If we apply this idea to Wallace’s writing, we might say that Wallace’s formalistic idiosyncrasies—the diagrams in “Host,” the self-conscious formalism of “Octet,” the footnotes and endnotes in everything—are ways of providing obstacles for himself, an erratic and unfamiliar terrain to navigate better than anyone else.  They bring the Midwestern wind into his fiction. Avant-garde formal and narrative techniques are what enable Wallace’s genius, not, as readers like Wood have suggested, what hinders it. And there are two ways to look at this. On the one hand, he is like a teenager who challenges his little brother to a game of Ping-Pong but plays left-handed, or standing on one foot, or in that sort of upside down ‘Chinese’ style: if he—the older brother—wins it’s all the more glory, but if he loses he can tell himself it was because of the handicap and not because his stupid little brother is better than him.[6]

Wallace creates his own court, a grid with looping, fractal lines, and he wins point after point against any rival. In this vision, what looks like ambitious literary courage—e.g. writing a 1000-plus-page novel, structured like a Sierpinski gasket, with 200 pages of endnotes—is really a kind of adolescent self-defense strategy. It’s not just, “look, Ma, no hands.” It’s “look, Ma, no hands, and I can still sort of juggle!” We might be impressed, but we still don’t know if he can really juggle. Or else, we think, “well that’s something, but just imagine how incredibly well he could juggle if he did use his hands!”



[6] I begin writing projects, almost regardless of length, at the very last minute. I never feel that this produces my best possible work, but often I tell myself that given the time constraints, the sleeplessness and over-caffeination, what I’ve produced is pretty solid, impressive even. The scary question here is whether I procrastinate because, like many, I need the imminent deadline to overcome the inertia of cunctation, or whether, like Wallace and his formal hijinks, I deliberately create obstacles for myself (e.g. time crunch, fatigue etc.) because I’m scared to actually test the limits of my capacities, to challenge my longstanding conviction that, given enough time and energy, I could write something really fucking great. It is a simultaneous fear of our own limits (that without the wind, all we’ve got is a decent two-handed backhand) and of infinite possibility (the idea that we might actually be great but that it might take long, hard, unsexy work to achieve greatness) that drives us to limit and conceal ourselves.