MICHAEL SILVERBLATT: Hi, this is Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm. Today my guest is David Foster Wallace, the author of Infinite Jest, recently published by Little, Brown. He is the author, as well, of a book of stories, Girl With Curious Hair, recently put out in paperback, and an earlier book soon to be out or available again called The Broom of the System.
I don't know how, exactly, to talk about this book, so I'm going to be reliant upon you to kind of guide me. But something came into my head that may be entirely imaginary, which seemed to be that the book was written in fractals.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: Expand on that.
MS: It occurred to me that the way in which the material is presented allows for a subject to be announced in a small form, then there seems to be a fan of subject matter, other subjects, and then it comes back in a second form containing the other subjects in small, and then comes back again as if what were being described were -- and I don't know this kind of science, but it just -- I said to myself this must be fractals.
DFW: It's -- I've heard you were an acute reader. That's one of the things, structurally, that's going on. It's actually structured like something called a Sierpinski Gasket, which is a very primitive kind of pyramidical fractal, although what was structured as a Sierpinski Gasket was the first- was the draft that I delivered to Michael in '94, and it went through some I think 'mercy cuts', so it's probably kind of a lopsided Sierpinski Gasket now. But it's interesting, that's one of the structural ways that it's supposed to kind of come together.
MS: "Michael" is Michael Pietsche, the editor at Little, Brown. What is a Sierpinski Gasket?
DFW: It would be almost im- ... I would almost have to show you. It's kind of a design that a man named Sierpinski I believe developed -- it was quite a bit before the introduction of fractals and before any of the kind of technologies that fractals are a really useful metaphor for. But it looks basically like a pyramid on acid --
MS: [Laughs]
DFW: -- with certain interconnections between parts of them that are visually kind of astonishing, and then the mathematical explanations of them are interesting.
MS: All I really know about fractals comes from an essay by Hugh Kenner who leapt up and said, "Oh! Pound did this." And he was trying to suggest that the ways in which material is organized in poetry and elsewhere is extremely unsophisticated, that the patterns of disorder are much more beautiful than the patterns of order, and equally discoverable. When you structure a book in this way, do you mean it to be discovered?
DFW: Yeah, that's a very tricky question, because I know that when I was a young writer I would play endless sort of structural games that I think, in retrospect, were mostly for myself alone; I didn't much care. I don't really -- I mean, Infinite Jest is trying to do a whole bunch of different things at once, and it doesn't make much difference to me whether somebody -- I mean, I would expect that somebody who's a mathematician or a logician or an ACS guy might be interested in some of the fractal structures of it. For me -- I mean, a lot of the motivation had to do with, it seems to me, that so much of pre-millennial life in America consists of enormous amounts of what seem like discrete bits of information coming, and that the real kind of intellectual adventure is finding ways to relate them to each other and to find larger patterns and meanings, which of course is essentially narrative, but that structurally it's a bit different. And since fractals are a more kind of -- oh, Lord -- since its chaos is more on the surface, sort of its bones or its beauty, a little bit more, that it would be a more interesting way to structure the thing. I -- okay, now I'm meandering, but I know that for doing something this long, a fair amount of the structural stuff is for me, because it's kind of like pitons in the mountainside. I mean it's ways for me to stay oriented and engaged and get through it. I don't think I would impose weird structures on the reader the way I would have, say, ten years ago. Does that make any sense?
MS: Yes it does, but I wanted to suggest, at least for me, that the organization of the material, whether or not someone leaps up and says "fractal," or even has heard of fractals, seemed to me to be necessary and beautiful because we're entering a world that needs to be made strange before it becomes familiar. And so it seemed to me that in this book, which contains both the banality and extraordinariness of various kinds of experience and banality of extraordinary experience as well, that --
DFW: And the extraordinariness of banal experience.
MS: Yeah. -- that a way needed to be found, and it thrilled me that it seemed to be structural, that the book found a way to arrange itself so that one knew... You know, for the longest time you would be faced with these analogies. You know, when Ulysses came out, people talked about its musical structures. When Dos Passos's books came out, people talked about film editing.
DFW. Mm hm.
MS: It seems very hard in the last period of years to find a new way to structure a book. The only thing that I know is Barth working with logarithmic spirals --
DFW: Uh huh.
MS: -- to deal with the unfoldings of memory and of seeing things from new perspective at later dates.
