What is unique about David Foster Wallace's writing style?
4 Answers
Lucas J Meeker, Um, I read it.
Updated 352w ago · Upvoted by Ellen Vrana, Full-time writer. · Author has 315 answers and 1.2m answer views
Rahul Raghavan is spot on in regards to the specific style of what his prose focuses on. I'd like to go over more concrete examples of things that DFW did that were particularly his own, or that he re-invented or exhibited or did-his-own-way to a large degree.
I cover some more of what made him so uniquely talented in that post I linked you to above. Please read that. I would list all those things here (like his amazing ability to be sloppy in the best way ever, or his amazing sy/empathetic ability to observe and report things in a raw, honest, and personable way), but that's not quite what you asked. You asked what he did that nobody else did. Items 1-3 above were things that are almost unique to him (nothing is unique to anybody, ultimately), and that he pioneered, changed, and pushed like no other writer in his generation. 4, 5, and 6 are things that aren't unique to him, but the ways he executed them were pretty damn unique.
Ultimately, there is a reason why there is a Quora question for Who are some authors similar to David Foster Wallace? Not necessarily Americans.. Once you've read a lot of him, and spent some time trying to find what he did so well -- better than anybody, really -- you'll find pretty quickly that you probably won't find it. I feel this way about DFW more than any other author, with Hemingway, Joyce, and Pound in a distant 2nd through 4th. You will find flashes of his style, pieces of the puzzle in other authors, but nothing comes close.
A word about the notes and errata below:
The idea here was to show you how some of what DFW's favorite tools can and maybe should work within a useful frame. But ultimately, the answer doesn't need these notes (and if you read them you're now seeing why I've been hammering home the concept of need against work and pleasure). It's a perfectly fine answer without the notes. But remember what I was saying about how DFW loved to write in a mechanically reflective manner that embodied what he was talking about? Well, in that post I linked you to, I talk about how DFW's writing changed who I am as a reader and writer. And the truth is that I'm not so much trying to copy DFW when i write like this, so much as show you how I've learned from what he did, and how I think I can personally use the same tools in ways that I feel are effective in my own personal writing. I don't want people to think that as a writer I'm trying to just copycat DFW, so much as exaggerate the usage of his kind of tools to give you a 3rd grade diorama-esque way of experiencing them.
But once again, you didn't need to read the notes, and you still don't need to, but what you might want to take away from this is not only how uniquely talented and influential DFW is/was, but also how his unique talents and skills -- i.e. what he was best at, which is really what you're asking about so that you can make a valuated decision about whether it's worth another shot -- probably changed the way that a lot of writers who read him think about the way that they can build and manipulate things that are completely separate from the words that we choose and in what order we choose them. And that's a pretty decent one or two sentence summary of what he's so damn important.
[1] See what I mean? Think about the way that the tone of the reading voice in your own head changed just by scrolling down and reading this sentence. And think about how there was really a tone gradation between the tone of this note and the tone of the prose you were just reading. The tone of the parenthetical that urged you to read this was probably somewhere in the middle -- detached form the tone of the narrative, yet not completely detached from the tone of this note. Moreover, think about how this difference functions not just for the reader, but even from a craft/mechanics perspective, how it functions for the author. As writers, we instinctively know that we can make relatively big shifts in tone and content within parentheticals, and even larger shifts in footnotes/endnotes/etc.
[2] When I say epic, I really completely mean epic in the definition sort of way, not the watered down slang kind of way.
