IJ study archive

Conversations with David Foster Wallace (Literary Conversations Series)

source

TL;DR

The standard scholarly anthology of Wallace interviews: 22 pieces spanning Arrival 1987 to the WSJ in May 2008, closing with Lipsky's posthumous Rolling Stone profile. For this archive, 16 of the 22 are new full texts; the headliners are Anne Marie Donahue 1996 ("it's supposed to stop and then kind of hum and project"), Michael Goldfarb 2004 (IJ "resolves sort of outside the right-frame of the picture" — this is the print transcript of the one broadcast interview our video set couldn't caption), and an EXPANDED McCaffery 1993 with ~2,000 words not in the RCF version we hold. Burn's introduction is itself a source: it quotes unpublished transcript material and letters to DeLillo.

Duplicates / edition notes (vs. what the archive already holds)

  • McCaffery 1993 (ch. 4, pp. 21-52) — we hold the RCF text in full (mccaffery-1993-interview); Burn's version is ~2,000 words longer, restored from the penultimate draft. New-to-us material: the calculus "dividing-as-if-by-zero" analogy for formally innovative fiction needing a real motive (not rebellion-for-show); the Alan Lelchuk/Arizona workshop war stories ("Lelchuk thought that I was insane… every once in a while I would feel a click"); a long autobiographical discussion of "Forever Overhead" — the diving-board incident "really happened to me," the memory "intensely shameful"; Faulkner/Joyce dislocation as mimesis vs. his own "desire to make something pretty"; expanded metafiction-as-recursion remarks. Burn's intro additionally quotes transcript material that made neither version: Pynchon's paranoia as "satanic" transcendence vs. the "angelic way" Wallace wanted, and the Madame Bovary "click." Intro also dates the session April 1991.
  • Miller, Salon 1996 (ch. 6, pp. 58-65) — same text as miller-1996-salon-interview; no changes.
  • O'Brien/Powers Lannan 2000 (ch. 16, pp. 110-20) — edited print transcript of the Q&A we hold as video-powers-obrien-qanda-2000; quote from print, not the ASR transcript.
  • Paulson, To the Best of Our Knowledge 2004 (ch. 18, pp. 127-35) — this IS the WPR Oblivion interview we hold as auto-captions (video-wpr-2004-oblivion): dread-vector boredom, "inner sap," Simpsons "corrosive to the soul" all here in clean print. Supersedes the transcript for quoting.
  • Scocca 1998 (ch. 11, pp. 82-88) — short Boston Phoenix print version; the full unedited transcript is in the Last Interview volume (see dfw-last-interview-expanded).
  • Lipsky, "The Lost Years and Last Days" Rolling Stone 2008 (ch. 22, pp. 161-82) — the posthumous profile built from the 1996 tapes plus family/friend interviews; overlaps heavily with lipsky-becoming-yourself but adds the biographical frame (childhood, Nardil history, the 2007-08 final spiral as told by his father and Karen Green). Not an interview; useful for the late-life chronology.

Key claims (new-to-archive interviews, by interview)

