There are four theoretical frameworks for time, plot and progression that are outlined in this chapter of Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates.
1.) James Phelan/Peter J. Rabinowitz
The two authors seek to explain the difference between ‘plot’ and ‘progression.’ ‘Plot’ has typically referred to the chronological sequence of events within a narrative, with special attention paid to the ordering of the events as well as how they are connected.
‘Progression,’ on the other hand, refers more to what is called ‘textual dynamics’: “the logic of the text’s movement from beginning to middle through ending” (58). Here, rather than a chronological arrangement of events, many stories are arranged somewhat atemporally as a means of creating a difference in story-time (the chronology of events) and discourse-time (in what order they are presented). This is because rearranging the events can aid in strengthening symbolism and themes, add character insight, or simply create more tension and therefore make a more enjoyable reading experience. In other words, there is a point to presenting events out of order, and the author knows this.
The authors also seek to combine the ideas of ‘plot dynamics’ (broadly, the events/characters/etc. which drive the story forward and seek closure) and ‘narratorial dynamics’ (gaps in knowledge between the narrator, narrative audience and authorial audience, as well as how narration is used with respect to the relationships between the narrator, narrative audience, authorial audience, and characters).
The authors then outline several ways of looking at the beginning, middle and end of a narrative. The first two are fairly straightforward and adhere to traditional understandings of how a story works (Exposition, Exposition, Exposition/Closure being a rather technical way of looking at it, and Launch-Voyage-Arrival, which is a much-simplified version of Freytag’s pyramid, or perhaps Campbell’s monomyth/hero’s journey). The third row is how the text progresses in terms of narratorial dynamics (and how those dynamics change over the course of the text) and the fourth is ‘readerly dynamics’ which focuses purely on how the reader experiences the text and what they come to understand about the narrative as a whole upon completion of the text.
2.) Robyn Warhol
The author examines how a narrative unfolds with regards to the works of Jane Austen. With the exception of Persuasion, each story is a sort of lateroversion of the familiar ‘boy meets girl’ plot: “girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl and boy are united in the end (66).” However, there are subtle variations regarding how even such a simple plot can play out, and the author suggests Austen’s talent was in “the details, the subtle renditions of conversations and situations (67).” However, Persuasion offers a lesson in diverging narratives in that two endings were written, and many editions of the text include both, with one inserted in the main narrative and the other separated. Such a choice allows for greater interaction with the text, as both endings are valid.
3.) David Herman
The author constructs a series of questions regarding the difference between a narrative’s chronological ordering and its structural ordering. The questions can be (to a degree) boiled down to ‘How are the chronological events related to their arrangement in the text, and how does this relationship create a narrative world?’
The author refers to ‘simultaneous narration’ such as in sportscasting, but focuses on ‘retrospective narration’ and how the arrangement of events can cast some of these events in a new light, as well as how the use of certain tenses such as subjunctive can imply their impact on an imagined future (or one that comes later in the text). The author also discusses how duration and frequency can be used to further highlight a reader’s understanding of the text, with examples such as a longer period of time being compressed into a shorter amount of text, or the increased frequency of an event suggesting its importance. Both of these help to make meaning.
The author ends with the suggestion that rereading an atemporally organized text can and does create a different reading experience, as the reader now enters the narrative world cognizant of the events both as they unfold chronologically as well as textually, and can better pick up on how they are related, thus answering the questions the author poses at the beginning of this section.
4.) Brian Richardson
The author begins by attempting to discern where the true beginning of a narrative lies. Typically, a text will introduce a problem. However, as the text continues and perhaps begins to incorporate atemporal organization, the reader sees that the textual beginning is not necessarily the narrative beginning, as events further back in the past have an impact on the story’s ‘present.’ This can be further complicated by how many modern writers use a textual beginning simply to establish setting, mood, etc., for the time being ignoring narrative conflict, while some postmodern writers have ‘deconstructed’ the narrative’s beginning in various ways.
