David Foster Wallace: Decider

David Foster Wallace, aka DFW, the best-selling, Macarthur Fellowship “genius grant-ed” author of Infinite Jest, has just had his introductory essay featured in The Best American Essays 2007, published online (look for it at houghtonmifflinbooks.com). In all its footnoted glory, Wallace explains his role as the editor (or “Decider” as he calls it) in a magnificent yet not unexpected way that will problematize not just his own job but also yours and mine and every American’s role as a citizen in this country.

In “Decidering” for The Best American Essays series, Wallace must chose approximately twenty essays out of the hundred or so selected by the publisher. Presumably, he must have some sort of criteria for his selections, as does the publisher, hopefully. But Wallace makes it clear that any rationale the publisher might give on paper has been purposefully vague, and that pushing any Decider (himself included) hard enough on an issue would end with either condescending arbitrariness (“Deciderize” seems very similar to Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness”) or a deluge of minor facts and points that would bog down even a supercomputer. But Wallace explicates nonetheless.

This is Wallace at his most interesting. Considering the way he can construct such clear premises and run with an argument to practically QED his criteria for selection, it’s no surprise he studied mathematics and philosophy at his alma mater. The way he can make the reader aware of the enormous complexities involved in such processes while at the same time anticipating unanswered questions is truly amazing. This mode his texts enact, which is more like causerie than strict essay, is something I’ve come to admire and appreciate most about Wallace’s nonfiction and is possibly why he is given so much credit for breaking down the fourth wall so to speak.

What is surprising about this essay is that Wallace is explicitly political at times. He mentions enough that if you didn’t already think America was in a crisis, you might now. This allows Wallace to relate his own Decidering to the inherent Decidering that individuals must do to be informed citizens. There’s no way for a person to absorb all of the information required to make intelligent decisions on every issue and still live a normal life, much less sleep. What then should people do? Default to some dogma? This seems to be what Wallace is most worried about in contemporary America, leading him to his main criteria that the best essays are ones that show informed adulthood to be “not just the intelligence to discern one’s own error or stupidity, but the humility to address it, absorb it, and move on and out from there, bravely, toward the next revealed error.”