QPB Talks to David Foster Wallace (QPB Review, Sept 1996)

TL;DR (plain-language summary)

A very short (three-question) Q&A from the Quality Paperback Book Club's member magazine, published in September 1996, the year Infinite Jest appeared. Its one load-bearing contribution is Wallace's account of the reader he wrote the novel for: he wanted the book to "sound intimate and conversational, as if somebody was talking right to you", and worked toward a "ghost reader" imagined as himself — roughly 25 to 45, over-educated, "puzzled and confused and overwhelmed," with a good antenna for the culture's noise but little training in making meaning from it. The rest is a brief riff on American cultural homogeneity in the age of the "antenna and a modem." Small but frequently quoted for the "ghost reader" formulation. Not in Burn's anthology.

Key claims

• Wallace names the voice he was after in Infinite Jest: "I wanted the book to sound intimate and conversational, as if somebody was talking right to you", so he carried "a kind of ghost reader for me all the way along."
• He describes that reader as a version of himself: "basically a narcissist, I imagine my reader as being somewhat like me" — "somebody probably between 25 and 45, with too much education, who's sort of puzzled and confused and overwhelmed," and who "has a pretty good antenna for a lot of the stuff that's floating around in the culture but not really much training in how to derive any sort of meaning out of it."
• On place and American culture: he wrote the book while living in Boston and Syracuse and now lives "in a tiny town in the Midwest", but insists location barely matters — "All you need is an antenna and a modem, and you're pretty much in the mainstream." His own town, he says, runs "three or four years behind the East Coast curve in terms of what's hip and what's cool," yet is "just as much in the thrall of hipness hipness and coolness" (the doubled word is the source's; cite-as-written), with people just as anxious about the attitude they project.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Infinite Jest was written toward an imagined "ghost reader" — an over-educated, culturally saturated, meaning-starved near-double of Wallace himself — in a voice meant to sound intimate and directly addressed

• Crux: communication-solipsism (also bears on eup-connection)
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] the aim: "I wanted the book to sound intimate and conversational, as if somebody was talking right to you. So I think there was a kind of ghost reader for me all the way along."
  • [author] the reader's profile: "somebody probably between 25 and 45, with too much education, who's sort of puzzled and confused and overwhelmed, and has a pretty good antenna for a lot of the stuff that's floating around in the culture but not really much training in how to derive any sort of meaning out of it."
  • [author] the self-modeling: "basically a narcissist, I imagine my reader as being somewhat like me".
• Notes: this is author-side testimony for the reading that Infinite Jest is built as an act of contact against isolation — the intimate, second-person-ish address as an antidote to the reader's own confusion. The over-educated, antenna-but-no-meaning reader profile also dovetails with the E Unibus Pluram essay's diagnosis of a culturally saturated audience. Wallace offers no counterclaim here; the only self-deflation is the "narcissist" joke about modeling the reader on himself.

Themes

Communication and solipsism (the intimate, directly-addressed voice as a bid for contact; the reader imagined as a fellow-sufferer); the intended reader and authorial voice; media culture and American homogeneity (the "antenna and a modem" mainstream; hipness anxiety regardless of geography).

Cross-references

• wiley-minnesota-daily-1997 — the fuller restatement, five months later, of the same fiction-as-contact program (fiction that works "both ways"); the QPB "ghost reader" is its compressed version.
• word-ezine-1996-chat — the same launch-year (May 1996) source on Wallace's aims for the novel; read together with QPB they bracket the 1996 publicity window's statements of intent.
• nyt-magazine-bruni-1996 — the same year's reception profile; QPB gives the author's stated reader where Bruni gives the reader the marketplace actually assembled.
• themes/communication-and-solipsism — the ghost-reader address is a primary author datum for the fiction-as-connection thread.

Notable passages

Verbatim from the archived Q&A. Locators are 1-indexed line numbers in qpb-1996.txt (see the note on the scheme below).

• "I wanted the book to sound intimate and conversational, as if somebody was talking right to you." [L18-19]
• "there was a kind of ghost reader for me all the way along" [L19-20]
• "basically a narcissist, I imagine my reader as being somewhat like me" [L20-21]
• "somebody probably between 25 and 45, with too much education, who's sort of puzzled and confused and overwhelmed" [L21-22]
• "has a pretty good antenna for a lot of the stuff that's floating around in the culture but not really much training in how to derive any sort of meaning out of it" [L22-24]
• "All you need is an antenna and a modem, and you're pretty much in the mainstream." [L29-30]
• "three or four years behind the East Coast curve in terms of what's hip and what's cool" [L32-33]