sport, in a convenient, manipulative way, to say other things, which he deemed more significant—but that is not the writer you’ll meet in the following pages. This is instead one who can transpose on-court sensations into his prose. In those paragraphs that describe how growing up in a windy country shaped his game, briefly allowing him to excel over more talented opponents who tended to get frustrated in unpredictable conditions, he tells us that he was “able to use the currents kind of the way a pitcher uses spit. I could hit curves way out into cross-breezes that’d drop the ball just fair; I had a special wind-serve that had so much spin the ball turned oval in the air and curved left to right. . . .” In reviewing Tracy Austin’s autobiography, he finds a way, despite his disappointment with the book, to say something about athletic greatness and mediocrity, and what truly differentiates them, remembering how as a player he would often “get divided, paralyzed. As most ungreat athletes do. Freeze up, choke. Lose our focus. Become self-conscious. Cease to be wholly present in our wills and choices and movements.” Unlike the great, who become so in part because it would never occur to them not to be “totally present.” Their “blindness and dumbness,” in other words, are not “the price of the gift” but “its essence,” and are even the gift itself. The writer, existing only in reflection, is of all beings most excluded from the highest realms.

Possibly Wallace’s finest tennis piece, certainly his most famous, is “Federer Both Flesh and Not,” an essay first published in 2006 in the  Times ’ short-lived sports magazine  Play . The greatest tennis writer of his generation was writing about the greatest player of his generation. The sentence needs no qualifiers. Federer himself later remarked, in a question-and-answer forum, that he was astonished at what a “comprehensive” piece Wallace had produced, despite the fact that Federer had spent only “20 min with him in the ATP office.” But I doubt Wallace wanted more face time than that. He had come to Wimbledon in search of not the man Roger Federer but rather the being Federer seemed to become when he competed. What Wallace wanted to see occurred only as spectacle. In that respect and others, it is interesting to compare the Federer piece with the profile Wallace had written precisely a decade before, about Michael Joyce. I tend to prefer the earlier piece, for its thick description and subtleties, while recognizing the greatness of the later one. In the Joyce piece, Wallace had written about a nobody, a player no one had heard of and who was never going to make it on the tour. That was the subtext, and at times the text, of the essay: you could be  that _  good and still not be good enough. The essay was about agony. In Federer, though, he had a player who offered him a different subject: transcendence. What it actually looked like. An athlete who appeared “to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws.” One can see exactly what Wallace means in footage of the point he breaks down so beautifully—a “sixteen-stroke point” that reads as dramatically as a battle scene—which occurred in the second set of Federer’s 2006 Wimbledon final match against Rafael Nadal, a point that ends with a backhand one can replay infinite times and somehow come no closer to comprehending, struck from about an inch inside the baseline with some kind of demented spin that causes the ball to  slip  _over the net and vanish. Nadal never touches it. Wallace is able not only to give us the moment but to let us see the strategic and geometric intelligence that went into setting it up, the ability Federer had (has, as of this writing) to “hypnotize” opponents through shot selection.

The key sentences in the Federer essay, to my mind, occur in the paragraph that mentions “evolution.” In discussing the “power baseline” style that has defined the game in the modern era—two heavy hitters standing back and blasting wrist-fracturing ground strokes at each other—Wallace writes that “it is not, as pundits have publicly feared for years, the evolutionary endpoint of tennis. The player who’s shown this to be true is Roger Federer.” One imagines his writing this sentence with something almost like gratitude. It had taken genius to break through the brutal dictates of the power game and bring back an all-court style, to bring back art. And Federer, as Wallace emphasizes, did this from “within” the power game; he did it while handling shots that were moving at hurricane force. Inside the wind tunnel of modern tennis, he crafted a style that seemed made for a butterfly, yet was crushingly effective. What a marvelous subject, and figure, for a twenty-first-century novelist, a writer working in a form that is also (perpetually?) said to be at the end of its evolution, and an artist who similarly, when at his best, showed new ways forward.

This piece was drawn from the introduction to “String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis,” which is out May 10th from Library of America.

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By D. T. Max

By David Foster Wallace

By Nathan Heller

David Foster Wallace on Writing, Self-Improvement, and How We Become Who We Are

By maria popova.

