An Interview with David Foster Wallace (David Wiley, Minnesota Daily A&E — full transcript)

TL;DR (plain-language summary)

The full (~5.4k-word) transcript of David Wiley's February 1997 interview with DFW, done on the A Supposedly Fun Thing tour and later reposted on Wiley's blog "A Certain Slant" at greater length than the print A&E Magazine version. It is essentially a live, extended gloss on "E Unibus Pluram": irony as a once-rehabilitative mode gone toxic, fiction that must work "both ways" (referential and recursive), and TV as the water we swim in. For this archive the load-bearing new material is DFW explaining the Entertainment's lethality on Larry Niven's "wire-head" model ("wire-heads die … it's like sustained orgasm") and volunteering that "a lot of it got cut out" of IJ; his Pynchon accounting (the Steeply/Marathe Brockengespenst shadow scene is "an outright allusion" to Gravity's Rainbow, but Mondragon/Bodine are not Pynchon allusions); and his deflation of the title ("a long encomium to the dead father … multivalent, but it's not particularly profound. I'm not very good at titles"). Interviewer-published transcript = quotable with light care. Not in Burn's anthology.

Capsule (who / when / where / what)

• Who: David Foster Wallace, interviewed by David Wiley for The Minnesota Daily's A&E Magazine. Wiley had been publishing reviews since 1995, when he was an undergraduate.
• When: conducted 12 Feb 1997; published 27 Feb 1997 (the blog repost dates itself the same). ASFT was just out; IJ's paperback had just appeared. DFW is 34 ("what it feels like emotionally to be thirty-four in this country").
• Where: Minneapolis, on the ASFT promotional tour. The archived copy is the blog full-transcript (longer than the print magazine cut), preceded on the page by Wiley's own review-essay.
• What ground it covers: irony/satire toxicity and the EUP thesis; whether novelists must engage TV (and which writers do — DeLillo, Gaddis, Vollmann, Powers vs. Updike, late Pynchon); metafiction (recursive vs. referential fiction; Barth/Gass); Ozick appreciation; and then IJ directly — the title, art-vs-entertainment, the movie's lethality (wire-heads), and the Pynchon-allusion question.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: The Entertainment kills on the "wire-head" model — direct pleasure-center stimulation that makes the viewer stop eating/drinking, "like sustained orgasm" — and much of IJ's explanatory apparatus for this was cut

• Cruxes: entertainment-lethality, ij-cuts
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] Larry Niven's wire-heads as the model: they "jack into your brain, and you will be able to have a system whereby you can plug it into a wall and have your pleasure-center stimulated … wire-heads die. Because they don't eat or drink or anything. I mean it's like sustained orgasm." [L606-614]
  • [author] "There's a lot of this stuff in [Infinite Jest], but a lot of it got cut out." [L608-609]
  • [author] he read Niven only after finishing the book and worries "everybody's going to think I ripped him off" [L612-613]
  • [author] on whether he'd watch it: "I don't think that I would do it, but I think what I would do is I would arrange to have a lot of friends around me who would keep me from doing it." [L634-636]
• Notes: DFW frames the film's lethality as continuous with a real technological trajectory ("maybe not in my lifetime but in yours"), i.e. wire-head pleasure-jacking, not a magical property — bearing on the "continuous with real TV/tech" side of entertainment-lethality. The cut material is the wire-head / p-terminal / VR stratum; this is author-side corroboration of the cuts story (cf. the 400→100-pages endnote figure in dfw-last-interview-expanded, Stivers 1996). "[Infinite Jest]" is Wiley's bracketed insertion in the transcript, not DFW's word — flagged so the audit doesn't read the brackets as scare quotes.

