Boston marathon bombing: how it connects Tolstoy, David Foster Wallace

"I was returning home by the fields. It was midsummer, the hay harvest was over and they were just beginning to reap the rye. At that season of the year there is a delightful variety of flowers – red, white, and pink-scented tufty clover; milk-white ox-eye daisies with their bright yellow centers and pleasant spicy smell; yellow honey-scented rape blossoms; tall campanulas with white and lilac bells, tulip-shaped; creeping vetch; yellow, red, and pink scabious; faintly scented, neatly arranged purple plantains with blossoms slightly tinged with pink; cornflowers, the newly opened blossoms bright blue in the sunshine but growing paler and redder towards evening or when growing old; and delicate almond-scented dodder flowers that withered quickly."

And David Foster Wallace’s: 

"Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb’s‑quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek." 

"The similarity in the passages certainly is striking," notes D.T. Max, author of "Every Love Story is a Ghost Story," the first biography to be written of Wallace.

Both Tolstoy and Wallace use the floral setting as a metaphor for what will elapse in the novel. In Tolstoy’s novel, a particularly hardy red thistle called the Tatar, clearly a floral stand-in for the hardy Chechen tribe, catches the narrator’s attention. At the end of the novel, when Hadji Murad is slain, he falls on his face into the mud like a “scythed thistle”. The narrator tries his best to pluck the plant, but it pricks his fingers even through his handkerchief, making him admire its tenacity. He then comes across the plant again but this time it is badly damaged, leading him to pointedly anthropomorphize its mutilation: 

“Evidently a cartwheel had passed over the plant but it had risen again, and that was why, though erect, it stood twisted to one side, as if a piece of its body had been torn from it, its bowels drawn out, an arm torn off, and one of its eyes plucked out. Yet it stood firm and did not surrender to man who had destroyed all its brothers around it….”

In Wallace’s case, the key to unlocking the metaphorical meaning lies in that first phrase “the flannel plains.” The use of the word ‘flannel’ is just superb. Flannel plains evoke an image of a grey and weed-filled tract of land, but closer scrutiny reveals a plain bursting with foliage that is medicinal, edible, poisonous, pretty,  and, like that prickly Tatar thistle, sturdy. It is like the men in grey flannel suits who populate the IRS and the novel. Dull government types, they are in fact highly individualistic and even idealistic, including a former “wasteoid.” These taxmen who spend their lives handcuffed to boredom are civic heroes like policemen and firefighters but perhaps even more so given that "true heroism is a priori incompatible with audience or applause or even the bare notice of the common run of man.” There is something stirring in all that weediness because this is how Wallace ends that paragraph:

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