Would You Do It If No One Was Watching?

David Foster Wallace; "Paper Moon"

Is the best literature always the most enjoyable?

Consider David Foster Wallace. He was a great writer. A prodigy. A virtuoso. His writing was in another stratosphere. Reading his work, you get the impression, first and foremost, that your own writing sucks, and then, once your feelings of creative inadequacy wear off, that your intellect must not be that great either, because you’ve just bore witness to true genius.

In other words, he’s brilliant. His essays and stories and novels exhibit a command of the English language completely unparalleled by any modern writer, and arguably any writer ever. He’s witty, clever, and often laugh-out-loud funny.

There’s only one problem with his work. Despite all these near-perfect qualities, virtually everything Wallace has ever written is extremely tedious to get through.

I don’t want to knock him for it—in fact, it’s kind of his ‘thing.’ In a way, David Foster Wallace turned pretension and inaccessibility into an art form. It’s kind of cool that his pieces are arrogant and dense and difficult and distant, that the author makes you work for every ounce of meaning that you extract from them.

However, this also means that even the people who enjoy his work struggle to get through it. It means that Infinite Jest, his sprawling behemoth of a novel that has become more of an idea than a book at this point, has been bought a million times, began several hundred thousand, and read in its entirety maybe once or twice.

Alright, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. Still, the book would definitely have reached more people had it been a little more fun to read, had it contained about half the amount of three-page-long sentences, had the pages upon pages about the technicalities of competitive tennis been just a bit more accessible to the tennis-indifferent layman.

Again, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, Infinite Jest would not be Infinite Jest without these near-endless ramblings.

In fact, the huge, impenetrable, sprawling nature of Infinite Jest may have been an asset to the writer’s popularity. One can make the argument that Infinite Jest obtained its bestseller status precisely because of its difficulty.

Perhaps the gimmick worked, from a sales perspective. However, if the point of writing is to communicate an idea, then Wallace, with all of his linguistic prowess and gargantuan vocabulary and pin-sharp wit, kind of failed.

There are so few true geniuses in this world. It is a shame that the ones that exist end up fading into obscurity either in name or in meaning, because most people just don’t have the patience to sit there and figure out what the hell they’re trying to say.

Infinite Jest had a clever and very important message about the absurd, existential consumerism that was overtaking America. Judging by concept alone, it ranks among the best of dystopian novels. “Subsidized time” is hilarious, and there are parts of it that are truly prophetic (e.g. there’s a very funny segment about video calls that predicted Instagram filters two decades before their release).

The book is awesome. It’s intelligent and different and laugh-out-loud funny. But after the fifteenth page-long sentence in thirty pages, enough is enough. It starts to get exhausting. I love David Foster Wallace, but the first time I read Infinite Jest, I trailed off halfway through and plodded my way to the end without understanding much, and the second time, I quit close to two hundred pages in at the first or second dense fifty-page block of absolute nonsense. The thing is impossible. It’s too much. Was that his objective? To impart his message to the ten or fifteen people in this world who are willing to put in the work to understand what he’s saying. Is his message intentionally inaccessible to everyone except the worthy few who really fight for it?

Alright, so one of his books wasn’t for me. He wrote a ton of them. I love his essay collections, and his short stories are pretty cool, too (although the sixty-something-page “Mister Squishy” which begins his short story collection Oblivion suffers from the long, laborious Infinite Jest syndrome).

I’ve always wondered if Wallace realized what he was doing. Perhaps he really existed in such a different realm of intellectual magnitude that common people like you and I just couldn’t easily understand him. His mind just worked too fast, made sentences too large and connections too vast for the average person to keep up easily. Maybe it was just an example of him being out of touch.

I don’t know if that’s really the case. Wallace was an agonizing perfectionist. He labored over his pieces of writing for hours to days to years before deciding that they were good enough to be subjected to the public eye. He cared. Deeply. Not just about the work’s integrity in its own right, but also how the work would be perceived.

Perhaps the reason why David Foster Wallace never wrote a ‘normal’ story at all wasn’t because such a thing was beneath him, but instead because he was scared.

Think about it. Wallace’s essays are significantly more accessible than his fiction. They’re still heady and verbose, but they’re not impossible. I think writing fiction scared the shit out of him.

It’s easier to write a story that no one’s ever attempted before than to write a simple narrative that others may have done better. If you’re trying to be the greatest of all time, it’s intimidating to go into the ring with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Agatha Christie and all of the other popular or acclaimed writers who have perfected the art of storytelling. It’s much easier to create a new game, a new genre of your own, and to be the best at that. There’s no competition.

John and I recently watched the film Paper Moon. It was fantastic. Just a straightforward, chronological story about a conman and a young orphan who form an unlikely friendship.

The movie reminded me of my mother. She’s always complaining about how ‘no one writes a normal story anymore.’ Modern books have too many characters, flip back and forth too many times, and have nonlinear plots which obfuscate their meaning rather than aiding it along.

