David Foster Wallace and the “nomological orgy” of tennis
I recently re-read some of my favourite David Foster Wallace essays. Over the years, the one I’ve found myself going back to more than any other is “Tennis player Michael Joyce’s professional artistry as a paradigm of certain stuff about choice, freedom, limitation, joy, grotesquerie, and human completeness”.
Undoubtedly this has something to do with my love of tennis and my delight in Foster Wallace’s descriptions of players I used to watch: Richard Krajicek “rushes the net like it owes him money and in general plays like a rabid crane”, Jacob Hlasek looks like “a lifeguard in hell”, Michael Chang “has a mushroom-shaped head … and an expression of deep and intractable unhappiness, as unhappy a face as I’ve ever seen outside a Graduate Writing Programme”.
It’s a great essay, as trenchant as anything I’ve ever read about tennis. But there’s one jarring paragraph, in which Foster Wallace remarks that the names of professional tennis players “constitute a nomological orgy that makes for truly first-rate bathroom reading”.
On the whole Foster Wallace’s use of recondite vocabulary is satisfyingly precise, but I’m pretty sure that on this occasion he’s wide of the mark. The OED definition of “nomological” is “Relating to, concerned with, or designating laws”, which surely has nothing to do with Foster Wallace’s delight in names such as Adolf Musil and Martin Zumpft; I suspect he actually meant “nomenclatural” or “nomenclatorial”.
In any case, the names that Foster Wallace picks — from among more than a thousand — don’t justify the line about “truly first-rate bathroom reading”. 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 isn’t amusing.
I’m not going to pretend that I’m the sort of person who wouldn’t smirk on discovering that my child’s 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 omen”). Yes, there’s a Belgian footballer called Mark De Man — and yes, he’s a defender. Yes, there really is a scholarly article about incontinence by Splatt and Weedon.
But there’s a difference between (a) deriving amusement from what Jung called the “sometimes quite grotesque coincidence between a man's name and his peculiarities” and (b) simply laughing at unfamiliar names. Maybe Foster Wallace thought the names he was listing were cool rather than funny. That’s 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 that’s played internationally, you are exposed to an immense variety of names, and Foster Wallace, a self-professed tennis nut, surely couldn’t 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 aren’t called things like Michael Joyce or David Foster Wallace. And if Foster Wallace really thought that the names of Joyce’s fellow pros looked like they were “out of some postmodern Dickens”, what would he have made of the credits that roll at the end of a typical twenty-first-century American TV drama?