IJ study archive

DFW on Whad'Ya Know? with Michael Feldman — PRI, Madison WI (April 5, 1997)

source

TL;DR

A 22-minute phone spot on a live public-radio comedy quiz show: Wallace calls in from Bloomington, Illinois, before a Madison audience, six weeks after A Supposedly Fun Thing came out. The register is banter — Feldman needles, Wallace volleys — and the ground is almost entirely the essay collection: state fair, cruise, David Lynch, tennis. The yield is accordingly thin and mostly biographical color, and this note is short on purpose. But three exchanges earn their keep: an on-tape account of what the footnote apparatus is for (a doubled consciousness, a call-and-response on the page) plus the 1997 self-declared footnote ban; a defensive claim that at least 20 percent of both books was cut by him and his editor; and a flat denial, when teased about the baton-twirler carnage, that any of it was made up. IJ itself is touched only glancingly — the host's ten-pounder intro, a voice-of-a-generation anecdote, and the footnote fight. ASR transcript: paraphrase only, no quotation; the mp3 opens with a much-later Feldman retrospective intro that is not 1997 tape.

Key claims

  • The occasion. Feldman introduces Wallace as the most talked-about young author in the country, holds up Infinite Jest as what the business calls a ten-pounder, admits he is only about an inch into it, and brings Wallace on by phone from Bloomington [00:00:46–00:01:32]. Wallace asks whether there are really people there; Feldman jokes the crowd is digitized sound effects; Wallace says his nervousness has now tripled [00:01:32]. He later admits he had listened to the show beforehand and got anxious about the quiz element until reassured he would not be quizzed [00:08:46].
  • Fame, sized honestly. The number of people whose lips discuss literary stuff is small enough that his fame is roughly equivalent to a small-market TV weatherman's, so he is bearing up surprisingly well [00:02:46]. The Gen-X label is silly on its face: born 1962, he is demographically a baby boomer [00:03:28]. On a radio show, a caller asked whether he was the voice of a generation apropos Infinite Jest — and since Generation X's defining trait is the absence of any shared voice or unity, the question undoes itself [00:04:53]. He represents nothing except, he jokes, early middle-aged onset [00:04:53]. (The why-do-we-pigeonhole answer — too much information, so we categorize everything including ourselves — sits in an exchange where the ASR does not mark speakers; attribution between host and guest is uncertain there [00:04:10].)
  • The Harper's method. Most of the essays were for Harper's, which he calls fiendishly clever for giving no instructions at all — just go and do the best you can — so that he gets really anxious, and a fair portion of the wit is that anxiety converted [00:04:53–00:05:31]. He repeats the mechanism for the cruise: no instructions, terror of failing, and therefore really close attention to everything [00:15:24]. Asked whether the fair assignment demanded a witty ironic thing about Midwestern yokels for Eastern readers, he concedes that was kind of the stance adopted in the piece, while denying that it treated the Midwest with any special meanness [00:05:31].
  • Footnotes, endnotes, and the ban. Feldman asks why a 700-some-page book needs footnotes at all; Wallace corrects him — endnotes, actually — twice, and says there are fairly good reasons for them beyond sounding pretentious [00:06:12, 00:06:53]. The essays written before he started Infinite Jest have no footnotes, and the notes get more and more extreme as the collection goes on; they got addictive, he lost control of them, and he has personally declared a footnote ban going forward — nothing against footnotes as such [00:06:53]. The positive case: after this interview a second voice in his head will start listing everything he should have said; most of his consciousness is doubled like that, and a footnote is a way to get that double consciousness, a kind of call and response, onto the page — balanced against the irritation quotient of making the reader slog, on which some people have suggested he overshot the mark [00:07:35].
  • The cuts, defended mid-banter. Needled about whether he ever throws anything away or just footnotes it, he protests that he throws a surprising amount away [00:06:53, 00:08:07], and that at least 20 percent of both books was cut by him and the editor — he gets irked when reviewers suggest the work is padded or first-draft [00:08:07–00:08:46].
