David Foster Wallace died last Friday, and tributes to him pour out, here, and here, here, and here, and elsewhere. I was only introduced to the Wallace's writing in the past few years, by a friend who stored Wallace's Infinite Jest on a shelf for years, before reading it very slowly, over a period of many months, and occasionally sharing with me poignant, amusing, sad, or shocking snippets, insights, and footnotes.
I found Wallace's essays thought-provoking or entertaining even when obsessively self-reflective, overtly grim, sad, or downright depressing to read. Suicide and death were fair game in any context, from an essay on the seemingly benign topic of a cruise ship vacation, to long form fiction such as Infinite Jest, to a commencement address he gave to the Kenyon College Class of 2005.
With piercing observation and salient humor he buffered the sharpest commentary on vagaries of modern culture or various abysses a person might fall into, and he certainly didn't shy away from delivering this dystopian if hopeful fare no matter how stilted or predictable the occasion. In his Kenyon graduation speech he mostly avoided the usual soaring, upbeat yet forgettable accolades, the "pervasive cliche[s] in the commencement speech genre", he said, instead warning graduates of inevitable "day in day out" drudgery that would inevitably greet them in the future. He told them to keep their brains "well adjusted" in the face of the upcoming tedium, "alert and attentive". He called the mind the "terrible master", often and not coincidentally the target of firearm suicides, then described liberal education as the freedom that allows one to be "lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms".
With words of wisdom interspersed with clauses of modesty, he urged graduates in the thick of the "day in day out" to focus on the "important freedom", that which "involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able to truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day."
To me reading Wallace's writing was somewhat like watching an Olympic gymnast, or as he once described, Roger Federer's tennis. I didn't need to identify with the ability to performance such stunts in order to appreciate the talent. To this admittedly casual reader, his wisdom and clear view of the world kept his writing eternally optimistic despite his propensity to focus on some dark, unbearable moments of life.
Like many people, I found his use of footnotes fascinating, perhaps especially so because of my science background. Footnotes and endnotes serve many purposes for fiction and non-fiction authors but they're essential to science papers, not only to document sources but to describe previous research that lays the foundation for the experiments in the current work.
Scientists stand on the shoulder's of previous scientists, as the cliche has it, but the truth is that without the footnotes, ("references") scientists would be at sea. The common connotation of the word "footnote" as supplemental information, tremendously diminishes they're importance to science. Every new experiment depends on the veracity of the research that advanced the field to it's current place. And an untrustworthy reference can set a scientist back interminably -- stuck trying to figure out why, when they repeat this previous scientist's work, do they get a different result? I was taught to pay inordinate attention to references (previous research) and to pay close attention to the assumptions researchers chose to build their work on.
In a lot of non-fiction however, the "footnote" merely augments the main body of work, or is used to expound on non-integral ideas, to aid a reader's independent study, or for routine documentation of sources. That type of footnote helps speed the reader through the main points of the text. David Foster Wallace used it for the exact opposite purpose, to slow the the reader down.
Recently, the reputation of footnotes has been confused and corrupted by Michael Crichton and his ilk. Crichton the fiction writer deployed them cynically in his pseudoscience fiction to fool readers into thinking his fiction was actually non-fiction. Politicians and our current president highlighted the presence of the footnotes Crichton used to dispute actual science and to manipulate voters about global warming. Crichton used footnotes to the exact opposite purpose of how they're intended, and politicians were cynical in deploying them to their own ends.
Wallace's footnotes were the antithesis of these politically constructed ones. Not that his prolific footnoting didn't confuse people. Charlie Rose asked Wallace in a 1997 interview : "What are the footnotes about? Where did it come from? 304 footnotes?"
Wallace explained that he inserted footnotes to "fracture" his writing, to make it more like reality. The alternative he said, was to jumble the sentences, but obviously you couldn't do that to the reader. As with every other topic, Wallace's ideas about footnotes turn out to be complex, but reading his footnotes is integral to reading his work. They're speed bumps that slow the reader down, perhaps drawing her in, perhaps repelling him -- but in any case forcing Wallace's reader to refocus again and again, to reconsider what might be important, what's true, and to think more deeply, even when the footnotes seemed inserted solely for amusement.
And sometimes they seemed to be just that, for your amusement. In his famous 1997 "Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal Comforts of Luxury Cruise)"1, he wrote about developing a "lifelong grudge" against the cruise ship's hotel manager. He explained in a footnote:
1 "Somewhere he'd gotten the impression that I was an investigative journalist and wouldn't let me see the galley, bridge, or staff decks, or interview any of the crew in an on-the-record way, and he wore sunglasses indoors, and epaulets, and kept talking on the phone for long stretches of time in Greek when I was in his office after I'd skipped the karaoke semifinals in the Rendez-Vous Lounge to make a special appointment to see him, and I wish him ill."
Wallace continues on, expounding on his fascination with sharks and sharing in a subsequent footnote that during the first cruise ship dinner gathering he asked one of the waitstaff if they could donate "a spare bucket of au jus drippings from supper so that I could try chumming for sharks off the back rail of the top deck".
He quickly second guesses his own odd request and wonders if it may have been "a journalistic faux pas", one perhaps so repulsively disturbing to everyone who learned of it, that they treated him differently, with the hotel manager reflexively barring Wallace's access to the ship's behind-the-scenes workings. Of course, despite the author's stated remorse about his subsequent lack of access, his essay doesn't suffer a whit, in fact this conceit of nautical isolation and his self-reported bumbling anchors the story.
The last essay of Wallace's I read was last February's,"The Compliance Branch", published in Harper's and originally presented at a conference in Italy in 2006. In Wallace's fictional account he observes and interacts with a "fierce" infant, a managera-like baby. Unlike some of his other work, the essay is short, less than 2000 words; not sad, or maybe sad only in the way "The Office" would be soul-sucking without the over-the-top humor; and it contains none of Wallace's trademark footnotes.
I didn't know him, never read his work as prolifically as others, and don't claim to have any insight about who he was, but in digesting accounts of those who knew him better, it seems he lived the life he prescribed. I probably run amok of proper respect by quoting his work out of context, and also risk underselling him, but we'll miss his perspective on all things.
1 (Harper's, 1997), also included in the collection, A Suposedly Fun Thing I'll Never do Again.
