infinite grammar: week three · Jul 9, 06:55 AM by j.
As the above picture makes clear, I’ve done most of my recent reading amidst the water, sun, and trees (and lately, the rain) of New Hampshire, and so I haven’t exactly been able to keep my OED at arm’s length. Hence, I’ve taken to circling the words I don’t know, and I’ll be honest, certain pages have ended up looking like a pathetically-rendered word search puzzle.
The point is, vocabulary is a major part of this novel, not only because Wallace is a master of language, but because he has a tendency to make use of words most readers have never even heard of, and furthermore, will probably never need again.
Some examples:
festschrift: a volume of articles, essays, etc. contributed by many authors in honor of a colleague, usually published on the occasion of retirement
quincunx: an arrangement of five objects, as trees, in a square or rectangle, one at each corner and one in the middle
prolix: extended to great, unnecessary, or tedious length; long and wordy
Now, I’m all for a challenging read. I’m all for expanding my vocabulary. I’m all for a writer flexing his or her brainiac abilities. But as the pencil in my hand found itself circling again and again, I couldn’t help looking for a larger reason. As a writer myself, I know that every single thing an author does (or doesn’t do) is a choice, and while I consider myself a member of the school that believes Wallace is genius-material, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that he spent a hefty bit of quality time with the OED while writing this opus. It might be his style, but it takes a lot of time and research to create such a style. And so we are back to my original question: what is the larger reason behind such language?
aleatory: depending on a contingent event, or pertaining to accidental causes; of luck or chance
fallow: uncultivated (as in land) ; not in use, inactive; pale-yellow or light-brown
creosote: an oily liquid having a burning taste and a penetrating odor, obtained by the distillation of coal and wood tar, used mainly as a preservative for wood and as an antiseptic
And then on page 100, something clicked. This is the scene where Hal and all the boys from ETA are in the locker room venting and decompressing. They are beyond tired, and so in order to express the extent of their exhaustion, they begin to experiment with description:
“My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I’m so tired.”
“I’m waiting til the last possible second to even breathe. I’m not expanding the cage till driven by necessity of air.”
“So tired it’s out of tired’s word-range,” Pemulis says. ‘Tired just doesn’t do it.”
“Exhausted, shot, depleted,” says Jim Struck, grinding at his closed eye with the heel of his hand. “Cashed. Totalled.”
“Look.” Pemulis pointing at Struck. “It’s trying to think.”
“A moving thing to see.”
“Beat. Worn the heck out.”
“Worn the fuck-all out is more like.”
“Wrung dry. Whacked. Tuckered out. More dead than alive.”
“None even come close, the words.”
“Word-inflation,” Stice says, rubbing at his crewcut so his forehead wrinkles and clears. “Bigger and better. Good greater greatest totally great. Hyperbolic and hyperbolicker. Like grade-inflation…”
Hal raises his eyebrows at Stice and smiles. “Hyperbolicker?”
“My daddy as a boy, he’d have said ‘tuckered out’ll’ do just fine.”
“Whereas here we are sitting here needing whole new words and terms.”
“Phrases and clauses and models and structures,” Troeltsch says, referring again to a prescriptive exam everyone but Hal wishes now to forget. “We need an inflation-generative grammar.”
Keith Freer makes a motion as if taking his unit out of his towel and holding it out at Troeltsch: “Generate this.”
Strangely, this scene reminded me of Faulkner, as well as a paper I once wrote about his influence on Junot Díaz. In Absalom, Absalom, Faulkner makes certain choices in telling the story, or, in some cases, in not telling it. In that novel (and, come to think of it, in this one) there are multiple unreliable narrators narrating from multiple time periods, and the language is often difficult, wordy, and winding. It’s as if the story itself resists being told. Faulkner most likely made this choice because he was trying to get at something very deep and complex, this idea that the South was essentially destroyed by slavery, and yet, how can an author convey such destruction in a single novel? In short, he must create “whole new words and terms.” He must make use of new “phrases and clauses and models and structures.” When the old, traditional, and linear ways of storytelling simply do not cut it, he must find new ways to tell his own in order to convey the depth of feeling that such destruction elicits (albeit on a smaller scale). Díaz does something similar in his latest novel, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. He uses multiple time periods, an unreliable narrator, and footnotes that interrupt the narrative, all by way of telling the complicated story of one family’s history under the violent Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. And you know what? I’m starting to believe that Wallace is doing something similar here, not only with his endnotes that constantly interrupt, not only with his multiple voices, environments, and strangely-named years, but also with his use of dense language and difficult vocabulary. (Sidenote: I would wager that it is no coincidence that Hal’s mother is the book’s grammarian. So far she is a shadowy figure, but once she comes center stage, as I have no doubt she will, I think her role in this deferment will be made clear.)
eidetic: of, pertaining to, or constituting visual imagery vividly experienced and readily reproducible with great accuracy and in great detail
mishit: a bad or faulty hit, as in tennis or cricket
meatus: an opening or foramen, esp. in a bone or bony structure, as the opening of the ear or nose
Two hundred pages in, I cannot logically expect to know what Wallace is trying to convey with all this, but my gut feeling is that it has something to do with the desire to get at this all-encompassing tragedy and sadness that lurks within – for lack of a better term – the American Dream. Page 173: “Have Himself hunch down to put a long pale arm around your shoulders and tell you that his own father had told him that talent is sort of a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost.” It is no coincidence that the two major settings of this book are a school for the highest-achievers and a rehab for society’s rejects, with a simple hill between them. Perhaps Wallace is suggesting that addiction is a byproduct of a failure of talent, of the failure to grasp this inherent dream. Only the next eight hundred pages will tell.
let the infinite summer begin: week one my return from the infinite: week, ahem, sixteen?