david foster wallace television essay

8 David Foster Wallace Essays You Can Read Online

If you've talked to me for more than five minutes, you probably know that I'm a huge fan of author and essayist David Foster Wallace . In my opinion, he's one of the most fascinating writers and thinkers that has ever lived, and he possessed an almost supernatural ability to articulate the human experience.

Listen, you don't have to be a pretentious white dude to fall for DFW. I know that stigma is out there, but it's just not true. David Foster Wallace's writing will appeal to anyone who likes to think deeply about the human experience. He really likes to dig into the meat of a moment — from describing state fair roller coaster rides to examining the mind of a detoxing addict. His explorations of the human consciousness are incredibly astute, and I've always felt as thought DFW was actually mapping out my own consciousness.

Contrary to what some may think, the way to become a DFW fan is not to immediately read Infinite Jest . I love Infinite Jest. It's one of my favorite books of all-time. But it is also over 1,000 pages long and extremely difficult to read. It took me seven months to read it for the first time. That's a lot to ask of yourself as a reader.

My recommendation is to start with David Foster Wallace's essays . They are pure gold. I discovered DFW when I was in college, and I would spend hours skiving off my homework to read anything I could get my hands on. Most of what I read I got for free on the Internet.

So, here's your guide to David Foster Wallace on the web. Once you've blown through these, pick up a copy of Consider the Lobster or A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again .

1. "This is Water" Commencement Speech

Technically this is a speech, but it will seriously revolutionize the way you think about the world and how you interact with it. You can listen to Wallace deliver it at Kenyon College , or you can read this transcript . Or, hey, do both.

2. "Consider the Lobster"

This is a classic. When he goes to the Maine Lobster Festival to do a report for Gourmet , DFW ends up taking his readers along for a deep, cerebral ride. Asking questions like "Do lobsters feel pain?" Wallace turns the whole celebration into a profound breakdown on the meaning of consciousness. (Don't forget to read the footnotes!)

2. "Ticket to the Fair"

Another episode of Wallace turning journalism into something more. Harper 's sent DFW to report on the state fair, and he emerged with this masterpiece. The Harper's subtitle says it all: "Wherein our reporter gorges himself on corn dogs, gapes at terrifying rides, savors the odor of pigs, exchanges unpleasantries with tattooed carnies, and admires the loveliness of cows."

3. "Federer as Religious Experience"

DFW was obviously obsessed with tennis, but you don't have to like or know anything about the sport to be drawn in by his writing. In this essay, originally published in the sports section of The New York Times , Wallace delivers a profile on Roger Federer that soon turns into a discussion of beauty with regard to athleticism. It's hypnotizing to read.

4. "Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise"

Later published as "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" in the collection of the same name, this essay is the result of Harper's sending Wallace on a luxury cruise. Wallace describes how the cruise sends him into a depressive spiral, detailing the oddities that make up the strange atmosphere of an environment designed for ultimate "fun."

5. "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction"

This is definitely in the running for my favorite DFW essay. (It's so hard to choose.) Fiction writers! Television! Voyeurism! Loneliness! Basically everything I love comes together in this piece as Wallace dives into a deep exploration of how humans find ways to look at each other. Though it's a little long, it's endlessly fascinating.

6. "String Theory"

"You are invited to try to imagine what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something. At anything. I have tried to imagine; it's hard."

Originally published in Esquire , this article takes you deep into the intricate world of professional tennis. Wallace uses tennis (and specifically tennis player Michael Joyce) as a vehicle to explore the ideas of success, identity, and what it means to be a professional athlete.

7. "9/11: The View from the Midwest"

Written in the days following 9/11, this article details DFW and his community's struggle to come to terms with the attack.

8. "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage "

If you're a language nerd like me, you'll really dig this one. A self-proclaimed "snoot" about grammar, Wallace dives into the world of dictionaries, exploring all of the implications of how language is used, how we understand and define grammar, and how the "Democratic Spirit" fits into the tumultuous realms of English.

Images: cocoparisienne /Pixabay; werner22brigette /Pixabay; StartupStockPhotos /Pixabay; PublicDomainPIctures /Pixabay

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The Last Essay I Need to Write about David Foster Wallace

Mary k. holland on closing the “open question” of wallace’s misogyny.

Feature photo by Steve Rhodes .

David Foster Wallace’s work has long been celebrated for audaciously reorienting fiction toward empathy, sincerity, and human connection after decades of (supposedly) bleak postmodern assertions that all had become nearly impossible. Linguistically rich and structurally innovative, his work is also thematically compelling, mounting brilliant critiques of liberal humanism’s masked oppressions, the soul-killing dangers of technology and American narcissism, and the increasing impotence of our culture of irony.

Wallace spoke and wrote movingly about our need to cultivate self-awareness in order to more fully see and respect others, and created formal methods that construct the reader-writer relationship with such piercing intimacy that his fans and critics feel they know and love him. A year after his death by suicide, as popular and critical attention to him and his work began to build into the industry of Wallace studies that exists today, he was first outed as a misogynist who stalked, manipulated, and physically attacked women.

In her 2009 memoir, Lit , Mary Karr spends less than four pages narrating the several years in which Wallace pursued her, leading to a brief romantic relationship that ended in vicious arguments and “his pitching my coffee table at me.” Unlike her accounts of the relationship nearly a decade later, Karr’s tone here notably remains clever and humorous throughout. She also follows each disclosure of Wallace’s ferocity with a confession of her own regrettable behavior: regarding his “temper fits” she admits to “sentences I had to apologize for” and assures us—twice—that “no doubt he was richly provoked.” After describing the coffee-table incident, she notes parenthetically that “years later, we’ll accept each other’s longhand apologies for the whole debacle,” as if having a piece of furniture thrown at you makes you as guilty as having thrown it.

Three years later D.T. Max published his biography of Wallace, in which he divulged more shocking details about the relationship with Karr—that Wallace tried to buy a gun to kill her husband, that he tried to push her from a moving car—while also dropping enough details about Wallace’s sex life and professed attitudes toward women to make him sound like one of his own hideous men. Wallace called female fans at his readings “audience pussy”; wondered to Jonathan Franzen whether “his only purpose on earth was ‘to put my penis in as many vaginas as possible’”; picked up vulnerable women in his recovery groups; admitted to a “fetish for conquering young mothers,” like Orin in Infinite Jest ; and “affected not to care that some of the women were his students.”

In a 2016 anthology dedicated to the late author, one of those students, Suzanne Scanlon, published a short story about a student having a manipulative, emotionally abusive sexual affair with her professor (called “D-,” “Author,” and “a self-identified Misogynist”), using characteristic formal elements of “Octet” and “Brief Interviews” and dominated by the narrative voice popularized by David Foster Wallace.

None of these accounts had any visible impact on fans’ or readers’ love of Wallace’s writing or on critics’ readings and opinions of his work. Rather, one writer, Rebecca Rothfeld, confessed in 2013 that Max’s record of (some of) Wallace’s misogynistic acts and statements could not shake her “faith in [his] fundamental goodness, intelligence, and likeability” because his “work seemed more real to me than his behavior did.” Critic Amy Hungerford took the opposite stance in 2016, proclaiming her decision to stop reading and teaching Wallace’s work, but without mentioning his abusive treatment of women or the question of how that behavior presses us to re-read the same in his work.

Another writer, Deirdre Coyle, explained her discomfort at reading Wallace not in terms of the author’s own behavior—which she gives no sign of being aware of—but because of sexual and misogynistic violence perpetrated on her by men she sees as very much like Wallace (“Small liberal arts colleges are breeding grounds for these guys”) and in terms of patriarchy in general (“It’s hard to distinguish my reaction to Wallace from my reaction to patriarchy.” Any woman who has been violated, talked over, and condescended to by this kind of man, the kind who thinks his pseudo-feminism allows him to enlighten her about her own experiences of male oppression and sexual violation, cannot help but sympathize with Coyle.

But in rejecting Wallace because of other men’s sexual violence and misogyny in general, she shifts the argument away from questions about how these function in the fiction and how Wallace’s biography might force us to re-read that fiction, and allows for the kind of circular rebuttal that a (male) Wallace critic offered a year later: not all male readers of Wallace are misogynists; therefore, women should listen to the good ones and read more Wallace; let me tell you why.

These pre-#MeToo reactions to Karr’s and Max’s reports of Wallace’s abuse of women clarify what is at stake as readers, critics, and teachers consider this biographical information in the context of Wallace’s work. For, while Wimsatt and Beardsley’s argument against the intentional fallacy is compelling and important, its goal is to protect the sanctity of the text against the undue influence of our assumptions about the person who wrote it. Arguments defending the importance of Wallace’s beautiful empathizing fiction in spite of his abuse of women threaten to do the opposite.

Like Rothfeld, whose admiration for Wallace’s fiction renders his own misogynistic acts less “real,” David Hering argues that “the biographical revelation of unsavoury details about Wallace’s own relationships” leads to an equation between Wallace and misogyny that “does a fundamental disservice to the kind of urgent questions Wallace asks in his work about communication, empathy, and power”—as if Wallace’s real abuse of real women is not worth contemplating in comparison with his writing about how fictional men treat fictional women. Hering’s use of the euphemism “unsavoury” to describe behavior ranging from exploitation to physical attacks, like his description of Wallace’s work regarding gender as “troublesome,” illustrates another widespread problem with nearly all critical treatments of this topic so far: an unwillingness to say, or perhaps even see, that what we are talking about in the fiction and in the author’s life is gender-motivated violence, stalking, physical abuse, even, in the case of Karr’s husband, plotting to murder.

In the wake of the October 2017 resurgence of Burke’s #MeToo movement, we see a curious split between Wallace-studies critics and others in their reactions to these allegations. Not only does Hering’s response downplay the severity of Wallace’s behavior and its relevance to his work; it also asserts Hering’s “belief” that Wallace’s work “dramatize[s]” misogyny, rather than expressing it—without offering a text-based argument or pointing to the critical work that had already done this analysis and found exactly the opposite to be true.

He also relies on a technique used by memoirists, bloggers, and critics alike in their attempts to save Wallace from his own biography: he converts an example of male domination of women into a universal human dilemma, erasing the elements of gender and power entirely, by reading Wallace’s silencing of his female interviewer’s voice in Brief Interviews as “embody[ing] the richness of Wallace’s work—its focus on the difficulty and importance of communication and empathy, and its illustration of the poisonous things that happen when dialogue breaks down.” Such a reading ignores the fact that when dialogue breaks down between an entitled man and a pressured woman , the things that can happen go beyond metaphorically poisonous to physically sickening and injurious—as so many of the stories in that collection illustrate.

Given the same platform and the same task—celebrating Wallace around what would have been his 56th birthday—critic Clare Hayes-Brady offered “Reading David Foster Wallace in 2018,” mere months after the social media flood of women’s testimonies about sexual violence had begun. It does not mention #MeToo or the public allegations that had been made about Wallace, raising the question of what “in 2018” refers to. When asked several months later “what’s changed?” in Wallace studies, after the public (but not critical) backlash had begun, Hayes-Brady falls back on the same generalizing technique used by Hering. She reframes accusations of misogyny as an entirely academic development, beneficial to Wallace studies and unrelated to #MeToo outcry against perpetrators of sexual violence (“a coincidence of timing”). She equates “flaws in his writing both technical and also moral and ethical,” as if women had been up in arms across Twitter over Wallace’s exhausting sentence structures.

When directly asked if Wallace was a misogynist, she replies “yes, but in the way everyone is, including me,” as if we neither have nor need a separate word for men who do not just live unavoidably in our misogynistic culture but also willfully perpetrate selfish, cruel, and violent acts of misogyny against women. That is, rather than responding humanely to indisputable evidence that our beloved writer was not the saint he would have liked us to think he was (and that we would have liked to believe him to be), Wallace critics—including me, in my silence at that time—refused to allow #MeToo to force the reckoning that was so clearly required. We did so by denying the relevance of his personal behavior to his fiction and to our work, or—worse—by participating in that age-old rape culture enabler: refusing to believe women’s testimony.

Those outside literary studies reacted quite differently to the renewed attention #MeToo brought to these accusations. After Junot Díaz was publicly accused on May 4, 2018, of sexually abusing women, causing immediate public protest, Mary Karr responded by reminding us on Twitter of the abuse she had reported nearly a decade earlier, prompting a series of blog articles and interviews that supported Karr by recounting the allegations made by Karr and Max. They also began to reveal the misogyny that had shaped and stifled public reception of those allegations.

Whitney Kimball pointed out that Max described Wallace’s violent treatment of Karr as beneficial to his creative output and part of what made him “fascinating”; that in praising the “quite remarkable” “craftsmanship” of one of Wallace’s letters, Max notes only in passing that the letter is Wallace’s apology for planning to buy a gun to kill Karr’s husband. Megan Garber noted the misogyny of an interviewer asking Max why “his feelings for [Karr] created such trouble for Wallace”—an example of what Kate Manne calls “himpathy,” or empathizing with a male perpetrator of sexual violence rather than the victim.

#MeToo also began to make the misogyny of Wallace’s work more visible to his readers. Devon Price describes how reading about Wallace’s abuses against women caused them to revisit Wallace’s work and see its gender violence for the first time. Tellingly, Price also realizes that one of the reasons they were depressed when they fell in love with Wallace’s work is that they were then in a physically, emotionally, and sexually abusive relationship. Price’s realization points to another common reason why readers are blind to or defensive about the misogyny in Wallace’s work and behavior, and to a key way in which the #MeToo movement can allow reading and literary studies to illuminate misogyny in synergistic ways: we are often blind to misogyny and sexual abuse, in fiction and in others’ behavior, because we are living in it unaware. And the awareness of the spectrum of sexual abuse brought by #MeToo testimonies reveals misogyny not just in the fiction that we read, but in our own lives—one revelation causing the other.

To date, no new criticism has emerged that directly considers the implications to his work of Wallace’s now widely reported misogyny and violence toward women. But the recent publication of Adrienne Miller’s memoir In the Land of Men (2020), which describes her years-long relationship with Wallace while she was literary editor at Esquire , makes a compelling, if unwitting, argument for the necessity of such biographically informed criticism. Miller documents the connection between Wallace’s life and work in excruciating detail, recounting extended scenes between them in which Wallace speaks and acts nearly identically to the misogynists of Brief Interviews , an identification he encourages by telling her that “some of the interviews were ‘actual conversations I had when I had to break up with people.’”

But though Miller lays out the “sexism” of Wallace’s fiction, especially Jest and Brief Interviews , more baldly than any of us Wallace scholars has so far, she remains, even from the vantage point of twenty years later and post-#MeToo, unable or unwilling to identify Wallace’s treatment of her as abusive or misogynistic. In fact, most shocking about the memoir is not its record of Wallace’s behavior but its methodical and steadfast refusal to acknowledge the gender violence of that behavior, and Miller’s disturbing pattern of normalizing, apologizing for, and denying it.

Ultimately, she attempts to redirect us from the question of whether her relationship with Wallace qualifies as abuse or sexual harassment by asking, “Who looks to the artist’s life for moral guidance anyway?” and “What are we to do with the art of profoundly compromised men?” But rather than neatly pivoting from Wallace’s culpability, these questions reveal important reasons why we must consider the lives of such men in conversation with their art. For these men are not merely passively “compromised” but aggressively compromis ing , in ways that our misogynistic culture obscures, and which savvy investigation of their art and lives can illuminate. And “moral” investigation is particularly indicated by the work of Wallace, who declared himself a maverick writer willing to return literature to earnestness and “love” (“Interview with David Foster Wallace” 1993), who wrote fiction that quizzes us on ethics and human value (“Octet” 1999), and who delivered a beloved commencement speech arguing the importance of recognizing one’s inherent narcissism in order to extend care to others.

What does it mean that this artist could not produce in his life the mutually respecting empathy he all but preached in his work (or, most clearly, in his statements about it)? What does it mean that a man and a body of work that claimed feminism in theory primarily produced a stream of abusive relationships between men and women in life and art? What can we learn about the blindness of both men and women to their participation in misogyny and rape culture, despite their professions of awareness of both? How might reading Wallace’s fiction in the contexts of biographical information about him and women’s narratives about their experiences of sexual violence enable us to better understand—and interrupt—the powerful hold misogyny and rape culture have on our society, our art, and our critical practices?

_____________________________________________________________________

Excerpted from #MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture , edited by Mary K. Holland & Heather Hewett. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Bloomsbury Academic. © 2021 by Mary K. Holland & Heather Hewett.

Mary K. Holland

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A Brand New Interview with David Foster Wallace

This discussion of postmodernism, translation, and the internet has never been published in English

Eighteen years ago, writer and translator Eduardo Lago sat down with David Foster Wallace for a discussion that ranged from pedagogy to tennis to the influence of the internet on literature. The interview remained unpublished until Lago, an award-winning Spanish novelist, critic, and translator who teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, included it in his new book Walt Whitman ya no vive aquí , ten years after Wallace’s death . It has never been published before in English. The conversation has been lightly edited for readability.

Eduardo Lago: I know you’re not teaching right now, but can you talk a little bit about the reading lists of your courses?

David Foster Wallace: Most of what I teach is writing classes where we’re concentrating more on the student’s own writing. When I teach literature classes, I’ve taught everything from freshman literature, where the department will buy an anthology and I will teach them John Updike’s “A & P,” and John Cheever’s “The Five-Forty-Eight,” and Ursula le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas,” “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, a lot of very what I consider to be very standard stories that are in all the anthologies. I’ve tried teaching more ambitious or strange or difficult fiction, but with freshmen and sophomores their preparation isn’t very good and it doesn’t work well. Graduate literature courses are usually themed courses, so what the reading lists are depends a certain amount on how I design the course, as I’m sure you know. I’ve taught a fair amount of Cormac McCarthy, who’s a writer I admire a great deal, and Don DeLillo and William Gaddis. I’ve taught quite a bit of William Gass, but usually his earlier books, and I teach poetry … I’m not a professional poet but I’m an avid reader of poetry, so I teach most of the contemporary poetry that’s available in book form.

EL: Do you consider yourself an accessible writer, and do you know what kind of people read your books?

DFW: That’s a very good question. I think the sort of work I do falls into an area of American fiction that, yes, that is accessible, but that is designed for people who really like to read and understand reading to be a discipline and to require a certain amount of work. As I’m sure you know, most of the money in American publishing gets made in books — some of which I think are very good — that don’t require much work. They’re almost more like motion pictures, and people read them on airplanes and at beaches. I don’t do stuff like that. But of the American writers I know who do some of the more demanding fiction, I think I’m one of the more accessible ones, simply because when I’m working, I’m trying to make it as simple as possible rather than trying to make it as complicated as possible. There’s some fiction that’s very good that I think is trying to be difficult by putting the reader through certain sorts of exercises. I’m not one of those, so within the camp people usually talk about me being one of the more accessible ones, but that camp itself is not regarded as very accessible and I think it tends to be read by people who have had quite a bit of education or a native love of books and for whom reading is important as an activity and not just something to do to pass the time or entertain themselves.

I think I’m one of the more accessible ones simply because I’m trying to make it as simple as possible rather than trying to make it as complicated as possible.

EL: I’ve read in a number of places that you intended Infinite Jest to be a sad book. Can you talk specifically about that aspect of the novel and what else were you intending to do when you started writing it?

DFW: I think what I meant by that was that there are some facts about American culture, particularly for younger people, that seem to me to be far clearer to people who live in Europe than to Americans themselves, which is that in many ways America is a wonderful place to live from a material standpoint, and its economy is very strong and there’s a great deal of material plenty, and yet — let’s see, when I started that book I was about 30, sort of upper middle class, white, had never suffered discrimination or any poverty that I myself had not caused, and most of my friends were the same way, and yet there was a sadness and a disconnection or alienation among I would say people under 40 or 45 in this country, that — and this is probably a cliche — you could say dates from Watergate, or from Vietnam or any number of causes. The book itself is attempting to talk about the phenomenon of addiction, whether it’s addiction to narcotics or whether it’s addiction in its original meaning in English which has to do with devotion, almost a religious devotion, and trying to understand a kind of innate capitalist sadness in terms of the phenomenon of addiction and what addiction means. Usually I would tell people I meant to do it a sad book because when I did a lot of interviews about Infinite Jest all people would seem to want to talk about was that the book was very funny and they wanted to know why the book was so funny and how it was supposed to be so funny, and I was honestly puzzled and disappointed because I had seen it as a very sad book, and that was my attempt to explain to you the sadness that I’m talking about.

EL: How would you define your literary generation?

EL: If you believe in that.

DFW: Can you explain the question a little bit, say who are the writers of the generation?

EL: Perhaps I mean that you belong in a certain age group that has inherited a literary tradition that you are trying to transform somehow. In other words, what are young American writers today like yourself — in a certain type of fiction because there are many different approaches to literature — doing. Do you think you belong in a group where your original work plays a role, or something like that?

DFW: Well, I don’t know. See, when people would ask me that question before it was because I was very young and I was in the youngest generation, and I think there’s probably a whole new generation now. A generation in American fiction is probably every five or seven years. Usually when people talk to me about my work, the other younger writers they lump it in with are William T. Vollman and Richard Powers, Joanna Scott, A. M. Homes, Jonathan Franzen, Mark Leyner. Those are all — I think Powers and Scott are in their early 40s, I’m 38, I think it’s all sort of writers now in their later 30s and early 40s and I think we all started publishing books at about the same time. And that group of younger writers, as I’m sure you know, we’re only a small percentage of the younger writers who are out there. There are plenty of active, productive young writers who do what I think is called Realism with a capital R: the sort of traditional, third person limited omniscient, central character, central conflict, classically structured kind of fiction. I know a couple of the other writers I get lumped in with, whom I just mentioned to you, and if there seems to be something in common, it seems to be that we all, particularly in college, were exposed to a great deal of first of all literary theory and continental theory, and second of all, classic American postmodern fiction, which means Nabokov and DeLillo and Pynchon and Barth and Gaddis and Gass and all these guys. And both of those exposures, it seems, make it constitutionally more difficult to do traditional stuff, because some of the best classic postmodern fiction really, at least for me, exploded or destroyed the credibility of a lot of the sort of conventions and devices that classic realism uses. Nevertheless, I think that what gets called classic American postmodernism — which would be, you know, metafiction or really high surrealistic fiction — has a very limited utility. Its essential task appears to me to be to be destructive — to clear away, to explode a lot of hypocrisies and conventions — but it gets rather tiresome rather quickly. Now that’s being kind of general. I myself personally find John Barth’s first few books interesting and then it seems to me that all he’s done since is work out certain techniques and certain obsessions over and over and over and over and over and over again. I don’t think any of the writers that I’ve mentioned, myself included, are comfortable with the idea of simply doing more of that kind of fiction. On the other hand we’ve all been influenced by it a great deal and I think for a whole lot of different reasons don’t see and understand the world in the way that classic realist fiction tries to capture or mirror.

I think that what gets called classic American postmodernism has a very limited utility.

So I think what I’m trying to say, in a long-winded way, is [that] probably the group I get lumped in with has been heavily influenced by American postmodernism, and of course by European postmodernism too — I mean Calvino — or Latin American writers like Borges and Marquez and Puig. But nevertheless we are also uncomfortable with some of the self-consciousness, and for me in particular some of the intellectualism, of standard postmodernism, and are interested in trying to do fiction that doesn’t seem to be formulaic or “traditional” but nevertheless has an emotional quality to it; is not meant simply to be about language or certain cognitive paradoxes, but is supposed to be about the human experience, what it is to be particularly an American and yet not be a John Updike or John Cheever traditional story.

EL: Just for a brief answer, why does tennis occupy such a space in your writings?

DFW: The biggest reason isn’t very interesting at all: It’s the one sport that I in particular know about. I grew up playing competitive tennis and just know a great deal more about it and follow it more avidly than any other sport. I think aside from one or two essays and Infinite Jest I don’t know that I’ve written anything else about tennis. There are reasons why so much of Infinite Jest has to do with tennis but those aren’t really autobiographical, it just has to do with the structure of the book.

EL: And how is that?

DFW: [groans] I set myself up for that one, didn’t I. You know, a very simple answer would have to do with the idea of constant movement but within a rigidly defined set of constraints and also with the idea of two and twoness and things moving back and forth between two sides in such a way that a pattern is created.

EL: What is the relationship between television and fiction, and have things changed much in the years following the publication of your essay?

