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

TL;DR

A 52-minute Oblivion-tour stage conversation (plus audience Q&A) between Wallace and book critic David Kipen, recorded for the City Arts & Lectures radio series in San Francisco the day after the Bloomsday centenary. Ground: almost entirely craft and teaching — reader tempo, endings, cross-cutting, copy-editing, the drafting routine — with a late Q&A drift through hip hop, Pomona, and Joyce. IJ is named exactly once, by Kipen, in a question about cross-cutting; there are no retrospective statements about IJ's composition, cuts, or reception, and honest thinness on that front is recorded as such. The real yield is firsthand craft testimony that upgrades three design cruxes currently resting on secondary evidence: tempo engineering, the figurant / anti-protagonist structural preference (Wallace reaches for the figurant term himself), and the anti-commercial-arc ending philosophy. ASR transcript: paraphrase only, no quotation; timestamps sparse in the back half (one paragraph spans roughly 00:24:49 to 00:45:41 — locators there are flagged as stretch positions).

Key claims

• Reader tempo is engineered. Wallace says he drafts repeatedly until a piece sounds real to him, and that part of that realness is speed: he describes himself as a control freak about how fast the reader reads, wanting some passages slow with an echoey resonance and others breathless and headlong [00:02:42]. The easiest tempo lever is sentence length — a run-on built grammatically so the reader never gets lost but never quite gets to stop produces the breathless effect; overused, it fatigues and annoys, so speeds must vary [00:03:40]. He notes there is no critical vocabulary for the physics of reading speed the way poetry has metrics; prose rightness is partly a drumbeat, judged by ear rather than by intentional metrics [00:04:16–00:04:53].
• But long sentences are not a program. He rejects Kipen's media-theory gloss (the long sentence as a device for fencing out distraction) as the sexy answer he could riff on but that is false to the primitive, by-ear, by-stomach way the writing actually happens [00:06:26–00:07:08]; and he says audience laughter at his sentence length reads to him as evidence of failure — a rightly structured long sentence should go unnoticed [00:08:14]. To the extent he cares about attention and fragmentation, he locates it in structure — how things are divided up and faceted — not in the sentence [00:07:08].
• Reading-as-relationship origin story. He started reading very young because he was lonely (immediately qualifying: not lonelier than anybody else [00:09:02]) and went to books for a relationship — never the sense of talking to a person, but of an intelligence, another human thing, he was in communion with; the intimacy drive in his sentences descends from that [00:07:08]. Work of his that feels alive carries a feeling of communicating with somebody, with no idea who; the operative distinction is communication versus mere exposition [00:09:02–00:09:56].
• Endings. Prompted by Kipen's contrast of The Suffering Channel (suspended ending) and Good Old Neon (recursive ending), Wallace says a piece that is alive reveals, around its two-thirds mark, how it will finish — its pitch, not merely its plot; lacking that, the thing is probably dead. He mocks the Freytag-triangle arc (describing its climax bump in off-color anatomical terms and calling the whole shape somewhat prurient) and says the tight commercial climax-and-denouement arc has been ruined for him by a lifetime of televised, cinematic, packaged narrative: he does not like his stuff to end the way mainly commercial things end, while conceding this is recoil, not sophistication. He happily sits through formulaic movies as a passive viewer; on the page the same formula makes his stomach hurt and feels false [00:24:49 stretch, early].
• Cross-cutting and figurants. Kipen names Infinite Jest (the tennis academy and, down the road, the other institution) while asking about the converging-strands technique. Wallace answers that television acculturated him to identify the single main character as himself, with everyone else reduced to a figurant or a secondary — the figurant term is his own reach — and that he prefers, both reading and writing, several things happening at once, with communities in the piece rather than one main character. He associates the binary version of the structure with Richard Powers, and disclaims an aesthetic rationale: he calls the preference a weird psychological thing and describes multi-strand narrative as simply more appetizing to him [00:24:49 stretch, mid].
• Character, realism, and the technique math problem. He narrates the early-80s grad-school split between capital-R realism and the Gaddis/Pynchon experimental camp (his camp), and says age taught him what the profs meant: the postmodern giants, Nabokov down, matter because they run overt games AND characters alive enough to invest in without realism's covert tricks. His stated fantasy: work utterly overt about technique that still lands the full emotional punch of classic realism — technique calls attention to itself, attention is finite, so it is a math problem; the star he steers by is something technically brilliant that is also devastatingly sad. He admits feeling jaw-dropped inferiority before Alice Munro's character magic and says most of his own characters feel a little contrived to him because he remembers contriving them; he flatly denies that his characters are mouthpieces for himself [00:24:49 stretch, mid].
• Sadder, not funnier. His work is changing under him: across roughly his first two books the ruling motive was cracking himself up; the stories that engage him now and survive all the drafts seem sadder — not tearjerker sad, but moving rather than funny [00:24:49 stretch, late]. (Consistent with the sad-book intent testimony in the D.T. Max material; see Cross-references.)
• Literary fiction is dying as a cultural force — his words' gist: like poetry, dying a little, demographically and commercially rather than artistically, because movies, television, and the internet are changing how people apportion aesthetic attention; deep, quiet-room, single-object immersion will become alien to nearly everyone who lacks hard training in it, the kind acquired at a demanding college. Fewer people are interested every year. He notes this answer upset an audience in LA a few days earlier [00:13:25–00:14:38].
