Conversations with David Foster Wallace

An Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace

21 An Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace Larry McCaffery/1993 From the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993. © 1993 by the Review of Contemporary Fiction and Larry McCaffery. Reprinted by permission. LARRY McCAFFERY: Your essay following this interview is going to be seen by some people as being basically an apology for television. What’s your response to the familiar criticism that television fosters relationships with illusions or simulations of real people (Reagan being a kind of quintessential example)? DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: It’s a try at a comprehensive diagnosis, not an apology. U.S. viewers’ relationship with TV is essentially puerile and dependent , as are all relationships based on seduction. This is hardly news. But what’s seldom acknowledged is how complex and ingenious TV’s seductions are. It’s seldom acknowledged that viewers’ relationship with TV is, albeit debased, intricate and profound. It’s easy for older writers just to bitch about TV’s hegemony over the U.S. art market, to say the world’s gone to hell in a basket and shrug and have done with it. But I think younger writers owe themselves a richer account of just why TV’s become such a dominating force on people’s consciousness, if only because we under like forty have spent our whole conscious lives being part of TV’s audience. LM: Television may be more complex than what most people realize, but it seems rarely to attempt to challenge or disturb its audience, as you’ve written me you wish to. Is it that sense of challenge and pain that makes your work more “serious” than most television shows? DFW: I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious 22 CONVERSATIONS WITH DAVID FOSTER WALLACE fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience , more like a sort of generalization of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with characters’ pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might be just that simple. But now realize that TV and popular film and most kinds of “low” art—which just means art whose primary aim is to make money—is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas “serious” art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art audience, especially a young one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction. That’s not good. The problem isn’t that today’s readership is dumb, I don’t think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture’s trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today’s readers both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard. LM: Who do you imagine your readership to be? DFW: I suppose it’s people more or less like me, in their twenties and thirties , maybe, with enough experience or good education to have realized that the hard work serious fiction requires of a reader sometimes has a payoff. People who’ve been raised with U.S. commercial culture and are engaged with it and informed by it and fascinated with it but still hungry for something commercial art can’t provide. Yuppies, I guess, and younger intellectuals , whatever. These are the people pretty much all the younger writers I admire—Leyner and Vollmann and Daitch, Amy Homes, Jon Franzen, Lorrie Moore, Rick Powers, even McInerney and...