[3] This is my way of introducing the kind of small, seemingly unimportant prompts that I further discuss in #6 above. The concept of work to a reader, should be innately foreign. I.E. it's really easy for us to fall back into "academic mode" when reading something as difficult as IJ because it is so inherently taxing. And so the question becomes, why are we working for something that is supposed to be pleasurable [a]. Because we generally find DFW's writing enjoyable enough to consider it a reward in and of itself. But what is so fun about a lot of his stuff that requires work is that the texts are littered with small, treasure hunt style rewards that work on a simpler level than the larger scale reward of enjoying the process as a whole... it's like a video game. You enjoy playing the video game, sure, and that process is great all by itself, but small rewards and progress within the game are even more enjoyable within the terms and confines of the game itself. Infinite Jest seems to have a relatively fun, kind of small but still pretty cool sense of an esoteric work/reward structure in the many allusions and details that cross up and expand and network through the development of the plots that happen out of order as the book moves forward. And when you finally get one of these allusions, or even catch it early and make a guess that ends up right, you want to freaking high-five yourself, in that same way that you do when you're watching Hawaii 5-0 or Law and Order and you see past the wrong leads to who the bad guy actually was well before the time where the plot was constructed to even hint that the leads they gave you were wrong. Lots of writers and books and kinds of media give us that work/reward process, but within the vast landscape of a book like Infinite Jest, it perhaps becomes a much larger tool in the mechanics of keeping the reader paying attention. At least that's what it does for me [b].
[a] This is the big question here, and it's buried within this really, long, rambling idea that is constructed in a manner that pushes the reader to a conclusion that really narrows and broadens the scope of the idea at the same time. I've pushed to one of many facets of how or why the idea of work in a text might function, but ultimately, by pushing to one exclusive idea, I've really just attempted to open a door for you to think about other possibilities of how work might function. And so in a way, I've given you detail and focused you down, but I've also exploded this really big, intangible, philosophical, why-do-we-do-what-we-do/what-are-we-here-for type of issue, work in terms of pleasure (that being the aforementioned issue, right [Roman Numeral i]), in such a way that you'll end up probably thinking about that more than what you actually came looking for with this question to begin with.
[b] As I do with any answer I give on Quora where I'm too lazy (yes this answer is kind of lazy believe it or not) to speak about things in critically responsible language where I detach intent and the author from the work and the text and even detach that from the way it functions mechanically and linguistically for the reader, which is another separate entity that doesn't actually exist. Sometimes, when talking about why I value something, it's easier just to summarize my conjectures about their talents by framing them as "DFW understood x y or z" or "what he (instead of text or diction or whatever) does is x y or z". And ultimately I'm not writing a freaking academic essay, so for fuck's sake [Roman Numeral ii] I don't want to bring Jauss and Derrida and Foucault into every facet of my damn life.
[Roman Numeral i] And ultimately, that's the ELEPHANT IN THE FREAKING ROOM in terms of your question. What your question really is, in essence, is a declaration that reading DFW is a really big pain in the ass sometimes (yup), specifically Infinite Jest because it's supposedly the best one and all your friends who have read it just won't shut up about it already, and you want somebody to give you the highlights of why the hell somebody might think its worthwhile when you think it's just an insanely overly-complicated tedious spaghetti-noodles-in-a-big-tangly-ball type of mess that just allows people who have nothing better to do to talk about how great it is in a semi-elitist and simultaneously casual way. And you might be half-right on that front. Because sometimes we do just do things just to say we did, and maybe that's okay? (ha, another big idea, let's not go there, I'm already on my third order of notes, but I still couldn't resist). And maybe if it's just too much of a pain in the ass, then it's just that, a pain in the ass. And that's probably okay too (I'm physically resisting putting another note here, so I'll just say this: that's another thing that DFW did a lot that I liked -- after fully extrapolating something complex and next-to-impossible to keep clear, he would then generalize the issue by using words like "okay" or "stuff" or "maybe" and while from a diction standpoint it might normally look like lazy writing, with DFW's care and precision, you then learn that those words are loose and sloppy intentionally, because that kind of word is appropriate for the topic that the word is wrapped around, and then language becomes even more fun).
[Roman Numeral ii] Remember when I was talking about different layers of notes and tones and narratives and how different framings of prose make different tones happen in your head? Well at this point you might be freaking annoyed with what I've done here, and that's probably intentional and intentionally an extreme use of the tool, but also the best exhibit of what DFW did with notes, and also how they functioned as a tool. When you can detach narratives to self-comment on them, you can use very seemingly small developments in the first order of the text (the actual answer of what makes DFW unique that you forgot about by now this deep in the notes) to explore very, very large, more complicated, generally sloppy and difficult ideas in a way that while tedious, is also maybe organizationally more efficient and clearer than trying to keep this threads neat and tidy and a few normal paragraphs. Also, what I actually created this note to say, was that just as I was talking about how different frames of prose create different tones, the seemingly random use of the word "fuck" where this note was placed clearly delineates that as I get further into the order of these notes, my tone between them varies and shifts, and that at some point I'm not necessarily trying to be authoritative and clear, but that with these notes I'm being more casual and colloquial in an effort to more simply express my whole point, the issue of my point being a whole other issue. And that's the kind of thing DFW did with contrasting detailed, verbose, and esoteric adjectives against colloquial daily slang, like what I discussed in point number 3 above.
- Footnotes - DFW is notorious for his footnotes and endnotes. People who don't like reading them often cite them as being tedious, annoying, useless, etc. I had a good friend, whom I generally think is a pretty smart guy, react to a DFW footnote in an advanced non-fiction seminar by saying "I just don't get it. I don't get why you need it." Which is a pretty stupid reaction, to be fair. And shockingly guttural at that. But, you don't need it. What DFW understood, perhaps better than any writer since Joyce, is that the way that prose behaves within literature is quite unlike the way that we think naturally [1] (don't be lazy, go read the footnote at the bottom). And that's because the way that we think is a lot sloppier than the way that we want a character to think, and it's a lot less "clean" than what a good editor would usually allow as passable writing. So DFW used lots of different tools to isolate and complicate sections of writing and narratives so that his work behaved in a way that was, yes, more tedious, but also intrinsically more human. The footnote/endnote is exactly that. The footnote is a separate, detached narrative (literally, and the endnote even moreso) and it allows the writer to expand the scope of the narrative in different directions without losing the core of the narrative. Think of it as an ability to even further de-linear-ize prose, and make it more intricate. And then you'll get to the footnotes that have footnotes which might have footnotes, and you'll start to think that it really was just to be annoying, and it sure as hell might have been just that.
- Manipulation of the Page - DFW's understanding of the actual, physical and process-oriented mechanics of reading, the act of reading itself, gave him the ability to use that as a strategic jumping-off point for the development of physical, act-of-reading style. The footnotes and endnotes are the most obvious example of this. But, DFW did it in tons of other ways too. His non-fiction pieces were often structured in such a way as to use the very mechanics and workings of the piece as commentary or reference to the topic at hand. His essay Host is a great example of this. It's about talk radio, specifically conservative talk radio, and his reaction to the intricate spider webs of redundantly dependent causal logic is to show that sloppiness and loose connection on the page, with the very way that it's built. This is not the way it's published in the essay collection Consider the Lobster (which you should read, by the way, and I explain why here: On David Foster Wallace (author) and selfishness. And his non-fiction. Especially that last part.). But this gives you an idea of how it operates on the page, even though it's better structured in the essay collection (FYI, the gray highlights refer to the box to the left, in the CtL version, there are lines drawn to boxes all over the page, super messy, I like it better that way): .He also did a lot of more simple stuff too, like labeling paragraphs with emboldened titles that were self-descriptive (like what I did in my post that I linked you to). These are only a few examples of the way that DFW understood how the physical act of how you read is a tool that is also totally functional and effective for an author. For me, this is his greatest accomplishment.
- Highly Stylized, Intricate Prose - Rahul made a mention of DFW's insane vocabulary. This is perhaps one of the reasons to read him on a Kindle/iPad... the dictionary feature. I need it regularly, and I'm a pretty well-read High Honors in English kinda guy. But what makes DFW's esoteric diction so tolerable is that it's completely emulsified in emotional, colloquial prose that is a lot more conversational than most of "literature." He might begin sentence with three decidedly acute, rare adjectives, but then finish that same sentence with three abbreviations and then the phrase "and so on and so forth." He tempered his vast complexity and intricacy with very real, tangible phrasing and expressions. Not because it makes him look smart or because it made reading him a pain in the ass, but because it makes the text function in a way that is hyper-precise, and the text then sort of self-highlights in a way that most conversational or highly ecclectic prose doesn't... for me, at least, I begin to pay more attention to the construction and diction of colloquialisms and turns-of-phrase that we use everyday but don't acknowledge as anything more than hyperbole. In short, the language is hyper-efficient as well as hyper-precise, and it allows for very distinct manipulation of emotion and stress and importance within the structure of a single sentence. Because some of the diction requires so much attention, the language we normally gloss over suddenly becomes fresh.