DFW: You've got to realize, though, when like, you know, when you're talking to somebody who's actually written the thing, there's this weird Monday morning quarterbacking thing about it. Because I know that, at least for me, -- I mean I don't sit down to try to, "Oh, let's see: what -- how can I find a suitable structural synecdoche for experience right now?" It's more a matter of kind of whether it tastes true or not. And I know that this is the first thing I ever did that I took money for before it was done, because I just didn't have any money and I wanted to finish it. And Michael Pietsche, the editor, said -- I think that he got like the first four hundred pages -- and he said it seemed to him like a piece of glass that had been dropped from a great height. And that was the first time that anybody had ever conceptualized what was to me just a certain structural representation of the way the world kind of operated on my nerve endings, which was as a bunch of discrete random bits, but which contained within them, not always all that blatantly, very interesting connections. And it wasn't clear whether the connections were my own imagination, or were crazy, or whether they were real, and what were important and what weren't. And so I mean a lot of the structure in there is kind of seat-of-the-pants, what kind of felt true to me and what didn't. A lot of the-- I did not sit down with, you know, "I'm going to do a fractal structure," or something --
MS: Mm hm.
DFW: -- I don't think I'm that kind of writer.
MS: So there aren't diagrams? or the diagrams emerged as you went along?
DFW: Ahh ... well, I had -- I mean, I've got a poster of a Sierpinski Gasket that I've had since I was a little boy that I like just because it's pretty. But it's real weird: I'm not -- there's -- I think writing is a big blend of -- there's a lot of sophistication and there's a lot of kind of idiocy about it. And so much of it is gut and "this feels true / this doesn't feel true; this tastes right / this doesn't," and it's only when you get about halfway through that I think you start to see any sort of structure emerging at all. Then of course the great nightmare is that you alone see the structure and it's going to be a mess for everyone else.
MS: Well, what thrilled me about the book is that around two hundred pages in what I felt about it was that it just began to get better and better and better. I started to like it more and more, and look forward to going back to reading it and felt a kind of, I don't know, tenderness toward it, toward both its characters and its narrator, because of the extraordinary effort that was going into writing it. It didn't seem like difficulty for difficulty's sake; it seemed like immense difficulty being expended because something important about how difficult it has become to be human needed to be said, and that there weren't other ways to say that.
DFW: I feel like I want to ask you to adopt me.
MS: [Laughs]
DFW: Because, yeah, this is the great nightmare when you're doing something long and hard, is you're terrified that it will be perceived as gratuitously hard and difficult, that this is some, you know, avant-garde for its own sake sort of exercise. And having done some of that stuff, I think, earlier in my career, I was really scared about it: That the trick of this -- (you know, I've got this whole rant about I think a lot of avant-garde fiction and serious literary fiction that bitches and moans about, you know, readers defection and, you know, and blaming it all on T.V., is to a certain extent bullshit) -- [is] that I think a lot of the avant-garde has forgotten that part of its job is to seduce the reader into being willing to do the hard work. And so doing something like this, there were a lot of fears and one of them was "Oh no, this doesn't make any sense." Another was, "Oh no, this is going to come off as gratuitously long or gratuitously hard." And I don't know, it makes me happy you said that because, yeah, I worked harder on this than anything I've ever done in my life and there's nothing in there by accident and there have already been some readers and reviewers that see it as kind of a mess, and as kind of random, and I just have to sort of shrug my shoulders.
MS: Well it does seem to me that, unfortunately, if you haven't encountered -- if you can't look at a jellyfish and see how miraculously complex it is -- I don't know why it is, but people seem to look at, say, a computer and say, "Well that's the computer, I don't know how it works, but it does--" you know, "--the silly job I give to it." And so they don't know how to look at prose, something man-made or something natural, and see that its beauty is in resolving complexity into a kind of organism -- order.
DFW: And part of that is maybe the fault of some sort of reading culture or something, but part of it is that fiction's got a very weird and complicated job. Because part of its job is to 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 that stuff's inc-- 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; it didn't strike me as gratuitous," because that's, of course, your great hope when you're doing it.
MS: Well --
DFW: Does that make any sense?
MS: Absolutely.
DFW: Okay.
MS: Doubly so, because I have to explain: I first met John Barth when Lost in the Funhouse had just come out. I was a student at Buffalo; Chimera was about to appear. There were, between the Lost in the Funhouse publication and Chimera many, many years of confusion and indecision, and to some extent, although there will never be an influence as great on my life as to be in the presence of that man, I feel in many ways he took a wrong turning, you know?, and that what we see now is two things: a squirming -- the feeling that the turning was so narrowly wrong, that it can be rectified. So you see almost books being written again and again in the attempt not exactly to get them right, but to find out where they went wrong. And the other is the strange quality, and you find it in these, -- your books as well -- that he solved certain of life's problems in ways that he thought life couldn't be solved. He's become happy, he's become uxorious, and he truly loves someone. And this is something that seems to be difficult for fiction that began with a nihilist bent to reconcile.
