The writer as companion and tour guide, not teacher — fellowship with the reader as the reachable good, in an America…
echoes
From: Bookworm: David Foster Wallace on A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again — KCRW (May 15, 1997)
- Early text:
[scene] Condensed aphoristic nonfiction would set the
writer up as a teacher; he wanted instead to be a companion or tour
guide — very observant, possibly somewhat annoying, but one who will not
BS the reader and will not posture above her, being every bit as bound up,
Americanized, self-conscious, and insecure as she is [pt2 22:44,
23:54–24:11]. He grants this defends a literature inferior to the effaced,
live-as-if-already-dead mode — which he has seen only in spiritual and
religious literature — but insists it is not without value
[pt2 24:23–24:56]. Earlier, the same stance grounds his defense of the
on-page neurosis: an era terribly afraid of one another, few venues to
talk about it, and the essays as an invitation to a conversation between
him and the reader [pt2 20:22–20:27]
- IJ echo: the communication-and-solipsism spine — fiction as a
conversation between human beings against loneliness, as he put it on
this same program a year earlier
- Weight: shared-preoccupation