Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays

by David Foster Wallace

  All right, so the obvious point: Great athletes usually turn out to be stunningly inarticulate about just those qualities and experiences that constitute their fascination. For me, though, the important question is why this is always so bitterly disappointing. And why I keep buying these sports memoirs with expectations that my own experience with the genre should long ago have modified … and why I nearly always feel thwarted and pissed when I finish them. One sort of answer, of course, is that commercial autobiographies like these promise something they cannot deliver: personal and verbal access to an intrinsically public and performative kind of genius. The problem with this answer is that I and the rest of the US book market aren’t that stupid—if impossible promises were all there was to it, we’d catch on after a while, and it would stop being so profitable for publishers to churn these memoirs out.

  Maybe what keeps us buying in the face of constant disappointment is some deep compulsion both to experience genius in the concrete and to universalize genius in the abstract. Real indisputable genius is so impossible to define, and true techne?248-175? so rarely visible (much less televisable), that maybe we automatically expect people who are geniuses as athletes to be geniuses also as speakers and writers, to be articulate, perceptive, truthful, profound. If it’s just that we naively expect geniuses-in-motion to be also geniuses-in-reflection, then their failure to be that shouldn’t really seem any crueler or more disillusioning than Kant’s glass jaw or Eliot’s inability to hit the curve.

  For my part, though, I think there’s something deeper, and scarier, that keeps my hope one step ahead of past experience as I make my way to the bookstore’s register. It remains very hard for me to reconcile the vapidity of Austin’s narrative mind, on the one hand, with the extraordinary mental powers that are required by world-class tennis, on the other. Anyone who buys the idea that great athletes are dim should have a close look at an NFL playbook, or at a basketball coach’s diagram of a 3-2 zone trap … or at an archival film of Ms. Tracy Austin repeatedly putting a ball in a court’s corner at high speed from seventy-eight feet away, with huge sums of money at stake and enormous crowds of people watching her do it. Ever try to concentrate on doing something difficult with a crowd of people watching? … worse, with a crowd of spectators maybe all vocally hoping you fail so that their favorite will beat you? In my own comparatively low-level junior matches, before audiences that rarely hit three digits, it used to be all I could do to manage my sphincter. I would drive myself crazy: “… but what if I double-fault here and go down a break with all these folks watching? … don’t think about it … yeah but except if I’m consciously not thinking about it then doesn’t part of me have to think about it in order for me to remember what I’m not supposed to think about? … shut up, quit thinking about it and serve the goddamn ball … except how can I even be talking to myself about not thinking about it unless I’m still aware of what it is I’m talking about not thinking about?” and so on. I’d get divided, paralyzed. As most ungreat athletes do. Freeze up, choke. Lose our focus. Become self-conscious. Cease to be wholly present in our wills and choices and movements.

  It is not an accident that great athletes are often called “naturals,” because they can, in performance, be totally present: they can proceed on instinct and muscle-memory and autonomic will such that agent and action are one. Great athletes can do this even—and, for the truly great ones like Borg and Bird and Nicklaus and Jordan and Austin, especially—under wilting pressure and scrutiny. They can withstand forces of distraction that would break a mind prone to self-conscious fear in two.

  The real secret behind top athletes’ genius, then, may be as esoteric and obvious and dull and profound as silence itself. The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player’s mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all.

  How can great athletes shut off the Iago-like voice of the self? How can they bypass the head and simply and superbly act? How, at the critical moment, can they invoke for themselves a cliché as trite as “One ball at a time” or “Gotta concentrate here,” and mean it, and then do it? Maybe it’s because, for top athletes, clichés present themselves not as trite but simply as true, or perhaps not even as declarative expressions with qualities like depth or triteness or falsehood or truth but as simple imperatives that are either useful or not and, if useful, to be invoked and obeyed and that’s all there is to it.

  What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, “I quickly accepted that there was nothing I could do about it,” the statement is not only true but exhaustively descriptive of the entire acceptance process she went through? Is someone stupid or shallow because she can say to herself that there’s nothing she can do about something bad and so she’d better accept it, and thereupon simply accept it with no more interior struggle? Or is that person maybe somehow natively wise and profound, enlightened in the childlike way some saints and monks are enlightened?

  This is, for me, the real mystery—whether such a person is an idiot or a mystic or both and/or neither. The only certainty seems to be that such a person does not produce a very good prose memoir. That plain empirical fact may be the best way to explain how Tracy Austin’s actual history can be so compelling and important and her verbal account of that history not even alive. It may also, in starting to address the differences in communicability between thinking and doing and between doing and being, yield the key to why top athletes’ autobiographies are at once so seductive and so disappointing for us readers. As is so often SOP with the truth, there’s a cruel paradox involved. It may well be that we spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones able truly to see, articulate, and animate the experience of the gift we are denied. And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it—and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.

