A peripatetic list of words I've looked up #5.

echolalia — (1) meaningless repetition of another person’s spoken words (part of a psychiatric disorder) (2) repetition of speech by a child

dysphemism — a derogatory or unpleasant term used in place of a pleasant or neutral one, ie, “white hell” for “snowy landscape”

I’ve been reading DFW’s Consider the Lobster — the whole book; haven’t reached the eponymous essay just yet — and thinking about my complex relationship with his writing and why it is that I have long been antagonistic towards him. Both of these words were found within the pages of Consider the Lobster, the first in the titanic, sometimes hilarious, occasionally twee opening essay, “Big Red Son”, which is about academy awards of pornography(1), the second from “Authority and American Usage”, which uses the prism of a usage dictionary as a way of mucking about in the history of usage wars — in which I, myself, have occasionally gotten caught, usually as a conservative, usually to be accused of being a fascist.

(1)And, since this is an essay on DFW†, let us have some footnotes: in true DFW fashion, this isn’t so much an essay about a specific event as a kaleidoscope of jokes, narrative, and general hand-wringing about/appreciation of pornography and the industry surrounding it.

†David Foster Wallace, not Dallas-Fort Worth

Anyway, as should be obvious to anybody who has read both Wallace and this blog, he and I share a love of obscure vocabulary, as well as an occasional need to uncork a sentence that goes on for a page and a half and contains a good dozen subordinate clauses. Consider the Lobster has been useful on this front, as I think I’ve looked up and will now use at least a half-dozen words I had either not heard before or had not bothered to understand before(2). There’s also a certain undeniable, in-love-with-our-own-voices logorrhea that we share (witness these bits of navel-gazing right here). And I must admit, Wallace in his nonfiction comes off as a sympathetic character, funny and a bit overwhelmed by the events into which he inserts himself, admirably fair in his judgements, generally worthy of praise. So what is it about him that makes me want to gouge my eyes out sometimes?

(2)There’s even a blog, now defunct (for the obvious reason?), entitled Words I Learned from David Foster Wallace, which consists almost entirely of five-dollar corkers that come from “Authority and American Usage”, at least at first blanch.

I won’t go too far into the woeful story of the one weekend when I met Wallace and he treated me like the self-impressed little pissant I must have been. Suffice it to say I was part of a hiring(3) committee at Pomona College, and when he came to “interview” for a position at the school, our particular mix of insecurity and arrogance turned out to be toxic. He probably had long forgotten my existence by the time he came to end his own, but for two days, we really did not like each other at all.

(3)Rubber-stamp, natch.

So my objectivity has been compromised, it’s true. But I had tried to read Infinite Jest even before that encounter and found it pointlessly tenebrous and obscure. It seemed to me that DFW had the following two desires:

(A) To prove how much smarter he was than everybody else.

(B) To write a Thomas Pynchon novel.

… and that any artistic considerations — thoughts about making a book difficult because its very difficulty was part and parcel of its message — were totally subordinate to these two. Whether or not he had been successful in the first of these aims is up to other people to determine, but he roundly failed in the second, in my evaluation; his book lacked, in my reading, the import, the heft, and the dick jokes, in ascending order of how critical these aspects are to giving Pynchon his place as the great postmodern American writer. Infinite Jest seemed to me — and has seemed on my two subsequent attempts to slog through it — to be falling into the trap of substituting cleverness for having something to say. This is a problem that a lot of experimental writing has, and it annoys the shit out of me.

Now, this is a totally unfair and mean-spirited reading of Infinite Jest, and my reading of Consider the Lobster has compromised it enough that I’m probably going to give that tome another go over the summer, in hopes of understanding DFW’s project better. But I do maintain that DFW cannot resist his urge to over-explain things, and enumerate all possible connotations and subtext, just in case his audience isn’t as bright as he is. I wish I had read “Big Red Son” with pen in hand, because I felt that the footnotes in that essay were habitually used in this manner, to say to the reader: “Hey, just in case you’re not as smart as yr. corresps., here’s what I meant when I told that story about Max Hardcore(4) up there,” but a the moment I’m having a hard time sifting through 50-plus pages of dense text.

(4)As a for-example.

What’s clear from Consider the Lobster, that I didn’t find in Infinite Jest or in the man’s brief flit through the candlelight of my own life, is DFW’s deeply humane attitude toward the world — his willingness and desire (and, frankly, ability) to understand the urges and attitudes that are born of, and shape, our lives, be they the irrepressible and pathetic cupidity of the porn industry, or the convenient othering that turns a debate over whether “irregardless” is really a word into a holy war.(5) I guess this isn’t my first-ever lesson in the complexity of human nature, but sometimes it does leave a fellow nonplussed(6) that a person can be simultaneously titanically arrogant and so deeply compassionate.

(5)A holy war, by the way, in which those of us who kind of want to barf every time we hear the word “irregardless” are made out by some people to be something on the order of Blackshirts, tramping about the countryside and brutalizing anybody who hasn’t received our privileged upbringing and education.

(6) By the way! This fucking word does not mean “unruffled”. It means “confused”. What I want it to mean is “confused to the point of agitation”, but that’s not quite right.

In one of his many reflections on the death of Christopher Hitchens, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “Virtues don’t excuse sins; they cohabit with them.” Maybe that’s what the problem has been all along. I’ve been hoping to find something in DFW’s writing that excused his sins — his arrogance, his suicide, his willingness to treat anonymous college kids(7) like bugs on the sole of his dirty sneakers. Something that would make me say, Fine, this guy was all right. But that’s just not going to happen. I have to let his virtues cohabit with his sins: if I want the compassion, I have to swallow it with the arrogance.(8)

(7) Me, remember?

(8) And a footnote.