Edition

A student at a nearby college had recorded the address, and sent out a transcript to a list-serv for Wallace fans. By June, a transcript of the speech was circulating in email chain letters and on Facebook. Wallace himself was confused as to how far it had spread, his biographer wrote, because he hadn’t even given Kenyon a copy of the speech.

Sam Levine, “David Foster Wallace’s Famous Commencement Speech Almost Didn’t Happen,” HuffPost, 20 May 2016.

In addition to being transmitted electronically, the speech was also printed in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006 as “Kenyon Commencement Speech.” The 2006 version was reprinted with Wallace’s permission with a copyright year of 2005, and differs in significant ways from the words Wallace spoke at Kenyon in 2005.

Wallace died by suicide in 2008 and his speech gained even greater attention after his death. The 2006 version was reprinted in the Wall Street Journal a week after Wallace’s suicide. Little, Brown and Company published a small book in 2009, seven months after Wallace’s death, entitled This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. The book is formatted with just one sentence on each page, stretching a speech of about 4,000 words to fit 137 pages. The remediation of “This is Water” into this format has been received with mixed feelings. Online reviews extol the book’s emphasis on Wallace’s words and the affordances that the format offers: being able to focus on each sentence and meditate on its meaning. Others disagree.

Some critics worried that the physical formatting of the speech tainted its delivery. Zach Baron of The Village Voice wrote that he feared that the essay’s now-stretched format provided an almost mantra-like emphasis to areas not intended by Wallace.

“This is Water,” Wikipedia, 17 July 2021.

In 2013, a Los Angeles-based film company, The Glossary, produced a nine-minute cinematic adaptation of Wallace’s speech that included his voice from 2005. While it received millions of views and much positive attention as an homage to Wallace, it was produced without permission and removed from YouTube and Vimeo after a copyright claim by Wallace’s estate. However, the video is once again available.

This digital edition of “This is Water” is meant to allow its users to reach their own conclusions about the remediation and meaning of Wallace’s words by presenting them parallelly in a variety of mediums: the audio of Wallace’s 2005 speech; a transcription of the 2005 audio; the 2009 text from the book, This is Water; the 2013 cinematic interpretation; and a transcription that highlights which parts of the speech are used in the video.

The 2006 text is not included because it varies only in small ways from the 2009 text, while both differ substantially from the 2005 speech. Additionally, the 2006 text received less attention than the 2009 text, which was printed after Wallace’s 2008 suicide as a stand-alone text and in a controversial format, which is replicated below by separating the sentences as they are in the book.

Some controversy emerged over the part of Wallace’s speech in which he directly discussed suicide by firearms, particularly the line, “They shoot the terrible master,” which references a cliché that the mind is “an excellent servant but a terrible master.” Wallace committed suicide by hanging, not with a firearm. Many people incorrectly believe that the line was removed after Wallace’s death in 2008, but it does not appear in the 2006 version either. Critics have argued about the significance of the line’s removal, but this debate takes on a different meaning given that Wallace was alive for the edit and either made it himself or was amenable to the suggestion of it.

The other variations between the 2005 audio of Wallace’s speech and the 2006 and 2009 printed versions are very interesting and give two very different impressions of the author and his address. While Wallace’s address at Kenyon is at times bleak and gloomy, the overall message is compassionate and reflective, undoubtedly in part because of the environment in which he delivered the speech. Wallace’s anecdotes are conveyed warmly and received with laughter even when they reflect malcontent. However, the similar versions printed in books in 2006 and 2009 include lines that go beyond mere irritation to depict Wallace as downright misanthropic. His anecdotes include more details about dissatisfaction and anger at people around him, and he uses more vulgar, disturbing language.

… when he suggests that the “capital-T Truth” of life “is about making it to 30, or maybe even 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head,” his intended audience of college graduates floats away, and the haunting, answerless questions crowd suffocatingly in. Whom, you wonder, was he really speaking to?

Tom Bissell, “Great and Terrible Truths,” The New York Times, 24 April 2009.

Clearly, the words are darker overall, raising questions about why the 2009 book reprints Wallace’s 2006 text rather than a transcription of his 2005 audio, especially in light of his suicide. It also generates questions, like Bissell’s above, about Wallace’s intended audience. The 2005 speech gives the impression that Wallace, after struggling with depression or a dark period, has improved, while the 2006 text makes it clear that Wallace was still very much mired in this struggle. Thus, if we are to honor and respect Wallace’s life and work, it is of utmost importance that we listen to, read, and watch the variants of “This is Water” with awareness of the others.