Wallace reappears to promote essays (William R. Wineke, Wisconsin State Journal, Feb 23 1997)

TL;DR (plain-language summary)

A brief Wisconsin State Journal profile from the Madison stop of the A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again tour, Feb 23 1997 — Wallace giving the interview flu-ridden in a Sheraton "executive floor" room. It is the near-twin of the same fortnight's Isthmus piece and touches Infinite Jest only in passing — as the tour's real draw: Wallace grumbles that the publisher added Infinite Jest readings just as its paperback appeared ("so I think they got me"). The one interpretively useful strand is Wallace's clearest statement of why he prefers fiction to nonfiction: accurate nonfiction inevitably hurts the real people it portrays, so "I would rather write fiction where you can get at the truth but where you aren't writing about living people." The rest is Midwest-vs-New-York local color and writer's-life temperament. A minor tour-stop piece; value is as a blunt restatement of the fiction/nonfiction-truth boundary. Not in Burn's anthology.

Key claims

• The scene: Wallace, recovering from flu, "sticks a wad of snuff in his cheeks and prepares for yet another interview", rolling his eyes at the hotel's key-card "executive floor". Wineke's opening line: "David Foster Wallace doesn't feel at all good."
• On the writer's life: "It takes a strange temperament to be a writer," Wallace says, then: "You stay cooped up by yourself for years while you work on a book and, then, you reappear for a few weeks, stay in hotels with executive floors and try to be gregarious. Then you disappear again."
• On the tour's real engine: he "told the publisher I wouldn't do a paperback tour", but they added Infinite Jest readings — "they suggested I do some readings from 'Infinite Jest,' too and that just happens to be coming out in paperback, so I think they got me".
• On living in the Midwest over New York: "Out here I enjoy not having to lock my doors"; he lets his two black-lab mixes run; "I never have understood the logic of living in New York City" given that a writer is "basically living on a fixed income" against a sky-high cost of living.
• On the essays (the ASFT collection, whose title "comes from a Harper's magazine article he wrote about taking a cruise"): Wineke's own verdict is that "The essays are good because they are accurate", but "Wallace says, he doubts he will do more journalistic essays."
• The core statement — the ethics of accurate nonfiction: "If you are going to write accurately about an experience, you will portray people in a way that may hurt their feelings." On the cruise, as he put it, "They were on the ship to engage in a fantasy vacation and I was there to write down what I saw and heard." His conclusion: "I would rather write fiction where you can get at the truth but where you aren't writing about living people."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Wallace prefers fiction to nonfiction because accurate nonfiction necessarily harms the real people it portrays — fiction reaches the truth without that cost

• Crux: nonfiction-fictionalization (also bears on nonfiction-persona)
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] the harm thesis: "If you are going to write accurately about an experience, you will portray people in a way that may hurt their feelings."
  • [author] the asymmetry of consent: on the cruise, "They were on the ship to engage in a fantasy vacation and I was there to write down what I saw and heard."
  • [author] the preference: "I would rather write fiction where you can get at the truth but where you aren't writing about living people."
• Notes: oeuvre-scoped (the nonfiction): the truth-vs-real-people problem at the heart of the nonfiction, stated in its bluntest form. This is the same material the Isthmus interview gets a fortnight earlier; where Isthmus dwells on the elitism backlash, Wineke gets the plain fiction-is-safer conclusion. The in-source counter-current is Wineke's own verdict that "The essays are good because they are accurate" — the piece asserts the mode's value in the same breath that Wallace renounces it. (The accuracy-praise is the journalist's narration, not a Wallace quote.)

Themes

Nonfiction ethics and the fiction/nonfiction boundary (accurate portrayal that hurts real people; the retreat to fiction); the writer's life and temperament (the cooped-up/reappear/disappear rhythm; fame as an intermittent ordeal); place and the literary economy (the Midwest over New York; the writer on a "fixed income"); the book tour driven by the Infinite Jest paperback reissue.

Cross-references

• isthmus-laskin-1997 — the near-twin from the same Feb 1997 Madison tour fortnight; the two are one tour stop seen twice, Isthmus on the elitism backlash and Wineke on the plain fiction-over-nonfiction conclusion.
• wiley-minnesota-daily-1997 — the same-month Minnesota interview from the same ASFT tour, carrying the fuller entertainment/irony material this brief profile omits.
• dfw-last-interview-expanded — a career-spanning interview anthology (1987-2008) that corroborates the tour-weariness and the fiction/nonfiction stance.
• burn-conversations-with-dfw — this profile is not among the 22 pieces Burn collected.

Notable passages

Verbatim from the archived profile. Locators are 1-indexed line numbers in wisconsin-state-journal-wineke-1997.txt (see the note on the scheme below). Direct DFW quotation is marked (DFW); otherwise the span is Wineke's prose.

• (Wineke) "David Foster Wallace doesn't feel at all good." [L18]
• (Wineke) "sticks a wad of snuff in his cheeks and prepares for yet another interview" [L24-25]
• (DFW) "It takes a strange temperament to be a writer" [L26]
• (DFW) "You stay cooped up by yourself for years while you work on a book and, then, you reappear for a few weeks" [L26-27]
• (DFW) "they suggested I do some readings from 'Infinite Jest,' too and that just happens to be coming out in paperback, so I think they got me" [L34-35]
• (DFW) "Out here I enjoy not having to lock my doors." [L40]
• (DFW) "I never have understood the logic of living in New York City." [L43]
• (DFW) "If you are going to write accurately about an experience, you will portray people in a way that may hurt their feelings." [L54-55]
• (DFW) "They were on the ship to engage in a fantasy vacation and I was there to write down what I saw and heard." [L57-58]
• (DFW) "I would rather write fiction where you can get at the truth but where you aren't writing about living people." [L58-59]
• (Wineke) "The essays are good because they are accurate." [L52]