DFW: That essay was actually written in 1990 and it didn’t come out until 1993. To be perfectly honest with you, I haven’t owned a television now for probably ten years. I sometimes watch television at friends’ houses and I just don’t know that much about American television anymore. I know that the purpose of that essay was largely to articulate some of the concerns and agendas of myself and some of the other younger American writers I mentioned to you. I don’t know that I could sum up the relationship between television and fiction now in the year 2000 in one or two sentences. I think the interesting answer is that serious literary fiction in America is in a very complicated love-hate relationship and dialogue with commercial entertainment in this culture, which probably is of no surprise to Europeans. It’s not just economic, it’s also aesthetic, and it also has to do with us both trying to produce things and sometimes entertain people but also to be ourselves, a generation who grew up watching television and understanding ourselves as part of an audience. So except from saying that I’m sure they’re still probably fairly closely connected — although now there’s such an explosion in internet technology and the idea of “interactive entertainment” that the relationship is probably vastly more complicated now than it was ten years ago when I wrote that piece.

The internet is almost the perfect distillation of the American capitalist ethos, a flood of seductive choices with no really effective engines for choosing.

EL: That was going to be my next question: how do you think the internet is affecting the art of fiction?

DFW: I think that’s a terrific question. Most of the journalism I read in America right now is interested in how the internet is going to affect the business of publishing. I personally think that the internet represents simply an enormous flood of available information and entertainment and sensations with very little assistance to the consumer in terms of choosing, finding, discerning between those choices and this sort of rabid, capitalist fervor with which the internet is being not just developed but invested in. I don’t have to tell you about the .com stock market explosion and all that. It seems to me, as just a layman and an amateur, that the internet is almost the perfect distillation of the American capitalist ethos, a flood of seductive choices. It’s completely laissez-faire, with no really effective engines for choosing or searching and everybody being much more interested in the economic and material aspects of it than some of the aesthetic and ethical and moral and political questions attached to it. I can’t think of a better summing up of what America’s strengths and weaknesses are right now, and I’m sure that there are writers who are interested in in the internet as a tool in fiction. As far as I can think it’s really only Richard Powers in Galatea 2.2 and he’s got a new book out called Plowing the Dark , which is partially about virtual reality. Powers, who is himself kind of a cyber-scientist, is really the only one who I think found really effective ways to use the web and the internet as an as an actual tool in fiction. I think most of the rest of us are kind of just standing around with our mouths open, amazed that everybody’s so excited about a phenomenon that really is nothing more than an exaggeration of what we’ve had up ’til now.

EL: Do you find any significant parallels between your aesthetics as a writer and the aesthetics of David Lynch as a filmmaker?

DFW: That’s a really good question. I don’t know. I did an article about David Lynch during which I discovered for myself some stuff about him. I think I pretty much decided he was almost a classical expressionist. I think Lynch and art movies in general are working off an almost classically surrealist aesthetic whereby they are going much more sort of by dream associations and literally unconscious stuff than for instance I would be. I think modern postmodern or avant garde fiction or whatever is quite a bit more deliberate and self conscious and claustrophobic than modern American art film. I do know that watching Lynch at his best is exciting for me both as somebody who loves movies and as a writer. I think he’s probably a Great Artist in the capital-G capital-A way. I don’t know that I understand either his or my own aesthetic enough to know. Blue Velvet , that was his big movie for me, came out in grad school and I know there’s a part of that article that talks about how it affected us but I think that it was more about the emotional effect than the aesthetic effect.

EL: Do you consider Infinite Jest your best book?

DFW: I don’t think in terms of best and worst.

EL: Are you working on a novel right now or do you intend to do so in the more or less near future?

DFW: You would have to explain what you mean by “work on.” I tend to work on several things at the same time and most of them fail at some point. I don’t know what the next thing I finish will be.

EL: The direction of my question was if your readers can expect a big book like Infinite Jest , big in all the meanings of the word.

DFW: It is a superstition with me that I do not talk about work that is not finished yet.

I tend to work on several things at the same time and most of them fail at some point. I don’t know what the next thing I finish will be.

EL: Very good. I’m fascinated by your use of footnotes in Infinite Jest and other books. On the one hand one could see them perhaps as a trademark of “academic writing”; on the other, it is a highly original form of innovation a way of restructuring plots, a fragmentary form of storytelling. Do you have a poetics of the footnote, and what would that poetics be like?

DFW: Not really. I started using them for Infinite Jest as a way to create one more sense of doubleness. One of the things that seems to me to be artificial about most fiction is that it pretends as if experience and thought and perception are linear and singular and that we’re thinking and feeling only one way at a certain point in time. You know, some of that is the constraint of the page, and I think to an extent the footnotes are to suggest at least a kind of doubling that I think is a little more realistic. I should point out though that Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman is just one example I can think of [that also uses footnotes], I believe John Updike’s A Month of Sundays as well. I certainly did not invent this. I leaned on it very heavily in Infinite Jest and I think got in a sort of habit of thinking and writing that caused me to lean on it some more. The last couple things I’ve done don’t have any footnotes in them. They’re certainly not a trademark, at least I hope they’re not. I think they just sort of became a compulsion for a little while.

EL: Another very interesting aspect of your work is the use of fictional interviews in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men . Can you talk about the genesis of that idea?

DFW: Oh boy. There was a great deal of the first draft of Infinite Jest that took place in interviews and I think most of that got cut out. I think I like the idea of interviews because I like the idea of a transcript; it reduces everything to voice in a plausible way. There’s some fictions that just have voices talking to you but that always seems kind of mannered to me. This is a plausibly realistic way to represent nothing but somebody speaking and allowing the reader to know and feel about that character entirely through her voice. In a book of short stories that just came out, it’s a little different, because you get only one side of the interview and so one of the things the answers are doing is, hopefully, helping the reader to guess what the questions were and over time to develop an idea of the character and ideology of the of the interrogator, of the questioner. So I don’t know that I have an aesthetic of it; I find it an interesting style. It’s also not one that I invented. I know DeLillo has written at least a couple of short stories that consist entirely of interviews or transcripts, you know, Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” any sort of dramatic monologue has the implication of a sort of conversation of which you’re only hearing part or one side.

EL: I have not not been able to read Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present which I understand you co-wrote with Mark Costello. Could you talk briefly about that book?

DFW: Um, sure! That was a book that was written in the late ’80s which was the time in America when rap music, particularly something called gangsta rap, which is very violent and materialistic and misogynistic, became very popular and also popular with white listeners, and the book is really just a long essay on what it’s like to be white in America and to listen to this music and also to like this music and why white listeners might find something to identify with or or feel strongly about in the music. That’s really all, it was a very small book.

EL: In my interviews with North American writers, I sometimes find that many of them remain very endogamic, they almost exclusively read other American writers and talk about North American literature. Is that the case with you? Are you aware of developments in Europe or in other continents?

DFW: The strange thing, Eduardo, is there’s stuff I have to read for school, there’s stuff I have to read for work and my own work, and there’s stuff I read for fun. I read less contemporary American fiction than I do anything else. Part of it is it’s not helpful in my work, because I don’t want my work to have anything to do with what other people are doing. I don’t find it much fun because I think I read it more critically than I read other stuff I end up reading. I’m not terrifically conversant with developments in European and Latin and Asian fiction but I read probably about as much of it as any other American does. I’m not terrifically comfortable with translations, although Suzanne Jill Levine and [Gregory] Rabassa seem to me to be good enough that I don’t feel too guilty reading Spanish language fiction, although most of the Spanish language fiction I read comes from Latin America.

EL: The book that has just been published in in Spain is Girl with Curious Hair. Do you feel very removed from that book, aesthetically, and the first novel too?

DFW: I didn’t even know that any of my stuff had been published in Spain. I feel pretty removed from anything that’s in translation, because I think that when you’re reading the translation of a book, and I mean absolutely no offense, if [someone is reading] your translation of The Sot-Weed Factor then the readers are really enjoying Eduardo Lago’s book. I think most of this is formed for me as a reader of poetry: if you’re not reading something in the original you’re not reading anything remotely like what the author wrote. There are stories in Girl with Curious Hair that I think are very very good. It also seems to me to be a book written by a very very young man.

EL: Which are the ones you like the best?

DFW: The very first story in there, which is about a game show that I don’t know if people in Spain will have heard of called Jeopardy, is a very very good story, and there’s a story about Lyndon Johnson that I think works very well. There’s a story about somebody having a heart attack in a parking garage that I think must have been hard to translate because it’s mostly one long sentence. I don’t know whether anybody will like it, but that’s more or less a perfect story, I think. And the very last piece in there which is partly about John Barth, I really liked when I did it and then for a few years I didn’t like it at all and was tired of talking about it and I re-read it about a year ago and actually now think it’s very good again. [laughs]

EL: What you did with John Barth, was it some kind of literary exorcism in the sense of what you were saying before: that enough was enough with…

DFW: I think that in some ways that story, or I guess it’s really even a novella, I’m not sure, is meant to carry certain axioms of classic American postmodernism to their logical conclusion. But also to talk about a tremendous sadness and emotion that I think is implicit in really good kind of classic postmodernism that I don’t get the sense that the authors are aware of. So… There was kind of a love-hate thing with Barth there, I had just finished a graduate writing program at Arizona and had sort of very complicated feelings about the idea of MFA programs and “schools” for learning to write fiction. I think if anything that piece for me was more of an exorcism of academic fiction than it was of John Barth in particular. Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, in America it’s this sort of sacred text, kind of Eliot’s “Waste Land” of postmodernism, and it was just probably the easiest thing to write about.

EL: I’m going back briefly to some things that you were saying before. You partially answered the question I was going to ask you, which has to do with your relationship with so-called classical postmodernism in America. You seem to indicate a type of writing which incorporates a good dose of experimentalism but which results in a radically new form of realism somehow, not the typical tradition of realism. What would that realism be like, or is realism even a good term?

DFW: It’s a good question. I feel as if I’m almost the last person who would answer it, though, because, I’m sure you can understand this, working on fiction for me — I mean I think of myself mostly as a fiction writer, but it’s very hard and very scary for me and for the most part I go by whether what I’m working on feels alive to me or not. I don’t even know if can explain that; sometimes it feels alive and real and I feel as if I’m in a conversation with the characters and parts of myself and the reader and it’s just very exciting, and other times it feels false and arch and postured and formulaic. Now, that’s talking about my own work; as a reader I think I get the same sort of sense. The stuff that I really like tends for me to be essentially about emotion and spirituality for people living in America at the Millennium, and yet it’s not stupid or trite or sentimental. It’s emotion and spirituality that has to be earned through tremendous amounts of cognitive processing [laughs] and certainly a great deal of political — boy, see, I’m not answering this well. My real answer to that is that what you just told me would be a good description of the fiction that I like to read. When it’s experimental-looking, I never get the sense that it’s experimental because it’s trying to be experimental or trying to make some sort of coy point about structure. It seems that it’s experimental because that was the one and only inevitable way that the author could convey the dimensions of experience and emotion and cognition that was the story’s world. And what I’m trying to do is describe the fact that there are examples of both classic realism and classic sort of avant garde experimentalism that I truly truly love, and mostly as a reader I try to articulate what it is I love about them. And I think as a writer, that’s certainly what I want in in my own work, but as you’re well aware it’s not a matter of sitting there writing something saying “okay, now what I’m doing is I’m going to go for a certain kind of experimentalism but I want it to seem realistic too.” It’s more how it kind of tastes in my mouth or feels in my stomach as I’m doing it.

The fiction I like to read is experimental because that was the one and only way that the author could convey the dimensions of experience that was the story’s world.

EL: Are you aware of the fact that they are going to publish Infinite Jest in Spanish?

DFW: No, my agent and I have made a deal where I am not told about translations, because if they’re in a language that I can read, I interfere in the translation, and if they’re in a language I cannot read it just drives me crazy and I lie awake at night worrying about that [laughs]. So I just don’t get told.

I wish the translator a lot of luck because I don’t think Infinite Jest is translatable. I think the English is too idiomatic. It’s obviously flattering to have your work translated, but it’s also very scary. Because readers are going to think it’s you.

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David Foster Wallace and the Joy of Irony

July 25, 2022

Raymond Dokupil

Articles , Arts & Culture Articles

“I want to convince you that irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive of those features of contemporary U.S. culture (of which cutting-edge fiction is a part) that enjoy any significant relation to the television whose weird, pretty hand has my generation by the throat. I’m going to argue that irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that, at the same time, they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that, for aspiring fictionists, they pose terrifically vexing problems.” – David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing

“the problem with making yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.” – c.s. lewis, the magician’s nephew, my meditations on irony began with two pieces from david foster wallace. the first was his essay “e unibus pluram: television and u.s. fiction,” written in 1990 and published in 1993. the second was an interview of wallace conducted by a german television station in 2003. while these are by no means considered wallace’s most prominent creative products, they are central to wallace’s philosophy and i will refer to them throughout the course of this essay., wallace died by suicide in 2008, supposedly as a result of being removed from his antidepressant medications. but we do a disservice to wallace’s intellectual struggles if we simply conclude that he “died of depression.” in his 2003 interview, wallace explained his inspiration for infinite jest began with a much deeper problem than his own mental health condition:, “for the upper middle-class in the u.s., particularly younger people, things are often materially very comfortable, and there’s also often a great sadness and emptiness…i started [ infinite jest ] after a couple of people, not close friends, but people i knew, who were my age [and] had committed suicide. it just became obvious that something was going on. and i know that that impulse was part of starting the book.” [1], wallace was interested in what had driven people of his generation to suicide, and in some sense infinite jest was an investigation of that question. but the reader who was not familiar with wallace himself may not have been aware that he was conducting such an investigation. to quote wallace,, “i’m not often all aware of stuff that’s really funny in the book…i set out to write a sad book. and when people liked it and told me that the thing they liked about was that it was so funny, it was just very surprising.”, jennifer frey, professor of philosophy at usc, describes wallace as someone who “wanted to be charles dickens and couldn’t.” [2] frey’s assessment of wallace is not to say that wallace had delusions of grandeur—quite the contrary. if the duty of the novelist is to identify and provide answers to the particular cultural malaise of his own time in accessible and contemporary language, no one took this duty more seriously than wallace. the undertaking of such a project was what defined the success of dickens, austen, tolstoy, dostoevsky, and the like. it just so happens that today’s cultural malaise is apparently in some state can only be described as an addiction to postmodern irony, and this poses an especially pressing problem for artists., the use of postmodern irony originally began not as a philosophical movement but with the “metafiction” of elite avant-garde novelists. but by the time of the 80s and 90s, postmodern irony had become so mainstream that it was appearing on the david letterman show and pepsi commercials. how can novelists provide an anecdote to postmodern irony when the novelists themselves were responsible for developing it wallace saw that there was a serious (if not insurmountable) challenge in using fiction to solve a problem which the whole genre of fiction had itself embraced. he wanted to answer what dostoevsky called “the desperate questions of existence.” but to truly seek the answer, to ask the question as if you really wanted the answer, would be received by modern audiences merely as moralistic finger-wagging. it is now considered banal and unsophisticated to say what you really mean or claim that what you are saying is actually true. this is the way the universe ends, not with a bang, not even with a whimper, but with a perfunctory roar of canned laughter from saturday night live., one might say that the solution to this problem is simply to ignore the cultural riffraff and return to a more classical state of mind. maybe wallace’s problems are merely the product of his own vanity. he wanted to say what he meant and still be considered a relevant turn-of-the-century novelist. but it is not so simple to escape an addiction to a certain habit of thinking. wallace knew that if he simply adopted some higher, more classical form of language, he would risk being branded as another alan bloom type and dismissed as yet another conservative doomsday prophet. the effects of postmodern irony are so ubiquitous that it could almost be described as cancerous on a cellular level, and no one is immune to it, not even conservatives., indeed, the modern disease of cancer is a very appropriate analogy. cancer cells are not harmful when they work for us. they only become a disease when they turn against us. when rationality turns against us, the soul is at civil war. you may try criticizing the disease of postmodern irony, but you cannot wield the critical mind against postmodernism any more than you can run to the police for aid if you are being chased by them. criticism itself is the thing that has gone wrong. our present situation cannot be resolved by returning to classical irony. a more serious operation is at hand., wallace felt that his audiences were so addicted to these habits of thought that there was no other way of writing fiction except in the language of postmodern irony. by most measurements, this project was a failure, and wallace knew it. wallace’s suicide was not just manic depression. one cannot read his work without being haunted by the sobering suspicion that the cause of his suicide was directly related to the fact that he could not resolve the problems he identified in his writing. assuming that wallace’s critiques of u.s. literature are legitimate and not simply the obsessive pessimism of a disgruntled manic depressant, it is incumbent upon us to wrestle with these critiques as if our life depended on them, because for wallace, it did., irony, comedy, and the devil, i am both a drama teacher and a debate coach, which comes as a surprise to many people who see rhetoric and theatrical arts to be as different as apples and oranges. debate is rational, analytical, left-brained (they say) while drama is artistic, creative, visual, spatial, right-brained. in many ways, drama and debate are closer cousins than they appear, but the strangest common attribute they share is the constant recurring character of the devil. the phrase “devil’s advocate” ( advocatus diaboli ) has its origins in the catholic church, but the methodology itself is part of an older tradition rooted in the socratic method (διαλεκτική). if we note the latin and greek origins of “devil” and “dialectic”, we see their kinship on more obvious display. the word for devil is diabolos , meaning “to tear through.” “dialectic” or “dialogue” comes from dialektike, or “to speak through.” one must not forget, however, that playing “devil’s advocate” is just that: playing. it is an ironic stance. the devil’s advocate pretends to believe the opposite of what he really believes in the service of the thesis, with the intention of sharpening and narrowing the interlocutor’s conclusion. but playing the devil is playing with fire, and things do have a way of getting out of control., in the arts, particularly in comedy, there is a similar attraction to “playing the devil.” the comedic opportunities are obvious. there is nothing particularly funny about saying, for example, “i love beyonce,” but put on devil’s horns and say the exact same thing, and it becomes a joke (about which beyonce happens to be the unfortunate victim). the word satan means “accuser” and comedians generate laughter by doing precisely that: accusing. the devil calls black “white” and white “black”—anything the devil condones is, at the same time, a damning indictment. for a comedian, playing the devil is a goldmine for comedy. comedy, like rhetoric, thrives on reductio ad absurdum —a tactic which reveals the ridiculous by seeing the world through the devil’s perspective. rationality, dialectic, comedy, and the devil are all devices in the ironist’s toolkit., of course, i am not saying that comedy is a satanic profession (or am i ha ha, just kidding.) but the comedian’s reputation for being (secretly and ironically) the most depressed person in the room is so well-known now that it is almost a cliché to point it out. the “sad clown” has become a stereotype. it is easy to see why. the ironic stance is liberating and, at the same time, dangerously addictive. it was wallace who pointed out that the original meaning of addict, addicere , meant religious devotion. he continually emphasized the importance of human beings needing to be able to worship something. what was worthy of our worship, however, wallace did not know., humor and violence, it is a given that much of comedy depends on making a jab at another’s expense. there is an implicit violence in comedy which is revealed in our language by the very fact that we call the ironic twist the “punchline.” in film, visual humor is often referred to as a “gag.” being the “butt-end” of a joke calls to mind the picture of being bludgeoned by the end of a spear. when a joke is funny enough you can even say that it “kills you” or that you “died laughing.” i used to write comedy sketches as a teenager and stumbled across this comedic maxim independently of any professional tutelage: pain is funny. this raised for me a rather uncomfortable question. is the postmodern claim true that all language is simply masked violence, we are taught as children that happy people laugh, and sad people cry. but if it is true that all humor depends on some form of violence or cruelty, then the true makeup of the human psyche is much more malevolent than we supposed. in fact, it is entirely malevolence, and the postmodern claim that all speech is violence is true. there is no difference between “wholesome” comedy and “black” comedy—there is only mildly violent and more violent, and your taste for either depends entirely on your tolerance for pain., it is true that we tend to idealize the innocence of children and gloss over certain acts of childhood cruelty which, without discipline, will later develop into undisguised malevolence. an honest interrogation of human nature will reveal to us the unpleasant truth of our own darkness. the same spirit which drives a mean child to pull the wings of a moth may be the same spirit which drives him to torture political prisoners in an internment camp. should we assume that this malevolent spirit composes the whole of the human spirit, many would naturally respond to this accusation by insisting upon the inherent innocence of children. but the cynic can easily blockade any attempt to return to such a paradisal state of mind by dismissing it as sentimentalism. once the accusatory stance has been assumed, it difficult, perhaps even impossible, to go back. irony is caustic: once the punchline has been delivered, the previous perspective dissolves in the light of the (superior) ironic perspective. once the accuser has spoken, we see our nakedness, and are ashamed., c.s. lewis and the devil, c.s. lewis was a master satirist, and it is not an accident that one of lewis’ must humorous works consisted in him playing the devil in the screwtape letters . screwtape, a senior devil instructing his nephew on the ways of damnation, devotes an entire letter to the subject of laughter. screwtape divides the four kinds of laughter into joy, fun, the joke proper, and flippancy. for screwtape, joy is the least desirable form of laughter:, you will see [joy] among friends and lovers reunited on the eve of a holiday. among adults some pretext of jokes [3] is usually provided, but the facility with which the smallest witticisms produce laughter at such a time shows that they are not the real cause. what the real cause is we do not know. something like it is expressed in much of that detestable art which the humans call music, and something like it occurs in heaven—a meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience, quite opaque to us. laughter of this kind does us no good and should always be discouraged. besides the phenomenon is of itself disgusting and a direct insult to the realism, dignity, and austerity of hell . [4], screwtape’s ignorance of joy is key to lewis’s work and provides insight into the plight of the comedian: “what the real cause is we do not know .” lewis, of course, knows about joy, but he must pretend that he does not know, because he is in the ironic position of the devil. the greek root for irony, eironeia, means “feigned ignorance.” if the ironic stance is to play the devil, such ignorance is necessary for the role, for the devil knows nothing of joy. given the nature of irony as such, it becomes clear where comedians go wrong. if you make a career out of playing the devil and become too used to seeing the world from his point of view, there may come a day when the “feigned ignorance” is not so feigned. comedy is cutthroat industry, and the one who wishes to be the king of comedy must be funny all the time . he cannot afford taking off the horns even for a second. if there is no use for joy in his profession, why keep on pretending why not make a faustian deal and become the devil himself the depressed clown is depressed because he pretended to know nothing of joy until he really didn’t. as lewis put it in the magician’s nephew , “the problem with making yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.” [5], fun, says screwtape, is related to joy and is therefore also of no interest to him. any kind of disinterested fun or enjoyment of something, which cannot be proven to really be at anyone’s expense, obviously cannot be very fertile grounds for cultivating vice. the joke proper is a “much more promising field” for screwtape. screwtape defines the joke proper as the “sudden perception of incongruity” and lewis is probably referring to the more formal kind of joke-telling which depends on an ironic twist and a punchline (i.e. “a man walks into a bar…”). the joke proper is about having a “refined” sense of humor, which i find to be much more characteristic of british than of american comedy. the joke proper is the mother of flippancy, and it is flippancy which screwtape holds in highest regard. as an extension of the west, american tends to take british sensibilities to their farthest extremes, and it is not surprising that flippancy has become our primary mode of humor. screwtape says,, flippancy is the best of all…only a clever human can make a real joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. among flippant people the joke is always assumed to have been made. no one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. if prolonged, the habit of flippancy builds up around a man the finest armor against the enemy that i know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. it is a thousand miles away from joy; it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and excites no affection between those who practice it ., at the heart of the problem of postmodern irony is demonic flippancy. this is the cardinal sin of postmodernism which david foster wallace failed to identify. it is impossible to employ postmodern irony as a means to escape flippancy and return to joy. the title of wallace’s novel, infinite jest, meant more than even he realized: it is no accident that hell is described as a bottomless pit. insofar as the western literary tradition has embraced postmodern irony, fiction as an art form is dead. if the novel is to survive, this tradition must be abandoned. only by a total death of this tradition can our culture resurrect the childlike appreciation of disinterested joy., the rediscovery of joy, i argued in part 1 of this essay series that the toddler playing peek-a-boo was the “atomic building block” of laughter. the rediscovery of joy is the most urgent quest of our present age—the “desperate question of our existence.” our call to action, then, is to look to the child. the toddler plays with a narrative in which the mother does not exist, but only in the interest of celebrating her existence. his “irony,” if we are to call it that, is predicated on joy, because the punchline depends not on accusing the solidity of her existence, but on affirming her solidity., joy is a certain quality of being which, by definition, is opaque to the ironic stance, because it is a thing outside of irony. and it is this quality of being which we must somehow return to. we must become as children to enter the kingdom of heaven. we must be born again. the ironist sees at once that such a thing is impossible. “how can one be born again” asks the bewildered rationalist thinker nicodemus. “he cannot enter again into his mother’s womb, can he” jesus answers,, that which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. do not be amazed that i said to you, ‘you must be born again.’ the wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the spirit., nicodemus said to him, ‘how can these things be’, jesus answered and said to him, ‘are you a teacher of israel and do not understand these things truly, truly, i say to you, we speak of what we know and testify of what we have seen, and you do not accept our testimony. if i told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if i tell you heavenly things no one has ascended into heaven, but he who descended from heaven: the son of man. as moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the son of man be lifted up; so that whoever believes will in him have eternal life.’ [6], christ says that we must be born of the spirit to inherit the kingdom. those born of the spirit evade the accusatory stance of the ironist. the ironist cannot “zoom out” over those born of the spirit and accuse them, because they are like wind and their origins cannot be identified. christ as the divine logos is origin itself. christ’s statement leaves the final arbiter of truth in a domain outside of argument, posing problems for both the atheist and the christian apologist alike. even if we were proclaim upon the rooftops, “joy is the final layer of sincerity,” we would not yet have saved ourselves, even if such a statement were true—even if we sincerely say it. irony—or rather, the rational principle—cannot discover joy. if the truth cannot be arrived at by argument, our knowledge of joy depends entirely on revelation. no matter how well the comedian perfects his art, no matter how loud his audience howls and whoops with overtures of approval, he has not come one step closer to creating joy. joy must be revealed to us in a divine action of grace, or not at all. what other choice do we have, [1] wallace, “david foster wallace unedited interview”, 2003, https://www.youtube.com/watchv=iglzwdt7vgc, [2] jennifer frey, “the therapeutic fiction of david foster wallace”, sacred and profane love , 2021, https://sacredandprofanelove.com/podcast-item/ep-32-jon-baskin-on-the-therapeutic-fiction-of-david-foster-wallace/, [3] lewis deliberately capitalizes the word “joke” and “laughter.” i do not know whether this is some british peculiarity or whether lewis has in mind some idea of a perfect platonic joke and therefore capitalizes it for emphasis., [4] the screwtape letters, ch. xi, [5] lewis, the magician’s nephew, [6] john 3:6-15, * see parts 1 and 2 of raymond’s essays here and here ..

