David Foster Wallace on Art and Truth
Interview with David Foster Wallace, September 2006. Text
Here’s an interview with David Foster Wallace that I took in September 2006. Parts of it were broadcast by Radio Svoboda (in Russian) and published in SHO magazine (in Russian), A2 magazine (in Czech) and in The New York Review of Books (in English). Also, the interview was published in full by Terre di Mezzo Editore (in Italian).
The full English text of the interview was published in my blog on Livejournal.com. Now I'm moving it here.
It’s the first in the series of my interviews with American and European writers, artists, and movie directors, which were taken for various Russian media in 2000-2010 and never published in English before. Each month, I’m going to post one interview - not just the text but also the audio version.
If I have enough subscribers after I finish publishing my old interviews, I’ll start taking new ones. I’ve missed talking to interesting people.
THE INTERVIEW
OK – According to some comments on Infinite Jest, we live in the Year of the Whisper — Quiet Maytag Dishmaster. There's no ONAN; years are not subsidized. But many people are thinking, and me in particular, I'm feeling it too, that the society is more and more consumer–oriented. Do you share this feeling? Do you believe it's true?
DFW – What for you does the term “consumer–oriented” mean?
OK – It means for me that all that surrounds me is trying to sell me something. It means that all the values... well, of course not all the values, but many of the values of the society, in particular there in the US as I can guess by films or books or TV programs, as well as here in Europe, many of the values are directed to buying something.
DFW – So you're asking me about kind of American society, not all of the world?
OK – Do you feel we're living in the consumerism age or it's just a media concept that doesn't have any real meaning in your opinion?
DFW – This question, as you know, is very complicated. I can give answers that are somewhat simple and I can talk really only about America, because it's really the only society that I know. America as everybody knows is a country of many contradictions. A big contradiction for one time has been between a very aggressive form of capitalism and consumerism against what might be called moral or civic impulses. For many years people did know that business is meant to make money, but people were a little embarrassed or ashamed by it. It was regarded as somewhat crass. Some of this contradiction comes out of England and of an old conflict between the bourgeoisie and nobility. What I think you and I will agree is that sometime – I’m not sure whether it was in 1990s or 1980s in America – half of this conflict really sort of disappeared and there’s now a celebration of commercialism and consumerism and marketing that is not really balanced by any kind of let's say shame or embarrassment or reticence or any sense that in fact consumerism and commercialism are really a very small part of human life. I think in many people's daily lives... that daily lives of many people aren’t really only consumer–driven here in America, but they’re certainly much more so, then they were 20 or 30 years ago. Where it gets interesting and complicated is in diagnosis of what's happens and what it augurs to the future. But that's a much more complicated issue. Here in America whole books are written on this sort of consumerism of modern society, on the effects of media and advertising, how the American character is changing. It’s extremely complicated.
OK – Do you think it's a natural trend that will stop by itself at some moment. Or there’s something dangerous in it? In Infinite Jest you're quite sarcastic about consumerism: all those subsided years etc.
DFW – Subsidized years were meant to be a joke. Now in America every large sporting event is called Acme Corporation Super Bowl or something like it. Part of the progression here is that corporations have very smart hard–working people doing marketing and advertising and that in American culture advertisers have figured out and determined all kinds of ways to get their advertising across. Nobody would ever have imagined in the 1960s and 1970s that very profusion of marketing and media and selling gives you and me and many people sense that we’re awash in this kind of consumerist world. Where it’s going? I’m not entirely sure. In America and I imagine in most parts of Western Europe there’s a certain problem that is corporations have gotten more and more power, both culturally and politically. Here in America it now takes large amounts of money to run to various kinds of democratic office. Corporations have a great deal more of money than private citizens, corporations make these donations that then result in laws that favor corporations even more – sort of a circle. I don’t know if I’m totally pessimistic, the problem here, it seems to me, that at least since WWII America has become more and more a corporate society. That we've turned give more and more of our political and cultural life over to corporations. And corporations are very strange, they’re composed of people, they have a legal status of a person, but they don’t have a consciousness or soul the way people do. Corporations really are machines for making money, enormous sophisticated machines. Given the fact that corporations have that one interest, and human beings, those of us who live here in America, have assortment of different interests, of which making money and being financially comfortable is only one, you end up with increasing distortion of American values where everything becomes about money and selling and buying and display, where in reality people's domestic lives and interior lives require a great deal more then that for anything like happiness or wholeness. In that sense these corporations become more and more powerful, one could probably see a trend that’s not a happy trend. On the other hand, where it gets complicated, is American politics. We've reached the point with the current American president and the current administration where corporations have so much influence and so much control and are doing so much damage that’s obvious to anybody that there’s may be what’s known in English as “backlash”, a kind of spasmodic reaction. The next ten years here in America are going to be very interesting probably for the whole world to watch.
OK – Interesting optimistically saying, or as interesting as watching a volcano eruption?
DFW – Those are the two possibilities. Either American voters will figure out there need to be some counterbalances to corporate and capitalist forces, the balance that can be achieved through political process. Or me may very well end up here with a form of fascism. Many people in America throw the term “fascism” around particularly for Middle–Eastern terrorists, but in fact fascism is close alliance between a unitary executive and a state, large corporations and a state. We could be entering a period much like Russia went through much of the XX–th century with a great deal of repression and hollowness and artificiality of the culture. Because everything in the culture is directed toward the interests of the corporations rather then the citizens. But I have to got something out of it too. How do you think it will play out? Will it be a volcano?
OK – In America? I don't know. I'm rather optimistic about it, because I think America is well–balanced country and it has long tradition of changing government. I'm more concerned about Russia. We have a grave situation with elections, which will take part about the same times as yours. And in Russia I'm afraid that it will be something more like a volcano.
