1993
Afterword
For the past ten years, I have asked my undergraduate nonfiction class at Yale to read three pages from “Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away from It All,” David Foster Wallace’s 1994 piece on the Illinois State Fair. Other readings for English 469 have changed, but not that one. I always assign those three pages—“08/13/1235h. Lunchtime”—at the beginning of the semester because they contain a mind-bending payload of writing lessons (truly mind-bending, as in “How could that tiny VW hold all those clowns?”). The very next week, the students write better. It sounds impossible, but it’s true.
I ask my students to consider five things in the pages they’ve read.
The first is structure. This section of the piece surveys the fairground’s lunch offerings. I read aloud a little outline I’ve made:
I. Milkshakes
II. Pork
III. Sweet Stuff
IV. Nonsweet Stuff
V. More Sweet Stuff
VI. Crowds & Fat People
VII. More Sweet Stuff, climaxing with DIPPIN DOTS
I point out that Wallace has put sweet stuff in four different places and ask the students, who in other classes have been trained to group topics thematically, why he was so disorganized. One year out of two, someone says, Because fairs are disorganized! And then we talk about how creative nonfiction has no one-size-fits-all template: the structure can fit the subject.
The second is grammar. Wallace was a language snob, or, as he termed it in “Authority and American Usage,” a SNOOT. He compiled handouts for his writing students at Amherst and Pomona with what-not-to-do examples from their own work: dangling modifiers, split infinitives, non-parallel phrases. Some of my students have never read Wallace before, and they have a vague idea that he was a wild and crazy guy who flouted the conventions of grammar and punctuation and would, by happy example, give them license to do the same. I ask someone to read aloud a 103-word sentence—the one that begins “The crowd’s adults are either pale or with the pink tinge of a new burn”—whose thicket of predicate adjectives and appositives is meticulously subdivided by commas, semicolons, and dashes. Oh. It is instantly clear that although minimalists can afford to be a little hazy on mechanics (not that I recommend it), maximalists can’t.
The third is wordplay. Wallace doesn’t bend grammar, but he bends English. He loves Germanic compounds like “shingle-sized” (describing pizza slices), “Rice-Krispie-squarish” (describing Krakkles), and “pubic-hair-shaped” (describing Curl Fries). If no existing adjective can do exactly what he wants, he invents one—for instance, “Jetsonian” (describing DIPPIN DOTS). The students, ecumenical scholars of pop culture, all get the reference.
The fourth is lists. I ask someone to read this one aloud: “But holy mackerel are there sweets: Fried Dough; Black Walnut Taffy; Fiddlesticks; Hot Crackerjack. Caramel apples for a felonious $1.50. Angel’s Breath, known also as Dentist’s Delight. Vanilla fudge that breaks a kind of weird sweat the minute it leaves its booth’s freezer.” Notice anything about the sequence? Everyone does. The items get longer and longer. Also funnier and funnier. When you write a list, I suggest, put the least surprising items at the beginning and the longest/funniest/most ridiculous ones at the end.
The fifth is multisensory description. We all have noses, ears, tongues, and skin, but most people write as if they had only eyes. Not Wallace. That’s how he makes us feel we’re at the fair, not just reading about it. I ask for examples of each sense. Everyone speaks at once. Sound-carpet of deep fryers! Air spicy with antiperspirant and Coppertone! Yummy Elephant Ears! The weird, abstract texture of DIPPIN DOTS! I ask how they’d characterize “the green reek of fried tomatoes” and “bright-yellow popcorn that stinks of salt.” It’s Yale. At least four students cry out, Synesthesia!
One of the traditions of English 469 is that most of the authors on the syllabus have generously agreed to answer a single e-mailed question. We take the exercise seriously. Each student brings in a question. There is an election. It is an honor to win.
In 2006 and 2007, we sent questions to David Foster Wallace. The first year, the question was written by a sophomore named Dan Fromson: In writing about the Illinois State Fair, you critique the animal-like fairgoers, and yet you also subtly mock your own voice as narrator. As a writer, how does one find a balance between mocking one’s target and mocking oneself?
You can imagine what it was like for a nineteen-year-old DFW fan to get a response—and not just a line or two but a 645-word mini-essay that opened with “Dear Mr. Fromson et al.” and closed with “Tally Ho, David Wallace.”
