By Isaac Butler
For nonfiction workshop, we each get to assign an essay to the rest of the class to read by an author we admire. I'm thinking of using DFW's Consider The Lobster which, while not my favorite of his essays fits the length guideline, gives some sense of him as a nonfiction writer and is still quite fun. I thought I might as well turn my thoughts on it into a little series here on Parabasis. Hope you enjoy.
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In rereading CTL to decide whether to use it or not, I realized how genuinely subversive it is, and how that subversiveness is muted by the context in which we readers receive it. The issue of context is particularly heightened with essay collections, as works contained therein generally appeared in other publications, written for that publications' readership, and thus were originally formed with some amount of baggage. Collected in one book, these contexts frequently jut up against each other or disappear into subtext.
Writers deploy various strategies to get around this. Jonathan Lethem's The Disappointment Artist is very carefully curated in order to focus only on his essays the interweave autobiography and (pop) cultural criticism. As a result, the book feels like a cohesive whole, an odd postmodern memoir via his obsessions with Philip K. Dick, The Searchers, John Casavetes and others. By winnowing down the material, the original contexts of the pieces don't matter, and if you bother to look up the originals and compare them, each has been subtly (but importantly) altered to make them all feel of a piece.
Some writers do the exact opposite. Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind feels almost like the Friday night document dumps the Bush administration was so famous for. The book's introduction basically tells the reader that between the covers you will find every piece of nonfiction she wrote for money over the past few years. She even includes a collective of her very short film reviews right in the middle of it like a bomb. There's some rough attempt to group the essays thematically, but really Changing My Mind invites you to consider each piece on its own. It largely works because each is so pleasurable to consider independent of the others, and because there's no pressure to read the whole thing (although I have). If you'd rather focus on Smith's journalism and avoid her thoughts on Zora Neal Hurston, for example, that's your prerogative.
Consider the Lobster is unified by David Foster Wallace's unmistakeable voice and his seeming incapability of not funneling every topic at some point through his one main theme: how we think. Not every piece is primarily about How We Think of course, but it's in there, all the time. Still, the pieces were written-- and then heavily edited-- for a variety of publications, and then collected-- and un-or-re-edited-- in this book. There's even a note in the front letting you know that the pieces "were originally published in edited heavily edited, or (in at least one instance) bowdlerized form" prior to being collected.
Sometimes the change is so drastic that the original context doesn't matter. For the title essay, it's quite important, because it demonstrates DFW's occasional subversity (hell, almost perversity) as a writer.
First, you have to consider that DFW's name as a nonfiction writer was made with At The Fair (eventually retitled Getting Away From Being Pretty Much Away From It All), a piece of participatory journalism where he visits an enormous state fair with a friend. The piece takes you all over the fair, from the tasting booths (where women, thinking he's from Harper's Bazaar instead of Harper's, fill him so full with deserts that he gets ill) to the carnies and everywhere in between. The piece is unendingly funny, more than a little smug, and quite perceptive about idea of rural life and community.
So it makes a certain amount of sense that a magazine, in wanting to cover the Maine Lobster Festival would send The Guy Who Is Awesome At Talking About These Sorts Of Things. And DFW self-consciously rebels against the idea, deciding instead to note that "the Maine Lobster Festival really is... a midlevel county fair, with a culinary hook,"and proceeds to quickly debunk the idea that there's much special about it, because it's like so many other midlevel county fairs with culinary hooks. It's worth noting here that his own previous writings render the idea that all county fairs are alike and thus not worth talking about deeply absurd. It's a rebellion against both editorial and reader expectations, deployed so quickly that the reader might not even notice it's happening (we'll get to this more in a subsequent post).
This pivot from expected-topic-to-thing-DFW-wanted-to-talk-about is a move he deployed several times in his later years. In Roger Federer as Religious Experience, he details all the conventional wisdom and widely known stuff about R-Fed, the kind of stuff whose repetition would normally make up a garden variety profile, and tell you you can go look it up on google if you want to. In that article, he interviews Federer, but finding his answers largely useless (in the way most celebrity interviews are useless and unrevealing) zooms out to talk about the Issues Surrounding Federer's Greatness. Would you believe this ends up with him talking about God? It does.
Anyway, the second act of subversity (or perversity, I suppose) is the moral questioning of Lobster eating in the first place. And here's where the second context matters, and it's a context he keeps deliberately drawing attention to in an almost Brechtian fashion: This piece was published in Gourmet, at the time the country's most respected venue for food writing. DFW's piece calls into question-- on moral grounds, no less (something again, we'll talk about later)-- what food writing is for. Here it's worth keeping in mind that CTL ran two years prior to The Omnivore's Dilemma, after all. At the time, mainstream food writing was far more focused on pleasure and far less focused on things like politics and philosophy.
Reading the essay collected in a volume along side book reviews, political musings, an essay on 9/11, a profile of a radio shock jock and a long piece about the porn industry dulls the double-switcheroo DFW is committing here first by refusing to write a satisfying piece of participatory journalism about the lobster fest and second by deliberately not evaluating food according to the pleasure it provides.
To get some sense of the wave it caused when it came out, it's worth returning to its original context. Apparently, the essay was... shall we say... quite controversial within Gourmet's readership. It received a record number of letters to the editor, which you can read here and here. They're almost as much fun as the essay itself, which we'll dive into later in the week (time willing).
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