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This is KCSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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Our show today is about the writer David Foster Wallace.
And it comes to you courtesy of the many emails I've received from listeners over the past few years.
listeners who adamantly believe that entitled opinions and David Foster Wallace are a natural fit,
and that the two are destined to meet sooner or later, so why not make it sooner?
Unfortunately now is not soon enough to have Wallace himself on the show.
He would have made a very compelling guest and interlocutor, I'm sure,
but he died some five years ago before I had even gotten around to reading him.
Nevertheless, I have with me in the studio the next best thing to Wallace himself, Michael Hoier,
a recent Stanford PhD in comparative literature whose dissertation on what she calls project fiction
contains an impressive central section on David Foster Wallace.
It was when I read that dissertation that I began to suspect that maybe some of the hype surrounding this writer is justified after all.
And that yes, maybe it's time for entitled opinions to devote a show to him.
I'm still not convinced that Wallace is a great fiction writer,
but if anyone can make the case for him, it's my guest today.
As some of you die hard fans know, there's always a risk of incineration on entitled opinions.
Will David Foster Wallace get out of here alive?
Hard to say.
Stay tuned and find out.
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Today's show and the author is devoted to,
bring to mind the full title of this radio broadcast,
entitled opinions about life and literature.
As I said in the very first show, we ever aired back in 2005,
the phrase "life and literature" is almost pleonastic,
in the sense that literature concerns itself with life,
and that life seeps into and saturates literature.
That was still a mildly controversial claim back then,
deconstruction and postmodernist dogmas, while on the way,
still hung heavy in the halls of academia at the time.
Many of us who had become professors of literature had been taught as graduate students,
that literature is not about life, that only a naive, natural attitude believes
that fiction refers to lived experience, that novels are a textile industry.
In other words, they are texts that refer first and foremost to their own,
a rachnoid acts of textualization.
Ole bersou.
That kind of deconstructive postmodern,
numbrelesum, which is a French word for staring at your belly button,
was all the rage in American academia and fiction writing
when David Foster Wallace came of age as a college student and later as a writer.
He was plenty guilty of it himself to be sure,
yet he insisted in interview after interview that his goal as a writer
was to break the solipsistic glass cage of postmodernism
and return serious fiction to the serious business
of saying something seriously meaningful about life, suffering,
personal experience, and the lived world we share in common with one another,
but from which we consumers caught in the web of capitalism seduction
and the
relationships and blandishments have an irrepressible urge to escape from.
Serious fiction is not or should not be a game,
and if it has a ludicrous quality about it,
as Wallace's writing does,
it should nevertheless make an effort to transcend itself
referential cleverness and find its way back to earnesty,
sincerity, and existential relevance.
All that is fine and good, and when I read Wallace on the vocation of serious fiction in our time,
I become a fan of his,
and I understand why so many listeners have urged me to do a show on him.
By contrast, when I read some of his fiction,
I have a harder time believing that as an artist he gives us the kind of literature he himself advocated.
In other words, I still need to be persuaded that his fiction matches his vision
for what fiction should be, and that will be one of the challenges facing the guest who joins me today,
namely to convince us that Wallace, in fact, practiced what he preached.
Michael, welcome to the program.
Hi, Valbert, thank you so much.
So life and literature have important convergences when it comes to David Foster Wallace, obviously,
and in his case, it's not only life, death as well plays an important role in that convergence.
So for those listeners who may not know much about this writer, could you start off by telling us who Wallace was
and what kind of life he led, and how and why he willfully terminated it at the age of 46?
Sure. It's always a challenge to condense that and take it from start to finish as a sad prospect now that he's gone already,
Yes, David Foster Wallace was born in 1962.
Both of his parents are academics, his father's a philosophy professor, and his mother is an English professor.
So he was steeped in philosophical thinking and logic on the one hand and language and literature on the other from very early on.
He went to Amherstly, grew up in the Midwest and was a nationally ranked junior tennis player.
And already in high school was suffering some pretty severe panic attacks, which a little aside, that is why he wore the bandana, the iconic bandana,
or fashion statement of any sort, but began because when he would do readings and things, the sweat would drip down into his eyes and onto the page.
So he left the Midwest for Amherst and pursued philosophy as a course of study, modal logic and high level mathematics as well.
But it was in his sophomore year that his first bout with clinical depression really took a serious turn and he retreated, went back home to Illinois.
