A Conversation with David Foster Wallace

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TL;DR

The canonical statement of DFW's aesthetic, given mid-composition of IJ (he was drafting "the Project" — his own name for the second novel, as D.T. Max reports — 1991-93). Nearly every thematic machine in IJ — fiction as cure for loneliness, TV/entertainment as anesthetic, irony as a cage, art-as-seduction vs. art-as-gift — is articulated here as explicit program, three years before the novel appeared. Read alongside E Unibus Pluram, which ran in the same RCF issue.

Key claims

Fiction's purpose: "Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being." Half its job is to dramatize what makes the contemporary U.S. hard to be human in; the other half is to dramatize that we still can be human.
The loneliness thesis: serious fiction gives a reader "marooned in her own skull" imaginative access to other selves; if we identify with a character's pain we can imagine others identifying with ours — "we become less alone inside." This is the exact mechanism IJ's AA sections dramatize (Identify, don't Compare).
TV diagnosis: TV's sole raison is to be liked; it rewards passive spectation and works to "help us deny that we're lonely," supplying "the facsimile of a relationship without the work of a real relationship" — an anesthesia of "form." Our dread of loneliness and relationships is a sub-dread of being trapped in a self, i.e., of dying alone. Real art fiction's job is to aggravate that sense of entrapment so it can be countenanced. The Entertainment in IJ is this diagnosis literalized: perfect passive pleasure that dissolves the self.
Irony critique (continuous with E Unibus Pluram): postmodern irony was liberating for debunking 50s-60s hypocrisy but has become "an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication... Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving"; he cites "irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage." Names Barth/Coover/Burroughs/Nabokov/Pynchon as the "patriarch for my patricide"; Leyner and Limbaugh as "the nineties' twin towers of postmodern irony, hip cynicism, a hatred that winks and nudges you and pretends it's just kidding."
Against Ellis-style nihilist mimesis: "In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness."
The seduction trap: an artist dependent on being liked develops hostility to the audience ("look-at-me-please-love-me-I-hate you") — the love-hate dynamic of seduction. DFW admits this in himself: gags, data-bludgeoning, setting up expectations to disappoint them. IJ's difficulty (flash-cuts, withheld connections, endnotes) is the declared alternative: forcing the reader to do "her share of the linguistic work" so reading becomes a full human relationship rather than spectation.
Metafiction post-mortem: recursion "gets empty and solipsistic real fast"; "Westward" was his attempt to detonate metafiction ("Metafiction's real end has always been Armageddon") and "out of the rubble reaffirm the idea of art being a living transaction between humans, whether the transaction was erotic or altruistic or sadistic."
Wittgenstein and solipsism: the Investigations is "the single most comprehensive and beautiful argument against solipsism that's ever been made"; language is possible only as a function of relationships between persons. This is the philosophical underwriting of IJ's communication theme (Hal's final unintelligibility; "I am in here").
Biography of the "click": math-logic prodigy, crisis at twenty, discovered the aesthetic "click" in fiction via Barthelme's "The Balloon"; good art comes from "the part of you that loves the thing" not "the part that just wants to be loved" — the writer must "be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow."
The reader as co-author: post-structuralism's useful residue for him is that once the text is done "The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes" — relevant to IJ's projected-beyond-the-frame ending.

Themes

Entertainment/irony (the essay-level program for the samizdat and for IJ's tone); communication/solipsism (Wittgenstein, fiction as anti-loneliness tech); addiction (TV as anesthetic, pleasure as teleological end — "pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself"); the seduction/love-hate dynamic that maps onto Himself's filmography and Joelle; death and self-entrapment.

Cross-references

E Unibus Pluram: same RCF issue; the interview opens by discussing it ("a try at a comprehensive diagnosis, not an apology").
Salon interview: the post-publication restatement — "lostness," AA's banal-but-true clichés, fiction making us "feel unalone."
The Unfinished: D.T. Max quotes this interview repeatedly as the key to Wallace's project; dates it 1991.
Characters/scenes: the Entertainment (perfect passive pleasure), Hal's E.R.-frame opening (failure of communication), AA's anti-irony pedagogy, Marathe/Steeply on choosing one's idols, Himself's anti-confluential films (suppression vs. assertion of mediating consciousness).

Notable passages

"Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being."
"We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside."
"One thing TV does is help us deny that we're lonely. With televised images, we can have the facsimile of a relationship without the work of a real relationship."
"Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage."
"Really good work probably comes out of a willingness to disclose yourself, open yourself up in spiritual and emotional ways that risk making you really feel something. To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow."