You Need to Quack This Way: Wallace on the Sentence

The last long interview — as the book bills it — was about grammar

On February 3, 2006, in a second-floor room the hotel had turned into an impromptu studio, Wallace sat down across from the lawyer-lexicographer Bryan Garner for what the book made of the tape bills as his last long interview — "the only one of its kind in subject matter" (garner-quack-this-way). Not the Entertainment, not addiction, not the shape of the ending: usage. For sixty-seven minutes the author of the era's most famous difficult novel talked about how to write a clear sentence, why so much professional prose is strangled, what a usage dictionary is for, and why the little word utilize should make you wince. His own agent had told him not to do it, for a reason that turns out to describe the whole session: "Because you'll have complete control of it" (garner-quack-this-way). He did have control of it, and what he did with the control was teach.

This essay is about that teaching, and about the household it came out of and went back into. The novel's language obsession has its own survey next door in language and grammar, which owns the prescriptive frame, the ventriloquism, the Wardine problem, and the error-or-plant debates; what this essay owns is the Garner session itself and the braid it makes between Wallace at the interview table and the fictional family he built out of exactly this material. The interview is the clearest place in the whole record where you can watch him say the ethic plainly, and then turn and find it dramatized, one house over, as comedy and as damage.

The snoot ethic, self-diagnosed

Wallace comes to the table already confessed. Asked about his own investment in correct usage, he does not defend it as neutral competence; he owns it as a temperament, and a slightly embarrassing one. He calls himself "a snooty guy" and the whole usage fixation "a very elitist thing," noting that its adepts tend to be the highly educated and the high-SAT, which is why the subject gets "politically charged" (garner-quack-this-way). The self-diagnosis is not false modesty; it is the honest ground floor of everything he goes on to argue. He knows the trait is a form of vanity before he tries to make it into a virtue, and he traces the trait to a childhood he elsewhere calls "Mom's brainwashing" (garner-quack-this-way) — a house where grammar was corrected at the dinner table and correctness was a form of love. Keep that phrase; it is the seed of the whole second half of this essay.

What redeems the snootery, in his account, is that it points outward. The one rule he says he would put above all others for a student writer is not a rule about commas. It is that "writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the reader" (garner-quack-this-way), and the maxim under it, which he says twice for emphasis, is the plainest sentence in the book: "The bromide associated with this is that the reader cannot read your mind. The reader cannot read your mind" (garner-quack-this-way). That doubling is the ethic in miniature. Attention to the sentence is attention to the person who has to read it; usage is manners scaled up to prose. He is explicit that the discipline is moral before it is technical — writing, he says, is "a great remedy for my natural self-involvement and self-centeredness" (garner-quack-this-way), the daily practice of remembering that there is another human being on the far end of the line. The snoot's fussiness and the novelist's whole campaign against solipsism turn out to be the same muscle.

Puff words: the moral theory of usage

The session's most quoted stretch is its closing exchange, and it is worth getting the attribution exactly right, because the clip has circulated for years under more than one label. Garner asks the last question. He asks it in his own vocabulary: "What's wrong with genteelisms like prior to and subsequent to?" (garner-quack-this-way). Genteelism is Garner's word, offered charitably, in the question. Wallace rejects the frame in his answer and supplies the coinage the clip is famous for: "Genteelism seems to me to be an overly charitable way to characterize them. To me, they're puff words, like using utilize instead of use" (garner-quack-this-way). "Puff words" is Wallace's, said against Garner's "genteelism" — the print transcript settles it, and the widely circulated two-minute film clip is a cut from this session, not from any other.

The theory inside the phrase is small and complete. A puff word is one that adds syllables without adding meaning, and the syllables do work anyway — they puff the speaker up. Utilize for use, which "in 99 cases out of 100 is just stupid"; individual for person, "more syllables, it's just puffed up" (garner-quack-this-way). The pedant's kicker, delivered deadpan, is that the man who says prior to to sound careful has not even been careful: "Why say prior to rather than before? Everybody knows what before means, it's fewer words," and by the Latin roots "it should be posterior to if you're going to use prior to" (garner-quack-this-way) — which nobody says, because the pretension was never about accuracy.