And it was there, he had always read a lot of fiction and read a lot of everything. He had a voracious curiosity, but it was then that he began writing fiction.
And as he reports to Larry Mcaffery in that famous interview from 1993, citing Yates, it was fiction writing.
He pursued philosophy to find the click of the well made box, that's the Yates citation.
He stopped finding that click, that in philosophy, and it was fiction writing that got him out of the cage that that box of philosophical thinking and rigorous logic had created for him.
So when he went back to Amherst, he added English as another course of study and wrote theses in both philosophy and English.
It was the 700 page novel that he wrote as his undergrad thesis in English that would become the broom of the system. His first novel published in 1987, shortly after he graduated.
So from there, he decided to pursue an MFA in fiction writing at University of Arizona.
He went there, but after a spell decided that maybe philosophy was, that calling was stronger again.
So he, after finishing the MFA, went to Harvard and matriculated as a PhD student in philosophy.
Now this is where again, getting deep into the thinking of logic and dealing particularly with the doctrine of solipsism and the issue of fatalism.
He had a second major crisis that in 1989 that landed him in the mental institution.
He attempted suicide and was using drugs and alcohol heavily at this period.
Michael, you mentioned solipsism as something that he fell into the trap of solipsism, I believe, were your words.
What was that trap of solipsism? What did it have to do with suicide? Because you seem to link those two things.
Well, if not suicide, then depression, I guess.
Yeah. So Wallace from very early on in his undergraduate studies was an amort of Wittgenstein in particular, and the tractatus.
And the doctrine of solipsism that nothing exists outside of one's own head or thoughts, actually.
So as fascinating as this course of philosophical thought could be, David Foster Wallace also linked it to his personal experience of feeling completely disconnected from everyone and everything around him, really stuck in his own head.
From the academic side, he, most of his work was trying to disprove this difficult to disprove logical, the...
Yes, it's difficult to disprove if you buy into that analytic philosophy tradition that dominates American academia.
And I know that someone who struggled a lot with that is Stanley Cabelle, the philosopher whom I admire a lot, who was educated in the analytic tradition.
And then he realized that it's absolutely crazy to go on obsessing about issues of solipsism where it just goes against all common sense to believe that you're the only thing.
And why do you have to prove something that seems very obvious? I have a feeling he studied with Stanley Cabelle. I don't know this because I don't know his biography well enough.
But that this kind of solipsism, it seems to me having read your dissertation and other things that he said that he tries to generalize this as a particular pathology of the American society that we live in, namely that people are trapped inside their own heads and have a hard time getting outside of their own...
What you call hyper-traffic loneliness, you'll talk more about that I hope. And that this and our heads are these traps.
Yes.
You actually gave me a very interesting quote from one of his commencement addresses where he says that it is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master.
Yes. Okay. So yes, we're touching on so many fascinating parts of David Foster Wallace's both life and writing as you mentioned in the beginning they're so intertwined. So first of all, to the point that solipsism logically is difficult to disprove, but in reality we all know that it's not actually the case.
That links specifically, I mean this clarifies the relationship between fiction and philosophy for David Foster Wallace
Because for them fiction has the power to humanize important truths by bringing them back into contact with—who lived experience
And concretizing them in in imagined and imaginable reality, you know, in a novel populated by relatable I'll be at sometimes grotesque and
Difficult to imagine people
That putting them in this fictional context we can get at the fact that they
Can't they don't have as much power over us over us as we might think they do so in his first novel the broom of the system
Which grapples very blatantly and self-consciously with Vic and Shini and questions
The protagonist Lenore
Has this debate with her brother who is very into Vic and Shine
He you know rehearses the problem about how we can't think of anything outside of our own head and she says watch me
I just did you know, so that's simple like look I just did it and nothing happened. I'm still here
So and that's what
mystifies me a little bit about Wallace to be frank that he
He suffered from a particular kind of neurosis. Let's say which is
Highly academic and philosophical analytic philosophy in nature
And it may also have to do with his personality
You want to call it personality disorder? I'm sure some people are hyper cerebral and that they're they they listen to the thoughts that are going on in their heads
And it's a voice or many voices that just will not stop. Yeah, and you just want to
You just don't know how to control all that you have a very interesting
thesis about his fiction writing as as trying to bring discipline to this
Chaos in the mind. Yes, so perhaps you could say something about
Yeah, this this this head inside which he he felt like he was trapped and he wanted to get outside of it
Yeah, certainly so I I do make that point
I think that accounting for heads in in Wallace's writing across genres is crucial to understanding not only his work