Raymond Dokupil is a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He co-hosts a culture and literature podcast: Unreliable Narrators .

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Another Thing to Sort of Pin on David Foster Wallace

By Maud Newton

Aug. 19, 2011

Ten years ago, David Foster Wallace admitted in “Tense Present,” one of his best and most charming essays, to being a “SNOOT,” which he defined as a “really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to look for mistakes in Safire’s column’s prose itself.” He outed himself while writing in Harper’s on Bryan A. Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage, a book, he says, that serves to confirm its author’s “SNOOTitude while undercutting it in tone.”

Ultimately, though, “Tense Present” is as much about Wallace’s own rhetorical postures as about Garner’s, so much so that Wallace might as well be talking about himself. Garner’s book is “so good and so sneaky,” Wallace contends, because it relies on a “subtle rhetorical strategy.” Its “Ethical Appeal” amounts to “a complex and sophisticated ‘Trust me,’ ” one that “requires the rhetor to convince us not just of his intellectual acuity or technical competence, but of his basic decency and fairness and sensitivity to the audience’s own hopes and fears.”

Wallace, too, strived to make ethical arguments while soothing and flattering his readers and distracting them from the fact that arguments were being made. He was inarguably one of the most interesting thinkers and distinctive stylists of the generation raised on Jacques Derrida, Strunk and White and Scooby-Doo, and his nonfiction writings, on subjects as diverse as cruises, porn, tennis and eating lobster, are a compelling, often dizzying mix of arguments and asides, of reportage and personal anecdotes, of high diction (“pleonasm”), childlike speech (“plus, worse”), slacker lingo (“totally hosed”) and legalese (“what this article hereby terms a ‘Democratic Spirit’ ”), often within the course of a single paragraph. As John Jeremiah Sullivan astutely observed in GQ , Wallace repudiated the demands of “the well-tempered magazine feature,” which “seeks to make you forget its problems, half-truths and arbitrary decisions.” Yet Wallace’s rhetoric is mannered and limited in its own way, as manipulative in its recursive self-second-guessing as any more straightforward effort to persuade.

Geoff Dyer, an essayist as idiosyncratic and perceptive as Wallace but far more economical, confessed recently in Prospect magazine that he “break[s] out in a mental rash” when forced to read Wallace. “It’s not that I dislike the extravagance, the excess, the beanie-baroque, the phat loquacity,” Dyer wrote. “They just bug the crap out of me. ” Wallace’s nonfiction abounds with qualifiers like “sort of” and “pretty much” and sincerity-infusers like “really.” An icon of porn publishing described in the essay “Big Red Son,” for example, is “hard not to sort of almost actually like.” Within a brief excerpt from that piece in The New York Times Book Review, Wallace speaks of “the whole cynical postmodern deal” and “the whole mainstream celebrity culture,” and concludes that “the whole thing sucks.” Nor is this an unrepresentative sample; “whole” appears 20 times in the essay, so frequently that it begins to seem not just sloppy and imprecise but argumentatively, even aggressively, disingenuous. At their worst these verbal tics make it impossible to evaluate his analysis; I’m constantly wishing he would either choose a more straightforward way to limit his contentions or fully commit to one of them.

Of course, Wallace’s slangy approachability was part of his appeal, and these quirks are more than compensated for by his roving intelligence and the tireless force of his writing. The trouble is that his style is also, as Dyer says, “catching, highly infectious.” And if, even from Wallace, the aw-shucks, I-could-be-wrong-here, I’m-just-a-supersincere-regular-guy-who-happens-to-have-written-a-book-on-infinity approach grates, it is vastly more exasperating in the hands of lesser thinkers. In the Internet era, Wallace’s moves have been adopted and further slackerized by a legion of opinion-mongers who not only lack his quick mind but seem not to have mastered the idea that to make an argument, you must, amid all the tap-dancing and hedging, actually lodge an argument.

Visit some blogs — personal blogs, academic blogs, blogs associated with some of our most esteemed periodicals — to see these tendencies writ large. My own archives, dating back to 2002, are no exception.

I suppose it made sense, when blogging was new, that there was some confusion about voice. Was a blog more like writing or more like speech? Soon it became a contrived and shambling hybrid of the two. The “sort ofs” and “reallys” and “ums” and “you knows” that we use in conversation were codified as the central connectors in the blogger lexicon. We weren’t just mad, we were sort of enraged; no one was merely confused, but kind of totally mystified. That music blog we liked was really pretty much the only one that, um, you know, got it. Never before had “folks” been used so relentlessly and enthusiastically as a term of general address outside church suppers, chain restaurants and family reunions. It’s fascinating and dreadful in hindsight to realize how quickly these conventions took hold and how widely they spread. And! They have sort of mutated since to liberal and often sarcastic use of question marks? And exclamation points! “Oh, hi,” people say at the start of sentences on blogs, Twitter and Tumblr these days, both acknowledging and jokily feigning surprise at the presence of the readers who have turned up there.

Wallace isn’t responsible for his imitators, much less for the stylized mess that is Gen-X-and-Y Internet syntax. The devices can be traced back to him, though, if indirectly; they were filtered through and popularized by Dave Eggers’s literary magazine and publishing empire, McSweeney’s, and Eggers’s own novels and memoirs, all of which borrowed not only Wallace’s tics but also his championing of post-ironic sincerity and his attempts to ward off criticism by embedding all possible criticisms within the writing itself. “There is no overwhelming need to read the preface,” Eggers wrote in “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”; in fact, after “the first three or four chapters” the book “is kind of uneven.”

The ur-text of this movement, though, is Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” written in 1993. It’s a call for writing that transcends irony and detachment but, itself, comes drenched in both. The essay bemoans what Wallace saw as the near-impossibility of writing inventive, self-aware fiction in a television culture. He concludes by imagining some future group of “literary ‘rebels’ ” who would be “willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs . . . [and] accusations of sentimentality, melodrama.”

In its soaring romanticism, its Orwellian fears, its I’m-just-riffing-here backtracking and its infuriating absence of question marks following interrogatories, this essay prefigures many of the worst tendencies of the Internet. As the Times critic A. O. Scott has observed , Wallace “wants to be at once earnest and ironical, sensitive and cerebral, lisible and scriptible , R&D and R&R, straight man and clown, grifter and mark.” Every assertion, consequently, comes wrapped in qualifications, if not partial refutations; a later essay, appearing in “Consider the Lobster,” is titled, “Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think.”

In a 2000 essay for Feed , Keith Gessen applauds Wallace for “trying, at last, to destroy” the oppositions between “irony and sincerity, self-consciousness and artifice.” He chastises those critics who in effect suggest that at “this late date, we might unlearn the postmodern vocabulary and recapture some pre-ironic way of being.” What we need, Gessen posits, in fiction writing at least, is someone to work “a sort of Barthelmeic magic” and “transform our language of apathy into a cri de coeur .”

How we arrived at the notion that the postmodern era is the first ever to confront the tension between sincerity and irony despite millennia of evidence to the contrary is no mystery: every generation believes its insights are unprecedented, its struggles uniquely formidable, its solutions the balm for all that ails the world. Why so many of our critics are still, after all these years, making their arguments in this inherently self-undermining voice — still trying to ward off every possible rejoinder and pre-emptively rebut every possible criticism by mixing a weird rhetorical stew of equivocation, pessimism and Elysian prophecy — is another question entirely. Perhaps even now some Wallacites would argue that we simply have yet to reach that idyllic moment at which our discourse will naturally transform into a sincere yet knowing cry from the heart. I would put it differently.

In “Generation Why?” a social-networking jeremiad published in The New York Review of Books last year, Zadie Smith reduces the motivations of the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to one: he wants to be liked. She writes, “For our self-conscious generation (and in this, I and Zuckerberg, and everyone raised on TV in the Eighties and Nineties, share a single soul), not being liked is as bad as it gets. Intolerable to be thought of badly for a minute, even for a moment.” Even if you reject, as I do, the universality of her diagnosis, Smith has pinpointed the reason so much of what passes for intellectual debate nowadays is obscured behind a veneer of folksiness and sincerity and is characterized by an unwillingness to be pinned down. Where the craving for admiration and approval predominates, intellectual rigor cannot thrive, if it survives at all.

At 20 I congratulated myself on my awareness of the subjectivity of aesthetic judgments, the arbitrariness of critical proclamations, the folly of received wisdom. I pored over the Deconstructionists and the French feminists and advocated, in complete seriousness, the overthrow of language. (Also, the patriarchy.) Then I went to law school and was forced to confront serious practical and ethical questions — Brown v. Board of Education, for instance, and Roe v. Wade — that managed not to be resolved by the insights of Derrida. Now, having entered and abandoned the practice of law and spent roughly a decade straddling legal publishing and the blogosphere, I’m increasingly drawn to directness, which precludes neither nuance nor irony. (For details, see the essays of Mark Twain, who believed that “plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities.”)

Qualifications are necessary sometimes. Anticipating and defusing opposing arguments has been a vital rhetorical strategy since at least the days of Aristotle. Satire and ridicule, when done well, are high art. But the idea is to provoke and persuade, not to soothe. And the best way to make an argument is to make it, straightforwardly, honestly, passionately, without regard to whether people will like you afterward.

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August 2, 2013

A conversation with david foster wallace by larry mccaffery.

From “The Review of Contemporary Fiction,” Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2

LARRY McCAFFERY: Your essay following this interview is going to be seen by some people as being basically an apology for television. What’s your response to the familiar criticism that television fosters relationships with illusions or simulations of real people (Reagan being a kind of quintessential example)?

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: It’s a try at a comprehensive diagnosis, not an apology. U.S. viewers’ relationship with TV is essentially puerile and dependent, as are all relationships based on seduction. This is hardly news. But what’s seldom acknowledged is how complex and ingenious TV’s seductions are. It’s seldom acknowledged that viewers’ relationship with TV is, albeit debased, intricate and profound. It’s easy for older writers just to bitch about TV’s hegemony over the U.S. art market, to say the world’s gone to hell in a basket and shrug and have done with it. But I think younger writers owe themselves a richer account of just why TV’s become such a dominating force on people’s consciousness, if only because we under forty have spent our whole conscious lives being “part” of TV’s audience.

LM: Television may be more complex than what most people realize, but it seems rarely to attempt to “challenge” or “disturb” its audience, as you’ve written me you wish to. Is it that sense of challenge and pain that makes your work more “serious” than most television shows?

DFW: I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of “generalization” of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple. But now realize that TV and popular film and most kinds of “low” art—which just means art whose primary aim is to make money—is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas “serious” art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art audience, especially a young one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction. That’s not good. The problem isn’t that today’s readership is “dumb,” I don’t think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture’s trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today’s readers both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard.

LM: Who do you imagine your readership to be?

DFW: I suppose it’s people more or less like me, in their twenties and thirties, maybe, with enough experience or good education to have realized that the hard work serious fiction requires of a reader sometimes has a payoff. People who’ve been raised with U.S. commercial culture and are engaged with it and informed by it and fascinated with it but still hungry for something commercial art can’t provide. Yuppies, I guess, and younger intellectuals, whatever. These are the people pretty much all the younger writers I admire—Leyner and Vollman and Daitch, Amy Homes, Jon Franzen, Lorrie Moore, Rick Powers, even McInerney and Leavitt and those guys—are writing for, I think. But, again, the last twenty years have seen big changes in how writers engage their readers, what readers need to expect from any kind of art.

LM: The media seems to me to be one thing that has drastically changed this relationship. It’s provided people with this television-processed culture for so long that audiences have forgotten what a relationship to serious art is all about.

DFW: Well, it’s too simple to just wring your hands and claim TV’s ruined readers. Because the U.S.’s television culture didn’t come out of a vacuum. What TV is extremely good at—and realize that this is “all it does”—is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it. And since there’s always been a strong and distinctive American distaste for frustration and suffering, TV’s going to avoid these like the plague in favor of something anesthetic and easy.

LM: You really think this distaste is distinctly American?

DFW: It seems distinctly Western-industrial, anyway. In most other cultures, if you hurt, if you have a symptom that’s causing you to suffer, they view this as basically healthy and natural, a sign that your nervous system knows something’s wrong. For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire’s still going. But if you just look at the number of ways that we try like hell to alleviate mere symptoms in this country- from fast-fast-fast-relief antacids to the popularity of lighthearted musicals during the Depression—you can see an almost compulsive tendency to regard pain itself as the problem. And so pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It’s probably more Western than U.S. per se. Look at utilitarianism—that most English of contributions to ethics- and you see a whole teleology predicated on the idea that the best human life is one that maximizes the pleasure-to-pain ratio. God, I know this sounds priggish of me. All I’m saying is that it’s shortsighted to blame TV. It’s simply another symptom. TV didn’t invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression. Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.

LM: Near the end of “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” there’s a line about Mark that “It would take an architect who could hate enough to feel enough to love enough to perpetuate the kind of special cruelty only real lovers can inflict.” Is that the kind of cruelty you feel is missing in the work of somebody like Mark Leyner?

DFW: I guess I’d need to ask you what kind of cruelty you thought the narrator meant there.

LM: It seems to involve the idea that if writers care enough about their audience—if they love them enough and love their art enough—they’ve got to be cruel in their writing practices. “Cruel” the way an army drill sergeant is when he decides to put a bunch of raw recruits through hell, knowing that the trauma you’re inflicting on these guys, emotionally, physically, psychically, is just part of a process that’s going to strengthen them in the end, prepare them for things they can’t even imagine yet.

DFW: Well, besides the question of where the fuck do “artists” get off deciding for readers what stuff the readers need to be prepared for, your idea sounds pretty Aristotelian, doesn’t it? I mean, what’s the purpose of creating fiction, for you? Is it essentially mimetic, to capture and order a protean reality? Or is it really supposed to be therapeutic in an Aristotelian sense?

LM: I agree with what you said in “Westward” about serious art having to engage a range of experiences; it can be merely “metafictional,” for example it has to deal with the world outside the page and variously so. How would you contrast your efforts in this regard versus those involved in most television or most popular fiction?

DFW:This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants. When you read that quotation from “Westward” just now, it sounded to me like a covert digest of my biggest weaknesses as a writer. One is that I have a grossly sentimental affection for gags, for stuff that’s nothing but funny, and which I sometimes stick in for no other reason than funniness. Another’s that I have a problem sometimes with concision, communicating only what needs to be said in a brisk efficient way that doesn’t call attention to itself. It’d be pathetic for me to blame the exterior for my own deficiencies, but it still seems to me that both of these problems are traceable to this schizogenic experience I had growing up, being bookish and reading a lot, on the one hand, watching grotesque amounts of TV, on the other. Because I liked to read, I probably didn’t watch quite as much TV as my friends, but I still got my daily megadose, believe me. And I think it’s impossible to spend that many slack-jawed, spittle-chinned, formative hours in front of commercial art without internalizing the idea that one of the main goals of art is simply to “entertain,” give people sheer pleasure. Except to what end, this pleasure-giving? Because, of course, TV’s “real” agenda is to be “liked,” because if you like what you’re seeing, you’ll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it’s its sole raison. And sometimes when I look at my own stuff I feel like I absorbed too much of this raison. I’ll catch myself thinking up gags or trying formal stunt-pilotry and see that none of this stuff is really in the service of the story itself; it’s serving the rather darker purpose of communicating to the reader “Hey! Look at me! Have a look at what a good writer I am! Like me!”

Now, to an extent there’s no way to escape this altogether, because an author needs to demonstrate some sort of skill or merit so that the reader will trust her. There’s some weird, delicate, I-trust-you-not-to fuck-up-on-me relationship between the reader and writer, and both have to sustain it. But there’s an unignorable line between demonstrating skill and charm to gain trust for the story vs. simple showing off. It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art. I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art. This seems like a poisonous lesson for a would-be artist to grow up with. And one consequence is that if the artist is excessively dependent on simply being “liked,” so that her true end isn’t in the work but in a certain audience’s good opinion, she is going to develop a terrific hostility to that audience, simply because she has given all her power away to them. It’s the familiar love-hate syndrome of seduction: “I don’t really care what it is I say, I care only that you like it. But since your good opinion is the sole arbitrator of my success and worth, you have tremendous power over me, and I fear you and hate you for it.” This dynamic isn’t exclusive to art. But I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.

LM: In your own case, how does this hostility manifest itself?

DFW: Oh, not always, but sometimes in the form of sentences that are syntactically not incorrect but still a real bitch to read. Or bludgeoning the reader with data. Or devoting a lot of energy to creating expectations and then taking pleasure in disappointing them. You can see this clearly in something like Ellis’s “American Psycho”: it panders shamelessly to the audience’s sadism for a while, but by the end it’s clear that the sadism’s real object is the reader herself.

LM: But at least in the case of “American Psycho” I felt there was something more than just this desire to inflict pain—or that Ellis was being cruel the way you said serious artists need to be willing to be.

DFW: You’re just displaying the sort of cynicism that lets readers be manipulated by bad writing. I think it’s a kind of black cynicism about today’s world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what’s always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative world that’s cliched and not recognizably human, etc.—is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend “Psycho” as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it’s no more than that.

LM: Are you saying that writers of your generation have an obligation not only to depict our condition but also to provide the solutions to these things?

DFW: I don’t think I’m talking about conventionally political or social action-type solutions. That’s not what fiction’s about. Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still “are” human beings, now. Or can be. This isn’t that it’s fiction’s duty to edify or teach, or to make us good little Christians or Republicans; I’m not trying to line up behind Tolstoy or Gardner. I just think that fiction that isn’t exploring what it means to be human today isn’t art. We’ve all got this “literary” fiction that simply monotones that we’re all becoming less and less human, that presents characters without souls or love, characters who really are exhaustively describable in terms of what brands of stuff they wear, and we all buy the books and go like “Golly, what a mordantly effective commentary on contemporary materialism!” But we already “know” U.S. culture is materialistic. This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn’t engage anybody. What’s engaging and artistically real is, taking it as axiomatic that the present is grotesquely materialistic, how is it that we as human beings still have the capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections, for stuff that doesn’t have a price? And can these capacities be made to thrive? And if so, how, and if not why not?

LM: Not everyone in your generation is taking the Ellis route. Both the other writers in this issue of “RCF” seem to be doing exactly what you’re talking about. So, for example, even though Vollmann’s “Rainbow Stories” is a book that is in its own way as sensationalized as “American Psycho,” the effort there is to depict those people not as flattened, dehumanized stereotypes but as human beings. I’d agree though, that a lot of contemporary writers today adopt this sort of flat, neutral transformation of people and events into fiction without bothering to make the effort of refocusing their imaginations on the people who still exist underneath these transformations. But Vollmann seems to be someone fighting that tendency in interesting ways.

That brings us back to the issue of whether this isn’t a dilemma serious writers have always faced. Other than lowered (or changed) audience expectations, what’s changed to make the task of the serious writer today more difficult than it was thirty or sixty or a hundred or a thousand years ago? You might argue that the task of the serious writer is easier today because what took place in the sixties had the effect of finally demolishing the authority that mimesis had assumed. Since you guys don’t have to fight that battle anymore, you’re liberated to move on to other areas.

DFW: This is a double-edged sword, our bequest from the early postmodernists and the post-structuralist critics. One the one hand, there’s sort of an embarrassment of riches for young writers now. Most of the old cinctures and constraints that used to exist—censorship of content is a blatant example—have been driven off the field. Writers today can do more or less whatever we want. But on the other hand, since everybody can do pretty much whatever they want, without boundaries to define them or constraints to struggle against, you get this continual avant-garde rush forward without anyone bothering to speculate on the destination, the “goal” of the forward rush. The modernists and early postmodernists—all the way from Mallarmé to Coover, I guess—broke most of the rules for us, but we tend to forget what they were forced to remember: the rule-breaking has got to be for the “sake” of something. When rule-breaking, the mere “form” of renegade avant-gardism, becomes an end in itself, you end up with bad language poetry and “American Psycho” ’s nipple-shocks and Alice Cooper eating shit on stage. Shock stops being a by-product of progress and becomes an end in itself. And it’s bullshit. Here’s an analogy. The invention of calculus was shocking because for a long time it had simply been presumed that you couldn’t divide by zero. The integrity of math itself seemed to depend on the presumption. Then some genius titans came along and said, “Yeah, maybe you can’t divide by zero, but what would happen if you “could”? We’re going to come as close to doing it as we can, to see what happens.”

LM: So you get the infinitesimal calculus—”the philosophy of as if.”

DFW: And this purely theoretical construct wound up yielding incredibly practical results. Suddenly you could plot the area under curves and do rate-change calculations. Just about every material convenience we now enjoy is a consequence of this “as if.” But what if Leibniz and Newton had wanted to divide by zero only to show jaded audiences how cool and rebellious they were? It’d never have happened, because that kind of motivation doesn’t yield results. It’s hollow. Dividing-as-if-by-zero was titanic and ingenuous because it was in the service of something. The math world’s shock was a price they had to pay, not a payoff in itself.

LM: Of course, you also have examples like Lobochevsky and Riemann, who are breaking the rules with no practical application at the time—but then later on somebody like Einstein comes along and decides that this worthless mathematical mind game that Riemann developed actually described the universe more effectively than the Euclidean game. Not that those guys were braking the rules just to break the rules, but part of that was just that: what happens if everybody has to move counter-clockwise in Monopoly. And at first it just seemed like this game, without applications.

DFW: Well, the analogy breaks down because math and hard science are pyramidical. They’re like building a cathedral: each generation works off the last one, both in its advance and its errors. Ideally, each piece of art’s its own unique object, and its evaluation’s always present-tense. You could justify the worst piece of experimental horseshit by saying “The fools may hate my stuff , but generations later I will be appreciated for my ground breaking rebellion.” All the beret-wearing “artistes” I went to school with who believed that line are now writing ad copy someplace.

LM: The European avant-garde believed in the transforming ability of innovative art to directly affect people’s consciousness and break them out of their cocoon of habituation, etc. You’d put a urinal in a Paris museum, call it a “fountain,” and wait for the riots next day. That’s an area I’d say has changed things for writers (or any artist)—you can have very aesthetically radical works today using the same features of formal innovation that you’d find in the Russian Futurists or Duchamp and so forth, only now these things are on MTV or TV ads. Formal innovations as trendy image. So it loses its ability to shock or transform.

DFW: These are exploitations. They’re not trying to break us free of anything. They’re trying to lock us tighter into certain conventions, in this case habits of consumption. So the “form” of artistic rebellion now becomes . . .

LM: . . . yeah, another commodity. I agree with Fredric Jameson and others who argue that modernism and postmodernism can be seen as expressing the cultural logic of late capitalism. Lots of features of contemporary art are directly influenced by this massive acceleration of capitalist expansion into all these new realms that were previously just not accessible. You sell people a memory, reify their nostalgia and use this as a hook to sell deodorant. Hasn’t this recent huge expansion of the technologies of reproduction, the integration of commodity reproduction and aesthetic reproduction, and the rise of media culture lessened the impact that aesthetic innovation can have on people’s sensibilities? What’s your response to this as an artist?

