in memoriam: David Foster Wallace

in David Foster Wallace a great part of the american landscape of literature and language was lost. As an addendum to Scott's last post, i wanted to point out the ways DFW touched invented usage.

better than Dave Eggers
when we decided to book club on invented usage, our first (and so far, only) attempt was Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. i was still reeling from my first encounter with Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and those discussions showed it. in both part 1 and part 3, i really revealed how much he influenced all the reading i did afterward. if you'll permit me to quote myself...

and the thing that sets the gimmickry of ahwosg apart from that of, say, david foster wallace, is that eggers never turns the lens around. he never makes the reader speak to him, never comes out with 'the only access you have to these tragedies is what i'm choosing to tell you about it, and you can't trust me!'. (part 1)

i think that witty, po-mo, self-referentiality was, at one time, a very new idea. but now we've read david foster wallace and the whole new generation of writers that he and Eggers spawned, so i feel like the style has lost some freshness. (part 3)

for a certain genre of writing, DFW has informed, if not outright spoiled, innumerable readers of our generation.

death of a SNOOT
in the summer of 2006, i came across an article by DFW, Harper's Magazine: Tense Present, that i felt compelled, as a usage liberal, to engage with. the resulting post, the SNOOT fallacy, generated a lot more comments than average, and in turn compelled me to write one of my favorite posts, the deconstruction of a stradivarius.

it's an understatement to say i was surprised to find out that DFW was a SNOOT. really, it shook the core liberal values that have inspired this blog from the beginning. if a writer like DFW, who so clearly knows and respects the value of language, calls himself a SNOOT, maybe SNOOThood isn't as bad as i'd previously thought?

i stood my ground, obviously, and those posts explain why, but DFW was the most worthy SNOOT adversary i can imagine. that confrontation is a moment worth pointing out in the blog's history.

suicide the internet
DFW is called a postmodern writer for several reasons. not the least of these, i think, is his engagement with media in a lot of different forms. what little of his writing i've actually read involves characters who realize that their whole lives are built by text and so on. for me, he really brought home the ways in which we are surrounded (in some cases trapped) by the texts that surround us (writing and speech about us, by us, for us).

i'm not sure whether it's ironic or appropriate, then, that he's now the subject of an extensive online obituary. gawker's compilation points out the fact that DFW will now continue to reach out, via the internet -- from beyond the grave -- to new readers. mcsweeney's probably has THE example of this postmodern obit. their 'memories' page collects the eulogies of anyone and everyone who ever met DFW -- especially those who got kind notes from him -- so that seemingly every word he wrote is collected and instantly accessible.

but this new DFW is surrounded by his suicide. if his work was somewhat disquieting before, it will now be a road map into depression or an extended suicide note.

suicide presents all kinds of questions, and writings like DFW's provide lots of possible answers. i predict, the commentary (see all the comments on the links above) from readers will no longer be about our modern times or about technology, but about the man himself. and who knows whether he would have wanted that?

Christ on a jet-ski, Hallie!

David Foster Wallace left us this past weekend, and the world is a much sadder place for it. I'd first heard his name when in high school, when my most beloved teacher, Ms. Wilson, recommended his magnum opus "Infinite Jest" to me. She knew that I might find the 1,100 page novel a bit daunting, and suggested--if I didn't have the nerve--that I might as well just pick up "Girl With Curious Hair."

It wasn't until after college, during the summer of '07, that I finally got up the nerve to tackle IJ with my girlfriend who would be reading it also. It took over our lives in a way only few things can, and we became both a source of irritation and envy for our friends. During that time, reading about Don Gately, Hal Incandenza, O.N.A.N., Eschaton, Wheelchair Assasins, Madame Psychosis, The Entertainment, the concavexity, etc etc, I kept thinking to myself that I wish I'd read it sooner. In it's pages I found a sensitivity to the modern condition that was at once critical and empowering, at once heartbreaking and hopeful.

In the days since DFW "eliminated his own map" (to borrow terminology from IJ), I've read tributes written by everyone from Patton Oswalt to Dave Eggers to Gawker commenters. It's surprising and heartening to see just how many people are affected by his loss. His genius was one of those rare types, so total and self assured as to take the form of a sheer force of nature. In no small sense, his gift was taken for granted, and, now that it is gone, his lack will leave a gaping hole in the literary consciousness that it is incumbent upon us to fill.