But also him as a person because for him the head condenses
You know this pervasive noun and symbol it condenses the most positive and the most problematic aspects of his imaginary
Meaning that you know it comprises the physiological components of the skull and the brain
And that is where we get the grotesque representations of characters that are deprived of skulls
Well one so she wears this metal cap so that her brain and cerebral spinal fluids won't
explode or come running out
And another character described as them having a skull so large and hair and skin so thin that it's
Stretch so tight they he is called skull head
So we have we have these grotesque representations of the physiological components of heads and then at the same time these
portraits of the internal workings of the mind and
Those tend to be of characters that have that suffer from this problem of thinking too much and
It's David Foster Wallace's phrase abstract thinking and I
append to that that discipline to abstract thinking
So why abstract thinking why not just thinking well
It's particularly this analytical kind of thought that you're speaking about so when he
found himself deep in these studies of
Logical justifications for phenomena that we witness every day. We know exist
But cannot justify logically he said he has this passage in the
Nonfiction book he wrote called everything in more brief history of infinity
Where it still has these elements of the fiction writer so there's a passage about
laying in bed and your alarm clock goes off now
Do you just hit your alarm clock jump out of bed and go about your day
Or are you the type of person who can lay there and for hours constantly
Justify to yourself whether the floor will hold beneath you or not because you know from past experience
You know deductive reasoning, but the floor will indeed hold but how can you justify this?
Well, you can either way in bed all day contemplating this and getting stuck in your own head or you can
Move on so disciplining one's abstract thinking allows one to
You know shut down as you said those voices that want to constantly be
Going in the solipsistic circle of of internal thinking
Okay, can I ask now about the relationship between this
Head issue and the society that we live in because in the same commencement speech that I
referenced earlier he says that
That the no BS value of a liberal arts education is how to keep going through
your
comfortable prosperous respectable adult life not dead or unconscious or being a slave to your head and
To make how to avoid your natural default setting being that of being a uniquely completely
Empirially alone
Individual day in and day out so that is I like the way he phrases it this natural default setting of being uniquely alone
But the interesting thing is that he then relates it to the social
capitalistic
Consumers world that we live in and he says that this so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your
Default settings because the so-called real world of men and money and power
Humps merely along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and the worship of self
And he goes on to suggest that
the system
profits
And and capitalizes on the
Loneliness of the individual who was trapped inside his or her own head. Yeah, and this is where it's thought takes on
A sociological dimensions of a sociological commentary
Can you say something about how he viewed the social social pathology of the it's in particular the United States of America in this
Kind of late capitalistic stage that he felt that we were
Yeah, absolutely, and um, you know
I you and I've spoken about this before. I know you're aware of the the essay he wrote the long essay
He wrote on television and US fiction
um in which his thesis is the television is in large part
Motivated by these consumerist ideals that are constantly creating
Desire and seducing the viewer into capitalizing on these desires that they have that may or may not be good for them
these
Media
seduce the reader so that they are the perfect
consumer
This
Inelastic supply
You know the addict isn't is the perfect consumer because the addict constantly wants more
so would you say there is some
connection that he was
very intuitively
identified between solipsism
Not now as a philosophical problem, but solipsism as an existential MO
That many people in our society live with and capitalism that it suits the purpose of capitalism and consumerism to have
us be atomized individuals
Alienated from one another. Yeah, because there we are put at the mercy of what he calls these forms of passive
Spectation whether it's of television and of addiction of yeah, well, yes, absolutely
I wouldn't credit, you know the
I wouldn't credit the system for you know
Thinking this through in any way. I don't know that that they there's some master plan behind it all but exactly this works in in two ways
One if you create enough of a vacuum around
an individual that they feel they constantly need to be filling with commodities or by consuming
you know substances and
You know foods and all the stuff the hot new thing. That's one way it works the other way is if you
are alienating
People from one another then they are they need to escape themselves
by
Immersing themselves in things that help them forget they're you know empirically alone
Condition this hyper-trophic loneliness that you spoke up before I I append the adjective hyper-trophic because
Going along with with Wallace's diagnosis of this problem that we evolve
You know the human species has always contended with this condition of existential loneliness of
You know being able to relate to one another but only so far so that you will never know what it's like to be me
And I will not have that kind of insight into your experience either