The author goes on to reiterate the difference between fabula and sjuzhet, then giving many examples of the latter, with several that even avoid one set sjuzhet by allowing the reader to arrange the events in whatever order they please. The author also gives a number of examples of texts that play with temporality in terms of creating a closed loop (Finnegans Wake) or a narrative where time acts upon characters in different ways (Orlando), even a narrative that allows readers to choose which events are canonical (The Mixquiahuala Letters), which throws the concept of sjuzhet out the window, as such a text shows there is no actual fixed order of events to sort through and arrange chronologically. The author then considers the ways a narrative ‘progresses’ to borrow a definition from Phelan/Rabinowitz. A text can model its progression on that of an earlier text, or it can impose artificial structural constraints, or even ‘denarration,’ where certain events that have been recounted are then exposed as false (or at least suggested to be).
Finally, the author looks at how a narrative ends, and the trend of moving away from endings in which the closure firmly wraps up all lingering elements. Beginning with realist authors, narratives started moving away from this as it was arguably unrealistic, as real life does not just end. Some texts end with some, but not all elements satisfied, while others end in unexpected and/or ‘unsatisfying’ ways, such as an ending being deliberately withheld by an author, or multiple endings being presented.
If we consider Herman’s questions in regards to the episode of Fargo we watched this week, we can make a few connections between the first two scenes. The first is a flashback of Dodd Gerhardt as a child accompanying his father to a meeting with a rival crime boss. The meeting ends with Dodd and his father killing the competition. On its own, this scene retroactively shows how Dodd was set on the road to ruthlessness we see in 1979, and also explains why Dodd is more loyal to his father than his mother: his father taught him how to run the business. Putting this directly before the second scene in which Dodd takes his nephew to rough up some of their current competition shows that Dodd sees himself as the successor to his father, not only in terms of actions and ideology but in passing down the skills needed to keep running the family business.
Keep reading if you want something a little more interesting.
“Consider an Editor, or A Supposedly Good Thing I’ll Never Read Again”
This marks the second time that I have attempted to ‘get into’ David Foster Wallace, as well as the second time I have utterly failed. This is due to the fact that I love cult authors like Philip K. Dick but am unnerved by those who seem to actually have a cult built around them, like Wallace. I previously read a few sections from Consider the Lobster, choosing that over Infinite Jest because the latter is admittedly intimidating. This is purely due to its length and not its reputation as a book that will ‘totally blow your mind, dude,’ as more than one (white male) person who (probably) never read it has told me. Proust is intimidating for exactly the same reason. Wallace might find such a comparison pleasing, whether he would choose to admit it or not.
First, Host. I think there’s something in here, nestled beneath the unending streams of asides. Unfortunately, that something isn’t much, and this is due to the massive problems with focalization. Ostensibly, this story is about John Ziegler, conservative radio host. But I will argue that this story is actually (heavily) focalized on Wallace himself. In the course of telling his story about John Ziegler, he falls into constant asides showcasing his own thoughts. Page 338; “He keeps saying he cannot believe they’re giving Simpson airtime. No one points out that his shock seems a bit naïve given the business realities of network TV news, realities about which Ziegler is normally very savvy and cynical.”
The first sentence in this quote is a very simple, factual account, which supports the idea that Wallace is providing a narrative of Ziegler. The second sentence confirms two things. First, that this narrative is not at all the story of John Ziegler but is actually about what Wallace thinks of his subject. Sure, you could argue that every narrative is constructed by the author, sewn with the threads of rhetoric. I’ll buy that. But rarely is it so tangible as it appears in Wallace’s writing. While he rarely makes reference to himself in text, his writer’s voice is so overwhelming (I’m deliberately not using the word ‘strong’) that we are constantly aware of his presence. He hovers over everything, like a god watching His subjects.