It began:
Well, hmm. You’re about to get a more or less freewritten reply, which will be my attempt at simulating a live, sweaty, physically-present-type answer. Said answer being mainly: I don’t know. At least I’m not sure whether (a) there is such a balance, and (b) if there is, whether finding it can be prescribed in any kind of formula. This isn’t to say that I don’t see your question’s point—at least I think I do, although I did that piece a long time ago, and I don’t have any copies of it here to look at. Part of me wants to object to “you critique the animal-like fairgoers,” although I seem to recall stuff about clinically fat people engaged in peripatetic eating that made them look bovine. But I also recall a certain tenderness for the Midwesterners there (of whom I was, by origin and upbringing, one), and an attempt to explain, for the mainly cosmopolitan readers of Harper’s, some of the effects rurality, physical distance, lack of stimulation, etc. have on people. Still, I must also admit that I got some pissed-off letters indeed from Midwesterners, along with some aggrieved press mentions in the Midwest—“Local boy goes off east and writes smart-ass article for hip New York mag,” etc. Some people sure felt mocked, it would appear.
From the next paragraph:
I’d say that this is a dangerous kind of piece to do, because it sets up Narrator Persona challenges, more specifically the Asshole Problem. I’m sure you guys have seen it—it’s death if the biggest sense the reader gets from a critical essay is that the narrator’s a very critical person, or from a comic essay that the narrator’s cruel or snooty. Hence the importance of being just as critical about oneself as one is about the stuff/people one’s being critical of.
The Asshole Problem! What a magnificent concept! If you make fun of other people, you’ll sound like an asshole unless you also make fun of yourself. When Dan read this paragraph aloud, his classmates immediately understood why Wallace had presented himself as a clueless reporter who forgot his pen, a wuss who was scared to ride the Zipper, an obnoxious poseur who used phrases like “regional politico-sexual contrast” and “postmodern embarrassment of riches.”
The next year, a senior named Alex Borinsky asked: Have you ever not written something for fear the subject might read it?
Wallace sent Alex a response nearly as long as the last one. Yes, he said. He had backed out of book reviews because he didn’t want to skewer the books. He had omitted personal details from a profile because they had been revealed in moments of indiscretion. He explained:
On the one hand, a writer has to understand that his primary allegiance is to the reader, not to the article’s subject. Excessive concern about subjects’ feelings can lead to all sorts of dishonesty that the reader will be able to detect (whether this detection is conscious or not). On the other hand, life is short, and hard, and it seems like good policy to inflict the absolute minimum pain/humiliation on other people as we schlep through the day.
Alex and his classmates were glad to hear this. Wallace’s descriptions of the fat fairgoers had troubled them. He was snide. But he was also kind. It was instructive to realize that one could be both.
David Foster Wallace died six days before my 2008 class. We talked about “Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away from It All” and also about what Wallace had meant to the students who knew his work. It was a very quiet class.
We have c
ontinued to read those three pages every year, along with Wallace’s responses to Dan and Alex. As a result, my students choose structures that fit their subjects. The maximalists among them see long sentences as an occasion for careful grammar rather than an excuse to avoid it. They play with language. They write good lists. They write multisensory descriptions. They use self-deprecation to avoid the Asshole Problem—a term they employ so frequently one might assume it was a staple of literary criticism. They try to inflict less pain/humiliation as they schlep through the day. Some of them close their e-mails to each other with “Tally Ho.” They wish David Foster Wallace were alive, not only so he could continue to write but so they could ask him a question.
—Anne Fadiman
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
1
RIGHT NOW IT’S Saturday 18 March, and I’m sitting in the extremely full coffee shop of the Fort Lauderdale Airport, killing the four hours between when I had to be off the cruise ship and when my flight to Chicago leaves by trying to summon up a kind of hypnotic sensuous collage of all the stuff I’ve seen and heard and done as a result of the journalistic assignment just ended.
I have seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled what suntan lotion smells like spread over 21000 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as “Mon” in three different nations. I have watched 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that looked computer-enhanced and a tropical moon that looked more like a sort of obscenely large and dangling lemon than like the good old stony U.S. moon I’m used to.
I have (very briefly) joined a Conga Line.
I’ve got to say I feel like there’s been a kind of Peter Principle in effect on this assignment. 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. But this time there’s this new feeling of pressure: total expenses for the State Fair were $27.00 excluding games of chance. This time Harper’s has shelled out over $3000 U.S. before seeing pithy sensuous description one. They keep saying—on the phone, Ship-to-Shore, very patiently—not to fret about it. They are sort of disingenuous, I believe, these magazine people. They say all they want is a sort of really big experiential postcard—go, plow the Caribbean in style, come back, say what you’ve seen.