In late 1999, David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962–September 12, 2008) — poignant contemplator of death and redemption , tragic prophet of the meaning of life , champion of intelligent entertainment , admonisher against blind ambition , advocate of true leadership — called the office of the prolific writer-about-writing Bryan A. Garner and, declining to be put through to Garner himself, grilled his secretary about her boss. Wallace was working on an extensive essay about Garner’s work and his newly released Dictionary of Modern American Usage . A few weeks later, Garner received a hefty package in the mail — the manuscript of Wallace’s essay, titled “Tense Present,” which was famously rejected by The New Republic and The New York Review of Books , then finally published by Harper’s and included in the 2005 anthology Consider the Lobster and Other Essays . Garner later wrote of the review, “a long, laudatory piece”: “It changed my literary life in ways that a book review rarely can.”

Over the course of the exchange, the two struck up a friendship and began an ongoing correspondence, culminating in Garner’s extensive interview with Wallace, conducted on February 3, 2006, in Los Angeles — the kind of conversation that reveals as much about its subject matter, in this case writing and language, as it does about the inner workings of its subject’s psyche. Five years after Wallace’s death, their conversation was published in Quack This Way: David Foster Wallace & Bryan A. Garner Talk Language and Writing ( public library ).

Wallace begins at the beginning, responding to Garner’s request to define good writing:

In the broadest possible sense, writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the reader. Where there’s some kind of relationship between the writer and the reader — even though it’s mediated by a kind of text — there’s an electricity about it.

Wallace, who by the time of the interview had fifteen years of teaching writing and literature under his belt, considers how one might learn this delicate craft:

In my experience with students—talented students of writing — the most important thing for them to remember is that someone who is not them and cannot read their mind is going to have to read this. In order to write effectively, you don’t pretend it’s a letter to some individual you know, but you never forget that what you’re engaged in is a communication to another human being. The bromide associated with this is that the reader cannot read your mind. The reader cannot read your mind . That would be the biggest one. Probably the second biggest one is learning to pay attention in different ways. Not just reading a lot, but paying attention to the way the sentences are put together, the clauses are joined, the way the sentences go to make up a paragraph.

This act of paying attention, Wallace argues, is a matter of slowing oneself down. Echoing Mary Gordon’s case for writing by hand , he tells Garner:

The writing writing that I do is longhand. . . . The first two or three drafts are always longhand. . . . I can type very much faster than I can write. And writing makes me slow down in a way that helps me pay attention.

In a sentiment that brings to mind Susan Sontag’s beautiful Letter to Borges , in which she defines writing as an act of self-transcendence, Wallace argues for the craft as an antidote to selfishness and self-involvement, and at the same time a springboard for self-improvement:

One of the things that’s good about writing and practicing writing is it’s a great remedy for my natural self-involvement and self-centeredness. . . . When students snap to the fact that there’s such a thing as a really bad writer, a pretty good writer, a great writer — when they start wanting to get better — they start realizing that really learning how to write effectively is, in fact, probably more of a matter of spirit than it is of intellect. I think probably even of verbal facility. And the spirit means I never forget there’s someone on the end of the line, that I owe that person certain allegiances, that I’m sending that person all kinds of messages, only some of which have to do with the actual content of what it is I’m trying to say.

Wallace argues that one of the most important points of awareness, and one of the most shocking to aspiring writers, can be summed up thusly:

“I am not, in and of myself, interesting to a reader. If I want to seem interesting, work has to be done in order to make myself interesting.”

(Vonnegut only compounded the terror when he memorably admonished , “The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not.” )

Wallace weighs the question of talent, erring on the side of grit as the quality that sets successful writers apart:

There’s a certain amount of stuff about writing that’s like music or math or certain kinds of sports. Some people really have a knack for this. . . . One of the exciting things about teaching college is you see a couple of them every semester. They’re not always the best writers in the room because the other part of it is it takes a heck of a lot of practice. Gifted, really really gifted writers pick stuff up quicker, but they also usually have a great deal more ego invested in what they write and tend to be more difficult to teach. . . . Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.

