"Infinite Jest: Reviews, Articles,
and Miscellany"
The Nature of the Fun
By David Foster Wallace
Fiction Writer Magazine, September 1998
The best metaphor I know of for being a fiction writer is in Don DeLillo's
"Mao II," where he describes a book-in-progress as a kind of hideously
damaged infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the
writer (dragging itself across the floor of restaurants where the writer's
trying to eat, appearing at the foot of the bed first thing in the morning,
etc.), hideously defective, hydrocephalic and noseless and flipper-armed
and incontinent and retarded and dribbling cerebo-spinal fluid out of its
mouth as it mewls and blurbles and cries out to the writer, wanting love,
wanting the very thing its hideousness guarantees it'll get: the writer's
complete attention.
The damaged-infant trope is perfect because it captures the mix of repulsion
and love the fiction writer feels for something he's working on. The fiction
always comes out so horrifically defective, so hideous a betrayal of all
your hopes for it -- a cruel and repellent caricature of the perfection
of its conception -- yes, understand: grotesque because _imperfect_. And
yet it's yours, the infant is, it's _you_, and you love it and dandle it
and wipe the cerebro-spinal fluid off its slack chin with the cuff of the
only clean shirt you have left (you have only one clean shirt left because
you haven't done laundry in like three weeks because finally this one chapter
or character seems like it's finally trembling on the edge of coming together
and working and you're terrified to spend any time on anything other than
working on it because if you look away for a second you'll lose it, dooming
the whole infant to continued hideousness). And but so you love the damaged
infant and pity it and care for it; but also you hate it -- _hate_it_ --
because it's deformed, repellent, because something grotesque has happened
to it in the parturition from head to page; hate it because its deformity
is _your_ deformity (since if you were a better fiction writer your infant
would of course look like one of those babies in catalogue ads for infant
wear, perfect and pink and cerebro-spinally continent) and its every hideous
incontinent breath is a devastating indictment of _you_, on all levels...and
so you want it dead, even as you dote and wipe it and dandle it and sometimes
even apply CPR when it seems like its own grotesqueness has blocked its
breath and it might die altogether.
The whole thing's all very messed up and sad, but simultaneously it's also
tender and moving and noble and cool -- it's a genuine _relationship_, of
a sort -- and even at the height of its hideousness the damaged infant somehow
touches and awakens what you suspect are some of the very best parts of
you: maternal parts, dark ones. You love your infant very much. And you
want others to love it, too, when the time finally comes for the damaged
infant to go out and face the world.
FOOLISH OR FOOLING?
So you're in a bit of a dicey position: You love the infant and you want
others to love it but that means that you hope others won't see it _correctly_.
You want to sort of fool people; you want them to see as perfect what you
in your heart know is a betrayal of all perfection.
Or else you don't want to fool these people; what you want is you want them
to see and love a lovely, miraculous, perfect, ad-ready infant and to be
_right_, _correct_, in what what they see and feel. You want to be terribly
wrong, you want the damaged infant's hideousness to turn out to have been
nothing but your own weird delusion or hallucination. But that'd mean you
were crazy; you have seen, been stalked by, and recoiled from hideous deformities
that in fact (others persuade you) aren't there at all. Meaning you're at
least a couple of fries short of a Happy Meal, surely. But worse: It'd also
mean you see and despise hideousness in a thing _you_ made (and love), in
your spawn and in certain ways _you_.
And this last, best hope -- this'd represent something way worse than just
very bad parenting; it'd be a terrible kind of self-assault, almost self-torture.
But that's still what you most want: to be completely, insanely, suicidally
wrong.
