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A Night at the D.F.W.W.C.L.I.

Zora Sanders April 21

(That’s David Foster Wallace Wheeler Centre Love-in, in case you didn’t figure it out)

Last night I attended the Wheeler Centre’s David Foster Wallace event, which was partly an unofficial launch for The Pale King, but mainly served as a chance for fans to get together and celebrate Wallace’s work and, undoubtedly, mourn his loss.

The format was simple, six readers read from Wallace’s work and the audience listened enthralled, and afterward perhaps had a little commiserating hug about the fact that The Pale King, Wallace’s posthumously released unfinished novel, will be the last time we get to hear his staggeringly unique voice.

Until recently I was very much a David Foster Wallace outsider, and viewed the author with the same dubious suspicion that I would any cultish figure who provokes the kind of adulation and devotion that Wallace does from fans and critics alike. Having read more of Wallace’s work, I am starting to see why he is so important, and perhaps more difficult to understand, why he is so personally beloved.

After the event I chatted to three of the readers, Nam Lee, Lorin Clarke and Ronnie Scott about their personal experience of reading David Foster Wallace.

Ronnie Scott is the editor of iconic literary magazine The Lifted Brow, and in 2010 published a previously unseen except of The Pale King. Now when you buy your copy of The Pale King it has ‘as published in The Lifted Brow’ in the front, which I think is pretty damn cool. Ronnie is also a massive (MASSIVE) David Foster Wallace fan.

I started by asking Ronnie what Wallace had meant to him personally, and about whether the cult of David Foster Wallace sometimes overshadows his actual writing,

“I’ve never had anyone close to me die, and it was really shocking to me, how I couldn’t sleep, and I watched youtube videos of him over and over again. I don’t know what it would be like to come to him only after he died. It must colour it in a really weird way.

The reason I love him is that, people talk a lot about his ‘literary pyrotechnics’ but they’re not for showing off with, I don’t think, I think they’re for expressing the depth and range of human hearts, the lived experience."

Nam Lee is the award winning author of The Boat, as if you didn’t know, and is also Fiction Editor of the Harvard Review. I asked him why he thought Wallace was important.

“I just think he’s brave. I think he’s honest. And of course he’s smart, and of course he’s self-aware, but it’s more that it felt like everything he did, the stakes we as high as they possibly could have been. And you can sense that every page. I’m not always on the same page with his aesthetic choices or his structural choices, but that’s not what matters. There’s something underneath that that makes those issues ancillary.”

Me: “And have you read The Pale King yet? What did you think?”

“Yes, I have read it, I’m not one of those people who think we should gloss over it’s incompleteness. It is incomplete. It’s very different from what he would have wanted it to be, and I think we can see from Infinite Jest and from his other work, he does a lot of mucking around after a draft is done to get it to it’s final state. I think it’s a great loss we don’t get his hard work on completing the thing. But as it stands, it’s still crucial.”

Lorin Clarke is a writer and director and has directed a bunch of shows at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. She also wrote a brilliant piece on the history and future of the comedy festival for the March edition of Meanjin, which you can read here.

I asked Lorin what draws her to David Foster Wallace’s work and how she came to be here tonight.

“I’m here tonight because I find what David Foster Wallace does so beautifully is the serious, big life-changing stuff but he uses humour beautifully and language beautifully, so you don’t feel you’re being preached to.

I came to him through his non-fiction writing and once you’ve read that, I think his ethical perspective really comes through and I’ve really enjoyed that. I must confess I’m not one of those people who’ve read everything he’s ever written, and that’s delicious to me now because I’ve heard a lot more this evening and I’m looking forward to reading more."

The evening also featured readings from Tony Wilson, Nick Maniatis, and Toni Jordan, who picked a thoughtful selection of Wallace’s work to read, and gave everyone there a strong sense of his importance as a writer, as well as his humour, warmth and incredible insight into human nature.


 

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Comments

by NFNF
22 Apr 11 at 19:08

Nam Lee?

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by Clare
24 Apr 11 at 9:19

Excellent – thanks for the follow-up.

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