  1994

  UP, SIMBA

  Seven Days on the Trail of an Anticandidate

  OPTIONAL FOREWORD

  FROM THE AD 2000 INTRODUCTION TO THE ELECTRONIC EDITION OF “UP, SIMBA,” MANDATED AND OVERSEEN BY THE (NOW-DEFUNCT) “I-PUBLISH” DIVISION OF LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY, INC.

  Dear Person Reading This:

  Evidently I’m supposed to say something about what the following document is and where it came from.

  From what I understand, in autumn 1999 the powers that be at Rolling Stone magazine decided they wanted to get four writers who were not political journalists to do articles on the four big presidential candidates and their day-to-day campaigns in the early primaries. My own résumé happens to have “NOT A POLITICAL JOURNALIST” right there at the very top, and Rolling Stone magazine called, and pitched the idea, and furthermore said I could pick whichever candidate I wanted (which of course was flattering, although in retrospect they probably told the other three writers the same thing—magazines are always very flattering and carte blancheish when they’re trying to get you to do something). The only candidate I could see trying to write about was Senator John McCain (R-AZ), whom I’d seen a recent tape of on Charlie Rose and had decided was either incredibly honest and forthright or else just insane. There were other reasons for wanting to write about McCain and party politics, too, all of which are explored in considerable detail in the document itself and so I don’t see any reason to inflict them on you here.

  The Electronic Editor (actual title, like on his office letterhead and everything) says I should insert here that I, the author, am not a Republican, and that actually I ended up voting for Sen. Bill Bradley (D-NJ) in the Illinois primary. I don’t personally see how my own politics are anybody’s business, but I’m guessing the point of the insertion is to make clear that there are no partisan motives or conservative agenda behind the article even though parts of it (i.e., of the upcoming article) might appear to be pro-Mc
Cain. It’s not, though neither is it anti-; it’s just meant to be the truth as one person saw it.

  What else to tell you. At first I was supposed to follow McCain around in New Hampshire as he campaigned for 1 February’s big primary there. Then, around Christmastime, Rolling Stone decided that they wanted to abort the assignment because Governor Bush was way ahead in the polls and outspending McCain ten to one and they thought McCain was going to get flattened in New Hampshire and that his campaign would be over by the time anything could come out in Rolling Stone and that they’d look stupid. Then on 1 February, when the early NH returns had McCain ahead, the magazine suddenly turned around and called again and said the article was a Go again but that now they wanted me to fly out to NH and start that very night, which (because I happen to have dogs with professionally diagnosed emotional problems who require special care, and it always takes me several days to recruit, interview, select, instruct, and field-test a dogsitter) was out of the question. Some of this is probably not too germane, but the point is that I ended up flying out the following week and riding with the McCain2000 traveling press corps from 7 to 13 February, which in retrospect was probably the most interesting and complicated week of the whole 2000 GOP race.

  Especially the complicated part. For it turned out that the more interesting a campaign-related person or occurrence or intrigue or strategy or happenstance was, the more time and page-space it took to make sense of it, or, if it made no sense, to describe what it was and explain why it didn’t make sense but was interesting anyway if viewed in a certain context that then itself had to be described, and so on. With the end result being that the actual document delivered per contract to Rolling Stone magazine turned out to be longer and more complicated than they’d asked for. Quite a bit longer, actually. In fact the article’s editor pointed out that running the whole thing would take up most of Rolling Stone’s text-space and might even cut into the percentage of the magazine reserved for advertisements, which obviously would not do. * And so at least half the article got cut out, plus some of the more complicated stuff got way compressed and simplified, which was especially disappointing because, as previously mentioned, the most complicated stuff also tended to be the most interesting.

  The point here is that what you’ve just now purchased the ability to download or have e-mailed to you or whatever (it’s been explained to me several times, but I still don’t totally understand it) is the original uncut document, the as it were director’s cut, verbally complete and unoccluded by any lush photos of puffy-lipped girls with their Diesels half unzipped, etc.

  There are only a couple changes. All typos and factual boners have now (hopefully) been fixed, for one thing. There were also certain places where the original article talked about the fact that it was appearing in Rolling Stone magazine and that whoever was reading it was sitting there actually holding a copy of Rolling Stone, etc., and many of these got changed because it just seemed too weird to keep telling you you were reading this in an actual 10" ¥ 12" magazine when you now quite clearly are not. (Again, this was the Electronic Editor’s suggestion.) You will note, though, that the author is usually still referred to in the document as “Rolling Stone” or “RS.” I’m sorry if this looks strange to you, but I have declined to change it. Part of the reason is that I was absurdly proud of my Rolling Stone press badge and of the fact that most of the pencils and campaign staff referred to me as “the guy from Rolling Stone.” I will confess that I even borrowed a friend’s battered old black leather jacket to wear on the Trail so I’d better project the kind of edgy, vaguely dangerous vibe I imagined an RS reporter ought to give off. (You have to understand that I hadn’t read Rolling Stone in quite some time.) Plus, journalistically, my covering the campaign for this particular organ turned out to have a big effect on what I got to see and how various people conducted themselves when I was around. For example, it was the main reason why the McCain2000 High Command pretty much refused to have anything to do with me * but why the network techs were so friendly and forthcoming and let me hang around with them (the sound techs, in particular, were Rolling Stone fans from way back). Finally, the document itself is sort of rhetorically directed at voters of a particular age-range and attitude, and I’m figuring that the occasional Rolling Stone reference might help keep the reasons for some of this rhetoric clear.