DFW – Can you describe the characteristics of the volcano? How does Putin and his administration figure into this?
OK – I don’t know. I'm away of Russian political situation right now, but everybody's talking of a theoretical Putin's protege who will be the next president. But it seems to me that the balance of power inside the Putin's administration is so thin, that they probably won't be able to chose among his proteges and there will be a quarrel inside the administration after Putin leaves. So I can expect anything after or even before the elections, may be even something like riots.
DFW – I don’t know whether we're close to this here… One thinks about America is that America is so comfortable and so prosperous that it would take some outrageous violations of civil liberties for actual rioting in the streets. But the situation is strangely similar it seems to me, other than that.
OK – It seems to me that we're somehow following your trends, not the good ones, and sometimes even over outdoing you.
DFW – Or we're following yours. It's not always clear which way it is.
Q – A popular modern Russian writer, Viktor Pelevin, has said that the main character of the modern cinema and pop–literature – all the pop–culture – is a black briefcase with money. We mostly follow its fate, and fate of the other characters depends on it, even the nominal protagonists are really just supporting characters to this briefcase. Do you agree that mass culture is preoccupied with money?
DFW – I’ve heard about Viktor Pelevin, and everything I’ve heard about him is showing that he’s very smart and very astute. I think his image here, one reason it’s so funny is that's somewhat accurate. At least here in America, we’re in a time that’s very, very cynical. So when you have a piece of mass– culture that has a very virtuous person or a hero, people see those qualities much more as presentations by someone who’s trying to get something, whether money or approval, then true human virtue or true qualities. One consequence of what American scholars call a post–modern era is that everyone has seen so many performances, that American viewers and American readers, we simply assume now that everything is a performance, and it's strategic, and it's tactical. It’s probably true that in this period of cynicism one thinks that people believe in and truly see as having value are things like money or particularly sound money that people are willing to fight and die for. It’s a very sad situation and I think the chances are that nations go through periods of great idealism and great cynicism, and America and Europe, at least Western Europe right now, are in period of great cynicism.
OK – You can’t imagine what cynicism we have in Russia now. It’s certainly not less than in Western Europe.
DFW – Yes, but what’s strange to me, at least as to an amateur and someone who doesn’t know so much about Russia, is that so much of Russian cynicism is due to the terrible things that the government did to civilians for so many years. Now at least at some ways commercialism and capitalism has been unleashed.
OK – Backlash, as you've said.
DFW – Yes, something like a backlash. What’s strange to watch is how closely that backlash or explosion in places like Russia mirror developments in America that really were kind of slow and progressive over much of the 20th century with just capitalist and commercialist and consumerist values getting more and more pronounced and less and less balanced by values that people simply don’t really believe in anymore. No, that’s too simple. It’s not that people don’t believe in it anymore, it’s that they believe that no one else around them believes in them and it all is simply a display or a sales technique. So everyone is so afraid of being taken advantage of, that they feel they have to be extremely cynical and calculating all the time. It’s one reason it’s a very kind of sad, depressed, angry time in America right now. Certainly the worst I can remember.
OK – Is there any way out of it? Can you see any developments, albeit minor, that could lead to some good results in the future?
DFW – Speaking totally as an amateur, not any kind of government expert, I would say, sure, at least in America there's been a highly artificial situation for very many years that the American standard of living, the American degree of consumption of resources and exploitation of other countries has been extraordinary. America’s now starting to face certain economic realities that we’ve been shielded from for many years. The price of gasoline is slowly becoming closer to what it is in the rest of the world. The awareness that the entire Earth climate is affected by all nations, and that the United States as far and away the biggest carbon dioxide producer bears some special responsibility for possible environmental collapse later. Americans are slowly waking up out of a kind of dream, of special exemption and special privilege in the world. To use your term, this could result in some kind of volcano and America becoming some kind of nightmarish imperial force that takes resources from other countries, or it could result as I think it does in many countries in a kind of slow awakening to the fact that having and consuming and exhausting resources is actually not a very good set of values for living. America has got once again to find another time a way to live in consent with other countries. There could be a real renaissance of United Nations, not as idealistic enterprise but as many of the leading nations realizing that we have to work together and share and compromise, or else the entire planet will be in a very big problem. So which way it will go? I don’t know. And it’s one reason it’s a very frightening time in America, particularly with the people who’re in power right now – many of us are in a position of being more afraid of our own country and our own government right now, then we are of any supposed enemy somewhere else. For someone like me who grew up in the 60s at the height of the Cold War and whose consciousness was formed by the thought that we are the good guy and there’s one great looming dark enemy and that’s the Soviet Union, the idea of waking up to the fact that in this world very possibly we are the villain, we are dark force, to begin to see ourselves a little bit through the eyes of people in other countries. You can imagine how difficult that is for Americans to do. Nevertheless, with a lot of the people I know it’s very slowly starting to happen.
OK – Can we tell art from entertainment? For example, a program on TV with just entertainment value, can we call it art, if it's really very good? Like your Entertainment, is it art or just entertainment?
DFW – You’re asking me a basic question of what’s called in English “esthetics”. The question of what is art, – your own Tolstoy wrote an entire book about this. This is a very, very complicated question. Personally I believe that there’s a difference between art and entertainment. But it’s not a sharp dark line dividing the two, it’s more like – do you know what the word “continuum” is?
OK – Yes, I have mathematical education.
DFW – We have here much more like continuum here than any kind of a strict demarcation. One reason why the question is very interesting now is that America has gotten very, very, very good in producing entertainment. Vivid spectacular engrossing colorful sophisticated entertainment. And many American scholars and estheticians wonder how serious art will survive in a culture that becomes more and more about entertainment and amusement and escape.
