This feels a bit like the literary equivalent of Mulholland Dr. We all have pet theories about what is real, who is delusional, and so on. Some of theThis feels a bit like the literary equivalent of Mulholland Dr. We all have pet theories about what is real, who is delusional, and so on. Some of these theories have better support than others, but of course part of the point is to create the effect of epistemological bi-stability: at different points, different theories seem more or less truth.
But I don't really want to talk about that: I want to talk about David Foster Wallace. David Foster Wallace was a prodigious user of footnotes and endnotes. Infinite Jest has 388 of them, some of which last for seven or eight pages. They also threaten to subsume his essays, with some pages containing only a few lines of main text with a huge footnote crammed below it. You can't help but wonder why -- is it just a weird stylistic quirk, or is it a deliberate repurposing of a stuffy scholar's tool as a literary device?
Pale Fire, I believe, gives us some hints about what literary value annotations might have. It takes endnote-mania to its extreme, with 999 lines of a nice, but somewhat unremarkable poem, then 200 pages of line-by-line commentary. Like Infinite Jest, this commentary plays on the reader's expectations of a scholarly, informative suΩpplement to the text (valid expectations, since this is how they are used 99% of the time). Instead, they present an additional authorial voice parallel to the main text, which has beliefs and desires of its own. Typically, fiction may use different voices for different characters but, by virtual of the linearity of the written word, can only have one author behind it all. With commentary or footnotes, you don't just get another character, but possible another writer (or the same writer, freed of the conventions of the text).
Obviously, this is an exciting playground for the post-modernist: an opportunity for self-awareness that the text is a text, and the meta-fictional insanity that can result. Nabokov uses it to allow one character to curate and twist the words of another character, creating uncertainty over each character's motives and reliability. But it's also exciting for someone like Wallace who wants a deeper relationship with his reader: the footnotes let him look at his text the same way the reader does, and "read it with them." ...more
I have been told that the style of Sir Thomas Browne's prose surpasses anything else written in the English language. After finishing this beautiful NI have been told that the style of Sir Thomas Browne's prose surpasses anything else written in the English language. After finishing this beautiful NYRB edition, I am inclined to add my support to that claim. It's sheer playfulness. I often find embellished writing tedious and suspicious, as if the author is trying to slip some deep flaw past me by applying a heavy varnish of awe and wonder. But Browne embraces his flaws and inconsistencies (of which there are many!) He dawdles over "irrelevant" details and fondly rattles off long lists of Greek poets and Biblical characters, commenting and speculating on their contradictory viewpoints.
For me, his writing is most captivating when it's rooted in curiosity. Perhaps this is why I enjoyed the Urne-Buriall much more than the Religio Medici on the whole. ...more