Serious art must make us confront difficulty; the danger is a pleasure-conditioned culture in which "the commercial…
echoes
From: An Interview with David Foster Wallace (David Wiley, Minnesota Daily A&E — full transcript)
- Early text: n/a (interview) — "really serious art … takes really hard
work … That stuff's not fun in the way commercial entertainment is fun. I
mean fun--like eating a Twinkie. It's like slipping into a warm bath after a
hard day … The danger comes when the escape becomes the overriding purpose."
[L570-576]; "serious art is supposed to make us confront things that are
difficult … if we get conditioned to confront less and less and experience
more and more pleasure, the commercial stuff's gonna win out." [L595-598]
- IJ echo: the book-as-entertainment crux (whether IJ performs or resists
the samizdat's logic). DFW frames IJ's own project as the hard-work,
confront-difficulty pole against the Twinkie/warm-bath escape pole — an
author-intent anchor for reading IJ as the Entertainment's antidote rather
than its double, though he does not use the samizdat-mirror framing himself.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation