Talking With... David Foster Wallace (Oregon Voice, April 1998 — full transcript)

TL;DR (plain-language summary)

A rare full-length Q&A given by David Foster Wallace in April 1998, from his home in Bloomington, Illinois, in the wake of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and roughly two years after Infinite Jest. Though it post-dates the novel, it is the richest of the small 1998-99 regional interviews for reading Infinite Jest: Wallace lays out the pleasure-culture thesis the book dramatizes (that America is the first culture rich enough that it "can kill ourselves with pleasure"), names the novel's emotional genesis (privileged thirty-year-olds who are unhappy though "none of us had ever been hungry"), and answers the endurance question point-blank ("I don't think anything that I've done will last"). He also confirms the HBO option (he took the money himself, "gleefully") and hears — as news to him — of a reported 157-page screenplay of Infinite Jest, and reaffirms that art exists to say "stuff that can't be said- except indirectly." It speaks directly to the novel's core preoccupations; the fame and book-industry material is period context.

Key claims

• Wallace frames American life through an unprecedented relationship with pleasure: no prior culture (he excepts "maybe for royalty in medieval times or in ancient Rome") had the surplus to "kill ourselves with pleasure", so ours is "testing parts of the human psyche that haven't been tested yet" — his stated interest is less drug addiction per se than free will and whether the culture assumes the point of life is maximal pleasure. [L48-64]
• He gives the novel's emotional genesis: it grew from watching a cohort of privileged, healthy, successful thirty-year-olds be unhappy anyway, which he found "sad and true." [L94-108]
• On whether Infinite Jest will be read in twenty years he demurs, then flatly doubts his own permanence: "I don't think anything that I've done will last." [L227-241]
• He confirms the HBO option of Infinite Jest was real (he "gleefully" took the money expecting nothing to come of it) and is hearing of the reported 157-page screenplay for the first time; he doubts anyone wants "a movie of like mostly 1100 pages of people talking" [L261-271].
• On the novelist's role and fame: literary notoriety is small ("about as much attention as a popular local TV weatherman"); the death-of-the-novel question shows the questioner "co-opted by a very modern idea which is a lie" — and anyone declaring the novel dead "in this age of electronic media" is really showing "how much they themselves have been hypnotized." [L110-169]
• He confesses a television habit even without a set — people tape episodes of Ally McBeal for him, "which I have an obsession with the show." [L246-248]
• His stated reason for writing: art is "one of those covers" for "all the really important stuff to talk about" that "can't be said- except indirectly." [L287-291]

Theories & evidence

THEORY: America is the first culture with enough surplus that pleasure itself becomes lethal — the Entertainment's logic is continuous with a real cultural condition, not a science-fiction contrivance

• Crux: entertainment-lethality
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] "we as a culture have a relationship with pleasure that's unprecedented," a surplus earlier cultures lacked "because they're just trying to get enough to eat" [L48-53].
  • [author] the danger is that "we can kill ourselves with pleasure in a way that other cultures haven't" — a new test for the psyche. [L52-55]
  • [author] the underlying question of the work is "whether really the point of life is to experience as much pleasure as possible" and "whether, in fact, America is under that assumption." [L62-64]
• Notes: This is the culture-side of the lethality reading — Wallace grounds the Entertainment's fatal pull in a real relationship with pleasure rather than a magic cartridge, i.e. the film's danger is continuous with real television, not a science-fiction contrivance. In-source qualifiers: he excepts "maybe for royalty in medieval times or in ancient Rome" from the unprecedented-surplus claim [L49-50]; he disclaims authority up front — "I don't claim to be a sociologist or a cultural critic" [L48] — and hedges the whole diagnosis ("I'm sorry if that sounds like a bunch of rubbish", L107-108), so this is offered as a private citizen's intuition, not a thesis he defends.

THEORY: Infinite Jest executes the E Unibus Pluram diagnosis — a media-saturated culture of maximal pleasure produces a privileged generation that is nonetheless unhappy, anxious and impotent

• Crux: eup-connection
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] the book's genesis: "The genesis of that book was people about age 30 who have been incredibly lucky career-wise" and yet unhappy — "All of us having similar friends and all of us seeming to be unhappy when none of us had ever been hungry for a day, or cold." [L98-101]
  • [author] the material backdrop: "We have 500 channels of television. Americans enjoy a standard of living with a degree of excess that's really unprecedented in history." [L102-104]
  • [author] he ties the novel's reputation as "sad and true" to this diagnosis of unearned unhappiness. [L94-96]
• Notes: Wallace names the affective core the novel shares with the essay — surplus, television, and the puzzle of an unhappy privileged cohort — without using the word "irony"; the EUP linkage here is the pleasure/television/ malaise complex, not the irony-mechanism specifically. He immediately undercuts the diagnosis himself — the unhappy cohort might just be "a bunch of ungrateful, self-absorbed whiners" [L106-107].

Themes

Entertainment and the self (the pleasure-surplus thesis; television as compulsion even for a man without a set); addiction (reframed as a free-will/ pleasure problem rather than pharmacology); communication / solipsism (writing as the "cover" for what "can't be said- except indirectly"); the American character (an "odd combination of exhibitionism and weird self-conscious fear of other people's judgment"); fame and the book industry (literary notoriety as weatherman-scale; publishers as profit-seeking conglomerates; the death-of-the-novel claim as self-hypnosis).

Cross-references

• e-unibus-pluram — the pleasure/television/malaise diagnosis here is the interview-era restatement of the essay's argument, in the emotional register rather than the irony-mechanism register.
• wiley-minnesota-daily-1997 — the closest sibling: Wiley (Feb 1997) gives the "wire-head" lethality mechanism, where this Oregon Voice piece gives the cultural condition that mechanism literalizes; together they bracket Wallace's pleasure-lethality thinking either side of the ASFT tour.
• oregonlive-four-writers-1998 — the same season's Portland panel, where Wallace gives the companion book-as-work claim that the novel's job is to induce the reader to do the work; read together they show the pleasure-diagnosis (here) and the antidote-claim (there) side by side.
• The Entertainment / Infinite Jest's samizdat film — Wallace's "kill ourselves with pleasure" is the author-stated intuition behind the fatal cartridge; the HBO-option remarks bear wryly on a real film adaptation of a novel about a lethal film.

Notable passages

Verbatim from the archived transcript. Locators are 1-indexed line numbers in oregon-voice-1998.txt (see the note on the scheme below).

• "we as a culture have a relationship with pleasure that's unprecedented" [L49-50]
• "we can kill ourselves with pleasure in a way that other cultures haven't" [L52-53]
• "whether really the point of life is to experience as much pleasure as possible" [L62-63]
• "The genesis of that book was people about age 30 who have been incredibly lucky career-wise" [L98-99]
• "All of us having similar friends and all of us seeming to be unhappy when none of us had ever been hungry for a day, or cold." [L99-101]
• "That is the American character. There's this kind of odd combination of exhibitionism and weird self-conscious fear of other people's judgment." [L87-89]
• "I don't think anything that I've done will last." [L239]
• "HBO optioned Infinite Jest for X amount of money, which I gleefully took in the full expectation that nothing would come of it." [L265-267]
• "who wants to watch a movie of like mostly 1100 pages of people talking?" [L270-271]
• "all the really important stuff to talk about is stuff that can't be said- except indirectly" [L288-289]
• "people tape episodes of Ally McBeal which I have an obsession with the show" [L247-248]