Considering David Foster Wallace

Every so often, you come across a writer that seems to articulate your thoughts better than you could ever do. It’s exhilarating and comforting when this happens. The language, the ideas fit smoothly into the grooves of your own thoughts. It reinforces your beliefs. This is important because often, life gets lonely, especially if you have a thought that popular culture doesn’t seem to embody. You begin to doubt the validity of your ideas and the sanity of your mind. Just then, you stumble upon another human being who not only echoes your thoughts but endorses them.

That’s what I felt reading David Foster Wallace’s Consider The Lobster.

DFW’s writing made me jealous of that accurate, pared prose; those sentences that gleam with polish, that anally clenched grammar, the titanic words which seem at first to be large red flags of egotism but when you take the time out to look them up in a dictionary, turn out to be crosshairs for accurate meaning. The scope of his research is astonishing, the breadth of his knowledge is imposing and the depth of his thinking is intimidating.

You can feel the attention that has been paid to the writing. It is a level of concentration that is difficult to generate and almost impossible to maintain. A scrutinizing eye has gone over each sentence after a rigorous mind has arranged them. His arguments are beautifully laid out; thoughts organized in precise ways but culminating in radiant, chaotic epiphanies; both geometry and symphony.

It’s flagrantly good writing. It’s the kind of virtuosity and diligence that is usually displayed by toppers and which makes them such a revolting species of people. And DFW would have been the same had there also not been such a disarming vulnerability infused throughout the writing. As you read, you can feel the questing, curious mind of Wallace, you follow the questions of his searching mind as he thinks, posits, infers things.

Behind every piece, there isn’t just the stating of a fact or the narrating of a story. There is also the poking and prodding to understand the subject a little more deeply. An earnest hunt for grand themes, even within the most mundane happenings, especially within the most mundane happenings. This is especially refreshing because most of life isn’t lived in grand adventures but in petty day-to-day routines and it is important to infuse them with grand adventures.

There is humor. There is a recognition of the absurdity that is so sharp that it makes the comedian in me happy. But above all, there is humanity. There is a tender-hearted, optimistic love for fellow human beings. There is understanding for their choices and redemption for the helpless. There is empathy for the lives and stories of even the most repulsive people and judgment only for the most selfish and arrogant. This is compassionate writing, apologetic a lot of times for making bold claims but brave to make them anyway.

Underneath it all was a man relentlessly curious, asking many questions, unafraid of what they might mean for his own beliefs. DFW the writer, was sharp, stringent and sure but DFW the man, was fumbling, inquisitive and uncertain. It is the tension between these two facets that makes for such compelling prose.

And it was such a relief to recognize this humanity in another writer, to see how he dealt with the big questions of existence without being shrill or preachy, but instead by gently working through the problem, leading you with him, slowly and without condescension. Take for example the titular essay, Consider the Lobster. It is written on assignment for a food magazine. He was commissioned to cover the Maine Lobster Festival. What should have been a straightforward profile of a gastronomical experience gently became a rumination on the ethics of killing and eating animals. A topic that is handled with such a cherubic sincerity that it doesn’t matter the context or the publication.

DFW is proof that passion and ingenuity can make anything interesting. You can see this on the essay on the Grammar Usage Wars. This was written as a review of a dictionary. Imagine a) reviewing a dictionary b) turning it into an absorbing history of language and its usage c) writing it so dramatically that it makes you sound like a war correspondent instead of the reviewer of a dictionary. That is stuff that only black-belt writers do.

Then there is the essay on the AVN awards. DFW was sent on assignment to cover the premier porn industry awards night. A lesser writer would not have gone or if they had, they would have turned in page after page of jokey, patronizing text. It’s easy to look at porn stars and their open vulgarity and mock them for their deviancy. DFW doesn’t do that. He treats them with dignity and observes them critically, with respect and wonder. He finds virtue in the bawdy display. At the end of the piece you have a glittering insight into sex, culture, award shows and pornography. You can never quite look at porn the same way again.

All writing is about crafting a persona. Everything I’ve written about DFW as a person is conjecture. Yet, the writing is fact and the persona in it is worth emulating. How vital it would be to live struggling for meaning, resisting simplicity, embracing complexity, intensely attentive, infinitely curious, infinitely compassionate, infinitely generous.