Which brings us to point the second. This is a narrative about how David Foster Wallace is smarter than you.+ Who, you? Yes, you! Don’t feel bad, he’s smarter than me, too! Despite the fact that Wallace in this piece is encroaching on a world not his own (broadcast journalism), he makes it clear through these constant asides (arguably ‘paratextual’ material in regards to Genette’s definition of such) that he actually knows everything about it. More, in fact, than the people within it. That seems to be the major point of this narrative device of what I’ll call ‘Floating Footnotes’ (for reasons I’ll get to in a moment). To show that he knows everything.
Sure, you could argue that this piece is meant to be read online (as I did supplementarily), where these FFs can be clicked on, minimized, maximized, where they can be ignored if the reader so chooses, and that putting the piece in print more or less defeats the purpose. But a) here we are, reading it in print, and b) they are clearly not meant to be ignored. They are THE most critical part of this narrative’s construction as they give weight to Wallace’s omniscience.
Imagine coming across this article without the FFs. Wallace is talking about lots of stuff you’re unfamiliar with (because, remember, he’s smarter than you), so it becomes necessary for you to do a little more research. ‘Peaking?’ (Page 278) What’s that? Don’t worry, Wallace has you covered. He’s already done the research and has made the work of looking it up unnecessary. He has curated the research for you.
A problem with that, though. He is firstly introducing a term most laypeople (as we all are) are not familiar with, and he is then providing you his subjective answer. When confronted with a new concept, I tend to do a little research and then form my own thoughts about it. It’s a three step process. 1) encounter new concept, 2) research it and learn objective facts about it, 3) form my own somewhat subjective understanding of it. But Wallace has, in his quest for omniscience, completely skipped over step 2, which is really the most important one, as it is a meeting point for all the subjective opinions that are birthed from an objective set of facts. But there’s no step 2 here, and instead of being given the opportunity to figure something out for ourselves (because, remember, we are not as smart as David Foster Wallace) we are instead told how to think about something and what to think about it by a more subjective voice. The opportunity to make ourselves smarter by engaging in the infinite cornucopia of information on the internet has been taken away from us because Wallace already knows how and what we should think. The infinity of the internet has been shrunk. And that defeats the purpose of the internet (and, by extension, the structure of this article as something akin to the internet folding in on itself).
The problem is more complicated than that. In this example regarding ‘peaking,’ his explanation is not up to snuff and we aren’t really given enough information to come up with a clear definition of what this is. I chose this example deliberately because, as someone who did his undergrad in this stuff, I do know what peaking is and could provide a detailed, thorough and objective explanation of what it is. In this one small sense, I am actually objectively smarter than David Foster Wallace. His FF here is simply not very good at accomplishing what it seems to want to accomplish. I only know what peaking is because I already knew. I had someone else read this FF and they were unable to understand what it is. So I had to explain it.
Unfortunately, I cannot hope to compete with DFW because of the scope, number and measure of his knowledge, as evidenced by the FFs. Even if I beat him once, he’s got me beat a thousand other times. And that’s the issue I seem to have with Wallace’s writing. He seems to be in constant competition with everyone and everything, from the people he’s writing about (foreshadowing of the last paragraph here) to you, the reader.
To get deeply into the nitty-gritty theory here, I turn to Slomith Rimmon-Kenan’s Narrative Fiction. Put as simply as possible, there are two types of ways to create and/or develop characterization. The first is ‘direct definition’ by the author, i.e. me saying “David Foster Wallace is a bad writer.” That is a direct definition. The second way is ‘indirect presentation’: “A presentation is indirect when rather than mentioning a trait, it displays and exemplifies it in various ways.” There are a few sub-groups here such as action, external appearance, and environment (both physical and social). But the important one here is speech: “A character’s speech, whether in conversation or as a silent activity of the mind, can be indicative of a trait or traits both through its content and through its form.” Since the entirety of Host is, in essence, Wallace’s ‘speech,’ much of it completely extradiegetic and therefore outside the purview of the other ‘characters’ (to the point where, on the surface, he is barely even a real character in the narrative) we can examine how it indicates his trait(s). And the conclusion that I have come to, for the reasons listed above, is that his central trait is that he is smarter than everyone else. I would go even further and suggest that, due to the prevalence of this one trait, he is as E.M. Forster would suggest, a ‘flat’ character. Now, to be fair, Rimmon-Kenan herself points out that Forster’s simple binary classification falls apart quite easily, as in his hypothesis, ‘flat’ is to ‘simple/undeveloping’ as ’round’ is to ‘complex/developing.’ Rimmon-Kenan rightly sees ‘simple versus complex’ and ‘undeveloping versus developing’ as two different axes rather than one, and gives a number of examples of characters who are simple but developing (‘Everyman’) or complex but undeveloping (Dickens’s Miss Havisham). All well and good, and I don’t disagree. However, I concur with Forster here in that there are characters who can be both simple and undeveloping.
