David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen and Mark Leyner on Charlie Rose (1996)

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TL;DR

The "future of American fiction" roundtable from the IJ publicity season, with DFW, Franzen, and Mark Leyner — the latter the unnamed target of E Unibus Pluram's "Image-Fiction" critique, which gives the panel its real (mostly submerged) tension. DFW's contributions are a compact statement of his whole TV-and-fiction position: television as his generation's "artistic snorkel to the universe," commercial entertainment changing what audiences want from art, and fiction's job as redemptive communication, not just delight. Leyner argues for pure delight; Franzen for the reader-as-misfit.

Key claims

(Panel speech is paraphrase throughout; the one verbatim quote below is print-carried.)

TV as formation: television, he says, was raised into his generation as the main artistic snorkel to the universe; commercial entertainment's sheer pleasure-delivering efficiency changes people's relationship to art — and changes them deeper down, which is exactly the level serious fiction ought to be working at now.
TV occupies subject matter: he essentially can't write a precinct house — television has done so slick a job on them that the screen version sits in his head, and in his reader's head, invited or not.
The constructed reader: he consults himself as audience — a reader whose expectations about narrative art of every kind have been profoundly rewired by the last fifty years.
Against pure delight (contra Leyner): beyond delight there's the part of reading that fills you — redemptive, instructive — the shock of recognizing yourself on the page and knowing you're not alone; fiction as an exchange between consciousnesses, a way of talking about what ordinarily can't be talked about.
The culture's TV double bind: enormous watching rates alongside tremendous cultural contempt — to the point that TV mocking TV is now itself popular TV; the heavy watcher watches while aware something is missing.
His IJ formula: to make something complicated, hard, and weird that is nonetheless seductive enough that the reader will do the work — and a joke that he's Franzen and Leyner run through a blender.
Reading habits: avant-garde fiction has, in his phrase, relinquished the field — current art fiction reads as academic, cloistered, made for critics and Ph.D. students, and "hellaciously un-fun"; he feels more strongly about that than about anything television does.
Franzen's reader thesis (useful foil): serious readers as a-priori outsiders, people who read because the surrounding society isn't giving them everything they need; DFW pushes back on the strong version.
Stray biography: a rare on-air recovery aside — he's catching up on the reading he skipped while getting high and screwing around, a chapter he declares finished.

Themes

Entertainment/irony (TV's pleasure-efficiency and self-mocking loop); communication/solipsism (fiction as exchange between consciousnesses); seduction vs. difficulty (the IJ design problem); audience and loneliness.

Cross-references

E Unibus Pluram: this panel is EUP staged as conversation — image-fiction, TV-watching-TV, the snorkel; Leyner's presence closes the loop on the essay's critique of him.
McCaffery interview: "My God, that's me" = "fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being"; the delight-vs-redemption split is McCaffery's seduction/CPR distinction.
Salon 1996 / Bookworm 1996: same-season statements of the seduce-the-reader-into-hard-work design.
IJ connections: the Entertainment as terminal pleasure-delivery; Himself's anti-confluential films vs. watchable art; ETA students' contempt-plus-consumption of cartridges; Mario as the unironic counterexample.

Notable moments (paraphrase)

Television as his generation's artistic snorkel to the universe.
The recognition shock of reading: seeing yourself on the page and discovering your aloneness was never total.
TV mocking TV as itself popular TV, watched by people aware they're missing something.
Contemporary avant-garde fiction dismissed as "hellaciously un-fun."