A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

by David Foster Wallace

The wind had a personality, a (poor) temper, and, apparently, agendas. The wind blew autumn leaves into intercalated lines and arcs of force so regular you could photograph them for a textbook on Cramer’s Rule and the cross-products of curves in 3-space.

Midwest junior tennis was also my initiation into true adult sadness. I had developed a sort of hubris about my Taoistic ability to control via noncontrol. I’d established a private religion of wind.

Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. They are born watchers. They are viewers. They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow. Almost predatory. This is because human situations are writers’ food. Fiction writers watch other humans sort of the way gapers slow down for car wrecks: they covet a vision of themselves as witnesses. But fiction writers tend at the same time to be terribly self-conscious. Devoting lots of productive time to studying closely how people come across to them, fiction writers also spend lots of less productive time wondering nervously how they come across to other people. How they appear, how they seem, whether their shirttail might be hanging out of their fly, whether there’s maybe lipstick on their teeth, whether the people they’re ogling can maybe size them up as somehow creepy, as lurkers and starers.

The result is that a majority of fiction writers, born watchers, tend to dislike being objects of people’s attention. Dislike being watched. The exceptions to this rule—Mailer, McInerney—sometimes create the impression that most belletristic types covet people’s attention. Most don’t. The few who like attention just naturally get more attention. The rest of us watch.

Television, from the surface on down, is about desire. And, fiction-wise, desire is the sugar in human food.

Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.

Make no mistake—seeming unwatched in front of a TV camera is an art.

The Emersonian holiday that television actors’ eyes carry is the promise of a vacation from human self-consciousness. Not worrying about how you come across. A total unallergy to gazes. It is contemporarily heroic. It is frightening and strong. It is also, of course, an act, for you have to be just abnormally self-conscious and self-controlled to appear unwatched before cameras and lenses and men with clipboards. This self-conscious appearance of unself-consciousness is the real door to TV’s whole mirror-hall of illusions, and for us, the Audience, it is both medicine and poison.

For 360 minutes per diem, we receive unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant quality of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching.

“Pop music is no longer a world unto itself but an adjunct of television, whose stream of commercial images projects a culture in which everything is for sale and the only things that count are fame, power, and the body beautiful.”

Junior advertising executives, aspiring filmmakers, and grad-school poets are in my experience especially prone to this condition where they simultaneously hate, fear, and need television, and try to disinfect themselves of whatever so much viewing might do to them by watching TV with weary contempt instead of the rapt credulity most of us grew up with. (Note that most fiction writers still tend to go for the rapt credulity.)

if Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.

It is of course undeniable that television is an example of Low Art, the sort of art that has to please people in order to get their money.

Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

Television’s greatest minute-by-minute appeal is that it engages without demanding. One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving.

See for instance Stephen Dobyns’s 1980 “Arrested Saturday Night”: This is how it happened: Peg and Bob had invited Jack and Roxanne over to their house to watch the TV, and on the big screen they saw Peg and Bob, Jack and Roxanne watching themselves watch themselves on progressively smaller TVs…16 or Knott’s 1983 “Crash Course”: I strap a TV monitor on my chest so that all who approach can see themselves and respond appropriately.

I quote this at such length not only because it’s too good to edit but also to draw your attention to two relevant features. One is the Dobyns-esque message here about the metastasis of watching. For not only are people watching a barn whose only claim to fame is being an object of watching, but the pop-culture scholar Murray is watching people watch a barn, and his friend Jack is watching Murray watch the watching, and we readers are pretty obviously watching Jack the narrator watch Murray watching, etc.

And Mark Leyner’s 1990 campus smash My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, less a novel than what the book’s jacket copy describes as “a fiction analogue of the best drug you ever took,”

When everybody we seek to identify with for six hours a day is pretty, it naturally becomes more important to us to be pretty, to be viewed as pretty. Because prettiness becomes a priority for us, the pretty people on TV become all the more attractive, a cycle which is obviously great for TV. But it’s less great for us civilians, who tend to own mirrors, and who also tend not to be anywhere near as pretty as the TV-images we want to identify with. Not only does this cause some angst personally, but the angst increases because, nationally, everybody else is absorbing six-hour doses and identifying with pretty people and valuing prettiness more, too. This very personal anxiety about our prettiness has become a national phenomenon with national consequences.

It’s not paranoid or hysterical to acknowledge that television in enormous doses affects people’s values and self-perception in deep ways. Nor that televisual conditioning influences the whole psychology of one’s relation to himself, his mirror, his loved ones, and a world of real people and real gazes. No one’s going to claim that a culture all about watching and appearing is fatally compromised by unreal standards of beauty and fitness.

