Infinite Jester

I’ve been reading a lot about David Foster Wallace lately – old interviews, new reviews of The Pale King, old reviews of Infinite Jest, all sorts of articles. He’s made headlines recently because of The Pale King, but my interest in him isn’t new. I’ve been fascinated by him for a long time.

Hard to say exactly why. I’m much less interested in, say, Jonathan Franzen, who occupies a similar spot in the literary world. I haven’t even read any of DFW’s novels yet (have to remedy that someday).

Partly, I’m sure, my fascination comes from reviewers and authors who keep using words like “transcendent” and “brilliant” to describe his work. Partly it’s because I love what I have read – mostly essays and short fiction. (I recommend “The Depressed Person” and, most especially, “This Is Water,” which actually made me cry; your mileage may vary.) Partly it’s because of his own tragic story: his lifelong battle against depression, drugs, and alcohol, his suicide in 2008. Partly it’s his staggering vocabulary, which guarantees I will learn awesome new words like “fantods” every time I read his stuff. Partly it’s because, unlike so many other Great Men of Genius™, he seems to have been a warm, kind, and genuinely compassioniate person. And partly it’s because he was crazy, crazy smart, about everything from English to math to the game of tennis.

I came across this in one of his old essays that I stumbled across yesterday:

The best metaphor I know of for being a fiction writer is in Don DeLillo’s “Mao II,” where he describes a book-in-progress as a kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the writer (dragging itself across the floor of restaurants where the writer’s trying to eat, appearing at the foot of the bed first thing in the morning, etc.), hideously defective, hydrocephalic and noseless and flipper-armed and incontinent and retarded and dribbling cerebo-spinal fluid out of its mouth as it mewls and blurbles and cries out to the writer, wanting love, wanting the very thing its hideousness guarantees it’ll get: the writer’s complete attention.

The damaged-infant trope is perfect because it captures the mix of repulsion and love the fiction writer feels for something he’s working on. The fiction always comes out so horrifically defective, so hideous a betrayal of all your hopes for it — a cruel and repellent caricature of the perfection of its conception — yes, understand: grotesque because _imperfect_. And yet it’s yours, the infant is, it’s _you_, and you love it and dandle it and wipe the cerebro-spinal fluid off its slack chin with the cuff of the only clean shirt you have left…

This is so very true. I love it.