  • State fair color. The baton-twirler damage was not made up — the worst injuries came when top-row spectators caught a baton and fell onto the rows below [00:08:46–00:09:14]. The highlight was clogging, which he expected to be slow Jed Clampett stuff and turned out to be very fast and very cool — like Riverdance without a hideous Michael Flatley ego figure out front, or country tap dancing on methamphetamine [00:09:14–00:09:52]. The Sky Coaster seemed designed to mimic a near-death experience; its rider looked picked out of the crowd for looking wrong — aviator glasses and loafers suggesting the East Coast — and was dangled by the feet and swung at about a hundred feet [00:10:35–00:11:10]. The fair held three crowds that never mixed: the husbandry people, the midway people, and the expo people with the joke toilet paper and the crude t-shirts [00:11:10–00:11:46]. The 4-H kids really do sleep with their animals in the barns, up at four for training; the horror was the string-tie judges from meat companies buying the winners, with no sign on the kids' faces that they knew — which lent the whole thing its tragic air [00:12:22–00:12:58].
  • Carnies and chickens. Asked whether anyone has done the carny book, he cites Harry Crews's Biography of a Place material (surname ASR-garbled as Cruz) as the nearest thing [00:12:58]. For a couple of days at the fair his companion was an ex-girlfriend whose considerable good looks got the carnies chatting freely; in him they showed little interest, and he was not about to brandish press credentials at them [00:13:34]. He has chicken issues — he was pecked — and could not do the chicken barn, saying the subject is one he cannot broach unless someone supportive is on hand [00:13:34–00:14:05].
  • Slaughterhouse date. He lives near a slaughterhouse; the second date with his current girlfriend was watching a cow get slaughtered, after which he got sick and she suggested breakfast. He can no longer eat red meat but gleefully eats chicken; they are still together and the quality of the dates has increased [00:14:05–00:14:46].
  • The cruise. The piece's object, on his account: say what a cruise is like, and — since the cruise is the ultimate fantasy vacation — say something about Americans' relationship to pleasure; he immediately mocks his own description as incredibly lame [00:15:24–00:16:02]. His personal problem: he cannot have fun when someone grabs him by the lapels and screams that fun is being had, and the ship is staffed with Julie McCoy-style figures whose whole job is high-wattage exhortation — so he sticks his lower lip out and resolves not to have fun to show them [00:16:02–00:16:42]. Every legal and moral fun venue was available, some cheesy (the electric slide, borscht-belt stand-up) and some genuinely fun; there was an entire art auction of Leroy Neiman prints — prints, not originals — and the bidding was spirited [00:16:42–00:17:25].
  • David Lynch. A hero, though an odd kind of one: he dislikes some films, but the ones he likes he likes a whole lot [00:18:02]. What made the Lynch assignment agreeable was never having to talk to him — he orbited from ten feet and says he would have immediately wet himself had Lynch approached [00:18:02]. Lynch is pretty completely unironic, a man for whom keen is the highest praise, which makes it weird to set his manner against homicidal dwarves eviscerating people onscreen [00:18:37]. He was enthusiastic about the Lost Highway rough cut, but saw the finished film a couple of weeks ago and thinks it is kind of a dink, so he looks a bit stupid in the essay — the paperback, he deadpans, will have a few more footnotes [00:19:17]. On the Richard Pryor cameo: theoretically apt in a film about identity, since this both is and is not the Pryor we remember, but it just seems mean — he bets Pryor thought he was hired to act, not to be a damaged object for theoretical scrutiny. There is a coldness and meanness in Lynch he dislikes and that also fascinates him, because sadism viewed from a safe remove is something audiences enjoy; the films work on you the way dreams do, making you vulnerable without your knowing why [00:19:52–00:21:03].
  • Tennis. His game is not that strong — he got hurt in his late twenties and is less mobile than he would like, but still plays for fun. Learning the game in rural Illinois meant playing it as it lies: the cracks in the court and, above all, the wind [00:21:03–00:21:39].
  • Midwest banter. Illinoisans draw a sharp distinction between themselves and Wisconsin people, and the feeling is mutual [00:01:32]; he grew up in Champaign, went to school out of state, and holds for Champaign-Urbana against the newer Urbana-Champaign ordering, which he suspects won on poetic scansion [00:02:11–00:02:46].