• Teaching. Pretty good, not great, by his own rating; he learns more per class than the students because articulating things to someone who does not yet get it is the best exercise there is. Teaching quality tracks how well you read people, not literature [00:15:22–00:16:07]. The core undergraduate move is shifting students from expressive writing (good because I wrote it; every reader is your mom) to communicative writing (the reader is a busy adult; how will you make it worth her time) — a genuine terror for bright students, teachable as early as freshman comp [00:16:07–00:17:32]. Two lethal student types: the paralyzed (convinced nothing they think could interest anyone) and the entranced (unable to imagine a reader less fascinated than themselves); both call for a carefully mixed dose of nursing and of the boot; he was and remains a blend of the two [00:18:08–00:18:49].
• Biography scattered through: both parents academics, his mother a tough reader of his stuff back to high school; the standard-80s arc of arriving at a good school as a high-school hotshot and collecting Cs and Ds; professors who, after his office-hours hysterics, explained that two pages on a tiny point bores another person [00:17:32–00:18:08]. Won fifty dollars in seventh grade for a four-page rhyming ABAB effort on a fouled creek near home, read it on television during a break in an early-morning show, Champaign, Illinois, circa 1972–73, and would pay real money to keep the kinescope lost [00:04:53–00:05:38]. Nonfiction began because he was genuinely poor in the early 90s and Colin Harrison at Harper's threw him jobs; he does about one piece a year, has an unnamed magazine piece coming within months and another assignment later in the year, and expects an eventual nonfiction collection when there is enough — while repeating his after-every-book suspicion that he may be all done [00:12:06–00:13:25].
• Drafting routine (audience Q): first draft longhand, second draft rewritten longhand on a clipboard, then typed, then retyped entirely from the top off hard copy — not computer-fiddled — with a one-to-two-week rest before redoing; drudgery traded for permission to be crummy in early drafts; a routine honed just before computers became ubiquitous, which he suspects computer-native writers cannot replicate [00:24:49 stretch, Q&A]. He writes without music but edits with it. Trunk discipline: pieces that quit breathing and turn blue go in a trunk, sometimes stopping mid-sentence; he has lots of trunks, and worries only that published work should have been trunked, rarely the reverse [00:21:06–00:21:41].
• Copy-editing: magazine house styles cause fights (the comma between independent clauses); the Oblivion copy editor made the book better via the diplomatic query — flagging a comma used on one page and omitted in the identical situation four pages later, dead sentences, a word repeated across three consecutive sentences unnoticed [00:23:31]. When you flout rules for character texture you must flout them consistently, and copy editors punish inconsistency [00:21:41].
• Rules: prescriptive rules (split infinitives on down) are guidelines that improve student writing up to the point they become a cage; in fiction, characters' deviations from usage rules are part of their texture, which forces meta-choices about which rules to flout where [00:21:41].
• Noticing machine: responding to Laura Miller's tag (ASR renders the first name as Lauren), he says he cannot compare noticing machines but knows his wiring: strong on visual and sound, weak on taste and smell — people have pointed out something like three food mentions across his entire output. Nonfiction is hard for him precisely because reality over-supplies detail, where fiction lets you choose what exists [00:19:35–00:20:16].
• Q&A odds and ends: Signifying Rappers dates to roughly 1989 and a six-month immersion with his roommate in Public Enemy, N.W.A., and other acts the ASR garbles (one rendering suggests De La Soul, another Schoolly D); afterward he went back to the Carpenters; his editor had to explain what Dr. Dre became; someone finally played him an Eminem album and he was startled by how good it was; he essentially still listens to what he listened to in 1984 and declines to name titles [00:24:49 stretch, Q&A]. On Pomona: smart, reasonably happy, well-adjusted students with priorities in order and awareness of a world beyond Claremont — advantages he lacked at his own similar Massachusetts college — and he jokes about becoming a sweatshirt-wearing booster [00:24:49 stretch, Q&A]. Declines all 2004 election writing despite the McCain-piece questioner: he is a private citizen, the cycle's journalism is savage on all sides, and his own state is so upset and negative that he would amount to nothing more than another froth-flecked figure jumping around; he lacks the balance the job would need [00:45:41]. Blurb-speak (reinventing American fiction) is literally meaningless advertorial hyperbole, though preferable to savage meaningless phrases [00:45:41]. Asked to mark the Joyce centennial, he says the adolescent fantasy of growing up to be like the immortals gives way, when the comparison is actually posed, to wanting to throw up: he counts himself one solid member of a cohort of American writers, young to middle-aged, producing fairly interesting work, and states flatly that no current writer will approach the stature of Joyce, Mann, or Kafka because the period is not right for it [00:49:45].
• The autumnal aside: asked whether sadness is fuller than other emotional effects, he says at 42 that aging feels autumnal — much of emotion's resonance comes from finitude and bittersweetness, which is actually quite beautiful — then immediately floats the alternative that he is simply sick and needs some sort of medication and that joy and lightheartedness are the real thing, and says he looks forward to his 50s [00:24:49 stretch, late]. Recorded without comment; the medication phrasing is the transcript's own and is paraphrased here, not quoted.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Wallace's prose is deliberately engineered to control reader tempo — sentence grammar and length as pacing machinery, varied passage by passage

