David Foster Wallace's frenzy

At the beginning of Pop Quiz 9, last section of Octet, in David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, his frighteningly extensive language turns abruptly on the reader.

How exactly the cycle's short pieces are supposed to work is hard to describe. Maybe say they're supposed to compose a certain sort of 'interrogation' of the person reading them, somehow—i.e. palpitations, feelers, into the interstices of something, etc... though what that 'something' is remains maddeningly hard to pin down, even just for yourself as you're working on the pieces.

There we are, readers, with all our interstices suddenly exposed. It's uncomfortable and pleasurable. His excesses are never far from pain. His writerly frenzy is almost sacrificial: he could torture for ever the least rustle of human life. He's writing but also doing something else less clear, something exhaustive. His words will never say it all, but they might insinuate themselves into the reader's equilibrium. There's no redemption unless we readers are redemptive, not just chewing on David Foster Wallace's frenzy but meeting it with a freshly minted frenzy of our own.

You have to read him while holding your breath, in order to stay clear, until after you stop reading, of this interrogation he's holding. How much of this can you, the reader, bear at one sitting? I like to imagine being on a train with only this book to read, maybe a stopped train on a branch line in the middle of Ireland for half a day or more, and how I'd stay with all the footnotes, which, as with Oliver Sacks, sometimes occupy more pages than the text itself, unspool all the possibilities to emerge eventually at my destination a fully interrogated, fully exposed human being.

In fact I am at home, a somewhat exposed human being listening to Shostakovich and watching a stormy sunset, reading David Foster Wallace, badly. As he fears he wrote, badly. Pop Quiz 9 doubts what any of the Pop Quizzes have managed to communicate.

At any rate it's not going to make you look wise or secure or accomplished or any of the things readers usually want to pretend they believe the literary artist who wrote what they're reading is when they sit down to try and escape the insoluble flux of themselves and enter a world of prearranged meaning. Rather it's going to make you look fundamentally lost and confused and frightened about whether to trust even your fundamental intuitions about urgency and sameness and whether other people deep inside experience things in anything like the same way you do.

Like a thirteen year-old on the high diving board for the first time.

I started reading Infinite Jest near the start of what turned out to be a summer they’d write songs about. The plateau of house and garden baked, the cats extenuated.

A second try at some essays by David Foster Wallace as well as an article in the New Yorker about a new biography of DFW, left me curious and raised a challenge: young men under twenty-five are apparently his natural constituency, my friend in Waterstones tells me. I ordered two copies. One was for a friend who is slightly nearer the ideal than I: thirty-something, a woman, a compulsive in a different darkroom.

My progress was slow. I often read it at night, which made it even slower. This is a thick heavy book. Proust would have done it in three volumes. DFW has longer, thinner breaths. Sometimes I felt like my mother in her latter years picking up The Paston Letters or a volume of Walter Scott at four a.m. neither knowing nor caring how recently, if at all, she’d read this page. Sometimes I couldn’t face David Foster Wallace (who may have liked to resonate with Charles Foster Kane). On any impulse I picked up something else: Amos Tutuola, Ruskin, Janet Malcolm’s essays, Sir Thomas Browne’s Urne Buriall, a hardback William Saroyan novel on the free shelves at the Ireland waiting area at Heathrow, Allen Shawn’s book about phobia, I wish I were there, a new issue of Sebald writing, even other essays by DFW, especially about Roger Federer; anything to be in a different jungle with other animals.

I talked about this to my friend in Waterstones as I bought the new Sebald, A Place in the Country (among titles to seduce and distract). Maybe the second half will be easier, she said. If only DFW had had an island in a lake, like Rousseau, a house by a river, like Kleist and Robert Walser. A house on an island or by a river.

There were moments when I felt at one with DFW’s mania. He was a riotous Allen Shawn, Sir Thomas Browne with tennis instead of religion, he played among pharmaceuticals Proust hadn’t dreamed of. Worst fears and best fun. The liberty of despair. A description of the return from an NA meeting in Boston on foot, and what befell, must stand as one of the great unputdownable reading moments: it wasn’t the drama, it was the compulsive attention, the wilful, willless, lurid, anal, rhapsodic attention of it, so voluble that its clarity turned to obscurity and back again several times as I read, like that woman in North Kerry the night of her mother’s funeral who said she was so drunk she was coming round to being sober again.

I enjoyed DFW’s bracketing and his disruptions, the relentless closeness of his verbal acrobatics and where they left me, the reader, breathless and disorientated, so sensitised I was almost happy. A fine prelude to sleep, as well as a fruitful pondering around four a.m. especially around the subject of the second copy I bought but have not yet sent to my friend in London. It is too thick to go through her letterbox, and she has a bad record of picking things up from the Post Office. I could tear it into sections and send them in sequence or out. Would it matter? A chunk of language, a random segment of mania. Though I’m not sure that Infinite Jest, both in title and in substance (abuse) might not be a bit close to the bone.