Understanding the Essay, edited by Patricia Foster & Jeff Porter Broadview Press, 2012
Excerpt from J. Porter, Reading “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”
A sprawling 1,079 pages and ten-city book tour later, Wallace was heralded as the redeemer of contemporary fiction. Infinite Jest is a big brainy novel that weighs four pounds. Though already ample, the book could have been longer had Little, Brown not asked Wallace to trim 300 pages from his first draft. On the strength of Infinite Jest, Wallace became a kind of spokesman for a generation of writers who grew up with TV as well as French literary criticism and media theory. He was keenly alert to his own group, to the sub-forty crowd, but the slackerish persona he cultivated so well—with razor stubble, unkempt hair, and trademark bandana—was largely a mask. Behind the grunge look, in fact, was an inquisitive mind that just didn’t stop. “I am probably not the smartest writer going,” he said, “but I work really, really hard. You give me 24 hours in a room by myself, alone? Then I can be really, really smart.”
Wallace’s smartness is a spiraling sort of brilliance, an intelligence that is conveyed by innumerable twists and turns of thought that seek out the nth dimension of writing. He is one of those writers whom Hemingway would dismiss as never learning how to say no to a typewriter. The famous Hemingway prose style was spare of description and defiantly non-analytic. By withholding so much, Hemingway hoped to convey a depth of feeling. “If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. The test of any story is how very good the stuff that you, not your editors, omit.”
On the other side of Hemingway’s minimalism lies Pynchonesque excess, and this is the home turf of Wallace. The footnotes, the self-conscious pomo style, the cartload of information, the constant shifting between the colloquial and the erudite, the concern with incongruities, the obsession with facts—these are trademark signs of a maximalist style Wallace borrowed from a previous generation and revived in both his novels and his nonfiction. His essays in particular are driven by an almost demonic attention to details. Writing as if possessed, whether about carnies at the Illinois State fair, lobstermen in Maine, or obese passengers aboard a cruise ship, Wallace reveals a feverish interest in his subjects—a kind of fascination of the abomination, to borrow Conrad’s phrase. It’s partly a totalizing urge but also the moral imperative of an intellectual with philosophical training. On one level, Wallace follows the horse-and-buggy trade of the essayist, so old-world as to be quaint: how to live a meaningful life. But on another, the will to know, the instinct to say absolutely everything about a subject (cataloging the entire ship from bow to stern, for instance) while remaining endlessly self-conscious drives the essay toward the brink of literary madness. Although this totalizing urge might be exhausting at times, Wallace’s attention to the smallest aspects of his subject, with bursts of self-reflexive humor that poke holes in the enterprise without sinking it (“The toilet’s flush produces a brief but traumatizing sound, a kind of held high-B gargle, as of some gastric disturbance on a cosmic scale”), is easily the most captivating feature of his prose.
“A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” has become famous, especially in the aftermath of his death. There are some, in fact, who think Wallace’s literary legacy may hinge more on his nonfiction than on his fiction. “A Supposedly Fun Thing” has drawn praise as an example of stunt writing, where a journalist ventures forth on a zany escapade and then writes about it. The essay is a hilarious, smart, and disturbing description of Wallace’s week-long Caribbean cruise. Quirky characters and odd events receive special attention. There’s the mistrustful and secretive Mr. Dermatitis (the ship’s unpleasant hotel manager), the flawless room service (arranged by the omnipresent cabin steward Petra), the diverting supper mates (Trudy resembled “Jackie Gleason in drag”), the canned entertainment (a performance by a bored hypnotist), awkward activities (skeet shooting, bridge with the geriatric set), the Midnight Buffet, the overzealous Towel Guy, the thirteen-year-old kid with the toupee, and of course Captain Video (who “camcords absolutely everything”). Piling description upon description, Wallace draws an elaborate picture of a subculture so perverse in its numbness that it comes close to Huxleyan dystopia.
Advanced Praise and Reviews
“Understanding the Essay is a magnificently intelligent examination of the essay’s diverse pleasures, with fresh, revealing looks at writers from Montaigne to David Foster Wallace. Bravo to Patricia Foster and Jeff Porter for providing this important, insightful, readable resource. Teachers, students, and essayists will be bending back pages and marking the margins for years to come.”
— Dinty W. Moore, author of Crafting the Personal Essay
“Understanding the Essay is a warm and intelligent addition to our understanding of a form seemingly built for confusion. Foster and Porter know their subject: the subtle demands and inventions of the form; the tension between a narrator and her unsettled sibling, the author; the importance of integrity to both the known and the inventive voice. The brief biographies create a nuanced context in which to read the work; the analytic essays offer insight into work we think we know—or have yet to explore—in such a way that we can read as though for the first time.”
— Sallie Tisdale, author of Talk Dirty to Me
Understanding the Essay is an anthology of nineteen critical pieces on how to read and understand the essay, bookended by co-editor Jeff Porter’s introduction and a useful compendium of terms relevant to the essay. This book is a valuable contribution to essay studies and a spirited effort to give the essay a more stable literary status and pull it into the academic center from the margins. [If the book is compelling it is] because the editors and authors continually show new facets of this enduring form. Even the most seasoned reader-teacher-writers contributing to the book discover and share with us something they hadn’t noticed during previous readings; these discoveries deepen, for me, the mystery and beauty of the essay. It also reminds those who teach the essay—both how to read it and how to write it—that its provisional nature is like the facets of a gem. Just keep turning it around in the light.
— Madeline Walker, University of Virginia
