David Foster Wallace and the ânomological orgyâ of tennis
I recently re-read some of my favourite David Foster Wallace essays. Over the years, the one Iâve found myself going back to more than any other is âTennis player Michael Joyceâs professional artistry as a paradigm of certain stuff about choice, freedom, limitation, joy, grotesquerie, and human completenessâ.
Undoubtedly this has something to do with my love of tennis and my delight in Foster Wallaceâs descriptions of players I used to watch: Richard Krajicek ârushes the net like it owes him money and in general plays like a rabid craneâ, Jacob Hlasek looks like âa lifeguard in hellâ, Michael Chang âhas a mushroom-shaped head ⌠and an expression of deep and intractable unhappiness, as unhappy a face as Iâve ever seen outside a Graduate Writing Programmeâ.
Itâs a great essay, as trenchant as anything Iâve ever read about tennis. But thereâs one jarring paragraph, in which Foster Wallace remarks that the names of professional tennis players âconstitute a nomological orgy that makes for truly first-rate bathroom readingâ.
On the whole Foster Wallaceâs use of recondite vocabulary is satisfyingly precise, but Iâm pretty sure that on this occasion heâs wide of the mark. The OED definition of ânomologicalâ is âRelating to, concerned with, or designating lawsâ, which surely has nothing to do with Foster Wallaceâs delight in names such as Adolf Musil and Martin Zumpft; I suspect he actually meant ânomenclaturalâ or ânomenclatorialâ.
In any case, the names that Foster Wallace picks â from among more than a thousand â donât justify the line about âtruly first-rate bathroom readingâ. 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 isnât amusing. Â Â
Iâm not going to pretend that Iâm the sort of person who wouldnât smirk on discovering that my childâs 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 omenâ). Yes, thereâs a Belgian footballer called Mark De Man â and yes, heâs a defender. Yes, there really is a scholarly article about incontinence by Splatt and Weedon.Â
But thereâs a difference between (a) deriving amusement from what Jung called the âsometimes quite grotesque coincidence between a man's name and his peculiaritiesâ and (b) simply laughing at unfamiliar names. Maybe Foster Wallace thought the names he was listing were cool rather than funny. Thatâs 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 thatâs played internationally, you are exposed to an immense variety of names, and Foster Wallace, a self-professed tennis nut, surely couldnât 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 arenât called things like Michael Joyce or David Foster Wallace. And if Foster Wallace really thought that the names of Joyceâs fellow pros looked like they were âout of some postmodern Dickensâ, what would he have made of the credits that roll at the end of a typical twenty-first-century American TV drama?