Christ on a jet-ski, Davie! We'll miss you.

the SNOOT fallacy

at issue is this article by David Foster Wallace (who i typically like and agree with). it's quite lengthy but well worth the read; Wallace is a very interesting writer and the topic is the politics of usage and dictionary-making. what could be more at home here on invented usage? there's a lot here i'd like to talk about and argue with, but i'll try to focus.

the article, which appeared in Harper's, i believe, amounts to a glowing review of Bryan Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage. true to form, though, Wallace also gives us all the backstory including the 'seamy underbelly' of lexicography: the descriptivist/precriptivist divide. descriptivists would like a dictionary to reflect language the way people actually use it, insofar as possible, while prescriptivists tend to believe that a dictionary should tell us what's right and how to use words properly. i found it somewhat surprising that Wallace himself comes down firmly on the prescriptive side, proudly calling himself a SNOOT. that's a nice, cute term for something i've called a 'grammar nazi' or a 'big fat jerk' elsewhere on this blog. i'm sure he has his reasons for capitalizing it (and for once mispelling it as 'SNOT,' i'd like to add).

his precious reasons. wallace, garner, and snoots of their ilk are fond of reasoning about language. and the basic premise of 99% of logical arguments about language is... drumroll please... "the purpose of language is communication." in fact, this maxim is taken so keenly for granted that it is embedded only in parentheticals on linguistics departments' webpages. (Brown's for instance: How does the function of language (to communicate) interact with its structure?) so of course wallace feels justified in defending at least the prescriptivist rules that aid 'clarity and precision.'

i'd like to submit (usage liberal that i am) that language has more purposes than just communication. i even believe it goes beyond wallace's observation that the diction/style/accent we use communicates something about us. language is used to confuse, to distract, to entertain, to kill time, to remember, to make art, to perform ceremonies, all of which could be considered communicative under my usually broad definition... but beyond even that, the ways people judge each other based on language use are PART OF LANGUAGE ITSELF. its purpose is also to divide, include, grade and judge. these functions determine who gets listened to, and in extreme cases, who gets listened to is a matter of life and death.

wallace quotes a snoot friend of his: "listening to most people's English feels like watching somebody use a Stradivarius to pound nails." this analogy reveals more than a few things about the prescriptivist (snoot) perspective. first, it reveals that they consider language an object. an object that we all approach the same way from the outside and use for a determined purpose. they believe there is a right function and a wrong function for language, that that function is essentially benign and beautiful. wallace acts as though prejudice, awkwardness, and judgmentality are faults of people, and not built into language in any way.

wallace writes,

These are tense linguistic times. Blame it on Heisenbergian Uncertainty or postmodern relativism or Image Over Substance or the ubiquity, of advertising and P.R. or the rise of Identity Politics or whatever you will — we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation. In rhetorical terms, certain long-held distinctions between the Ethical Appeal, Logical Appeal (= an argument's plausibility or soundness), and Pathetic Appeal (= an argument's emotional impact) have now pretty much collapsed — or rather the different sorts of Appeals now affect and are affected by one another in ways that make it almost impossible to advance an argument on "reason" alone.

and i'd like to object. postmodernism is NOT relativism, though this is a common misconception. postmodernism never says 'everything is the same. it doesn't matter how we speak because everything is as good as everything else.' it says 'the distinctions we make in language are arbitrary, but they have to be made. we have to make the choice to have an official academic language, or to read a certain text a certain way. it's just VERY important that we consider why (and from what cultural standpoint) we're making those decisions.' wallace's distinciton between different rhetorical strategies is an old one--one of the oldest, in fact. but language has never been transparent. there has never been a 'logical' argument that was not also rhetorical and emotional. EVERY statement that has content also has form and also has a speaker who speaks from a particular perspective and whose words therefore have a particular emotional impact. as soon as a word enters the language (or is uttered... not the same thing, i guess) it's encoded with information about the social and mental status of those who use it. logic never has been and never will be free of language.

wallace finally praises garner's dictionary of modern usage because garner himself seems not to speak from a normal human position.

It's like he's so bland he's barely there. E.g., as this reviewer was finishing the book's final entry, it struck me that I had no idea whether Bryan Garner was black or white, gay or straight, Democrat or Dittohead. What was even more striking was that I hadn't once wondered about any of this up to now; something about Garner's lexical persona kept me ever from asking where the guy was coming from or what particular agendas or ideologies were informing what he had admitted right up front were "value judgments."

that is, according to wallace, the perfect person to judge language is barely a person at all. garner lays bare his assumptions, but doesn't admit the sociocultural ground he makes them from (although i'll lay 20-to-1 he's white). this is perfection in scientific distance and objectivity. maybe it's a great way to write a text book, but it misses something fundamentally beautiful about what language is: inconsistent and ever-changing, as anything determined by everyone in the world all at once has to be.