The Legacy of David Foster Wallace

An Interview with David Foster Wallace

 113 David Lipsky An Interview with David Foster Wallace Do you wonder if books are passé? Do you worry about that? As we were talking about yesterday, Rolling Stone hasn’t covered a writer your age in ten years. I think books used to be real important parts of the cultural conversation , in a way that they aren’t anymore. And the fact that Rolling Stone, which is a pretty important mainstream magazine, doesn’t cover them that much anymore says a lot. Not so much about Rolling Stone. But about how interested the culture is in books. For me—and you know this, you get together with writers, and this is a great topic of conversation, ’cause we all just bitch and moan. We’ll talk about the decline of education and people’s declining attention spans, and the responsibility of TV for this. For me the interesting question is, what’s caused books to become kind of less important parts of the cultural conversation? A minority taste? Yeah, in a certain way. The thing that I think a lot of us forget is, part of the fault of that is books. Is that probably as, you know—you get this sort of cycle, as they become less important commercially and in the mainstream, they’ve begun protecting their ego by talking more and more to each other. And establishing themselves as this tight kind of 114 A esthetics cloistered world that doesn’t really have anything to do, you know, with real regular readers. And uh, so, so no, I don’t think they’re passé. I think they’ve gotta find fundamentally new ways to do their job. And I don’t think for instance we as a generation have done a very good job of this. Hey, Jeeves—shut that off for a second. [Jeeves whimpers, sits.] Must find new ways to make books—what new ways? You know what? I don’t know. My guess is, it’s gonna involve some way ofmakingsomesortofoldeternalveritiesandquestionscomprehensible —I can’t think of a way to say it that isn’t academic. Could you loosen it? (Silent verbal scowl) Well, it’s not just a question of loosening up, it’s that it’s very hard and complicated, and to try to compress it into a couple of sentences . . . [Tape off, break] [We talk it out for a few minutes; then, when he thinks he’s ready —and this must be what it’s like to watch him go through a few drafts, as he said in the car; he’s found a way to do answer drafts on the spot, by regulating the tape flow; clever—he turns the tape back on.] I’m not sure about “give movies that” [the audience], but you’re right, do you want me to just say it over? Yeah, there’s stuff that really good fiction can do that other forms of art can’t do as well. And the big thing, the big thing seems to be, sort of leapin’ over that wall of self, and portraying inner experience. And setting up, I think, a kind of intimate conversation between two consciences. And the trick is gonna be finding a way to do it at a time, and for a generation, whose relation to long sustained linear verbal communication is fundamentally different. I mean, one of the reasons why the book is structured strangely is it’s at least an attempt to be mimetic, structurally , to a kind of inner experience. And I know we disagreed in Monical ’s about whether experience really feels like that, I mean, I don’t know 115 Interv iew | Dav id Lipsk y whether I’ve done it, it’s something that I’m interested in, and am trying to do. Subject matter untackled too? Yeah, I guess. . . . [To tape] David is talking about today people watch more MTV and more movies and more TV, and so that the world in which readers move is very different than the world in which, say, you know, our parents moved. I guess. Yeah, I guess my first inclination would be to say that most of that would be—to create stuff that mirrors sort of neurologically the way the world feels. [Dogs whimpering] [Snapping fingers] Hey c’mere! C’mere, Jeeves. But you’re right; and the fact of the matter is— I was quoting...