David Foster Wallace on the Illinois State Fair

Ticket to the Fair by David Foster Wallace
As included in The Next American Essay and in A supposedly Fun Thing
I’ll Never Do Again.


It is David Foster Wallace’s writing that helped bring to my attention
that I was reading essays for fun on my own time and loathing writing
essays on academic time. His essay here, Ticket to The Fair was
initially included in a collection of his called A supposedly Fun
Thing I’ll Never Do Again, published in 1997. DFW will probably go
down in history as the writer of Infinite Jest, a gargantuan 1000+
novel, complete with Wallace’s signature footnotes. A sprawling
meditation on addiction, tennis, family relationships, ripe with
heartbreaking humor and more than human reflections on our obsession
and need to be entertained.

His essays are contrasted however to his fiction writing. Take for
example Ticket to the Fair which was an assignment given to Wallace by
Harper’s Magazine post Infinite Jest fame. What could a famous and
revered, self deprecating fiction writer in his prime, possibly take
away from the Illinois State Fair? The simple answer is a whole hell
of a lot actually. It is peculiar, but refreshing that this essay made
it into John D’Agatas collection of lyric essays, considering it is so
grounded in concrete observation, containing a linear plot line and
facts –these things contrasted to the other essays in the anthology
that seem moody and abstract at times (not bad things) and seem to be
always teetering on the edge of word salad -stuff that is joyfully
defunct and playful, like the eccentric friend you have to prepare to
hang out with, but don’t want to be caught off guard, say they come to
your house unbeknownst, and you haven’t mustered the energy to see
them.

The essay is a gem, just because it contrasts so starkly with the
story about the essay D’Agata is trying to weave together. On Wallace,
he says: [1997] “in this year when fiction writer David Foster Wallace
turns his fact-obsessed attention to the Illinois State Fair, he
proves, once again, that the world around us sometimes is more
interesting than those within us.” This statement is interesting for
two reasons: 1.) You have to give it to D’Agata for including an essay
by a guy that is “fact obsessed” considering D’Agata tells us to
question the fact, like shaky wide-eyed conspiracy theorist tells us
to question the government. Secondly.) It is hard at times to
differentiate this essay from journalism, although once you get to
reading it, you understand, that for all of Wallaces objective,
fly-on-the-wall musings, all of these observations are filtered
through a very intelligent man in a humorous light. It’s confusing.
This essay, does not seem to fit the lyric essay mold, but then again,
I think this is what D’Agata is aiming for.

Ticket to the Fair, comparatively, is a long piece of writing, and
there are too many funny quips on pudgy Americans that you lose count.
Wallace is given the assignment to observe the Illinois State Fair,
from an un-named East Coast Magazine. “Why exactly they’re interested
in the Illinois State Fair remains unclear to me,” Wallace says. “I
suspect that every so often editors at East Coast Magazines slap their
foreheads and remember that 90 percent of the United States lies
between the coasts, and figure they’ll engage somebody to do
pith-helmeted anthropological reporting on something rural and
heart-landish.”
So Wallace has an assignment, he’s also from Illinois it may be
important to note. Throughout the essay he is trying to develop or
come up with some groundwork or thesis or something, for what the
piece of writing about the Illinois State Fair is going to be about.
What is it about the Midwest that contrasts so starkly to the east
coast maybe? This question isn’t terribly important because it will
develop and become more interesting over time.

Wallace has a way of blending details with sudden humor. Just by his
observations alone, of a landscape so seemingly boring, the story is
well, made very interesting. Senses are evoked. You get the real
feeling of summertime heat: “The heat is all too familiar. In August
it takes hours for the dawn fog to burn off. The air is like wet
wool…The sun is a blotchy in a sky that isn’t so much cloudy as it is
opaque.” The fly-on-the-wall observations continue over the course of
two days at the fair. Attention to sharp detail and thousands upon
thousands of unique observations.

For all funny quips –seemingly uneventful observations on livestock
that turn in to hilarious drama, “The sleeping swine thrash in dreams,
their legs working. Unless they’re in distress, swine grunt at a low
constant pitch. It is a pleasant sound…(Next paragraph, abruptly) But
now one butterscotch-colored swine is screaming. Distressed swine
scream. The sound is both human and inhuman enough to make your hair
stand.” –there a these beautiful, brief explanation, or ways that
Wallace synthesizes the details and makes sense of them. It is this
particular ability in his essay writing –a blend between objective
observation and almost anthropological and social theory, that make
his essays so fun:

“Kids are having little epileptic fits all around us, frenzied with a
need to take in everything at once. I suspect that part of the
self-conscious community thing here has to do with space. Rural
Midwesterners live surrounded by unpopulated land, marooned in a space
whose emptiness is both physical and spiritual. It is not just people
you get lonely for. You’re alienated from the very space around you,
for here the land is not an environment but a commodity. The land is
basically a factory. You live in the same factory you work in. You
spend an enormous amount of time with the land, but you’re still
alienated from it in some way. I theorize to Native Companion
(Wallace’s anonymous nickname for the woman he took to the prom who is
accompanying him to the fair)…A special vacation from alienation, a
chance, for a moment, to love what real life out here can’t let you
love.”

So the original question is begging for an answer here. What if
anything, separates journalism from essay writing? Well, the obvious
answer is there: journalistic objectivity, removing oneself from the
story, a devotion to “fact.” Sure. This is an easy answer. A textbook
answer, if you’re going to journalism school. But for all of Wallace’s
fact obsessed details, whose to say that the reader can’t get just as
much from his essay about going to the fair, then from a piece of
“journalism that you’d find in the Illinois Herald?” Who knows
entirely. I can say however, there is something to be said, about an
essay, so entertaining, you can’t wait to turn the page to figure out
what happens. And then you think, I’ve been to the fair, and I’ve
never had as much fun, as just enjoying the blend of humor and insight
that Wallace offers in this essay.