Now, I’m not saying that these literary techniques are always bad. I don’t think she is, either. But it does kind of seem like nowadays, people are afraid to write a straightforward, no-nonsense story. In all of the flipping back and forth between characters and timelines, writers can hide the fact that they actually have no idea where their stories are going at all.

Paper Moon kind of seems like a rebellion against this. It came out in 1973. By this point, Stanley Kubrick was already waving his pretentious, self-important schlong all over the entertainment business, films were more heralded for their special effects and big budgets than their actual stories, and the humble, straightforward screenplay had faded into obscurity.

Paper Moon had none of these things. It was just a good story. A chronological plot with a beginning, middle, and end, centered around two characters whose relationship to one another is clear very early on in the film.

This type of thing may not have been as rare in the 70s, but it’s virtually extinct today. In fact, the makers of Paper Moon seemed to be aware that they were making something ‘old-school.’ The movie was filmed in black and white—a reference to the film being set in the past, for sure, but also potentially to the idea that, by 1973, such a story was already starting to become old-fashioned.

Or maybe I’m overthinking it.

Whether Paper Moon was aware that it was going to be one of the last straightforward films (or stories) of the modern era, the fact remains that it is. It’s just a narrative. No frills, no gimmicks. It doesn’t try to tackle something gargantuan in order to mask its insecurity.

It struck me recently that it would be easier for David Foster Wallace to write another Infinite Jest than write such a straightforward narrative.

Perhaps I’m being harsh. After all, who’s to say he couldn’t write a typical, straightforward story that doesn’t require a dictionary to understand? Perhaps he just didn’t want to.

Who’s to say that sticking to the standard, ‘traditional’ structure is preferable, anyway (besides my mom, of course).

Why should Wallace have ‘dumbed down’ his writing, altered what he wanted to write so that it could reach a larger audience? His work might just be perfect the way it is. After all, David Foster Wallace is one of the few writers whose words I always read in their voice instead of my own.

There’s something so recognizable about it, so distinctive, so unmistakably his. Why should he change the very thing which gives his prose its voice just because I don’t always have the patience to read it?

I’m sure that the people out there who love Infinite Jest love it precisely for the qualities I listed as being drawbacks to the common reader—its denseness, its vocabulary, its Brobdingnagian sentences and its long, rambling tangents. Changing any of these things would destroy the character of one of the most unique novels that’s ever been written. So what if its audience is small? Doesn’t that audience deserve the book in its perfect, unadulterated form?

This, of course, boils down to a simple, pervasive, evasive question: What’s the point of writing?

Does a book exist for its readers, or is it some kind of entity in and of itself that has value independent of the people who enjoy it? Is it more valuable for a book to be beloved and respected by a few people, or to be widely read and enjoyed by many?

Of course, as with all questions, we can stretch this one to its most extreme incarnation: Is there any value to a book that’s read by no one except its author?

Imagine an Infinite Jest on steroids—a gargantuan effort, but one that is so extremely esoteric that it cannot be understood by anybody except its author. Perhaps this is the best book that’s ever been written—with the small caveat that no living person has any hope of ever understanding what it means.

Is there any value in this book? Similarly, is there any value in the countless unpublished novels that are shown to a few people and then abandoned, or the countless first drafts that are written for pleasure and then shoved in drawers, whose authors have never even considered ‘going pro’ simply because they’ve never considered the idea possible?

Is writing a book for yourself a worthwhile pursuit? One could argue that it’s at least as worthwhile as playing a game or reading a book, just for its entertainment value. Perhaps even more so, because the author is also honing a skill, even if it isn’t a skill that they ever plan on exploiting for profit.

I get the feeling, though, that Wallace didn’t write for fun. Judging by his attitude towards his work, one can assume that he did it not because it was enjoyable but because it was important.

I would argue that it was. The fact that his work continues to sell millions of copies today is proof of it.

Would it have been more important if it had sold billions? Less important if it had sold less? What about if it’s, for example, widely assigned in school but scarcely ever understood or enjoyed? What if it tanks, goes out of print, and all evidence of its existence save for the original manuscript and some dusty old copies are gone within the author’s own lifetime?

Our material world is so fickle that we can barely understand it. Why do some immensely successful popular writers vanish into complete obscurity within a generation? In another generation or two, it will be like they never existed. Even Shakespeare’s name will die one day. Even the impact of the most widely read, deeply loved writer is so unimaginably small.

So what’s the point? Is it communication? Is it love? Or is there something inherently good in the act of creation itself that defies all external measurement?

Perhaps it’s not meaningful. Perhaps nothing is meaningful. Or perhaps ‘meaningful’ is a judgment that we like to put on things, and nothing is meaningful or meaningless in and of itself, and everything just simply is.

This is a pretty intense, Wallace-like (or would it be Wallacian?) tangent, and I guess the conclusion is that his work and everyone else’s is perfect the way it is simply because that’s the way they turned out. And if I or my mom or anyone else in the world wants to read a smart but accessible work of literature, perhaps we should all just look for another writer, and dive into our David Foster Wallace collection when we’re up for a challenge and a vocabulary lesson.

That’s probably what he would’ve wanted.