'A Frightening Time in America': An Interview with David Foster Wallace (Ostap Karmodi, Radio Svoboda / NYRB)

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TL;DR (plain-language summary)

In September 2006, on the tenth anniversary of Infinite Jest, DFW gave a long telephone interview to Ostap Karmodi, a Russian journalist making cultural programs for Radio Free Europe / Radio Svoboda in Prague. Karmodi planned fifteen minutes; they talked for nearly two hours. An edited English text ran on the NYRB blog in 2011; it is the quotable layer digested here. The conversation is overwhelmingly political and philosophical: American consumerism, corporate power and a coming "backlash," the danger of a soft fascism, the cynicism of a culture that assumes everything is a performance, factory farming as an unspoken horror, relativism and journalistic fairness, and the state of American literature. It is one of DFW's fullest late statements of the cultural diagnosis that drives IJ's satire, delivered ten years after the fact.

Two things shape how much weight it can carry. First, DFW repeatedly disclaims detailed recall of the novel — saying on the tape that he did that book a long time ago [20:19] — and, near the end, that authors are the worst people to ask about their own work and that once he finishes something he stops thinking about it. So the interview advances no fresh interpretation of IJ; its value is the 2006 register on the book's themes, not new authorial rulings on its cruxes. Second, the single most IJ-relevant passage is not in the quotable text at all. The NYRB editors cut DFW's entire art-versus-entertainment discussion, including the one moment he speaks directly about the film inside the novel (the Entertainment) and glosses it as a deliberate parody-exaggeration of entertainment, analogous to a narcotic rather than to art. That material survives only on the tape and is handled here as paraphrase-only gap-fill.

Capsule (who / when / where / what)

Who: David Foster Wallace, by telephone from his home (his wife audible, laughing, at the start), interviewed by Ostap Karmodi — a Russian journalist based in Prague, then working for Russian and European media and a program-maker for Radio Free Europe / Radio Svoboda's culture block.
When: September 2006; the occasion is the tenth anniversary of IJ. DFW gives his age as forty-four (b. 1962). The talk references the second Bush administration.
Where: a transatlantic phone call, DFW at home, Karmodi in Prague; broadcast in edited form on Radio Svoboda, an edited English text first published on the NYRB blog on 13 June 2011 (per Karmodi's preface there, it had "never been published in English" before that).
What ground it covers (the full two-hour conversation — several of these topics survive only on the broadcast tape, not in the published text): consumerism and the collapse of the old shame around commercialism; corporate power, legal personhood, and a coming backlash; fascism as an executive-corporate alliance (with a US/Russia comparison); Pelevin's "black briefcase full of money" and cultural cynicism; climate, oil, and America seeing itself as possibly the villain; pure art and his wife's gift-economy painting; moral progress and factory farming; relativism, objectivity, and the ethics of editing/translation; tort reform, health care, pornography and the First Amendment, Guantanamo and torture; and finally the standard questions Karmodi apologizes in advance for asking — why no novel since IJ, fiction versus essay, the state of American literature, and Russian writers.

Theories & evidence

This interview advances no new theory about an IJ crux — DFW disclaims recall of the novel throughout. What it offers is late-register shared-preoccupation material: the same cultural diagnosis IJ dramatizes, restated in 2006. Verbatim quotes below come from the published NYRB text only; the richest entertainment material survives only on the broadcast tape and is paraphrased in the Gap-fill section, pointed to from the relevant block.