Rimmon-Kenan, by way of Ewen, further defines these axes. “At one pole on the axis of complexity he locates characters constructed around a single trait or around one dominant trait along with a few secondary ones. Allegorical figures, caricatures, and types belong to this pole.” Well, Wallace is a type, alright. Furthermore, the other axis: “Allegorical figures, caricatures and types are not only simple but also static, and can thus also occupy… one pole on the axis of development.” If you agree with my assessment of Wallace as having one dominant trait, then it must therefore follow that he is simple and undeveloping.
This is not always a bad thing. Allegorical figures, caricatures and types do serve a purpose in certain kinds of narratives. Unfortunately, they don’t in this one. And if the central character is inappropriate to the narrative, the narrative is going to suffer. Imagine Hamlet with the titular character staying a sad sack throughout the entirety of the play. Imagine the Creature from Frankenstein never learning to read and write.
False equivalencies? Maybe. Probably not. But I maintain that Wallace, despite anything else, is acting as both focalizer and focalized here (as per Genette’s definition). He is in charge of shining the spotlight wherever he wants it to go, but through his constant internal monologues, it is clear that he is the one we are supposed to be focusing on. More from Rimmon-Kenan: “In principle, the external focalizer (or narrator-focalizer) knows everything about the represented world.” Well, that certainly applies to Wallace in this sense. Also, “When the focalized [Wallace] is seen from within, especially by an external focalizer, indicators such as ‘he thought,’ ‘he felt,’ ‘it seemed to him,’ ‘he knew,’ ‘he recognized’ often appear in the text.” However, since this is a first-person account, those kinds of phrases are already built in due to Wallace’s perspective in relation to his own thoughts. So what is interesting, and perhaps even innovative (I’m loathe to admit) is that Wallace serves as both external focalizer and internal focalized. We could perhaps call this ‘first-person omniscient.’ Innovative, yes, but also ridiculous. The only other famous example I can think of which comes close is Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, another character who seemingly knows everything but really knows nothing, who narrates the lives of those around him only through a lens of how they relate to himself, who goes on far too long and says little of import. The difference though, and this is very important, is that Shandy is a fictional character meant to be ridiculed. Shandy’s constant digressions and inability to just shut up and tell the story are the entire point. He, the narrator-character, is the butt of the joke. Wallace plays this same role but plays it straight. If Sterne is telling a joke, then so is Wallace. The difference is that Wallace’s joke isn’t funny.
What makes it extra frustrating for me is that, in both of these pieces, Wallace seems to largely be looking at the world around him and saying ‘look at these idiots/freaks/assholes/foreigners.’ His role as focalizer diminishes those around him, subjecting everyone else to what Woloch calls ‘character compression.’ Despite the fact that the people around are, in fact, real people and by definition not ‘flat,’ Wallace makes them as such. And despite the fact that Woloch was talking about Jane Austen in the following quote, the point can just as easily be applied to Wallace: “[V]arious minor characters exemplify certain traits or ways of thinking that the protagonist must learn to discard. This is the pattern in all of Austen’s novels: dialectical progress for the central protagonists, and the flattening, fragmentation, and dismissal of many minor characters who facilitate this progress as negative examples.”