• Crux: prose-tempo-design
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] Self-description as a control freak about how fast the reader reads: some material meant to be read slowly with echoey resonance, other material meant to feel breathless and headlong; this speed-shaping is part of what makes a draft finally sound real to him [00:02:42]
  • [author] The mechanism named: sentence length is the easiest tempo tool — a run-on whose grammar never lets the reader get lost but never lets her stop yields the breathless quality; overuse fatigues the reader, so speeds must be varied [00:03:40]
  • [author] Meta-observation that no critical language exists for the physics of reading speed the way metrics exists for poetry; in his practice the tempo judgment is a drumbeat heard by ear [00:04:16–00:04:53]
• Notes: Counterevidence in the same source, twice: he rejects the host's long-sentence-as-media-strategy gloss as the sexy but false answer (writing is primitive, by ear or stomach) [00:06:26–00:07:08], and says laughter at his sentence length signals failure — a properly built long sentence should go unnoticed, and he has no stylistic or cognitive program about length [00:08:14]. So the design claim this source supports is tempo-control specifically, not length-as-signature. DFW firsthand — [B]-tier candidate.

THEORY: The multi-strand, cross-cut structure is a deliberate refusal of the single-protagonist model in which everyone but the hero is a figurant

• Crux: figurant-design
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] Answering a Kipen question that names Infinite Jest (the tennis academy, and down the road the other institution) as the prime case of his converging-strands habit, Wallace says TV acculturated him to treat the one main character as himself and everyone else as a figurant or a secondary — the figurant term is Wallace's own, unprompted — and that his preference runs hard toward simultaneity, several strands going at once, with communities in the piece rather than one main character, in both his reading and his writing [00:24:49 stretch, mid]
  • [author] He identifies Richard Powers as the writer whose books all carry the binary version of this structure [00:24:49 stretch, mid]
• Notes: Self-undercutting in-source: he explicitly denies an aesthetic rationale, calling the preference a weird psychological thing and saying multi-strand work is simply more appetizing to him. This source stops short of a moral reading of the design; what it adds is the figurant vocabulary and the anti-protagonist structural preference from Wallace's own mouth, in an exchange where IJ is named — the first firsthand testimony for a claim that previously rested only on secondhand craft evidence. Anchors to the wraith's figurant monologue, scene 162 (pp. 827–845). DFW firsthand — [B]-tier candidate.

