DFW: I don’t understand the question?

- Full interview from 1998 at Slate

At some point in my reading and writing that fall I discovered the click in literature, too. It was real lucky that just when I stopped being able to get the click from math logic I started to be able to get it from fiction. The first fictional clicks I encountered were in Donald Barthelme’s “The Balloon” and in parts of the first story I ever wrote, which has been in my trunk since I finished it. I don’t know whether I have that much natural talent going for me fiction wise, but I know I can hear the click, when there is a click.

Of course, I had to go find a copy of “The Balloon.” I had never read and Barthelme, had only vaguely heard of him and for some reason thought he was an author writing in the 1800s.

So I found a copy of “The Balloon” and began reading quickly; I really wanted to find out what ‘the click’ was all about. In my haste, I committed what I’ve long thought of as one of my most egregious misreadings of a story.

Here’s what my hurrying brain read the first time around:

Of course, the real version goes like this:

As I read on, I was so excited by what I was reading–a story recommended by David Foster Wallace–that I missed several other subtle references to the narrator’s control over the balloon. You can imagine my surprise at the final paragraph. I remember thinking to myself, “That’s it?”

I am a reader who must constantly remind himself to slow down, or else I’ll miss ‘the click.’

Here are my answers and, in cases where I missed something, Wallace’s edits to my answers:

(1) It was the yuletide season like I had never seen it before.

It was the yuletide season as I had never seen it before.

(2) We were in Innsbruck, Austria and we could not find a place to stay the night.

We were in Innsbruck, Austria, and we could not find a place to stay the night. [Comma after Austria]

(3) We passed by the inn.

We passed the inn. [By is redundant]

(4) It has made its way into the mainstream of verbal discourse.

It has made its way into mainstream discourse. [Discourse is already verbal]

(5) Cross burning began in medieval times on the green hills of Scotland, where clans used them to rally their kin and kith against enemies.

Cross burning began in medieval times on the green hills of Scotland, where clans used them to rally their kith and kin against enemies. [The idiom is reversed]

(6) “Get used to it.” I said to myself.

“Get used to it,” I said to myself

(7) As the president is a Christian, he prays every morning.

Since [or because] the president is  a Christian, he prays every morning. [As for because is a Britishism, if I remember correctly]

(8) I can support this claim with quotes from several published sources.

I can support this claim with quotations from several published sources.

(9) It consisted of only two brief 50-minute workshops which one speaker enticingly described as “therapy session sized.”

It consisted of only two 50-minute workshops which one speaker enticingly described as “therapy session– sized.” [Brief is redundant; n-dash between session and sized]

(10) How else can we explain such an abomination of human nature to occur?

How else can we explain the occurrence of such an abomination of human nature? [Or others, as long as the poor syntax is fixed]

(11) Bekavac also quoted Jeannette Rankin, which the Internet tells me was the first female representative to Congress.

Bekavac also quoted Jeannette Rankin, who the Internet tells me was the first female representative to Congress. [Not whom because it is a subjective pronoun with the verb "was"]

(12) There were less than a hundred students at the rally.

There were fewer than a hundred students at the rally. [Fewer if you can count it, less if you measure it.]

(13) People often say that Freud’s theories are about nothing but sex. They are generally correct.

People often say that Freud’s theories are about nothing but sex. The people are generally correct.

(14) Timothy McVeigh might be a leader and he has stepped over lines where only a minority of anti-government agitators will follow.

Timothy McVeigh might be a leader, and he has stepped over lines where only a minority of anti-government agitators will follow.

(15) The U.S., Canada, and Mexico comprise North America.

North American comprises the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

(16) The Dean of Students at Harvey Mudd had the burned cross thrown in a dumpster without notifying its original owner and it looked suspicious.

The Dean of Students at Harvey Mudd had the burned cross thrown in a Dumpster without notifying the original owner, and the situation looked suspicious. [Dumpster is a proper noun; "its" is a vague pronoun reference that could refer to [D]umpster, and “it” is vague as well.]

(17) His name was left off of the list.

HIs name was left off the list.

(18) Drug-induced or not, he’s very inarticulate.

Under the influence of drugs or not, he’s very inarticulate. [Other possibilities here, but "drug-induced" cannot modify "he"]

(19) A person should be honest about their desires.

A person should be honest about his or her desires.

(20) Most people are adverse to cannibalism.

Most people are averse to cannibalism.

(21) I must follow those that I lead.

I must follow those whom I lead.

(22) There was fog outside of our car.

There was fog outside our car.

(23) If one acts, you are a leader.

If one acts, one is a leader.