OK. There’s nothing wrong with that in theory, even supposing that we are allowed to, in the course of non-fiction and journalism, ‘compress’ people around us so that they serve a narrative function. But, as Woloch says, the entire point of this compression is to aid in the protagonist’s development. Now, you could argue that Wallace is not the protagonist of Host (and you’d be wrong) but there is no arguing that he is the protagonist of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. So, if you agree with Woloch’s point that reducing secondary characters to the level of “parody” is justified if it results in character development for the protagonist, then it’s OK that everyone around Wallace is an idiot/freak/asshole/foreigner. But as I already said, Wallace’s character doesn’t develop throughout these pieces at all. He begins and ends as the smartest person in the room, anywhere and everywhere he goes. And to me, a narrative where the central character spends all of his time showing off how smart he is and not learning/growing as a person is a shitty, shitty narrative. It can work when it isn’t played straight, such as in Tristam Shandy. It can’t work when it is played straight, like with Wallace.
[Sigh]… On a purely structural level, I suppose the main thing I should be getting from this essay is the narrative gimmick of the FFs. But I find them to be often pointless, as the one with peaking added nothing just as many of them add nothing. They are, when you get right down to it, footnotes in the traditional sense (at least structurally… sort of). But they are not placed at the bottom of the page. They are everywhere, visually muddying up and interrupting the main narrative (I suppose we could use the term supplementary, to tie this back to the Abbott readings). And what’s more, they aren’t even good footnotes. Real footnotes are for further explanation along with references and pointing interested readers toward further resources. Wallace only gets the first part of that in his FFs, with his own knowledge and opinions as the only necessary resource. This clearly posits him as the ultimate authority. But as I already explained, he’s not. Far from it. And furthermore, there are just too many of these FFs. There are FFs that have their own FFs. And beyond non-explanations, they add nothing of importance.
It’s clear to me that what Wallace really needed was an editor. Someone to tell him when to stop. I’m sure he had an editor, and I even found an interview with one while writing this, but he obviously didn’t have a good editor. It’s hard to tell someone who writes a 500,000 word smash success novel that he’s written too much. He can lean on that as proof that he knows better.
But both of these essays are entirely too long and entirely too pointless. If, hypothetically, we removed the unnecessary FFs from Host we are left with a not-that-interesting story which is somehow still too long, as Wallace couldn’t stop himself from interjecting even in the main, non-supplementary narrative. Again, on Page 338; “The poem’s final version… takes such a long time because of confusions about just how to conjugate ‘drown’ as a future contingent.” The implication that, during this completely unnecessary anecdote, Wallace’s subjects sat around discussing the future contingent in so many words is laughable. Instead, he is using his (unfinished) Harvard education to point out how stupid the people around him are, that they don’t know which tense of the word ‘drown’ to use. Does this (the complicated way of explaining something simple, or even the entire anecdote itself) add anything? I say no. But Wallace is a writer in love with his own prose (something, to be fair, I’ve been accused of myself) with ultimately little to say, so he puFFs it up.++ Everything in his writing is supplementary.
Which brings me to A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Like most of the think-pieces for literati magazines, such as Harper’s, which originally published this piece, this one is totally superfluous. As an avowed Marxist, perpetual poor person and descendant of generations upon generations of failed revolutionaries, anytime I think about the habits of the cognoscenti of the Humanities I am also reminded of people like Emperor Hirohito who, at the same time his country was committing unspeakable acts against humankind, was also one of Japan’s foremost marine biologists. My point is, those at the top can indulge in whatever they want, in whatever measure they want. This sometimes gives them the idea that whatever they want to indulge in must be very important, as they themselves are very important people who seldom hear the word no. Sometimes that’s good (marine biology) and sometimes that’s bad (crimes against humanity). And sometimes, as in this essay, it is utterly, utterly banal.
The best thing I can say about Supposedly Fun is that Wallace keeps the footnotes where they’re supposed to be.