FUN WHERE YOU FIND IT
But it's still a lot of fun. Don't get me wrong. As to the nature of that
fun, I keep remembering this strange little story I heard in Sunday school
when I was about the size of a fire hydrant. It takes place in China or
Korea or someplace like that. It seems there was this old farmer outside
a village in the hill country who worked his farm with only his son and
his beloved horse. One day the horse, who was not only beloved but vital
to the labor-intensive work on the farm, picked the lock on his corral or
whatever and ran off into the hills. All the old farmer's friends came around
to exclaim what bad luck this was. The farmer only shrugged and said, "Good
luck, bad luck, who knows?" A couple days later the beloved horse returned
from the hills in the company of a whole priceless herd of wild horses,
and the farmer's friends all come around to congratulate him on what good
luck the horse's escape turned out to be. "Good luck, bad luck, who
knows?" is all the farmer says in reply, shrugging. The farmer now
strikes me as a bit Yiddish-sounding for an old Chinese farmer, but this
is how I remember it. But so the farmer and his son set about breaking the
wild horses, and one of the horses bucks the son off his back with such
wild force that the son breaks his leg. And here come the friends to commiserate
with the farmer and curse the bad luck that had ever brought these accursed
horses onto the farm. The old farmer just shrugs and says, "Good luck,
bad luck, who knows?" A few days later the Imperial Sino-Korean Army
or something like that comes marching through the village, conscripting
every able-bodied male between like 10 and 60 for cannon-fodder for some
hideously bloody conflict that's apparently brewing, but when they see the
son's broken leg, they let him off on some sort of feudal 4F, and instead
of getting shanghaied the son stays on the farm with the old farmer. Good
luck? Bad luck?
This is the sort of parabolic straw you cling to as you struggle with the
issue of fun, as a writer. In the beginning, when you first start out trying
to write fiction, the whole endeavor's about fun. You don't expect anybody
else to read it. You're writing almost wholly to get yourself off. To enable
your own fantasies and deviant logics and to escape or transform parts of
yourself you don't like. And it works -- and it's terrific fun. Then, if
you have good luck and people seem to like what you do, and you actually
start to get paid for it, and get to see your stuff professionally typeset
and bound and blurbed and reviewed and even (once) being read on the a.m.
subway by a pretty girl you don't even know it seems to make it even _more_
fun. For a while. Then things start to get complicated and confusing, not
to mention scary. Now you feel like you're writing for other people, or
at least you hope so. You're no longer writing just to get yourself off,
which -- since any kind of masturbation is lonely and hollow -- is probably
good. But what replaces the onanistic motive? You've found you very much
enjoy having your writing liked by people, and you find you're extremely
keen to have people like the new stuff you're doing. The motive of pure
personal starts to get supplanted by the motive of being liked, of having
pretty people you don't know like you and admire you and think you're a
good writer. Onanism gives way to attempted seduction, as a motive. Now,
attempted seduction is hard work, and its fun is offset by a terrible fear
of rejection. Whatever "ego" means, your ego has now gotten into
the game. Or maybe "vanity" is a better word. Because you notice
that a good deal of your writing has now become basically showing off, trying
to get people to think you're good. This is understandable. You have a great
deal of yourself on the line, writing -- your vanity is at stake. You discover
a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary
to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.
At some point you find that 90% of the stuff you're writing is motivated
and informed by an overwhelming need to be liked. This results in shitty
fiction. And the shitty work must get fed to the wastebasket, less because
of any sort of artistic integrity than simply because shitty work will cause
you to be disliked. At this point in the evolution of writerly fun, the
very thing that's always motivated you to write is now also what's motivating
you to feed you writing to the wastebasket. This is a paradox and a kind
of double-bind, and it can keep you stuck inside youself for months or even
years, during which period you wail and gnash and rue your bad luck and
wonder bitterly where all the _fun_ of the thing could have gone.
TRY TO REMEMBER
The smart thing to say, I think, is that the way out of this bind is to
work your way somehow back to your original motivation -- fun. And, if you
can find your way back to fun, you will find that the hideously unfortunate
double-bind of the late vain period turns out really to have been good luck
for you. Because the fun you work back to has been transfigured by the extreme
unpleasantness of vanity and fear, an unpleasantness you're now so anxious
to avoid that the fun you rediscover is a way fuller and more large-hearted
kind of fun. It has something to do with Work as Play. Or with the discovery
that disciplined fun is more than impulsive or hedonistic fun. Or with figuring
out that not all paradoxes have to be paralyzing. Under fun's new administration,
writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate
precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this
stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers
and readers everywhere share and respond to, feel. Fiction becomes a weird
way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way
to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally
likable. This process is complicated and confusing and scary, and also hard
work, but it turns out to be the best fun there is.
The fact that you can now sustain the fun of writing only by confronting
the very same unfun parts of yourself you'd first used writing to avoid
or disguise is another paradox, but this one isn't any kind of bind at all.
What it is is a gift, a kind of miracle, and compared to it the rewards
of strangers' affection is as dust, lint.
*****
This piece is excerpted from "Why I Write," edited by Will Blythe,
and published by Little, Brown in the fall of 1998.