"Infinite Jest: Reviews, Articles,
and Miscellany"
Bookworm
Hosted by Michael Silverblatt
KCRW-FM
Santa Monica College
Interview with David Foster Wallace
May 15, 1997
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT: Hello and welcome to Bookworm. This is Michael Silverblatt
and today my guest is David Foster Wallace, author most recently of a collection
of essays and arguments, called "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never
Do Again." He's the author as well of "Infinite Jest." Listeners
to Bookworm know that I consider him to be the rare thing: someone who knows
how to build something new that's complicated and rich, and maybe among
the last who knows how to create technologies that result in these kinds
of structure. I noticed when I was reading the essays in "A Supposedly
Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," that at a certain point most of things
that you are looking at yield an addictiveness quotient -- the, um, the
tennis gets to a point where the volley turns into a trance; um, the pampering
on board the cruise -- in the final essay -- becomes something that yields
a desire for still more mega-pampering. And I wanted to ask you to address
this. I found as I was reading the essays that I was growing addicted to
them, that the essay itself -- in its length, in its repetitions -- were
forming a counter trance-like addiction. And I wondered if you could talk
about that.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: You know, there's about four questions all at once.
I do know that, um -- I think the oldest essay in that collection was written
in like 1990, which is when I was making the first stab at "Infinite
Jest." There's a lot of addiction stuff in "Infinite Jest."
And it's odd, I mean I went to a lot of open AA meetings, and I've read
a lot of, um, sort of addictionology books. And it does become a kind of
model or lattice through which you end up seeing a lot of stuff, particularly
American stuff -- advertising as seduction. I mean, the ultimate [garbled]
demand is an addict, which is, you know, terrific for commercial interests.
I think, um -- I'm not sure about addiction so much. I know, I know that
a lot of the essays ended up being about, um, certain kinds of seduction.
And seduction can, on one hand, be a neat thing -- it can make us feel a
lot better -- and on the other hand, seduction is literally, you know, promising
more than you can deliver. And there seems to be something particularly
American about that experience.
It's also true that, you know, I'm not a journalist. And a lot of these
pieces came about because Harper's commissioned one thing and other magazine
editors liked it and commissioned me to do other stuff. And I don't think
it's -- I really don't think it's all that surprising that a fair amount
of the sort of theory behind "Infinite Jest" comes out in the
essays because I didn't really have any idea how to write non-fiction. I
was bascially walking around paying as close attention as I could and then
trying to form it into something.
MS: Well, one of the things that interests me here is that it reminded me
a good deal as I went along in it of James Thurber. And I thought the James
Thurber technique of humor is to find a way for the person narrating the
event to be exactly the wrong person to be participating in the event. In
other words, the thing that the humorous essayist must first do is disqualify
himself --
DFW: Uh huh.
MS: -- at which point -- having become Charlie Chaplin -- everything that
happens to him is hilarious.
DFW: Interesting. It's -- I hadn't thought of it that way, and I don't know
that much about Thurber. I know that particularly starting with about the
third essay -- the State Fair thing -- there was a certain persona that
I found to do these things. A great deal of it was that I was petrified
because I feel like I know a certain amount about writing fiction -- didn't
know anything about writing non-fiction. I'm just now teaching a class at
ISU in non-fiction and I'm realizing how illiterate in the genre I am. I
hit on a tactic fairly early on of simply being candid about that and actually
developing a persona who was -- who came out in the essay and said, "I'm
not a journalist -- I'm petrified -- the terror is making me pay a whole
lot of attention." And then there is -- and then it becomes, yeah,
kind of lovable schmuck. Um, one guy in New York kept asking if I'd gotten
it from Woody Allen, you know. And there is a kind of Woody Allen -- it's
another reason why, like, I wanted to collect them all together in the book
and then not do anymore for a while because by the last one I was finding
that it was a particular kind of narrator.
MS: Yes, and yet the reason I think of Thurber is that he's from the Midwest
-- Columbus -- um, that he famously looks into a microscope in "University
Days" to examine his own eye, and that --
DFW: That's the stuff about Ohio State?
MS: Yeah.
DFW: Yeah. Okay. I've read some of that.
MS: Um, but there's the endearing tone of a man who in your case will find
himself in the beautiful legs contest. In Thurber's case is a man who by
the end of his life is blind and is drawing cartoons.
