Dodgem-car driver: David Foster Wallace and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men‘s spasmodic variety of forms
If I were asked to place David Foster Wallace in the literary carnival, I’d probably have him steering the dodgem cars. Not on the ghost train, with its foregone tricks, leaden tracks and lacklustre frights; nor on the spinning teacups that are happy to turn on their given place. Brief Interviews is a plenty-note introduction to the heady, acute jerks of Wallace’s wireless dodgers; the question constantly on the passenger’s lips is: are we going to crash?
There are 23 short stories in Brief Interviews. A survey of the first few reveals pretty neatly Foster Wallace’s hand (which is that he has a couple of trick decks up his sleeve). The first story, ‘A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life’, contains only two paragraphs. It would be useless to summarise it; a quote is better. The first paragraph reads:
When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.
Who the hell writes two-paragraph stories? Is it just American geniuses? (Tell me if you can think of anyone besides Lydia Davis. Hey, I’m in post-four-day-weekend mode here.) It might be unusual, but I really like the construction of this story: cutesy, bombastic title that helps set up the game; three watertight and knowable characters (the other one shows up in the next and final paragraph); narrative arc; conflict; insight into the ‘postindustrial human condition’. It’s like ticking boxes in a list, really.
Then, ‘Death is Not the End’, which starts out like this:
The fifty-six-year-old American poet, a Nobel laureate, a poet known in American literary circles as ‘the poet’s poet’ or sometimes simply ‘the Poet,’ lay outside on the deck, bare-chested, moderately overweight, in a partially reclined deck chair, in the sun, reading, half supine, moderately but not severely overweight, winner of two National Book Awards, a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Lamont Prize, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Prix de Rome, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Medal, and a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a president emeritus of PEN, a poet two separate American generations have hailed as the voice of their generation, now fifty-six, lying in an unwet XL Speedo-brand swimsuit in an incrementally reclinable canvas deck chair on the tile deck beside the home’s pool…
I’m pretty sure there are short of five full stops in this whole story, so it’s prudent to end there. It’s hilarious, isn’t it? It seems vulgar when I describe it, but the juxtaposition of ‘XL Speedo-brand swimsuit’ with the American literary superstar’s plaudit list is too lavish not to enjoy just a little bit.
‘Death is Not the End’ is longer than the first story, about a thousand words. In addition to the long-sentence funnies, ‘Death’ also has — wait for it — footnotes. Throw your hands up in the air, people who don’t like authors tinkering with fictional form. DFW is pretty famous for his footnotes, but this is the first time I’ve come across them. Out of context, the decision to use footnotes in a short story might seem despicable. I know I’ve turned my nose up at experimental fiction that’s used them before. But really, they’re so funny in this story. Witness:
…one of only three American recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature now living, 5’8″, 181 lbs., brown/brown, hairline unevenly recessed because of the inconsistent acceptance/rejection of various Hair Augmentation Systems-brand transplants, he sat, or lay — or perhaps most accurately just ‘reclined’ — in a black Speedo swimsuit by the home’s kidney-shaped pool,1 on the pool’s tile deck, in a portable deck chair whose back was now reclined four clicks…
_____________
1 Also the first American-born poet ever in the Nobel Prize for Literature’s distinguished 94-year history to receive it, the coveted Nobel Prize for Literature.
You’ve met this person; you’ve met the person who is so pathologically unable to cease glorifying his or her own achievements that random interjections about their accolades seem to pop out of their mouths like balls from a tennis machine. Or you know about that creative bigwig whose accomplishments loom over any conversation vaguely related to said bigwig’s area of expertise (‘Honey, can’t we stop talking about John Updike now? I want to eat my dinner.’) such that they seem a spectral annoyance instead of a guy whose books you might like to read one day. Footnotes, as used in ‘Death’, are a clever and playful technique that doffs its hat to the multifaceted literacies of modern-day readers.
As I said, DFW’s work is well known for the proliferation of these borrowed-from-academia interruptions, and sometimes the interpolations get sizier than the ‘actual text’. In ‘The Depressed Person’:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Awful quality photograph, but you can see here two pages in which the text-of-the-story, as we might think of it, is clinging with fond hope to the top of a page, an unathletic kid stranded in the middle of the monkeybars, watching the more acrobatic of her peers tumble back and forth below. God damn me if I lie, but I tried really hard to read every single word of the footnotes in this story and just failed miserably. After a while, I would say to myself, ‘I get it. It’s an overcogitated, anxious elaboration of an emotional point made regarding a particular character whose internal turmoil is not fully served by the tip-of-the-iceberg outlay she feels is socially acceptable. There are two layers. I get it,’ and just read the parts in bigger font. I’m only human.
Other forms DFW uses are the ‘reconstructed transcript’, a twenty-five line conversation with no attribution; a series of ‘pop quizzes’; and an excerpt from a future dictionary. And then there are the ‘Brief Interviews’ themselves, which I think I will talk about tomorrow.