Book Review of:   David Foster Wallace A Supposedly Fun Thing I\u27ll Never Do Again (Little, Brown and Company, 1997

Angell, Charles F.

Virtual Commons - Bridgewater State University

Bridgewater ReviewVolume 17 | Issue 1 Article 16Jun-1998Book Review: Nada YadaCharles F. AngellBridgewater State College, cangell@bridgew.eduThis item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts.Recommended CitationAngell, Charles F. (1998). Book Review: Nada Yada. Bridgewater Review, 17(1), 30-31.Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/br_rev/vol17/iss1/16_______________----' L _BOOKREVIEWNADAYADACharles F, AngellDavid Foster WallaceA Supposedly Fun ThingI'll Never Do AgainLittle, Brown and Company, 1997Disciplined as always about selecting my reading matter, I wasidling along the Wordsworthshelves not long ago and found myselfstaring at the cover photo (reproducedhere) of David Foster Wallace's A Suppos-edly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Es-says andArguments. I bought the book. Isuppose as a teacher ofwriting and invet-erate reader of essays I should have previ-ously encountered Wallace's efforts, butthey appeared in periodicals I don't hap-pen to subscribe to. I enjoy readingthoughtful, informative, and entertainingessays. Far too many that I read aren't.Student expository efforts-I read a lot ofthem-often inform me about things Iwish I didn't know and entertain me inweirdly unexpected ways. Most academicprose nowadays seems written with "fitaudience, though few" as the guiding prin-ciple, audience size considered an inverseratio to readability. Happy to report,Wallace informs and entertains his read-ers most satisfyingly.In the course of an interview withLaura Miller of the on-line magazineSalon, Wallace observed that "a lot of usprivileged Americans, as we enter our earlythirties, have to find a way to put awaychildish things and confront stuff aboutspirituality and values." Wallace under-stands the commercial trivializing ofAmerica and its corrosive effect on ourmore important values. He wonders dur-ing the course of the essay I'm about toexamine "whether or not 1990's youthculture seems as grim to you as it does tome," a culture where TV has taken "theinvolution, the absurdity, the sardonic fa-tigue, the iconoclasm and rebellion-and[bent] them to the ends of spectation andconsumption." Wallace asserts that irony,the rhetorical trope and stance preferredby modems of whatever persuasion, hasbecome "an agent of despair and stasis inU. S. culture." Young people's 'whatever'and 'yada yada yada' response to any ques-tion requiring serious answer encapsu-lates this "sardonic fatigue" and boredom.Wallace weaves his ideas about TV andirony together in one of his rather moreargumentative essays. "E Unibus Pluram:Television and U. S. Fiction" provides thekey to understanding where Wallace lo-cates the fracture point in contemporaryAmerican culture. He essentially arguesthat TV culture is contiguous withAmerican culture, pointing outthat on average Americans watchTV six hours a day which has itfunctioning in our lives much like"the overlit bathroom mirror be-fore which the teenager monitorshis biceps and determines his bet-ter profile." TV forms us into voy-eurs, but voyeurs of the sort whowatch TV performers who knowthey're being watched and who,because they know this, can flat-ter the audience with in-jokes andself-referentiality. (As an example,think of any newscast where thefocus is not so much the news, thewhat's happening, but how thenewspeople are reporting what'shappening.) Consequently,Wallace speculates, viewers who"spend enough time watching,pretty soon... start watching[themselves] watching. i ' Thiswatching grows into an extreme30form ofself-consciousness where to avoidbeing caught flat or uncool, the viewerperfects ironic responses that persistentlyundercut everything seen or spoken, thebrand of irony that Seinfeld epitomized.Wallace minces no words about sixhours exposure a day to this irony beingbad for us. "Television," he says, " engageswithout demanding. One can rest whileundergoing stimulation. Receive withoutgiving." Some pages later, as he arrives athis thesis, Wallace says ''I'm going to ar-gue that irony and ridicule are entertain-ing and effective and at the same time theyare agents of a great despair and stasis inU. S. culture...." Wallace maintains thatultimately "irony's singularly unsuccess-ful when it come to constructing anythingto replace the hypocrisies it debunks." TV'sirony and the corresponding ironic stanceit imposes upon viewers produces exhaus-tion. '~yone with the heretical gall to askan ironist what he actually stands for endsup looking like a hysteric or a prig. Andherein lies the oppressiveness of institu----------------- '------------------tionalized irony, the too successful rebel:the ability to interdict the question with-out attending to its subject is, when exer-cised, tyranny." TV imposes this tyrannyon U. S. culture.I