Despite the prevalence of mindless language usage , Wallace — not one to miss an opportunity to poke some fun at then-President George Bush — makes a case for a yang to the yin of E.B. White’s assertion that the writer’s responsibility is “to lift people up, not lower them down,” arguing that part of that responsibility is also having faith in the reader’s capacities and sensitivities:

Regardless of whom you’re writing for or what you think about the current debased state of the English language, right? — in which the President says things that would embarrass a junior-high-school student — the fact remains that … the average person you’re writing for is an acute, sensitive, attentive, sophisticated reader who will appreciate adroitness, precision, economy, and clarity. Not always, but I think the vast majority of the time.

Learning to write well, with elegance and sensitivity, shouldn’t be reserved for those trying to have a formal career in writing — it also, Wallace points out, immunizes us against the laziness of clichés and vogue expressions :

A vogue word … becomes trendy because a great deal of listening, talking, and writing for many people takes place below the level of consciousness. It happens very fast. They don’t pay it very much attention, and they’ve heard it a lot. It kind of enters into the nervous system. They get the idea, without it ever being conscious, that this is the good, current, credible way to say this, and they spout it back. And for people outside, say, the corporate business world or the advertising world, it becomes very easy to make fun of this kind of stuff. But in fact, probably if we look carefully at ourselves and the way we’re constantly learning language . . . a lot of us are very sloppy in the way that we use language. And another advantage of learning to write better, whether or not you want to do it for a living, is that it makes you pay more attention to this stuff. The downside is stuff begins bugging you that didn’t bug you before. If you’re in the express lane and it says, “10 Items or Less,” you will be bugged because less is actually inferior to fewer for items that are countable. So you can end up being bugged a lot of the time. But it is still, I think, well worth paying attention. And it does help, I think . . . the more attention one pays, the more one is immune to the worst excesses of vogue words, slang, you know. Which really I think on some level for a lot of listeners or readers, if you use a whole lot of it, you just kind of look like a sheep—somebody who isn’t thinking, but is parroting.

He returns to the question of good writing and the deliberate practice it takes to master:

Writing well in the sense of writing something interesting and urgent and alive, that actually has calories in it for the reader — the reader walks away having benefited from the 45 minutes she put into reading the thing — maybe isn’t hard for a certain few. I mean, maybe John Updike’s first drafts are these incredible . . . Apparently Bertrand Russell could just simply sit down and do this. I don’t know anyone who can do that. For me, the cliché that “Writing that appears effortless takes the most work” has been borne out through very unpleasant experience.

In a sentiment that Anne Lamott memorably made, urging that perfectionism is the great enemy of creativity , and Neil Gaiman subsequently echoed in his 8 rules of writing , where he asserted that “perfection is like chasing the horizon,” Wallace adds:

Like any art, probably, the more experience you have with it, the more the horizon of what being really good is . . . the more it recedes. . . . Which you could say is an important part of my education as a writer. If I’m not aware of some deficits, I’m not going to be working hard to try to overcome them. . . . Like any kind of infinitely rich art, or any infinitely rich medium, like language, the possibilities for improvement are infinite and so are the possibilities for screwing up and ceasing to be good in the ways you want to be good.

Reflecting on the writers he sees as “models of incredibly clear, beautiful, alive, urgent, crackling-with-voltage prose” — he lists William Gass, Don DeLillo, Cynthia Ozick, Louise Erdrich, and Cormac McCarthy — Wallace makes a beautiful case for the gift of encountering, of arriving in the work of that rare writer who not only shares one’s sensibility but also offers an almost spiritual resonance. (For me, those writers include Rebecca Solnit , Dani Shapiro , Susan Sontag , Carl Sagan , E.B White , Anne Lamott , Virginia Woolf .) Wallace puts it elegantly:

If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers … becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It’s like eating candy for the soul. And I sometimes have a hard time understanding how people who don’t have that in their lives make it through the day.

Echoing Kandinsky’s thoughts on the spiritual element in art , he adds:

Lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn’t mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you’re just never the same.