DFW: Uh-huh. Well, I actually -- I would claim that I belonged in the best
legs contest. I actually have -- I'm not the best looking guy in the world,
but I have been complimented on my legs more than once. It's weird, and
since I'm on a coast this might be news to somebody -- there is a kind of,
there's a Midwestern persona that's very useful to use, particularly in
New York, which is just shy of the "Golly, the buildings are so tall"
thing, where I think people from the Midwest are expected to be not only
non-hip but several I.Q. points slower. And it can be extremely useful.
People will reveal themselves to you in ways that they wouldn't to another
East Coaster. And I think a lot of these were complex -- because not only
was I dealing with topics that I didn't know all that well, but I was also
doing them for magazines, and East Coast magazines. I'm not used to being
edited very closely. I was very anxious. And I think there's a certain amount
of construction of the kind of -- and it is, it's somewhat of an ironic
pose, because I'm bright, and I'm a good writer. And so it's not like, you
know, shaking the straw out of my hair as I'm going to these things. But
there was this kind of extremely anxious, compulsive, agoraphobic person
who, um, um, -- I guess part of it, too, is a lot of these -- the danger
of a lot of these seem like they were set ups to just sneer at stuff, you
know: the East Coast guy returns home and sneers at the State Fair; the
egghead goes on a cruise and sneers at, you know, the gross consumption.
And that setting myself up as sort of vulnerable, and neurotic, and in-bent,
was a way to have at least a lot of the humor directed at myself rather
than them. I don't know if that makes any sense, but that was the thing
I was most concerned -- I didn't just want to do, you know, literate Spy
magazine parodies of things.
MS: But the effect that is most visible here has something to do with the
information gathering in the essays. The writing is presented as a kind
of hunger. In fact, I think one of the book's funniest moments is when you
have the historian of the Illinois State Fair give a whole set of very hard-to-remember
facts that are recited dutifully in prose in the paragraph, and you say,
"I wish I had a pen." Um, there's a certain aggressiveness about
the amount of information and how to parse it out, which is also true of
"Infinite Jest." The situating of the reader in "Infinite
Jest" comes around a third of the way into the book when we find out
what year we are in fact in --
DFW: Uh-huh.
MS: -- what is past, what is present, what is future. And "how do you
take in new information and arrange it?" seems to be part of your subject.
DFW: See, this is one of the things that's neat about coming on this show
-- is because you will point out stuff to me that I haven't realized. I
know, I know that with the non-fiction book -- particularly the first few
essays were extraordinarily stressful to me because, number one, you can't
lie. Fact checkers call you up and they get very nervous. Number two, non-fiction
is incredibly different because what's real is just -- I mean, we could
spend three hours describing the inside of this room, which is not very
lavishly decorated. And I had a tremendously difficult time knowing what
was important and what wasn't, and I was myself overwhelmed. And what I
did -- the rhetorical strategy I hit on -- was simply to be really candid
about it and invite the reader to kind of empathize both with my anxiety
and with the overload.
MS: Now, some of the overload effect takes the form -- at least visually,
spatially, reader-consciousness-wise -- of footnotes: having to go to the
bottom of the page, the information not fitting on the page itself. And
it began to make me think of something you say about television -- that
the television effect depends upon a splitting of the word -- the image
-- and what you hear about the image. And that this seems to be a kind of
tennis game that goes on in these footnotes as well -- a whole resetting,
actually. And the footnote form has become yours -- you're using it now
it seems virtually for everyone.
DFW: Well, you're getting now in the later essays -- which I wrote when
I was typing "Infinite Jest" -- I mean, the footnotes get, um
-- they're actually addictive, somehow -- there's a certain way that, um
-- a kind of call and response thing that's set up in your head. They're
a terrific way, um, to sort of draw back a dimension, or do a meta-comment
on the thing that you're doing. In the essays -- since I decided there was
no way I could pass myself off as a journalist, and was in fact going to
do these as kind of meta-essays and have part of the essay be about the
anxiety of producing the essays -- the footnotes were great places to do
that. The way that the editor of the book helped me is that the footnotes
can become for me very compulsive, until I can -- what will happen is there's
an anxiety that I haven't made something entirely clear -- or that "Oh
dear, an element of reality has escaped my pen" -- and so what I'll
do is drop it down to the bottom of the page. And Pietsch -- Michael Pietsch,
the editor -- pointed out to me that it's seems about a third of the footnotes
-- particularly in the Lynch thing, and the cruise thing -- were cut out
-- because he can nail when I have forgotten that the footnotes have to
be read exactly the same way the text does. That to me they become sort
of corollaries or afterthoughts, but for the reader actually they're even
more demanding because the reader has to stop, hold his or her place in
the text, go down, you know, read the interpolation and then return to the
text.