DFW: Mm. Yeah, one of the things -- now I'm not going to be able to remember the titles -- but there have been short pieces that have appeared recently, there was one in Harpers and there were three in Conjunctions, and it's very interesting to watch this. You're right, the vibe is discomfort at being happy, discomfort about how to write about, you know, sort of "heart craft" and real kind of stuff that in the Sixties I think would have seemed real cheesy and cliché and sentimental, through the kind of filter that he's so very carefully built. When you were talking, the thing that amuses me is the stuff that he's going back and rewriting is for me the stuff that's alive. I mean, for me, all the way, I think, through parts of Lost in the Funhouse I'm with him, and it's starting with Chimera that I think he becomes this sort of Clang Bird that flies in ever diminishing circles, although gorgeously. And I mean he writes some of the best prose in America. But he was a very big deal for me because I sort of broke -- I think I really saw myself as coming out of that tradition, and then in the late Eighties worked on the real long story that's sort of a reworking of _Lost in the Funhouse_ and really think that I came to see that there was nothing but involution and basically masturbation -- for me, anyway -- in that kind of game-playing meta-move intertextual stuff, and I too had a number of years where I didn't write any fiction and really had no idea where to go after doing Westward..., which was the long story.
MS: I'm speaking to David Foster Wallace, the author of Infinite Jest. This may be hard to do, but can you find a way of saying what the difference is between that kind of involution and the complexities of this novel?
DFW: [Whispers]: Boy. [Pause, whispers]: Boy. [Speaks] I probably can't do it and sound very smart or coherent, but I know that -- I guess I, 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 I don't think I really understood what loneliness was when I was a young man. 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-- 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 just something really sad and I wanted to do something about what was sad about America. And there's a fair amount 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 sort of proud of it in a way that I haven't been about earlier stuff is that I feel like 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. 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 [clears throat] faced various darknesses, it's very difficult to understand how precious and rare the sort of thing that art can do is.
MS: It's --
DFW: You're welcome to cut all this out if this just sounds like, you know, a Kraft product or something.
MS: No, no, no. It seems to me -- this is what I noticed, and maybe it's not there. But it seems to me that on the one hand that in Infinite Jest, by my guest David Foster Wallace, there's a very high-tech tennis academy bent on training prodigies. And prodigies can be trained and one might say that the result of such training in the novel might be a novel like LETTERS, by John Barth, and that there's a lot of internal structure, a lot of complicated intertextual exchange, that brilliance is in a way the subject of that novel even while it attempts to blow itself up. It's like the mad scientist who says, "I'm going to take everyone and all of my characters with me!" And then there's another kind of school, it seems to me, that maybe up until around maybe 1973 it was perhaps important to be smart. But then suddenly you looked outside the universities, and you said, "Well these people in the university are not all that interesting, and these people outside the university speak an entirely different language, value entirely different things, and are being blown to bits not by the training to be prodigies, but by the hopelessness of having nothing but addictions to erect structures upon. And so what goes on in this book seems to be that there's a second world, almost like a second chance, that one can be that kind of high performing tennis acrobat or you can completely fall apart and become someone who enters a different set of metaphors which all have to do with something called recovery, in which the book seems in some sense to believe. Am I way off here?
DFW: Yeah, although -- I mean the thing that makes me nervous talking about this is, so far it seems as if people think it really is sort of a book about drug addiction and recovery and, you know, intentional fallacies notwithstanding, what was really going on in my head was something more general like what you were talking about before, that there is a kind -- that some of the sadness that it seems to me kind of infuses the culture right now has to do with this loss of purpose or organizing principles, something you're willing to give yourself away to, basically. And that the addictive impulse, which is very much kind of in the cultural air right now, is interesting and powerful only because it's a kind of obvious distortion of kind of a religious impulse or an impulse to be part of something bigger. And, you know, the stuff at the academy is kind of weird because, yeah, it's very high-tech and it's very "become technically better so you can achieve x, y, and z," but also the guy who essentially runs the academy now is a fascist, and, whether it comes out or not, he's really the only one there who to me is saying anything that's even remotely non-horrifying, except it is horrifying because he's a fascist. And part of the whole -- part of the stuff that was rattling around in my head when I was doing this is that it seems to me that one of the scary things about sort of the nihilism of contemporary culture is that we're really setting ourselves up for fascism. Because as we empty more and more kind of values, motivating principles, spiritual principles, almost, out of the culture, we're creating a hunger that eventually is going to drive us to the sort of state where we may accept fascism just because -- you know, the nice thing about fascists is they'll tell you what to think, they'll tell you what to do --
MS: [Laughs]
DFW: -- they'll tell you what's important. And we as a culture aren't doing that for ourselves yet. I know this is somewhat digressive, but that was the only thing that it seemed to me you were missing in the thing about the academy, is kind of, there's an embedded fascist whose status is kind of ambivalent because he's a horrifying figure but he's also to me the only figure there who isn't completely insane in terms of his approach to at least sports.