OK – The Entertainment in your book – do you consider it art or…
DFW – The movie? The movie in that book is probably equivalent of Viktor Pelevin’s briefcase with the money. Probably – I did this book a long time ago – my guess is that really, really effective entertainment is usually commercial, meaning it’s primary goal is to get the audience to spend money. There’s a basic economic phenomena that’s named elasticity of demand. And what you want is inelasticity of demand, where the ideal piece of entertainment would something that people would want to see over and over and over again and pay for each time. The analogy for me is much more something like narcotics or addictive drugs than it is some kind of art. But probably the movie in that book is meant to be a sort parody, like exaggeration of entertainment the same kind as the subsidized time is kind of parody of corporate domination in culture.
OK – But, nevertheless, is it art?
DFW – Here’s the problem: you and I can sit down with a pot of coffee and many cigarettes and we could have a whole argument about this. The problem is that any definition one gives of art or any way that one tries in a sentence or two distinguish art from entertainment can be blown full of holes by counterexamples. I have two very simplistic believes: one is that the basic defining feature of an entertainment is that it provides some sort of relief or escape from real human life and the way we also feel inside all the time in the real life. Whereas art provokes more of an engagement or confrontation with that probably. It’s one reason why art requires more work both intellectually and sort of emotionally to observe than it does entertainment. That’s for me one difference. The other is that the entertainment’s goals, I usually think, in America are primarily economic, primarily commercial objects. And their true agenda is to get the consumer to spend money on them. Whereas art, including bad art, usually has much more complicated agendas that has to do at least partly with trying to give some sort of gift or have some kind of meaningful communication with the audience. Not that it’s necessarily succeeds or isn’t some times very bad. But at least deep down in it has the agenda.
Those are my two ways, sort of in my stomach or intuitively distinguish the two but of cause either of us can think of hundreds counterexamples that would make those differences very difficult to maintain in an argument.
OK – Lenin said that "The cinema is the most important art" because it appeals to the masses and therefore can be used as propaganda. Many of the best films of the past were pure propaganda, and not only from totalitarian regimes as "Battleship Potemkin"or "Triumph of the Will", but from democracies as well, as "Birth of the Nation".
DFW – The instance you brought up the Potemkin, I don’t know if it’s an entertainment in commercial sense, but it’s fairly unabashed propaganda. And yet, at least from a perspective of twenty–first century American movie fan, when I watch it, I watch it primarily as a piece of art. I’m moved by this piece of art. Some of it has to do obviously with the cultural context in which you observe something. Like in Borges’s short story "Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote". That's where it becomes even more complicated because then you have to start talking of political and cultural context of the production and also the perceiving of the piece of art or entertainment. They can obviously change over time at which point the whole thing begins just sort of giving you headache.
OK – Can pure art free of any commercial or propaganda value exist in your opinion?
DFW – What do you think?
OK - Well, it's of course a huge simplification but basically I think that there can't be any art totally free in political or commercial sense.
DFW – I’m suspicious of the word “pure”. It’s a very, very high standard to attach to a word like “art” given that the basic situation is a continuum. Let me give you an example: my wife is a fantastic artist and painter but she doesn’t attempt to sell her work for a great deal of money. She hasn’t made any attempts to get to a lot of galleries or museums to buy her work. She has shows and she can sell stuff when she wants, but mainly she gives them as gifts for people. It’s very interesting for me to watch her work. One reason she doesn’t want to try for a lot of conventional success, galleries… There’s a whole art world in America. You’re developing name and reputation, your art becomes more and more valuable and you can end up very wealthy. She’s afraid of this whole kind of process because she believes it will take something out of art, it will make it less fun for her to do. And for her it’s the most important thing of her life. So she is for me – I’ve only been married two years – watching her work and then going to the garage where I work, and trying to do my work and trying not to think what does this reviewer from the New York Times say or what is this rant in a magazine and everyone hates it and they're right in it, to find myself preoccupied and distracted by all kinds of what are really petty and immature and vain distractions is very educational. It may be the only way in America to produce pure art it would be to remove oneself from the public sphere and produce that art only as gifts where’s no money involved and no attempt for publicity or publication involved. The problem is that if everyone does that, then there’s no public arts here. So it all becomes kind of a paradox I spent a lot of the last years thinking about. I don’t have any answer to it. Tolstoy believed that pure art has exactly one agenda – that of to advance the cause of Christian brotherhood between human beings.
OK – That’s propaganda as well.
DFW – For me Tolstoy’s idea of what Christian brotherhood was was not any kind dogmatic church. The Tolstoy’s vision of what Christianity was was pure and good enough that for me it does not have the smack of propaganda. However it does seem to me wildly idealistic. And the standard so high that very few pieces of art other than for example “The death of Ivan Ilyich” could meet that standard. There’s good nourishing fascinating art for me that is far less pure then that. Though it would be very difficult to define it in a regular way that wouldn't be punched full of holes with counterexamples... You're asking philosophical questions. My educational background is like yours in mathematics, and philosophy, and it's difficult to give one's opinion in a few sentences without being aware that as a philosophical view or as, God forbid, as anything susceptible to anything like deductive proof or evidictive proof these are pathetic. I can think of counterexamples even as I'm saying these things.
OK – A friend of mine, who is a Czech movie director, says that when a movie director is trying to show objective picture, point of view of both sides, the people who watch the movie say “Now we can see that there’s no truth in this world, everything’s relative, every point of view has the same value. So what’s the point in doing anything in this life? Let’s just have a beer.” What do you think? Is objectivity an enemy of any action, any heroism, any progress?