but within late 20th century that gets
you know manifested in in this
Hyper-trophic way for these reasons and in the case of Wallace now we're actually in a strange way still with the biography
Although when you're talking about life you're talking about his literature as well and the fact that he
ended up losing his
his
Struggle against the forces of depression. Yeah, it is tempting to read into his suicide
some kind of
Defeat at the hands of the phenomena that he are under description in his essays as well as his fiction
Namely
You know a society which where everything conspires to perpetuate addictions and passive
Spectation and loneliness
But I think that you are right to be cautious about this
over-determination of
His final act which was to take his own life because it might not represent at all the logical conclusion of
a kind of nihilism at work in his vision of things that it might have a much more contingent
Causality or etiology
Absolutely
I'm really glad you bring that up because that I think if there's any notion that I would like to dispel with our
Conversation it is that actually well it's like compound notion
But that David Foster Wallace was someone so self-involved
and so
Unable to
Get out of his own vision of himself and his writing
That this is what led to somehow his arrogance and that is what led to his demise
Because I say that because some some people tend to oversimplify
his death
Connecting it to the fact that he was writing pale king which would have been or was published posthumous
From what he left behind of it. It wasn't finished in any way, but
The follow-up novel to
Infinite just which in the interim we he published multiple books of short stories and he wrote a lot of nonfiction as we know
But infinite just was published in 1996
He was working on pale king at the time of his death in 2008
And so the over simplification runs thus that you know here is this artist
working on
The next big work is dissatisfied with what he's coming up with and feeling creatively stunted or something and so therefore
This it
Contributed to his ending everything well as you point out and I believe very strongly that this is not the right view
For
David Foster Wallace
The struggle was with clinical depression on top of everything anything else
It's what drove him to drugs and alcohol early on. It's what fiction helped him come back and
Then at the same time. There's the chemical piece that you know over which
Someone suffering with depression has very little control
He had managed it for some 20 years with a drug called Nardil which was a clunky first-generation
antidepressant he went on in his teenage years and
You know the biographical piece of this story
leading up to his
suicide in
2008 is that he had an incident where you know Nardil has very
You can have strong reactions with certain foods and you may not even know
So he had one of these and ended up in the hospital for I think about a week or something
And at the time the doctors suggested that he try some other drug. They said well you're on this really old
antidepressant, you know technology we've we've gotten much further in being able to treat
Clinical depression without all these horrible side effects. So they tried him on
He tapered off of Nardil and tried a bunch of other drugs none of which worked and then when he tried to go back on Nardil that no longer worked either
so
It was very much a
Chemical problem in the end that led to so it's a chemical biochemical suicide not a metaphysical suicide as such
Yes, I agree that it's it's really important to keep
David Foster Wallace's suicide as separate as we can from
Thinking about his philosophy
on life because he in fact as you read from the Kenyan commencement speech from 2005
was very optimistic in in his thinking and
One of his main projects was to help people reconnect with one another and find this place of empathy and just joy despite
Challenging conditions and one of the ways he wanted to help people is through his fiction. Have you mentioned already?
more than once and now let's
Shift our attention really to to his practice because I have to say that
When I read him as a
His social commentary. I'm I'm persuaded. I'm impressed by his understanding of a certain kind of pathology that afflicts this nation of ours
Where you can see signs of it and symptoms of it in
Not only psychologically you can see it even physically in the kind of
bodies that have a kind of distortion about them all
Across this country of ours where you you see a reflection of some kind of
Disorders of one sort and I think that he he go he gets to something crucial about
um
Addiction
Living in contemporary
American
the collapse of of social communal structures and so forth
but now when we let me okay, so infinite justice is main
I consider by many people his main magnus opus
and I'm now gonna
adopt
a
Anatitude of skepticism because I'm not at all
I've tried to read it as most readers, you know, I gave up most readers read about till page 100
I've quared a number of friends of mine literary
Scholars as well as intense readers of contemporary fiction and so forth
and I would say I've acquired about eight seven or eight, you know, in preparation for the show not one of them
believes that
Or thought that infinite just was a great book and and not one of them was able to well
One of them was able to read it all the way through and I'd like to read a
an email I received from this friend of mine who's um, you know, highly literate and who
wrote to me when I informed him to ask and revise said in a way I'm quoting now in a way
I'm sorry you're dignifying David Foster Wallace with a show
He's almost my exact contemporary so I've been reading him pretty much from the get-go
He wrote some wonderful short stories, but his novels are awful
