Bookworm — DFW on Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (KCRW, August 12, 1999)

TL;DR

Wallace's third Bookworm appearance: a 27-minute conversation with Michael Silverblatt during the August 1999 Brief Interviews with Hideous Men tour. The center of gravity is the book's silent interviewer and Wallace's thesis that male objectification of women is rooted almost entirely in fear of being judged by another consciousness; the closing five minutes deliver one of his fullest statements anywhere of the everything-is-rhetoricalized diagnosis — the pre-scanning of how one will come off, traced back to the sophists and named a tremendous engine of loneliness. For this archive the prize is a rare piece of direct IJ retrospection: Wallace says he had tried to write conventional love-story and parent-child material into Infinite Jest, found the everybody-thought-it-was-funny reception frustrating, and built the new book so that no reader could escape its sadness. ASR transcript: paraphrase only throughout, no quotation.

Key claims

Wallace on the book and its design

• Title and assembly. The book is titled after its largest mass — the interview sequences — which at some level stitch the other pieces together; part of the book is independently written short work he wanted to collect, and part is meant to dwell in the odd area between novel and story collection [01:02]. Order and inclusion were settled late, by his editor Michael Pietsch (ASR renders the surname as Peach) — their third book together, and a man with a lot of credibility with him [01:43].
• The interlocutor came first. He was far more interested in the unseen, unheard woman conducting the interviews — her questions reduced on the page to a journalistic capital Q — than in the men speaking [03:07]. She is characterized almost entirely by what she, transcribing, permits the men to direct toward her [03:26]. The dark, in places predatory and evil collection of male voices came second; by the second and third drafts their talk started coming out and interested him too [04:01].
• No ideology; loneliness again. He resists attributing the book a psychology and denies it an ideology — something interviewers, he says, have begun hammering him over [04:19]. The sex and the heterosexual male-female hostility are a unifying principle for something that is really about loneliness, which as far as he can see is what everything he writes is about [04:35].
• Self-situating. He is 37, heterosexual, never married, a serial-monogamy type who has been out there and knows men, women, and himself; he is interested in misogyny and in political and emotional hostility between the sexes, though not for the reasons most people currently are — he even found genuinely interesting material in the pop book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus [06:24, 06:59].
• The fear thesis. His guess: the classic sneering objectification of women by straight white males — the pre-feminist knuckle-dragging kind — is rooted almost 100% in fear, and a weird kind of fear [07:22]: American male self-definition is precarious and sex-focused, and for all the cultural talk about the objectifying gaze, almost nothing gets said about the terror men feel before women's judgment — judgment not just sexual but existential and humanistic. Objectification and the standard withdraw-and-avoid tactics are tempting because being seen and appraised by another mind is terrifying [07:51].
• The dehumanizing instinct generalized. He connects this, claiming no originality, to accounts of the anti-Semitism behind the Holocaust: the instinct to dehumanize the other, to treat another person instrumentally instead of as an end in themselves, seems to him what a tremendous amount of cultural flux and pain is about [08:56]. He immediately flags all of this as post-game analysis prompted by good questions, not what was in his head while writing — what actually happened is that he heard these men through the sensibility of a particular woman who was very real to him but did not exist, whom he could neither see nor hear [09:24].
• IJ retrospection — the sad-book complaint. He had wanted to write a book with more of the conventional material — love stories, men and women, parents and children; Infinite Jest was his attempt at that, and the response was that everybody found the book very funny — nice, but also frustrating. This one he designed so that nobody escapes the fact that it is sad [10:53, 11:05, 11:13].