But perhaps his most important point is that the act of finding our purpose and finding ourselves is not an A-to-B journey but a dynamic act, one predicated on continually, cyclically getting lost — something we so often, and with such spiritually toxic consequences, forget in a culture where the first thing we ask a stranger is “So, what do you do?” Wallace tells Garner:

I don’t think there’s a person alive who doesn’t have certain passions. I think if you’re lucky, either by genetics or you just get a really good education, you find things that become passions that are just really rich and really good and really joyful, as opposed to the passion being, you know, getting drunk and watching football. Which has its appeals, right? But it is not the sort of calories that get you through your 20s, and then your 30s, and then your 40s, and, “Ooh, here comes death,” you know, the big stuff. . . . It’s also true that we go through cycles. . . . These are actually good — one’s being larval. . . . But I think the hard thing to distinguish among my friends is who . . . who’s the 45-year-old who doesn’t know what she likes or what she wants to do? Is she immature? Or is she somebody who’s getting reborn over and over and over again? In a way, that’s rather cool.

Quack This Way is excellent in its entirety, brimming with the very spiritual resonance discussed above. Complement it with this compendium of famous writers’ wisdom on the craft , including Kurt Vonnegut ’s 8 rules for writing with style , Henry Miller ’s 11 commandments , Susan Sontag ’s synthesized wisdom , Chinua Achebe on the writer’s responsibility , Nietzsche ’s 10 rules for writers , and Jeanette Winterson on reading and writing .

— Published August 11, 2014 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/08/11/david-foster-wallace-quack-this-way/ —

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The Best of David Foster Wallace

When the novelist learned to escape his own mind, he got a little closer to the greatness he sought.

by Ryan Bloom

November 26, 2012

May 2005, Kenyon College, Ohio. David Foster Wallace steps to the podium and looks out at the graduating seniors before him. He tugs at his academic robe and bends toward the microphone, hair falling onto his face. Sweat beads and drips over his body. "If anybody feels like perspiring," Wallace says, "I'd invite you to go ahead, 'cause I'm sure goin' to." He reaches into his pocket for a handkerchief and begins to relate the first of several parables: "There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, 'What the hell is water?'"

Laughter ripples through the convocation room. The gathered seniors, those who'd previously heard of David Foster Wallace, author of the scene-smashing, biblically large 1996 novel Infinite Jest , but like so many others hadn't actually read him, they probably hadn't expected this-this big, sweaty guy with a rural twang and halting speech pattern. Here was the MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant recipient who'd seen his first novel published before he was out of grad school, who'd written a serious math book on Georg Cantor's "infinity of infinities," who'd been appointed to the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language , and what was he doing? Dispensing fish tales.

Wallace's use of this tale is clever, though: It's precisely in mixing parables, relatable situations, and everyman locutions that he persuades the listener not only to accept the clichés without the usual ho-hum resignation but to actually be awakened and invigorated by them. When he talks about the egocentric nature of an after-work trip to the supermarket, about being stuck in the slowest, most frustrating checkout line and seeing everyone and everything around you as annoying and dumb and obnoxious-the "ADHD kids" running wild, the "cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left," the rude people "talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line"-we don't feel like we're being lectured or laughed at for our self-centeredness. Wallace uses our recognition, the unspoken thoughts most of us have had but never stopped to examine, to make a connection. Before the commencement speech rocketed around the Web, appeared in newspapers, was published as a stand-alone volume, and was even released in two audio versions (the original and a re-creation by his sister), Wallace was seen as a difficult writer, not one to dish out easily digestible bits of wisdom. But at Kenyon, he spoke in a straightforward manner of things that had come to be important to him, things the 20th century made it all too easy to ignore-mindfulness, maintaining a sense of humility, avoiding ego. These, "the most obvious, important realities," he told the graduating seniors, "are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about."

As someone who struggled with crippling bouts of depression throughout his life, Wallace knew the difficulties of fighting against one's own mind. In his first published story, "The Planet Trillaphon As It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing," he had described depression-the titular Bad Thing-as "having always before you and under you a huge black hole without a bottom, a black, black hole, maybe with vague teeth in it, and then your being part of the hole, so that you fall even when you stay where you are." Over the years, Wallace submitted himself to hospitalizations and multiple courses of electroconvulsive therapy, and on at least two occasions, feeling unable to escape the Bad Thing, to see beyond it, he attempted suicide; on September 12, 2008, he succeeded, hanging himself from a rafter above his backyard patio.