  • Katovsky, Arrival 1987 (pp. 3-7): earliest profile; UArizona teaching scene; "Writing fiction takes me out of time… That's probably as close to immortal as we'll ever get"; the Mr. Shulman nursing-home story — "Fiction either moves mountains or it's boring; it moves mountains or it sits on its ass." (Also reprinted in Last Interview.)
  • Dudar, WSJ 1987 (pp. 8-10): Broom-era; he can only draft in busy public places (writing as "secret," vaguely "illicit" activity); Manuel Puig as unnoticed influence; Broom's title from his mother's word for roughage.
  • Kennedy & Polk, Whiskey Island 1993 (pp. 11-20): mid-IJ composition ("hopes to complete this novel within a year of moving to his new home in Syracuse"). Pre-statement of the loneliness thesis: "all good writing somehow… acts as an anodyne against loneliness"; the Sixties' ironic inheritance — TV has absorbed the rebellious metatechnique ("Moonlighting ending with the set breaking down"), so his generation inherits "this ethos of jaded irony and self-aware nihilism"; Girl with Curious Hair as "a very traditionally moral book"; fiction's new job: "take a lot of this familiarity and remind people that it's strange"; "I'm the only 'postmodernist' you'll ever meet who absolutely worships Leo Tolstoy."
  • Caro, Chicago Tribune 1996 (pp. 53-57): composition facts — sold to Little, Brown on the first 250 pages; "I wanted to do a book that was sad," he said. "That was really the only idea that was in my head"; America "essentially miserable" amid maximal pleasure; AA research: "If I hadn't gone to a bunch of AA meetings, I wouldn't have gotten rid of my TV"; the dream-image of the book as "a very pretty pane of glass that had been dropped off the twentieth story of a building"; never been on the Internet; celebrity watching compromises the writer ("You can't speak for that reader anymore").
  • Streitfeld, Details 1996 (pp. 66-69): the print "Wasted Land" piece — 1988 suicide watch, Kate Gompert's marijuana-addiction accuracy, "drug addiction is really a form of religion, albeit a bent one," the Mary Karr tattoo, the failed Catholic RCIA and the Mennonite church. The much longer raw transcript is in the Last Interview volume — prefer that for quoting.
  • Donahue, Boston Phoenix 1996 (pp. 70-72): the densest 3 pages in the book. IJ is "a very careful mess"; "It's really designed more like a piece of music than like a book, so a lot of it consists of leitmotifs and things that curve back. And there's all this stuff about movement within limits and whether you can puncture the limits or not." On the ending: commercial endings show "contempt for the reader… Like they're children"; "Plot-wise, the book doesn't come to a resolution… On the surface, it might seem like it just stops. But it's supposed to stop and then kind of hum and project. Musically and emotionally, it's a pitch that seemed right." Reader-tasks: tracking enormous information, attending to entertainment's strategies, having formulaic expectations "fucked with. Not just disdained."
  • Fry, Seattle Times 1997 (pp. 73-75): TV-reality generation; converting students from "expressive writing" to "communicative writing"; gave up his TV ~5 years before, as IJ took shape.
  • Gilbert, Boston Globe 1997 (pp. 76-81): the four-feelings-about-fame catalogue; "attention is not the same as getting a lot of affection"; endnotes as benign play with the reader (two bookmarks, vaudeville call-and-response) and confessed footnote addiction → post-Lynch-essay "footnote detox"; the suicide-watch facts on the record (Newton-Wellesley, "I would not be talking with you about it if it hadn't slipped to the press"); AA: "it takes enormous courage to appear weak. Hadn't heard that anywhere else"; movie rights to IJ sold — "hoping that it doesn't get made… unless they wanted to dispense catheters"; Letterman as irony's "archangel," the Bueller-Bueller classroom confession; students "so tyrannized they're not aware that they're tyrannized."
  • Stein, Publishers Weekly 1999 (pp. 89-93): Brief Interviews as unfinished IJ business — Orin's sex-addiction "never coalesced," the hideous-men Q&A form was "a trick he had attempted but never mastered in Infinite Jest"; Boston open AA meetings — privileged people "who…have ruined their lives and look like Dachau survivors. That is what Infinite Jest is about, in one sense"; publication history (Howard, Nadell, the Girl legal fiasco, Pietsch cutting "two or three hundred pages"); IJ "a six-year novel that got written in three years"; "Novels are like marriages… it's so sad to end them."
  • Arden, Book 1999 (pp. 94-100): the Cracker Barrel interview; epiphany-distrust ("I don't think readers can buy epiphanies anymore" — why "Adult World II" is an outline); hype "just kind of made me feel empty"; religion skips a generation; America as "one big experiment in what happens when you're a wealthy, privileged culture that's pretty much lost religion or spirituality as a real informing presence."
  • Wright, Boston Phoenix 1999 (pp. 101-3): gimmick piece in the Brief Interviews Q-less format; "Attention is not the same thing as affection. I've finally figured that out."
  • Shechner, Buffalo News 2000 (pp. 104-9): watching/being-watched and the display-consciousness of public behavior; on Kate Gompert and the Tony Krause seizure scene — readers accept weirdness: "So long as there is a neural event going on that placates your realism fears"; refuses both pomo and realist camp membership; reading the towel-attendant Brief Interview aloud "once and will never do it again."
  • Crain, Boston Globe Ideas 2003 (pp. 121-26): Everything and More; he's a Platonist — "God has particular languages, and one of them is music and one of them is mathematics"; Marijuana Thinking linked to the math-philosophical abyss; Whitey Sorkin not an "isomorphically unique mapping" of Whitey Bulger, but the lottery-fixing rumor was Boston myth; IJ as a Boston novel (dialect); the made-up Greek epigraph ("It is not what's inside your head, it's what your head's inside").
  • Goldfarb, The Connection (WBUR) 2004 (pp. 136-51): print transcript of the call-in show our video set lists as missing (see video-transcripts-index). A caller (Amy) raises IJ's final sentence as "a truly human moment"; Wallace: "I like it as a last sentence… Yeah, I got hate mail about that," and then the key statement: "I've been asked a whole, whole lot why, after making the reader kind of climb this big hill does Infinite Jest not wrap up. That book, actually, for me does resolve, but it resolves sort of outside the right-frame of the picture. You can get a pretty good idea, I think, of what happens." Neat wrap-ups are "falsely satisfying," commercial-entertainment reflexes. Also: media as unexamined human product; postmodern perspectivalism weaponized by the political right; the cruise essay now makes him "wince because it seems cruel"; aging from clever toward moving.
  • Jacob, Le Nouvel Observateur 2005 (pp. 152-57): written answers; the smallness of America's serious-art audience keeps the vocations "purer"; anti-Hunter S. Thompson; doesn't want to hear admired writers' "real" voices; late self-assessment — envies not techniques but "capacities of spirit" (St. Paul, Dostoevsky, Camus): "To be able to be such a person!"
  • Farley, WSJ May 2008 (pp. 158-60): his last formal interview, on McCain's Promise; McCain's 2008 "flipperoos and weaselings"; Obama-as-orator; the smiley-face signature story from the 1995 advance-copy signing weekend. (Also closes the Last Interview volume.)