DFW: You’ve got a gift for lit-speak, LM. Who wouldn’t love this jargon we dress common sense in: “formal innovation is no longer transformative, having been co-opted by the forces of stabilization and post-industrial inertia,” blah, blah. But this co-optation might actually be a good thing if it helped keep younger writers from being able to treat mere formal ingenuity as an end in itself. MTV-type co-optation could end up a great prophylactic against cleveritis—you know, the dreaded grad-school syndrome of like “Watch me use seventeen different points of view in this scene of a guy eating a Saltine.” The real point of that shit is “Like me because I’m clever”—which of course is itself derived from commercial art’s axiom about audience-affection determining art’s value.

What’s precious about somebody like Bill Vollmann is that, even though there’s a great deal of formal innovation in his fictions, it rarely seems to exist for just its own sake. It’s almost always deployed to make some point (Vollmann’s the most editorial young novelist going right now, and he’s great at using formal ingenuity to make the editorializing a component of his narrative instead of an interruption) or to create an effect that’s internal to the text. His narrator’s always weirdly effaced, the writing unself-conscious, despite all the “By-the-way-Dear-reader” intrusions. In a way it’s sad that Vollmann’s integrity is so remarkable. Its remarkability means it’s rare. I guess I don’t know what to think about these explosions in the sixties you’re so crazy about. It’s almost like postmodernism is fiction’s fall from biblical grace. Fiction became conscious of itself in a way it never had been. Here’s a really pretentious bit of pop analysis for you: I think you can see Cameron’s “Terminator” movies as a metaphor for all literary art after Roland Barthes, viz., the movies’ premise that the Cyberdyne NORAD computer becomes conscious of itself as “conscious,” as having interests and an agenda; the Cyberdyne becomes literally self-referential, and it’s no accident that the result of this is nuclear war, Armageddon.

LM: Isn’t Armageddon the course you set sail for in “Westward”?

DFW: Metafiction’s real end has always been Armageddon. Art’s reflection on itself is terminal, is one big reason why the art world saw Duchamp as an Antichrist. But I still believe the move to involution had value: it helped writers break free of some long-standing flat-earth-type taboos. It was standing in line to happen. And for a while, stuff like “Pale Fire” and “The Universal Baseball Association” was valuable as a meta-aesthetic breakthrough the same way Duchamp’s urinal had been valuable.

LM: I’ve always felt that the best of the metafictionalists—Coover, for example, Nabokov, Borges, even Barth—were criticized too much for being only interested in narcissistic, self-reflexive games, whereas these devices had very real political and historical applications.

DFW: But when you talk about Nabokov and Coover, you’re talking about real geniuses, the writers who weathered real shock and invented this stuff in contemporary fiction. But after the pioneers always come the crank turners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank, and little pellets of metafiction come out the other end. The crank-turners capitalize for a while on sheer fashion, and they get their plaudits and grants and buy their IRAs and retire to the Hamptons well out of range of the eventual blast radius. There are some interesting parallels between postmodern crank-turners and what’s happened since post-structural theory took off here in the U.S., why there’s such a big backlash against post-structuralism going on now. It’s the crank-turners fault. I think the crank-turners replaced the critic as the real angel of death as far as literary movements are concerned, now. You get some bona fide artists who come along and really divide by zero and weather some serious shit-storms of shock and ridicule in order to promulgate some really important ideas. Once they triumph, though, and their ideas become legitimate and accepted, the crank-turners and wannabes come running to the machine, and out pour the gray pellets and now the whole thing’s become a hollow form, just another institution of fashion. Take a look at some of the critical-theory Ph.D. dissertations being written now. They’re like de Man and Foucault in the mouth of a dull child. Academia and commercial culture have somehow become these gigantic mechanisms of commodification that drain the weight and color out of even the most radical new advances. It’s a surreal inversion of the death-by-neglect that used to kill off prescient art. Now prescient art suffers death-by acceptance. We love things to death, now. Then we retire to the Hamptons.

LM: This is also tied to that expansion of capitalism blah blah blah into realms previously thought to be uncommodifiable. Hyperconsumption. I mean, whoever thought rebellion could be tamed so easily? You just record it, turn the crank, and out comes another pellet of “dangerous” art.

DFW: And this accelerates the metastasis from genuine envelope puncturing to just another fifteen-minute form that gets cranked out and cranked out and cranked out. Which creates a bitch of a problem for any artist who views her task as continual envelope-puncturing, because then she falls into this insatiable hunger for the appearance of novelty: “What can I do that hasn’t been done yet?” Once the first-person pronoun creeps into your agenda you’re dead, art-wise. That’s why fiction-writing’s lonely in a way most people misunderstand. It’s yourself you have to be estranged from, really, to work.

LM: A phrase in one of your recent letters really struck me: “The magic of fiction is that it addresses and antagonizes the loneliness that dominates people.” It’s that suggestion of antagonizing the reader that seems to link your goals up with the avant-garde program—whose goals were never completely hermetic. And “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” seems to be your own meta-fictional attempt to deal with these large areas in ways that are not merely metafiction.

DFW: “Aggravate” might be better than “antagonize,” in the sense of aggravation as intensification. But the truth is it’s hard for me to know what I really think about any of the stuff I’ve written. It’s always tempting to sit back and make finger-steeples and invent impressive sounding theoretical justifications for what one does, but in my case most of it’d be horseshit. As time passes I get less and less nuts about anything I’ve published, and it gets harder to know for sure when its antagonistic elements are in there because they serve a useful purpose and when their just covert manifestations of this “look-at-me-please-love-me-I-hate you” syndrome I still sometimes catch myself falling into. Anyway, but what I think I meant by “antagonize” or “aggravate” has to do with the stuff in the TV essay about the younger writer trying to struggle against the cultural hegemony of TV. One thing TV does is help us deny that we’re lonely. With televised images, we can have the facsimile of a relationship without the work of a real relationship. It’s an anesthesia of “form.” The interesting thing is why we’re so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness. You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness, both of which are like sub-dreads of our dread of being trapped inside a self (a psychic self, not just a physical self), has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I’m going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me. I’m not sure I could give you a steeple-fingered theoretical justification, but I strongly suspect a big part of real art fiction’s job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us first to face what’s dreadful, what we want to deny.

LM: It’s this inside-outside motif you developed throughout “The Broom of the System.”

DFW: I guess maybe, but it’s developed in an awful clunky way. The popularity of “Broom” mystifies me. I can’t say it’s not nice to have people like it, but there’s a lot of stuff in that novel I’d like to reel back in and do better. I was like twenty-two when I wrote the first draft of that thing. And I mean a “young” twenty-two. I still thought in terms of distinct problems and univocal solutions. But if you’re going to try not just to depict the way a culture’s bound and defined by meditated gratification and image, but somehow to redeem it, or at least fight a rearguard against it, then what you’re going to be doing is paradoxical. You’re at once allowing the reader to sort of escape self by achieving some sort of identification with another human psyche—the writer’s, or some character’s, etc.—and you’re “also” trying to antagonize the reader’s intuition that she is a self, that she is alone and going to die alone. You’re trying somehow both to deny and affirm that the writer is over here with his agenda while the reader’s over there with her agenda, distinct. This paradox is what makes good fiction sort of magical, I think. The paradox can’t be resolved, but it can somehow be mediated—”re-mediated,” since this is probably where post-structuralism rears its head for me—by the fact that language and linguistic intercourse is, in and of itself, redeeming, remedy-ing.

This makes serious fiction a rough and bumpy affair for everyone involved. Commercial entertainment, on the other hand, smooths everything over. Even the “Terminator” movies (which I revere), or something really nasty and sicko like the film version of “A Clockwork Orange,” is basically an anesthetic (and think for a second about the etymology of “anesthetic”; break up the word and think about it). Sure “A Clockwork Orange” is a self-consciously sick, nasty film about the sickness and nastiness of the post-industrial condition, but if you look at it structurally, slo-mo and fast-mo and arty cinematography aside, it does what all commercial entertainment does: it proceeds more or less chronologically, and if its transitions are less cause-and-effect-based than most movies’, it still kind of eases you from scene to scene in a way that drops you into certain kinds of easy cerebral rhythms. It admits passive spectation. Encourages it. TV-type art’s biggest hook is that it’s figured out ways to “reward” passive spectation. A certain amount of the form-conscious stuff I write is trying—with whatever success—to do the opposite. It’s supposed to be uneasy. For instance, using a lot of flash-cuts between scenes so that some of the narrative arrangement has got to be done by the reader, or interrupting flow with digressions and interpolations that the reader has to do the work of connecting to each other and to the narrative. It’s nothing terribly sophisticated, and there has to be an accessible payoff for the reader if I don’t want the reader to throw the book at the wall. But if it works right, the reader has to fight “through” the meditated voice presenting the material to you. The complete suppression of a narrative consciousness, with its own agenda, is why TV is such a powerful selling tool. This is McLuhan, right? “The medium is the message” and all that? But notice that TV’s meditated message is “never” that the medium’s the message.

LM: How is this insistence on meditation different from the kind of meta strategies you yourself have attacked as preventing authors from being anything other than narcissistic or overly abstract or intellectual?

DFW: I guess I’d judge what I do by the same criterion I apply to the self conscious elements you find in Vollmann’s fiction: do they serve a purpose beyond themselves? Whether I can provide a payoff and communicate a function rather than just seem jumbled and prolix is the issue that’ll decide whether the thing I’m working on now succeeds or not. But I think right now it’s important for art-fiction to antagonize the reader’s sense that what she’s experiencing as she reads is meditated through a human consciousness, now with an agenda not necessarily coincident with her own. For some reason I probably couldn’t even explain, I’ve been convinced of this for years, that one distinctive thing about truly “low” or commercial art is this apparent suppression of a mediating consciousness and agenda. The example I think of first is the novella “Little Expressionless Animals” in “Girl With Curious Hair.” Readers I know sometimes remark on all the flash-cuts and the distortion of linearity in it and usually want to see it as mimicking TV’s own pace and phosphenic flutter. But what it’s really trying to do is just the “opposite” of TV—it’s trying to prohibit the reader from forgetting that she’s receiving heavily mediated data, that this process is a relationship between the writer’s consciousness and her own, and that in order for it to be anything like a full human relationship, she’s going to have to put in her share of the linguistic work.

This might be my best response to your claim that my stuff’s not “realistic.” I’m not much interested in trying for classical, big-R Realism, not because the big R’s form has now been absorbed and suborned by commercial entertainment. The classical Realist form is soothing, familiar and anesthetic; it drops right into spectation. It doesn’t set up the sort of expectations serious 1990s fiction ought to be setting up in readers.

LM: “The Broom of the System” already displays some of the formal tendencies found in the stories in “Girl With Curious Hair” and in your new work—that play with temporal structure and flash-cuts, for instance, for heightened rhetorical effects of various sorts, for defamiliarizing things. Would you say your approach to form/content issues has undergone any radical changes since you were a “young twenty-two”?

DFW: Assuming I understand what you mean by “form/content,” the only way I can answer you is to talk about my own background. Oh boy, I get to make myself sound all fascinating and artistic and you’ll have no way to check up. Return with us now to Deare Olde Amherst. For most of my college career I was a hard-core syntax wienie, a philosophy major with a specialization in math and logic. I was, to put it modestly, quite good at the stuff, mostly because I spent all my free time doing it. Wienieish or not, I was actually chasing a special sort of buzz, a special moment that comes sometimes. One teacher called these moments “mathematical experiences.” What I didn’t know then was that a mathematical experience was aesthetic in nature, an epiphany in Joyce’s original sense. These moments appeared in proof-completions, or maybe algorithms. Or like a gorgeously simple solution to a problem you suddenly see after half a notebook with gnarly attempted solutions. It was really an experience of what I think Yeats called “the click of a well-made box.” Something like that. The word I always think of it as is “click.”

Anyway, I was just awfully good at technical philosophy, and it was the first thing I’d ever really been good at, and so everybody, including me, anticipated I’d make it a career. But it sort of emptied out for me somewhere around age twenty. I just got tired of it, and panicked because I was suddenly not getting any joy from the one thing I was clearly supposed to do because I was good at it and people liked me for being good at it. Not a fun time. I think I had kind of a mid-life crisis at twenty, which probably doesn’t augur real well for my longevity.

So what I did, I went back home for a term, planning to play solitaire and stare out the window, whatever you do in a crisis. And all of a sudden I found myself writing fiction. My only real experience with fun writing had been on a campus magazine with Mark Costello, the guy I later wrote “Signifying Rappers” with. But I had had experience with chasing the click, from all the time spent with proofs. At some point in my reading and writing that fall I discovered the click in literature, too. It was real lucky that just when I stopped being able to get the click from math logic I started to be able to get it from fiction. The first fictional clicks I encountered were in Donald Barthelme’s “The Balloon” and in parts of the first story I ever wrote, which has been in my trunk since I finished it. I don’t know whether I have that much natural talent going for me fiction wise, but I know I can hear the click, when there is a click. In Don DeLillo’s stuff, for example, almost line by line I can hear the click. It’s maybe the only way to describe writers I love. I hear the click in most Nabokov. In Donne, Hopkins, Larkin. In Puig and Cortázar. Puig clicks like a fucking Geiger counter. And none of these people write prose as pretty as Updike, and yet I don’t hear the click in Updike.

But so here I am at like twenty-one and I don’t know what to do. Do I go into math logic, which I’m good at and pretty much guaranteed an approved career in? Or do I try to keep on with this writing thing, this “artiste” thing? The idea of being a “writer” repelled me, mostly because of all the foppish aesthetes I knew at school who went around in berets stroking their chins calling themselves writers. I have a terror of seeming like those guys, still. Even today, when people I don’t know ask me what I do for a living, I usually tell them I’m “in English” or I “work free-lance.” I don’t seem to be able to call myself a writer. And terms like “postmodernist” or “surrealist” send me straight to the bathroom, I’ve got to tell you.

LM: I spend time in the toilet stalls myself. But I noticed you I didn’t take off down the hall when I said earlier that your work didn’t seem “realistic.” Do you agree with that?

DFW: Well, it depends whether you’re talking little-r realistic or big-R. If you mean is my stuff in the Howells/Wharton/Updike school of U.S. Realism, clearly not. But to me the whole binary of realistic vs. unrealistic fiction is a canonical distinction set up by people with a vested interest in the big-R tradition. A way to marginalize stuff that isn’t soothing and conservative. Even the goofiest avant-garde agenda, if it’s got integrity, is never, “Let’s eschew all realism,” but more, “Let’s try to countenance and render real aspects of real experiences that have previously been excluded from art.” The result often seems “unrealistic” to the big-R devotees because it’s not a recognizable part of the “ordinary experience” they’re used to countenancing. I guess my point is that “realistic” doesn’t have a univocal definition. By the way, what did you mean a minute ago when you were talking about a writer “defamiliarizing” something?

LM: Placing something familiar in an unfamiliar context—say, setting it in the past or within some other structure that will re-expose it, allow readers to see the real essence of the thing that’s usually taken for granted because it’s buried underneath all the usual sludge that accompanies it.

DFW: I guess that’s supposed to be deconstruction’s original program, right? People have been under some sort of metaphysical anesthesia, so you dismantle the metaphysics’ axioms and prejudices, show it in cross section and reveal the advantages of its abandonment. It’s literally aggravating: you awaken them to the fact that they’ve been unconsciously imbibing some narcotic pharmakon since they were old enough to say Momma. There’s many different ways to think about what I’m doing, but if I follow what you mean by “defamiliarization,” I guess it’s part of what getting the click right is for me. It might also be a part of why I end up doing anywhere from five to eight total rewrites to finish something, which is why I’m never going to be a Vollmann or an Oates.

LM: You’ve mentioned the recent change about what writers can assume about their readers in terms of expectations and so on. Are there other ways the postmodern world has influenced or changed the role of serious writing today?

DFW: If you mean a post-industrial, mediated world, it’s inverted one of fiction’s big historical functions, that of providing data on distant cultures and persons. The first real generalization of human experience that novels tried to accomplish. If you lived in Bumfuck, Iowa, a hundred years ago and had no idea what life was like in India, good old Kipling goes over and presents it to you. And of course the post-structural critics now have a field day on all the colonialist and phallocratic prejudices inherent in the idea that writers were “presenting” alien creatures instead of “re presenting” them—jabbering natives and randy concubines and white man’s burden, etc. Well, but fiction’s presenting function for today’s reader has been reversed: since the whole global village is now presented as familiar, electronically immediate—satellites, microwaves, intrepid PBS anthropologists, Paul Simon’s Zulu back-ups—it’s almost like we need fiction writers to restore strange things’ ineluctable “strangeness,” to defamiliarize stuff, I guess you’d say.

LM: David Lynch’s take on suburbia. Or Mark Leyner’s take on his own daily life—

DFW: And Leyner’s real good at it. For our generation, the entire world seems to present itself as “familiar,” but since that’s of course an illusion in terms of anything really important about people, maybe any “realistic” fiction’s job is opposite what it used to be—no longer making the strange familiar but making the familiar strange again. It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most “familiarity” is meditated and delusive.

LM: “Postmodernism” usually implies “an integration of pop and ‘serious’ culture.” But a lot of the pop culture in the works of the younger writers I most admire these days—you, Leyner, Gibson, Vollmann, Eurudice, Daitch, et al.—seems to be introduced less to integrate high and low culture, or to valorize pop culture, than to place this stuff in a new context so we can be “liberated” from it. Wasn’t that, for example, one of the things you were doing with “Jeopardy” in “Little Expressionless Animals”?

DFW: One new context is to take something almost narcotizingly banal- it’s hard to think of anything more banal than a U.S. game show; in fact the banality’s one of TV’s great hooks, as the TV essay discusses—and try to reconfigure it in a way that reveals what a tense, strange, convoluted set of human interactions the final banal product is. The scrambled, flash-cut form I ended up using for the novella was probably unsubtle and clumsy, but the form clicked for me in a way it just hadn’t when I’d done it straight.

LM: A lot of your works (including “Broom”) have to do with this breakdown of the boundaries between the real and “games,” or the characters playing the game begin to confuse the game structure with reality’s structure. Again, I suppose you can see this in “Little Expressionless Animals,” where the real world outside “Jeopardy” is interacting with what’s going on inside the game show—the boundaries between inner and outer are blurred.

DFW: And, too, in the novella what’s going on on the show has repercussions for everybody’s lives outside it. The valence is always distributive. It’s interesting that most serious art, even avant-garde stuff that’s in collusion with literary theory, still refuses to acknowledge this, while serious science butters its bread with the fact that the separation of subject/observer and object/experiment is impossible. Observing a quantum phenomenon’s been proven to alter the phenomenon. Fiction likes to ignore this fact’s implications. We still think in terms of a story “changing” the reader’s emotions, cerebrations, maybe even her life. We’re not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader’s own life “outside” the story changes the story. You could argue that it affects only “her reaction to the story” or “her take on the story.” But these things “are” the story. This is the way Barthian and Derridean post-structuralism’s helped me the most as a fiction writer: once I’m done with the thing, I’m basically dead, and probably the text’s dead; it becomes simply language, and language lives not just in but “through” the reader. The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I’ll hush.

LM: Let’s go back just for a moment to your sense of the limits of metafiction: in both your current “RCF” essay and in the novella “Westward” in “Girl With Curious Hair,” you imply that metafiction is a game that only reveals itself, or that can’t share its valence with anything outside itself—like the daily world.

DFW: Well, but metafiction is more valuable than that. It helps reveal fiction as a meditated experience. Plus it reminds us that there’s always a recursive component to utterance. This was important, because language’s self-consciousness had always been there, but neither writers nor critics nor readers wanted to be reminded of it. But we ended up seeing why recursion’s dangerous, and maybe why everybody wanted to keep linguistic self-consciousness out of the show. It gets empty and solipsistic real fast. It spirals in on itself. By the mid-seventies, I think, everything useful about the mode had been exhausted, and the crank-turners had descended. By the eighties it’d become a god awful trap. In “Westward” I got trapped one time just trying to expose the illusions of metafiction the same way metafiction had tried to expose the illusions of the pseudo unmediated realist fiction that came before it. It was a horror show. The stuff’s a permanent migraine.

LM:Why is meta-metafiction a trap? Isn’t that what you were doing in “Westward”?

DFW: That’s a Rog. And maybe Westward” ’s only real value’ll be showing the kind of pretentious loops you fall into now if you fuck around with recursion. My idea in “Westward” was to do with metafiction what Moore’s poetry or like DeLillo’s “Libra” had done with other mediated myths. I wanted to get the Armageddon-explosion, the goal metafiction’s always been about, I wanted to get it over with, and then out of the rubble reaffirm the idea of art being a living transaction between humans, whether the transaction was erotic or altruistic or sadistic. God, even talking about it makes me want to puke. The “pretension.” Twenty-five year-olds should be locked away and denied ink and paper. Everything I wanted to do came out in the story, but it came out just as what it was: crude and naive and pretentious.

LM: Of course, even “The Broom of the System” can be seen as a metafiction, as a book about language and about the relationship between words and reality.

DFW: Think of “The Broom of the System” as the sensitive tale of a sensitive young WASP who’s just had this mid-life crisis that’s moved him from coldly cerebral analytic math to a coldly cerebral take on fiction and Austin-Wittgenstein-Derridean literary theory, which also shifted his existential dread from a fear that he was just a 98.6 calculating machine to a fear that he was nothing but a linguistic construct. This WASP’s written a lot of straight humor, and loves gags, so he decides to write a coded autobio that’s also a funny little post-structural gag: so you get Lenore, a character in a story who’s terribly afraid that she’s really nothing more than a character in a story. And, sufficiently hidden under the sex-change and the gags and theoretical allusions, I got to write my sensitive little self-obsessed bildungsroman. The biggest cackle I got when the book came out was the way all the reviews, whether they stomped up and down on the overall book or not, all praised the fact that at least here was a first novel that wasn’t yet another sensitive little bildungsroman.

LM: Wittgenstein’s work, especially the “Tractatus,” permeates “The Broom of the System” in all sorts of ways, both as content and in terms of the metaphors you employ. But in later stages of his career, Wittgenstein concluded that language was unable to refer in the direct, referential way he’d argued it could in the “Tractatus.” Doesn’t that mean language is a closed loop—there’s no permeable membrane to allow the inside from getting through to the outside? And if that’s the case, then isn’t a book “only” a game? Or does the fact that it’s a language game make it somehow different?

DFW: There’s a kind of tragic fall Wittgenstein’s obsessed with all the way from the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” in 1922 to the “Philosophical Investigations” in his last years. I mean a real Book-of-Genesis type tragic fall. The loss of the whole external world. The “Tractatus” ’s picture theory of meaning presumes that the only possible relation between language and the world is denotative, referential. In order for language both to be meaningful and to have some connection to reality, words like “tree” and “house” have to be like little pictures, representations of little trees and houses. Mimesis. But nothing more. Which means we can know and speak of nothing more than little mimetic pictures. Which divides us, metaphysically and forever, from the external world. If you buy such a metaphysical schism, you’re left with only two options. One is that the individual person with her language is trapped in here, with the world out there, and never the twain shall meet. Which, even if you think language’s pictures really are mimetic, is an awful lonely proposition. And there’s no iron guarantee the pictures truly “are” mimetic, which means you’re looking at solipsism. One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism. And so he trashed everything he’d been lauded for in the “Tractatus” and wrote the” Investigations,” which is the single most comprehensive and beautiful argument against solipsism that’s ever been made. Wittgenstein argues that for language even to be possible, it must always be a function of relationships between persons (that’s why he spends so much time arguing against the possibility of a “private language”). So he makes language dependent on human community, but unfortunately we’re still stuck with the idea that there is this world of referents out there that we can never really join or know because we’re stuck in here, in language, even if we’re at least all in here together. Oh yeah, the other original option. The other option is to expand the linguistic subject. Expand the self.

LM: Like Norman Bombardini in “Broom of the System.”

DFW: Yeah, Norman’s gag is that he literalizes the option. He’s going to forget the diet and keep eating until he grows to “infinite size” and eliminates loneliness that way. This was Wittgenstein’s double bind: you can either treat language as an infinitely small dense dot, or you let it become the world—the exterior and everything in it. The former banishes you from the Garden. The latter seems more promising. If the world is itself a linguistic construct, there’s nothing “outside” language for language to have to picture or refer to. This lets you avoid solipsism, but it leads right to the postmodern, post-structural dilemma of having to deny yourself an existence independent of language. Heidegger’s the guy most people think got us into this bind, but when I was working on “Broom of the System” I saw Wittgenstein as the real architect of the postmodern trap. He died right on the edge of explicitly treating reality as linguistic instead of ontological. This eliminated solipsism, but not the horror. Because we’re still stuck. The “Investigation” ’s line is that the fundamental problem of language is, quote, “I don’t know my way about.” If I were separate from language, if I could somehow detach from it and climb up and look down on it, get the lay of the land so to speak, I could study it “objectively,” take it apart, deconstruct it, know its operations and boundaries and deficiencies. But that’s not how things are. I’m “in” it. We’re “in” language. Wittgenstein’s not Heidegger, it’s not that language “is” us, but we’re still “in” it, inescapably, the same way we’re in like Kant’s space-time. Wittgenstein’s conclusions seem completely sound to me, always have. And if there’s one thing that consistently bugs me writing-wise, it’s that I don’t feel I really “do” know my way around inside language—I never seem to get the kind of clarity and concision I want.

