Oblivion

by David Foster Wallace, 2004

Technical thinking and technical speaking are two very different things. Technical thinking is creative play with consequence, the delicate fusion of concepts whose very precision makes them hard to join and even harder to fashion. Technical speaking, on the other hand, involves a lot of numbers and acronyms and long words with Latinate endings. The fruits of technical thinking can usually be expressed with very non-technical language: even the most arcane mathematical theorem can often be explained in simple words, and if economies of space and expression recommend the use of variables, there variables can be clearly defined, intelligently applied, and suggestively qualified by a few well placed words. When these words themselves become number and symbol heavy, the intelligibility of the technical thought usually suffers as a consequence.

I found David Foster Wallace unreadable. He uses technical language in ways I consider superfluous, inelegant, and distracting. Worse: I think he uses technical language to snow the general reader into believing that what he has to say is ‘technological’, or ‘scientific’, and thus, in accordance with some weird cultural norm, true, relevant, and important. But though science certainly plays a fundamental role in any broad assessment of the human condition, there is a huge difference between the aesthetic, moral, and spiritual dimensions of living with technology, and the easy attacks on attention that attend bad writing. When I read scientific paper, what I feel has to do with the content, not the language.

Here’s an example Mr. Wallace in action: in his story Mister Squishy, we find that the frosting was injected with a ‘high pressure confectionery needle into the 26x13mm hollow ellipse in each Felony’s center (a center which in for example Hostess Inc.’s products was packed with what amounted to a sucrotic whipped lard), resulting in double doses of an ultrarich and near-restaurant-grade frosting whose central pocket…seemed even richer, denser, sweeter, and more felonious than the exterior icing, icing that in most rivals’ Field tests’ IRPs and GRDS was declared consumers’ favorite part. (Hostess’s lead agenc y Chiat/Day I.B.’s 1991-2 double blind Behavior series’ videotapes recorded over 45% of younger consumers actually peeling off Ho Hos’ matte icing in great dry jagged flakes and eating it solo, leaving the low-end cake itself to sit ossifying on their tables’ Lazy Susans, film clips of which had reportedly been part of R.S.B.’s initial pitch to Mister Squishy’s parent company’s Subsidiary Product Development Boys.)’

Mr. Wallace seems to delight in dwelling on precisely those elements of fact that I don’t care about. Measured against Kafka’s criterion that a book should be an ‘ice axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul,’ Oblivion seems a dull, lightweight, and fragile instrument. I did not finish this book, and don’t intend to: perhaps I am denying myself a great pleasure, or failing to recognize the genius of Wallace’s art, but first impressions are just as crucial for books as for job candidates, and I foresee no earthly circumstance that could induce me to pick up this text again. Perhaps the best thing I can say about this collection is that it is aptly titled--would that Wallace had stopped there.