DFW – What you’re asking about is called in America “relativism”. One of the big battles which are going on right now is people on the right, Republicans and Christians, believe that intellectuals are much too relativistic because we spend too much time saying: “Well, on the other hand” or “See it from their point of view” and to a certain point you’re right, this becomes paralyzing. What your friend the director seems to me to be espousing is exactly the vision of relativism that right–wingers in America direct toward left–wingers. Which is relativism that ends up in a kind or nihilism. There’s no absolute truth. There’s no absolute good. There’s no moral or ethical absolute. If ethics are relative then, you know, screw it. Let’s go do drugs or let’s go have sex with whomever we want or kill whoever we want.
OK – As Dostoevsky's put it “If there's no God, than everything is permitted”
DFW – Here in the States this is another feature of what’s called “the post–modern condition”. The post–structural critics have really been able to blast to smithereens any idea of objectivity in pretty much any of disciplines: quality in art, ethics, political rectitude. Again, keep I mind that America, when I was a child, seems now incredibly naïve, that we, the US, were the good people, and we were bringing democracy and prosperity and freedom to other nations, whereas the bad evil imperial Soviet Union attempting simply to absorb this satellites in its totalitarian web. As I got older entered college and began to know more about the American history, that isn’t in the textbooks, it became for me obviously much more complicated and it easier to see many times in history when America and any nation acts in a way that’s probably evil. And it does, it ends up being morally very confusing. My personal opinion is that great challenge for that of us who want to be decent human beings and citizens in America is how to be flexible and sophisticated enough to realize that there’s probably is no objectivity with the capital O. That there’s probably is no absolute right in all situations handed down from God on the stone tablets. To realize that on one hand. But on the other hand to realize that it is our job as responsible decent spiritual human beings to arrive at sets of principles to guide our conduct in order to keep us from hurting ourselves and other people. Probably the remedy that I see for it is some very, very mild form of Camus–like existential engagement. But you can see, the average Russian person reading about America probably can see the terrible way that this conflict is playing out. Because the backlash against this kind of relativism your director friend just espoused here in America is very, very frightening. “Abortion is evil, we must outlawed in all situations. Middle–Eastern terrorists, we must torture them. They have no rights, they’re not human beings. Oil, we have a right to cheap oil because we are force of democracy and light.” It all becomes self–serving bullshit so quickly that anybody who’s watching it can see the sort of evil and delusion in it. This is the danger here in America is that on one side things became very relativistic and now backlash is much more like Sharia and Islamic totalitarianism than it is like recognizable American democracy. And these two forces are playing out at America right now. I don’t believe your friend sincerely believes in it. It’s very effective argument. It’s device that’s hard to refute easily, but if I really, really, really believed that, then I think I would so empty and full of despair inside that I probably would want to go on with him.
OK – It's about his right for self–expression. His films are mostly documentaries, and he says that he has a right to express in his documentaries his own position. Not “all positions” but what he thinks.
DFW – Oh, then in fact that’s really probably true. The trick, at least here in America, we brought up worshiping this kind of democracy, diversity and tolerance. I have certain political believes that I believe in really strongly. But I’m required to allow you to have your believes and espouse and fight for your believes as strongly as I believe in mine. Which all sounds very nice but is actually very, very difficult to do in practice. And what’s scary in America right now is the more and more of the media is being taken over by the right–wing interests who are not at all interested in respecting or giving equal time to the other side. So now as you’ve explained I can understand what your friend is saying. Although you know that if you and him are sitting around and you drinking beer or whatever, the standards he brings to bear in his own documentary, what makes a certain sequence or set of edits good, you can end up forcing him to admit that there’s a set of a half of dozen or a dozen core values that deep down he's gonna feels that just about everybody shares. I think deep down we all still sort of believe in a kind of objectivity even though it’s not at all fashionable to talk about it.
OK – It seems to me – now it's my own opinion – that objectivity in mass media is on the side of the powerful. If we tell about some point of view that's shared by most, we can ignore all other points of view. But if we tell about a point of view of a minority, we absolutely must say that it's a minor point of view and there's a bigger one.
DFW – You and I have no disagreements about it. Again, this is part of post– structural or post–modern awakening. Part of what’s good about it. At least here in America we had a sort of naïve view of objectivity that it was some objective truth. For many years the country was so complaisant ensuing basic agreement, when the news came on, it was presented in a certain way. It seemed objective just because none of us in the mainstream had any substance of disagreement with it. Now of course the battle's really joined here in America. Because you have in essence a right–wing media and a left–wing media and what supposed to be a mainstream media but very confused and isn’t sure how to position itself. And it makes for a lot of chaos and confusion right now but if you right, which I think you are, the result of it will be good. Because this idea that any kind of objective particularly in politics – any kind of objective statement of facts – it’s always the matter in news of what clips of film one chose to broadcast versus cut out. When you edit this exchange you will have to make thousands of decisions about what to leave in, what to cut out, what to translate and how to translate it. And your basic attempt will be fair but what will end up will be much more reflection of Ostap then it will of David. It’s simply inevitable. And it’s part of the unspoken agreement that I assent to when I agree to talk with you this way on the telephone. It's inevitable. Nevertheless we in an attempt to be decent and minimally fair owe one another some felt some obligation to what seems like a truth or seems like fairness. Even though those of us who educated no longer really believe that it’s floating up there objectively like Platonic Ideal. It’s all very tricky. I'm sure you agree. Every time you edit it or translate it you must go through this. Are you distorting here? You have to cut this by 90%. How can you cut it so you're not totally distorting it? It's kinda drive you crazy. Unless you're just a bad guy and then you can cut it however you want to make it seem whatever you want. You and I both know this, I've done pieces of journalism. It's very very tricky. We're guided by some basic feel of fairness, otherwise we know we are not doing journalism, we're basically just doing propaganda. And cutting and chopping quotations to fit.
OK – At least I'm a freelancer and hopefully enjoy some degree of freedom, not being an employee. But of course on the basic level you're absolutely right.