Themes

Entertainment/the self (Stivers-adjacent material in Caro, Gilbert, Goldfarb); irony→sincerity arc traced live from 1993 (Kennedy/Polk) through 2004 (Goldfarb, Paulson); addiction/AA research (Caro, Stein, Gilbert, Streitfeld); structure and the ending (Donahue's music/leitmotif + hum-and-project, Goldfarb's outside-the-right-frame); endnotes (Gilbert, Scocca); communication/solipsism (Kennedy/Polk loneliness-anodyne, Fry expressive-vs-communicative).

Cross-references

Notable passages

  • "It may be a mess, but it's a very careful mess." (Donahue, p. 70)
  • "it's supposed to stop and then kind of hum and project. Musically and emotionally, it's a pitch that seemed right." (Donahue, p. 72)
  • "That book, actually, for me does resolve, but it resolves sort of outside the right-frame of the picture. You can get a pretty good idea, I think, of what happens." (Goldfarb, p. 145)
  • "I wanted to do a book that was sad," he said. "That was really the only idea that was in my head." (Caro, p. 55)
  • "this book was really a very pretty pane of glass that had been dropped off the twentieth story of a building." (Caro, p. 57)
  • "You see for the most part privileged people who… have ruined their lives and look like Dachau survivors. That is what Infinite Jest is about, in one sense". (Stein, p. 90)
  • "The cliché that getting a lot of attention is not the same as getting a lot of affection takes on new dimensions when you learn it through experience." (Gilbert, p. 77)
  • "Fiction either moves mountains or it's boring; it moves mountains or it sits on its ass." (Katovsky, p. 7)