- Detail. Serious Detail - There are parts of his non-fiction where DFW's keen eye for efficient, yet insanely detailed description is nothing short of impressive. And there are parts of his fiction where the detail is so completely and exhaustively fleshed out that it becomes frustrating, which maybe is the function of it. For me, however, the vast detail develops such complete dimension to characters and situations that might be considered "absurdist" that they become very believable. The reality (ha) is this: the imagination on display in Infinite Jest is nothing short of epic [2], and that it's so well developed that some of the more ridiculous plot lines and turns become legitimately believable within the world he's fashioned out -- just like you're totally okay with the ghost of Hamlet's father being like "Oh, hey, sup Ham-sauce!" instead of wondering why the hell we're feeling bad for Hamlet instead of thinking he's effing crazy because he's talking to a freaking ghost. Himself (the nickname of James O. Incandenza, one of the characters in IJ) is a famously obscure film director. At one point, a many many page endnote is the full IMDB style filmography of the character, including run time, media shot on, and actors. It is the most exhausting thing to read in the first quarter of the book, and yet, it's where we learn the title of a key object, which also happens to be Infinite Jest. It is quite literally buried in the most seemingly pointless, never-ending endnote ever. But if you do the work, you find it, and the detail in the process gives you a really good sense of what kind of guy the director was, even though he doesn't exist in the "current" timeframe of the book [3].
- Creativity - Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment. Enough said. Google it. The point is that whether in his fiction or non-fiction, the way that DFW created, or created ways to work around non-fiction, is sometimes so unique and unlike anything else as to be given merit solely for its seemingly complete originality.
- Self Awareness - DFW would often self comment in his non-fiction on the quality and value of the writing he was doing, and even the quality and value of the structure, length, and organization of his pieces. In Consider the Lobster (the full version), he empathizes with the editor of Gourmet magazine due to the length of the manuscript he turned in vs. the length of what a magazine article should be, and simultaneously writes off the process as exterior to the purpose of what he's doing anyways (which it wasn't... Gourmet put him on the assignment and paid his way). There are places where he has a footnote, and immediately after comments on whether or not he thinks that footnote is worth actually reading or if it can be skipped. It's a way of actually forcing the reader to make sure they read that footnote, because even if he says "that footnote wasn't very important", which it may not have been (whether or not he lied isn't the issue, the mechanics of it still pique your curiosity and you read it even if he says you don't need to), at some point it's important on some level, and the self-aware commentary really just serves as a sympathetic outreach to the reader about the annoying-ness of the footnotes. It functions the same way as someone commenting to you "god I know this is annoying but I promise you it's valuable on some level or else I wouldn't have bothered even asking you to consider reading it". Of course, whether or not a reader actually then reads the note is a pretty interesting little subscript to the nature of reading and writing and why we do it. The self-awareness of DFW's prose is littered with these kinds of small, seemingly unimportant prompts about purpose and value and need, that end up being actually really important questions about life in general.
I cover some more of what made him so uniquely talented in that post I linked you to above. Please read that. I would list all those things here (like his amazing ability to be sloppy in the best way ever, or his amazing sy/empathetic ability to observe and report things in a raw, honest, and personable way), but that's not quite what you asked. You asked what he did that nobody else did. Items 1-3 above were things that are almost unique to him (nothing is unique to anybody, ultimately), and that he pioneered, changed, and pushed like no other writer in his generation. 4, 5, and 6 are things that aren't unique to him, but the ways he executed them were pretty damn unique.