That is, television’s real pitch in these commercials is that it’s better to be inside the TV than to be outside, watching.

Miller’s 1986 “Deride and Conquer,” far and away the best essay ever published about network advertising, details vividly an example of how TV’s contemporary kind of appeal to the lone viewer works. It concerns a 1985-86 ad that won Clio Awards and still occasionally runs. It’s that Pepsi commercial where a special Pepsi sound-van pulls up to a packed sweltering beach and the impish young guy in the van activates a lavish PA system and opens up a Pepsi and pours it into

a cup up next to the microphone. And the dense glittered sound of much carbonation goes out over the beach’s heat-wrinkled air, and heads turn vanward as if pulled with strings as his gulp and refreshed-sounding spirants and gasps are broadcast. And the final shot reveals that the sound-van is also a concession truck, and the whole beach’s pretty population has now collapsed to a clamoring mass around the truck, everybody hopping up and down and pleading to be served first, as the cameras view retreats to an overhead crowd-shot and the slogan is flatly intoned: “Pepsi: the Choice of a New Generation.” Truly a stunning commercial. But need one point out—as Miller’s essay does in some detail—that the final slogan is here tongue-in-cheek? There’s about as much “choice” at work in this commercial as there was in Pavlov’s bell-kennel. The use of the word “choice” here is a dark joke.

Pynchon reoriented our view of paranoia from deviant psychic fringe to central thread in

the corporo-bureaucratic weave; DeLillo exposed image, signal, data and tech as agents of spiritual chaos and not social order. Burroughs’s icky explorations of American narcosis exploded hypocrisy; Gaddis’s exposure of abstract capital as deforming exploded hypocrisy; Coover’s repulsive political farces exploded hypocrisy.

“Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.”

One of the few things I still miss from my Midwest childhood was this weird, deluded but unshakable conviction that everything around me existed all and only For Me. Am I the only one who had this queer deep sense as a kid?—that

—that everything exterior to me existed only insofar as it affected me somehow?—that all things were somehow, via some occult adult activity, specially arranged for my benefit? Does anybody else identify with this memory?

Pigs are in fact fat, and a lot of these swine are frankly huge—say ⅓ the size of a Volkswagen. Every once in a while you hear about farmers getting mauled or killed by swine. No teeth in view here, though the swine’s hoofs look maul-capable—they’re cloven and pink and kind of obscene. I’m not sure whether they’re called hoofs or feet on swine. Rural Midwesterners learn by like second grade that there’s no such word as “hooves.” Some of the swine have large standing fans going in front of their pens, and twelve big ceiling-fans roar, but it’s still stifling in here. The smell is both vomity and excremental, like some hideous digestive disorder on a grand scale. Maybe a cholera ward would come close. The owners and swineherds all have on rubber boots nothing like L. L. Bean East-Coast boots. Some of the standing swine commune through the bars of their pens, snouts almost touching. The sleeping swine thrash in dreams, their hind legs working. Unless

“Save A Horse: Ride A Cowboy.”

We tend to trust speech over writing because of the immediacy of the speaker: he’s right there, and we can grab him by the lapels and look into his face and figure out just exactly what one single thing he means. But the reason why the poststructuralists are in the literary theory business at all is that they see writing, not speech, as more faithful to the metaphysics of true expression. For Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, writing is a better animal than speech because it is iterable; it is iterable because it is abstract; and it is abstract because it is a function not of presence but of absence: the reader’s absent when the writer’s writing, and the writer’s absent when the reader’s reading.

As William (anti-death) Gass observes in Habitations of the Word, critics can try to erase or over-define the author into anonymity for all sorts of technical, political, and philosophical reasons, and “this ‘anonymity’ may mean many things, but one thing which it cannot mean is that no one did it.” 1992

Except for the serve, power in tennis is a matter not of strength but of timing. This is one reason why so few top tennis players are muscular.

I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is, 40 and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that strange mix of caution and abandon we call courage. It also requires smarts.

I thus further confess that I arrived in Montreal with some dim unconscious expectation that these professionals—at least the obscure ones, the nonstars—wouldn’t be all that much better than I. I don’t mean to imply that I’m insane: I was ready to concede that age, a nasty ankle injury in ’91 that I haven’t bothered to get surgically fixed yet, and a penchant for nicotine (and worse) meant that I wouldn’t be able to compete physically with a young unhurt professional; but on TV (while eating junk and smoking) I’d seen pros whacking balls at each other that didn’t look to be moving substantially faster than the balls I hit. In other words, I arrived at my first professional tournament with the pathetic deluded pride that attends ignorance.