THEORY: Wallace's non-closural endings are deliberate — a recoil from the packaged commercial arc, with an alive piece's ending pitch known well before the end

• Crux: designed-holes
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] His stated test: a writer who reaches the two-thirds mark still without a fair idea of the ending — its pitch, not just its plot — is probably holding a dead piece; endings are settled matters of design well before arrival [00:24:49 stretch, early]
  • [author] His account of why his endings are weird: the Freytag exposition-complication-climax-denouement arc (which he mocks as prurient in shape) and its everybody-laughing-at-dinner TV resolution have been ruined for him by lifelong overexposure to televised, cinematic, commercial narrative; he does not like his stuff to end the way mainly commercial things end [00:24:49 stretch, early]
• Notes: Scope caution: the occasion is Oblivion — Kipen's examples are the suspended ending of The Suffering Channel and the recursive ending of Good Old Neon — and IJ is not named anywhere in the endings exchange, so this is general ending-philosophy evidence bearing on the crux, not an IJ-specific statement. Counterevidence in-source: Wallace deflates his own position, conceding that a recoil away from a thing is itself no very sophisticated stance, and admits he happily consumes exactly these formulaic arcs as a passive moviegoer — the objection is page-specific. Complements the anti-closure reading of the ending as [author]-grade testimony that non-resolution is a considered practice, not accident; [B]-tier candidate.

CONNECTION: Reading as a lonely child's relationship with a sensed intelligence, and writing judged alive only when it feels like communication — the communication-and-solipsism spine stated autobiographically

• Crux: communication-solipsism
• 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
• Notes: Directionality flag: this source postdates IJ, so the wire is continuity, not prefiguration — the spine restated as reader-autobiography rather than aesthetics. In-source qualification: he immediately denies having been lonelier than anybody else [00:09:02].

CONNECTION: The 2004 diagnosis that deep single-object attention is dying under movies, TV, and the internet — EUP's attention economics restated in the Oblivion year

• Crux: eup-connection
• Early text: [scene] Wallace argues literary fiction is, like poetry, dying a little as a cultural force — demographically and commercially, not artistically — because screen media are changing how people apportion aesthetic attention; quiet-room immersion in one thing for a long time will become alien to nearly everyone without hard training; fewer people are interested each year [00:13:25–00:14:38]
• IJ echo: EUP's television-attention argument and its IJ execution (e-unibus-pluram; the Entertainment as terminal attention capture)
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: Directionality flag as above: post-IJ continuity, not prefiguration. Framed here as a claim about the readership and cultural demographics, not about media addiction or specific technologies — for that reason it was deliberately NOT filed at media-prescience, which is scoped to IJ's fulfilled tech predictions (videophony, streaming), none of which come up. He records the audience-anger datum himself (the same answer caused trouble in LA days earlier) [00:14:38].

No other blocks. The interview takes no position on any plot crux — nothing on Hal, the ending of IJ, the Entertainment's mechanics, the wraith (the figurant exchange is structural, not wraith-scene-specific), composition history, or cuts. Honest thinness: Oblivion-era, and the conversation stays on craft.

Themes

Attention and entertainment (the dying-readership diagnosis; his own happy passivity before formulaic movies vs. page standards); communication vs. solipsism (books as company for a lonely kid; communication vs. exposition; expressive-vs-communicative pedagogy — the every-reader-is-your-mom problem is practically a solipsism seminar); sincerity/irony only obliquely (overt technique that still earns full emotion — the post-postmodern program restated); sadness and finitude (the autumnal-at-42 aside).

Cross-references

• video-wpr-2004-oblivion — same tour, weeks apart; that note holds the boredom/mediated-generation material this event lacks; together they are the Oblivion-era spoken record.
• mccaffery-1993-interview — the technique-plus-emotion star-to-steer-by here is the 1993 program restated eleven years on, with Munro-envy replacing the Barth polemics.
• gc-ep008-dt-max-biographer — the sadder-not-funnier self-description matches Max's testimony that Wallace wanted IJ read as a sad book and was annoyed by comedy-first reception.
• signifying-rappers — the Q&A hip-hop answer dates the immersion to roughly 1989 and confirms the six-month, roommate (Costello, unnamed on stage) frame from the Boston period.
• silverblatt-bookworm-1996 — the craft shelf's quotable IJ-era anchor; this note is its Oblivion-era ASR sibling on tempo and structure.
• e-unibus-pluram — the attention-apportionment diagnosis, here aimed at the readership rather than TV watchers.
• girl-with-curious-hair — Wallace's own pick for newcomers is Little Expressionless Animals, and he cracks that GWCH is literally juvenilia when Kipen holds the book up [00:11:19–00:12:06].