by tolerance | 2026-01-26 03:01:17+00:00
In conversation with Michael Silverblatt in 1996 (this is from a machine generated transcript, I’ll do my best to clean up after it’s attempts to parse DFW’s stammering):

> ...I guess when I was in my twenties, like deep down underneath all the bullshit, what I really believed was that the point of fiction was to show that the writer was really smart. And that sounds terrible to say. But I think looking back, that's what was going on. And uh I don't think I really understood what loneliness was when when I was a young man and and now I've got a much less clear idea of what the point of art is, but I think it's got something to do with loneliness, and something to do with setting up a conversation between human beings. And I know that when I started this book I wanted to I—I had very—I had very vague and not very ambitious ambitions. And one was I wanted to do something really sad. I'd done comedy before. I wanted to do something really sad. And I wanted to do something about what was sad about America. And um I—there's a—there's a fair amount of of weird and hard technical stuff going on in this book, but I mean one reason why I'm willing to go around and talk to people about it and that I'm sorta proud of it in a way I haven't been about earlier stuff is that I feel like I—Whatever's hard in the book is in service of something that at least for me is good and important. And it's embarrassing to talk about because I think it sounds kind of cheesy. Um I—I—I sort of think like all the way down kind of to my butthole I was a different person coming up with this book than I was about my earlier stuff. And I'm not saying my earlier stuff was all crap, you know, but it's just it seems like I think when you're very young and until you've sort of uh you know, faced various darknesses, um it's very difficult to understand how—how You're welcome to cut all this out if this just sounds like, you know, a craft product or something.

The part about writing having to "evince some kind of innate investment to the reader that piques their genuine interests and intrigue” is my own interpretation of what I took from interviews between Wallace and Silverblatt on KCRW between 1996 and 2006. Skimming through the entire transcript I have (there’s a 2+ hour compilation of all the interviews on Youtube) this is probably a mixture of remarks made in 1996 (Infinite Jest) [1] and 1997 (A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) [2]. I vaguely remember a remark of his along the lines of the duty of a writer to ‘always let the reader know what the stakes are’. Or something like that.

Another quote from the 1996 interview in attempt to support my previous statements:

> [Fiction’s] got a very weird and complicated job because part of its job is to—is to—teach; Teach the reader, communicate with the reader, establish some sort of relationship with the reader where the reader is willing on a neurological level to expend effort; to look hard enough at the jellyfish to see that it's pretty. And—and that stuff's in that kind of effort is very hard to talk about and it's real scary because you can't be sure whether you've done it or not. And it's what makes you sort of clutch your heart when somebody says, I really like this...

My favorite one may be from the conversation they had in 2000:

> I—I think—I—I—I think somewhere in the late eighties or somewhere some at some point when that sort of minimalist fiction began to pass from vogue It wasn't that the class questions changed, it was that I think the class questions disappeared. And—and questions that were issues that were fundamentally about—about class and inclusion became more for people like maybe my age a little younger, questions of—of corporation, um corporations and consumers and consuming models versus kind of alternative uh homemade quote unquote non—non—corporate transactions. I don't know if this makes any sort of sense. Where I—I know for me a certain kind of smoothness, um, that you could th—that you can identify with resolution, easily identified kind of black and white um heroes and villains, um standard standardly satisfying endings involving the gratification of romance or, you know, epistemological problems. I associate with corporate entertainment whose—whose agenda is fundamentally financial, whose—some—some of and—some of it’s—some of it's quite good. Um but—but its fundamental—its fundamental orientation is um there —there's no—there's no warmth in it toward the reader or no attempt to involve the reader or the audience in a kind of relationship or interaction. It's a—it's a—it's a transaction of a certain kind of gratification in exchange for in exchange for money. [3]

[1] <https://www.kcrw.com/shows/bookworm/stories/david-foster-wal...>

[2] <https://www.kcrw.com/shows/bookworm/stories/david-foster-wal...>

[3] <https://www.kcrw.com/shows/bookworm/stories/david-foster-wal...>