MS: Now when I first got this --
DFW: I am not Wyndham Lewis, by the way. It's not a pro-fascist book.
MS: [Laughs] And although it may look like The Apes of God,
DFW: [Laughs]
MS: -- it isn't The Apes of God [laughs] in its size and its length. I did want to say that when I first got the book in the mail from its editor -- I got it as a bound typescript, and I immediatly then jumped to the other side of the metaphor of this book, or at least the metaphor I'm suggesting in this book -- I was immediately upset because the author begins by announcing that AA meetings are open to the public and that he's grateful for the people who shared their experience, strength, and hope with him, and that he tells some of their stories in this book, and at first I found myself thinking, "Oh, this is real trouble, he's going to be in real trouble here," and then thinking "Yes, but it's absolutely necessary to tell these stories." That the culture that insists on anonymity and silence is one in which the spiritual principles you're talking about being emptied out of life are being sort of hidden underground, and this book seemed to want to find a trap door through which those things could be incorporated again without embarrassment.
DFW: Mm, I think that puts it very well. I think one of the great ironies is-- I've been to a few different churches, I've been to a few different things. The one place when I was researching this book, the one place where I saw the kind of stuff that seemed to me, at the time anyway, to be important talked about was AA. The great irony is that AA's got this thing called The Twelve Traditions, the eleventh of which is that any member of AA can't identify themselves on the level of press, radio, and film. Which means, really technically, somebody to write a book like this that's got a lot of AA in it, you can't be an AA member. Which is one reason why I was very lucky that the city that I was doing the research in, Boston, like seventy-five percent of its meetings were open. So you could just totter in off the street, fork over a buck, and kind of settle back and...anyway...
MS: But I'm curious. This begins to describe one of those double binds that this books seems to like to structure around its characters, that the only way you can be part of a spiritual community is not to be part of it. There's a very funny one, I think the first one where I began to put an exclamation point. A teacher is giving a class an exam in dysfunctional double binds and tells the class to imagine that they are (a) on the one hand kleptomaniacs and have as a raison d'etre the need to get out and steal, steal, steal, but on the other hand, they're agoraphobics and are afraid to go out and steal, steal, steal, and you think Oh what a great double bind! And the person beginning to answer this essay question in gender-neutral terms is starting to write about mail fraud, and you just rub your hands together and say This is the kind of delicious complexity and comedy the book is capable of. But why the double binds?
DFW: I think it's hard to talk smartly about it. It seems to me that most of the stuff in my own life and in my friends' life that's interesting and true involves double binds or setups where you're given two alternatives which are mutually exclusive and the sacrifices involved in either seem unacceptable. I mean ... [aspirates in rapid staccato "tch-tch-tch-tch..."] I mean, one of the big ones is, the culture places a huge premium on achievement. I mean, I went to like this real hoity-toity college and, as you know, and everybody's like now a millionaire on Wall Street. Anyway -- how both to work hard enough and invest enough of yourself really to achieve something and yet retain the sort of integrity so that you've got a self apart from your achievement. I mean, even something as banal as, you know, The modern woman can have it all: she can have a family and a deep fulfilling relationship with her children while being, you know, a CEO of a successful company. I mean, it's as if the culture is some Zen teacher, you know, whacking us no matter what we do. It's very interesting. I'm not really quite sure why we set it up that way. I'm also -- I gotta tell you, I'm worried these answers are just sounding totally insane. They're great questions, but it just seems to me like a lot of this is stuff that we could talk about for three hours.
MS: Well, the pleasure about the book, Infinite Jest, is that it does feel like a book that invites the beginning of a conversation, that the book is long enough, involved enough, rich enough, deep enough, and moving enough to begin to feel like a dialogue. That you could go back and talk to the book in the form of reading it again, because I did -- I'm halfway through it a second time. And, of course, the second time 'round, you know things that you couldn't have known the first time through, and so the book is like getting to know someone well.
DFW: That -- I mean, yeah, it's designed to be a book -- I mean this is probably a little pretentious to write a book this long and have it be designed to be read more than once. That, for me, wasn't the thing that was really hard and really scary, the really hard and really scary thing was trying to make it fun enough so somebody would want to. And also how to have it be fun without having it be reductive or pandering or get co-opted by the very principles of commercialism and, you know, "like me, like me, like me," that the book is partly about. And that stuff was real migraine-producing.
MS: I've been speaking to David Foster Wallace on the occasion of the publication of Infinite Jest. Thank you for joining me.
DFW: Thank you.