Reading David F. Wallace, and other things

Posted on | February 20, 2009 | Comments Off

Reading David Foster Wallace is like taking a peek inside of yourself, and not being very comfortable at what you find in there. I started with Infinite Jest today, and within finishing some ten pages of that nearly thousand page masterpiece, was a fan. But the book is on hold now, as in the time honoured tradition of my habits/peculiarities, I dropped the book to read more and more about Wallace. The only Wallace I had ever read earlier was the article about that Federer he had written earlier. Just finished reading “On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise”, an article he did for Harper’s Magazine back in 1996, some months prior to the publication of Infinite Jest. Besides, have read a lot of reviews of Wallace’s works and been trying to google out the site for Infinite Jest that Little, Brown created when the book was published, but, thirteen years after publication, it stands to reason that they probably discontinued the site. Next up for reading tonight is Wallace’s Commencement Address at Kenyon College in 2005, and his articles “Ticket to the Fair” and “Consider the lobster”. All this sort of constitutes a hiatus in the reading of Infinite Jest, which book I have come to admire after even the first few pages despite, or maybe because of, its overly verbose literalistic flourishes and bitter irony. And which book is nevertheless going to take quite some time to finish. As a reviewer predicted back then, it is a book which will “probably sell 50000 copies, out of which 500 will be read”.

I don’t have a very good record at reading what I really like. I often have left books I have loved, without completing them, while I have read some pieces of even pulp fiction more than twenty time over and over again. A clear case of hedonistic lethargy superceding intellectual curiosity and adventurousness, maybe even a crushing underfoot of supposed intellectual vanity? Somehow I think not, even though I have never particularly analysed it. Though if I were to hazard a guess, I might even say that it stems from some deep seated intellectual insecurity which rears its head whenever the mind begins to derive its pleasure from being stimulated, excited and disturbed and analysing and reformatting words and ideas simultaneously enjoying, more the process, than the results…which, of course, involves a desertion of the comfort zone, which maybe is the cause of the insecurity, in the first place- an ironic rejection of ventures into new intellectual territory which feeds itself off the frenzied yearning for newer ventures. And this is probably the reason I never finished reading books like The Stranger, or The Executioner’s Song, and even had to make two attempts to finish The Ground beneath her Feet.

Wallace has a kind of irony very different from anything I had previously encountered. I had read and heard much from many reviewers and recommenders of Wallce’s work about the irony inherent in his work. But it is not a delicious irony-it is difficult to bracket it. Reading his experiences aboard the luxury cruise, his satire, though extremely witty, is not at all funny –the shipboard world which he describes has an air of unreality about it- something of a ballardian dystopia, a postmodernistic nightmare which might have been at home in his own Infinite Jest, and yet, we know that it is a very real world which exists simultaneously and physically, in our own world, in a parallel universe which all of us aspire to be part of and yet are scared of in a sort of cosmic joke which is hilariously pathetic. And perhaps that is the ultimate irony, more than vacuous middle and post-middle age citizens taking their one week of suspension of reality aboard the supremely luxurious world that is luxury- hotel-cum-transportation-vehicle populated by its unobtrusive, but intrusively and repulsively servile denizens, the irony of stress caused by the efforts of negate stress is overshadowed by the supreme irony of people rushing into the stress of life with the objective of buying that stress-relief trip. If there is a supreme creator above watching this drama unfold on His presumably state-of-the-art plasma screen sitting in His own postmodern luxury suite which would probably not be out of place aboard the cruise-liner- He must be rolling on his couch trying to contain the mirth which must be straining to split his sides.

(To be continued…)

Similar Posts:

• infinite jest
• reading, and other updates
• reading

Comments