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Introduction
- University Press of Mississippi
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ix Introduction “I’m wretched at interviews,” David Foster Wallace told me in a letter sent late in the summer of 2007, “and will do them only under big duress.”1 Wallace ’s discomfort with interviews makes sense on multiple levels. His concern about public revelation is reasonable in terms of the overall arc of his career, which shuttled between what Wallace called the “schizophrenia of attention” and the despondency of private torment (Stein). Equally, his thematic obsessions—self consciousness, the difficult exchange economy that exists between characters’ interior landscapes and the world around them— draw on the same energies that might be located in the interview process. Finally , one of Wallace’s signature techniques for revealing character through dialogue—the one-sided conversation, which we might call the belled interview , after a term coined for Nabokov’s critique of telephone conversations where the reader hears only one speaker2 —turned the mechanics of an interview into a central focus of Wallace’s middle-period fiction (Infinite Jest [1996] and Brief Interviews [1999]). This nexus of imaginative activity made the set-piece of an interview something more than a polite formality for Wallace, a pursuit that could not be coolly divorced from creative practice. But there were clearly more personal reasons why Wallace became reticent about interviews. After he became engulfed in the media storm surrounding Infinite Jest, Wallace wrote to Don DeLillo about the experience: If you try to be unpretentious and candid, a reporter comments on the unpretentious , candid persona you’ve adopted for the interview. It ends up being lonely and wildly depressing. And strange. I had guys in my house (a tactical error). . . . The guy from the Post . . . who’s become a friend because he was my first interview and I was wildly indiscreet about stuff like drug histories . . . and he stopped me in the middle and patiently explained certain rules about what to tell reporters . . .3 Yet good advice might only lessen, not eradicate, personal intrusion. When Frank Bruni interviewed Wallace for New York Times Magazine, he felt obliged to chronicle the contents of the novelist’s medicine cabinet (“his bathroom contains special tooth polish to combat the effects of the tobacco x INTRODUCTION he chews. There’s also a special acne medication to keep his skin unblemished ”4 ), a move that outraged the novelist. Drawing this cluster of concerns together, Wallace came to the overarching conclusion that there were structural flaws that eroded the epistemological aspirations of the interview format , telling Amherst magazine in 1999 that the problem with interviews was “that no truly interesting question can be satisfactorily answered within the formal constraints (viz. magazine-space, radio-time, public decorum) of an interview.”5 Why, then, gather a collection of interviews with Wallace? On a basic level, it’s notable that in the years since Wallace’s death, Wallace-the-person (as opposed to purely the stylistic or thematic specter of Wallace-thewriter ) has become an increasing presence in contemporary American literature —in Jeffrey Eugenides’s “Extreme Solitude” (2010), Richard Powers’s Generosity (2009), and most directly in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010), Wallace’s biography seems to be recast and diffused through each narrative . While his technical influence is certainly still widely in evidence—Wallace ’s nested narration is playfully parodied in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)—because a good interview or profile illuminates both the writer and the work, it’s easier to objectively ask questions about the parallels between Wallace’s biography and such fictions—and hence, to measure Wallace’s personal impact on American letters—after reading these interviews.6 What does it mean, for instance, to note David Lipsky’s revelation that Wallace painted his bedroom black and was fascinated by Margaret Thatcher, and then register that such details overlap with Richard Katz’s biography in Freedom? Equally, while Wallace entertained few illusions about the interview’s formal limitations, it doesn’t necessarily follow that his own interviews were failures. His acute sensitivity to the medium’s boundaries made the interview a productive haven for Wallace’s remarkable articulacy. As Jonathan Franzen has argued, “the structure of interviews” provided a formal enclosure in which Wallace “could safely draw on his enormous native store of kindness and wisdom and expertise.”7 It’s not surprising, then, that one of most quoted sources in Wallace criticism is an interview—Larry McCaffery’s essential Review of Contemporary Fiction...