• Aging into what he fears. He doubts any era of fiction-writing is objectively harder than another, but as he gets older he grows less interested in intellectual material and more interested in precisely the things his training taught him to dread: sentimentality, strong emotion, didacticism, pretentiousness [12:44]. Commercialism he casts as the apple's first, polluting bite, now become a cultural engine of its own [12:44].
• The 1999 element — more cunning. Imagining himself listening to some self-centered, pretentious author on the radio, he says the only difference between himself and that author, if he is honest, is that he is somewhat more cunning [13:48]: he is so horrified of certain reader reactions — reactions he regards as prima facie intolerable (ASR renders the phrase as prime official) — that if the reader decides he is an obtuse pretentious dweeb, the story is dead, the possibility of interaction is dead, and, less romantically, he himself, Dave, personally, is dead [13:57, 14:08, 14:18]. Some of what has made his recent work uncomfortable, he thinks, is that it is like watching somebody simultaneously grasp at a thing and flinch away from it [14:36]. He wants to do work that is moving and that feels important, and he is scared poopless of it — his own on-air substitution for the four-letter version [14:52].
• The self-consciousness diagnosis, first pass. In his own defense, the rhetorical moment is treacherous for any writer caught between the commercially manipulative pole and the pointy-headed intellectual pole [15:01]: America is intensely self-conscious about presentation, about other people's analysis of us, about the nested awareness (ours of theirs of ours) that interpretation is always running. It can all get, in his coinage, clangbirdish — and it also seems to him very sad [15:38].
• Identification, not freak-show. Most of the voices, even the most misogynistic, have elements of fear, insecurity, and loneliness he identifies with; a couple are very close to things he has done and said — he cites the craven breakup monologue genre (the pressure of your moving out here is too much, now move back) as charming stuff he did in his 20s [20:56, 21:12]. But those are the small potatoes: it gets very dark, and if the book works the men are not freaks or monsters set up for author and reader to point at in shared relief — that move, he says, is dead [21:26, 21:30]. He recognizes himself in almost every speaker [21:46]. The last and longest interview — the man confronting his own reaction to a New Age woman's story of surviving a serial killer — he calls the best of them and the book's most upsetting stretch, because he would disavow every proposition the speaker asserts and yet identifies with him enormously; a certain amount of the interviews, he admits, is really stuff about himself [22:05]. His hope, and his publisher's, is that readers find sufficient loci of identification, so the book is not just a veiled confession (ASR: veil confession) staged to gross people out [22:42, 22:49].
• The closing statement — everything is rhetoricalized. Responding to Silverblatt's no-moral-underground reading, he denies the book an ideology but grants it is symptomatic of a potentially pernicious complication [24:18]: in male-female relations the darkest psychic truths arrive through jokes and cable-TV-grade material about wearing the right sensitivity for the 90s — the decade's skirt-chaser now affects an Alan Alda-ish sensitivity where fifteen years ago it was machismo [24:56, 25:00]. The condition is not an absent moral floor; it is that everything has been rhetoricalized — everything carries an element of presentation, interpretation, and sales pitch, a mental chess in which he scans and triages your possible responses before he speaks, and his responses to those responses, and the portraits each will form of the other [25:18]. This is why he, a person of reasonably strong moral beliefs, would never promulgate them on a radio show: half of him is split off, appallingly aware of how doing so would make him look to the listeners [25:39, 25:51]. Not since the sophists in Athens, he ventures, has there been so rapacious, effective, and widespread a rhetoricizing — a performance-and-review metastasis of me watching you watching me — in a vibrant culture; in a small way interesting, in a large way a tremendous engine of loneliness the culture will eventually have to reckon with [26:09, 26:26, 26:38]. He then notes that what he just said came close to an earnest moral statement, and that he feels better for it [26:47].