Wallace’s work will be seen as a huge failure, not in the pejorative sense, but in the special sense Faulkner used when he said about American novelists, “I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.” Wallace failed beautifully. There is no mystery whatsoever about why he found this novel so hard to finish. The glimpse we get of what he wanted it to be—a vast model of something bland and crushing, inside of which a constellation of individual souls would shine in their luminosity, and the connections holding all of us together in this world would light up, too, like filaments—this was to be a novel on the highest order of accomplishment, and we see that the writer at his strongest would have been strong enough. He wasn’t always that strong.

Insightful, or regurgitation of the “humanist” DFW diet? At what point will critics realize that there is not one single sense to DFW’s work–that is, Wallace as what Kyle Beachy, ironically or not, called the “empathy machine,” the brain with a heartbeat? There is no question that this caricature of Wallace suits our time, but it nevertheless should be considered as just that: a pitiful reduction of what Wallace demands, and the ensnaring of criticism in the dangerous matrix of “human values”–as if he awoke from his postmodern slumber merely to mourn the “souls who would shine”–which is, incidentally, my answer to Blake’s recent post. Answer: a critic should be critical, a problem which will be the challenge and measure of reviewing The Pale King.

This is for fun.

This is a contest. It is taken from a homework assignment in David Foster Wallace’s Extremely Advanced Composition class at Pomona College. It was a creative nonfiction workshop.

The contest is, correct these sentences for what Wallace, at least, perceived as errors in mechanics, grammar, punctuation, syntax, idiom, and/or usage. You get a point every time you are the first person to correct an error in comments (by rewriting the sentence correctly), but I’m going to wait to get lots of answers in to reveal the answers, so don’t hesitate to tackle a sentence that someone else has already tried. You may make multiple guesses on the same sentence, and you can guess out of order. Some sentences may have more than one error. One point per error. Prize TBA.

Some of these are pretty basic. Some are very obscure and speak to Wallace’s particular peeves, some of which I don’t share. The point is to figure out what he thought was wrong with these. No use arguing with a dead man.

And I quote:

English 183D 10 March 2004

” . . . every such phrase anesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.”–G. Orwell

(1) It was the yuletide season like I had never seen it before.

(2) We were in Innsbruck, Austria and we could not find a place to stay the night.

(3) We passed by the inn.

(4) It has made its way into the mainstream of verbal discourse.

(5) Cross burning began in medieval times on the green hills of Scotland, where clans used them to rally their kin and kith against enemies.

(6) “Get used to it.” I said to myself.

(7) As the president is a Christian, he prays every morning.

(8) I can support this claim with quotes from several published sources.

(9) It consisted of only two brief 50-minute workshops which one speaker enticingly described as “therapy session sized.”

(10) How else can we explain such an abomination of human nature to occur?

(11) Bekavac also quoted Jeannette Rankin, which the Internet tells me was the first female representative to Congress.

(12) There were less than a hundred students at the rally.

(13) People often say that Freud’s theories are about nothing but sex. They are generally correct.

(14) Timothy McVeigh might be a leader and he has stepped over lines where only a minority of anti-government agitators will follow.

(15) The U.S., Canada, and Mexico comprise North America.

(16) The Dean of Students at Harvey Mudd had the burned cross thrown in a dumpster without notifying its original owner and it looked suspicious.

(17) His name was left off of the list.

(18) Drug-induced or not, he’s very inarticulate.

(19) A person should be honest about their desires.

(20) Most people are adverse to cannibalism.

(21) I must follow those that I lead.

(22) There was fog outside of our car.

(23) If one acts, you are a leader.

Esposito writes:

It’s common knowledge now that Wallace did not get close to finishing The Pale King, and that the book that will be published on April 15 represents a heavily edited and stitched together version of what Wallace left behind. Clearly, this book has been made to serve the many readers out there who would like to see a completed, standardized version of The Pale King.

For more, go to the full post.

This is in response to Kyle’s comment on Sean’s post. Or, maybe in reaction. In the comment thread, I responded to part of what Kyle said, but the rest of my response veers pretty far from what Sean was asking, so I’m going to develop it here instead.

I want to take up the ideas of workshop as democracy and workshop as therapy session. What does it mean, really, to say you don’t like those ideas? I should just let Kyle answer that first, but I’m going to say what I make of those terms first.

Workshop as democracy: If I was the one saying that, I would mean that a workshop is a chance to hear from a group of the kind of people who would be your readers. With nobody’s reading being privileged, including the professor’s, who is just one reader. The professor certainly is there to teach how to respond to peer work, how to read and respond sensitively, but hers shouldn’t be the final word. Bruce Covey was telling me last night that he never speaks during the workshops he teaches. Each workshop, a student facilitates. I think this is a wonderful idea. Sure, workshops can work beautifully in other ways, too, but I think this is one good way. This can come down to tiny details. It’s great to know whether 10% or 80% of readers don’t catch a certain reference. To be in control of that, of how obscure the references are. I prefer the perhaps squishy sounding term “focus group” to “democracy” for this function (not the only function, but one function) of a workshop.

