Conversations with David Foster Wallace

To the Best of Our Knowledge: Interview with David Foster Wallace

127 To the Best of Our Knowledge: Interview with David Foster Wallace Steve Paulson/2004© 2004 by the Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin. Reprinted by permission. PAULSON: I want to start by talking about one particular story, “The Soul Is Not a Smithy.” How would you describe this story? WALLACE: As longer than I intended it to be? A little kid with attention problems in school is not attending on a very dramatic day for him, where his teacher kind of has a psychotic breakdown. PAULSON: His substitute teacher starts writing “Kill Them” over and over on the blackboard, and then when these kids in the fourth grade start realizing what he’s doing—that he’s basically lost his marbles—they panic. WALLACE: Yes. PAULSON: But your narrator who is reflecting back on that time, his mind was actually elsewhere because he had been staring out the window watching other strange stuff. WALLACE: Yeah, it’s weird because the narrator is partly narrating as a child and partly as an adult. But mainly his big concern is how boring and meaningless his life has been and how he’s missed the one really dramatic thing that ever happened to him. It’s actually more interesting than that— I’m not making it sound very . . . PAULSON: It’s actually a fascinating story, and I think fascinating partly because it takes a turn somewhere else, really near the end, and it becomes about a child’s fear of the adult world and what seems to be this boy’s fear of becoming like his own father, who is an insurance actuary. I wonder if you 128 CONVERSATIONS WITH DAVID FOSTER WALLACE could read a passage from the story, I’m thinking maybe starting around page 103 or so. WALLACE: So I should start now? PAULSON: Yes. [Wallace reads a section from pages 103–6 of Oblivion, beginning “For my own part . . .” and ending “. . . dreamed in the real world.”] PAULSON: That’s wonderful, thank you. So evocative, and I have to say that when I first read that passage it seemed like something right out of Kafka—the nightmare quality of the ordinary world—does that have any resonance for you? WALLACE: Well, no. It’s a weird story because the story started out really surreal and parts of this [section] are actually the climax, but the climax is much more plain, everyday realistic than surreal, so it ended up kind of like inverted Kafka for me. It’s a very strange piece, I think. PAULSON: Did you have that kind of dread when you were a kid? WALLACE: I think that in a country where we have it as easy as we do, one of our big dread vectors is boredom. I think little edges of despair and soullevel boredom appear in things like homework or particularly dry classroom stuff. I can remember the incredible soaring relief when certain teachers said we were going to watch a movie in grade school. And it wasn’t just a hedonistic “oh-we’re-going-to-have-fun.” It was a relief from some kind of terrible burden, I thought. So, I don’t know. Maybe. PAULSON: Did you look at what your parents were doing, your father, in particular, and think, “Oh my god, I don’t want to become like that”? WALLACE: I don’t know, both my parents were teachers so they always got pale and haunted looking when there were big stacks of papers to grade. But I think a lot of this has more to do with friends’ parents, and friends who have become kind of office workers. I just got interested in the reality of boredom, which is something that I think is a hugely important problem and yet none of us talk about it because we all act like it’s just sort of something that we have to get through, which I suppose we do. PAULSON: It’s funny because as I was reading that I was thinking back to my own childhood, and my father was a professor and after dinner he would STEVE PAULSON / 2004 129 typically go on up into his study and close the door. And I don’t know what he did but I remember thinking when I was pretty little that this doesn’t seem like fun to have to do this, night after night...