THEORY: IJ enacts the E Unibus Pluram program — irony began as a rehabilitative, hypocrisy-exploding mode but has hardened into a self-protective "song of a bird who enjoys being in the cage," and serious fiction must work against it while still engaging the culture

• Crux: eup-connection (also bears on irony-vs-recovery, sincerity-definition)
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] Lewis Hyde's figure, adopted: "irony after a while becoming the sound of prisoners who enjoy their confinement. The song of a bird who enjoys being in the cage." [L199-201]
  • [author] irony is not the enemy in itself: "Irony itself is fantastic. It's one of the primary rhetorical modes. It's been around forever. It's intensely powerful. There's nothing wrong with it." — the toxicity is "the cultural use to which it's put and how pervasive it is." [L213-214, L261-263]
  • [author] the corrosion mechanism: earnestness "opens you up to ridicule," so the safe move is the self-protective ironic pose; "the great terror is not that you're gonna hit me or that you're gonna disagree with me, it's that you're gonna make fun of me." [L252-260]
  • [author] fiction must work "both ways" — neither pure recursion (the Gass/Barth school that sees "fiction as essentially a recursive mechanism") nor naive realism ("Imagine, dear reader … and I don't believe that shit either"). [L485-517] In the later Ozick answer he warns that writing about writing "can very easily collapse into a pose and a game. You're just turning a crank on a certain kind of mechanism." [L549-558]
• Notes: This is the fullest lens-era restatement of the EUP thesis in the two new interviews; the WORD chat (word-ezine-1996-chat, May 1996) gives the compressed version nine months earlier. DFW explicitly disclaims a programmatic/reformist aim ("I'm not an advocate for cultural change … I'm talking like a private citizen … What I'm mostly trying to talk about is what it feels like emotionally to be thirty-four in this country," L263-267) — carry this as the in-source qualifier so the EUP-execution reading is not overstated as authorial manifesto.

THEORY: The Pynchon debt is real but narrow — the Steeply/Marathe Brockengespenst shadow scene is "an outright allusion" to Gravity's Rainbow, while the Mondragon/Bodine names are not Pynchon allusions, and DFW resists the blanket comparison

• Crux: pynchon-influence
• Stance: advances (with denials attached)
• Evidence:
  • [author] "there's even the use of the word Brockengespenst, which comes out of Slothrop and Geli Tripping [from Gravity's Rainbow] fucking on the Brockengespenst--that's an outright allusion." [L452-457]
  • [author] denial: "Jethro Bodine is from The Beverly Hillbillies. That's not a Pig Bodine thing." [L452] — and "I'm not trying to lace the book with allusions to other texts." [L459-462]
  • [author] biography: the NYT called The Broom of the System a rip-off of The Crying of Lot 49 "like that I hadn't read yet. So I got all pissed, and then I went and read The Crying of Lot 49, and it was absolutely, incredibly good." [L420-424]
• Notes: Counter-current on record (per the counterevidence rule): the same answer that grants one deliberate GR allusion firmly shrinks the Pynchon debt — DFW calls late Pynchon (Slow Learner, Vineland) "the same tired jokes"; more broadly "for the most part Pynchon kind of annoys me," with "his approach to a certain amount of stuff" judged "kind of shallow"; and he reads the pervasive Pynchon-comparison as a sign that "I've failed" (L411-448). So the block supports a bounded influence claim, not a broad one; the Brockengespenst allusion is the single item DFW himself certifies.

THEORY: The title Infinite Jest is "a long encomium to the dead father" and is deliberately multivalent — but the Hamlet/Yorick frame is not, by his account, particularly deep

• Crux: hamlet-frame
• Stance: entertains (with deflation)
• Evidence:
  • [author] "Well, it's supposed to be a long encomium to the dead father. But part of the book is about a culture deciding that the meaning of life consists in experiencing as much pleasure as much of the time as possible … So it's multivalent, but it's not particularly profound. I'm not very good at titles." [L563-566]
• Notes: Author-side counter-evidence for heavy Hamlet-structuralism (recorded per the counterevidence clause): DFW ties the title to the Yorick/dead-father elegy but expressly downgrades its profundity ("not particularly profound," "not very good at titles"). Note that the elaborate Hamlet mapping in the same page's frame (precocious son / sexy mother / dead father replaced by weaselly uncle) is Wiley's own article gloss [L137-140], not DFW's — do not attribute it to the author. This block is thus a soft-pedal on hamlet-frame: the frame is present and intended at the elegiac level, disclaimed at the deep-structural level.

