A Sleek and Brilliant Monster: David Foster Wallace comes clean (Benjamin Weissman, LA Weekly Literary Supplement)

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TL;DR (plain-language summary)

A phone interview Benjamin Weissman conducted for the LA Weekly Literary Supplement in late April 1999, on the eve of Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. It post-dates Infinite Jest, but three of Wallace's answers are load-bearing for reading the novel's program. He comes clean that his acclaimed nonfiction voice is a constructed persona, not, he says, "as honest as people think it is"; he states the empathy credo at its baldest (fiction as "an artificial enabler of empathy" that lets us "leap over the wall of self"); and he defends difficult fiction against an easy-pleasure culture, saying he buys more of John Gardner's moral-fiction premise than his avant-garde peers do. He also flatly disavows being a metafictionist and positions himself as "the house realist" among the Dalkey Archive experimentalists. Not in Burn's anthology.

Key claims

Wallace calls his nonfiction persona a manufactured effect: the work is not as honest as readers think, since a "certain amount of it is spent developing a kind of persona", including the "blushing, kicking the ground, gosh-golly" pose, which he likens to constructing a first-person narrator. [L89-95]
He states the empathy function of fiction directly — it is "an artificial enabler of empathy" that (in Vollmann's phrase he adopts) "allows us to leap over the wall of self." [L208-211]
He disavows metafiction ("I dont consider myself doing meta-fiction") and says he came up not in a postmodern heyday but "in the age of minimalism and the short-story renaissance, the early to mid-80s." [L134-146]
He positions himself as a reluctant realist among experimentalists: at Illinois State (home of Dalkey Archive Press) he is "almost the house realist," and jokes he feels "biracial" — mainstream publishers think he's "Mr. Weirdo," the true avant-garde think he's "very white bread." [L109-126]
He half-endorses John Gardner's On Moral Fiction: unpopular with the avant-garde now because "I buy more of Gardners premise than a lot of other people do," given that fiction must compete with "more powerful, and less work-intensive" entertainments. [L193-206]
On the state of fiction he demurs at Weissman's framing (metafiction struggling, the deaths of Burroughs, Acker, Hawkes and Gaddis as "the end of an era") and insists difficult writers found real support at major houses — while granting that "culturally, times are hostile to difficult stuff." [L128-170]

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Wallace's celebrated nonfiction "honesty" is a deliberately constructed persona — an engaging, self-deprecating narrative voice, not unmediated confession

Crux: nonfiction-persona
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [author] "I dont think this nonfiction is really as honest as people think it is." [L89-90]
- [author] "A certain amount of it is spent developing a kind of persona or narrative voice" that the reader will like — likened to building a first-person fictional narrator. [L90-95]
- [author] the specific manufactured tic: "this kind of blushing, kicking the ground, gosh-golly I really dont want to say this but I really will." [L91-92]
Notes: This is primary author testimony for the disingenuous-expertise-abrogation reading of Wallace's essay voice — the author himself naming the "gosh-golly" self-abrogation as a constructed, reader-pleasing device. He stops short of calling it dishonest — "I dont know that its dishonest. Its kind of manipulative the same way constructing a narrator in first-person fiction is" [L93-95] — the in-source qualifier.

THEORY: Fiction's core value is the manufacture of empathy — it lets the reader cross into another consciousness, "leap over the wall of self"

Crux: communication-solipsism
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [author] "one of the really neato-keano things about fiction is that its an artificial enabler of empathy." [L208-210]
- [author] he adopts Vollmann's formulation — fiction "allows us to leap over the wall of self" — and calls the effect both aesthetically and morally significant. [L210-212]
- [author] the stakes he assigns it: "How to be a real human being instead of just a very sophisticated animal." [L213-214]
Notes: The baldest interview-era statement of the empathy/anti-solipsism credo the novel's communication theme dramatizes; the same credo appears in nearly the same words in the Portland-panel writeup about a year earlier. He frames it modestly, "assuming we agree on a vague, general meaning of the word moral" [L212-213].

THEORY: Serious fiction must justify itself against an easy-pleasure entertainment culture — Wallace endorses a chastened version of Gardner's moral-fiction demand

Crux: eup-connection
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [author] "Fiction and poetry have always gone against the current, and right now the current is easy pleasure." [L152-153]
- [author] fiction must offer something the easier arts cannot: "Theres got to be some stuff that art-fiction and poetry and essays offer that The Matrix doesnt offer." [L205-206]
- [author] he buys Gardner's premise more than his peers, given that other entertainments are "more powerful, and less work-intensive than fiction", so that "fiction needs to carve out its niche." [L202-205]
Notes: This applies the E Unibus Pluram diagnosis to fiction's own cultural position — difficult art losing audience to ever-more-frictionless pleasure — and pairs it with a moral-fiction (Gardner) justification for difficulty. The in-source pushback runs the other way: it is Weissman, not Wallace, who dismisses On Moral Fiction as "that big, fat bullyish morality trip he pulled on American writers in his book" [L195-196] and calls for a "fly swatter" [L200]; Wallace's Gardner defense is his answer to that dismissal, and he concedes it costs him standing with "the avant-garde crowd" [L202].

Themes

Irony / sincerity (the moral-fiction defense of difficulty; the constructed "honest" persona); communication / solipsism (fiction as empathy machine, the wall of self); entertainment (difficult art versus frictionless "easy pleasure," The Matrix as the competing medium); composition and self-positioning (the metafiction disavowal, the Dalkey-Archive "house realist," the minimalist-era apprenticeship).

Cross-references

wiley-minnesota-daily-1997 — the metafiction disavowal here extends Wiley's recursive-vs-referential material; both push back on the experimentalist/postmodern label.
oregonlive-four-writers-1998 — the empathy credo appears in almost identical words on the Portland panel the year before; the two are the tightest verbal echo in this cluster.
oregon-voice-1998 — the easy-pleasure-versus-difficult-art argument restates, for fiction, the pleasure-culture diagnosis Wallace gives for the whole culture in the Oregon interview.
e-unibus-pluram — the "current is easy pleasure" argument is the essay's thesis turned onto the fate of literary fiction itself.
The novel's communication/solipsism theme (Hal's and Gately's isolation; the empathy the book asks of its reader) — Wallace's "artificial enabler of empathy" is the author-stated aim behind that theme.

Notable passages

Verbatim from the archived interview. Apostrophes were stripped by the web capture (cite-as-written). Locators are 1-indexed line numbers in laweekly-weissman-1999.txt.

"I dont think this nonfiction is really as honest as people think it is." [L89-90]
"A certain amount of it is spent developing a kind of persona or narrative voice" [L90-91]
"this kind of blushing, kicking the ground, gosh-golly I really dont want to say this but I really will." [L91-92]
"one of the really neato-keano things about fiction is that its an artificial enabler of empathy" [L208-210]
"It allows us to leap over the wall of self" [L211]
"How to be a real human being instead of just a very sophisticated animal." [L213-214]
"Fiction and poetry have always gone against the current, and right now the current is easy pleasure." [L152-153]
"Theres got to be some stuff that art-fiction and poetry and essays offer that The Matrix doesnt offer." [L205-206]
"I buy more of Gardners premise than a lot of other people do" [L202-203]
"I dont consider myself doing meta-fiction." [L135]
"the true weirdoes know for a fact Im very white bread" [L126]