An Appreciation of David Foster Wallace
by Ben Lambert, Culture Editor on October 1, 2008 in Culture
David Foster Wallace, a writer whose books were thought to be, by some (including me), among the best things produced in the past few decades, committed suicide two weeks ago. When an artist or other creative figure such as Wallace dies, the New York Times often prints an article with the header, “An Appreciation.” An appreciation appears to be a specific genre of newspaper article, similar to an obituary but more opinionated and, of course, laudatory.
At first, the appreciation seems like a bit of a weird genre, since it appears that the exact moment at which appreciating someone becomes a bit pointless is at the moment that they die. I, for example, would like everyone who appreciates me to manifest said appreciation as much as possible while I am still living, to the point of completely exhausting any capacity they might have for admiring me after my death.
The strangeness of the appreciation evaporates somewhat, however, when we consider that the people who are supposed to take pleasure from an appreciation – aside from those who are reading it strictly for its news value – are, first, those who knew or admired the figure being appreciated, and second, those who might not have been familiar with the person but who could benefit, or get some pleasure, from the deceased person’s work.
I would like to address this second group. If you already love Wallace, if he has been a touchstone of intelligence, fun, and generosity for you like he was to me, then you don’t have to read further. You have probably already read one of the many interesting and touching tributes to Wallace that have been pouring out since his death. But if you are less familiar with Wallace, or if you are hearing about him for the first time, than I would like to buttonhole you for a second and tell you to please, please read something by him.
Since this is HKS, you might want to start with his Rolling Stone article about following the McCain campaign in 2000. This is a good introduction to Wallace’s large body of journalism, and it carries the hallmarks of his journalistic style: extreme verbosity that conceals a surprising conversational and easy-to-read style. An insatiable curiosity. An eye for detail. Near perfect recall. A tendency to use events in the real world as touch-points for moral inquiry. And an endearingly and very self-consciously clumsy sense of humor.
Above all, if you read the article, you will notice Wallace’s unerring instinct for what is interesting. Much of life, and much of HKS, involves dealing with the mundane. It is often tempting to see 99 precent of life as jumping through various hoops in order to get to that 1 percent that actually interests and engages us, makes us passionate, makes us wake up, makes us shift from auto-pilot to manual. Somehow Wallace never seems to write about any of the aforementioned 99 percent. His journalism is all that 1 percent. And what you notice is that Wallace isn’t skipping anything – that mundane-ness that often seems to make up the vast majority of existence. Instead, by sheer virtue of close attention and effort, he is finding what is interesting in those things that appear non-interesting.
Take his article on dictionaries – “Tense Present,” published in Harpers, is about the conflict among dictionary-makers over whether dictionaries should be prescriptive – i.e. whether they should tell people how to use the English language correctly – or descriptive – i.e. whether they should simply record how English is currently spoken and make no judgments regarding whether current usage is correct. The natural journalistic response might be to shy away from this central issue and to instead focus on more supposedly interesting aspects such as the personal life of some particularly tumultuous dictionary editor. Wallace’s response, on the other hand, is to delve so deeply and passionately into his topic that he drags the reader along with him.
He performs a similar feat (and I use “feat” here very emphatically, the way I would use it to describe climbing a mountain or being the first person in your family to graduate from college) in his pretty famous article “Consider the Lobster” (originally published in Gourmet magazine) This is an article about a lobster festival in Maine, and like the dictionary article, it is rapturously interesting – a complete page-turner – without using any of the normal journalistic tricks to inspire interest. It just pays very close attention to the act of eating lobster and wonders what that means. Please, read it.
Like many very good thinkers, Wallace often seems inscrutable in that he finds it difficult to reach easy conclusions and to tell readers what he finally thinks about whatever it is he is writing about. Thus it is hard to find, among his writing, a good summary document, something to point at and tell a new a reader “look, if you want to get what this guy is all about, read this.”
The closest I can come is to tell you to read the transcript of the commencement speech that Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005. Besides being a humbling piece of rhetoric, it does give some indication of what Wallace was all about. The speech’s central contention is that we, being human, are all operating with certain default settings both biological and cultural. These begin operating on us as soon as we are born, responding to the instructions coded into our genes. It is these default settings that dictate to us what is good and what is bad, what is pleasurable and what is painful, what is in the end interesting and what is boring. If we choose to leave these default settings unexamined, we leave ourselves prey to being manipulated in ways that are ultimately not to our advantage – although they may be of advantage to our genes, or to those with the power to influence us.
It is (and here I am putting my own interpretation on what Wallace said) these default settings that often lead us to find ourselves wading through the 99 percent of hoops in order to reach the reward we have been conditioned to want. And Wallace’s point (again, according to my no-doubt-imperfect understanding) is to exhort the students that he is addressing to examine their own default settings and to make the effort to adjust these settings, if necessary, in ways that will make both themselves and others happier.
This of course takes a lot of effort. The whole point of a default setting is that it’s easy. How many of us have never adjusted the default settings of, say, our computers, despite the fact that given our idiosyncrasies it would be very unlikely for our computers have come to us without the exact optimal settings for our particular needs, and that adjusting these default setting would take only a small amount of time and effort?
From this perspective, Wallace’s journalism can be seen as a kind of example of one person struggling with these default settings, settings that would tell the journalist not to examine too closely the generally socially accepted practice of eating lobster despite the fact that close examination of this very normal act leads, in the end, to an exceptionally interesting and illuminating series of thoughts. To go further, Wallace’s journalism is not just an example, but in fact an inspiring example, because by struggling against his default settings Wallace accomplishes exactly what he tells those students listening to his commencement speech – with effort he overcomes his default settings and, through the writing that results, he has made many people much, much happier.
Comments
One Response to “An Appreciation of David Foster Wallace”
Got something to say?
Thank you Mr. Lambert. This was truly an appreciation. One of the better that I have read.