"This is Water"-- Remediating David Foster Wallace's Kenyon Commencement Speech
Delivered in twenty-three minutes, David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College had an audience of a few hundred. However, in the years which followed, the transcription of Wallace's speech became an internet phenomenon, coursing through millions of email boxes and introducing the writer to people unfamiliar with his complex fiction. "Thanks to the enthusiasm" of people who knew nothing about Wallace's work, and the "magic of the cut-and-paste function," Tom Bissell remarks that the address likely ranks "high among the most widely read things Wallace ever wrote." But perhaps the most significant testament to the speech's popularity is that the short speech would eventually become a book in its own right. In the year after Wallace's passing, the "Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address" became This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (2009). And yet, even as Little, Brown's publication of the lecture gave the speech permanence and stability, it also aroused significant debate about whether the form of this publication worked with or against the speech's message. In examining the remediation of Wallace's speech, I suggest that the debate refracts core concerns that Wallace addresses. In the beginning of his address to 2005's graduating class at Kenyon college, David Foster Wallace begins with a parable: "There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?" Demonstrating a self-reflexivity that marks all of his fiction, he follows up that this anecdote follows a standard convention of the "bullshitty" commencement speech genre, and that he is not going to presume the role of the "wise old fish" that tells the younger ones what