What happens when David Foster Wallace dies, and your husband starts reading everything he ever wrote, which leads him to browse random high-quality magazines’ online editions trolling for the dead author’s work? What happens is that articles about lobsters and “Roger Federer as Religious Experience” start showing up, duplex, on your bathroom floor.
Well, this one isn’t by DFW, but it looked promising enough that yoblo thought to copy it and set it down on the tile for me to read. It seemed an interesting topic, and it was right there in front of me, so I read it. You can too…go ahead, I’ll wait.
Now, here is my most overriding concern about the piece which has clearly been written by an intelligent and thoughtful writer, one with significantly better credentials than my own, and yet, I can’t help noticing the following:
It feels rather self-indulgent and sophomoric to end a piece with this sentence: “All we have to give up to get there is our sense of decency,” as though our author is the arbiter of the “decent” and “indecent”. Prior to that moment, he managed to seem (if somewhat disingenuously) open-minded about where this thought-experiment would take him, but that final line just seemed to be burning a hole in his proverbial literary pocket; it may well be that the entire piece was concocted around it.
Unfortunately, it also takes an ethical leap that the piece wasn’t ready to withstand, or perhaps didn’t even know was coming. It reminds me of a trite but sweet little essay from the Nshei Chabad newsletter (a publication for Lubavitch women and girls) written by a high school girl about the tznius (modesty) fashion show they had recently had at the school. Her point, while mired in generalities and grammatical atrocities, was well-taken for her context: if fashion is about getting noticed for what you wear, isn’t it anathema to modesty in dress? Should we be encouraging young women, even if they are dressed modestly, to parade around on a platform, “showing off” their clothing? She was very forceful in her points, and wasn’t unconvincing.
But then, in a final sentence I can only imagine was handed to her by some well-meaning would-be editor (read: older cousin or incompetent English teacher), she let it all go: “There’s nothing wrong with a tznius fashion show,” she wrote, “there’s just nothing to it at all”. Of course, this was precisely not the point she had been trying to make for the last three pages. According to her, there was something deeply wrong and troubling about a tznius fashion show, but that last line…it’s just such a …zinger. How could she resist?
Back to our original piece, then. By moralizing at the very end, when until then he had been at least somewhat careful to walk us through the various arguments, to try, it seemed, to help us reach our own conclusion, Mr. Douthat ruptures the whole piece. It is not a reversal in theme or tone, but it is a betrayal of sorts to a reader who had trusted the author to help her start to make sense of a complex issue. It makes one mistrustful of his research, of his sincerity, and of his claims. I, for one, felt that my time would have been better spent reading, say, Christopher Hitchen’s latest Vanity Fair article. At least he knows he’s right from the outset.
Mr. Douthat would do well to study the work of the late DFW in greater depth, not because he could ever replicate his delicacy or brilliance, but, just maybe, he could understand that delicacy, and even ambiguity, may be more powerful tools of persuasion (or perhaps more powerful in that they seek to engage rather than persuade) than the “pull by the wrist” methods he employs. After all, “There are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other”.
