Live with David Foster Wallace, Author of Infinite Jest (WORD e-zine live chat)

source

TL;DR (plain-language summary)

A live chatroom Q&A DFW did on Word.com's "The Habit" on 17 May 1996, three months after Infinite Jest came out. DFW types under the handle dfw while about a dozen participants heckle, riff, and occasionally ask real questions; the register is jokey and chaotic (a running carbuncle bit; a Marisa who at one point shouts "ASK DFW!!!!"). Because it is DFW's own typed words it is quotable, chat typos and all. Its single most important payload for this archive: this is almost certainly the primary source of the "beyond the right frame" ending statement — the one bounding author-quote the ending debate leans on, which the archive currently holds only secondhand (Swartz quotes it as "May 1996 Live Online"). The chat also carries live-1996 DFW on irony's function ("to protect the speaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental"), on redemption ("Maybe nothing. I fear it's not for me to decide"), on Hal as the answer to a participant's ask for the book's "purely inactive" hero, and on why the avant-garde filmography is in the book.

Capsule (who / when / where / what)

Who: David Foster Wallace (handle dfw), fielding questions from chat participants (handles: Marisa, Keats, Herb, Joshua S., raining sheep, iczy, talula, koleko, duddy, Tristero, DaleK, jr, billygoat1, Avrill, et al.). Hosted/moderated loosely by "Marisa" (who reads as a Word.com staffer).
When: 17 May 1996, ~4:00 PM EST start (Keats counts down "T minus … till 4:00 PM EST"). IJ was published 1 Feb 1996, so this is early publicity-era, pre-paperback.
Where: Word.com's "The Habit" section, a live web chatroom (DFW: "I'm not sure where I am. How does one denote locations in cyberland or whatever this is?"). Archived here as a lynx text dump of the deadword.com mirror.
What ground it covers: irony/sincerity as a cultural condition; the ending ("there is an ending as far as I'm concerned"); why the filmography is in the book; Hal as the inactive hero; redemption and Dostoevsky; Gaddis/McElroy/Pynchon name-checks; his own worst character flaw; the Mold Thing (raised, unanswered — he is cut off by the modem timer).

Theories & evidence

THEORY: There is a determinate-ish ending, but the reader must project it "beyond the right frame"; if the projection fails, the book has failed for that reader

Cruxes: ending-missing-year, designed-holes
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [author] "there is an ending as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an 'end' can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you." [L594-605]
Notes: Provenance finding. This is, to the word, the archive's canonical "right frame" bounding quote — the same text credited elsewhere in the archive to "May 1996 Live Online, preserved at the top of the Swartz essay" and independently attributed the same way in the Swartz source note. This WORD chat (Word.com, 17 May 1996, a live online chat) is the plausible original venue; the archive has only ever held it secondhand via Swartz. Two upgrades this note supplies: (1) a primary-source home for the quote; (2) a third sentence not carried in the canonical form — the failure clause "If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you" — which sharpens the statement from "the reader projects the end" toward "the projection is the reader's obligation, and its failure is a reading-failure, not a book-failure." The chat splits the sentence across two dfw messages (the modem cut him off mid-word between "occur" [L597] and "ed to you…" [L605]); rejoined as written above, his spelling "occured" preserved cite-as-written (not corrected to "occurred"). No support-judgment offered here.

THEORY: Contemporary irony's main function is self-protection — it shields the speaker from being read as naive or sentimental — and is therefore corrosive to the earnest, "funny and very sad" register IJ aims at

Crux: eup-connection (also bears on irony-vs-recovery, sincerity-definition, cynicism-naivete)
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [author] "I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect the speaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental." [L310-313]
- [author] irony "attenuates emotion. 'IJ' is at least SUPPOSED to be both funny and very sad." [L273-275]
- [author] "irony and hip ennui are extremely authoritarian … And that's paradoxical, since hip irony gained much of its cultural momentum through being an engine of rebellion." [L492-494]
- [author] on self-flattering advertising: "advertising that makes fun of itself is so powerful because it implicitly congratulates both itself and the viewer (for making the joke and getting the joke, respectively)." [L376-378]
Notes: This is the E Unibus Pluram thesis stated live and off-the-cuff, three months after publication and just over nine months before the Wiley interview restates it at length (see wiley-minnesota-daily-1997). DFW does not here claim IJ executes the EUP program in so many words; the crux tag marks the author-intent link, not a structural claim about the novel.

CONNECTION: DFW names Hal the book's "purely inactive" hero

Crux: hal-condition
Early text: n/a (interview) — participant Keats: "So which hero in IJ is the purely inactive one?"; dfw: "Keats -- Hal." [L692, L707]
IJ echo: Hal's passivity / inertness as his defining condition; a live-1996 author gloss aligning Hal with inaction (adjacent to the Hamlet-inaction frame Wiley's article draws out). Not a mechanism claim about what broke Hal.
Weight: shared-preoccupation
Notes: Answer is a single word inside a jokey exchange; weight it as an authorial characterization, not an argument. In the surrounding exchange DFW ducks the hero framing ("it would depend what you meant by "hero." Furilloesque hero, or McGarretesque hero, or cat.her., or what?") and separately asks Herb to be "more explicit" about a live-with-them-vs-watch-them question, so "Hal" is offered only against Keats's narrow "purely inactive" prompt.