The host's questions (paraphrased)

For the interview-questions compilation: Feldman's questions, in order, paraphrased. Comic crosstalk makes some attributions approximate; items flagged where the ASR leaves the asker uncertain.

  1. Are there actually people there with you? — asked by Wallace of the host, about the studio audience; inverted from the usual direction [00:01:32].
  2. You're Midwestern, aren't you — was Northern where you went to school? [00:01:32–00:02:11]
  3. When did they change Champaign-Urbana to Urbana-Champaign — which order do you say? [00:02:11–00:02:46]
  4. Now that the literary world is talking about you, how is the fame treating you? [00:02:46]
  5. Does it get tiresome, being made to stand for one generation or another? [00:03:28]
  6. Did they call Mark Twain the representative of his generation — isn't demographic pigeonholing a modern preoccupation? — raised by Wallace; the do-you-want-the-joke-or-the-serious-answer reply and the information-overload guess that follows are ambiguously attributed [00:04:10].
  7. A Supposedly Fun Thing — mostly written for Harper's? [00:04:53]
  8. Is the brief, when a magazine ships you off to the state fair in Illinois, to return with something arch and knowing about rural Midwesterners for readers back East? [00:05:31]
  9. In a book that already runs 700-some pages, what are footnotes even for — couldn't all of it have been worked into the text? [00:06:12]
  10. Does anything you write ever actually get discarded, or does it all just land in a footnote? [00:06:53]
  11. You're not like the diarist who logs everything, including his stools, for forty years? (a callback to a past show guest) [00:08:07]
  12. The baton twirlers — did a spectator really catch one in the groin? Was that the fair's highlight, or the crane ride? [00:08:46, 00:09:14]
  13. Is there clogging in Wisconsin? (to the audience as much as the guest) [00:09:52]
  14. The Sky Coaster guy they dangled — did they know he was from the East Coast? [00:10:35]
  15. The fair crowds — the husbandry people versus the midway city folk; and the 4-H kids who sleep with their heifers (Feldman's own riffs, offered for confirmation) [00:11:10, 00:12:22]
  16. Is the carny book still waiting to be written? And did the piece bring you into acquaintance with any carnies? [00:12:58, 00:13:34]
  17. The chicken barn — you couldn't do it? You were pecked? [00:13:34]
  18. Are you still going out with her? (the slaughterhouse-date girlfriend) [00:14:05]
  19. What's your take on this rampant irony sweeping the country? — self-aborted; Feldman retracts the question as too ironic to ask [00:14:46]
  20. The cruise — was the object to find out just how much pampering you could stand? [00:15:24]
  21. What fun is there on a ship — Arthur Murray-style ballroom dancing? [00:16:42]
  22. Is Lynch a hero of yours? (after Feldman's own story of freezing up on meeting Lynch at a Madison party) [00:17:25–00:18:02]
  23. If Lynch isn't ironic at all, what is his take on the things he portrays — the severed ear, the graphic violence against a Black man in Wild at Heart — what are we supposed to think? [00:19:17–00:19:52]
  24. And your tennis — is the game holding up? The Midwestern tennis days, playing the wind and the cracks — true? [00:21:03]

Theories & evidence

THEORY: The footnote/endnote apparatus exists to put a doubled consciousness — a call-and-response — on the page, disciplined against the reader's irritation quotient