This is where usage stops being etiquette and becomes ethics. The same attention, pointed at institutions, finds something worse than vanity. Wallace argues that officialese is not merely lazy but designed: "officialese, as spoken by officials, is meant to empty the communication of a certain level of humanity. On purpose" (garner-quack-this-way). The bureaucrat who writes that way is not failing to be a person on the page; he is declining to be one, speaking instead as the larynx of an institution. Wallace runs the same diagnosis through advertising — the grammar of a billboard promising "Save up to 50% and more" (garner-quack-this-way), a phrase engineered to sound generous while committing to nothing — and through political speech, arguing there are perhaps a thousand professional dialects of English, each with half-conscious motives. And even the turgid academic prose he began by mocking gets an unexpectedly generous root cause: it comes, he says, not from stupidity but from insecurity, from writing that has quietly become about "one's own qualifications for inclusion in the group" (garner-quack-this-way) rather than about transmitting anything. Bad prose, in every case, is a person hiding.

The reason to bother, then, is not correctness for its own sake; it is a small moral wager. Once you start paying this kind of attention you pay a price — his own example is that "You start noticing all of the people who say at this time rather than now" (garner-quack-this-way), and the noticing never switches off. But the upside is the one the clip ends on: your own writing gets more careful, and in doing the work you "become an agent of light and goodness rather than the evil that's all around us" (garner-quack-this-way) — a line he half means and half laughs at, which is the exact register of the whole SNOOT performance.

The practice: longhand and caviar work

None of this is theory he holds at a distance from his desk. Pressed on his own method, he is flatly concrete, and the concreteness is a small gift to anyone who has wondered how the sentences got made. The important writing is done by hand: "The writing writing that I do is longhand" (garner-quack-this-way), and "the first two or three drafts are always longhand" (garner-quack-this-way), for a reason that is pure attention-discipline — writing by hand is slow enough to force him to notice what he is doing. His own most demanding work he calls "caviar work" (garner-quack-this-way), recopied and supplemented across draft after draft.

The most disarming admission is what those early drafts look like. "My first draft usually approximates somebody in the midst of an epileptic seizure" (garner-quack-this-way) — and clarity, he says, only arrives on the second or third pass. The man whose prose reads as hyperarticulate control is telling you that the control is entirely a product of rewriting, that the alive-to-the-reader sentence begins as a convulsion and is disciplined into life. Writing, on this account, simply is rewriting; the ethic of the reader who cannot read your mind is enforced draft by draft, by hand, until the seizure resolves into something a stranger can follow.

He is just as concrete about the tools. He tells students to buy Garner's usage dictionary, and he describes what a usage dictionary is for in two images a novelist would reach for: "I consider it kind of like a linguistic hard drive" (garner-quack-this-way), and, better, "It is the trunk cable into the linguistic heart of these disciplines" (garner-quack-this-way) — how you make a character sound, on the page, like an actual lawyer or doctor. (He notes that Gaddis used Garner's legal usage dictionary to write A Frolic of His Own.) And he defends the genre against its reputation for dryness with the line that gives this whole craft-and-biography portrait its texture: "a usage dictionary is one of the great bathroom books of all time" (garner-quack-this-way). The reference books are not looked up; they are lived in. That is the household detail that matters, because it is exactly the household he wrote.

Back into the novel: the family that quacks

Turn from the interview table to the Incandenza house and the ethic is waiting there, dramatized — once as farce, once as inheritance. The farce is Avril. Her Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts are the snoot's outward-pointing attention turned into a standing army: the same supermarket-sign crusade Wallace had watched at home becomes, in Orin's telling, a squad that would "dun the manager if the Express Checkout sign says 10 ITEMS OR LESS instead of OR FEWER" (endnote 234, p. 1039). When an Orange Crush billboard prints "CRUSH: WITH A TASTE THAT'S ALL IT'S OWN, with like a possessive IT'S" (endnote 234, p. 1039), the M.G.M. squad, in Orin's phrase, lost their minds, and Avril acted as her own attorney in the resulting suit. Seen from the crow's nest at Convocation the same organization is drier and funnier still — "the academic PAC that watchdogged media-syntax" (scene 068, p. 288), which imports "florid fish-lipped guys from the French Academy to come speak with trilled r's on prescriptive preservation" (scene 068, p. 288). This is the exact machinery of the Garner session — puff words, officialese, the moral seriousness of a misplaced apostrophe — pushed one click past sanity into mania. The novel plays prescriptivism for laughs precisely by taking it as seriously as Wallace does at the interview table, and then adding a lawsuit.