The writer Jonathan Franzen, a rival and friend of Wallace's who would later deliver his own graduation address at Kenyon College, one not so different from Wallace's, complained in a New Yorker essay that after Wallace died, "people who had never read his fiction, or had never even heard of him, read his Kenyon College commencement address in The Wall Street Journal and mourned the loss of a great and gentle soul." Like much of Franzen's work, the essay comes off slightly bitter and holier-than-thou, but the notion Franzen reacts against-that in reading only one of Wallace's works people somehow felt they knew him, felt him to be a "great and gentle soul"-proves the ultimate success of Wallace's ambition to make people feel "less alone inside."

In 1963, when Wallace was a year old, his father took a job teaching philosophy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and it was in the Midwest that Wallace grew up amid strips of modest homes, ever-present neighbors, packs of kids on bikes, and endless fields of soy and corn, absorbing the value of community and normalcy. Because it was a university town, a high premium was also placed on intellectual achievement, and hints of Wallace's intelligence appeared early. Once, when his mother told him to "Behave," he replied, "I am 'have.'" He was three years old. By the time he was finishing a double major in English and philosophy at Amherst College, his writing was winning awards: His philosophy thesis, which would later be published as Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will , won the college's top departmental award, and his English thesis, a novel called The Broom of the System , would be published as he began graduate school at the University of Arizona. Wallace later attended Harvard but, again struggling with depression and finding his interest in pursuing an advanced degree in philosophy waning, he dropped out.

This is only the beginning of the story, but it is the end, Wallace's final years, that originally brought D.T. Max, author of Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace , to his subject. Max's March 2009 New Yorker essay, "The Unfinished," the bud from which his full-length biography bloomed, centered on Wallace's struggles to transcend the stylistic pyrotechnics of Infinite Jest -its twisting 500-word sentences, endless footnotes, and linguistic prolixity-which Wallace had come to see as a hindrance in his quest to connect with other minds, to make people feel less alone. For 11 years, Max says, Wallace had been working on a third novel, the "Long Thing," as he called it, which, like the Kenyon College speech, he hoped would illustrate the value of mindfulness, the way in which attention to even life's most soul-sucking, tedious tasks can be a lesson in how to "construct meaning from experience," to live rather than float on a sea of constant televisual, technological entertainment.

The desire for and effects of layer upon layer of mindless stimulation were subjects Wallace tackled in Infinite Jest , whose central plot circles a missing film cartridge, referred to as the Entertainment, which is so enchanting that anyone who watches it becomes unable to do anything else. The novel is diachronically fractured and told in a variety of registers and dialects, such as Ebonics, with a vocabulary that makes a dictionary necessary for even the most erudite reader. Following a large cast of characters, it's narratively nested and embedded and nested again, and, for the first couple of hundred pages, seems to have no through line. It helps to know your Hamlet -"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest"-but Shakespeare is only one of the book's many literary references. As with much of Wallace's fiction, Infinite Jest sometimes seems more concerned with being avant-garde, with its encyclopedic everything-and-more approach, with its own "head" than with communicating to a wider audience what, as Wallace famously said, "it is to be a fucking human being."

Wallace began work on the novel at a time when he seemed sure of his extraordinary intellectual abilities. Once, as Max relates, Wallace strode into a room of interviewers and told them, "You should know I am really really smart." This type of thinking eventually repulsed Wallace, though, and, looking back, he told Mark Caro, in an interview now collected in Conversations with David Foster Wallace , "When I was in my twenties, I thought I was really smart and really clever and that anybody would be privileged to read whatever I'd written." But thinking like that, he told Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky, "almost made me die." The loops of unending mental pressure such beliefs put on Wallace, the obsessive need to be liked, to be perfect-as manifested, for example, in the religious attention to grammar he inherited from his mother, a teacher who authored a book called Practically Painless English and who would pretend to have coughing fits whenever someone misspoke at the dinner table-led to a series of mental breakdowns and bouts of drug and alcohol addiction.