Ever heard the song “Common People” by Pulp? Supposedly Fun set that on constant rotation in my mind’s ear. Let’s keep something else in mind, though. From the moment he was born until the moment he died, whatever depressive maladies he may have suffered from aside, David Foster Wallace was always going to be fine. He was always upper-middle class at the very least, and that meant he would never have to deal with things like choosing to pay for food or medication. You know, things ordinary people actually have to deal with. Furthermore, that meant there was a certain leisure-ness he and all people of his class can (and do) indulge in. ‘Ordinary’ life is vastly different for people of different classes, not just down to one’s ability to pay the rent, but ideas of value. Ideas of luxury. For people without money, what real money looks like is the very, very visible. A mansion. A Lamborghini. A gold toilet. All of those things are out of reach. But a ‘luxury cruise’ may not be, if you save your pennies for years and years (and years). It may just be a way for the have-nots to have, even if only for a few days. And in that sense, it becomes an object of curiosity for the haves. The ways, means, pleasures, etc. of the hoi polloi are one of those things that people with real money and real power can indulge in on a whim, just like Hirohito indulged in marine biology, knowing that when he got bored he could just discard it.
When we talk about cultural appropriation, we often talk about ethnicity. A celebrity showed up to a Halloween party in a Native American headdress, a singer wore a bindi in her latest music video. But we rarely talk about class, because it’s much harder to codify. I’ll be blunt. ‘Luxury’ cruises are not the kind of thing rich people do because their version is called owning their own boat and employing a crew. So the act of going on a luxury cruise and making a profit off it, as Wallace does here, is a form of cultural appropriation in that he is taking something that doesn’t belong to him and he only slightly understands, and using it for his own ends without understanding the repercussions. Is it as bad as the hypothetical examples I provided above? No. But it’s not exactly good.
This is my close reading of this article, and it stems from a few passages, but these stand out; “A certain swanky East-Coast magazine approved of the results of sending me to a plain old simple State Fair last year to do a directionless essayish thing. So now I get offered this tropical plum assignment w/ the exact same paucity of direction or angle.” Page 256. By equating the cruise with another stereotypically poor people activity (and he emphasizes how little money was spent at the fair), he and the magazine he is working for are again saying, ‘hey, let’s check out what the poor people are doing.’ He then spends the next two pages giving us a whirlwind chronicle of the wacky stuff that happens when poor people spend money and think they’re getting ‘the luxury treatment’ and the subsequent system that is set up to accommodate that. The article itself is a joke wherein class differences are the setup and poor people are the punchline. Wallace spends much of the article gawking at the other people on the cruise as if he’s at a carnival freak show. And when we get right down to it, that’s what poor people are to the rich.
I’d like to point out that, while I have no interest in going on a cruise, many of the older people in my extended working-class family have, and enjoyed themselves. Their stories were not unlike Wallace’s except for the presence of sincerity being swapped in for his ironic, smirking detachment (he is even ironic about being long-winded, as one footnote on page 274 simply reads “Long story, not worth it”). My relatives are the people he describes thusly; “I don’t think it’s an accident that 7NC Luxury Cruises appeal mostly to older people. I don’t mean decrepitly old, but I mean age-50+ people, for whom their own mortality is something more than an abstraction.” Page 263. Again, Woloch’s ‘character compression.’ Wallace then goes on to discuss how the ships themselves are monoliths of decadence, with the knowledge that such a word evolved from decay.
And so, while Wallace has a little snigger about these poor people who had to save up to get a (highly manufactured) taste of the good life, and how the ship is all just a big symbol of the inability to stave off physical and spiritual decay, we need to keep in mind that he, born into an upper-middle class life, was always going to be fine and as such could never really understand his subjects, despite his subtextual (and supratextual) assertions of being smarter than you, ‘you’ here being the other people on the ship in addition to you, the reader. This makes it hard to get behind anything he might have to say, as he takes great pains to not just ‘compress’ but other everyone and dehumanize them, at one point even comparing standing in line with them to “the Auschwitz-embarkation scene in Schindler’s List.” Dehumanization complete! He later discusses (in a three page footnote, of course, pages 280-283) the people he had dinner with, whom he liked because they laughed at all his jokes. He says he wants to “avoid saying much about them for fear of hurting their feelings by noting any weirdnesses or features that might seem possibly mean.” He then goes on to discuss exactly that. He later spends an inordinate amount of time fixated on the nationalities of the (service) people he encounters, which has the effect of othering them, as well.