DFW – That's one level of freedom, not being an employee. But how free are we from our own prejudices?
OK – We're absolutely not.
DFW – I find every day something that I've taken for granted actually is not true. How things are in America right now, there’s room to walk around and really realize how full of shit I am most of the time about the things that I’m really confident of. And it’s really quite a privilege to get to walk around and realize that. I think there in a lot of times in world history and lot of countries where just isn’t an opportunity to realize how wrong I am most of the time.
OK – Let’s talk about good times and bad times. It's a common belief that we have some moral progress, some social progress, some political progress. But looking at 20th century it seems that it was the cruelest century of them all. All this mass murders, all this totalitarianism, everything that's happened between 1914 and let's say 1970. It’s unbelievable what up to 1970s people did to other people and what we still do to animals. We’ve actually built concentration camps for cows and chickens who live only to be killed and it structures all their lives. Do you believe in social or moral progress? Or may be you disagree with what I've just said and you don't think that the picture is so dark?
DFW – Again, if we sat with coffee and cigarettes we would agree that the whole question is very complicated. It is certainly true that as technology has progressed and economic mechanisms have progressed, it is increasingly possible to perpetrate terrible cruelties things on other human beings and on animals. You and I I think agree that one of the great unspoken horrors of modern capitalism is phenomena that’s known as “factory farming”. Which here in America for economic reasons, because it’s cheapest, animals are raised in such large numbers in such close captivity in such miserable conditions that if you assume that their neural system is capable of suffering, it is the grave horror of America right now. It’s not a view that most Americans are very interested in, most Americans believe there is a moral hierarchy and in it needs of people come first.
OK – I personally believe that needs of human come first, but it's a matter of degree, because, nevertheless, if needs of humans come first, the needs of animals should be at least considered.
DFW – I absolutely agree. I had many arguments with friend about this. It’s seems to me that there’s no better example why corporate interests and economic logic need to be balanced with laws and restrictions on corporate behavior than that in fact not only that so many animals are killed, but they are made to live lives where none of their instincts get to be acted out, where every waking moment of their lives is suffering and torture, all so that meat be produced at 50 cents less per pound. To me it’s a monstrosity. On the other hand, at least in America, one of the things that drive us crazy is our professed ideal to try to be fair to everyone. To try not to exclude and discriminate. And in some ways America has made progress in realizing as a culture for instance how terribly black Americans have been treated, how unfairly women have been treated, how handicapped people have been discriminated against by things as simple as staircases that wheelchairs can't get up. What you see in America right now is another backlash. It’s so expensive and so difficult to try to be fair to everybody and it ends up with so much litigation, and so many people howling for their rights that many on the right wing and many in business simple want to throw up their hands and say “Fuck the whole thing and let’s just step back to the state of Nature and war of all against all.” “I am stronger therefore too bad for you.” This all gets really tricky. My personal belief is that because technology and economic logic has got so sophisticated, cruelty could be perpetrated now so that would have been unimaginable two or three hundred years ago. Therefore we are under more of a moral obligation to try very very very hard to develop compassion and mercy and empathy. Which means these are very bad times in America because the American electorate is simply not interested for the most part in much of this right now.
OK – But do you think – not in America, in general, do human beings become better in moral sense? Does social structure gets better? There's no doubt about technological progress, but is there any progress besides technological?
DFW – What do you think?
OK – I really do not know.
DFW – You can make an argument that in some ways, particularly since WWII, we have realized… Once nuclear weapons were developed we could have whole conversation about Cold War, and the argument that in fact the invention of these unbelievably destructive weapons actually kept Russia and the United States from going to war.
OK – I personally believe in it. Did you read Konrad Lorenz’s book “On Aggression”? It's an ethologist who traces aggression instincts from the simplest species to humans. And he shows that the more dangerous weapons the species have the more elaborated are their rituals and mechanisms for peace negotiations. If they have weapons to kill each other, they have to develop some rituals and instincts preventing the killing.
DFW – This is not a book I’m familiar with. You and I would probably agree with him. We certainly have more rational motivation to develop those things. Then you get though into the question whether the human beings are fundamentally rational and moral or whether we’re essentially predators who find more and more sophisticated ways to...
OK – It’s not about predator – prey relationships. It’s about aggression to its own kind, inter–species aggression. Rat to rat, wolf to wolf, human to human.
DFW – We into a more philosophical thing. His argument in essentially not provable nor refutable until there's some kind... It may be from strictly evolutionary model there will have to be two or three nuclear holocausts before people realize that the aggression is simply so costly that those who survive would end up establishing some kind of Utopia or some kind of quantum moral leap. It’s seems to me that what his argument is sound about is certainly that the quality of the weapons, destructiveness of the weapons increases the rational motivation to cooperate rather than aggress. One of the things that are tricky here is that given the media we now have access to so many more acts of cruelty and horror then we did say a hundred years ago. It’s not clear to me whether this sort of things that’s going on in the Middle East or in the Sudan or in Chechnya or in Iraq are newly horrible or whether it’s simply that if I lived in 1850 and read a newspaper once a week, they didn’t intrude on my consciousness the way they do now. I think as a layman I simply don’t have an informed opinion about whether there’s any kind of moral evolution. It’s probably a matter of so many variables and it so depends on kind of model you wanna use to measure it, that it’s irresolvable. I agree, it's a fascinating question. I don’t even think I have an opinion on it. I just have a whole bunch of different fears.
OK – I've read a Chinese fairy–tale of something like 17th or 18th century where a protagonist, being deprived of all his possessions by a bad person, descends to the Underworld to enlist some ghost – not to help him revenge his enemy but to stand witness against him in court. At that time China couldn't withstand competition from Western civilization, being overly bureaucratized. Could this modern trend of suing everything that moves be dangerous to the Western World and especially the US? Like in your story “Philosophy and the mirror of nature” where there’s a big knot of legal issues when one of them leads to another.