Silverblatt's readings and questions (for the interview-questions shelf)

• Opening question: the title tells you what the book is, yet a bag covers the cover-gentleman's head — is the book's inner subject different from its ostensible one? [00:22] (Wallace's aside: beyond liking the cover's color he had nothing to do with it [00:49].)
• Whether a philosophical procedure operates not in the pieces but in the space between them — a post-personal, post-apocalyptic psychology evolving across the book [02:01].
• The mirror theme: the absent interviewer as missing mirror; the Narcissus-and-Echo retelling; the terrifying twin scene where a boy's hair is shorn Samson-like by his mother while his twin grimaces in imitation of his fear and pain — fear, pain, and parody hand in hand as a picture of the book itself [05:08].
• The post-personal restated: characters who exist and don't exist, whose talk is at once accurate depiction, abstraction, and parody of a kind of talk; a complicated reader response in which being tickled arouses pain and the need to escape the tickler [09:50, 10:03]. (An adjacent observation — that the men know they are speaking to a feminist journalist or essayist and are therefore rhetorically self-conscious too — sits at a speaker boundary the ASR does not mark [10:38].)
• Church Not Made With Hands as a deliberate goad: writing simultaneously very poetic and intentionally portentous, where recognition is reached by risking, enduring, or floating past portentousness, and a liquid emotion lives in the space between the story's styles and its dangers [11:32, 11:51].
• Whether the stories begin because they can, like improvisation — Wallace offers the first story and the diving-board story as examples [16:05] — and then revolve styles and creeds around themselves, tones within tones.
• The Infinite Jest memory: Silverblatt recalls telling Wallace that in the middle of the hilarious world-war game at the boys' school there is a boy catching snowflakes on his tongue — something heartfelt achieved because its surroundings had grown so complicated [16:25, 16:39]. (The Eschaton game: scene 073, pp. 321–342.)
• The dizziness reading: the book obliges the reader to revolve with no stable position until weariness, attrition, ecstasy, exhilaration, humor, and terror compound — the emotion bomb of the therapist's phrase, planted in the reader [16:59, 17:34]. Wallace's response: Silverblatt's interpretations run close to what he wants — his great fantasy wish is that inside layer upon layer of detailed, psychological-mirrors-facing-each-other complication there is the possibility of profound emotional, spiritual, and existential affect [17:54, 18:23]; though he worries he is kidding himself and merely wedded to a style that flatters his skills [18:33], and he knows other readers will see a cold technician's book that is mean to everyone it is possible to be mean to [18:50]. Talking to readers beyond Silverblatt worries him because he is not deep-down sure which reaction is right [19:02].
• The generational black-humor question: Terry Southern and Bruce Jay Friedman wrote celebrations of hideous values inviting the reader to sneer in complicity; here the complicity has become complicated — who is speaking, who put this speaker up to it, and why would a writer fill a book with attitudes any sane person would hate? [19:50, 20:17, 20:25]
• The one-person ghost town reading: the speakers as emanations of a spirit Silverblatt does not want to be but shares tendencies with; in this tornado-swept country no settled way of living holds, every person becomes a one-person ghost town, and the reader is left unsteady — not merely that our lives have been the wrong ones, but that no moral underground exists and identifying has become, in complicated ways, impossible [23:45, 24:04].

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Male objectification of women in Wallace's fiction dramatizes fear of female judgment — misogyny as terror, not triumph

• Crux: wallace-misogyny
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] Wallace's stated guess that classic straight-male sneery objectification is rooted almost 100% in fear — a weird kind: American male self-definition is precarious and sex-focused, and the terror men feel before women's judgment goes largely undiscussed next to the objectifying-gaze conversation (a judgment existential and humanistic as much as sexual); objectifying and withdrawing are tempting because being seen and appraised by another mind is terrifying [07:22, 07:51]
  • [author] The generalization: the instinct to dehumanize the other — to render the other an instrument, never an end — is the same shape he finds in accounts of the anti-Semitism behind the Holocaust, and what a tremendous amount of cultural pain is about [08:56]
  • [author] Self-implication rather than exemption: he recognizes himself in almost every speaker, including the most misogynistic, whose fear, insecurity, and loneliness he identifies with; some interviews are close to things he has himself done and said [20:56, 21:46]
• Notes: In-source qualification he raises himself: this is post-game analysis produced by good questions, not what was in his head composing — the composition experience was hearing the men through the sensibility of a woman who was real to him but did not exist [09:24]. Scope: the testimony is BIWHM-scoped and general-cultural; IJ is not named in the fear-thesis passage. Aligns with the fear-not-triumph reading carried at this crux by Clare Hayes-Brady (gc-ep021 [S]) — this is the crux's first [author]-grade seat.

