Is Precise Language (Always) Good? [Part II]

On David Foster Wallace's Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life

Continuing on my original reflections on the virtues of imprecise language, I’d like to examine a moment in a short short story by David Foster Wallace that strikes me as both good and precisely imprecise:

Much could be said of this “radically condensed history,” but let’s focus on the last sentence: “One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.”

What does it mean? Who is saying it? With what attitude? Is it the voice of the narrator? The voice of the introducer? Some hybrid of the two? Is it a transcript of the thoughts in a person’s head or a citation of a cultural maxim? All of these and more?

Here are some incomplete possibilities:

1. The narrator neutrally reports the inner thoughts of the man who introduced the couple. As the phrase “now did one” is repeated, the man convinces himself that even though his initial matchmaking lacks any heart or purpose, there’s no reason why it might not work, in the end. One never knew, after all…

2. The repeated phrase, “now did one…” is mocking. The narrator interpolates himself into the text, suggesting that the history of post-industrial life is one of heartless repetition that becomes its own kind of self-justifying motto. Couples pair off like products on an assembly-line, while matchmakers have an easy time connecting people, since what people have in common is nothing more than their desire to be liked and/or “to preserve good relations at all times.” The characters are blamelessly bland.

3. “Now did one now did one now did one” simulates a kind of Hegelian dialectic, at once comic, ominous, and tragic (or ominous, tragic, and comic): the first “now did one” refers to the matchmaker’s thesis, the second to its antithesis, the third to a synthesis. Perhaps the last “now did one” is the narrator’s self-critical voice; where is he in all the action he describes? Is he not implicated in it?

4. The repetition of “now did one” implies that this is not the first time the matchmaker—or others like him—has made lukewarm introductions of lukewarm people leading to lukewarm reproduction.

The diction is so simple and yet the meanings so multiple. Perhaps the best part of the last sentence is the fact that the comma we would expect to find between each “now did one” is dropped; this grammatical “mistake” creates an affective response as it simultaneously speeds up the language and slows down our comprehension, as if the action is outpacing our knowledge of it.

One never knew what the story meant, now did one now did one now did one.

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