CONNECTION: DFW declines to locate IJ's redemption and rules out Dostoevskian Christian redemption as still usable

Crux: salvation-spectrum
Early text: n/a — Herb asks what is "redemptive" about IJ (citing hope in Gately); dfw: "Maybe nothing. I fear it's not for me to decide." Then: "Dostovski meant 'redemption' in a pretty specific Christian way. I don't think we now can use the word the same way." [L273, L277-278]
IJ echo: the Gately/AA salvation question; DFW positions redemption as reader-decided and semantically unavailable in its old Christian sense — an author-intent datum for the salvation-spectrum reading, adjacent to his refusal to adjudicate the ending.
Weight: shared-preoccupation
Notes: cite-as-written "Dostovski" (his typo). Pairs with his separate Village-Voice Dostoevsky essay, name-checked by participant "koleko" in the same chat.

CONNECTION: The Mold Thing raised as an "unsolvable puzzle" — DFW gives no answer (cut off)

Crux: mold-significance (also bears on designed-holes)
Early text: n/a — Joshua S.: "There are a lot of half- and unsolvable puzzles in the book, like the Mold Thing. Was your intention, among other things, to comment on the futility of puzzle solving?" [L759-762]
IJ echo: the childhood mold-eating crux and the wider designed-holes reading (puzzles as deliberately unsolvable). No authorial response exists — the question lands in the last minutes and DFW is cut off by the Word.com modem timer. Recorded as a sighting of the puzzle-futility framing, not as an author statement.
Weight: shared-preoccupation
Notes: Logged per the mentions-still-get-counted rule; the absence of an answer is itself the datum (do not read DFW's silence as assent).

Themes

Irony / sincerity (the chat's spine: irony as self-protective, emotion-attenuating, authoritarian, and the fear of being made a fool of — DFW's own typed version runs "why is being maade a fool of such a Great Horror right now?"); entertainment and the self (advertising that flatters the viewer; Keats's closing sign-off gag — "if you see a room with a bunch of people sitting in their own filth and staring at a screen … don't go in"); communication / solipsism (the one-hand-clapping / egolessness riff; "It's what we breathe"); the ending and closure (the right-frame statement); redemption / recovery (the Gately/Dostoevsky exchange).

Cross-references

swartz-ij-ending and the-ending — primary-source upgrade: both hold the "right frame" quote only as "May 1996 Live Online" quoted through Swartz; this note is the plausible original venue and adds the failure clause.
wiley-minnesota-daily-1997 — the sibling new interview: Wiley (Feb 1997) restates the same irony thesis at length and supplies the entertainment-lethality (wirehead) material this chat only gestures at.
burn-conversations-with-dfw — NOT in Burn's 22 pieces (checked); no duplication. But Burn's Donahue 1996 ("hum and project," p. 72) and Goldfarb 2004 ("resolves … outside the right-frame," p. 145) are the two later author-statements that corroborate this chat's earlier and more explicit right-frame formulation.
e-unibus-pluram and mccaffery-1993-interview — the irony-as-self-protection material is the EUP thesis in compressed live form.
dfw-last-interview-expanded — Stivers (Stim.com, May 1996) is the same-month companion interview; the two are the best paired snapshot of publicity-era DFW on entertainment and irony.
Characters/scenes: Hal (the "purely inactive" hero, in Keats's phrase); the JOI filmography ("that's the kind of films that the Dad makes"); the Entertainment (the closing "don't go in" gag — Keats's sign-off, not DFW's).

Notable passages

Verbatim; cite-as-written (chat typos are DFW's own). Locators are 1-indexed line numbers in the archived lynx dump dfwtrans.txt (see apparatus).

"there is an ending as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an 'end' can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you." [L594-605]
"I don't think irony's meant to synergize with anything as heartfelt as sadness. I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect the speaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental." [L310-313]
"The worst thing about irony for me is that it attenuates emotion. 'IJ' is at least SUPPOSED to be both funny and very sad." [L273-275]
"irony and hip ennui are extremely authoritarian, I think -- so yes. And that's paradoxical, since hip irony gained much of its cultural momentum through being an engine of rebellion." [L492-494]
"Well, Marisa & Keats, it's in there because that's the kind of films that the Dad makes." (on the avant-garde filmography) [L201-202]
"Maybe nothing. I fear it's not for me to decide." (on what is redemptive in IJ) [L273]
"My worst character flaw that I'm conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It's paralyzing and boring for people around me." [L616-618]
"the point is to empty your mind of conscious cognitive thought. Become like the surface of a pond. Clap with only one hand." [L230-231]