Ultimately, there is a reason why there is a Quora question for Who are some authors similar to David Foster Wallace? Not necessarily Americans.. Once you've read a lot of him, and spent some time trying to find what he did so well -- better than anybody, really -- you'll find pretty quickly that you probably won't find it. I feel this way about DFW more than any other author, with Hemingway, Joyce, and Pound in a distant 2nd through 4th. You will find flashes of his style, pieces of the puzzle in other authors, but nothing comes close.
A word about the notes and errata below:
The idea here was to show you how some of what DFW's favorite tools can and maybe should work within a useful frame. But ultimately, the answer doesn't need these notes (and if you read them you're now seeing why I've been hammering home the concept of need against work and pleasure). It's a perfectly fine answer without the notes. But remember what I was saying about how DFW loved to write in a mechanically reflective manner that embodied what he was talking about? Well, in that post I linked you to, I talk about how DFW's writing changed who I am as a reader and writer. And the truth is that I'm not so much trying to copy DFW when i write like this, so much as show you how I've learned from what he did, and how I think I can personally use the same tools in ways that I feel are effective in my own personal writing. I don't want people to think that as a writer I'm trying to just copycat DFW, so much as exaggerate the usage of his kind of tools to give you a 3rd grade diorama-esque way of experiencing them.
But once again, you didn't need to read the notes, and you still don't need to, but what you might want to take away from this is not only how uniquely talented and influential DFW is/was, but also how his unique talents and skills -- i.e. what he was best at, which is really what you're asking about so that you can make a valuated decision about whether it's worth another shot -- probably changed the way that a lot of writers who read him think about the way that they can build and manipulate things that are completely separate from the words that we choose and in what order we choose them. And that's a pretty decent one or two sentence summary of what he's so damn important.
[1] See what I mean? Think about the way that the tone of the reading voice in your own head changed just by scrolling down and reading this sentence. And think about how there was really a tone gradation between the tone of this note and the tone of the prose you were just reading. The tone of the parenthetical that urged you to read this was probably somewhere in the middle -- detached form the tone of the narrative, yet not completely detached from the tone of this note. Moreover, think about how this difference functions not just for the reader, but even from a craft/mechanics perspective, how it functions for the author. As writers, we instinctively know that we can make relatively big shifts in tone and content within parentheticals, and even larger shifts in footnotes/endnotes/etc.
[2] When I say epic, I really completely mean epic in the definition sort of way, not the watered down slang kind of way.
[3] This is my way of introducing the kind of small, seemingly unimportant prompts that I further discuss in #6 above. The concept of work to a reader, should be innately foreign. I.E. it's really easy for us to fall back into "academic mode" when reading something as difficult as IJ because it is so inherently taxing. And so the question becomes, why are we working for something that is supposed to be pleasurable [a]. Because we generally find DFW's writing enjoyable enough to consider it a reward in and of itself. But what is so fun about a lot of his stuff that requires work is that the texts are littered with small, treasure hunt style rewards that work on a simpler level than the larger scale reward of enjoying the process as a whole... it's like a video game. You enjoy playing the video game, sure, and that process is great all by itself, but small rewards and progress within the game are even more enjoyable within the terms and confines of the game itself. Infinite Jest seems to have a relatively fun, kind of small but still pretty cool sense of an esoteric work/reward structure in the many allusions and details that cross up and expand and network through the development of the plots that happen out of order as the book moves forward. And when you finally get one of these allusions, or even catch it early and make a guess that ends up right, you want to freaking high-five yourself, in that same way that you do when you're watching Hawaii 5-0 or Law and Order and you see past the wrong leads to who the bad guy actually was well before the time where the plot was constructed to even hint that the leads they gave you were wrong. Lots of writers and books and kinds of media give us that work/reward process, but within the vast landscape of a book like Infinite Jest, it perhaps becomes a much larger tool in the mechanics of keeping the reader paying attention. At least that's what it does for me [b].