CONNECTION: Serious art must make us confront difficulty; the danger is a pleasure-conditioned culture in which "the commercial stuff's gonna win out"

• Crux: book-as-entertainment
• Early text: n/a (interview) — "really serious art … takes really hard work … That stuff's not fun in the way commercial entertainment is fun. I mean fun--like eating a Twinkie. It's like slipping into a warm bath after a hard day … The danger comes when the escape becomes the overriding purpose." [L570-576]; "serious art is supposed to make us confront things that are difficult … if we get conditioned to confront less and less and experience more and more pleasure, the commercial stuff's gonna win out." [L595-598]
• IJ echo: the book-as-entertainment crux (whether IJ performs or resists the samizdat's logic). DFW frames IJ's own project as the hard-work, confront-difficulty pole against the Twinkie/warm-bath escape pole — an author-intent anchor for reading IJ as the Entertainment's antidote rather than its double, though he does not use the samizdat-mirror framing himself.
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: Kept as CONNECTION, not THEORY: DFW addresses the art/entertainment polarity in general and about the movie Infinite Jest, not about whether the novel is or isn't the samizdat — the load-bearing step of book-as-entertainment is his readers', not his.

Themes

Entertainment and the self (the wire-head lethality model; art-vs-commercial pleasure; the lowered "pain threshold" TV instills); irony / sincerity (the EUP thesis at length; satire divorced from its reformist project; the terror of being "made fun of"); communication / solipsism (fiction that works "both ways"; readers as "college-educated people under fifty" who "know about the linguistic turn"); television / media (the whole first half — TV improving, auteurs, Kafka in a televisual culture); composition (the cut wire-head/VR material; the Pynchon accounting).

Cross-references

• e-unibus-pluram — this interview is a live, paragraph-by-paragraph oral gloss on the essay; DFW dates it "summer and fall of 1990," calls it "a bit dated," and says "the situation is roughly the same." Prime companion.
• word-ezine-1996-chat — sibling new interview (May 1996); the same irony thesis nine months earlier, plus the right-frame ending statement this transcript lacks. Together they bracket the 1996-97 publicity window.
• dfw-last-interview-expanded — Stivers 1996's endnote-cut numbers (400→100 pp.) and Streitfeld's "we kept cutting and cutting" are the same cuts story; Wiley's "a lot of it got cut out" (the wire-head stratum) is a third author-side attestation.
• burn-conversations-with-dfw — NOT among Burn's 22 pieces (verified); no duplication. Burn's Gilbert (1997) and Paulson (2004) replay the irony thesis a half-decade on, and Burn's Crain/ Stein carry adjacent composition lore — corroborative, not overlapping.
• themes/structure-and-hamlet — the title-deflation ("not particularly profound") is a datum against deep Hamlet-structuralism; pairs with Donahue's "designed more like a piece of music" (in Burn) as the author's own soft-pedaling of grand-design readings.
• mccaffery-1993-interview — the recursive-vs-referential / metafiction-as-crank material extends the 1993 statements.
• Characters/scenes: the Steeply–Marathe mountainside shadow dialogues (Brockengespenst allusion); the Entertainment / JOI's film (wire-head lethality); the Incandenzas-as-Hamlet frame (Wiley's gloss, not DFW's).

Notable passages

Verbatim from the transcript half of the archived page (the Q&A, from ~L184 on). Locators are 1-indexed line numbers in wiley-blogspot.txt (see apparatus). Where a line was also printed in Wiley's preceding article, the transcript locator is used.

• "There's a lot of this stuff in [Infinite Jest], but a lot of it got cut out." (on the wire-head material) [L608-609]
• "wire-heads die. Because they don't eat or drink or anything. I mean it's like sustained orgasm." [L612-614]
• "I don't think that I would do it, but I think what I would do is I would arrange to have a lot of friends around me who would keep me from doing it." (would he watch the Entertainment) [L634-636]
• "Well, it's supposed to be a long encomium to the dead father. … So it's multivalent, but it's not particularly profound. I'm not very good at titles." [L563-566]
• "there's even the use of the word Brockengespenst, which comes out of Slothrop and Geli Tripping [from Gravity's Rainbow] fucking on the Brockengespenst--that's an outright allusion." [L452-457]
• "Hyde talks about irony after a while becoming the sound of prisoners who enjoy their confinement. The song of a bird who enjoys being in the cage." [L199-201]
• "Irony itself is fantastic. It's one of the primary rhetorical modes. It's been around forever. It's intensely powerful. There's nothing wrong with it." [L213-214]
• "What I'm mostly trying to talk about is what it feels like emotionally to be thirty-four in this country." [L266-267]
• "The danger comes when the escape becomes the overriding purpose." [L575-576]