A Supposedly Posthumous Fun ...... by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

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Voodoo Child (A Slight Return)

ED: Welcome back. We are here with David Foster Wallace and were discussing his masterpiece, “Infinite Jest,” tennis, Boston, Generation X, and various other potpourris necessary to fill an hour. David, there is a lost and lonely feeling running through this whole book; especially seen in Hal. At times, it’s kind of creepy in that it alternates between being ominous with being what some of us see as an accurate depiction of life as we now live it, with an unclear boundary between. Was that your original intent?

DFW: You’ve partially focussed on the first meaning of fantod, giving it the attributes of a noun; a gerundic usage employed in

“Infinite Jest” as well as elsewhere. When I started, I wanted to do something about America that was sad but not derisive. Most of my friends are bright, privileged, well-educated Americans who are sad on some level, and it has something, I think, to do with loneliness and/or the isolation long ago suggested in “Anti-intellectualism in American Life.” Because such “thinking”

attitudes are un-popular I think the culture has filled that void and taught us or we’ve allowed the culture to teach us that the point of living is to get as much stuff as you can and experience as much pleasure as you can, and that the implicit promise is

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that will make you happy. Acquire, acquire, more, more, self, self. I know that’s vulgarly simplistic, but I would contend that the effects of it, perhaps encouraged through the concerted persuasive efforts of the ruling class, aren’t simplistic at all.

ED: What caused this view? Was it seen, felt, or what?

DFW: It’s hard to say. I know a certain amount of it parallels my own experience, which was that I got real lucky early on in my twenties and had some career success and got a lot of stuff and then discovered that I wasn’t happy. I was raised in a pretty middle class, academic environment and I’d never really seen how a lot of other people lived. I first saw that in Boston. It may sound silly as from the news reports and the occasional seeker of handouts at the highway top lights we all know that there are the disadvantaged and the homeless, but to encounter it up close is another matter, in full realization that any such sympathy risks putting one on the Doctor Zhivago path.

ED: Is the sadness in seeing it, David, or in confronting a life that hasn’t experienced any of that?

DFW: I’m not explaining it well. The sadness isn’t in seeing it.

The sadness is in realizing, for me, at the age of 27 or 28 at

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the time, how phenomenally lucky I’d been. To have this view so late can be viewed as rather banal in one sense as the vision is common in meta format, but not banal in the other sense of the experience I had with recovering addicts, right here in Boston.

Never before in history has a country been so blessed, materially and intellectually in the unfairly distributed aggregate, and perhaps as a consequence we’re miserable.

ED: For me, one of the memorable experiences of reading this book will forever be entwined with this sense that nobody gets out of here unwounded or with much of a clue about where in the world this society wants to go.

DFW: Well, the bulk of US society knows well what direction they prefer. Their “wounds” may be equated to the perennial upper middle class envy of the rich. They’re so close they think they can smell it, but are still short, necessitating more ....... of something they can’t articulate beyond more; and don’t know that they always will be in the same dissatisfied condition. The thing that strikes me is watching everyone contort about not raising taxes and simultaneously expectant of fiscal responsibility. I don’t know what this has to do with the book, but it seems bizarre to me that we are one of the least taxed industrial nations on Earth, that we demand all these services, punish

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politicians who raise our taxes, and then dislike politicians for lying when we encourage them to lie. I guess what makes me sad is that I would like my generation to realize that it would be way better for us to be willing to pay higher taxes to be able to shelter and feed poor people, not for their sake but for ours.

Are we so sad because we have become lethally selfish and self-indulgent?

As a brief aside, not so much an aside; I once had a very rambunctious puppy who could play all day. Worn and sore from the previous day I’d get up every morning and tell her that I didn’t think I’d be able to take her on our walk today. After breakfast I’d say; “Okay, let’s give it a shot. We can always turn back.”

I’d have to watch her like a hawk as she would eat anything she found and had no other idea of a car other than something which came out to play with her. After a few of these trips, I realized that through necessarily concentrating on her I forgot that I was worn and sore. So, we both “won” and in a month I no longer had any such physical considerations.

ED: On that physical level, in “Infinite Jest” you also wrote of a game you called Eschaton. For those in our audience who may not be familiar with the term as I was prior to the book, in political theory and theology to immanetize the eschaton means

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trying to bring about the eschaton, the final heaven-like stage of history. It has been used by critics as a pejorative reference to Nazism, socialism, anti-racism, and transhumanism. In all these contexts it means trying to make that which belongs to the afterlife happen here and now on earth. Why did you put in these seemingly out-of-context pages?

DFW: I don’t believe that anyone has to particularly try to bring eschaton about. It just happens through natural processes as we know them, both on an individual and joint basis. It’s complicated, but I can say that in my version there is a bewildered ineffectual god figure unable or wanting to appear as unable to stop the bombs from flying. Assuming that God exists, that seems consistent with human experience. After surviving a horrendous freshman start of being a picked-on player which prompts him to learn the game, Pemulis always wins through evasion and an ability to quickly calculate the simplest, most fundamental aspects of math, and act accordingly. This activity seems consistent with that which is depicted elsewhere in the book, usually where Hal is shot down when showing optimism. On a related topic, Ted Schact, who by the way, has not been mentioned by any reviewer is the conclusion to the "Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment" "joke", as he is inflicted with Crohn's Disease. Lefty Hal is the best player at the academy,

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but on one good day righty Schact played Hal in an un-refereed contest. The synopsis doesn’t do it justice, but each wants to give the close calls to the other, but it ends with a Schact ace he didn’t think was in. Hal says; "You hit that one so hard nobody could tell whether it was in or out."

The view of the audience chosen by the editors reflected the flasked and increasingly inebriated codger section. They were vigorously nodding to each other and whoever else might be looking as if they were registering their desired agreement with some profundity yet to be seen by those still deficient of decanter or carafe.

ED: I have to tell you that at the time of my reading I thought that David Foster Wallace looked like a tennis jock, and was about to become the hottest writer in the universe. “Infinite Jest” was like nothing else I’ve ever read. I was wondering why you worked on pieces for Harper’s rather than doing novels exclusively.

DFW: I did start what was to become “The Pale King” right after concluding “Infinite Jest.” It was a slow process and it was all over the place. I didn’t necessarily believe what you seem to be assuming; that novels are the highest form of literature. And,

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the editor at Harper’s, Colin Harrison, figured out that what he needed to do was come up with assignments that make me just short of suicidal. The more miserable I was on an assignment the funnier the essay he got. So he and his brain trust always tried to come up with something more hair-raising than a cruise.

ED: You took a cruise and wrote about it?

DFW: Yes, my facetious sir, a supposedly fun thing.

ED: You said that you have some sort of message you wish to convey. Can you make a distillate of it?

DFW: Most of my writing was an absurd treatment of how I saw reality. It contained no value-judgmental suggestions of what anyone should do or how they should live. It was a description, that’s all. The people who have promoted this DFW Brand would have you believe that he was some sort of great humanitarian as a means of marketing. That is not to say that he was a misanthrope; but it is to say that he was just a writer with an artistic streak. I realize that having said that, if this show gets any notice, that it will be derided and harangued by; 1) Those with a financial interest in the books.

A Supposedly Fun DFW Interview