Wallace had a deep-seated fear of being seen as a fraud, and this fear worked its way into his fiction. In the story "Good Old Neon," which comes from his last and darkest collection, Oblivion , the narrator explains, "The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt inside-you were a fraud." As Max astutely puts it, "Behind the ordinary fears lurked the fear of being ordinary."

As Wallace's literary star rose, the substance abuse continued, eventually sending Wallace to Alcoholics Anonymous. There, he was made to see that in order to heal he first had to accept that, despite the world's accolades, he was a normal human being who could be treated by normal means. Albert Camus, a writer Wallace admired, wrote in The Fall , "We're all special cases"; this understanding, Wallace learned, was good for his work. "To look across the room," Wallace later said, "and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not as good a writer."

But it was Wallace's acute perception and intelligence that made the clichés inherent in A.A. rhetoric so difficult to accept. In Infinite Jest , recovering drug addict Don Gately expresses similar reservations about the program, especially about praying to God, to which the "old guys [at A.A.] say it doesn't yet matter what you believe or don't believe, Just Do It, they say." So Gately "hits the knees in the A.M. and asks for Help and then hits the knees again at bedtime and says Thank You, whether he believes he's talking to Anything/-body or not, and he somehow gets through that day clean." At a reading in 2006, Wallace explained that though the old guys telling Gately to pray were not very credible, Gately "does it anyway because he's desperate, finds that the prayer works, and then finds that what happens then is very interesting … instead of immediately becoming religious or even grateful, it's more like a sense of shock and waiting for the other shoe to drop." Prodded by an audience member for his opinion on Gately's situation, Wallace said that everything "I've read that is ostensibly and directly about God appears to me to be either really, really simplistic or it's in service of an argument and so can't afford to countenance certain hard truths or other sides, which just kind of makes it dead to me." As Josh Roiland points out in The Legacy of David Foster Wallace , the "insufferable paradox of Wallace's philosophical worldview" is that it's "imperative to be conscious, but to be conscious is to be impaired."

Wallace wanted to be stronger than seeking the adoration of others and worshipping his own intellect; he wanted to accept what he was being told in A.A., but it was a constant battle. After winning a 1997 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, he wrote in the margins of one of his notebooks, "I don't feel like a Genius." Yet, Franzen says, the "mantle of 'genius'" conferred on Wallace by the award was something he "of course craved and sought and thought was his due."

After Wallace died, many commentators began interpreting his work in light of his suicide, in effect reducing the texts to a footnote. Instead of following suit, Max scours the rich repository of letters and interviews Wallace left behind in order to move beyond the hagiographic, media-driven "celebrity writer dude" label now attached to his name-a label his wife, Karen Green, whom he married in December 2004, says "would have made him wince." Max allows us to see a fuller picture of Wallace without making judgments, claiming this or that Wallace to be the true self, or romanticizing his torments-though Max says Wallace may have romanticized a little, thinking of his time at McLean Hospital, the famed psychiatric institute, as placing him in the ranks of literary depressives such as Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell.

Depression is often described as anger turned inward, and people suffering depression sometimes manifest that anger externally as well. Max describes how one time Wallace, annoyed that a car had cut him off, "rammed his car into the other person's." Another time, fuming at his girlfriend, the poet and memoirist Mary Karr, Wallace attempted to push her from a moving vehicle; he also threw her coffee table at her, shattering it (when he sent $100 to pay for the table, she had a lawyer friend write back to say that "all he'd bought was the 'brokenness'"). Wallace at one point went so far, Max tells us, as to contact an ex-con he knew from rehab to try to obtain a gun to murder Karr's then-husband, a thought that would later make Wallace sick. Even with his students-to whom he was notoriously dedicated, giving out his personal number for class questions and writing "long letters of analysis and critique to even routine undergraduate efforts"-Wallace could lose his temper, once shoving a student who spoke back to him.

