David Foster Wallace and theĀ ānomological orgyā of tennis
I recently re-read some of my favourite David Foster Wallace essays. Over the years, the one Iāve found myself going back to more than any other is āTennis player Michael Joyceās professional artistry as a paradigm of certain stuff about choice, freedom, limitation, joy, grotesquerie, and human completenessā.
Undoubtedly this has something to do with my love of tennis and my delight in Foster Wallaceās descriptions of players I used to watch: Richard Krajicek ārushes the net like it owes him money and in general plays like a rabid craneā, Jacob Hlasek looks like āa lifeguard in hellā, Michael Chang āhas a mushroom-shaped head ā¦ and an expression of deep and intractable unhappiness, as unhappy a face as Iāve ever seen outside a Graduate Writing Programmeā.
Itās a great essay, as trenchant as anything Iāve ever read about tennis. But thereās one jarring paragraph, in which Foster Wallace remarks that the names of professional tennis players āconstitute a nomological orgy that makes for truly first-rate bathroom readingā.
On the whole Foster Wallaceās use of recondite vocabulary is satisfyingly precise, but Iām pretty sure that on this occasion heās wide of the mark. The OED definition of ānomologicalā is āRelating to, concerned with, or designating lawsā, which surely has nothing to do with Foster Wallaceās delight in names such as Adolf Musil and Martin Zumpft; I suspect he actually meant ānomenclaturalā or ānomenclatorialā.
In any case, the names that Foster Wallace picks ā from among more than a thousand ā donāt justify the line about ātruly first-rate bathroom readingā. It seems churlish to chortle (as he does) over a tennis pro being called Slava Dosedel or Javier Frana. If there were an Italian engineer called Frana, that might raise a grim laugh, because in Italian a "frana" is a landslip. But an Argentine tennis player being called Javier Frana isnāt amusing. Ā Ā
Iām not going to pretend that Iām the sort of person who wouldnāt smirk on discovering that my childās woodwork teacher is called Dick Splinter. Most of us, I imagine, have had occasion to marvel at examples of nominative determinism (so neatly summed up in the Latin saying "nomen est omenā). Yes, thereās a Belgian footballer called Mark De Man ā and yes, heās a defender. Yes, there really is a scholarly article about incontinence by Splatt and Weedon.Ā
But thereās a difference between (a) deriving amusement from what Jung called the āsometimes quite grotesque coincidence between a man's name and his peculiaritiesā and (b) simply laughing at unfamiliar names. Maybe Foster Wallace thought the names he was listing were cool rather than funny. Thatās not how it comes across, though. Of course, if you pile up non-Anglo-Saxon names, as Foster Wallace does, you get some juxtapositions that will strike many English-speaking readers as incongruous. Of course, such juxtapositions can raise half a smile. But surely no more than that.
If you follow any sport thatās played internationally, you are exposed to an immense variety of names, and Foster Wallace, a self-professed tennis nut, surely couldnāt have been stunned to discover, when he embarked on writing about his countryman Michael Joyce, that there were professional tennis players from countries where most people arenāt called things like Michael Joyce or David Foster Wallace. And if Foster Wallace really thought that the names of Joyceās fellow pros looked like they were āout of some postmodern Dickensā, what would he have made of the credits that roll at the end of a typical twenty-first-century American TV drama?
