David Foster Wallace lands one sweet gig

In the fourth paragraph of his Biblically-proportioned essay, David Foster Wallace explicitly identifies his intended audience: ‘you are an American between say 18 and 35.’ In the next few sentences, he clearly establishes the patronizing, even downright in-your-face-insulting, tone which he will take toward these “Young Voters,” whom he has just identified as his audience, for the remainder of the piece. Btw, DFW was 38 years old at the time.

Although I would not doubt that the 38-year old DFW considered himself sufficiently superior to the 18 to 35 year old readers of Rolling Stone magazine to justify the condescension with which he treats the group throughout Up, Simba, I certainly do not believe that these Young Voters were actually his intended audience. Rather, he uses this textual identification of his intended audience as a rhetorical device—something like what Heinrichs describes as “irony, the technique of saying one thing to outsiders and another to insiders.”

That is, while ostensibly addressing 18 to 35 year old Rolling Stone readers, DFW was actually writing to his peers in the hallowed world of academia. English prof’s. Poly Sci and Gender Studies PhD’s. Folks who could grasp the ‘complicated stuff’ which didn’t make it into the magazine version. Which begs the question: if Wallace was really writing for such a high-minded audience, why didn’t he just make a few calls and get one of his friends to pull some strings over at the New Yorker?

By addressing 18 to 35 year old Rolling Stone readers, DFW enables himself to use as many shit’s and fuck’s as he wants. He can devote multiple pages to the elaborate development of observations which border upon truism (i.e. Incessant inundation with sales marketing in the latter decades of the 20^th century has made Americans increasingly cynical toward political campaigns...really?!) He can flow freely from academic-sounding flourishes to obnoxious run-on sentences filled with MTV colloquialisms—the parlance of our times. After all, the article was written for the 18 to 35 year old readers of Rolling Stone, right?