This is the second in our series of videos of writers speaking. Here, the late David Foster Wallace reads from “Getting Away From Already Pretty Much Being Away From It All”, a piece he wrote for Harper’s magazine about the Illinois State Fair. Jonathan Derbyshire discussed this piece in the essay he wrote about DFW for the NS in November 2008:
Wallace’s deepening ambivalence about the moral as well as aesthetic legacy of postmodernism is especially noticeable in the non-fiction he wrote in the last decade of his life. In many of his essays, whether the brief was to write about Caribbean cruises or the Maine Lobster Festival, he can be seen grappling obsessively with all that “stuff about spirituality and values”.
A good example is a piece he wrote after Harper’s sent him back to Illinois to attend the state fair, and to gorge on corn dogs while watching the rural Midwest at play. “Getting Away From Already Pretty Much Being Away From It All” derives all its considerable force from the tension between Wallace’s self-acknowledged “East Coast cynicism” and his yearning for a kind of authenticity.
He describes coming across a small hillock that, for some reason, has been covered in artificial grass: “a quick look under the edge of the fake-grass mat reveals the real grass underneath, flattened and already yellowing”. Now, the postmodernist debunker in him would have been content to leave that image to stand for the emptiness and shoddiness of the state fair as a whole. But Wallace doesn’t settle for simply unmasking the event as a sham; and this is partly because, for all his protestations that he is no longer “spiritually Midwestern”, he remains of the place he is describing.
He understands that to be Midwestern is to be “marooned in a space whose emptiness is both physical and spiritual”, and that what the state fair provides is a kind of temporary communal respite from that condition. As [writer Tom] Bissell, himself from the Midwest, puts it, “in terms of literary persona, [Wallace] was temperamentally speaking a rural Midwesterner, intellectually speaking a high-wire postmodernist, and emotionally speaking an artist-as-priest type. I’m not sure anyone else has really managed to combine those qualities.”
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