LM: Ray Carver comes immediately to mind in terms of compression and clarity, and he’s obviously someone who wound up having a huge influence on your generation.

DFW: Minimalism’s just the other side of metafictional recursion. The basic problem’s still the one of the mediating narrative consciousness. Both minimalism and metafiction try to resolve the problem in radical ways. Opposed, but both so extreme they end up empty. Recursive metafiction worships the narrative consciousness, makes “it” the subject of the text. Minimalism’s even worse, emptier, because it’s a fraud: it eschews not only self-reference but any narrative personality at all, tries to pretend there “is” no narrative consciousness in its text. This is so fucking American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.

LM: But did Carver really do that? I’d say his narrative voice is nearly always insistently “there,” like Hemingway’s was. You’re never allowed to forget.

DFW: I was talking about minimalists, not Carver. Carver was an artist, not a minimalist. Even though he’s supposedly the inventor of modern U.S. minimalism. “Schools” of fiction are for crank-turners. The founder of a movement is never part of the movement. Carver uses all the techniques and anti-styles that critics call “minimalist,” but his case is like Joyce, or Nabokov, or early Barth and Coover—he’s using formal innovation in the service of an original vision. Carver invented—or resurrected, if you want to cite Hemingway—the techniques of minimalism in the service of rendering a world he saw that nobody’d seen before. It’s a grim world, exhausted and empty and full of mute, beaten people, but the minimalist techniques Carver employed were perfect for it; they created it. And minimalism for Carver wasn’t some rigid aesthetic program he adhered to for its own sake. Carver’s commitment was to his stories, each of them. And when minimalism didn’t serve them, he blew it off. If he realized a story would be best served by expansion, not ablation, he’d expand, like he did to “The Bath,” which he later turned into a vastly superior story. He just chased the click. But at some point “minimalist” style caught on. A movement was born, proclaimed, promulgated by the critics. Now here come the crank-turners. What’s especially dangerous about Carver’s techniques is that they seem so easy to imitate. It doesn’t seem like each word and line and draft has been bled over. That’s a part of his genius. It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one.

LM: For various reasons, the sixties postmodernists were heavily influenced by other art forms—television, for instance, or the cinema or painting—but in particular their notions of form and structure were often influenced by jazz. Do you think that your generation of writers has been similarly influenced by rock music? For instance, you and Mark Costello collaborated on the first book-length study of rap (“Signifying Rappers”); would you say that your interest in rap has anything to do with your writerly concerns? There’s a way in which I can relate your writing with rap’s “postmodern” features, its approach to structure and social issues. Sampling. Recontextualizing.

DFW: About the only way music informs my work is in terms of rhythm; sometimes I associate certain narrators’ and characters’ voices with certain pieces of music. Rock music itself bores me, usually. The phenomenon of rock interests me, though, because its birth was part of the rise of popular media, which completely changed the ways the U.S. was unified and split. The mass media unified the country geographically for pretty much the first time. Rock helped change the fundamental splits in the U.S. from geographical splits to generational ones. Very few people I talk to understand what “generation gap” ’s implications really were. Kids loved rock partly because their parents didn’t, and obversely. In a mass mediated nation, it’s no longer North vs. South. It’s under-thirty vs. over thirty. I don’t think you can understand the sixties and Vietnam and love ins and LSD and the whole era of patricidal rebellion that helped inspire early postmodern fiction’s whole “We’re-going-to-trash-your-Beaver Cleaver-plasticized-G.O.P.-image-of-life-in-America” attitude without understanding rock ‘n roll. Because rock was and is all about busting loose, exceeding limits, and limits are usually set by parents, ancestors, older authorities.

LM: But so far there aren’t many others who have written anything interesting about rock—Richard Meltzer, Peter Guralnik . . .

DFW: There’s some others. Lester Bangs. Todd Gitlin, who also does great TV essays. The thing that especially interested Mark and me about rap was the nasty spin it puts on the whole historical us-vs.-them aspect of postmodern pop. Anyway, what rock ‘n’ roll did for the multicolored young back in the fifties and sixties, rap seems to be doing for the young black urban community. It’s another attempt to break free of precedent and constraint. But there are contradictions in rap that seem to perversely show how, in an era where rebellion itself is a commodity used to sell other commodities, the whole idea of rebelling against white corporate culture is not only impossible but incoherent. Today you’ve got black rappers who make their reputation rapping about Kill the White Corporate Tools, and then are promptly signed by white-owned record corporations, and not only feel no shame about “selling out” but then release platinum albums about not only Killing White Tools but also about how wealthy the rappers now are after signing their record deal! You’ve got music here that both hates the white GOP values of the Reaganiod eighties and extols a gold-and-BMW materialism that makes Reagan look like a fucking Puritan. Violently racist and anti-Semitic black artists being co-opted by white owned, often Jewish-owned record labels, and celebrating that fact in their art. The tensions are delicious. I can feel the spittle starting again just thinking about it.

LM: This is another example of the dilemma facing avant-garde wannabes today–the appropriation (and ensuing “taming”) of rebellion by the system people like Jameson are talking about.

DFW: I don’t know much about Jameson. To me rap’s the ultimate distillate of the U.S. eighties, but if you really step back and think not just about rap’s politics but about white enthusiasm for it, things get grim. Rap’s conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride. We seem to be in an era when oppression and exploitation no longer bring a people together and solidify loyalties and help everyone rise above his individual concerns. Now the rap response is more like “You’ve always exploited us to get rich, so now goddamn it we’re going to exploit ourselves and get rich.” The irony, self pity, self-hatred are now conscious, celebrated. This has to do with what we were talking about regarding “Westward” and postmodern recursion. If I have a real enemy, a patriarch for my patricide, it’s probably Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon. Because, even though their self-consciousness and irony and anarchism served valuable purposes, were indispensable for their times, their aesthetic’s absorption by the U.S. commercial culture has had appalling consequences for writers and everyone else. The TV essay’s really about how poisonous postmodern irony’s become. You see it in David Letterman and Gary Shandling and rap. But you also see it in fucking Rush Limbaugh, who may well be the Antichrist. You see it in T. C. Boyle and Bill Vollmann and Lorrie Moore. It’s pretty much all there is to see in your pal Mark Leyner. Leyner and Limbaugh are the nineties’ twin towers of postmodern irony, hip cynicism, a hatred that winks and nudges you and pretends it’s just kidding.

Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? “Sure.” Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, “then” what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.

LM: Humbert Humbert, the rutting gorilla, painting the bars of his own cage with such elegance. In fact, Nabokov’s example raises the issue of whether cynicism and irony are really a given. In “Pale Fire” and “Lolita,” there’s an irony about these structures and inventions and so forth, but this reaction is deeply humanistic rather than being merely ironic. This seems true in Barthelme, for instance, or Stanley Elkin, Barth. Or Robert Coover. The other aspect has to do with the presentation of themselves or their consciousness. The beauty and the magnificence of human artistry isn’t merely ironic.

DFW: But you’re talking about the click, which is something that can’t just be bequeathed from our postmodern ancestors to their descendants. No question that some of the early postmodernists and ironists and anarchists and absurdists did magnificent work, but you can’t pass the click from one generation to another like a baton. The click’s idiosyncratic, personal. The only stuff a writer can get from an artistic ancestor is a certain set of aesthetic values and beliefs, and maybe a set of formal techniques that might–just might–help the writer to chase his own click. The problem is that, however misprised it’s been, what’s been passed down from the postmodern heyday is sarcasm, cynicism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct, and a terrible penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness instead of an ambition not just to diagnose and ridicule but to redeem. You’ve got to understand that this stuff has permeated the culture. It’s become our language; we’re so in it we don’t even see that it’s one perspective, one among many possible ways of seeing. Postmodern irony’s become our environment.

LM: Mass culture is another very “real” part of that environment–rock music or television or sports, talk shows, game shows, whatever; that’s the milieu you and I live in, I mean that’s the world . . .

DFW: I’m always stumped when critics regard references to popular culture in serious fiction as some sort of avant-garde stratagem. In terms of the world I live in and try to write about, it’s inescapable. Avoiding any reference to the pop would mean either being retrograde about what’s “permissible” in serious art or else writing about some other world.

LM: You mentioned earlier that writing parts of “Broom of the System” felt like recreation for you–a relief from doing technical philosophy. Are you ever able to shift into that “recreational mode” of writing today? Is it still “play” for you?

DFW: It’s not play anymore in the sense of laughs and yucks and non-stop thrills. The stuff in “Broom” that’s informed by that sense of play ended up pretty forgettable, I think. And it doesn’t sustain the enterprise for very long. And I ‘ve found the really tricky discipline to writing is trying to play without getting overcome by insecurity or vanity or ego. Showing the reader that you’re smart or funny or talented or whatever, trying to be liked, integrity issues aside, this stuff just doesn’t have enough motivational calories in it to carry you over the long haul. You’ve got to discipline yourself to talk out of the part of you that loves the thing, loves what you’re working on. Maybe just plain loves. (I think we might need windwoods for this part, LM.) But sappy or no, it’s true. The last couple years have been pretty arid for me good-work-wise, but the one way I’ve progressed I think is I’ve gotten convinced that there’s something kind of timelessly vital and sacred about good writing. This thing doesn’t have that much to do with talent, even glittering talent like Leyner’s or serious talent like Daitch’s. Talent’s just an instrument. It’s like having a pen that works instead of one that doesn’t. I’m not saying I’m able to work consistently out of the premise, but it seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art’s heart’s purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It’s got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that love can instead of the part that just wants to be loved. I know this doesn’t sound hip at all. I don’t know. But it seems like one of the things really great fiction-writers do–from Carver to Chekhov to Flannery O’Connor, or like the Tolstoy of “The Death of Ivan Ilych” or the Pynchon of “Gravity’s Rainbow”–is “give” the reader something. The reader walks away from the real art heavier than she came into it. Fuller. All the attention and engagement and work you need to get from the reader can’t be for your benefit; it’s got to be for hers. What’s poisonous about the cultural environment today is that it makes this so scary to try to carry out. Really good work probably comes out of a willingness to disclose yourself, open yourself up in spiritual and emotional ways that risk making you really feel something. To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I’m scared about how sappy this’ll look in print, saying this. And the effort actually to do it, not just talk about it, requires a kind of courage I don’t seem to have yet. I don’t see that kind of courage in Mark Leyner or Emily Prager or Bret Ellis. I sometimes see flickers of it in Vollmann and Daitch and Nicholson Baker and Amy Homes and Jon Franzen. It’s weird–it has to do with quality but not that much with sheer writing talent. It has to do with the click. I used to think the click came from, “Holy shit, have I ever just done something good.” Now it seems more like the real click’s more like, “Here’s something good, and on one side I don’t much matter, and on the other side the individual reader maybe doesn’t much matter, but the thing’s good because there’s extractable value here for both me and the reader.” Maybe it’s as simple as trying to make the writing more generous and less ego-driven.

LM: Music genres like the blues or jazz or even rock seem to have their ebb and flow in terms of experimentalism, but in the end they all have to come back to the basic elements that comprise the genre, even if these are very simple (like the blues). The trajectory of Bruce Springsteen’s career comes to mind. What interests fans of any genre is that they really know the formulas and the elements, so they also can respond to the constant, built-in meta-games and intertextualities going on in all genre forms. In a way the responses are aesthetically sophisticated in the sense that it’s the infinite variations-on-a-theme that interests them. I mean, how else can they read a million of these things (real genre fans are not stupid people necessarily)? My point is that people who really care about the forms–the serious writers and readers in fiction–don’t want all the forms “broken,” they want variation that follows the essence to emerge in new ways. Blues fans could love Hendrix because he was still playing the blues. I think you’re seeing a greater appreciation for fiction’s rules and limits among postmodern writers of all generations. It’s almost a relief to realize that all babies were “not” tossed out with the bathwater back in the sixties.

DFW: You’re probably right about appreciating limits. The sixties’ movement in poetry to radical free verse, in fiction to radically experimental recursive forms–their legacy to my generation of would-be artists is at least an incentive to ask very seriously where literary art’s true relation to limits should be. We’ve seen that you can break any or all of the rules without getting laughed out of town, but we’ve also seen the toxicity that anarchy for its own sake can yield. It’s often useful to dispense with standard formulas, of course, but it’s just as often valuable and brave to see what can be done within a set of rules–which is why formal poetry’s so much more interesting to me than free verse. Maybe our touchstone now should be G. M. Hopkins, who made up his “own” set of formal constraints and then blew everyone’s footwear off from inside them. There’s something about free play within an ordered and disciplined structure that resonates for readers. And there’s something about complete caprice and flux that’s deadening.

LM: I suspect this is why so many of the older generation of postmodernists–Federman, Sukenick, Steve Katz and others (maybe even Pynchon fits in here)–have recently written books that rely on more traditional forms. That’s why it seems important right now for your generation to go back to traditional forms and re-examine and rework those structures and formulas. This is already happening with some of the best younger writers in Japan. You recognize that if you just say, “Fuck it, let’s throw everything out!” There’s nothing in the bathtub to make the effort worthwhile.

DFW: For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you’re in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it’s great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat’s-away-let’s-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody’s got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there’s a cigarette burn on the couch, and you’re the host and it’s your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It’s not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it’s 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody’s thrown up in the umbrella stand and we’re wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We’re kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we’re uneasy about the fact that we wish they’d come back–I mean, what’s wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren’t ever coming back–which means “we’re” going to have to be the parents.

The philosopher’s novelist: interview with kazufumi shiraishi, entropy mag: an interview with christopher woodall, interview with christopher woodall.

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David Foster Wallace on Art vs. TV and the Motivation to be Smart

By maria popova.

You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need… is seriously engaged art that can teach again that we’re smart. And that’s the stuff that TV and movies — although they’re great at certain things — cannot give us. But that have to create the motivations for us to want to do the extra work, to get those other kinds of art… Which is tricky, because you want to seduce the reader, but you don’t want to pander or manipulate them. I mean, a good book teaches the reader how to read it.

Clay Shirky, of course, has written a great deal about the enormous intellectual and creative resources that are being opened up as we shift away from TV in Cognitive Surplus . But Wallace’s point about motivations resonates particularly deeply with me as I consider my role — and Brain Pickings’ highest aspiration — to motivate people to be interested in things they didn’t know they were interested in until they are.

— Published March 2, 2012 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/03/02/david-foster-wallace-art-vs-tv/ —

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David foster wallace: the 'fresh air' interview.

In 1996, Wallace's novel Infinite Jest was a critical and popular success. The new movie The End of The Tour recreates the author's tour for that book. Originally broadcast March 5, 1997.

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'End Of The Tour': An Unauthorized 'Anti-Biopic' Of David Foster Wallace

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR, I'm Terry Gross. The writer David Foster Wallace was suspicious of fame, other people's and his own, but he allowed Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky to spend five days interviewing him and traveling with him in the final days of Wallace's 1996 book tour, promoting his novel "Infinite Jest." Those five days are the subject of the new film, "The End Of The Tour," starring Jason Segel as Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as Lipsky. We're going to hear an interview I recorded with David Foster Wallace in 1997. In 2008, at the age of 46, he hanged himself. Looking back on his work, New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani described Wallace as having used his prodigious gifts as a writer, his manic, exuberant prose, his ferocious powers of observation, his ability to fuse avant-garde techniques with old-fashioned moral seriousness, to create a series of strobe-lit portraits of a millennial America, overdosing on the drugs of entertainment and self-gratification. Before we hear what he had to say on FRESH AIR, let's listen to a clip from the film. This is shortly after Lipsky has arrived at Wallace's secluded in Bloomington, Ill. Lipsky has just turned on his tape recorder to begin the interview.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE END OF THE TOUR")

JASON SEGEL: (As David Foster Wallace) Listen, before we start putting stuff on tape, I need to ask you something. I need to know that anything that I say five minutes later not to put in, that you're not going to put in.

JESSE EISENBERG: (As David Lipsky) Absolutely.

SEGEL: (As David Foster Wallace) Just given my level of fatigue and my (expletive) quotient lately, it's the only way I can see doing it and not going crazy.

EISENBERG: (As David Lipsky) No, I completely understand.

SEGEL: (As David Foster Wallace) It's right back on.

EISENBERG: (As David Lipsky) You agreed to the interview.

GROSS: When I spoke with David Foster Wallace, his book, "Infinite Jest," had just been published in paperback, and he had a new collection of essays called "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" about the luxury cruise he was asked to write about for Harper's Magazine. The cruise ads promised exciting adventures and entertainment to fill every moment of the day. He wrote, it's as if they were trying to convince you that you are guaranteed of having a good time because the cruise personnel will micromanage every pleasure option, and your troublesome capacities for choice, error, regret, dissatisfaction and despair will be removed from the equation.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

GROSS: Do you think that when people are on vacation, they worry that they're not making the right choice in what they're doing and they're not having as much fun as other people on vacation are having? And that when you have the day managed for you, you can just relax because the professionals are handling it for you (laughter)?

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: I think that's probably true, and I think that there's a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is. And that's why I think that, you know, the paradox is that a great deal of the expense of a luxury cruise, other than the facilities, is the - this entire battalion of professional fun managers going around, and a big part of their job is to assure you that you're having a good time. And their smiles were very high-watt, and they were constantly sort of inviting people up to the microphone to give sort of almost evangelical testimony to what a good time they were having.

GROSS: You write, there's something about a mass-market luxury cruise that's unbearably sad. What's sad about it?

WALLACE: Oh boy, I think - now, again, I'm not any kind of cruisologist, right, so I'm just a regular sort of civilian who was on this thing. I think that I noticed the same kind of sadness whenever, in my own life, I know that there's hard stuff that I'm not dealing with. And so what happens is I'll jack it into fifth gear and begin moving so fast and doing so much and trying to experience so much that I'm really sort of trying to drown it out. What I really wanted, and Harper's didn't want to do it, was I really wanted to follow a couple cruisers back and see what the week after the cruise was like because the brochures and the sort of mythology of cruising suggests that you return to the stresses of your normal life, relaxed and refreshed. And, at least in my own experience, you know, the cruise was to completely infantilizing and there was so little demanded of me that even just, you know, standing in a supermarket checkout line seemed like an unendurable ordeal afterwards.

GROSS: You know, I really like the way you talk. You write about a pleasure and how difficult it can be (laughter) to really achieve. You write about pleasure in the "Infinite Jest," your latest novel. And I'm thinking, you know, one of the things relating to that, in "Infinite Jest," one of the characters finds that marijuana is - marijuana is no longer a pleasurable experience, it just makes him terribly self-conscious and therefore anxious. And I'm wondering what happens to you when you do something that's supposed to give you pleasure and it just makes you uncomfortable or anxious.

WALLACE: Boy, I'm not really even sure how to respond to that. Look, a lot of the impetus for writing "Infinite Jest" was just the fact that I was about 30 and I had a lot of friends who were about 30, and we'd all, you know, been grotesquely over-educated and privileged our whole lives and had better healthcare and more money than our parents did. And we were all extraordinarily sad. I think it has something to do with being raised in an era when really the ultimate value seems to be - I mean a successful life is - let's see, you make a lot of money and you have a really attractive spouse or you get infamous or famous in some way so that it's a life where you basically experience as much pleasure as possible, which ends up being sort of empty and low-calorie. But the reason I don't like talking about it discursively is it sounds very banal and cliche, you know, when you say it out loud that way. Believe it or not this was - this came as something of an epiphany to us at around age 30, sitting around, talking about why on earth we were so miserable when we'd been so lucky.

GROSS: Well, when did you realize that all the benefits you had in an educated middle-class life weren't bringing you happiness?

WALLACE: Well, look, I guess it sort of depends on what you mean by happiness. I mean, it's not like we were walking around fingering razor blades or anything like that. But it just sort of seems as if - we sort of knew how happy our parents were, and we would compare our lives with our parents and see that, at least on the surface or according to the criteria that the culture lays down for a successful, happy life, we were actually doing better than a lot of them were. And so why on earth were we so miserable? I don't think - you know, I don't mean to suggest that it was, you know, a state of constant clinical depression or that we all felt that we were supposed to be blissfully happy all the time. There was just - I have a very weird and amateur sense that an enormous part of, like, my generation and the generation right after mine is just an extremely sad, sort of lost generation, which when you think about the material comforts and the political freedoms that we enjoy, is just strange.

GROSS: In your novel, "Infinite Jest," you deal with the pursuit of entertainment and pleasure. In fact, "Infinite Jest" is the title of a movie within the novel. You want to tell us a little bit about that movie?

WALLACE: Well, the movie, I guess, is sort of the MacGuffin of the book. I guess the idea is a lot of the book is about a kind of art film director who eventually comes up with a film that's so entertaining that anybody who watches it never wants to do anything else. Then the interesting thing becomes, if such a thing exists, do you avail yourself of it or not, and various people wring their hands about various elements of that question, but that's part of what the book's about.

GROSS: Do you think there are other new forms of pleasure that people pursue in the novel?

WALLACE: Well, I think - and it's not much of a coincidence - I think a lot of the people in the book are at about, you know, the situation that I was in when I was starting to work on the book, which were people who not only were vaguely unhappy in certain ways, but they sensed a kind of incongruity about why they were unhappy and were beginning to wonder what values and assumptions were leading them to be unhappy and then facing the rather unpleasant fact that there's very little to replace those in this culture. If that makes any sense at all.

GROSS: What are the those that you're referring to?

WALLACE: Well, I guess the basic idea that - see, I feel lame saying it out loud, and it sounds like I'm Bill Bennett or something. I guess the basic idea that the purpose of life is to be happy or is to experience the most favorable ratio of pleasure to suffering or productivity to work or gratification to sacrifice or any of that stuff, which, you know, a couple generations ago, to say that kind of stuff would have made you, you know, a freak - a freak and an Epicurean - and now seems to be so much - simply an unquestioned assumption of the culture that we don't really even talk about it anymore. I'm certainly starting to perspire talking about it here...

GROSS: (Laughter).

WALLACE: ...'Cause I'm afraid it sounds very - you know, it sounds like I'm going to walk out of the room with my knuckles dragging on the ground.

GROSS: One of your essays in your new collection is about irony and how it's become the common language of TV and a lot of contemporary fiction. You talk about how television has institutionalized hip irony. Can I ask you to explain what you mean by that?

WALLACE: What sort of time limit is there?

WALLACE: No, I mean, the essay is really about the relation between TV and fiction and what it's like to be a fiction writer who watches a lot of TV. And I guess the basic point is that a lot of the tools that were used by literary fiction writers in, I guess, particularly the '60s, to help - I don't know if there was a social agenda. I think it was probably to debunk certain kind of hypocritical Ward Cleaver-ish assumptions that the culture was making about itself. Those techniques, including meta-discursive stuff, self-reference, irony, black humor, cynicism, grotesquerie and shock, that what's interesting now is - now that, really, television - I think it would be safe to say that television or televisual values rule the culture. Television is now successfully using a lot of those same techniques but using them for a very different agenda, which is to sort of create an ethos and please people and to sell products to consumers. So that - the essay is supposed to be a setup for sort of what is the literary rebel or the writer who wants to be engaged somehow with the culture do now? You know, how do you be a rebel when Burger King, you know, for two years their slogan was you got to break the rules? How do you rebel against anarchy or a kind of weird crafted anarchy?

GROSS: We're listening back to my 1997 interview with the late writer David Foster Wallace. We'll hear more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the 1997 interview I recorded with writer David Foster Wallace. He's portrayed by Jason Segel in the new film "The End Of The Tour."

GROSS: You write about how irony can become not only tiresome but even tyrannical. What are some of the problems you see with the ironic voice, whether you're a viewer watching television or a writer using it in your fiction or essays?

WALLACE: Well, a vivid example to use right now is how I feel in here, answering some of the questions you are asking about pleasure. The beads of perspiration I get on my forehead talking about something like does my generation face a task in terms of exploring what values we want to live our lives by or what we think the purpose of our life is and how much is pleasure a part of it, I'm so terrified of sounding like Bill Bennett or a, you know, church lady who's been parodied on "Saturday Night Live" or, God forbid, Stuart Smalley, who's been parodied on "Saturday Night Live." That this entire how to talk straight about anything, that really means anything that might sound cliche, that might sound uncool, might sound unhip, I mean, there's an absolute terror that goes along with it. And I know, because most of my friends are my age and younger, that this is not just me, that there is some weird way that - if the greatest sin in the integrated in the past was, you know, obscenity or shock, the greatest sin now is appearing naive or old-fashioned so that somebody can give you a sort of a very cool arch smile and devastate you with one extraordinarily crafted line that puts kind of a hole in your pretentious balloon.