The inheritance is Hal, and here the comedy has a floor under it. Where Avril polices the world's grammar, Hal has swallowed the dictionary whole. In the professional-conversationalist scene he is a ten-year-old who can "recite great chunks of the dictionary, verbatim, at will" (scene 005, p. 28); asked whether he knows the word implore, he returns the full entry — "to call upon, or for, in supplication; to pray to, or for, earnestly; to beseech; to entreat" (scene 005, p. 28) — down to the shelf location, "O.E.D. Condensed Volume Six page 1387 column twelve and a little bit of thirteen" (scene 005, p. 28). He is a partisan about editions the way only a child performing for a parent can be: "I'm an O.E.D. man, Doctor" (scene 005, p. 29). The book's own gloss makes the transmission explicit — "ten-year-old tennis and lexical prodigy" (scene 005, p. 30) is how he introduces himself, and "Hal Incandenza for a long time identified himself as a lexical prodigy" who had, by exactly this, "made his mother proud" (scene 048, p. 155). The dictionary-reciting is love and leash in one gesture: the way a child in that house earns the approval, and the way the approval keeps its grip. What Wallace calls "Mom's brainwashing" as a fond autobiographical joke, the novel renders as a boy who defines words to be loved, still performing the routine at seventeen. The household is the ethic; the ethic is inherited; the inheritance is not free.

Voice, taught and inherited

The title is the last thing to place. "You need to quack this way" (garner-quack-this-way) is what Wallace tells his elite students about the professional register they will have to master — said half in resignation, since between advertising and national politics he suspects he has lost his own finger on what language now means to people. Quacking is not contempt for the register; it is the admission that every discipline has a dialect and that fluency in it is a kind of power you can teach. It is also, uncomfortably, what Avril teaches and what Hal learns: a way of sounding that marks you as belonging, mastered so young it becomes the shape of the self. The models Wallace names as the far end of the same discipline — prose "crackling-with-voltage," the writers he most admires, "William Gass, Don DeLillo, Cynthia Ozick, Louise Erdrich when she's firing on all cylinders" (garner-quack-this-way), and, the weird one, McCarthy's Blood Meridian as "like the King James Bible on acid" (garner-quack-this-way) — are voice at its most alive, the opposite of officialese: prose that refuses to empty itself of a person.

That is the whole arc of the interview and of the household it doubles. Voice is taught, at the dinner table and in the writing seminar. It is inherited, whether you want the inheritance or not. It can be a weapon (the M.G.M. squad), a leash (Hal at the O.E.D.), or the last living thing in a person — and it is worth remembering that lexicography is the final faculty standing when Hal comes apart, the recitation still running when nothing else in him will. The snoot ethic Wallace laid out so cheerfully in a hotel room in 2006 — the reader cannot read your mind, so pay attention, so be a person on the page — is the same ethic he had already turned, ten years earlier, into a family: attention as love, correctness as control, and voice as the thing you pass down and cannot take back. He wrote the book about it before he ever sat for the interview about it. The interview is just the place where he said it with, in his agent's words, complete control.

Sources

• garner-quack-this-way — the full print transcript of the February 3, 2006 Garner interview, published in 2013 and billed by its publisher as the last long interview Wallace gave: the snoot self-diagnosis, the reader-cannot-read-your-mind maxim, the puff-words and officialese moral theory of usage, the longhand and "caviar work" account of how he composed, the defense of the usage dictionary, and the title phrase. Every quotation from Wallace and from Garner in this essay is drawn from this transcript, which is also where the puff-words attribution is settled: "puff words" is Wallace's, offered against the "genteelism" of Garner's question.
• The novel's own words on the language-obsessed household are quoted from the text itself: Avril's Militant Grammarians (endnote 234, p. 1039; scene 068, p. 288) and Hal the lexical prodigy (scene 005, pp. 28-30; scene 048, p. 155). The full critical survey of the novel's language theme — the autobiographical-Avril reading, the ventriloquism and dialect work, the error-or-plant question — lives in the sibling theme language and grammar, which this essay does not retell; the companion portrait of the author talking about his own book is what Wallace said.