For all of the unbecoming skeletons Max uncovers, equally endearing, even heartbreaking, traits surface, too. Visitors to Wallace's home noted how dedicated he was to his dogs, Jeeves, The Drone (a stray who joined Wallace on a jog and then followed him home), Bella, and Werner. Wallace fed Jeeves directly from his mouth and shared a bed with him and The Drone. "It's just much easier having dogs," he said. "You don't get laid, but you also don't get the feeling you're hurting their feelings all the time." When The Drone was diagnosed with lymphoma, Wallace wrote to novelist Brad Morrow, "I've been going around crying like a toddler at the prospect of him suffering or dying." In the days leading up to the dog's cremation, Max writes that Wallace "would go by the veterinary office and sit outside the freezer where his dog lay."

There are times, though, when Max's reliance on archival material leaves the reader wanting. Early in the book, when Wallace is still in high school, we get a glimpse of his anger when, at a party, he smashes his fist into a refrigerator, breaking his hand. A girl Wallace liked, Susie Perkins, who was then dating one of his friends, showed up at the party and, Max tells us, "something went on between Wallace and Perkins." A couple of years later, Max writes, Wallace and Perkins "became involved." Even though she continues to appear throughout Wallace's college years, seemingly an important figure in his early life, important enough that he dedicated his first book in part to her, Max never gives us a good sense of their relationship, and it's hard not to want her voice here. This is an issue with Max's bio-though his research included extensive interviews, we get little beyond Wallace's voice, and important players in his life, such as his father, his sister, and serious girlfriends remain not only silent but, in many cases, practically absent.

Through all of the revelations in Max's book, though, it's clear that, in his best moments, what Wallace wanted most was to be read. He admired Jean-Paul Sartre's novel Nausea but was aware of the fate of Sartre's philosophical behemoth, Being and Nothingness , which was, like Wallace's Infinite Jest -or so the joke goes-a highly acclaimed doorstop. "To make someone an icon," Wallace wrote, "is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people."

While his adherents tend to view Infinite Jest as today's Ulysses , the magnum opus of our time, it's Wallace's nonfiction that comes closest to his goal of ameliorating loneliness. In collections such as 1997's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and 2005's Consider the Lobster , as in the Kenyon speech, we encounter a more focused Wallace, who, despite the longer-than-usual leash some magazines allowed him- The Atlantic , for example, published the visually challenging "Host," which litters disruptive thought-bubble-like boxes throughout the text-is nonetheless constrained by the expectations of the form: the need to reach and relate to a wider audience, to paint a clear picture, to structure around a thesis, to pare down the maximalist approach to language. Even the most difficult essays have a clear through line apparent on a first read. Though Wallace, like many of his fans, viewed his nonfiction as less important and less serious than his fiction, little more than a way to make extra money, it is, nevertheless, hard to deny the pull of the nonfiction persona he creates-an affected, affably bumbling version of Wallace's own, a sort of intellectual everyman, a modern-day Virgil leading us through the hell of a lobster festival or the submerged gloom of a luxury cruise. Despite the vast vocabulary, the voice so clearly places itself among the anxious majority, one of us, that we feel connected to it. We want to mourn this Wallace, "the great and gentle soul," because without him we do feel a little more alone.

Even in the often-fluffy posthumous essay collection Both Flesh and Not , Wallace tells of his desire for his work to communicate with minds beyond his own "tiny skull-size kingdom." In "The Empty Plenum," he praises experimental author David Markson's depiction of the awful human consequences of extreme solipsism-solipsism as an individual reality rather than a philosophical position. Wallace writes that Markson's novel, Wittgenstein's Mistress , shows what it would be like to wake up one morning as "the last and only living thing on earth, with only your head, now, for not only company but environment & world, an inclined beach sliding toward a dreadful sea." The novel's narrator searches for signs of life, marks in the sand, anything to prove that a world exists outside her head. Her goal, as Wallace describes it-and which also seems to be his own-is "to get the words & voices not only out-outside the 16-inch diameter of bone that both births & imprisons them-but also down , trusting them neither to the insubstantial country of the mind nor to the transient venue of cords & air & ear." This, Wallace says, is "a necessary affirmation of an Outside, some Exterior one's written record can not only communicate with but inhabit ."

At its best, through all of Wallace's struggles, through the fractured fiction and the straightforward speech and journalism, what his work does so well, so beautifully, hauntingly well, is precisely what he'd hoped it would. It shows us marks in the sand, gives us a nudge, and says, there, that's the way to life. That's the path beyond the sea.