GROSS: Now does that - is that a problem for you as a writer? Do you feel that there are certain sentiments - certain, like, heartfelt sentiments that you're afraid to deal with because it might sound square and corny?

WALLACE: Well, it's more complicated than that because usually, if you're writing fiction, you're dealing with characters who, themselves, will have heartfelt sentiments but who, themselves, live in this culture right now and thus face all the impediments to sort of dealing with those parts of their lives that, you know, that we did. So it would be not only silly but unrealistic to have a character saying that kind of stuff. I don't know, I mean, other writers with whom I talk about this stuff, it's more just this - a lot of writers tired of doing kind of hip, slick, funny, dark, exploding hypocrisy, underlining once again the point that life is a farce and we're all in it for ourselves and that the point of life is to amass as much money/fame/sexual gratification, you know, whatever your personal thing is, and that everything else is just glitter or PR image - that we're tired of sort of doing that stuff over and over again. Yet to do stuff that flies in the face of that is to risk becoming the "Bridges Of Madison County" guy. I mean, a lot of the stuff that would seem on the surface of it to counteract that is gooey, hideous, horrible, retrograde, cynical stuff, if that makes any sense.

GROSS: Yeah, well, I think it's - I think it's just, like, very perceptive of you to put your finger on the limitations of, like, the need for irony but at the same time, the limitations of irony.

WALLACE: Irony, as far as I could see - and, you know, you can take college courses for three years on just what irony is, so there's something - I guess I'm going to assume that everybody kind of knows - when David Letterman comes out and draws himself up to his full height and says what a fine crows, you know, echoing the Arthur Godfrey of decades past, that's the kind of thing that I mean. Irony and sarcasm and all that stuff are fantastic for exploding hypocrisy and exposing what's wrong in extent values. As far as I can see, they're notably less good at erecting replacement values or coming any closer to the truth. And the thing about it is they're a terrific tool and they were used really well. We're just still using it, it seems to me, as a culture, 35, 40 years after it really had some use.

GROSS: Do you watch a lot of TV now?

WALLACE: I actually do not own a TV now but that is not TV's fault.

GROSS: Wow.

WALLACE: It's my fault because if I own it, I will watch it and, you know, even when, after an hour or so, I'm not even enjoying watching it because I'm feeling guilty at how nonproductive I'm being, except the feeling guilty then makes me anxious, which I want to soothe by distracting myself, so I'll watch the TV even more. And it just gets - I don't know, it just gets depressing. My own relationship to TV depresses me. It's not TV per se.

GROSS: When...

WALLACE: I do have a VCR, so it's not like I never watch a cathode ray screen.

GROSS: So when did you start realizing that in order to not watch TV you couldn't even own a TV?

WALLACE: I was sick in bed one day and decided I would amuse myself by drawing up a list of all the things I thought would be neat to read or that I should've read and that I had not read. By the time I was on the, like, 12th page, I began to panic and to realize that I needed to start doing some reading. And that if there was a TV in the room, I found out about a month later, I would simply - I mean, the game I'll play with myself is, oh, I'll read it with the TV on, which is just a farce. So I just decided I had too much to read to be able to own a TV.

GROSS: Something else you write about really well is self-consciousness. You write, for instance, about how writers are often bystanders, almost like voyeurs, and they're really good at watching other people, but they hate to be watched themselves and tend to be very self-conscious. Now, I know you don't want to overgeneralize and this isn't true of all writers, blah, blah, blah.

WALLACE: Well, I'm happy to overgeneralize.

GROSS: (Laughter) But it's certainly true of a lot of writers.

WALLACE: Yeah.

GROSS: And at the same time - I've said this before on FRESH AIR - I think self-conscious narrators make the best narrators because they're self-conscious about every detail, every action they're making and they're registering everybody else's action.

WALLACE: I do - I think there's a certain kind of neurological makeup that goes along with being a writer, and having been in the room with a few other writers at the same time, it's rather wearing to be around. And it does - there is a kind of hypervigilance about it. Unfortunately it's got disadvantages. If you turn that hypervigilance on yourself and, for instance, whether or not you have a pimple on the end of your nose, I mean, it can get really depressing. It can - it's also something of a continuum, and self-consciousness up to a point is really useful and really helpful, but I don't know how many people want to read a thing, you know, about self-consciousness, of self-consciousness or self-consciousness of that. And it - you can really kind of get in this infalling trap.

GROSS: One of the characters in "Infinite Jest" is a tennis player, and you were a champion tennis player when you were...

WALLACE: I was not. I deny.

GROSS: OK, not champion.

WALLACE: I deny steadfastly that I was a champion. I played competitive tennis on a regional junior level.

GROSS: You were...

WALLACE: I was not a champion. I don't want anybody from my hometown...

WALLACE: ...To hear me profess the word champion.

GROSS: You were a darned good tennis player (laughter).

WALLACE: I was decent by competitive standards.

GROSS: OK, good. And this is when you were about, what, age 12 to 15?

WALLACE: Something like that, yeah.

GROSS: Now did all your self-consciousness interfere with your performance on the court?

WALLACE: This is a marvelous set of - well, of course. I mean, this is - one of the great mysteries about athletes and why I think they appear dumb to some of us is that they seem to have this ability to turn off - I don't know how many of your listeners have this part in their brain - but what if I double fault on this point? Or what if I miss this free throw? Or what if I don't get this strike with the entire bowling team, you know, hanging - the professional athletes and great athletes, at first I thought it was that that stuff doesn't occur to them. But, you know, when I hung out with the pro tennis player for the tennis essay, it occurred to me that it's more like they have some sort of muscle that can cut that kind of thinking off. But that is literally paralyzing. You can end up like a bunny, you know, in the headlights of an oncoming car if you do that to yourself enough.

GROSS: Did you have that ability to turn it off?

WALLACE: No. And that is - I was middlingly-talented athlete but my big problem, and the coach told me at age 13, kid, you got a bad head. And what he meant was I would choke. I would begin thinking about, oh no, what if this happens and then I would say well, shut up, don't think about it. And then I would say to myself, but how can I not think about it if I'm not thinking about it. And meanwhile, you know, I'm standing, drooling, on the baseline going through this whole not very interesting game of mental ping-pong while the other guy is briskly going about the business of winning the match.

GROSS: David Foster Wallace, thank you very much for talking with.

WALLACE: Thank you, back.

GROSS: My interview with the late David Foster Wallace was recorded in 1997, one year after the new film about him is set. In the film, "The End Of The Tour," he's portrayed by Jason Segel. Jesse Eisenberg plays David Lipsky, the Rolling Stone journalist who accompanies Wallace on the end of his book tour, interviewing him every step of the way. Here they are at a diner.

SEGEL: (As David Foster Wallace) You know what I would love to do, man? I would love to do a profile on one of you guys who's doing a profile on me.

EISENBERG: (As David Lipsky) That is interesting.

SEGEL: (As David Foster Wallace) Is that too pomo and cute? I don't know.

EISENBERG: (As David Lipsky) Maybe for Rolling Stone.

SEGEL: (As David Foster Wallace) It would be interesting, though.

EISENBERG: (As David Lipsky) You think?

SEGEL: (As David Foster Wallace) I'm sorry, man.

EISENBERG: (As David Lipsky) What's wrong?

SEGEL: (As David Foster Wallace) It's just, you're going to go back to New York and, like, sit at your desk and shape this thing however you want. And that - I mean, to me, it's just extremely disturbing.

EISENBERG: (As David Lipsky) (Laughter) Why is it disturbing?

SEGEL: (As David Foster Wallace) 'Cause I think I would like to shape the impression of me that's coming across. Yeah, I don't even know if I like you yet. So nervous about whether you like me.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As waiter) Here you go. Your food will be out soon. Can I get you anything else?

EISENBERG: (As David Lipsky) No, no, no, we're fine. Thank you.

SEGEL: (As David Foster Wallace) Thanks. What's this story about in your mind? What does Yom want?

EISENBERG: (As David Lipsky) Just what it's like to be the most talked about writer in the country or (laughter) that sort of thing.

GROSS: We'll hear my 2009 interview with Jason Segel after a break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

David Foster Wallace

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30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the Web

in e-books , Literature | February 22nd, 2012 10 Comments

Image by Steve Rhodes, via Wikimedia Commons

We started the week expecting to publish one David Foster Wallace post . Then, because of the 50th birthday celebration, it turned into two . And now three. We spent some time tracking down free DFW stories and essays available on the web, and they’re all now listed in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices . But we didn’t want them to escape your attention. So here they are — 23 pieces published by David Foster Wallace between 1989 and 2011, mostly in major U.S. publications like The New Yorker , Harper’s , The Atlantic , and The Paris Review . Enjoy, and don’t miss our other collections of free writings by Philip K. Dick and Neil Gaiman .

“9/11: The View From the Midwest” (Rolling Stone, October 25, 2001)
“All That” (New Yorker, December 14, 2009)
“An Interval” (New Yorker, January 30, 1995)
“Asset” (New Yorker, January 30, 1995)
“Backbone” An Excerpt from The Pale King (New Yorker, March 7, 2011)
“Big Red Son” from Consider the Lobster & Other Essays
“Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” (The Paris Review, Fall 1997)
“Consider the Lobster” (Gourmet, August 2004)
“David Lynch Keeps His Head” (Premiere, 1996)
“Everything is Green” (Harpers, September 1989)
“E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (The Review of Contemporary Fiction, June 22, 1993)
“Federer as Religious Experience” (New York Times, August 20, 2006)
“Good People” (New Yorker, February 5, 2007)
“Host” (The Atlantic, April 2005)
“Incarnations of Burned Children” (Esquire, April 21, 2009)
“Laughing with Kafka” (Harper’s, January 1998)
“Little Expressionless Animals” (The Paris Review, Spring 1988)
“On Life and Work” (Kenyon College Commencement address, 2005)
“Order and Flux in Northampton” (Conjunctions, 1991)
“Rabbit Resurrected” (Harper’s, August 1992)
“ Several Birds” (New Yorker, June 17, 1994)
“Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise” (Harper’s, January 1996)
“Tennis, trigonometry, tornadoes A Midwestern boyhood” (Harper’s, December 1991)
“Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the wars over usage” (Harper’s, April 2001)
“The Awakening of My Interest in Annular Systems” (Harper’s, September 1993)
“The Compliance Branch” (Harper’s, February 2008)
“The Depressed Person” (Harper’s, January 1998)
“The String Theory” (Esquire, July 1996)
“The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys And The Shrub” (Rolling Stone, April 2000)
“Ticket to the Fair” (Harper’s, July 1994)
“Wiggle Room” (New Yorker, March 9, 2009)

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David Foster Wallace’s Final Attempt to Make Art Moral

By Jon Baskin

Before David Foster Wallace died by suicide at his California home, in 2008, he left a pile of papers, spiral notebooks, three-ring binders, and floppy disks on a table in his garage. The collection of notes, outlines, prose fragments, character sketches, and partial chapters reportedly ran to hundreds of thousands of words, most of them circling a group of accountants at an office for the Internal Revenue Service in Peoria, Illinois, circa 1985. According to David Hering, a lecturer at the University of Liverpool who has visited Wallace’s archives in Austin, Texas, the material went back more than a decade, to the period immediately after the publication of Wallace’s second novel, the career-making “ Infinite Jest ” (1996). Over the years, Wallace had often referred to the project as the “long thing,” and worried that it was becoming unmanageable. The editor Michael Pietsch, who assembled some of the pages into the book that would become “ The Pale King ,” published in 2011, says Wallace compared writing the novel to “trying to carry a sheet of plywood in a windstorm.” In an e-mail to his friend and sometimes rival Jonathan Franzen, Wallace wrote, “The whole thing is a tornado that won’t hold still long enough for me to see what’s useful and what isn’t.”

As usual, Wallace’s choice of words was not casual. The ability to see what’s useful and what isn’t wasn’t just what Wallace believed that he needed to complete his final novel; it was also the virtue of mind he hoped it would cultivate in his readers. The most common rhetorical mode of “The Pale King” is commotion recollected in tranquillity. “I was like a piece of paper on the street in the wind, thinking, ‘Now I think I’ll blow this way, now I think I’ll blow that way. My essential response to everything was ‘Whatever.’ ” This is from the first page of the monologue of the tax auditor Chris Fogle, who, in the longest continuous portion of the novel, explains to an offstage interviewer the path that brought him to the “Service.” The past tense is to the point: Fogle’s is a conversion narrative that begins with an adolescence during which he “had trouble just paying attention,” and that concludes, following a kind of religious experience in an accounting class at DePaul University, in Chicago, with his deliverance unto his mission as an accountant for the I.R.S.

Fogle’s monologue has now been published as a freestanding novella, christened “ Something to Do with Paying Attention ” (McNally Editions). In the introduction, the bookseller and editor Sarah McNally calls these pages “not just a complete story, but the best concrete example we have of Wallace’s late style, where calm and poise replace the pyrotechnics of Infinite Jest and other early works.” McNally is right to underscore the story’s relatively serene narration, which stands out even more now that it can be encountered independently from the larger book. For much of his career, Wallace was known for interminable footnotes, self-reflexive marginalia, and clause-heavy sentences that doubled back on themselves in an effort to represent the convolutions of the American mind—a mind jammed full of bureaucratic jargon, commercial slogans, and therapeutic pseudo-concepts, then wrapped in the trip wire of postmodern self-consciousness. He did not always want to write like this, though. And Fogle’s monologue offers, as McNally indicates, Wallace’s most sustained effort to adopt the plainspoken frankness that he admired in the “morally passionate, passionately moral” fiction of his Russian heroes, especially Dostoyevsky .

McNally has less to say about how the novella answers a perhaps more urgent question for Wallace, whose stylistic choices were always connected to moral-philosophical ones: what to use this newly frank moral authority for. Learning to “see what’s useful and what isn’t” may appear to be predominantly a matter of self-discipline or character, and at times this was how Wallace treated it. But Wallace’s late works reveal an increasing awareness that separating the useful and the useless also requires an ethical judgment: it means determining what is, or should be, worthy of our committed attention. Is public accountancy, as some of the characters in the novel insist, a moral vocation? What does it mean to be “useful,” whether as an employee of the federal government or as an artist, in the America shaped by Ronald Reagan? Although Wallace’s final work of fiction raises these questions, it does not exactly answer them, and perhaps for good reason.

Since the publication of D. T. Max’s essay “ The Unfinished ,” in 2009, in this magazine, discussions about Wallace in non-scholarly venues have taken a sharply biographical turn. Subsequent first-person accounts came from Wallace’s friends (including Franzen, in his long-form eulogy for this magazine), his former romantic partners (among them the writer Mary Karr, who reported that Wallace kicked her, stalked her, and threatened to kill her husband), and his editors (the latter two categories combined in the former Esquire editor Adrienne Miller’s 2020 memoir “ In the Land of Men ”). These accounts filled in important blanks in Wallace’s personal history, including aspects of his decades-long battle with addiction and depression, and the grim details of his final weeks in California. They also produced a fairly consistent picture of a selfish friend, a manipulative—and likely abusive—boyfriend, and a jealous and self-mythologizing writer. Even were we to desire to do so, there is no way to read Wallace today without knowing these things about him.

It’s worth noting, though, that for attentive readers of Wallace’s fiction, little of the news about his personal life could come as a surprise. Wallace’s great subject was the morass of selfishness, self-rationalization, and intellectualized narcissism into which his cohort of educated, relatively privileged Americans would sink—and were sinking—unless they could find something to love more than they loved themselves. A difference between Wallace and many of his contemporaries—one that sometimes opened him to charges of hypocrisy and self-delusion, not to mention cringeworthy sentimentalism—was his commitment to doing more than merely cataloguing the traps of modern alienation. This did not mean that he claimed to have escaped those traps himself. It did mean, as reflected by his attraction to conversion narratives like Fogle’s, that he hoped he could spring his readers free.

“Something to Do with Paying Attention,” like any worthwhile conversion narrative, begins with the unconverted self. With shame, Fogle recounts being an unfocussed child of the seventies who drifted between jobs and schools in Libertyville, a suburb of Chicago, where he and his “wastoid” friends smoked pot, traded interpretations of what Pink Floyd “truly” meant, and romanticized their “weird kind of narcissistic despair.” In another convention of the genre, part of Fogle’s problem, he sees now, was that he was not aware he had a problem. That starts to change after a sequence that could only have been written by Wallace—the last major American novelist to be fluent in popular television—in which Fogle, watching soap operas in his dorm room at DePaul, in 1978, is struck by a return-from-commercial tagline. The tagline is “ You’re watching As the World Turns”—emphasis Fogle’s. Fogle begins to apprehend, however foggily, “that I might be a real nihilist, that it wasn’t always just a hip pose. That I drifted and quit because nothing meant anything, no one choice was really better.” Beneath the theatrical performance of wastoid anomie, that is, lies the real thing.

The transition, for Fogle and for the reader, is from seeing Fogle’s aimlessness as a generic product of adolescent apathy to understanding it as a symptom of a broader social and spiritual deficit. Wallace was an uncommonly philosophical novelist in part because he believed that cultural life was oriented by a set of dominant ideas and pictures, which were both older and more entrenched than any specific trend or technology. The wasteland in which the wastoids live is, then, not merely attributable to the influence of popular media in seventies America; it emerges from the rocky soil of secular, modern ideals. The invocation of “nihilism”—a word that Fogle uses to describe himself five different times—connects his condition to the skepticism so often targeted by modern philosophers, from Kant to Simone de Beauvoir, in their attempt to secure a rational basis for morality after the death of God. Where Wallace believed that this effort had led is indicated by Fogle’s frustration with his humanities courses, which reflect the exhaustion of the search for a moral order and, in its place, the emergence of a postmodern project that tends to reinforce his nihilistic priors. “The whole point of the classes,” Fogle recalls, “was that nothing meant anything, that everything was abstract and endlessly interpretable.”

It is consistent with Wallace’s long quest for countercultural forces in the places his readers might least expect to find them—the role is played most convincingly by Alcoholics Anonymous in “Infinite Jest”—that Fogle’s conversion experience takes place neither in one of these literature or philosophy courses, nor in a traditional religious setting. Rather, it occurs when he wanders absent-mindedly, still thinking about his dorm-room epiphany, into the wrong classroom on the final day of a semester at DePaul. Instead of American Political Thought, he has arrived just in time for the final lecture in Advanced Tax.

If the soap-opera tagline has primed Fogle for his conversion, the accounting class completes the job. The course is taught by a Jesuit professor who immediately impresses Fogle with his authoritative bearing. (In a parallel to McNally’s judgment of Wallace’s late writing, the professor expresses a “zealous integrity that manifested not as style but as the lack of it.”) Fogle knows nothing about progressive marginal tax rates and adjusted gross income, but he does note a series of remarks the Jesuit makes in support of his conviction that “the accounting profession to which you aspire is, in fact, heroic.” On one of the professor’s transparencies appears a quotation: “What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war.” (Seeing the attribution to “James,” Fogle assumes the reference is to the “biblical apostle.”) At the end of class, stepping away from his charts for a final flourish, the Jesuit invokes the Kierkegaardian “leap outward” that will be required of the students if they wish to transcend the affectations of their youth and embrace a vocation worthy of an adult. The lecture ends with a corny pun that Fogle registers as a command: “Gentlemen, you are called to account.”

On the level of narrative, all that is left is for Fogle to buy a wool suit and make his way to the I.R.S. regional recruiting office in southwest Chicago—a task that he completes in a subtly haunting scene set amid dazzlingly bright snowbanks left over from the infamous blizzard of 1979, and overlaid with heavy-handed comparisons between entering the Service and signing up for war. The novella ends with Fogle being accepted into a vocation that, based on his comments in the present, has fulfilled all his expectations for it. But to regard Fogle’s conversion as straightforward in this way—that is, in the way it looks to him , post-conversion—is to tell only half the story in “Something to Do with Paying Attention.” For, unlike most of Wallace’s previous works of fiction, which take place either in some fictional future or in intimate settings with little social scaffolding, “The Pale King” is a historical novel.

“All this was in the Chicagoland area in the 1970s, a period that now seems as abstract and unfocused as I was myself,” Fogle recalls. “I seem to remember in 1976 my father openly predicting a Ronald Reagan presidency and even sending their campaign a donation.” Fogle remembers, too, the subtle marks of distinction that make adolescents such reliable guides to a given era: “Girls wore caps or dungaree hats, but most guys were essentially uncool if they wore a hat”; “I remember everyone pretending to be a samurai or saying ‘Excuse me !’ in all sorts of different contexts—this was cool”; “The smell of Brylcreem in my father’s hatband, Deep Throat, Howard Cosell . . .” Details like these are scattered throughout the first half of the novella, partly so Wallace can establish a generational caesura between Fogle and his father, the Reagan-campaign contributor. Fogle’s father is a “cost systems supervisor” for the city of Chicago, who never misses a day of work before dying in a gruesome subway accident in 1977. (Fogle, due to his “dawdling” behind his father on the platform, is partly responsible.) Only after his encounter with the Jesuit professor does Fogle recognize that his rebellion against what he had considered his father’s mindless conformism had itself been a product of mindless conformism. The father and son were “acting out typical roles . . . like machines going through their programmed motions.”

By choosing to follow in his father’s footsteps and devote his life to public service, Fogle seeks to break with his programming and live what he calls a “human” life. The problem is that public service, in the generation separating Fogle from his father, has itself come to be perceived as less and less human. Fogle’s father is part of the Depression-era Silent Generation, a group often associated with values like thrift, patriotism, and respect for authority. Fogle’s generation, by contrast, came of age during the Vietnam War and Watergate, events that created a breach in trust between citizens and their government. (Fogle recalls this being indicated by the ambient phrase “credibility gap.”) As the scholar Marshall Boswell has pointed out, Fogle’s monologue also contains echoes from a long debate about tax policy and ethics, which Pietsch places right before it in “The Pale King.” The debate is between veteran I.R.S. agents who see the agency as a repository of civic virtue and moral responsibility—the “nation’s beating heart”—and a new guard who seek to transform it into “a business—a going, for-profit concern type of thing.” As Boswell notes, the disagreement pits Fogle’s father’s dutiful civic-mindedness against the ascendent corporatist ethos of Fogle’s generation, which believes that “their highest actual duty was to themselves.”

The whole point of Fogle’s monologue, from his perspective, is that the Service has allowed him to subsume his self-interest in some larger purpose. And neither the novella nor “The Pale King” undermines the Jesuit’s teaching that public accountancy can be a noble calling, capable of inculcating virtues—duty, accountability, the ability to complete repetitive work with no expectation of applause—that run counter to the nihilism of the age. But it is no accident that Wallace also sets the story’s events on the cusp of the Reagan revolution, which, largely through tax policy, would hollow out America’s already ailing public institutions, exacerbating the pessimism about government and collective causes that informs Fogle’s initial “malaise.” The story is simultaneously about the lifesaving necessity of sincere, moral commitment and about the impossibility of finding a worthy object for that commitment in the historical period that immediately precedes our own.

Wallace could never have guessed that his final novel, written in the midst of neoliberal disinvestment and end-of-history disenchantment, would appear at the outset of a decade that marked a return to the ethics of conviction. Only one of several artists in his generation to call for a “new sincerity” (a term that he never actually used, though he is justly associated with the tendency) in culture, he was virtually alone in suggesting, with anything like a straight face, that American civic and political life might offer a proper receptacle for that sincerity. Remarkably, in the years that followed the publication of “The Pale King”—years that included events such as Occupy Wall Street, nationwide social movements for racial and gender equality, and the rise of Trumpism—the notion that American artists should make their work subserve political movements became prominent and then virtually inescapable. At times, these causes tempted artists into a kind of grandstanding that was at odds with the valorization, in Fogle’s monologue, of acts undertaken for “no audience.” Still, it is possible that Wallace’s most meaningful influence on the writers and literary commentators who followed him came neither from his stylistic innovations nor his broadsides against postmodern self-consciousness but, rather, from his insistence that literature should aim at a moral purpose that was higher than itself.