Infinite just was three novels in one seemingly combined for the publicity shock effect of a young man publishing a very long book
There's some wonderful writing about addiction
Some fair writing about tennis and a preposterous third plot about Canadian terrorism
In which for all his pose of knowingness he consistently misspells the French word for wheelchair
I guess poser is the word I'm looking for
That's a harsh judgment
But it comes from someone who has put in the time and who has earned the right to that judgment through
Was you know
Spending however many hours it takes to read it looks like infinite just
so I would like to hear you defend it on the basis of its literary merits and convince me
that it's not bloated and
self-indulgent and
overwritten and full of all those things that in his interview he says he's trying to avoid namely
Look at me how clever I am
what he calls you know the
the sort of puffed up attitude of the writer drawing attention to himself for herself
So here you go Michael well that that's a tall order indeed, but I will try to channel all the enthusiasts out there
Because I know we are legion in fact
I
believe strongly that it is a great work of fiction
American fiction and in fact probably
maybe the greatest
Novel of the 20th century
In that it really reflects
You know so much of what we've been speaking about what it feels like to
Be alive in this moment and
Perhaps that's part of the key as to why your friend there and
You know you and other readers have not your friend made it through but the criticism might have to do with a generational
Positioning
Because Wallace you know we've spoken a bit about the high level
solipsism and and philosophical thought that he
dedicated much of his study to and also suffered from that that is only a particular
Population that can relate to that but at the same time
you know there's a
generational difference divide in in the language that he's speaking and in the phenomenon that he's
Reconstructing yes, but you
You say that he's the greatest it's the greatest novel of the 20th century
But if it's so generationally determined and I would actually question that because the email I received from you know
My friend said that that he's he's
Wallace's contemporary right exact contemporary and he doesn't seem to get into it that much either and
So is it the greatest novel of a particular slice of a generation?
Is novel of art of art particular decade or two decades or is it really the greatest novel of the 20th century in your view?
Well American novel I'm assuming
um
I mean, okay, let's say one of the greatest one of the top three maybe greatest novels
I think what we need to address when we speak about the criticism that this book and that Wallace has received
I think we need to remember what happens to
um
sort of highly visible targets
that they they kind of
Have this magnetic effect to negative criticism particularly this novel which as you mentioned too the other people you queried
very few of Wallace's
Staunches critics have read infinite just all the way through so one could
You know surely there's no judgment on character there or whatever you can read the novel you cannot read the novel
But can you not read the novel and make pronouncements about what it is or isn't or how successful it is or is not that
I'm not so sure about well can I ask then I'm because I'm gonna push you hard now like because you said that
You have to make it through that novel
But you also mentioned that he submitted a novel that was 700 pages longer than what
It the published version was and people like me, you know read the first hundred pages and say
This ain't Kafka. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you got you got you he distills in five pages
Absolutely essential psychic and social phenomena so forth and you know there there's a sense that
He claimed when he's that everything there was there for a reason
but if you can
Reduce it down by 700 pages it means that there's a lot of
Perfluest stuff there was a lot of superfluous stuff in there and I'm not convinced that the thousand plus pages of
His published version is all absolutely essential and everything
It's necessary has on that in there to vent but you are persuaded of that I am and I think it has to do with
What it means for something in this novel to be essential for it to have a reason to be there because
Thinking about how the novel operates and again when I speak about project fiction I think about
novels that tend to have this long duration and that that voluminous structure is what allows the authors to
To rehearse and proposed certain principles about
Thinking through what it means to live a good life and in their contemporary moment there each of these novels, you know, and Bruce is another
I look at and
George Pecax
Lavimodempoa life a users manual
They are inherently bound up in their contemporary moment. So with Wallace
It's a tricky question. What is
Essential and what isn't because the one of the essential points is that we live in a time where there's so much overload
Our stimuli are constantly I mean there's constant
Influx of stimuli and
things calling out for us to pay attention to them and
You know in to his mind and and what he is thinking about in the fiction is that we've potentially lost
strategies and
practical
tools to cope with this overflow and and complete
Overabundance of substances and stimuli and you know
Words coming at us every day. So this novel
one of the tools that it gives the reader is
Practicing coaching them to develop how it's habits of intentional awareness that
Our vital to living well today
So you're suggesting I gather that there is an antidote
in the writing to the ailments of the society in particular
the overload the addiction the inability to