[a] This is the big question here, and it's buried within this really, long, rambling idea that is constructed in a manner that pushes the reader to a conclusion that really narrows and broadens the scope of the idea at the same time. I've pushed to one of many facets of how or why the idea of work in a text might function, but ultimately, by pushing to one exclusive idea, I've really just attempted to open a door for you to think about other possibilities of how work might function. And so in a way, I've given you detail and focused you down, but I've also exploded this really big, intangible, philosophical, why-do-we-do-what-we-do/what-are-we-here-for type of issue, work in terms of pleasure (that being the aforementioned issue, right [Roman Numeral i]), in such a way that you'll end up probably thinking about that more than what you actually came looking for with this question to begin with.
[b] As I do with any answer I give on Quora where I'm too lazy (yes this answer is kind of lazy believe it or not) to speak about things in critically responsible language where I detach intent and the author from the work and the text and even detach that from the way it functions mechanically and linguistically for the reader, which is another separate entity that doesn't actually exist. Sometimes, when talking about why I value something, it's easier just to summarize my conjectures about their talents by framing them as "DFW understood x y or z" or "what he (instead of text or diction or whatever) does is x y or z". And ultimately I'm not writing a freaking academic essay, so for fuck's sake [Roman Numeral ii] I don't want to bring Jauss and Derrida and Foucault into every facet of my damn life.
[Roman Numeral i] And ultimately, that's the ELEPHANT IN THE FREAKING ROOM in terms of your question. What your question really is, in essence, is a declaration that reading DFW is a really big pain in the ass sometimes (yup), specifically Infinite Jest because it's supposedly the best one and all your friends who have read it just won't shut up about it already, and you want somebody to give you the highlights of why the hell somebody might think its worthwhile when you think it's just an insanely overly-complicated tedious spaghetti-noodles-in-a-big-tangly-ball type of mess that just allows people who have nothing better to do to talk about how great it is in a semi-elitist and simultaneously casual way. And you might be half-right on that front. Because sometimes we do just do things just to say we did, and maybe that's okay? (ha, another big idea, let's not go there, I'm already on my third order of notes, but I still couldn't resist). And maybe if it's just too much of a pain in the ass, then it's just that, a pain in the ass. And that's probably okay too (I'm physically resisting putting another note here, so I'll just say this: that's another thing that DFW did a lot that I liked -- after fully extrapolating something complex and next-to-impossible to keep clear, he would then generalize the issue by using words like "okay" or "stuff" or "maybe" and while from a diction standpoint it might normally look like lazy writing, with DFW's care and precision, you then learn that those words are loose and sloppy intentionally, because that kind of word is appropriate for the topic that the word is wrapped around, and then language becomes even more fun).
[Roman Numeral ii] Remember when I was talking about different layers of notes and tones and narratives and how different framings of prose make different tones happen in your head? Well at this point you might be freaking annoyed with what I've done here, and that's probably intentional and intentionally an extreme use of the tool, but also the best exhibit of what DFW did with notes, and also how they functioned as a tool. When you can detach narratives to self-comment on them, you can use very seemingly small developments in the first order of the text (the actual answer of what makes DFW unique that you forgot about by now this deep in the notes) to explore very, very large, more complicated, generally sloppy and difficult ideas in a way that while tedious, is also maybe organizationally more efficient and clearer than trying to keep this threads neat and tidy and a few normal paragraphs. Also, what I actually created this note to say, was that just as I was talking about how different frames of prose create different tones, the seemingly random use of the word "fuck" where this note was placed clearly delineates that as I get further into the order of these notes, my tone between them varies and shifts, and that at some point I'm not necessarily trying to be authoritative and clear, but that with these notes I'm being more casual and colloquial in an effort to more simply express my whole point, the issue of my point being a whole other issue. And that's the kind of thing DFW did with contrasting detailed, verbose, and esoteric adjectives against colloquial daily slang, like what I discussed in point number 3 above.
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William M. Brandon III, Writer, code-jockey, father, and ecstatic malcontent
Rahul Raghavan, Investing, Cinema, Literature.
Answered 383w ago · Upvoted by Ellen Vrana, Full-time writer. · Author has 103 answers and 314.8k answer views
Tim Chi, My favorite kind of writing is the kind with words in 'em