Conversations with David Foster Wallace

Looking for a Garde of Which to Be Avant: An Interview with David Foster Wallace

11 Looking for a Garde of Which to Be Avant: An Interview with David Foster Wallace Hugh Kennedy and Geoffrey Polk/1993 From Whiskey Island, Spring 1993. © 1993 by Whiskey Island Magazine. Reprinted by permission . At thirty, David Foster Wallace has been called the best of his generation of American writers. His novel, The Broom of the System, and his collection of short stories and novella, Girl with Curious Hair, have earned him wide critical acclaim, a prestigious Whiting Writers’ Award, and an intensely devoted readership. Wallace, a mathematics and philosophy major at Amherst College, did not begin writing creatively until the age of twenty-one. His first novel was published while he was still an M.F.A. student at the University of Arizona at Tucson. His writing benefits from a mathematical and philosophical grasp of symbolic systems and large, overarching concepts, drawing out every implication to its fullest and often most hilarious extent. He is inventive in a way that recalls Pynchon, and culturally omnivorous in a way that recalls everyone from Don DeLillo to David Letterman, who is the subject of one of his stories. At Cleveland State University, Wallace read from his second novel to a large, appreciative audience. He hopes to complete this novel within a year of moving to his new home in Syracuse, New York. We met with David Wallace in his hotel suite in downtown Cleveland, the day after his reading. He wore a striped mock turtleneck, gray chinos, and tan work boots. During the first half of the interview, Wallace spat Kodiak tobacco juice into a small white bucket, with one leg up on the gold and violet couch, then smoked and drank diet cola for the second half. He wore 12 CONVERSATIONS WITH DAVID FOSTER WALLACE his brown hair parted in the center, which often necessitated brushing it out of his eyes, and had a habit of lightly striking the back of his head with an open palm, a habit which, Wallace noted, descends in a direct line from his father, a philosopher at the University of Illinois Champagne/Urbana; through his father’s teacher, Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein’s last student; back to Wittgenstein himself. Wallace spoke in a smooth, subdued Midwestern voice. His natural shyness in combination with his striking intelligence can make him appear off-putting, and he confessed that his family communicates primarily via jokes and wisecracks. He also noted that “two years ago, there was no way I would have done this. I would not have sat with two people I did not know well and talk. I couldn’t have done it. I would have sat in the bathroom and called out answers to you.” Once relaxed, however , he became generous, honest and articulate—even passionate—in his judgments and ideas about fiction. H.K. HK: I was interested in the way you made philosophy an element of your first novel, Broom of the System, and I wondered if you had to make a decision at any point whether you were going to write about philosophy the way philosophers do, and maybe if you then saw fiction as a way, culturally, to bracket concepts like philosophy, God, America, and so on. WALLACE: I don’t know about you guys, but I didn’t start writing fiction until I was twenty-one, and at the beginning we all have to write our requisite amounts of shit, and my shit was basically disguised essays. They were like really bad Ayn Rand or something. I was a math and philosophy major at college. I wasn’t a writer, so a lot of it had to do with the fact that The Broom of the System the first draft of that, was one of my honors theses as an undergraduate. The other one was a really hardcore math and semantics thing that used a lot of Wittgenstein. And the two kept bleeding into each other, for instance, the math thesis was written in conversational voice, which you’re not supposed to do. So the two went back and forth. The other thing is that my father is a professional philosopher, he was a student of Wittgenstein’s last student, Norman Malcolm, who wrote his biography. A lot of The Broom of the System is weirdly autobiographical in ways that no one else knows. Like the title comes from my mother’s pet name for roughage. She calls roughage and fiber “the broom of the system.” I think...