Consider the Author

 This is something that I started writing some time ago and I think that it has legs but I lost track of it and just never finished it. As of now, I am not interested in finishing this, but I want to post this because I think that I make a few good observations here and it is hard to throw away a piece of writing like this once it has begun. It's my blog, so that's it.

Parts of this are a little rough and some places I just leave off because I was just jotting down notes. There is one point at the end that I will comment on after the text that I have written.

So here it is, another unfinished essay about David Foster Wallace.

Consider the Author

I have written a lot about the work of David Foster Wallace in my academic career and elsewhere. He has always been something of a problematic figure for me because there is a great deal of his output that I have enjoyed but there has always been a kernel of something that is at the heart of it that gives me pause. If this were a piece of my academic work, I would take the time to work this all out ahead of time and treat you to a thesis claim. But since you are reading (maybe) this on my personal blog, I am going to write for exploration and maybe figure out what I mean by the end of it.

There is something about Wallace's work that has started to chafe at me. Still, there is much about his work that I enjoy, so I have found this to be a difficult relationship. I have written about my early experiences reading DFW elsewhere, but it bears repeating in brief here.

When I first read his work I hated it. I picked up Oblivion on the recommendation of a friend (he didn't recommend this book in particular, just that I read DFW's work and this is the one that I selected). I hated it. The overly detailed exactitude of his descriptions and the seeming lack of emotional depth turned me off and I quit reading. After further coaxing I picked up Infinite Jest and struggled through reading it over the course of about 8 months. This novel was less jarring in its minutiae than the stories in Oblivion but I still just didn't get it, didn't like it. But I kept thinking about. For the next two years I thought about that book and discussed it with whomever I met who had also read it (even in my doctoral program I found few who had made it through the whole of it). I eventually picked it back up to read again and had a very different experience. I loved the novel for a number of reasons. There were parts of it that still rankled, but I like the the experience of reading it and what it seemed to stand for. On that first read-through I had missed a lot of the post-/anti-ironic elements and I missed the true suffering that Hal faces. I, as I found others would too, had misread the character and read Wallace's descriptions of Hal's postmodern detatchment as endorsement rather than diagnosis.

I come to this point in my writing now because I have picked up DFW's Consider the Lobster, one of his collections of essays. The background here is that, with the exception of Infinite Jest, I have always preferred Wallace's non-fiction to his fiction. This is going to figure into my summation later. But what I noticed while reading the first essay in this collection, “Big Red Son,” is that it just drips with smarm.

“Big Red Son” is the first essay in the collection and it details Wallace's attendance at the Adult Video News awards, porn awards. While there are some amusing observations throughout, one really gets the sense that DFW is congratulating himself throughout for the edginess of covering this subject. Wallace attempts to give the subject the serious treatment that he implies that it deserves while simultaneously making fun of the people involved for their earnestness in their profession and undercutting his reportage at nearly every turn. Wallace's signature style is to insert himself into his own journalism and he casts himself as a sort of gee-shucks regular Joe that he does in much of

One of the big problems that emerges in DFW's work is a self-assuredness in his perspective as some sort of “outsider.” Wallace adopts a particular tone in which he assumes authority on select topics because he is a combination of a) being young enough to understand youth and youth perspective; b) being educated enough to view this perspective critically while also tapping into traditionalist views; and c) aware enough of the irony of the confluence of these positions to comment on all of it. The difficulty is that he then often writes himself into blind spots that seem to confirm the negative assertions of his critics.

Let me give you a specific example from the essay “Authority and American Usage,” a review of a style guide that ends up a polemic on English dialects and the role of proper English. I will note that I do agree with much of what Wallace writes in this essay and it is, overall, an extremely fine argument about the political role of language as political and cultural signifier. In one aside, Wallace strives to tell his reader what the problem of “politically correct” language is. The problem, for Wallace, is that it amounts to self-congratulatory virtue signaling on the part of the Left. But Wallace seems to go out of his way to provide examples in bad faith, referring to the poor as “economically disadvantaged” and eventually “pre-prosperous.” His examples tend to follow in the footsteps of many conservative critics who would demean “PC” by just making things up that no one ever actually said and then pointing at their imagined examples as subject of ridicule. This is poor argumentation. But there is a more serious flaw. In the pages leading up to this analysis, Wallace off-handedly uses the word “fag” as

This is where I ended it. I wanted to pick back up here because I remember the point that I was moving toward and I think that it bears finishing that thought, at least.

So what rankled me about this is not that Wallace has a dislike for what he calls PC language or that that he uses a slur in a denigrating way. What bothered me then, and what I still think about, is that in this essay that is supposedly about the political power of language, Wallace ignores the power of language to damage and dehumanize others. I don't think that he means to be hurtful by using the word “fag” in such a way, but that is what he is doing. By not thinking about his usage in this way, he participates and promotes a homophobic agenda.

This is disappointing because Wallace is typically a very thorough thinker and this seems like a real gap in his reasoning that is surprising to read now. It is also disappointing because Wallace is typically such an empathetic writer.