I have seen a lot of really big white ships. I have seen schools of little fish with fins that glow. I have seen a toupee on a thirteen-year-old boy. (The glowing fish liked to swarm between our hull and the cement of the pier whenever we docked.) I have seen the north coast of Jamaica. I have seen and smelled all 145 cats inside the Ernest Hemingway Residence in Key West FL. I now know the difference between straight Bingo and Prize-O, and what it is when a Bingo jackpot “snowballs.” I have seen camcorders that practically required a dolly; I’ve seen fluorescent luggage and fluorescent sunglasses and fluorescent pince-nez and over twenty different makes of rubber thong. I have heard steel drums and eaten conch fritters and watched a woman in silver lamé projectile-vomit inside a glass elevator. I have pointed rhythmically at the ceiling to the 2:4 beat of the exact same disco music I hated pointing at the ceiling to in 1977.
I have learned that there are actually intensities of blue beyond very, very bright blue. I have eaten more and classier food than I’ve ever eaten, and eaten this food during a week when I’ve also learned the difference between “rolling” in heavy seas and “pitching” in heavy seas. I have heard a professional comedian tell folks, without irony, “But seriously.” I have seen fuchsia pantsuits and menstrual-pink sportcoats and maroon-and-purple warm-ups and white loafers worn without socks. I have seen professional blackjack dealers so lovely they make you want to run over to their table and spend every last nickel you’ve got playing blackjack. I have heard upscale adult U.S. citizens ask the Guest Relations Desk whether snorkeling necessitates getting wet, whether the skeetshooting will be held outside, whether the crew sleeps on board, and what time the Midnight Buffet is. I now know the precise mixological difference between a Slippery Nipple and a Fuzzy Navel. I know what a Coco Loco is. I have in one week been the object of over 1500 professional smiles. I have burned and peeled twice. I have shot skeet at sea. Is this enough? At the time it didn’t seem like enough. I have felt the full clothy weight of a subtropical sky. I have jumped a dozen times at the shattering, flatulence-of-the-gods sound of a cruise ship’s horn. I have absorbed the basics of mah-jongg, seen part of a two-day rubber of contract bridge, learned how to secure a life jacket over a tuxedo, and lost at chess to a nine-year-old girl.
(Actually it was more like I shot at skeet at sea.)
I have dickered over trinkets with malnourished children. I now know every conceivable rationale and excuse for somebody spending over $3000 to go on a Caribbean cruise. I have bitten my lip and declined Jamaican pot from an actual Jamaican.
I have seen, one time, from an upper deck’s rail, way below and off the right rear hull, what I believe to have been a hammerhead shark’s distinctive fin, addled by the starboard turbine’s Niagaracal wake.
I have now heard—and am powerless to describe—reggae elevator music. I have learned what it is to become afraid of one’s own toilet. I have acquired “sea legs” and would like now to lose them. I have tasted caviar and concurred with the little kid sitting next to me that it is: blucky.
I now understand the term “Duty Free.”
I now know the maximum cruising speed of a cruise ship in knots.1 I have had escargot, duck, Baked Alaska, salmon w/ fennel, a marzipan pelican, and an omelette made with what were alleged to be trace amounts of Etruscan truffle. I have heard people in deck chairs say in all earnestness that it’s the humidity rather than the heat. I have been—thoroughly, professionally, and as promised beforehand—pampered. I have, in dark moods, viewed and logged every type of erythema, keratinosis, pre-melanomic lesion, liver spot, eczema, wart, papular cyst, potbelly, femoral cellulite, varicosity, collagen and silicone enhancement, bad tint, hair transplants that have not taken—i.e. I have seen nearly naked a lot of people I would prefer not to have seen nearly naked. I have felt as bleak as I’ve felt since puberty, and have filled almost three Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me. I have acquired and nurtured a potentially lifelong grudge against the ship’s Hotel Manager—whose name was Mr. Dermatis and whom I now and henceforth christen Mr. Dermatitis2—an almost reverent respect for my waiter, and a searing crush on the cabin steward for my part of Deck 10’s port hallway, Petra, she of the dimples and broad candid brow, who always wore a nurse’s starched and rustling whites and smelled of the cedary Norwegian disinfectant she swabbed bathrooms down with, and who cleaned my cabin within a cm of its life at least ten times a day but could never be caught in the actual act of cleaning—a figure of magical and abiding charm, and well worth a postcard all her own.