  The other thing I’d note is simply what the article’s about, which turned out to be not so much the campaign of one impressive guy, but rather what McCain’s candidacy and the brief weird excitement it generated might reveal about how millennial politics and all its packaging and marketing and strategy and media and spin and general sepsis actually makes us US voters feel, inside, and whether anyone running for anything can even be “real” anymore—whether what we actually want is something real or something else. Whether it works on your screen or Palm or not, for me the whole thing ended up relevant in ways far beyond any one man or magazine. If you don’t agree, I imagine you’ll have only to press a button or two to make it all go away.

  WHO CARES

  All right so now yes yes more press attention for John S. McCain III, USN, POW, USC, GOP, 2000.com. The Rocky of Politics. The McCain Mutiny. The Real McCain. The Straight Talk Express. Internet fund-raiser. Media darling. Navy flier. Middle name Sidney. Son and grandson of admirals. And a serious hard-ass—a way-Right Republican senator from one of the most politically troglodytic states in the nation. A man who opposes Roe v. Wade, gun control, and funding for PBS, who supports the death penalty and defense buildups and constitutional amendments outlawing flag-burning and making school prayer OK. Who voted to convict at Clinton’s impeachment trial, twice. And who, starting sometime last fall, has become the great populist hope of American politics. Who wants your vote but won’t whore himself to get it, and wants you to vote for him because he won’t whore. An anticandidate. Who cares.

  Facts. The 1996 presidential election had the lowest Young Voter turnout in US history. The 2000 GOP primary in New Hampshire had the highest. And the experts agree that McCain drew most of them. He drew first-time and never-before voters; he drew Democrats and Independents, Libertarians and soft socialists and college kids and soccer moms and weird furtive guys whose affiliations sounded more like cells than parties, and won by 18 points, and nearly wiped the smirk off Bush2’s face. McCain has spurned soft money and bundled money and still raised millions, much of it on the Internet and from people who’ve never given to a campaign before. On 7 Feb. ’00 he’s on the cover of all three major newsweeklies at once, and the Shrub is on the run. The next big vote is South Carolina, heart of the true knuckle-dragging Christian Right, where Dixie’s flag flutters proud over the statehouse and the favorite sport is video poker and the state GOP is getting sued over its habit of not even opening polls in black areas on primary day; and when McCain’s chartered plane lands here at 0300h on the night of his New Hampshire win, a good 500 South Carolina college students are waiting to greet him, cheering and waving signs and dancing and holding a weird kind of GOP rave. Think about this—500 kids at 3:00 AM out of their minds with enthusiasm for … a politician. “It was as if,” Time said, “[McCain] were on the cover of Rolling Stone,” giving the rave all kinds of attention.

  And of course attention breeds attention, as any marketer can tell you. And so now more attention, from the aforementioned ur-liberal Rolling Stone itself, whose editors send the least professional pencil they can find to spend a week on the campaign with McCain and Time and the Times and CNN and MSNBC and MTV and all the rest of this country’s great digital engine of public fuss. Does John McCain deserve all this? Is the attention real attention, or just hype? Is there a difference? Can it help him get elected? Should it?

  A better question: Do you even give a shit whether McCain can or ought to win. Since you’re reading Rolling Stone, the chances are good that you are an American between say 18 and 35, which demographically makes you a Young Voter. And no generation of Young Voters has ever cared les
s about politics and politicians than yours. There’s hard demographic and voter-pattern data backing this up … assuming you give a shit about data. In fact, even if you’re reading other stuff in RS, the odds are probably only about 50-50 that you’ll read this whole document once you’ve seen what it’s really about—such is the enormous shuddering yawn that the political process tends to evoke in us now in this post-Watergate-post-Iran-Contra-post-Whitewater-post-Lewinsky era, an era in which politicians’ statements of principle or vision are understood as self-serving ad copy and judged not for their truth or ability to inspire but for their tactical shrewdness, their marketability. And no generation has been marketed and spun and pitched to as relentlessly as today’s demographic Young. So when Senator John McCain says, in Michigan or SC, “I run for president not to Be Somebody, but to Do Something,” it’s hard to hear it as anything more than a marketing tactic, especially when he says it as he’s going around surrounded by cameras and reporters and cheering crowds … in other words, Being Somebody.