In a book just published yesterday, the words of one of the best writers in the last 50 years are worth reading. David Foster Wallace was a troubled genius. His suicide was not unexpected by those close to him. But for those who loved his words, in essays, novels, short stories, speeches and in conversations, it is a voice to be missed. And returned to.
The new book is Both Flesh and Not. It contains some previously published essays in slightly different forms as well as some early essays that have not yet been collected.
The essay I am excerpting from is called "The Nature of the Fun". While its topic is writing fiction, I would argue that it equally applies to creative non-fiction, his own, and those who struggle to write essays that are creatively and artistically rendered. So every time you see the word 'fiction' you can just as easily substitute non-fiction there too. Foster's essays are endlessly creative, jump from the range of arcane philosophy to endlessly beautifully twisting sentences describing a Roger Federer return of a single shot in a tennis tournament. Anyone who wants to learn how sentences sing and cry, disturb and at the same time entice, should spend some time with this book.
There are also a number of essays and speeches available for free. The site is called Open Culture. There are 30 essays and stories here.Reading the best writers in the world is always useful for those seeking to break the tired approach of a template driven essay. But as you will read in a minute, it is always a risk to try to awaken readers from the slumber induced by soft beds of sentences that lull us into agreement. He confronts us. Maybe you will decide to try this too, if not on a college admission essay, where some readers want standard prose, at least once you're off in the world of college and beyond, where words that create 'terrible beauty' will make you heard around the world.
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'THE BEST METAPHOR I know of for being
a fiction writer is in Don DeLillo’s Mao II, where he describes a
book-in-progress as a kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the writer
around, forever crawling after the writer (i.e., dragging itself across the
floor of restaurants where the writer’s trying to eat, appearing at the foot of
the bed first thing in the morning, etc.), hideously defective, hydrocephalic
and noseless and flipper-armed and incontinent and retarded and dribbling
cerebrospinal fluid out of its mouth as it mewls and blurbles and cries out to
the writer, wanting love, wanting the very thing
its hideousness guarantees it’ll get: the writer’s complete attention...
The damaged-infant trope is perfect
because it captures the mix of repulsion and love the fiction writer feels for
something he’s working on....
The fiction always comes out so
horrifically defective, so hideous a betrayal of all your hopes for it—a cruel
and repellent caricature of the perfection of its conception—yes, understand:
grotesque because imperfect. And yet it’s yours, the infant is, it’s you, and
you love it and dandle it and wipe the cerebrospinal fluid off its slack chin
with the cuff of the only clean shirt you have left because you haven’t done
laundry in like three weeks because finally this one chapter or character seems
like it’s finally trembling on the edge of coming together and working and
you’re terrified to spend any time on anything other than working on it because
if you look away for a second you’ll lose it, dooming the whole
infant to continued hideousness. And but so you love the damaged infant and
pity it and care for it; but also you hate it—hate it—because it’s deformed,
repellent, because something grotesque has happened to it in the parturition
from head to page; hate it because its deformity is your deformity (since if
you were a better fiction writer your infant would of course look like one of
those babies in catalogue ads for infantwear, perfect and pink and
cerebrospinally continent) and its every hideous incontinent breath is a
devastating indictment of you, on all levels… and so you want it dead, even as
you dote and love and wipe it and dandle it and sometimes even apply CPR when
it seems like its own grotesqueness has blocked its breath and it might die altogether.
The whole thing’s all very messed up and sad, but simultaneously it’s alsotender and moving and noble and
cool—it’s a genuine relationship, of a sort—and even at the height of its
hideousness the damaged infant somehow touches and awakens what you suspect are
some of the very best parts of you: maternal parts, dark ones. You love your
infant very much. And you want others to love it, too, when the time finally
comes for the damaged infant to go out and face the world....
So you’re in a bit of a dicey
position: you love the infant and want others to love it, but that means you
hope others won’t see it correctly. You want to sort of fool people: you want
them to see as perfect what you in your heart know is a betrayal of all
perfection. Or else you don’t want to fool these people; what you want is you
want them to see and love a lovely, miraculous, perfect, ad-ready infant and to
be right, correct, in what they see and feel. You want to be terribly wrong:
you want the damaged infant’s hideousness to turn out to have been nothing but
your own weird delusion or hallucination. But that’d mean you were crazy: you
have seen, been stalked by, and recoiled from hideous deformities that in fact
(others persuade you) aren’t there at all. Meaning you’re at least a couple
fries short of a Happy Meal, surely. But worse: it’d also mean you see and
despise hideousness in a thing you made (and love), in your spawn, in in
certain ways you. And this last, best hope—this’d represent something way worse
than just very bad parenting; it’d be a terrible kind of self-assault, almost
self-torture. But that’s still what you most want: to be completely, insanely,
suicidally wrong....
Onanism gives way to attempted
seduction, as a motive....
Now,
attempted seduction is hard work, and its fun is offset by a terrible fear of
rejection. Whatever “ego” means, your ego has now gotten into the game. Or
maybe “vanity” is a better word. Because you notice that a good deal of your
writing has now become basically showing off, trying to get people to think
you’re good. This is understandable. You have a great deal of yourself on the
line, now, writing—your vanity
Because the fun you work back to has
been transfigured by the unpleasantness of vanity and fear, an unpleasantness
you’re now so anxious to avoid that the fun you rediscover is a way fuller and
more large-hearted kind of fun. It has something to do with Work as Play....
Or with the discovery that disciplined
fun is more fun than impulsive or hedonistic fun. Or with figuring out that not
all paradoxes have to be paralyzing. Under fun’s new administration, writing
fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the
stuff you don’t want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually
turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers
share and respond to, feel...
... a way to countenance yourself and to
tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in
a way you figure you will be maximally likable. This process is complicated and
confusing and scary, and also hard work, but it turns out to be the best fun
there is. The fact that you can now sustain the fun of writing only by
confronting the very same unfun parts of yourself you’d first used writing to
avoid or disguise is another paradox, but this one isn’t any kind of bind at
all. What it is is a gift, a kind of miracle, and compared to it the reward of
strangers’ affection is as dust, lint.
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