On Tennis: Five Essays by David Foster Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Two things:
First, I think it’s important for a novelist, especially one who wants to write grandly and with a wide scope — a maximalist — to engage deeply with other arts besides writing. There’s so, so much in these essays that points to important themes in Infinite Jest; you can see how all his thinking turns around the same constellation of subjects. It’s wonderful.
Second, I’ve been thinking for a few years about DFW’s footnotes. I’ve decided that they’re an attempt to resist the one-dimensional direction of writing. He’s writing a sentence. He has two different ideas that connect to the sentence. Both are important. But the temporal sequence of spoken and read language only allows one of the ideas to be directly connected. The other has to go somewhere else.
Well, why? Actual thought, and any object of such thought, contains whole jumbles of ideas, all connected to each other in all sorts of ways, such that it’s impossible to put them in an order that doesn’t distort the whole set by neglecting some connections and emphasizing others.
With a footnote, DFW can move along another dimension, briefly, showing a facet of the jumble that’s relevant, but connects to the whole along different principles from the main flow of the narrative. Since the flow of the narrative is usually somewhere on a spectrum between ‘completely artificial’ and ‘mildly suggestive of truth’, with ‘aesthetically pleasing’ a hopeful third point to aim for, this resistance to that monodimensional tyranny of language gives a better sense of the thought as a whole than otherwise.
This is something that I sometimes imagine that computers could help us with, except that the human eye pretty much only focuses on one thing at a time — and so the path through any set of words, no matter the arrangement, is always going to be linear, even if they move around or interact with you. It seems the thought is always non-linear, and the mode of expression always linear.
Anyway, his reflections on why sports biographies are so bad are pretty great. I think he could have gotten some even more interesting ideas out of it, since it’s probable, I think, that the cliches athletes use are shadows of vast archetypes that, real or not, move in currents beneath the world, and it may be that their (the athletes’) genius comes in part from a refusal to ironically resist those archetypes. Or, that’s what the essay made me think about.
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