MS: Uh-huh.
DFW: And so, the reason why I was lucky -- Pietsch has been, Michael Pietsch
was a really good editor of both these books -- is that he was able, he
gets it, and he sees, he sees some of the virtues of the footnotes, but
he was very good at figuring out where I had just kind of lost it with ceasing
to identify with the reader in any way, which is kind of working out this
weird kind of addictive quality the footnotes have. And by the way, I am
in cold turkey from footnotes. I don't -- I'm not doing them anymore.
MS: Um, I wanted to talk to you about style. You are the inventor -- as
far as I know -- of the compound-conjunction: paragraphs beginning, "And
but now..." I've never seen them before and I wanted to ask you about
them. You do it ferociously. And so, I assume, not unconsciously.
DFW: Well, you're referring I think -- what I'm interested in more than
style is just pace. And it's one reason why these tours are hard for me
because I don't think my stuff's meant to be read out loud. And I get terrible
breathing problems; it's like the text's revenge. Um, I just have a lot
of friends, and I myself when I get -- you know, when somebody's talking
and they get on a roll, and they start talking faster and faster -- and
they don't breathe -- one of the things they'll do is have, um, compound-conjunctions
because you're really -- you're wanting that sentence to serve a number
of things. It's both a contrast and a continuation, and it's also, you know,
an extrapolation. And it's, it's, I think, a little unconscious clue to
the reader that he's more listening than reading now --
MS: Uh-huh.
DFW: -- that we're in a -- we're in a speed -- we're, we're at a pace now
that's supposed to be far more sound and pace and breath than it is these,
you know, short contained sentences.
MS: When I was in college I knew a girl who -- speaking so fast and furiously
as she would -- at the point where she would want to say, "you know,
like," she would say, "y'knike."
DFW: Yeah.
MS: And we used to write it on walls with spray-paint. It was, you know,
like a motto.
DFW: The other thing that's annoying is that when people say "like"
in speech -- you know, "I'm like 35 years old" -- there's never
a comma. And I would always read this stuff where writers trying to be hip
would have, like, um -- "I'm comma like comma 35" -- which, which
is just absolutely wrong. It makes it easier to read, but it doesn't sound
-- it doesn't make your brain-voice mimic the sound of somebody actually
saying it. Which is one reason why I guess when I'm writing stuff that's
going to be read very fast there's not much punctuation. And there's a lot
of stuff that's strictly speaking ungrammatical, although the syntax is
kind of strategic.
MS: Well, I'm glad you used the phrase because I was about to use it --
in fact, I thought I had invented it -- that I would say that these things
-- at least these books that I know -- are written in the "brain-voice."
DFW: To an extent. I think -- I don't know whether anybody else sees this
-- there's a real progression -- I mean, the first two, the first two things
in here were done before I wrote "Infinite Jest." And "Infinite
Jest" is the first thing that I wrote where the narrator -- it's supposed
to sound like the narrator's talking to you.
MS: Uh-huh.
DFW: The first few pieces of fiction that I wrote were very -- what I thought
was literary -- they were very "written," and very kind of distant
and contained. And, um, I think as the essays in the book go on -- they're
in roughly chronological order -- more and more of that voice creeps in,
creeps into the voice of the essays. I'm not sure that it's entirely intentional,
although I'd be happy to pretend that it was -- it would make me sound more
impressive.
MS: Well, what's nice -- I guess -- is that impressive as these books are
there's also a countervening desire not to sound impressive. In other words,
from time to time, in both places -- the essayist who's writing "A
Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" calls himself a looney --
the world of "Infinite Jest" is also full of people who are saying
brilliant things to you and apologizing for saying them, apologizing for
being the kind of people who think these things and think them at this rate
and express them at this length. And that's what I mean, I guess, by the
brain-voice -- that somehow or other there is that self-interrupting capacity.
Everything that a writer does is not peculiar to a writer -- it's something
that he's located somewhere in the culture or in his head that -- finally
put onto the page -- people stop and say, "yes, people do that -- "
And your work seems to be the result of something that developed in America
when everyone started going to college. They read things their parents hadn't
read -- maybe not your parents, but mine. And suddenly all sorts of locutions
entered speech that previously had only been on the page.
DFW: For example?
MS: The "inasmuch as" stuff.
DFW: Uh-huh.