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David Foster Wallace’s argument analysis Essay

David Foster Wallace uses an introduction to state his general point in relation to the work titled “The Best American Essays” and readies the audience with its content. The general idea relates to what a person knows and understands, and the overwhelming amount of information that modern day and age has put forth for an individual.

The major theme that has been around for some time is that a person is either limited by ignorance and leads a life of blind and chaotic movement or an individual tries to find out as much as possible about life, only to realize that the amount of information is too vast to know and comprehend. The reality is that there is a certain amount and type of concepts that is necessary for full functioning in the world and society, which will allow for the quality of existence to grow and develop at an ever-increasing pace.

In the first sentence, David Wallace mentions that the decision to act and think comes through the state of “emergency”. What he means is that people are quick to judge and act on things they are not too sure off, and the constant need to make a decision puts much pressure on an individual.

Society demands that people behave a certain way and so, people choose to either follow a preset mode and rules or divert from normal and try other avenues. Someone who chooses the “pre-formed” schemas and behavior or attitude is escaping the truth and thus, they become “immature”. People often hide anything they do not want to know from themselves, this makes life easier and so, they deprive themselves of responsibility to act and think.

Those who choose the option of being informed, as Wallace says, the amount of information is so enormous that a person gets lost in it and is unable to decide which choice is best. This leads to a conflict within an individual and they realize how profane they really are. He ends with summarizing the idea that in the present times, to know a lot means that a person will simply realize how much other information is still unknown and this will make a person opposite to smart.

In the first part of the argument, David Foster Wallace is very right. People often take an easy way out and choose “ignorance is bliss” option. The do not want to preoccupy themselves with the problems that are taking place domestically, not to mention internationally.

They tend to live in their own secluded world where as many variables as possible are under control and nothing can upset the order. In a way, people protect themselves from the stress that they know is out there and it is done by adjusting to the norm. This norm is as regular as can possibly be, a grey and routine existence that does not involve any perturbations or pressures. This becomes a vicious cycle of life because people get used to this sort of living and their want to know or experience something different dies down.

The balance and equilibrium with the world satisfies their basic needs and they resort to mostly surfaced pleasures and quickly achievable goals. It is possible to understand such point of view because often, there are stressors that push people to tune out and lead a life of blind following. The world of today has become demanding which conforms people and leaves little time or place to wonder off into the unknown.

The part where David Wallace argues that to know a lot is to realize yourself “stupid” seems somewhat extreme. There is no denying that the amount of information that is available cannot be learned, retained and used in one lifetime. Even the great amount of knowledge that someone gets in an educational institution is not used later in life but this happens only because it is not the individual who controls the type and amount of information that must be learned.

If a person develops an interest in a certain field, they can become quite proficient in it and in case they have a talent, then they could be one of the top thinkers or scientists in the world. Of course, even being a professor does not mean that one knows everything but the standard of knowing and understanding everything is being compared to the highest forces of being.

A human cannot dream to know unlimited an amount of information in a place like Earth, with limited physical and moral capacities. This leads to suppose that there is a certain type of information and understanding that will guarantee a full and happy living. A person equally developed in the necessary topics can become quite successful in life. Being “stupid” is a very relative concept and in reality, there is nothing to compare to.

Logic and reasoning of the argument help to better understand the difference between being overly critical of own thinking, or understanding enough as to realize what other things must be learned and conceptualized.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2018, December 25). David Foster Wallace’s argument analysis. https://ivypanda.com/essays/david-foster-wallaces-argument-analysis/

"David Foster Wallace’s argument analysis." IvyPanda , 25 Dec. 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/david-foster-wallaces-argument-analysis/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'David Foster Wallace’s argument analysis'. 25 December.

IvyPanda . 2018. "David Foster Wallace’s argument analysis." December 25, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/david-foster-wallaces-argument-analysis/.

1. IvyPanda . "David Foster Wallace’s argument analysis." December 25, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/david-foster-wallaces-argument-analysis/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "David Foster Wallace’s argument analysis." December 25, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/david-foster-wallaces-argument-analysis/.

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