have condensed Wallace's argumentto leave myself space to consider other ofhis essays. I do think it's useful to sug-gest, however, that the other essays beviewed in terms of what Wallace arguesabout irony and self-referentiality. In "Get-tingAway from Already Being Pretty MuchAway from It All." Wallace, raised in theMidwest and educated in the East, visitsthe Illinois State Fair, ostensibly to re-search an article for "a swanky East-Coastmagazine." "I suspect," he says, "that ev-ery so often editors at these magazinesslap their foreheads and remember thatabout 90% of the United States lies be-tween the Coasts and figure they'll engagesomebody to do pith-helmeted anthropo-logical reporting on something rural andheartlandish." Wallace casts his editors aship easterners and himself as their agent,but as a native mid-westerner he can'tquite bring himself to adopt the stance ofthe bored sophisticate aloof from therurals. '~d this Fair-the idea and real-ity of it-does seem to have somethinguniquely to do with state-as-community,a grand scale togetherness." Like all fairstoday, the Illinois State Fair relies on ma-jor corporate sponsors. Wallace conveyshow out-of-place corporate McDonaldsseems amid the baking contests, animalshows, clog dancing, and tractor pulls thatform the Fair's core activities. It's the'carnies' who figure as the Fair's real so-phisticates. The essay, a long one, findsWallace exploring the Fair with a high-school friend he refers to a 'Native Com-panion.' She functions as the counter-point to his mock-anthropological disqui-sitions on the meaning of it all and pro-vides, in her earthiness and openness tothe Fair's attractions, a good deal of hu-mor. Wallace shows us those who are inand of the Fair and those who will foreverremain strangers to its place. The essay,in its clash of cultures, introduces us topeople who are serious, engaged with theirworld, and most surely not victims ofironic despair.Not quite the case with the partici-pants on the Caribbean cruise whichforms the subject for the essay which givesWallace's collection its title, "A SupposedlyFun Thing I'll Never Do Again." "A certainswanky East-Coast magazine approved ofthe results of sending me to a plain oldsimple State Fair last year to do adirectionless essayish thing. So now I getoffered this tropical plum assignment withe exact same paucity of direction orangle. But this time there's this new feel-ing of pressure: total expenses for the StateFair were $27.00 excluding games ofchance. This time Harper's has shelled outover $3000. U. S. before seeing pithy sen-suous description one." I don't know my-self quite what Harper's expected fromWallace, but I think the essay he delivered,a long meditation on why people sign upfor cruises and what happens to them,probably surprised his editors. This essayuses footnotes, lots of them, to counter-point Wallace the tourist experiencing thecruise to Wallace the reporter comment-ing on the cruise's anomalies. Wallacecontrives to tell the reader a great dealabout what transpires aboard acruise liner,much of it sounding very akin to 'forcedfun.' But when Wallace the tourist picksup a glossy brochure and comes across aFrank Conroy essay extolling the wonderof the Celebrity Cruise without acknowl-edging the essay had been written as anadvertisement, his gloves come off. Say-ing that "an essay's fundamental obliga-31tions are supposed to be to the reader,"Wallace argues that "in the case of FrankConroy's 'essay,' Celebrity Cruises is try-ing to position an ad in such a way thatwe come to it with the lowered guard andleading chin we properly reserve for com-ing to an essay, for something that is art(or that is at least trying to be art). An adthat pretends to be art is-at absolutebest-like somebody who smiles warmlyat you only because he wants somethingfrom you. This is dishonest. ... It makesus feel confused and lonely and impotentand angry and scared. It causes despair."The Celebrity Cruise in its final and fulleffect tyrannizes its participants much asTV tyrannizes its viewers. Wallace, seeingan admired and established writer likeConroy became an agent of this tyranny,refuses the ironic shrug and declares out-right his sense of violation.Wallace's essays are difficult, some-times hard to follow, and occasionally abit prolix. Regardless, he's a sharp ob-server, very thoughtful, and quite funny.Wallace is mindful of the great essay tra-dition but also of contemporary taste inprose style. He examines America's popu-lar culture with a generous spirit and fond-ness. His refusal to seek refuge in dismiss-ive cheap shots or superciliousness makeshis voice refreshing, his engagement wel-come, his vision worthwhile. A Suppos-edly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again chal-lenges its readers in a most fruitful way.One finishes Wallace's collection havinghad serious fun and desiring more. ~

Book Review: Nada Yada

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