Conversational Reading

You can find my LA Times review of David Lipsky’s book about traveling around with David Foster Wallace at the tail end of the Infinite Jest book tour here. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Right here.

For some context (and grave doubts as to The Pale King's publish-ability as a completed novel) see DT Max's excellent piece on Wallace's suicide and post-Infinite Jest novel-writing.

And lastly, there are The Quarterly Conversation's own thoughts on posthumous publication.

If you’re going to write a book featuring a Militant Grammarian as a character, it probably behooves you to cross every ‘t’ and forget no tittles, to split no infinitives and dangle no participles. David Foster Wallace’s long, grandly periodic sentences, which often resemble nothing so much as a prolonged clay court baseline rally, are not helpful in this regard; the multiple subordinations, extended parentheticals, and drifting subject matter are enough to give a prescriptive grammarian palpitations.

Yet Wallace is perhaps more careful than he needs to be with his reader, more solicitous of the possibility that the string of the sentence has crossed itself one too many times, and its referents and antecedents have become blurred and disordered. Quite frequently, he simply adds a parenthetical or appositional reminder of who a pronoun refers to, just to let you know about whom we’re still talking. For instance,

Orin’s decision to attend college pleased his parents a great deal, although Mrs. Avril Incandenza, especially, had gone out of her way to make it clear that whatever Orin decided to do would please them because they stood squarely behind and in full support of him, Orin, and any decision his very best thinking yielded. (283)

That’s a fairly tame sentence as far as these things go; for a real whopper, see page 295, beginning with “He told Joelle van Dyne…” Thirteen lines later, Wallace finds it necessary to insert a kindly “(O.)” just to let you know that Joelle hasn’t started talking to another man.

A more straightforward example, which is played very well for laughs, is the sentence “There is something queerly poignant about a deeply faded tattoo, a poignancy something along the lines of coming upon the tiny and poignantly unfashionable clothes of a child long-since grown up in an attic trunk somewhere (the clothes, not the grown child, Ewell confirmed for G. Day)” (209). The parenthetical clause here is ostensibly clarifying a humorously misplaced modifier of the kind and quality that Strunk & White might use to demonstrate the perils of lax composition. Of course, no one would actually get mixed up by this—the syntactically correct interpretation is just too bizarre and unlikely, even for Ewell. Wallace can’t actually be concerned that this sentence might be misinterpreted; he’s just having a little fun with Ewell’s batsness.

But worrying about the reader’s confusion with pronominal antecedents is just one possible explanation of why these little tagged modifiers pop up from time to time, and I tend to believe, now at least, after some thought, that it’s not even a very good one. Even in the first sentence I quoted above, although James O. is invoked indirectly by the blanket reference to “parents,” there is really no possible confusion as to whom any subsequent “him” might be referring, particularly not when we’re talking about a “him” who is being fully supported. The “him, Orin,” construction is wholly superfluous; there’s just no possible ambiguity that would require a reiteration of the referent. And while I think that Wallace takes a slightly erratic view of his audience’s intellectual acumen and knowledge, sometimes giving us a fairly casual and indifferent gloss on a bit of arcana, at other times delivering exhaustively granular detail on completely tangential material, there is no way David Foster Wallace thinks you can’t follow the syntactic traffic signs for a measly 55-word sentence.

But if excessive syntactic solicitude is not the purpose of these “him, Orin,” constructions, then what is?

Continue reading Infinite Summer: David Foster Wallace as Militant Grammarian