IJ study archive

Reading as a lonely child's relationship with a sensed intelligence, and writing judged alive only when it feels like…

echoes

From: DFW in conversation with David Kipen — City Arts & Lectures, San Francisco (June 17, 2004)

  • Early text: [scene] Wallace roots the intimacy drive of his sentences in having started reading very young out of loneliness, going to books for a relationship — never a person talking, but the sense of an intelligence, another human thing, he was in communion with [00:07:08]; and he says the work of his that feels alive carries a feeling of communicating with somebody unknown, the live distinction being communication versus exposition [00:09:02–00:09:56]
  • IJ echo: the oeuvre-wide communication/solipsism spine; the fiction-as-anti-loneliness program stated to McCaffery in 1993 (mccaffery-1993-interview)
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation