David Foster Wallace Interview

[Otto]

Transcript of the David Foster Wallace Interview

by David Wiley
The Minnesota Daily
Feb. 27, 1997

(...)

I'm not a sociologist, I'm not a politician, I'm not an advocate for
cultural change. I'm talking like a private citizen. My stuff is
not programmatic, and I don't want to revolutionize American
culture. What I'm mostly trying to talk about is what it feels
like emotionally to be 34 in this country.

This reminds me of DeLillo's White Noise -- the section about 'The
Most Photographed Barn in America' -- the levels of distancing as
you watch something.

DeLillo and Pynchon and Gaddis and a lot of those guys I think
called the situation a long time ago. What's ironic (laughs
ironically) is that the stuff they're talking about is still going
on but their ironic, sarcastic voice we have adopted as a way to
protect ourselves from responsibility to the situations. So it's
like we've taken the technique or the surface of what it is
they're talking about, but we haven't listened to what the message
is.

So you don't watch much TV any more?

I did at one time, but now -- I've got a VCR, but I don't get any
TV on it, so I'm a little out of it. 

(...)

So now we see Pynchon scrambling to keep up with the techniques
that television stole from him.

Pynchon's another one whom I regard as really kind of
old-fashioned. I like early Pynchon. I like The Crying of Lot 49.
I like Gravity's Rainbow. But the Pynchon of Slow Learner 
and Vineland, which I didn't like very much, seems to be making
the same tired jokes -- 'look how shallow and superficial the
culture is.' All right -- I've been told -- TV itself now tells
that to me. It just seems like more of the same. I'm not as big a
Pynchon fan as some other people are.

The word Pynchon is on every one of you're book covers as a
comparison. Does this drive you crazy?

Pynchon was important to me when I was in college. The first book
that I wrote, Broom of the System, some reviewer for the New York
Times said it was a rip-off of The Crying of Lot 49, like that I
hadn't read yet. So I got all pissed, and then I went and read The
Crying of Lot 49, and it was absolutely, incredibly good. I think
a certain amount of this is marketing, and, you know, the fastest
way to tell what something is like is to compare it to something
else. And having read Gaddis and having read Pynchon and DeLillo
and Coover and McElroy and Sorrentino, I can see that the kind of
stuff that I do or like that Bill Vollmann does or that Richard
Powers does is certainly more like that than it's like, you know,
Irwin Shaw or John Updike. Writers are bad to ask about this
though, because we're all egomaniacs, and we all want to be
utterly unique and, you know, not like anybody else, and so
there's a certain amount of bristling about it, but after a while
there's just no way to help it. Gravity's Rainbow is a great book,
but for the most part Pynchon kind of annoys me, and I think his
approach to a certain amount of stuff is kind of shallow, to be
honest with you. So I get uncomfortable about that, and when
people ask it over and over again I get the sense that they're
saying they think I'm ripping him off or just rehashing stuff he's
done, in which case I get pissed, but if that's how they're seeing
it, it means I've failed. I mean if my stuff's coming off
derivative of somebody else, it means there's something that I'm
doing that isn't right. But I find myself doing it all the time.
I'll see a movie, and I'll really like it, and I'll recommend it
to friends, and I'll say, well, it's sort of like this combined
with this. I mean it's such a convenient shorthand. And nobody
likes to have it done to them. You don't want to have a friend say
to you, 'You're just exactly like this other guy we know.' You
say, 'No, I'm not. I'm me.' But we do it to each other all the
time.

(...)

http://www.smallbytes.net/~bobkat/jestwiley2.html