MS: Meta-language.
DFW: Uh-huh.
MS: Little bits of apologies for being smart. Um, self --
DFW: Or as if looking as if you're trying to sound smart.
MS: Yes.
DFW: Which is -- for me -- I find what you're saying flattering -- um, but
I think you're overestimating some of the reasons -- like this thing about
the constant self-consciousness and apology. Somebody at the reading in
San Francisco last night was very acute and made me very uncomfortable because
she talked about the second essay in the book, which is this big thing about
writing fiction when you watch a lot of TV and you live in this kind of
very hip, ironic culture, and how hip irony can become toxic and blah blah
blah -- I won't rehash the argument. But she pointed out that, you know,
this essay makes that argument and then a great deal of the rest of the
essays in the book employ a certain amount of hip, ironic self-consciousness
that is -- to me that isn't that attractive. And the apologizing for being
smart, I think, can very easily become trying to head off the central criticism
from you by acknowledging that I can get there first and deprecate myself
so that you don't get a chance to do it. And it's very much of a piece with
a certain kind of insecurity -- what to me seems like a very American insecurity
-- that I have fully internalized, where I'm so terrified of your judgment
that if I can show some kind of hip, self-aware, self-conscious judgment
of myself first, I somehow am defended against your ridiculing me or parodying
me or something like that -- um, to the extent that I don't think I'm the
only person who suffers from it. I may be affective, but a great deal of
it is, I think -- that's expressive stuff that I'm not comfortable with
-- I think a lot of that's just a tic about my own psychology that I think
my work would be better if there wasn't quite so much of that in there.
Because it really is manipulative. I mean, it is acting out of terror of
another's judgment, and so trying to look as if he can't possibly come up
with a criticism of you having to do with how you appear that you haven't
gotten there first.
MS: One of my favorite things to talk to you about follows from this. We
both share an admiration for a barely known book called "Wittgenstein's
Mistress" by David Markson, which is published by Dalkey Archive Press.
The books by David Foster Wallace -- "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never
Do Again" and "Infinite Jest" -- are published by Little,
Brown.
DFW: Nice of you to insert the plug. "Wittgenstein's Mistress"
now, by the way, available in paperback for, I think, only $8 [sic; actually
$11.95] from Dalkey Archive Press.
MS: Yes. But what we like about it is its mixture of extraordinary intelligence
and, at the same time, sadness. And the intelligence in it is really swallowed
by a narrative situation that wants to compress it and make it nearly impossible
to express. So that the book alternates between weeping, really, and extraordinary
observation.
DFW: Or both at the same time.
MS: And we talked about that kind of book -- I say that Rilke and Kafka
do it -- that manages to be extremely self-conscious and yet to attain some
kind of sanctity or purity or holiness or humanness or all at the same time
-- that I sense is the alternative to the massive book of "Infinite
Jest" and the massive self-consciousnesses and paralyses this kind
of book involves. I wanted to talk about that.
DFW: I think -- I mean, I agree with you, and I think "Wittgenstein's
Mistress" is a magical book. Not because it alternates between incredible
intellectual stunt-pilotry and pathos, but because it manages to marry the
two in a way that -- I mean, that's what my dream is: to someday be able
to do something like that. I think there's a difference, though, between
the kind of self-consciousness that you're talking about with "Wittgenstein's
Mistress" or "The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge" or "A
Hunger Artist" or "The Metamorphosis." The self-consciousness
there is a far, sort of deeper, wiser -- it's a more autonomous, almost
solipsistic self-consciousness. The kind that I'm talking about is far more
concerned with the perception by others -- what others' judgments are of
you. It's a way of kind of positioning one's self to prevent something terrible
happening that only you think is going to happen -- or something that's,
um -- I think we need more words for self-consciousness the way Eskimos
have for snow. Because I think you're right: there are some kinds of self-consciousness
that are much -- it's more like self-awareness -- or a kind of deep -- a
very involved, sophisticated acceptance of human limitation versus "I
want to make a certain kind of impression," you know -- I want to show
you, number one, I'm very smart, but number two, I'm not pretentious at
all, I'm not hung up on myself, so I will therefore everytime I say something
erudite make very clear to you that I'm not all puffed up, because if for
a moment I show myself as puffed up, well, we know from watching American
sit-coms what happens to the character who shows himself as puffed up or
pretentious -- I mean, the analogy's somewhat forced -- but I think there
are moments in some of my later stuff where I've managed to hit a note of
that kind of self-consciousness that for me is wise and timeless. But there's
also times when I know that I get scared, um, and I'm positioning myself
a certain way -- particularly in the non-fiction -- that I don't think that's
interesting or productive self-consciousness. In a perverse way, though,
I think it's far -- I think it's mimetic of a very kind of late twentieth
century American experience, which is -- I think this is a time when we're
terribly afraid of one another. And there seems to be very few venues for
talking about it. And so if betraying some of that neurosis in these essays
is at least a way of inviting some kind of conversation between me and the
reader about it, that's one thing. But I also know that, you know, I'm very
bright, but I'm also terrified of coming off as someone who thinks he's
very bright -- because people who think they're very bright are buttholes.