Impose restraint you also claim in your in your work on him that he is
Using fiction as an occasion to discipline abstract thought
Absolutely and
But here again, I
Would like to hear more about why you believe that that is actually taking place in the novel because I I read it as
symptomatic of the overload and of the excess and of that there's a certain incontinence in in the book from my
Very partial reading of it literal sense and I have a sense
I mean I I knew an academic once who was
an
alcoholic much, you know like
Wallace was and while he was an alcoholic he wrote very brilliant
lucid and
Almost Apollonian kind of essays and chapters of a book
Then he went into rehab gave up alcohol all of a sudden his writing became
Completely intoxicated and drunken and he ended up
Trading in one form of excess for another and he would have probably for his academic career would have done better
To remain an alcoholic at least until he got tenure which didn't happen so yeah
When I read infinite just I have a sense that here we have
You know an addict who who has transpose onto into his fiction a certain kind of
inability to exercise restraint on
Unaddiction or a passion or whatever you call it interesting
well, I don't know how helpful
the
mapping
Wallace's own addiction is on to reading the novel, but I do grant and
citing
Wallace in an interview
That I know that he had trouble
determining what was most important and less important to include in his nonfiction
But I feel like in his fiction again that
everything is in there for a
reason in that
This nonlinear recursive presentation of these proliferate plot elements and narrative details
Encourage as the reader to exercise the cognitive muscles that
You know he or she uses to parse and organize the barrage of input that
his or her brain processes daily so in the novel itself
It's like being out in the world and
at the same time it is controlled and constrained because
You know your your movements are dictated by
The words on the page by flipping back and forth to the end notes at different moments
and in
Remember the
attentional awareness now what I mean when I say that is that
the way things things
Being you know mobile synecticae these nouns that accrue significance and
are
Deployed throughout the text in different synectic docket relations
So they stand in as parts for different holes at different moments
and have different symbolic and comic
Resonance so that the reader
Moving through this thousand page text has to awaken
to
Paying attention to the details that are important and parsing out actually what is more or less important and again
I should say that um
You know of course there's uneven writing and of course more could have been edited out
Particularly around the 200 page mark. I feel as some of the weak stuff
I think it's around there there are few voices that come in that um
You know he he brings in different dialects and things and that is some somewhat interesting
But they do not come back in a substantive way
So one is a feeling that you know that is a thread that did not get picked up again
And maybe could have been cut out
Well you have a really
intriguing and compelling
Analysis of some of some of these
Mobile synectic geez as you call them one of which is of course is the head
Yeah, and that's where you know reading you I start suspecting that you know maybe there is a kind of intensely controlled
System of metaphoric taking place because the head in in infinite just
From your reading anyway seems to take have many different declensions
And it even now makes sense to me why the tennis academy becomes a central locus because the the game of tennis is
about heads in
number of different ways first thing you
Hit the ball with the head of the racket
or even a brand, you know the head brand of
the
industry
but it's also a highly mental game
And you drew my attention to a passage in infinite just where
Character has a dream of some vast tennis this again for me is so David Wallace
It's not a tennis court of the normal dimensions. It's a size of a football field
And it's full of complexity in terms of the rules
So he takes a game which is clean lucid and contained and in large is it to a football field and and and complex
This is what I feel when I read him as a fiction writer is what he does to a good story
But anyway
The head there is in the tennis, but it's also in the solipsism of other characters and it's in the headquarters
So for so you have a really very compelling analysis of that particular
mobile synectically and on others and
I take it you you believe that if you have the right
amount of patience and reading him with a suspension of
cynicism let's call it yeah, you will uncover that most of what's in that book is actually there for a very good reason
absolutely I mean now granted
When talking about literature and our entitled opinions about literature in life that we we have we come to text with different
interests and personalities and
goals
you know someone who is is
Interested in you know following game of thrones or something
May although nextly. I don't know anything about game of thrones
But that person might actually really love it and it's just from my understanding of the yes
It's in it's that's in content. It's not quite as incontinent, but it can't it can't contain itself
Well, yes, I think the proliferation of characters and you know plotlines and things but um
Yeah, I I
Feel that
Infinite just
Has enormous payoff for readers who are willing and can find the time and space necessary
To dedicate themselves to reading it from start to finish
And I don't I don't deny that it takes
a
Certain metal and motivation to get through the text. I myself started a few times before I was able to push through and I don't know that
if I had not had the mandate of
