Wallace and Twitchell: Style, Tone, and Consumerism

Introduction: Two Writers, One Shared Sensibility

One writes about a lobster festival in Maine for Gourmet magazine; the other reflects on the human tendency toward materialism. Despite their different assignments, both James Twitchell and David Foster Wallace share a deep appreciation for the written word. Their writing styles are engaging, using colloquial and familiar language to explore weightier topics. Twitchell's naturalistic language prevents "Two Cheers for Materialism" from falling into the trap of making scholarly writing inaccessible to general readers, and likewise, Wallace's approach prevents "Consider the Lobster" from being as trite and trivial as most articles written for mainstream magazines.

Stylistic Similarities: Language, Tone, and Neologism

The similarities between these two essays are remarkable given their different subject matters and themes. In terms of both tone and style, Wallace and Twitchell use just enough sarcasm to keep the reader engaged, but neither allows their wit to be weighed down by cynicism. Both authors use neologisms judiciously — Wallace coins the term "yachty" to describe Camden, Maine, and Twitchell introduces "mallcondo" culture. In both cases, it is difficult to imagine better words for these concepts, which is precisely why the option of coining new terms remains open. Both authors use real words when possible, but when existing vocabulary cannot quite capture the essence of what they wish to convey, their invented terms make the concepts sound far more vivid.

Both authors use long sentences liberally, yet neither allows those sentences to become cumbersome or grammatically strained. Their sense of pacing is precise: short sentences break up the longer ones at just the right moments. As part of their commitment to keeping language fresh, Wallace and Twitchell both embrace plain, unadorned words like "stuff." For example, Wallace writes, "And it's true that they are garbagemen of the sea, eaters of dead stuff, although they'll also eat some live shellfish, certain kinds of injured fish, and sometimes each other" (1). Twitchell, similarly, writes, "Americans spend more time tooling around the mallcondo — three to four times as many hours as our European counterparts — and we have more stuff to show for it." In both sentences, the tone is straightforward and tinged with playful sarcasm.

Subject as Springboard: Depth Beneath the Surface

Both Wallace and Twitchell use their primary subject as a launching pad for discussing deeper matters, though this is truer for Wallace than for Twitchell. Twitchell remains broadly on point, discussing the nature of materialism in America, but along the way he introduces readers to the history and evolution of ideas surrounding materialism. The reader is taken on a journey beginning roughly with the Protestant Reformation, continuing through Marxism, and arriving at the twentieth century. Mallcondo culture becomes the springboard from which to explore the ethical, social, and political repercussions of materialism. By treating mallcondo culture with humor, Twitchell avoids sounding pedantic — a tone that would be foreign to his natural style.

Likewise, Wallace's discussion of the evolutionary biology of the lobster and its role in society is a surprisingly — and ironically — deep undertaking for Gourmet magazine. The irony in Twitchell's piece is more subtle, buried in places such as the title itself, which plays on the "three cheers" cliché. Whereas Twitchell takes the reader back to the sixteenth century, Wallace reaches even further, to proto-history, when the first arthropods crawled out of the primordial deep. Wallace uses tongue-in-cheek phrasing such as "as you can imagine, unimaginable" (1). Twitchell's style is similar when he observes that humans have a proclivity to hoard objects and that "often these objects have no observable use" — a sentence that bears a strong resemblance in tone to Wallace's wry observation about why consumers have been led to believe lobster is a delicacy: "Or so we think," he writes (2).