MS: After around what was it -- fifteen years? -- of waiting for William
H. Gass to finish "The Tunnel," I said to myself: Wouldn't it
be wonderful if after all this time -- during which time we know that he's
been working like a dog -- if he published a book and it was 77 pages long.
For me, that would have been extremely heroic --
DFW: Yeah.
MS: -- because, you know, it wouldn't have been one of those little tiny
aperitif and toothpick kind of books -- it would have been the exudation
--
DFW: It would have been "The Philosophical Investigations" is
what you're talking about, right?
MS: Exactly.
DFW: Yeah.
MS: And I'm very curious about that ability to heroically throw away what
might be brilliant stand-up stuff, set-pieces, wit, extravagance -- and
to have the essence. It seems to me that a lot of the questions that get
asked in "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" -- that
is to say, how you get out of the loop of addiction and consumerism and
everything else, is to tell not the truth, but the essence of truth -- to
get past the process of truth-telling and go to the truth itself.
DFW: I agree with 90% of what you're saying in principle. The problem is
in practice. What you're talking about is a very condensed, aphoristic --
you're talking about "Thus Spake Zarathustra" or "The Philosophical
Investigations" or "The I Ching" or really really good, really
really good poetry. And the problem with doing something like that kind
of in non-fiction is that I think then you're setting yourself up as a,
as a teacher, rather than as a companion. And I think part of it -- I agree,
I agree with a lot of what you're saying, and in fact even though "Infinite
Jest" is really long, the thing I'm most proud of is that for once
I did not reptilianly fight and hang on to every single page that I did.
And I let -- I allowed myself to have faith in a really smart editor and
cut some of it -- and like that, that for me was what was valuable about
that process. But I am not yet good and smart enough to be able to do what
you're talking about. I agree, I agree with you about what would be magical
about that, and I think one of the most toxic things about the movement
called minimalism in the 1980s was that it aped the form of that without
any of its spirit, or any of what would truly be magical -- it's moments
in Carver, maybe the end of "So Much Water So Close to Home,"
but for the most part it got Americanized: it got reduced to a set of formal
schticks, an appearance, a persona. For now, given my limitations -- at
least like in the non-fiction book -- I wanted much more to set myself up
as the sort of companion with whom the reader could tell might be somewhat
annoying but was not going to be [garbled] the reader, and was not going
to adopt a certain kind of posture where I'm up here and the reader's down
there, or I'm up here and the other cruisers are down there. And was going
to be a kind of companion or tour-guide who was very observant but was also
every bit as bound up and Americanized and self-conscious and insecure as
the reader. Now, I realize that what I'm giving you is a literary defense
for a kind of literature that is inferior to the kind you're talking about.
But I don't think, I don't think it's without value.
MS: No, you're very present. And I guess what I'm talking about is a literature
that implicitly takes to heart the Zen maxim, "Live as if you were
already dead."
DFW: Oh yeah. Well, you're talking about an effaced narrator where it's
not a literary choice, but it's in fact a truth. And, except for very rare,
transcendent pieces of fiction, I haven't seen that done anywhere except
spiritual and religious literature. Or, you know, at the end of Wittgenstein's
"Tractatus." I mean, you're talking about the sort of thing that
an absolute genius -- I mean, a Mozart of living -- comes up with after
decades of effort. And I'm comfortable, I'm comfortable saying I'm not there
yet.
MS: I've been speaking to David Foster Wallace on the occasion of the publication
of "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." Thank you, David,
for joining me. [Laughing]
DFW: Thank you. I'm now going to beat my head against the wall for 30 seconds.
MS: The engineer today -- you won't hear this -- is Jennifer [garbled].
I'm Michael Silverblatt, join me again -- no, he actually IS -- stop! --
on Bookworm........