Yet the difficulty that Wallace had in finding an object for this purpose proved predictive in a different sense. His inability to locate institutions not already corrupted in near-fatal ways, nor causes dignified enough to hold his skepticism at bay, hinted at the fickle, fugitive quality that would attend so many of the public passions of the ensuing decade. It also suggested why our artists and intellectuals cycle so reliably between utopian evangelism and ironic anti-politics . If Wallace believed that we should pursue the “moral equivalent of war” in the social realm, as James (the pragmatist philosopher, not the apostle) put it, he was also alive to the possibility that our moral wars would be about as decisive, and lead to just as much disillusionment and cynicism, as our military ones. We might read Fogle’s story today as an allegory for Wallace’s attempt to write passionately moral fiction for a society that had lost not only the will but also the capacity to make shared judgments about what’s useful and what isn’t. Wallace was like a man trying to build a new attic on a house whose foundation he knows has collapsed. It’s a kind of dark miracle that he stayed up there so long. ♦

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photo of Icon of the Seas, taken on a long railed path approaching the stern of the ship, with people walking along dock

Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever

Seven agonizing nights aboard the Icon of the Seas

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Updated at 2:44 p.m. ET on April 6, 2024.

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MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, from the window of an approaching Miami cab, brings on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress. I shut my eyes in defense, as my brain tells my optic nerve to try again.

The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots. Vibrant, oversignifying colors are stacked upon other such colors, decks perched over still more decks; the only comfort is a row of lifeboats ringing its perimeter. There is no imposed order, no cogent thought, and, for those who do not harbor a totalitarian sense of gigantomania, no visual mercy. This is the biggest cruise ship ever built, and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.

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“Author embarks on their first cruise-ship voyage” has been a staple of American essay writing for almost three decades, beginning with David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which was first published in 1996 under the title “Shipping Out.” Since then, many admirable writers have widened and diversified the genre. Usually the essayist commissioned to take to the sea is in their first or second flush of youth and is ready to sharpen their wit against the hull of the offending vessel. I am 51, old and tired, having seen much of the world as a former travel journalist, and mostly what I do in both life and prose is shrug while muttering to my imaginary dachshund, “This too shall pass.” But the Icon of the Seas will not countenance a shrug. The Icon of the Seas is the Linda Loman of cruise ships, exclaiming that attention must be paid. And here I am in late January with my one piece of luggage and useless gray winter jacket and passport, zipping through the Port of Miami en route to the gangway that will separate me from the bulk of North America for more than seven days, ready to pay it in full.

The aforementioned gangway opens up directly onto a thriving mall (I will soon learn it is imperiously called the “Royal Promenade”), presently filled with yapping passengers beneath a ceiling studded with balloons ready to drop. Crew members from every part of the global South, as well as a few Balkans, are shepherding us along while pressing flutes of champagne into our hands. By a humming Starbucks, I drink as many of these as I can and prepare to find my cabin. I show my blue Suite Sky SeaPass Card (more on this later, much more) to a smiling woman from the Philippines, and she tells me to go “aft.” Which is where, now? As someone who has rarely sailed on a vessel grander than the Staten Island Ferry, I am confused. It turns out that the aft is the stern of the ship, or, for those of us who don’t know what a stern or an aft are, its ass. The nose of the ship, responsible for separating the waves before it, is also called a bow, and is marked for passengers as the FWD , or forward. The part of the contemporary sailing vessel where the malls are clustered is called the midship. I trust that you have enjoyed this nautical lesson.

I ascend via elevator to my suite on Deck 11. This is where I encounter my first terrible surprise. My suite windows and balcony do not face the ocean. Instead, they look out onto another shopping mall. This mall is the one that’s called Central Park, perhaps in homage to the Olmsted-designed bit of greenery in the middle of my hometown. Although on land I would be delighted to own a suite with Central Park views, here I am deeply depressed. To sail on a ship and not wake up to a vast blue carpet of ocean? Unthinkable.

Allow me a brief preamble here. The story you are reading was commissioned at a moment when most staterooms on the Icon were sold out. In fact, so enthralled by the prospect of this voyage were hard-core mariners that the ship’s entire inventory of guest rooms (the Icon can accommodate up to 7,600 passengers, but its inaugural journey was reduced to 5,000 or so for a less crowded experience) was almost immediately sold out. Hence, this publication was faced with the shocking prospect of paying nearly $19,000 to procure for this solitary passenger an entire suite—not including drinking expenses—all for the privilege of bringing you this article. But the suite in question doesn’t even have a view of the ocean! I sit down hard on my soft bed. Nineteen thousand dollars for this .

selfie photo of man with glasses, in background is swim-up bar with two women facing away

The viewless suite does have its pluses. In addition to all the Malin+Goetz products in my dual bathrooms, I am granted use of a dedicated Suite Deck lounge; access to Coastal Kitchen, a superior restaurant for Suites passengers; complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream (“the fastest Internet at Sea”) “for one device per person for the whole cruise duration”; a pair of bathrobes (one of which comes prestained with what looks like a large expectoration by the greenest lizard on Earth); and use of the Grove Suite Sun, an area on Decks 18 and 19 with food and deck chairs reserved exclusively for Suite passengers. I also get reserved seating for a performance of The Wizard of Oz , an ice-skating tribute to the periodic table, and similar provocations. The very color of my Suite Sky SeaPass Card, an oceanic blue as opposed to the cloying royal purple of the standard non-Suite passenger, will soon provoke envy and admiration. But as high as my status may be, there are those on board who have much higher status still, and I will soon learn to bow before them.

In preparation for sailing, I have “priced in,” as they say on Wall Street, the possibility that I may come from a somewhat different monde than many of the other cruisers. Without falling into stereotypes or preconceptions, I prepare myself for a friendly outspokenness on the part of my fellow seafarers that may not comply with modern DEI standards. I believe in meeting people halfway, and so the day before flying down to Miami, I visited what remains of Little Italy to purchase a popular T-shirt that reads DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL across the breast in the colors of the Italian flag. My wife recommended that I bring one of my many T-shirts featuring Snoopy and the Peanuts gang, as all Americans love the beagle and his friends. But I naively thought that my meatball T-shirt would be more suitable for conversation-starting. “Oh, and who is your ‘daddy’?” some might ask upon seeing it. “And how long have you been his ‘little meatball’?” And so on.

I put on my meatball T-shirt and head for one of the dining rooms to get a late lunch. In the elevator, I stick out my chest for all to read the funny legend upon it, but soon I realize that despite its burnished tricolor letters, no one takes note. More to the point, no one takes note of me. Despite my attempts at bridge building, the very sight of me (small, ethnic, without a cap bearing the name of a football team) elicits no reaction from other passengers. Most often, they will small-talk over me as if I don’t exist. This brings to mind the travails of David Foster Wallace , who felt so ostracized by his fellow passengers that he retreated to his cabin for much of his voyage. And Wallace was raised primarily in the Midwest and was a much larger, more American-looking meatball than I am. If he couldn’t talk to these people, how will I? What if I leave this ship without making any friends at all, despite my T-shirt? I am a social creature, and the prospect of seven days alone and apart is saddening. Wallace’s stateroom, at least, had a view of the ocean, a kind of cheap eternity.

Worse awaits me in the dining room. This is a large, multichandeliered room where I attended my safety training (I was shown how to put on a flotation vest; it is a very simple procedure). But the maître d’ politely refuses me entry in an English that seems to verge on another language. “I’m sorry, this is only for pendejos ,” he seems to be saying. I push back politely and he repeats himself. Pendejos ? Piranhas? There’s some kind of P-word to which I am not attuned. Meanwhile elderly passengers stream right past, powered by their limbs, walkers, and electric wheelchairs. “It is only pendejo dining today, sir.” “But I have a suite!” I say, already starting to catch on to the ship’s class system. He examines my card again. “But you are not a pendejo ,” he confirms. I am wearing a DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL T-shirt, I want to say to him. I am the essence of pendejo .

Eventually, I give up and head to the plebeian buffet on Deck 15, which has an aquatic-styled name I have now forgotten. Before gaining entry to this endless cornucopia of reheated food, one passes a washing station of many sinks and soap dispensers, and perhaps the most intriguing character on the entire ship. He is Mr. Washy Washy—or, according to his name tag, Nielbert of the Philippines—and he is dressed as a taco (on other occasions, I’ll see him dressed as a burger). Mr. Washy Washy performs an eponymous song in spirited, indeed flamboyant English: “Washy, washy, wash your hands, WASHY WASHY!” The dangers of norovirus and COVID on a cruise ship this size (a giant fellow ship was stricken with the former right after my voyage) makes Mr. Washy Washy an essential member of the crew. The problem lies with the food at the end of Washy’s rainbow. The buffet is groaning with what sounds like sophisticated dishes—marinated octopus, boiled egg with anchovy, chorizo, lobster claws—but every animal tastes tragically the same, as if there was only one creature available at the market, a “cruisipus” bred specifically for Royal Caribbean dining. The “vegetables” are no better. I pick up a tomato slice and look right through it. It tastes like cellophane. I sit alone, apart from the couples and parents with gaggles of children, as “We Are Family” echoes across the buffet space.

I may have failed to mention that all this time, the Icon of the Seas has not left port. As the fiery mango of the subtropical setting sun makes Miami’s condo skyline even more apocalyptic, the ship shoves off beneath a perfunctory display of fireworks. After the sun sets, in the far, dark distance, another circus-lit cruise ship ruptures the waves before us. We glance at it with pity, because it is by definition a smaller ship than our own. I am on Deck 15, outside the buffet and overlooking a bunch of pools (the Icon has seven of them), drinking a frilly drink that I got from one of the bars (the Icon has 15 of them), still too shy to speak to anyone, despite Sister Sledge’s assertion that all on the ship are somehow related.

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The ship’s passage away from Ron DeSantis’s Florida provides no frisson, no sense of developing “sea legs,” as the ship is too large to register the presence of waves unless a mighty wind adds significant chop. It is time for me to register the presence of the 5,000 passengers around me, even if they refuse to register mine. My fellow travelers have prepared for this trip with personally decorated T-shirts celebrating the importance of this voyage. The simplest ones say ICON INAUGURAL ’24 on the back and the family name on the front. Others attest to an over-the-top love of cruise ships: WARNING! MAY START TALKING ABOUT CRUISING . Still others are artisanally designed and celebrate lifetimes spent married while cruising (on ships, of course). A couple possibly in their 90s are wearing shirts whose backs feature a drawing of a cruise liner, two flamingos with ostensibly male and female characteristics, and the legend “ HUSBAND AND WIFE Cruising Partners FOR LIFE WE MAY NOT HAVE IT All Together BUT TOGETHER WE HAVE IT ALL .” (The words not in all caps have been written in cursive.) A real journalist or a more intrepid conversationalist would have gone up to the couple and asked them to explain the longevity of their marriage vis-à-vis their love of cruising. But instead I head to my mall suite, take off my meatball T-shirt, and allow the first tears of the cruise to roll down my cheeks slowly enough that I briefly fall asleep amid the moisture and salt.

photo of elaborate twisting multicolored waterslides with long stairwell to platform

I WAKE UP with a hangover. Oh God. Right. I cannot believe all of that happened last night. A name floats into my cobwebbed, nauseated brain: “Ayn Rand.” Jesus Christ.

I breakfast alone at the Coastal Kitchen. The coffee tastes fine and the eggs came out of a bird. The ship rolls slightly this morning; I can feel it in my thighs and my schlong, the parts of me that are most receptive to danger.

I had a dangerous conversation last night. After the sun set and we were at least 50 miles from shore (most modern cruise ships sail at about 23 miles an hour), I lay in bed softly hiccupping, my arms stretched out exactly like Jesus on the cross, the sound of the distant waves missing from my mall-facing suite, replaced by the hum of air-conditioning and children shouting in Spanish through the vents of my two bathrooms. I decided this passivity was unacceptable. As an immigrant, I feel duty-bound to complete the tasks I am paid for, which means reaching out and trying to understand my fellow cruisers. So I put on a normal James Perse T-shirt and headed for one of the bars on the Royal Promenade—the Schooner Bar, it was called, if memory serves correctly.

I sat at the bar for a martini and two Negronis. An old man with thick, hairy forearms drank next to me, very silent and Hemingwaylike, while a dreadlocked piano player tinkled out a series of excellent Elton John covers. To my right, a young white couple—he in floral shorts, she in a light, summery miniskirt with a fearsome diamond ring, neither of them in football regalia—chatted with an elderly couple. Do it , I commanded myself. Open your mouth. Speak! Speak without being spoken to. Initiate. A sentence fragment caught my ear from the young woman, “Cherry Hill.” This is a suburb of Philadelphia in New Jersey, and I had once been there for a reading at a synagogue. “Excuse me,” I said gently to her. “Did you just mention Cherry Hill? It’s a lovely place.”

As it turned out, the couple now lived in Fort Lauderdale (the number of Floridians on the cruise surprised me, given that Southern Florida is itself a kind of cruise ship, albeit one slowly sinking), but soon they were talking with me exclusively—the man potbellied, with a chin like a hard-boiled egg; the woman as svelte as if she were one of the many Ukrainian members of the crew—the elderly couple next to them forgotten. This felt as groundbreaking as the first time I dared to address an American in his native tongue, as a child on a bus in Queens (“On my foot you are standing, Mister”).

“I don’t want to talk politics,” the man said. “But they’re going to eighty-six Biden and put Michelle in.”

I considered the contradictions of his opening conversational gambit, but decided to play along. “People like Michelle,” I said, testing the waters. The husband sneered, but the wife charitably put forward that the former first lady was “more personable” than Joe Biden. “They’re gonna eighty-six Biden,” the husband repeated. “He can’t put a sentence together.”

After I mentioned that I was a writer—though I presented myself as a writer of teleplays instead of novels and articles such as this one—the husband told me his favorite writer was Ayn Rand. “Ayn Rand, she came here with nothing,” the husband said. “I work with a lot of Cubans, so …” I wondered if I should mention what I usually do to ingratiate myself with Republicans or libertarians: the fact that my finances improved after pass-through corporations were taxed differently under Donald Trump. Instead, I ordered another drink and the couple did the same, and I told him that Rand and I were born in the same city, St. Petersburg/Leningrad, and that my family also came here with nothing. Now the bonding and drinking began in earnest, and several more rounds appeared. Until it all fell apart.

Read: Gary Shteyngart on watching Russian television for five days straight

My new friend, whom I will refer to as Ayn, called out to a buddy of his across the bar, and suddenly a young couple, both covered in tattoos, appeared next to us. “He fucking punked me,” Ayn’s frat-boy-like friend called out as he put his arm around Ayn, while his sizable partner sizzled up to Mrs. Rand. Both of them had a look I have never seen on land—their eyes projecting absence and enmity in equal measure. In the ’90s, I drank with Russian soldiers fresh from Chechnya and wandered the streets of wartime Zagreb, but I have never seen such undisguised hostility toward both me and perhaps the universe at large. I was briefly introduced to this psychopathic pair, but neither of them wanted to have anything to do with me, and the tattooed woman would not even reveal her Christian name to me (she pretended to have the same first name as Mrs. Rand). To impress his tattooed friends, Ayn made fun of the fact that as a television writer, I’d worked on the series Succession (which, it would turn out, practically nobody on the ship had watched), instead of the far more palatable, in his eyes, zombie drama of last year. And then my new friends drifted away from me into an angry private conversation—“He punked me!”—as I ordered another drink for myself, scared of the dead-eyed arrivals whose gaze never registered in the dim wattage of the Schooner Bar, whose terrifying voices and hollow laughs grated like unoiled gears against the crooning of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

But today is a new day for me and my hangover. After breakfast, I explore the ship’s so-called neighborhoods . There’s the AquaDome, where one can find a food hall and an acrobatic sound-and-light aquatic show. Central Park has a premium steak house, a sushi joint, and a used Rolex that can be bought for $8,000 on land here proudly offered at $17,000. There’s the aforementioned Royal Promenade, where I had drunk with the Rands, and where a pair of dueling pianos duel well into the night. There’s Surfside, a kids’ neighborhood full of sugary garbage, which looks out onto the frothy trail that the behemoth leaves behind itself. Thrill Island refers to the collection of tubes that clutter the ass of the ship and offer passengers six waterslides and a surfing simulation. There’s the Hideaway, an adult zone that plays music from a vomit-slathered, Brit-filled Alicante nightclub circa 1996 and proves a big favorite with groups of young Latin American customers. And, most hurtfully, there’s the Suite Neighborhood.

2 photos: a ship's foamy white wake stretches to the horizon; a man at reailing with water and two large ships docked behind

I say hurtfully because as a Suite passenger I should be here, though my particular suite is far from the others. Whereas I am stuck amid the riffraff of Deck 11, this section is on the highborn Decks 16 and 17, and in passing, I peek into the spacious, tall-ceilinged staterooms from the hallway, dazzled by the glint of the waves and sun. For $75,000, one multifloor suite even comes with its own slide between floors, so that a family may enjoy this particular terror in private. There is a quiet splendor to the Suite Neighborhood. I see fewer stickers and signs and drawings than in my own neighborhood—for example, MIKE AND DIANA PROUDLY SERVED U.S. MARINE CORPS RETIRED . No one here needs to announce their branch of service or rank; they are simply Suites, and this is where they belong. Once again, despite my hard work and perseverance, I have been disallowed from the true American elite. Once again, I am “Not our class, dear.” I am reminded of watching The Love Boat on my grandmother’s Zenith, which either was given to her or we found in the trash (I get our many malfunctioning Zeniths confused) and whose tube got so hot, I would put little chunks of government cheese on a thin tissue atop it to give our welfare treat a pleasant, Reagan-era gooeyness. I could not understand English well enough then to catch the nuances of that seafaring program, but I knew that there were differences in the status of the passengers, and that sometimes those differences made them sad. Still, this ship, this plenty—every few steps, there are complimentary nachos or milkshakes or gyros on offer—was the fatty fuel of my childhood dreams. If only I had remained a child.

I walk around the outdoor decks looking for company. There is a middle-aged African American couple who always seem to be asleep in each other’s arms, probably exhausted from the late capitalism they regularly encounter on land. There is far more diversity on this ship than I expected. Many couples are a testament to Loving v. Virginia , and there is a large group of folks whose T-shirts read MELANIN AT SEA / IT’S THE MELANIN FOR ME . I smile when I see them, but then some young kids from the group makes Mr. Washy Washy do a cruel, caricatured “Burger Dance” (today he is in his burger getup), and I think, Well, so much for intersectionality .

At the infinity pool on Deck 17, I spot some elderly women who could be ethnic and from my part of the world, and so I jump in. I am proved correct! Many of them seem to be originally from Queens (“Corona was still great when it was all Italian”), though they are now spread across the tristate area. We bond over the way “Ron-kon-koma” sounds when announced in Penn Station.

“Everyone is here for a different reason,” one of them tells me. She and her ex-husband last sailed together four years ago to prove to themselves that their marriage was truly over. Her 15-year-old son lost his virginity to “an Irish young lady” while their ship was moored in Ravenna, Italy. The gaggle of old-timers competes to tell me their favorite cruising stories and tips. “A guy proposed in Central Park a couple of years ago”—many Royal Caribbean ships apparently have this ridiculous communal area—“and she ran away screaming!” “If you’re diamond-class, you get four drinks for free.” “A different kind of passenger sails out of Bayonne.” (This, perhaps, is racially coded.) “Sometimes, if you tip the bartender $5, your next drink will be free.”

“Everyone’s here for a different reason,” the woman whose marriage ended on a cruise tells me again. “Some people are here for bad reasons—the drinkers and the gamblers. Some people are here for medical reasons.” I have seen more than a few oxygen tanks and at least one woman clearly undergoing very serious chemo. Some T-shirts celebrate good news about a cancer diagnosis. This might be someone’s last cruise or week on Earth. For these women, who have spent months, if not years, at sea, cruising is a ritual as well as a life cycle: first love, last love, marriage, divorce, death.

Read: The last place on Earth any tourist should go

I have talked with these women for so long, tonight I promise myself that after a sad solitary dinner I will not try to seek out company at the bars in the mall or the adult-themed Hideaway. I have enough material to fulfill my duties to this publication. As I approach my orphaned suite, I run into the aggro young people who stole Mr. and Mrs. Rand away from me the night before. The tattooed apparitions pass me without a glance. She is singing something violent about “Stuttering Stanley” (a character in a popular horror movie, as I discover with my complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream Internet at Sea) and he’s loudly shouting about “all the money I’ve lost,” presumably at the casino in the bowels of the ship.

So these bent psychos out of a Cormac McCarthy novel are angrily inhabiting my deck. As I mewl myself to sleep, I envision a limited series for HBO or some other streamer, a kind of low-rent White Lotus , where several aggressive couples conspire to throw a shy intellectual interloper overboard. I type the scenario into my phone. As I fall asleep, I think of what the woman who recently divorced her husband and whose son became a man through the good offices of the Irish Republic told me while I was hoisting myself out of the infinity pool. “I’m here because I’m an explorer. I’m here because I’m trying something new.” What if I allowed myself to believe in her fantasy?

2 photos: 2 slices of pizza on plate; man in "Daddy's Little Meatball" shirt and shorts standing in outdoor dining area with ship's exhaust stacks in background

“YOU REALLY STARTED AT THE TOP,” they tell me. I’m at the Coastal Kitchen for my eggs and corned-beef hash, and the maître d’ has slotted me in between two couples. Fueled by coffee or perhaps intrigued by my relative youth, they strike up a conversation with me. As always, people are shocked that this is my first cruise. They contrast the Icon favorably with all the preceding liners in the Royal Caribbean fleet, usually commenting on the efficiency of the elevators that hurl us from deck to deck (as in many large corporate buildings, the elevators ask you to choose a floor and then direct you to one of many lifts). The couple to my right, from Palo Alto—he refers to his “porn mustache” and calls his wife “my cougar” because she is two years older—tell me they are “Pandemic Pinnacles.”

This is the day that my eyes will be opened. Pinnacles , it is explained to me over translucent cantaloupe, have sailed with Royal Caribbean for 700 ungodly nights. Pandemic Pinnacles took advantage of the two-for-one accrual rate of Pinnacle points during the pandemic, when sailing on a cruise ship was even more ill-advised, to catapult themselves into Pinnacle status.

Because of the importance of the inaugural voyage of the world’s largest cruise liner, more than 200 Pinnacles are on this ship, a startling number, it seems. Mrs. Palo Alto takes out a golden badge that I have seen affixed over many a breast, which reads CROWN AND ANCHOR SOCIETY along with her name. This is the coveted badge of the Pinnacle. “You should hear all the whining in Guest Services,” her husband tells me. Apparently, the Pinnacles who are not also Suites like us are all trying to use their status to get into Coastal Kitchen, our elite restaurant. Even a Pinnacle needs to be a Suite to access this level of corned-beef hash.

“We’re just baby Pinnacles,” Mrs. Palo Alto tells me, describing a kind of internal class struggle among the Pinnacle elite for ever higher status.

And now I understand what the maître d’ was saying to me on the first day of my cruise. He wasn’t saying “ pendejo .” He was saying “Pinnacle.” The dining room was for Pinnacles only, all those older people rolling in like the tide on their motorized scooters.

And now I understand something else: This whole thing is a cult. And like most cults, it can’t help but mirror the endless American fight for status. Like Keith Raniere’s NXIVM, where different-colored sashes were given out to connote rank among Raniere’s branded acolytes, this is an endless competition among Pinnacles, Suites, Diamond-Plusers, and facing-the-mall, no-balcony purple SeaPass Card peasants, not to mention the many distinctions within each category. The more you cruise, the higher your status. No wonder a section of the Royal Promenade is devoted to getting passengers to book their next cruise during the one they should be enjoying now. No wonder desperate Royal Caribbean offers (“FINAL HOURS”) crowded my email account weeks before I set sail. No wonder the ship’s jewelry store, the Royal Bling, is selling a $100,000 golden chalice that will entitle its owner to drink free on Royal Caribbean cruises for life. (One passenger was already gaming out whether her 28-year-old son was young enough to “just about earn out” on the chalice or if that ship had sailed.) No wonder this ship was sold out months before departure , and we had to pay $19,000 for a horrid suite away from the Suite Neighborhood. No wonder the most mythical hero of Royal Caribbean lore is someone named Super Mario, who has cruised so often, he now has his own working desk on many ships. This whole experience is part cult, part nautical pyramid scheme.

From the June 2014 issue: Ship of wonks

“The toilets are amazing,” the Palo Altos are telling me. “One flush and you’re done.” “They don’t understand how energy-efficient these ships are,” the husband of the other couple is telling me. “They got the LNG”—liquefied natural gas, which is supposed to make the Icon a boon to the environment (a concept widely disputed and sometimes ridiculed by environmentalists).

But I’m thinking along a different line of attack as I spear my last pallid slice of melon. For my streaming limited series, a Pinnacle would have to get killed by either an outright peasant or a Suite without an ocean view. I tell my breakfast companions my idea.

“Oh, for sure a Pinnacle would have to be killed,” Mr. Palo Alto, the Pandemic Pinnacle, says, touching his porn mustache thoughtfully as his wife nods.

“THAT’S RIGHT, IT’S your time, buddy!” Hubert, my fun-loving Panamanian cabin attendant, shouts as I step out of my suite in a robe. “Take it easy, buddy!”