THEORY: The silenced woman at the structure's center is deliberate design — the unheard interlocutor was Wallace's primary interest, defined by what she permits

• Crux: silenced-feminine
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] His interest ran much more to the interlocutor — the woman never seen or heard, her questions a bare capital Q — than to the men speaking, and does not expect the reader to share the priority because her development is so oblique [03:07]
  • [author] The mechanism of her characterization: she is characterized almost entirely by what she, transcribing, permits the men to direct toward her [03:26]
  • [author] Order of composition: the woman came first; the dark, predatory male voices grew interesting to him only by the second and third drafts [04:01]
• Notes: BIWHM-scoped testimony; the theory record entry's fight is about IJ's gender politics and reception, so this attaches as authorial evidence that the silent-woman structure is a considered device in the oeuvre, not an IJ-specific claim. The adjacent observation that the men know their listener is a feminist journalist and perform accordingly sits at an unmarked ASR speaker boundary [10:38] — attribution between host and guest uncertain; not counted as author testimony. The interlocutor-as-organizing-consciousness point recurs across the 1999 BIWHM interviews (Frumkes; the Eye-on-Books rebroadcast) — one sighting per source, counted here for this episode.

THEORY: Wallace's sincerity is a cunning-riddled, structurally self-conscious project — earnestness pursued while pre-scanning its own reception

• Crux: sincerity-definition
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] The 1999-element confession: the only difference between himself and a pretentious, self-imposing author he would deride on the radio is that he is somewhat more cunning; certain reader reactions strike him as prima facie intolerable (ASR: prime official), and if the reader writes him off as a pretentious dweeb then the story, the interaction, and — less romantically — Dave personally are all dead [13:48, 13:57, 14:08, 14:18]
  • [author] His own account of his recent work's discomfort: it is like watching somebody simultaneously grasp at a thing and flinch away from it; he wants to do moving, important-feeling work and is scared poopless of it [14:36, 14:52]
  • [author] The lived demonstration: he explains that he would never promulgate his reasonably strong moral beliefs on air because half of him splits off, appallingly aware of how he would come off to listeners [25:39, 25:51] — then delivers the engine-of-loneliness diagnosis, names it almost an earnest moral statement, and says he feels better for having made it [26:47]
  • [author] The aging vector: he is increasingly drawn to exactly what his training taught him horror of — sentimentality, strong emotion, didacticism, pretentiousness [12:44]
• Notes: Supports the crux's coherence-not-authenticity framing from the author's side chiefly via the [12:44] aging vector — Wallace's own account of being drawn toward what his training taught him horror of. Silverblatt's gloss on Church Not Made With Hands frames sincerity the same way — not unselfconscious purity but something reached by risking, enduring, or floating past portentousness [11:32, 11:51] — but Wallace does not take the gloss up (his next turn changes topic [12:25]), so it carries interviewer-side weight only. Counterweight in-source: he worries aloud that the fantasy of profound affect inside heavy complication may be self-deception — that he is merely wedded to a style that lets him use what he is good at [18:33] — and that he cannot be deep-down sure whether the moved reader or the cold-technician reader is right [18:50, 19:02].

