This from “David Foster Wallace: An Appreciation by David Gates (Newsweek Books).
I suspect that Wallace was a genius who happened to be a writer, rather than a writer who happened to be a genius-Hemingway, for instance. You can’t imagine Hemingway writing, as Wallace did, a treatise called “Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity” (2004), or winning an undergraduate prize at Amherst College for a thesis on “modal logic,” whatever that may be, or going on to Harvard for graduate study in philosophy after his well-reviewed first novel, “The Broom of the System” (1987) was published-this after getting an MFA in fiction at the University of Arizona. Like Wallace, Hemingway worked as a journalist (in his case, primarily as a war correspondent), but he was an observer while Wallace was an explorer.
This idea of being a genius who happened to be a writer reminds me of a certain person I know, who is/was a math and computer genius but “rebelled” against this side of him and decided, at one point in his early 20s, to pursue an MFA in poetry, which he did, and published some books, did some translation, etc. I don’t know if he is still a writer, or whether or not he has become an architect or something…but anyhow, David Green expounds a bit more on the idea later:
The writer who happens to be a genius—the archetype is Shakespeare—is in love with his words, his story and his people. Wallace-the reverse archetype-surely knew as much about words, stories and people as any writer would ever need to know, but he gave his deepest love to his ideas about them. If the endlessly self-analytical Hamlet had been a writer (aside from that “speech of some twelve or fifteen lines” he composes to insert in “The Murder of Gonzago,” the play within the play), he would have written far more like Wallace than like Shakespeare. Hamlet says that “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams”; it’s a line that the author of “Infinite Jest” must have taken deeply to heart. Wallace’s encyclopedic self-reflexiveness made his work, at its best, a wonder of the literary world, and at its worst, nearly unreadable.