my dissertation and wanting to piece all this together
It might have been more difficult for me to do it
But when when I was reading this is another piece
We should talk about the
experiential factor of
of
Getting involved with infinite just and spending the amount of time that it takes
with this novel is that
It um it's
affective power the characters that Wallace creates are
so three-dimensional and
So vulnerable a lot of them and struggling with really difficult
um
conditions of life
that you
Become really attached to them and to the feeling of
Sitting down with this novel and this whole host of characters that you've come to know that you know by the time you reach the last page
There is a bit of a let down one of these
I know readers of all sorts of long novels know this feeling you're like oh no now it's over
In fact, you're drawing attention to a very important element of a fiction reading in general which is that
You empathize or empathize might not be the right way you identify you you become friends or you become a quaint
An acquaintance of the characters
You're in their company for a long time now either you enjoy being in the company of a cast of characters
Or you don't and I think
Some people like some novels because they do others will not like that same novel because they don't and
Is it the case that someone of your age and generation
Can warm up to this cast of characters and enjoy have the actual pleasure of spending all those hours with them in the book as
Opposed to someone from another generation or from another class or from another kind of experience in life where these characters are
Actually just annoying. I'm not sure that
That
One's enjoyment of the novel is dependent upon you know one's generational
Dance I think that it's rather the
Identification with the dilemmas that the main characters are going through and the the challenges they
confront
Would be the piece that would
maybe speak more to
David Foster Wallace's generation and younger readers the enjoyment factor
I think as with anything it's a matter of taste and a matter of
what one finds pleasurable now
Infant adjust
Has the range I mean it the whole spectrum from the body grotesque humor and
satire to really eloquent
descriptive passages of
Difficult things like depression and addiction, but then also really beautiful
Parts of life and David Foster Wallace said in an interview somewhere
That part of serious fiction's job
I mean primarily is to give give the reader who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull
There we have the head again to give her imaginative access to other self. So that's where fiction can
bridge our
existential
Lonely conditions we can get into one other's mind. So that that is the pleasurable piece
I think is to find solace and comfort and yes to empathize with these characters who
You know our experiencing
The peaks and valleys of life as we all do what do you make of the
dialectic let's say or the tension between
The demands on the novelist to entertain the reader and provide pleasure
and at the same time the
Imperative for serious fiction not to become another form of
Television like entertainment which with its passive
Spekitation and therefore
Wallace feels obliged to unsettled the reader and to get him or her outside of his or her comfort zone and
Wake up to the fact that no you have to do some work here. Right. Right. Yeah, no absolutely
He was he was very aware of that and I
Identify that as one of the primary traits of
again project fiction is
The acknowledging the fact that you have to
expend a heightened amount of effort really in the reading of these novels
But there's a reward for this effort namely you
Engage with a text in a way that you know, I mentioned before I think the the non-linearity the
Volum the luminosity of it having to keep different plots in mind and characters and revisiting them those
Those features I think exercise, you know
Quite concretely cognitive muscles. We know now about the plasticity of the brain, you know operating
Through these neural pathways you can reinforce them
Through just patterns of thought and behavior. So there's that on the one hand but on the other hand the novel offers
Pretty concrete pragmatic strategies that the reader, you know consciously or unconsciously
I
Think can leave the text and bring back into his or her everyday life
We've talked about the
necessity to to choose to make conscious
thoughtful choices and you reference the canyon conventions commencement speech to not be operating on our default settings day and day out
But to to pay attention and to think really hard about what we spend our time energy and money on so that we have the best
outcome we can and
your convinced Michael that
reading a work like infinite just actually
Serves the purpose of breaking down some barriers of alienation and of promoting a
more a greater awareness of the
uh
predicaments and the
and the seduction and blandishments that the
hyper-capitalistic system that
wants to impose on us um I I do absolutely I mean
um I believe that it provides us with an occasion
to practice new habits of thought and
and mind and you know
There's a lot of studies now. There's a whole branch of positive psychology that's developed
around mindfulness training and
how it's really in our control our
power through through
practices that are
They might not seem like they can be effective but meditation for example
as dramatic positive effect on our experience because in the end
again this is
amply represented in the novel in the end our experience can come down to
how we choose to
see ourselves
either as a part of something larger or as an
an island on our own completely isolated and disconnected from those around us
was Wallace uh
someone who practiced meditation?