CONNECTION: A culture so cynical it reads every virtue as performance — the 2006 restatement of the everything-as-performance diagnosis

Crux: cynicism-naivete (also bears on sincerity-definition, worship-attention)
Early text: n/a (interview) — endorsing Pelevin's image of pop culture, DFW says a cynical audience reads a virtuous hero's qualities "as presentations by someone who's" trying to get something rather than as real virtue; the post-modern upshot is that "everyone has seen so many performances" that "we simply assume now that everything is a performance and it's strategic" and tactical. "It's a very sad situation", he adds, and nations pass "through periods of great idealism and great cynicism," America and Western Europe now in the latter. [NYRB text]
IJ echo: the announced-key crux (irony/cynicism as the water IJ swims in; p. 694 + E Unibus Pluram) — the culture-wide suspicion of sincerity that the novel's earnestness sets itself against. DFW is diagnosing the culture, not reading the book, so this is a preoccupation-echo, not an intent claim about IJ.
Weight: shared-preoccupation
Notes: This is the EUP/announced-key diagnosis a decade after IJ and the same year as the Bookworm Consider the Lobster appearance; it names cynicism as a cyclic cultural condition rather than a permanent one. No IJ mechanism claimed.

CONNECTION: Corporations as soulless money-machines and a disengaged electorate — the soft-fascism / "backlash" diagnosis behind IJ's political satire

Crux: gentle-electorate (also bears on media-prescience)
Early text: n/a (interview) — corporations have gained cultural and political power because "it now takes large amounts" of money to run for office; they "have the legal status of a person, but" "they don't have a conscience or soul the way people do." DFW warns there "may be a" "backlash, a kind of spasmodic reaction against it", and that the alternative to political counterbalance is a form of fascism — "what fascism really is is a" "close alliance between a unitary executive and a state and large" corporations. On moral progress he ends: "these are very bad times" in America because "the American electorate is simply not interested for" the most part. [NYRB text]
IJ echo: the disengaged-electorate → Gentle/ONAN reading of IJ's political world (Schtitt's argument that a citizenry which will not choose its own limits invites an external one). DFW's real-world 2006 diagnosis — corporate capture, an emptied civic culture, a passive electorate — is the same engine the gentle-electorate reading maps onto the novel; the corporate-domination point also feeds media-prescience.
Weight: shared-preoccupation
Notes: Corroborates the real-world phenomenon the reading keys to; it is not DFW mapping the diagnosis onto IJ. The media-prescience and gentle-electorate slugs are reception-side readings; this block adds a 2006 authorial statement of the underlying diagnosis, not an endorsement of either reading.

CONNECTION: Pure art as a gift outside the money-and-publicity machine — the wife-as-painter parable

Crux: entertainment-purpose (also bears on book-as-entertainment)
Early text: n/a (interview) — "I'm suspicious of the word" pure, DFW begins. His example is his wife, a painter who mainly "makes them as gifts for people" rather than chasing galleries and market value, because that process would make the work less fun for her. He extends it to himself: the only way to make "pure" art in America might be to "remove oneself from the public sphere and produce" "that art only as gifts, where there's no money involved and no attempt" at publicity — but if everyone did that there would be no public art, a paradox he says he has no answer to. [NYRB text]
IJ echo: the art-versus-commerce polarity that underwrites both entertainment-purpose (what a work is for — gift/communication vs. commercial capture) and book-as-entertainment (whether IJ performs or resists the samizdat's logic). Here the load-bearing distinction is gift vs. market; in IJ the samizdat is the pure-pleasure commodity's limit case.
Weight: shared-preoccupation
Notes: The fuller and more directly IJ-relevant statement of this polarity — DFW's explicit art/entertainment continuum, his gloss of the film inside the novel, and the narcotics/inelastic-demand analogy — was cut from the NYRB text and survives only on the tape. It is paraphrased (no quotation) in the Gap-fill section's cut art-versus-entertainment entry [19:50]–[24:11] and is the strongest entertainment-purpose / entertainment-lethality / book-as-entertainment material in the source.

Karmodi's questions (interviewer register)

Karmodi's questions below are quoted from the published NYRB text; his many tape-only questions are paraphrased in the Gap-fill section. His framing is unusually essayistic and comparative (Russia/US), which is why DFW keeps calling the questions philosophical.