Workshop as therapy session: This is thrown around a lot, always negatively. Workshop shouldn’t be therapy. I think there are two problems with this. One, what kind of therapy are we talking about. Substitute “person” in what Kyle says at the end. “…from there, to help a [person] do the thing the [person] really wants to do as powerfully and truly as the [person] can.” That can be (should be?) the goal of therapy, no? When I went to therapy, that’s what I was looking for, and I found it. This happened in many ways and on multiple levels, but I’ll use an example that has to do with writing. Toward the end of my course of therapy, my main problem was that I was behind on my thesis. (After I finished, my therapist said it was time I set new goals or quit therapy. I quit, and we kept in touch.) My therapist said, how about writing five pages a day (I think she said three at first, but I explained I wouldn’t make the deadline that way). I started writing five pages a day. I finished the thesis. I sent the critical component of the thesis–which was never workshopped–to someone I interviewed for it. He wanted me to adapt it for the magazine he edits. Made $1500 for the article. Didn’t pay for my whole course of therapy, but it more than covered the session where she said to just write 5 pages a day. Why shouldn’t a workshop do this?

Apparently, I was damned. By the time I started writing in earnest, the whole mechanism had to do with not only discussing but sharing your work in progress. In college, this was great, because I wasn’t in any way ready to complete anything to the point that it could be published. So participating in workshops was like army boot camp. I learned lots.

In MFA school, I still learned, especially in literature seminars, but I certainly didn’t complete anything publishable. But this time, I was probably ready to, but was hampered by the workshop process. There were three reasons for this, I think. 1, in no workshop that I took did anyone say that a piece should just be abandoned.  All criticism was constructive, which was the point, but in reality some work needs to be torn down so that something better can be built in its place. I’m very impressionable, so after hearing my work discussed for 20 or so minutes, I became convinced it was worth my continued attention even if it really wasn’t. But I ran into trouble with the continued attention because 2, my classmates’ and professor’s opinions about any one piece, even a 3-pager, were so conflicted, and the problems they unearthed so convoluted, that I was totally lost when faced with revision. To make matters worse, 3, my professors and classmates (not to mention lots of other people in my life–they all agreed) also told me what book they thought I should write, and how I should go about it. Almost five years later, I have only just really decided that they were wrong, and that the book they had in mind is not the one I should write, at least not right now. Like I said, I’m very impressionable. I have confidence in my own work, sure, but there is something powerful about everyone you know saying they want to read the same as-yet-unwritten book by you. Powerful and dangerous.

Things have gotten better since grad school. There is no longer a structure for me share work in progress, so I find myself writing and revising by my own lights (sometimes with the help of an editor, as in the case of the essay I published in Tin House, but a single editor who wants to put out a great publication is totally different than 15 editors in workshop who actually have no stake at all in what you write), and the results are often publishable. But I have yet to complete a book manuscript. Every time I start one, I make what I am beginning to think really is a fatal mistake: I talk about it.

Like I said, the pendulum seems to have shifted. Whereas there used to seem to be a certain mystique in not talking about work in progress, I think the opposite is now true. “Real” writers don’t go in for that kind of superstition, right? This is perhaps my own insecurity. When someone asks me, “What are you working on?” all I hear is, “Are you a real writer?” If I don’t tell them what I’m working on, I worry, they will think I’m not a real writer either because a) I’m not currently writing and real writers write all the time or b) I’m coyly/superstitiously/affectedly “protecting” what I’m working on by not discussing it. So I always dish. Like I said, horribly impressionable. And apparently pretty insecure, as I’m pretty certain most of the time that my writer friends think I’m a fraud.

Today, Sara Faye Lieber shared a link on her Facebook page to an article by David Foster Wallace. She introduces the link with the line “why i don’t want to talk about the book i’m working on.” I read the article, and while Wallace isn’t addressing this exact question, it definitely clarified some things for me. He writes, “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 everywhere share and respond to, feel.”

I would add writing nonfiction and poetry to the same. But not conversation! In conversation, I have very different goals than I do when writing. Talking about having written something is one thing, though I’m not too into that either. But for me, talking about a work in progress infects the work in question. I start thinking about audience in a way that takes me away from my own vision and my own standards. Somehow I think being a southern woman is mixed up into this. Something about a more radical difference in my own perceptions of my public and private self–not in a dishonest way, just in a southern way of wanting to get along and make a connection without revealing very much. The paradox of being not at all reserved but being very private. This works in conversation, but it fails on the page.

Not everyone faces this struggle, and for them it is nothing to talk about work in progress. But I don’t think it’s because they are real writers and I’m not. At least I hope not! I would love to hear other people’s thoughts about this. I’m still trying to understand it myself.