I don't know that I would imagine that along with you know he was he was
um
very quiet about AA and everything in his personal life
he
upheld that
tenant of not speaking publicly about it as a member but of course it it's in infinite just
a lot but I wouldn't imagine that meditation would have been part of his practice yeah
well I um feel that you've done a really good job bringing attention to what is at work
in the fiction and that it's not just um it's not just a literary enterprise that he was involved in
but that he was trying to give an existential density
uh and transitivity to to what he wrote and that
infinite just has its proper justification for having those three parts and and being so
complex ultimately that's the word that keeps coming back I mean I know people have talked about it
as being a fractal novel and that he was very into the mathematical and that that appeals to a
certain kind of reader perhaps you know to decode and and and analyze in terms of complexity I
like some other readers I find that there's an inexhaustible depth to
lucidity and certain kind of minimalism it's the the Kafka
he agreed with you he says oh if only I could write you know something as lucid and short as that
yeah yeah and again I don't want to I'm not here to bash him I actually um have become a fan of his
especially if he has an essay essay I will I promise you I'm going to make a good heart of
effort now again to go through infinite just but so for example tennis is something that I
you know I know about I play it I've I've done a show on it in fact with the
Dick Gould the fame tennis coach of Stanford oh yeah no and and I'm a huge fan of Roger Federer so
here again David Wallace writes an essay on on you know the mystical the religious experience
of watching Federer do match which is but if you read it you'll find that it's not just
the normal editorial piece in the New York Times it's very very long and I feel like he makes some
very original points and nothing but if I were an editor I would be do's into one fifth of
its idea would be a much more crystalline compelling uh common on Roger Federer whereas I have to
wait through a bunch of pages but anyway that's again we're talking about style here and
I'm certainly a pluralist in the sense that I think that literature should have a plurality of styles
and they can go from the the bleak minimalism of a Samuel Beckett you know to the kind of wild
profusion of a Joyce or Robert Muzil whom I do love and I think you believe that Wallace belongs
to a distinct genre of the novel what you call project fiction that requires
a certain kind of length or volume for it to work right yeah yeah yeah as we were saying before that
it needs a novel a project fiction is as long as it is so that the reader can really dwell within it
for a good portion of time and in order to practice the the practices that are on offer and the
strategies and to to have a real human experience of what is presented now I'm distracted right now
because I have this this citation a perfect quote you were speaking a moment ago about both tennis
and then also the voluminous the expansion and the impossibility of editing editing David Foster Wallace
so I think it's perfect here it's a passage describing Gerhard Stitt he's the tennis coach at
the Kent tennis academy in Infinite Just and it's again this narrative voice that is this
authorially authorially inflected narrative voice but not any character in the text
it's describing why howling candidates as father hired Stitt because he has knowledge of formal math
or you know sorry because he does not have knowledge of for while he does not have knowledge
of formal math he in here begins the citation he nevertheless seem to know what hotman and
vandamir and bulletary seemed not to know that locating beauty and art and magic and improvement
and keys to excellence and victory in the prolic's flux of match play is not a fractal matter
of reducing chaos to pattern seemed intuitively to sense that it was a matter not of reduction
at all but perversely of expansion the alliatory flutter of uncontrolled metastatic growth
each well shot ball admitting of n possible responses to n possible responses to those responses
and on into what incandenza would articulate to anyone who both who shared both his backgrounds as
a cantorian continuum of infinities of possible move and response
cantorian and beautiful because in foliating contained this diagonal infinity of infinities
of choice and execution mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained bounded by the talent
and imagination of self and opponent bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill
and imagination the brought one player finally down they kept both from winning that made it
finally a game these boundaries of self that's great michael that means david fusselwall
gets the last word on this show yeah he won the mat he did thank you for joining as we've been
speaking with michael hoier who got her dissertation done last year over just about a year ago in
comparative literature here at stanford with david foster wallace being you know one of the main
protagonists along with much said post pama in terms of company thanks again for coming on michael
i'm robert harris and for entitled opinions thanks for listening thanks
they spent a ton of the TV
blowing kisses and my pep see
i knew just had to be your pit and had a whole to see
it's just one thing that isn't right
something that keeps me up
beneath the lipstick and the blush i think i got into two months
it's this one i was supposed to know that you want me my that goes my face my my bloodies great
you might do me now that mother's gone away you think that you can help your way
so you stroke my feet with lips with your filthy fingertips there's just one thing that isn't right
something that keeps me up
i think i got into two months
it's this one i was supposed to know that you want me my that goes my face my my bloodies
my to me
me
you
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