  • Crux: endnotes-function
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [author] Wallace explains the apparatus by live demonstration: when this interview ends, a second voice in his head will begin listing what he should have said; most of his consciousness is doubled that way, and a footnote is a way to get that double consciousness, a sort of call and response, onto the page [00:07:35]
    • [author] The escalation account: the essays in ASFT written before he started Infinite Jest have no footnotes, and the notes grow more and more extreme as the collection proceeds; they get kind of addictive [00:06:53]
    • [author] The discipline half: the reader-irritation quotient must be kept fairly low, you have to be careful how much slogging you impose, and some people have suggested he overshot the mark [00:07:35]
    • [author] He insists twice that there are fairly good reasons for the apparatus beyond recording every thought that shoots across his consciousness [00:06:12, 00:08:07]
  • Notes: Comic-defensive register throughout — Feldman is teasing (why footnotes in a 700-page book; do you ever throw anything away), and Wallace twice corrects footnotes to endnotes while defending them. In-source counterweight: he says he has now personally declared a footnote ban and lost control of the device [00:06:53] — a 1997 self-description, not a stable fact about later practice. DFW firsthand on tape, IJ named in the exchange's setup.

THEORY: The cuts were real and substantial — at least 20 percent of both books cut by author and editor — against the padded/first-draft reception

  • Crux: ij-cuts
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [author] Both of those books (in context: Infinite Jest and A Supposedly Fun Thing) had at least 20 percent cut by him and the editor of both, and he gets irked when reviewers suggest the work is padded or first-draft [00:08:07–00:08:46]
    • [author] Adjacent throwaway-discipline claim: he insists a surprising quantity of material really does get discarded [00:07:35–00:08:07]
  • Notes: The figure is offered defensively mid-banter, with no base specified — manuscript pages versus book pages is exactly the page-count discrepancy the archive already flags elsewhere — and it is a percentage, not a page count. Recorded as said; no arithmetic attempted here.

THEORY: The nonfiction reports what happened — the baton-twirler carnage was not invented

  • Crux: nonfiction-fictionalization
  • Stance: rejects
  • Evidence:
    • [author] Asked whether a spectator really caught a baton in the groin, Wallace answers that none of that was made up — this is nonfiction — and elaborates unprompted that the really bad injuries were top-row catchers falling onto lower rows [00:08:46–00:09:14]
    • [author] The essay's fair companion is given a firsthand, matter-of-fact existence: an old girlfriend who accompanied him for a couple of days and could talk to the carnies when they had no interest in him [00:13:34]
  • Notes: Scope caution: the denial covers the twirler material specifically (and by extension the fair reportage), not the nonfiction wholesale — and it is the author speaking in his own defense on a comedy show. Cite-as-written; weighing it against the later fabrication literature is a later pass's job, not this note's.

THEORY: The nonfiction persona is a constructed stance — the anxious ironic Easterner adopted for the piece, with anxiety as the engine

  • Crux: nonfiction-persona
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [author] Asked whether the fair assignment wanted a witty ironic thing about Midwestern yokels for Eastern readers, he concedes that was kind of the stance adopted in the piece [00:05:31]
    • [author] The mechanism, stated twice: Harper's fiendishly gives no instructions, he gets really anxious, and the anxiety translates into wit [00:05:31] — and, for the cruise, the terror of not doing a good piece makes him pay really close attention to everything [00:15:24]
  • Notes: In-source qualification: in the same breath he denies the fair piece was particularly mean to the Midwest — the concession is to constructedness of stance, not to bad faith. The crux's scholarly form (disingenuous expertise-abrogation) goes further than anything said here.

Themes

Entertainment and pleasure (the cruise as the ultimate fantasy vacation and the mandated-fun problem — the essay-side cousin of IJ's pleasure critique, kept in Key claims rather than forced onto an IJ crux); irony and sincerity (Lynch as the wholly unironic artist; Feldman's irony question collapsing under its own irony before it can be asked; Wallace performing wit while describing anxiety as its engine); watching and cruelty at a distance (the Lynch sadism exchange, the meat-company judges); Midwest identity (the Illinois-Wisconsin border comedy, tennis in the wind).

Cross-references

Advances