DFW – Lot of nations know what a terrible mess American healthcare is in, one of the reasons why American healthcare is such a mess is that's so expensive. One of the reasons it’s so expensive is that doctors have to pay for malpractice insurance. Because they’re constantly getting sued and those insurances are so expensive and it goes around and around and around. Any eighth–grader can trace out the problem. Here in America we live in a culture where we assume that people have rights and don’t get to exploit each other. And we have a system of laws therefore it’s appeal to civil law by which one tries to get compensated for things that are unfair. And it all sounds very good, it’s much better than if you’ve damaged me in some way and I’m picking up a gun and go to your house and shooting you and your loved ones. It’s improvement over that. But it quickly becomes absurd. All this litigation. Again, you focus on one of the big conflicts in America right now. Many on the right and many corporations want what’s called “tort reform”. They want it to be much more difficult to sue. And they want damages, the amounts of money that’s awarded in lawsuits to be very strictly limited by law.
OK – Something like the system they have in France?
DFW – Yeah, although in France they have many more legal traps on corporations than we do here. It all gets really tricky. Tort reform sounds really great until you realize that however ridiculous this system is, it‘s one of very few defenses an ordinary citizen has against a corporation. Let’s say, since we were talking about farming, you don’t bother to make sure that your meat is hygienic and you kill one of my children because the meat you sold me has E.coli in it. A lawsuit is one of the very few ways that I can hurt your company badly enough so that becomes actually in corporation’s interests to maintain high standards of its meat. Because if it doesn’t it will just get sued so badly that it will become bankrupt. If you have tort reform and those lawsuits become way harder to file and the damages are strictly limited, then it’s one less incentive corporations have to do anything besides pursue maximum profit no matter what it has to do. And if that means killing 500 people a year because maintaining high health standards for its meat production is too expensive, then it's just what they will do. It’s really a terrible problem. Because cause tort reform is really frightening and yet the current system… – so many people abuse it and there are so many lawsuits over futilest things. It's close to being paralyzing and it also adds tremendously to the cost of everything here. Happily I'm not a politician who has to decide.
OK – In Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon” there’s an example that's really disturbed me. Stephpenson writes about diving teaching to dive really deep are not published anymore. Because if you use this manual and die when diving – and it can happen to anybody, deep– water divers die quite often, – the publisher can be sued. So they've completely stopped publishing those tutorials. Divers have to learn by second–hand tutorials published in the 50th.
DFW – It’s true, it happens sometimes. Let me give you another example. I've basically just gave you an argument against tort reform. However terrible those examples like Stephenson's example are, I would argue that it would be politically too expensive to get rid of the current lawsuit culture. Here's another example: we have the bill of rights in America and we have freedom of expression, one result of this is that certain kinds of pornography are now put out both on video and Internet that are really just disgusting. That caters only to people who have problems and aggression. It demeaning, it makes you embarrassed to live in culture that makes this sort of shit gets put out. But it would be too expensive to outlaw it. Because in order to outlaw that pornography you would have to so undercut the first amendment that certain kind of protected free speech that we really do value and really do need in America could also be threatened. So this is one of the things that just drives a kind of literate person crazy in America right now is that we’re in these situations that are truly terrible. But the remedies for them, and many on the right want this sort of simple draconian remedies, the remedies are simply too expensive in terms of political liberty and any kind of moral robustness for the culture. I would much rather have the problem of kids able to see internet porn, then I would have George W Bush deciding what is decent to broadcast and what isn’t.
OK – Do you think there’s no way out of this lawsuits trap?
DFW – My guess is that the way these things get corrected is through a system of kind of extremes and cycles. It may be will be that in say healthcare and malpractice law things may reach such a point that we as a culture decide that it’s more important to have affordable healthcare, possibly national healthcare, than it’s for people to be able to sue doctors whose negligence hurts them terribly. We may try it that way for a while until there are hundreds or thousands cases of negligence and harm so awful that we as a country decide once again… This may go back and forth and play out over decades and even a century.
OK – So you think the system is basically good?
DFW – I don’t know whether the system is good or not. It’s part of the same syndrome your director friend was talking about. I detest the current litigational system, but I’m paralysed, in terms of tort reform, by anticipating of what the disadvantages would be if we allowed corporations and reach people to establish very, very strict criteria for lawsuits. They would find a way to abuse that system the same way some ordinary citizens abuse the litigation system and I'm worried the things actually may get worse overall.
OK – I've heard of an the idea of a proportional responsibility of a plaintiff, which sounds for me as a possible way out. Like if you sue somebody for 1 billion dollars and you lose, you pay let’s say some 50% of your annual salary. What do you thing about it?
DFW – That sound really good, but if you think about it in practice, corporations and medical practices are usually really rich. They can afford a hundred lawyers and in fact many of these lawsuits ordinary civilians with good cases actually lose. Because the lawyers for the corporations can drag the case out so long that it becomes so expensive that the person just can’t pursue it. So what you're saying sounds good in theory, but in practice large corporations and wealthy medical practices will be able use this to terrorize people who really have been injured out of making any sort of claim. May be your idea finally would have more advantages than disadvantages, but the problem here is that once things are instituted, you can see in the media, and, because we're an open society, we can see what the actual consequences are, and the actual consequences of what you're suggesting could be really really oughtful. This is the privilege of living in a more or less open democratic societies, – it drives you crazy. Because anybody can figure out a way to abuse every freedom and the problem becomes how do you close up the possibility of abuse without getting rid of that freedom. And you're seeing ti especially now here in America with the issue of whether terrorism suspects can be tortured in violation of the Geneva Convention. You have people on the right wing who are claiming that the danger to American citizens is so pressing that it outweighs the rights of the accused and then you have those of us who’s on the left, – and I’m afraid I’m someone very much on the left, – who're saying “Even if you right it’s too expensive. We can not do without those protections because what happens if we have a president even worse then you, who wants to do this to his enemies?” I mean, basically, then you have the GULAG. So what do you do? I don’t know.