Opening: whether we live in an age of consumerism "or is that just a media concept that doesn't have any real meaning?"
On the corporate trajectory: is it interesting "optimistically speaking, or interesting as in watching a volcano erupt?"
He introduces Pelevin's image of the black briefcase of money as the true protagonist of pop culture (his own gloss, quotable in the text).
On art: "Can pure art free of any commercial or propaganda value exist in your opinion?"
On moral progress, with the interview's sharpest image: "We've actually built" "concentration camps for cows and chickens who live only to be killed".
The IJ-at-ten prompt: that DFW wrote no novel after IJ, "just essays and stories" — is it over with big novels?

Themes

Entertainment and the self (the art/entertainment continuum — mostly cut to tape; the pure-art gift economy); irony / sincerity / cynicism (the "everything is a performance" diagnosis; sincerity read as strategy); media and consumerism (corporate capture of culture and politics; advertising's sophistication; the subsidized-time conceit as a corporate-domination gag — tape); communication and solipsism (art as gift and meaningful communication — tape); the political and moral register of the late essays (factory farming, relativism, tort reform, torture) that IJ's satire sits inside.

Cross-references

crain-2003-tape — the nearest sibling for the weighting caution: as in 2003, DFW disclaims detailed recall of IJ (the tape-only did-that-book-a-long-time-ago aside [20:19]; authors are the worst people to ask; he stops thinking about a finished work). Pair the two when adjudicating how much late DFW-testimony about IJ should weigh.
kcrw-bookworm-2006-lobster — same-year (2006) register; the closest dateable companion for late-DFW voice.
e-unibus-pluram — the cynicism / everything-is-a-performance diagnosis is the EUP thesis restated a decade on.
word-ezine-1996-chat and wiley-minnesota-daily-1997 — the 1996-97 interview digests state the same irony/entertainment material at IJ-era strength; this note is the ten-years-later bookend, weaker on IJ specifics (by DFW's own disclaimer) but rich on the political diagnosis.
video-zdf-2003-consumerism — adjacent consumerism material from a 2003 German interview.
This interview supplies a 2006 authorial statement of the real-world diagnosis that the Gentle-as-electorate and media-prescience readings key to.
Characters/scenes: the Entertainment, i.e. the film inside the novel (glossed by DFW on tape as a parody-exaggeration of entertainment); Schtitt's argument about a citizenry that will not choose its own limits (the gentle-electorate anchor).

Notable passages

Verbatim from the NYRB text. Trims and joins are marked with ellipses outside the quotation marks.

"we simply assume now that everything is a performance and it's strategic and it's tactical. It's a very sad situation" … (on cultural cynicism)
"they have the legal status of a person, but they don't have a conscience or soul the way people do." (on corporations)
"what fascism really is is a close alliance between a unitary executive and a state and large corporations and a state." (defining fascism)
"there may be a backlash, a kind of spasmodic reaction against it." (the coming corporate backlash)
"these are very bad times in America because the American electorate is simply not interested for the most part in much of this right now." (moral progress)
"I'm suspicious of the word" pure … "the only way in America to produce pure art would be to remove oneself from the public sphere and produce that art only as gifts, where there's no money involved" … (the wife-as-painter parable)
"I tend to start three or four things for every one thing that gets finished." … "A lot of stuff that I write just goes in a big box in my office and no one else ever sees them." (on the post-IJ silence)
"we are the villain, we are the dark force" (America seeing itself through other countries' eyes)

Gap-fill (audio only — paraphrase, no quotation)

The following material is on the tape but was cut from the NYRB text. It is paraphrased from the broadcast audio — no verbatim quotation; timestamps are [mm:ss] into the recording. This is where the archive's genuinely IJ-relevant content lives, so it is captured carefully but never quoted.

The subsidized-time gag, glossed [05:26]. Prompted by Karmodi's opening riff about living in the Year of the Whisper Quiet Maytag Dishmaster with no ONAN and no subsidized years, DFW explains that the subsidized-years conceit was meant as a joke, pointing to how any big American sporting event is now branded with a corporation's name. He frames it as satire of corporate domination of culture rather than prophecy.