CONNECTION: The everything-is-rhetoricalized metastasis — me watching you watching me — named as a tremendous engine of loneliness

• Crux: communication-solipsism
• Early text: [scene] Wallace's closing diagnosis: everything carries presentation, interpretation, and sales pitch; before speaking he scans and triages the listener's possible responses and his responses to those responses; not since the Athenian sophists has a vibrant culture been so saturated in performance, review, and mutual watching, and the metastasis is in a large way a tremendous engine of loneliness [25:18, 26:09, 26:26, 26:38]. Anchored earlier by the oeuvre-wide claim that everything he writes is about loneliness, with the book's sexual politics only a unifying principle for it [04:35]
• IJ echo: the communication/solipsism spine oeuvre-wide; the fiction-as-anti-loneliness program stated to McCaffery in 1993 and restated on this same program in 1996 as setting up a conversation between human beings (silverblatt-bookworm-1996)
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: Directionality: post-IJ, so continuity rather than prefiguration — the 1996 Bookworm loneliness statement extended into a cultural mechanism. The radio-show framing makes the claim self-exemplifying: he names the split-off self-watching while performing on the medium that provokes it [25:39].

CONNECTION: Language as pre-emptive image management — the mental chess of triaging responses before speaking, and the interviews' rhetorically self-aware monologues

• Crux: articulate-evasion
• Early text: [scene] The mental-chess account: before saying the thing he already scans and triages the other's possible responses, his responses to those responses, and the portraits each will form of the other — articulate foresight deployed to manage exposure rather than to make contact [25:18]. Enacted in the book he is describing: the craven breakup monologues he admits to having delivered in his 20s, fluent performances that reframe abandonment as the partner's burden [21:12]; and his refusal to state moral beliefs on air as a worked example of eloquence withheld to control reception [25:39]
• IJ echo: the oeuvre-wide language-behavior preoccupation this slug tracks — Hal's articulate interior behind an unreadable exterior, the professional-conversationalist scene (scene 005), Marathe–Steeply's verbal fencing; on the pre-IJ side the Here and There / My Appearance / Broom chain already registered
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: Post-IJ continuity, not prefiguration. Distinctness from the communication-solipsism block above: that one files the loneliness-engine diagnosis; this one files the speech-behavior itself — fluent, precise talk as evasion — which is what the slug is scoped to. The men's rhetorical self-consciousness before their feminist-journalist listener belongs here too, but its on-tape attribution is uncertain (ASR speaker boundary [10:38]) and it is held to a mention.

Themes

Communication and solipsism (the watching-metastasis as loneliness engine; everything he writes about loneliness); irony and sincerity (more cunning, reach-and-recoil, the almost-earnest moral statement and the relief after); gender and the gaze (fear thesis, the silent interlocutor, objectification as dehumanization); entertainment and self-presentation (commercialism as cultural engine; sensitivity as sales pitch); sadness by design (the IJ funny-reception complaint and the nobody-escapes-the-sadness intent).

Cross-references

• silverblatt-bookworm-1996 — the same pair three years earlier on IJ; the loneliness-and-conversation statement there is the direct ancestor of this episode's engine-of-loneliness close, and the seduce-the-reader worry recurs here as the fear of the reader's verdict.
• gc-ep008-dt-max-biographer — Max's testimony that Wallace wanted IJ read as a sad book and chafed at comedy-first reception; this episode is Wallace saying exactly that himself in 1999 [11:05, 11:13].
• mccaffery-1993-interview — the fiction-as-relief-from-loneliness program; the 1999 close is its cultural-mechanism restatement.
• video-frumkes-1999 — same tour, weeks apart; shared talking points (the interlocutor's centrality) counted once per source.
• city-arts-lectures-2004-kipen — the sadder-not-funnier trajectory five years on; the reader-verdict terror here is the emotional substrate of that event's craft talk.
• infinite-summer-pietsch-editing-ij — Pietsch's editing relationship, here attested from Wallace's side as the third book together with late work on order and inclusion [01:43].
• e-unibus-pluram — the watching-watching metastasis is EUP's spectation anxiety carried from television into face-to-face life.
• IJ text: the Eschaton game (scene 073, pp. 321–342) — Silverblatt's snow-on-the-tongue memory [16:25, 16:39].