OK – That's an example where democracy just doesn't work, because what they're doing in Guantanamo is, as I understand, against American laws, but they're doing it anyway.
DFW – Well, then you get into a muddy issue of... The truth is in healthcare you and I can have a whole argument about there ought to be tort reform, in Washington DC now the tort reform is all about whether corporate lobbies is more powerful then trial lawyers lobbies. In fact the way these laws are made right now are so corrupt and so influenced by large business contributions, that you and I can have our quaint little arguments in terms what's right, but in terms of the actual laws that get implemented it’s completely about economic interests. It’s all about the briefcase full of money right now.
OK – It’s really scary to see selective usage of democracy.
DFW – Yeah, it’s really scary. And that’s got to be really odious to people in other countries to hear our leaders beat their breasts about being democracy and harbingers of freedom while systematically striping away the freedoms and the liberties that are really the only thing that made this country special and interesting over the last couple centuries. This is the great war in America right now and it’s the really scary thing. Those of us who do not agree with the current administration are fighting very, very hard but the current administration has very, very good advertisers on its side. There are voters in America who seem ready to sign away their own liberty for their own physical safety. And if that happens, we deserve whatever we get.
OK – You wrote “Infinite Jest” 10 years ago, and after that you didn’t write any other novel, just essays or stories. Do you feel it’s over for you with big novels? Is it more interesting for you to write stories now?
DFW – There are writers in America who consider themselves only novelists. I do all kinds of different things. I will probably at some point finish a novel. Whether it will be good enough to publish, I don’t know. I can start 3 or 4 things for every one thing that gets finished. I was trained mainly as a short story writer and that’s how I started writing, but I've also become very interested in non–fiction, because I’ve got a couple of magazine jobs when I was really poor and needed the money and it turned out that non–fiction was much more interesting then I thought it was. I am, as American writers go, very eclectic. I haven’t made any decisions about one kind of genre or another. I love to read poetry but I will probably never write it because I have no talent for it. But other then that I probably want to try everything. It's a true answer, probably not very interesting. I don't have any views about the novel versus the short story or anything like that.
OK – But now you just don’t feel like writing another novel?
DFW – Well, you make it sound like writing a novel is a matter of sitting down for an afternoon. I have for the past 5 or 6 years many times started some things. I don’t really understand the term “Novel”, but I guess everything over about 150 pages is a novel. I’ve done a couple of longer things, I just don’t like them very much right now and I don’t whether I will rewrite them. I don't really need the money, my wife and I live very simply and we don't need very much money. I'm sure I will write more novels; I don't know whether I will publish them or not. A lot of stuff that I write just goes in a big box in my office and none else ever sees them.
OK – Your stories are very philosophical and quite political too. Is there for you any big difference between a story and an essay?
DFW – I don’t know if I agree that my fiction is really all that political.
OK – Philosophical at least.
DFW – People are often surprised, I think I’m fundamentally fairly traditional conservative kind of writer. I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and kind of inner experience. Essays can be much more expository and didactic and more about subjects and ideas. If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas it probably means that these are pieces where characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be.
OK – But, say the same story “Philosophy and the mirror of nature” or in “Octet” in “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” are in my view pretty much reflections on law system in the first case and on moral issues in the second one.
DFW – Eh... OK. You must run across it when interviewing writers, it becomes very difficult for me to reduce... If I’ve written a story that I like enough to publish it, it’s usually for me about so many different things, that whenever somebody says this story's about X or Y or Z, I just sort of smile, but inside that seems very reductive to me, but I’m sure you aware that authors are the worst people to ask about their stories, because they end up being for the authors about things that are often very remote from what reader's experience of them is. Usually when I finish something I just don't think about it anymore. I'm not very good at this sorts of questions.
OK – Like everybody.
DFW – Yeah. OK.
OK – Well, not that you answer the same things that everybody answer, but I think nobody's good at this sort of questions. I'm just supposed to ask them.
DFW – Oh, no, it's fine. May I ask you, why is your English so good?
OK – Thank you very much, I just read a lot. And I don't think it's so good. At least not as good as I'd like it to be.
DFW – Considering that in Russian I can say just “Eto koshka...”
OK – But, you can speak French for example and probably other languages.
DFW – I read French quite well. Speaking it – someone has to speak very slowly. Because I just haven't been around French speakers very much. I tried to take a semester of Russian in school and I had no talent for it.
OK – It's a very difficult language. I think of European languages only Finnish and Hungarian are more difficult.
DFW – OK, I won't bother you any more. Go ahead and ask your questions.
OK – What do you think of the modern state of American literature?
DFW – Oh– oh. Somebody asked me couple of weeks ago. I think the truth is that it’s a very exciting period but it’s one that probably people in other countries won’t have as much access to. Because 40 or 50 years ago American literature mainly existed in a ten or a dozen giant literary figures, and now it’s probably more like 100 or 200 all of whom are quite good and quite interesting, but none really of the stature and international reputation of say Saul Bellow or William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway.
OK – May be it’s just a matter of time?
DFW – Possibly. But I also think that for reasons that are extremely complicated in terms of culture and media… I mean I’m now 44, so I’m half way between a young writer and an older writer. Starting with my generation, generations are much more diffused and much more difficult to characterize or capture. To have 2 or 3 voices of a generation becomes more and more difficult and probably will be done more by certain classic television shows or movies than by writers. Writers in America are much more on a cultural margin than they used to be. That’s very exciting in terms of sort of freedom and ability to experiment, but it also means that there’s much less cohesion and unity. It would be very difficult for somebody in another country unless they make a full–time business of it to even keep up with what American literature is right now.