I have come up with a new dressing strategy. Instead of trying to impress with my choice of T-shirts, I have decided to start wearing a robe, as one does at a resort property on land, with a proper spa and hammam. The response among my fellow cruisers has been ecstatic. “Look at you in the robe!” Mr. Rand cries out as we pass each other by the Thrill Island aqua park. “You’re living the cruise life! You know, you really drank me under the table that night.” I laugh as we part ways, but my soul cries out, Please spend more time with me, Mr. and Mrs. Rand; I so need the company .

In my white robe, I am a stately presence, a refugee from a better limited series, a one-man crossover episode. (Only Suites are granted these robes to begin with.) Today, I will try many of the activities these ships have on offer to provide their clientele with a sense of never-ceasing motion. Because I am already at Thrill Island, I decide to climb the staircase to what looks like a mast on an old-fashioned ship (terrified, because I am afraid of heights) to try a ride called “Storm Chasers,” which is part of the “Category 6” water park, named in honor of one of the storms that may someday do away with the Port of Miami entirely. Storm Chasers consists of falling from the “mast” down a long, twisting neon tube filled with water, like being the camera inside your own colonoscopy, as you hold on to the handles of a mat, hoping not to die. The tube then flops you down headfirst into a trough of water, a Royal Caribbean baptism. It both knocks my breath out and makes me sad.

In keeping with the aquatic theme, I attend a show at the AquaDome. To the sound of “Live and Let Die,” a man in a harness gyrates to and fro in the sultry air. I saw something very similar in the back rooms of the famed Berghain club in early-aughts Berlin. Soon another harnessed man is gyrating next to the first. Ja , I think to myself, I know how this ends. Now will come the fisting , natürlich . But the show soon devolves into the usual Marvel-film-grade nonsense, with too much light and sound signifying nichts . If any fisting is happening, it is probably in the Suite Neighborhood, inside a cabin marked with an upside-down pineapple, which I understand means a couple are ready to swing, and I will see none of it.

I go to the ice show, which is a kind of homage—if that’s possible—to the periodic table, done with the style and pomp and masterful precision that would please the likes of Kim Jong Un, if only he could afford Royal Caribbean talent. At one point, the dancers skate to the theme song of Succession . “See that!” I want to say to my fellow Suites—at “cultural” events, we have a special section reserved for us away from the commoners—“ Succession ! It’s even better than the zombie show! Open your minds!”

Finally, I visit a comedy revue in an enormous and too brightly lit version of an “intimate,” per Royal Caribbean literature, “Manhattan comedy club.” Many of the jokes are about the cruising life. “I’ve lived on ships for 20 years,” one of the middle-aged comedians says. “I can only see so many Filipino homosexuals dressed as a taco.” He pauses while the audience laughs. “I am so fired tonight,” he says. He segues into a Trump impression and then Biden falling asleep at the microphone, which gets the most laughs. “Anyone here from Fort Leonard Wood?” another comedian asks. Half the crowd seems to cheer. As I fall asleep that night, I realize another connection I have failed to make, and one that may explain some of the diversity on this vessel—many of its passengers have served in the military.

As a coddled passenger with a suite, I feel like I am starting to understand what it means to have a rank and be constantly reminded of it. There are many espresso makers , I think as I look across the expanse of my officer-grade quarters before closing my eyes, but this one is mine .

photo of sheltered sandy beach with palms, umbrellas, and chairs with two large docked cruise ships in background

A shocking sight greets me beyond the pools of Deck 17 as I saunter over to the Coastal Kitchen for my morning intake of slightly sour Americanos. A tiny city beneath a series of perfectly pressed green mountains. Land! We have docked for a brief respite in Basseterre, the capital of St. Kitts and Nevis. I wolf down my egg scramble to be one of the first passengers off the ship. Once past the gangway, I barely refrain from kissing the ground. I rush into the sights and sounds of this scruffy island city, sampling incredible conch curry and buckets of non-Starbucks coffee. How wonderful it is to be where God intended humans to be: on land. After all, I am neither a fish nor a mall rat. This is my natural environment. Basseterre may not be Havana, but there are signs of human ingenuity and desire everywhere you look. The Black Table Grill Has been Relocated to Soho Village, Market Street, Directly Behind of, Gary’s Fruits and Flower Shop. Signed. THE PORK MAN reads a sign stuck to a wall. Now, that is how you write a sign. A real sign, not the come-ons for overpriced Rolexes that blink across the screens of the Royal Promenade.

“Hey, tie your shoestring!” a pair of laughing ladies shout to me across the street.

“Thank you!” I shout back. Shoestring! “Thank you very much.”

A man in Independence Square Park comes by and asks if I want to play with his monkey. I haven’t heard that pickup line since the Penn Station of the 1980s. But then he pulls a real monkey out of a bag. The monkey is wearing a diaper and looks insane. Wonderful , I think, just wonderful! There is so much life here. I email my editor asking if I can remain on St. Kitts and allow the Icon to sail off into the horizon without me. I have even priced a flight home at less than $300, and I have enough material from the first four days on the cruise to write the entire story. “It would be funny …” my editor replies. “Now get on the boat.”

As I slink back to the ship after my brief jailbreak, the locals stand under umbrellas to gaze at and photograph the boat that towers over their small capital city. The limousines of the prime minister and his lackeys are parked beside the gangway. St. Kitts, I’ve been told, is one of the few islands that would allow a ship of this size to dock.

“We hear about all the waterslides,” a sweet young server in one of the cafés told me. “We wish we could go on the ship, but we have to work.”

“I want to stay on your island,” I replied. “I love it here.”

But she didn’t understand how I could possibly mean that.

“WASHY, WASHY, so you don’t get stinky, stinky!” kids are singing outside the AquaDome, while their adult minders look on in disapproval, perhaps worried that Mr. Washy Washy is grooming them into a life of gayness. I heard a southern couple skip the buffet entirely out of fear of Mr. Washy Washy.

Meanwhile, I have found a new watering hole for myself, the Swim & Tonic, the biggest swim-up bar on any cruise ship in the world. Drinking next to full-size, nearly naked Americans takes away one’s own self-consciousness. The men have curvaceous mom bodies. The women are equally un-shy about their sprawling physiques.

Today I’ve befriended a bald man with many children who tells me that all of the little trinkets that Royal Caribbean has left us in our staterooms and suites are worth a fortune on eBay. “Eighty dollars for the water bottle, 60 for the lanyard,” the man says. “This is a cult.”

“Tell me about it,” I say. There is, however, a clientele for whom this cruise makes perfect sense. For a large middle-class family (he works in “supply chains”), seven days in a lower-tier cabin—which starts at $1,800 a person—allow the parents to drop off their children in Surfside, where I imagine many young Filipina crew members will take care of them, while the parents are free to get drunk at a swim-up bar and maybe even get intimate in their cabin. Cruise ships have become, for a certain kind of hardworking family, a form of subsidized child care.

There is another man I would like to befriend at the Swim & Tonic, a tall, bald fellow who is perpetually inebriated and who wears a necklace studded with little rubber duckies in sunglasses, which, I am told, is a sort of secret handshake for cruise aficionados. Tomorrow, I will spend more time with him, but first the ship docks at St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Charlotte Amalie, the capital, is more charming in name than in presence, but I still all but jump off the ship to score a juicy oxtail and plantains at the well-known Petite Pump Room, overlooking the harbor. From one of the highest points in the small city, the Icon of the Seas appears bigger than the surrounding hills.

I usually tan very evenly, but something about the discombobulation of life at sea makes me forget the regular application of sunscreen. As I walk down the streets of Charlotte Amalie in my fluorescent Icon of the Seas cap, an old Rastafarian stares me down. “Redneck,” he hisses.

“No,” I want to tell him, as I bring a hand up to my red neck, “that’s not who I am at all. On my island, Mannahatta, as Whitman would have it, I am an interesting person living within an engaging artistic milieu. I do not wish to use the Caribbean as a dumping ground for the cruise-ship industry. I love the work of Derek Walcott. You don’t understand. I am not a redneck. And if I am, they did this to me.” They meaning Royal Caribbean? Its passengers? The Rands?

“They did this to me!”

Back on the Icon, some older matrons are muttering about a run-in with passengers from the Celebrity cruise ship docked next to us, the Celebrity Apex. Although Celebrity Cruises is also owned by Royal Caribbean, I am made to understand that there is a deep fratricidal beef between passengers of the two lines. “We met a woman from the Apex,” one matron says, “and she says it was a small ship and there was nothing to do. Her face was as tight as a 19-year-old’s, she had so much surgery.” With those words, and beneath a cloudy sky, humidity shrouding our weathered faces and red necks, we set sail once again, hopefully in the direction of home.

photo from inside of spacious geodesic-style glass dome facing ocean, with stairwells and seating areas

THERE ARE BARELY 48 HOURS LEFT to the cruise, and the Icon of the Seas’ passengers are salty. They know how to work the elevators. They know the Washy Washy song by heart. They understand that the chicken gyro at “Feta Mediterranean,” in the AquaDome Market, is the least problematic form of chicken on the ship.

The passengers have shed their INAUGURAL CRUISE T-shirts and are now starting to evince political opinions. There are caps pledging to make America great again and T-shirts that celebrate words sometimes attributed to Patrick Henry: “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government.” With their preponderance of FAMILY FLAG FAITH FRIENDS FIREARMS T-shirts, the tables by the crepe station sometimes resemble the Capitol Rotunda on January 6. The Real Anthony Fauci , by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appears to be a popular form of literature, especially among young men with very complicated versions of the American flag on their T-shirts. Other opinions blend the personal and the political. “Someone needs to kill Washy guy, right?” a well-dressed man in the elevator tells me, his gray eyes radiating nothing. “Just beat him to death. Am I right?” I overhear the male member of a young couple whisper, “There goes that freak” as I saunter by in my white spa robe, and I decide to retire it for the rest of the cruise.

I visit the Royal Bling to see up close the $100,000 golden chalice that entitles you to free drinks on Royal Caribbean forever. The pleasant Serbian saleslady explains that the chalice is actually gold-plated and covered in white zirconia instead of diamonds, as it would otherwise cost $1 million. “If you already have everything,” she explains, “this is one more thing you can get.”

I believe that anyone who works for Royal Caribbean should be entitled to immediate American citizenship. They already speak English better than most of the passengers and, per the Serbian lady’s sales pitch above, better understand what America is as well. Crew members like my Panamanian cabin attendant seem to work 24 hours a day. A waiter from New Delhi tells me that his contract is six months and three weeks long. After a cruise ends, he says, “in a few hours, we start again for the next cruise.” At the end of the half a year at sea, he is allowed a two-to-three-month stay at home with his family. As of 2019, the median income for crew members was somewhere in the vicinity of $20,000, according to a major business publication. Royal Caribbean would not share the current median salary for its crew members, but I am certain that it amounts to a fraction of the cost of a Royal Bling gold-plated, zirconia-studded chalice.

And because most of the Icon’s hyper-sanitized spaces are just a frittata away from being a Delta lounge, one forgets that there are actual sailors on this ship, charged with the herculean task of docking it in port. “Having driven 100,000-ton aircraft carriers throughout my career,” retired Admiral James G. Stavridis, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, writes to me, “I’m not sure I would even know where to begin with trying to control a sea monster like this one nearly three times the size.” (I first met Stavridis while touring Army bases in Germany more than a decade ago.)

Today, I decide to head to the hot tub near Swim & Tonic, where some of the ship’s drunkest reprobates seem to gather (the other tubs are filled with families and couples). The talk here, like everywhere else on the ship, concerns football, a sport about which I know nothing. It is apparent that four teams have recently competed in some kind of finals for the year, and that two of them will now face off in the championship. Often when people on the Icon speak, I will try to repeat the last thing they said with a laugh or a nod of disbelief. “Yes, 20-yard line! Ha!” “Oh my God, of course, scrimmage.”

Soon we are joined in the hot tub by the late-middle-age drunk guy with the duck necklace. He is wearing a bucket hat with the legend HAWKEYES , which, I soon gather, is yet another football team. “All right, who turned me in?” Duck Necklace says as he plops into the tub beside us. “I get a call in the morning,” he says. “It’s security. Can you come down to the dining room by 10 a.m.? You need to stay away from the members of this religious family.” Apparently, the gregarious Duck Necklace had photobombed the wrong people. There are several families who present as evangelical Christians or practicing Muslims on the ship. One man, evidently, was not happy that Duck Necklace had made contact with his relatives. “It’s because of religious stuff; he was offended. I put my arm around 20 people a day.”

Everyone laughs. “They asked me three times if I needed medication,” he says of the security people who apparently interrogated him in full view of others having breakfast.

Another hot-tub denizen suggests that he should have asked for fentanyl. After a few more drinks, Duck Necklace begins to muse about what it would be like to fall off the ship. “I’m 62 and I’m ready to go,” he says. “I just don’t want a shark to eat me. I’m a huge God guy. I’m a Bible guy. There’s some Mayan theory squaring science stuff with religion. There is so much more to life on Earth.” We all nod into our Red Stripes.

“I never get off the ship when we dock,” he says. He tells us he lost $6,000 in the casino the other day. Later, I look him up, and it appears that on land, he’s a financial adviser in a crisp gray suit, probably a pillar of his North Chicago community.

photo of author smiling and holding soft-serve ice-cream cone with outdoor seating area in background

THE OCEAN IS TEEMING with fascinating life, but on the surface it has little to teach us. The waves come and go. The horizon remains ever far away.

I am constantly told by my fellow passengers that “everybody here has a story.” Yes, I want to reply, but everybody everywhere has a story. You, the reader of this essay, have a story, and yet you’re not inclined to jump on a cruise ship and, like Duck Necklace, tell your story to others at great pitch and volume. Maybe what they’re saying is that everybody on this ship wants to have a bigger, more coherent, more interesting story than the one they’ve been given. Maybe that’s why there’s so much signage on the doors around me attesting to marriages spent on the sea. Maybe that’s why the Royal Caribbean newsletter slipped under my door tells me that “this isn’t a vacation day spent—it’s bragging rights earned.” Maybe that’s why I’m so lonely.

Today is a big day for Icon passengers. Today the ship docks at Royal Caribbean’s own Bahamian island, the Perfect Day at CocoCay. (This appears to be the actual name of the island.) A comedian at the nightclub opined on what his perfect day at CocoCay would look like—receiving oral sex while learning that his ex-wife had been killed in a car crash (big laughter). But the reality of the island is far less humorous than that.

One of the ethnic tristate ladies in the infinity pool told me that she loved CocoCay because it had exactly the same things that could be found on the ship itself. This proves to be correct. It is like the Icon, but with sand. The same tired burgers, the same colorful tubes conveying children and water from Point A to B. The same swim-up bar at its Hideaway ($140 for admittance, no children allowed; Royal Caribbean must be printing money off its clientele). “There was almost a fight at The Wizard of Oz ,” I overhear an elderly woman tell her companion on a chaise lounge. Apparently one of the passengers began recording Royal Caribbean’s intellectual property and “three guys came after him.”

I walk down a pathway to the center of the island, where a sign reads DO NOT ENTER: YOU HAVE REACHED THE BOUNDARY OF ADVENTURE . I hear an animal scampering in the bushes. A Royal Caribbean worker in an enormous golf cart soon chases me down and takes me back to the Hideaway, where I run into Mrs. Rand in a bikini. She becomes livid telling me about an altercation she had the other day with a woman over a towel and a deck chair. We Suites have special towel privileges; we do not have to hand over our SeaPass Card to score a towel. But the Rands are not Suites. “People are so entitled here,” Mrs. Rand says. “It’s like the airport with all its classes.” “You see,” I want to say, “this is where your husband’s love of Ayn Rand runs into the cruelties and arbitrary indignities of unbridled capitalism.” Instead we make plans to meet for a final drink in the Schooner Bar tonight (the Rands will stand me up).

Back on the ship, I try to do laps, but the pool (the largest on any cruise ship, naturally) is fully trashed with the detritus of American life: candy wrappers, a slowly dissolving tortilla chip, napkins. I take an extra-long shower in my suite, then walk around the perimeter of the ship on a kind of exercise track, past all the alluring lifeboats in their yellow-and-white livery. Maybe there is a dystopian angle to the HBO series that I will surely end up pitching, one with shades of WALL-E or Snowpiercer . In a collapsed world, a Royal Caribbean–like cruise liner sails from port to port, collecting new shipmates and supplies in exchange for the precious energy it has on board. (The actual Icon features a new technology that converts passengers’ poop into enough energy to power the waterslides . In the series, this shitty technology would be greatly expanded.) A very young woman (18? 19?), smart and lonely, who has only known life on the ship, walks along the same track as I do now, contemplating jumping off into the surf left by its wake. I picture reusing Duck Necklace’s words in the opening shot of the pilot. The girl is walking around the track, her eyes on the horizon; maybe she’s highborn—a Suite—and we hear the voice-over: “I’m 19 and I’m ready to go. I just don’t want a shark to eat me.”

Before the cruise is finished, I talk to Mr. Washy Washy, or Nielbert of the Philippines. He is a sweet, gentle man, and I thank him for the earworm of a song he has given me and for keeping us safe from the dreaded norovirus. “This is very important to me, getting people to wash their hands,” he tells me in his burger getup. He has dreams, as an artist and a performer, but they are limited in scope. One day he wants to dress up as a piece of bacon for the morning shift.

THE MAIDEN VOYAGE OF THE TITANIC (the Icon of the Seas is five times as large as that doomed vessel) at least offered its passengers an exciting ending to their cruise, but when I wake up on the eighth day, all I see are the gray ghosts that populate Miami’s condo skyline. Throughout my voyage, my writer friends wrote in to commiserate with me. Sloane Crosley, who once covered a three-day spa mini-cruise for Vogue , tells me she felt “so very alone … I found it very untethering.” Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes in an Instagram comment: “When Gary is done I think it’s time this genre was taken out back and shot.” And he is right. To badly paraphrase Adorno: After this, no more cruise stories. It is unfair to put a thinking person on a cruise ship. Writers typically have difficult childhoods, and it is cruel to remind them of the inherent loneliness that drove them to writing in the first place. It is also unseemly to write about the kind of people who go on cruises. Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit.

A day or two before I got off the ship, I decided to make use of my balcony, which I had avoided because I thought the view would only depress me further. What I found shocked me. My suite did not look out on Central Park after all. This entire time, I had been living in the ship’s Disneyland, Surfside, the neighborhood full of screaming toddlers consuming milkshakes and candy. And as I leaned out over my balcony, I beheld a slight vista of the sea and surf that I thought I had been missing. It had been there all along. The sea was frothy and infinite and blue-green beneath the span of a seagull’s wing. And though it had been trod hard by the world’s largest cruise ship, it remained.

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “A Meatball at Sea.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

IMAGES

5 David Foster Wallace essays you need to read before The End of the
Opening page of corrected proof of Wallace’s 1996 essay “Shipping Out
8 David Foster Wallace Essays You Can Read Online Right Now
David Foster Wallace’s Commencement Speech "This is Water" Free Essay
This Is Water- David Foster Wallace Free Essay Example
David Foster Wallace Biography

VIDEO

Ticket to the Fair by David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace on Leo Tolstoy
David Foster Wallace on College
David Foster Wallace/Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace tries out Coke League Of Legends
David Foster Wallace's Addictions Explained

COMMENTS

PDF Wallace, David Foster, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
Wallace, David Foster, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction , Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13:2 (1993:Summer) p.151
8 David Foster Wallace Essays You Can Read Online
Wallace describes how the cruise sends him into a depressive spiral, detailing the oddities that make up the strange atmosphere of an environment designed for ultimate "fun." 5. "E Unibus Pluram ...
Acting natural: television and David Foster Wallace's metaffective
This article looks at three important early works about television by David Foster Wallace that are not often studied in tandem: the stories 'Little Expressionless Animals' (1988) and 'My Appearance' (1988), and the long essay on television and American fiction, 'E Unibus Pluram: Television and Contemporary U.S. Fiction' (1993).
The Last Essay I Need to Write about David Foster Wallace
November 29, 2021. Feature photo by Steve Rhodes. David Foster Wallace's work has long been celebrated for audaciously reorienting fiction toward empathy, sincerity, and human connection after decades of (supposedly) bleak postmodern assertions that all had become nearly impossible. Linguistically rich and structurally innovative, his work is ...
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
These widely acclaimed essays from the author of Infinite Jest -- on television, tennis, cruise ships, and more -- established David Foster Wallace as one of the preeminent essayists of his generation. In this exuberantly praised book -- a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary ...
David Foster Wallace, on Television, on Television as the Dominant
David Foster Wallace, on Television, on Television as the Dominant. I'm very fond of quoting from Roman Jakobson's 1935 essay "The Dominant". Lately I've been thinking about this passage in particular: We may seek a dominant not only in the poetic work of an individual artist and not only in the poetic canon, but also in the art of a ...
A Brand New Interview with David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace: ... What is the relationship between television and fiction, and have things changed much in the years following the publication of your essay? DFW: That essay was actually written in 1990 and it didn't come out until 1993. To be perfectly honest with you, I haven't owned a television now for probably ten years.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
These widely acclaimed essays from the author of Infinite Jest -- on television, tennis, cruise ships, and more -- established David Foster Wallace as one of the preeminent essayists of his generation. In this exuberantly praised book -- a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary ...
David Foster Wallace and the Joy of Irony
My meditations on irony began with two pieces from David Foster Wallace. The first was his essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," written in 1990 and published in 1993. The second was an interview of Wallace conducted by a German television station in 2003.
Acting natural: television and David Foster Wallace's metaffective
This article looks at three important early works about television by David Foster Wallace that are not often studied in tandem: the stories 'Little Expressionless Animals' (1988) and 'My ...
Another Thing to Sort of Pin on David Foster Wallace
The ur-text of this movement, though, is Wallace's essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," written in 1993. It's a call for writing that transcends irony and detachment but ...
A Conversation with David Foster Wallace By Larry McCaffery
A Conversation with David Foster Wallace By Larry McCaffery. From "The Review of Contemporary Fiction," Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2. LARRY McCAFFERY: Your essay following this interview is going to be seen by some people as being basically an apology for television. What's your response to the familiar criticism that television fosters ...
David Foster Wallace on Art vs. TV and the Motivation to be Smart
In early 1996, journalist David Lipsky accompanied 34-year-old David Foster Wallace on the last leg of his tour for his breakout novel, Infinite Jest for an ambitious Rolling Stone interview. The feature was never published, but in 2010, some 14 years after the road trip and two years after Wallace's suicide, Lipsky released the transcript in Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself ...
E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction by David Foster Wallace
An article by David Foster Wallace from 1993, about American T.V. commercialism, advertising and American T.V. culture, highlighting the connection between A...
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
In this exuberantly praised book - a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner - David Foster Wallace brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal facility that has ...
David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 - September 12, 2008) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and university professor of English and creative writing. ... In the essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" (written 1990, published 1993), ...
25 Great Articles and Essays by David Foster Wallace
25 Great Articles and Essays by David Foster Wallace A collection of the best essays, nonfiction writing and journalism from the late great DFW ... television and U.S. fiction "Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. The minute fiction writers stop moving, they start lurking, and stare. ...
David Foster Wallace: The 'Fresh Air' Interview : NPR
In 1996, Wallace's novel Infinite Jest was a critical and popular success. The new movie The End of The Tour recreates the author's tour for that book. Originally broadcast March 5, 1997.
30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the Web
HP Lovecraft. Edgar Allan Poe. Free Alice Munro Stories. Jennifer Egan Stories. George Saunders Stories. Hunter S. Thompson Essays. Joan Didion Essays. Gabriel Garcia Marquez Stories. David Sedaris Stories.
David Foster Wallace's Final Attempt to Make Art Moral
David Foster Wallace's Final Attempt to Make Art Moral. In a late work, Wallace captured the appeal—and the impossibility—of the literature that he hoped to create. By Jon Baskin. July 27 ...
David Foster Wallace
Review Essay. Information Journal of American Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , ... 1 David Foster Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," in idem, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (London: ... 140. 4 4 David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (London: Abacus, 2008; first published 1996), 725. 5 5 McCaffery, 132. 6
New sincerity
Its usage dates back to the mid-1980s; however, it was popularized in the 1990s by American author David Foster Wallace. In music ... Jest is Wallace's attempt to both manifest and dramatize a revolutionary fiction style that he called for in his essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction". The style is one in which a new sincerity ...
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
35318437. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments is a 1997 collection of nonfiction writing by David Foster Wallace . In the title essay, originally published in Harper's as "Shipping Out", Wallace describes the excesses of his one-week trip in the Caribbean aboard the cruise ship MV Zenith, which he rechristens the Nadir.
Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever
"Author embarks on their first cruise-ship voyage" has been a staple of American essay writing for almost three decades, beginning with David Foster Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I ...