The cut art-versus-entertainment stretch [19:50]-[24:11] — the most IJ-relevant passage in the whole interview, and absent from the text. Asked whether art can be told from entertainment, DFW invokes Tolstoy's book on the question and calls the distinction a continuum rather than a sharp line [19:50], [20:08]. Karmodi then asks directly whether the Entertainment in IJ is art; DFW, prefacing that he did the book a long time ago, says the movie in that book is probably his equivalent of Pelevin's black suitcase of money [20:19]. He reasons that the most effective entertainment is commercial and aims at inelasticity of demand — the ideal being something an audience wants to see over and over and pay for each time [21:33] — so his analogy for it is much more a narcotic or addictive drug than any kind of art [21:45]. He then says the movie in the book is meant as a parody-exaggeration of entertainment, in the same way subsidized time is a parody of corporate domination of culture [21:54]. He offers two intuitive markers: entertainment provides relief or escape from real life, whereas art provokes engagement or confrontation and therefore takes more intellectual and emotional work to absorb [22:44], [22:53]; and entertainment's true agenda is commercial, whereas art (even bad art) is trying to give a gift or achieve some meaningful communication with its audience [23:37]. He immediately undercuts himself with counterexamples — Eisenstein's Potemkin as unabashed propaganda he nonetheless receives as art, and Borges's Pierre Menard — noting reception and cultural context can flip the categories [24:11].

Tolstoy on pure art [after the text's wife-painter answer]. Extending the pure-art paradox, DFW discusses Tolstoy's claim that art's one legitimate agenda is advancing Christian brotherhood, which he says is technically propaganda but, in Tolstoy's non-dogmatic version, does not carry propaganda's smell — while being so idealistic a standard that almost nothing except a work like The Death of Ivan Ilyich could meet it.

Relativism, objectivity, and the ethics of editing [~34:26 region]. A long digression on relativism as a road to nihilism, a mild Camus-style existential engagement as his remedy [34:26], and a candid aside that when Karmodi edits and translates this exchange the broadcast will inevitably reflect Karmodi more than DFW — journalism as an unavoidably shaping act, distinct from propaganda only by a felt obligation to fairness.

Konrad Lorenz on aggression [48:23]. DFW is unfamiliar with Lorenz's On Aggression when Karmodi summarizes its thesis (that species with deadlier weapons evolve stronger peace rituals); he grants the rational motive to cooperate rises with weapon lethality but doubts any real moral evolution, suggesting on a strict evolutionary model it might take several nuclear holocausts before survivors make a moral leap. (Karmodi twice mis-names Lorenz a mythologist; he was an ethologist.)

The weighting caution, in DFW's own late voice [1:07:46], [1:09:46], [1:09:57]. Explaining the post-IJ silence he says a lot of what he writes just goes into a big box no one sees [1:07:46]; and on being asked what his stories are about, he says authors are the worst people to ask about their own work [1:09:46] and that once he has finished something he simply stops thinking about it [1:09:57]. Together with his passing aside that he did that book a long time ago [20:19], this is the audio-only basis for treating late-2006 DFW statements about IJ as low-weight testimony (cf. the crain-2003 disclaimer).

No television [1:20:05]. DFW says he does not own a television because if he sat down in front of one he would waste three or four hours he would rather spend reading — a small entertainment-and-self-discipline datum.

Biographical / Russia angle (did-you-know mining). DFW tried one semester of college Russian and had no talent for it, calling it the hardest language he attempted [1:11:56]. He came to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov late, in his thirties, and prefers Constance Garnett's older Dostoevsky translations to the newer ones everyone praises [1:22:17]. He teaches a Daniil Kharms micro-story every semester — the one about a red-haired man who turns out to have no hair, no arms, no legs — which he says deconstructs a character decades before Derrida [1:16:10]. He read two Pelevin stories from a collection with werewolves in the title [1:14:18] and recommends Pelevin's Chapaev and Void (translated as The Clay Machine-Gun / Buddha's Little Finger) as his best book [1:20:25]. He notes America has no real samizdat, so its form of censorship is the market — only what a publisher finds profitable gets published [1:17:13].