OK – Do you read modern Russian literature?
DFW – Except for some of the stories in Viktor Pelevin's – his collection “Werewolves”…
OK – It's probably been translated as “A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia”.
DFW – Yes. Other than that – very little. Except for knowing little about some absurdists of the 20s like Daniil Kharms, I mostly know Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Chekhov and Pushkin and Gogol and all that writers who are probably so familiar to Russians that they're just not all that interesting any more.
OK – Yes, we study them in school, so afterward nobody wants to hear about them. For 10 or 20 years after school you have a vaccination against Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Later you get back to them...
DFW – I never got to read any of them in school, I started reading them in my 30s, even though I think there are terrible translation problems and I can tell that Dostoevsky in Russian is probably kind of more beautiful then in English, they are to me probably better than anything in English except may be certain Henry James. But it is no news to everybody because everybody knows they're giants.
OK – What do you think of Kharms?
DFW – I think that stuff is fascinating. I read the Russian absurdists kind of the same way I read the fragments of Kafka or Bruno Schulz or even some of Kierkegaard's apothegms. They seem to me much more cerebral and intellectual than the kind of literature that most Americans do right now. I think they’re wonderful. There’s one Kharms story that I teach every semester: “There once was a man with red hair who actually didn’t have red hair… He didn’t have arms or legs” and it all ends up “So we better not talk about him any more”. The story literally deconstructs, almost right out of Derridial manual, a character 80 years before Foucault and Derrida even started thinking about what deconstruction was. It’s absolutely fascinating. All I can read is what available in translation because I have no Russian. So I’m very limited. It’s the same with German literature: I’m in the mercy of translators. I don’t like it very much.
OK – I don’t think Kharms is particularly difficult to translate.
DFW – May be, but I don’t think all of Kharms have been translated. I have one anthology of Russian absurdism that was put out by University Press. This is the problem in America, here’s no Samizdat, so one is limited to works of literature that some publishers decided profitably to publish. That’s our form of censorship here.
OK – We have something similar now in Russia in the last decade. What do you think about Pelevin?
DFW – I’ve read only two stories. From what I understand, he’s on my list along with a couple of Germans for the next non– American writer I want to learn more about. 'Cause everything I’ve read and heard about him sounds as if he’s very exciting. Is he sorts of best known of the contemporary Russians?
OK – Yes, he's certainly the most popular of non pulp–writers.
DFW – What are pulp–writers like in Russia? Crime and mystery?
OK – Yes, mostly.
DFW – Who're the most... Like America has Steven King and Tom Clancy...
OK – We do not have anybody like this. We have mostly police novels and it's mostly women who write them, the most popular ones. Marinina, Dashkova and a third one, I don't remember the name.
DFW – Are any of this available in English?
OK – I think some Marinina can be available in English. And more high– brow detective novels, not pulp fiction any more, but still mass fiction, are written by Akunin. He was translated in English. The Winter Queen.
DFW – Yeah, I've heard the name vaguely.
OK – It's about a 19th century Russian detective Fandorin. They are good books. And about Pelevin – what were the stories you read?
DFW – I don't remember. I was sitting in somebody's class and our teacher gave us two stories from the collection of his with something with “Werewolves” in its title. Werewolves of something. I don’t remember the titles, I remember liking them very much. It was in the midst of... We had 10 stories a week to read. , but I remember I liked them very much. I wrote his name down and he’s slowly climbing to the top of the list. The problem in America for is there’s so much to read. And people are always mentioning or showing you things that are fantastic. And you wanna go read them all, but you've also got four or five other things to read. It’s a big reason why I don’t own a television: it's that there's so much stuff I want to read that if I sit in front of a television I will waste 3 or 4 hours. So the basic answer is I'm appallingly ignorant of the state of Russian literature right now.
OK - Of Pelevin, if you decide to read his some day, I think his best book is The Clay Machine Gun. Or sometimes it's called Buddha's Little Finger – there are two different translations.
DFW – It's a play?
OK – It's a novel. In Russian it's called Chapayev i Pustota, Chapayev and Emptiness. But in English it was translated as The Clay Machine Gun. Or Buddha's Little Finger, there are two different translations.
DFW – I was going to read short stories, but I will trust you recommendation.
OK – It's certainly his best, but I'm not sure I can recommend it, it's rooted so deep in the Russian modern popular culture and in classic Russian movies, that I believe the third part of the appeal is when you recognize all those things. I can not say if it's as good when you don't know them.
DFW – This is the same reason why I was somewhat surprised when someone like you wanted to talk to me. My staff is so American and so idiomatic. I guess may be American popular culture is known a little better. It just seems to me that nobody who isn't in America over the last 20 years would find anything enjoyable in any of my stories.
OK – I really liked your stories and the novel.
DFW – Well, it's nice to hear. You know, part of it too is... for instance the Pelevin, my situation it won't be whether I just like Pelevin, it will also be whether I like the translator. For instance I know there is supposed to be a wonderful new translations of both Kafka and Dostoyevsky but I prefer the Constance Garnett's translations of Dostoyevsky from the 9th century which everybody which everybody says are not good. But I like the English of hers much better than I like these new translations though. There will be certain stuff in foreign languages that I won't finish not because I don't like the author but because I find the translation so frustrating. Anyway, I'm sure it's a very common problem.
OK – In Russian they do not publish so many good books now, that's why I read more in English than in Russian these days.
DFW – Well, you can make the same argument about books in English. At least that many good books don't get any attention or support or as many as worse ones that they think will sell much more, it's what they spend all their time getting readers to know about.