On David Foster Wallace and abbreviations

Issue: OMG!

The tools: ‘ abbreviates at the beginning and . at the end (of something - (smthg.))

David Foster Wallace (DFW) is an elongation surrounded by abbreviations. Before the publication of The Broom of the System he was always David Wallace. But then he, too, was abbreviated: he cut himself short. (Remember, Sept. ’08?).

DFW became indispensable as if by stealth: a writer at once vital to his contemporaries (The Corrections [‘Correx’ / ‘Correct’] would have been impossible w/out Infinite Jest (IJ)) and to his readers. There is an element of the abbreviated in this stealth, is there not? Do you see?

Abbreviations stand apart from the body of a text as their own language. The jargon that DFW writes in is the unnoticed language of our world – the musak of literature. Often vowelless, they are unpronounceable like the Russian names one skips over in W&P. Do we pay them enough attention? They are, after all, the things that decide; they are often the action points, the committees, the societies, the organizations and the conferences. They are the inactive language of actions that look like stones littered throughout his book: textual roadblocks taking form and moving all that flows around them.

They are ambiguity and clueless. Eliot asked: ‘Where is the Life we have lost in living?/Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? /Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?’ DFW has answered.

The abbreviation of a name – O, Hal, E.T.A itself – is a renaming and he knew it. Names have a property more than words – they are closer to a purer, spoken language: what Derrida called an ‘original’ language; they are meant, created to be spoken and called. The abbreviation of a name can be affectionate and teasing: here it’s in jest.

Orlando Whitfield | March 22nd, 2010 | Featured in The Issue: OMG! | See more from post-it-notes

Leave a response, or trackback from your own site.