Conversations with David Foster Wallace

Conversation with David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers

110 Conversation with David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers John O’Brien/2000© 2000 by the Lannan Foundation. Reprinted by permission. O’BRIEN: Most of the questions are about relationships, fortunately not personal ones. First is relationship to your readers. How much do you take your reader into account, how much do you think about your reader as you’re writing? How often are you afraid that you may be stepping over the boundary with readers, expecting too much from them or demanding too much? David, this is a subject you and I have discussed many times, actually. WALLACE: One of many reasons for being terrified about this sort of venue is that a lot of the stuff, it sort of feels like it’s not in my interests to think about—think-think. I know that if stuff is going well, it feels like I’m talking to somebody, or like there’s somebody there, and I think it’s somebody rather suspiciously like me. And I know it’s a very charitable way to put it, “Are you making too high demands on stuff.” I know I run into problems with irritation thresholds, cost-benefit flux, and all kinds of stuff. I guess the deal I’ve made with myself is that I don’t think about it a whole lot when I’m working but I’ve gathered a little set of three or four readers—only one of whom is a relative—who have graciously been reading for me for fifteen years and are fairly blunt about when irritation thresholds or gratuitousness thresholds are being exceeded. I think I lean on them in the respect that it allows me not really to think about it very much when I’m doing it, which of course doesn’t yield a very interesting answer. O’BRIEN: I’ll come back to our ongoing argument about this. JOHN O’BRIEN / 2000 111 WALLACE: Hence embedding the thing about the outside readers, which is the only nugget I really have to offer. O’BRIEN: Rick? POWERS: This came up at breakfast. Michael Silverblatt had used a line with regard to another writer—that his books would have been much better had he completely discounted their effect, or ceased to think about their effect on his readership. It was such a strange and wonderful formulation that I’ve been turning it over in my head all day. I guess, finally, it seems to me almost inconceivable that you would not be gauging the effect of the work upon some receiver. The question is, who? It’s not a question of whether you’re writing without mindfulness, or creating a transmission without a reception, the question is: who is the ideal reader? Is this a stable configuration or is this perpetually reinvented in the light of the many, many needs that a novel will present? I think it’s a good exercise, at various points in the creative process, to reach out towards something antithetical to your own ideal reception. I mean, I agree with David, in some ways my ideal reader does look like me, at least during the first draft, the invention part of the process. I think, at different moments in revision, I will work hard to see what this would look like to someone who is very much not me. O’BRIEN: If it’s pleasing you, do you assume it’s going to please others? POWERS: That’s a horrible assumption! The assumption that pleasure can be calculated at all in advance is a very difficult one. WALLACE: Although if it’s pleasing enough you just don’t care. Which is nice. And then if, by chance, people do like it, it seems like this wonderful bit of frosting. POWERS: Can you do that? You can get to a level of personal pleasure where you essentially . . . WALLACE: I thought implicitly we were talking early drafts and stuff here, then there’s the horrible dash of cold water when you realize someone else is going to see this. 112 CONVERSATIONS WITH DAVID FOSTER WALLACE O’BRIEN: So the next level of this, or maybe it’s pre-level: relationship with editors. To what degrees are they helps, hindrances, learning from . . . POWERS: You know, I can honestly say that I do not think of my current editor as...