Still, the beauty of his prose+++ is undeniable, as is his bank of knowledge. He not only knows what metalepsis is, he uses it (page 322, “Tibor’s cuteness has been compared by the women at Table 64 to that of a button.”)!
And that’s the shame of it all, to me. Wallace is obviously smart in a way.* However, he hasn’t done much with it besides show off how much he knows. He hasn’t contributed anything worthwhile to any adjacent field such as linguistics, semiotics, etc. Nor has he postulated any new, radical approaches to criticism. Instead, he has spent his career spouting recondite, sesquipedalian platitudes and writing about mind-numbing minutiae as if it’s incredibly profound.
I am still wondering how these pieces qualify as journalism, and if they even do. I don’t think they do. If anything, they’re a warning against self-indulgence. Wallace is the kind of writer who appeals to a certain group of people I cannot, and do not, find myself part of. Toxic masculinity, toxic whiteness, toxic upper-classness. All of which should be railed against, and rightly is in our current zeitgeist. I suggest forgetting him for every reason other than as a cautionary tale. He is the id of privilege, let loose upon the literary world.
Perhaps the only redeeming part of these entire essays, and by far my favorite part, is pages 325-326 when Wallace faces off in chess** against a nine year old girl named Deirdre. She prefaces the game by telling him something about how different cultures symbolically interpret different colors. His response is “I tell her I already know all that.” Even with a nine year old stranger on a boat in the middle of nowhere, where the stakes are as close to zero as they can get, he feels the need to point out that he is smarter than her. So it’s beautiful to me that he then immediately gets his ass kicked by this girl. Of course, any symbolic power this incident might have is completely lost on Wallace and the incident is not referred to again.
+First superfluous footnote; “Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.” From his 2006 commencement speech, “This is Water.” Is he outing himself here? Does he, like so many other learned white men, not understand the difference between knowledge and intelligence?
++Second superfluous footnote; funny story. My word processor kept auto-correcting ‘FFs’ to ‘Ffs.’ After I finished writing, I hit ‘Find and replace’ to fix this. It had the unintended side-effect of changing this word from ‘puffs’ to ‘puFFs.’ I think it’s appropriate, so I kept it.
+++This is another superfluous footnote: read that as “the interminability of his prose.”
*This is yet another superfluous footnote; by “in a way” I mean “has acquired a great deal of knowledge.” Again, the difference between knowledge and intelligence.
**This is the final superfluous footnote; chess, that perennial ‘smart white man’ game, is arguably racist in a number of ways. White always moves first. A number of chess organizations have been accused of racist policies. And chess has been used as one of the many arms of nationalism, specifically in Western (often Anglo-Saxon and even ‘Aryan’ nations). Here, a citation! http://chesshistory.com/winter/extra/nationalism.html That’s how you do it, Mr. Wallace.***
***Holy crap, a superfluous footnote of a superfluous footnote? My real opinion on DFW, if it wasn’t clear from all this, is that he was a terrible writer who churned out pablum just sophisticated enough to be mind-expanding, but only to people who don’t actually read/think a lot, evidenced by his shallow, easily-digestible, reference-heavy style and his toxic fanbase of Book-Readin’ Bros. DFW is the Ur-Example, at least in the modern age, of every white man who read a few books he half-understood and assumed his opinion on everything was suddenly one billion times more informed/important than everyone around him. I am immediately suspicious of anyone who claims to be a true aficionado of his work. Also, DFW was a horrible, disgusting human being. Citation! https://medium.com/@devonprice/a-brief-on-hideous-things-about-david-foster-wallace-72034b20de94