Hell, I could probably spend a couple of posts just talking about this interview, since it’s full of great stuff. One reason I’m finding it so fascinating is it’s closer to the start of Wallace’s career. 1993—when postmodernist fiction’s strong grip on literature had already been on the wane in the US for a decade—Don DeLillo, Samuel Delany and Kathy Acker are all great authors that may best be described as postmodernist, but other new trends also surfaced in American literature. DFW discusses the case of Bret Easton Ellis, who a Trotskyist might call a “degenerated postmodernist” in multiple senses of the word (though “Lunar Park” shifts towards post-romanticism in some interesting ways.) The specifics of DFW’s denunciation are worth reading at length, but take for instance:

DFW: “Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend ‘Psycho’ as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it’s no more than that.”

This is great as an early statement of purpose for post-romanticism. I think the movement is evolving in constantly dense forms and are finding new ways to accommodate a haunting, sensuous darkness that has always existed in the best gothic writing. This may be one reason why the McSweeney’s crowd is rediscovering Joyce Carol Oates, an author who’s always been amazing but hasn’t gotten nearly the attention she deserved at the height of postmodernism, which valorized an aesthetic style she didn’t seem to have much of a use for. By the time DFW killed himself, this had already changed enough to influence the likes of Bret Easton Ellis. Another example: This is an interview that discusses at some length the failures of contemporary television as art, a subject DFW published an article on elsewhere in the issue of the journal this was originally featured in.

DFW, 1993: “TV promulgates the idea that good art is just that art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art. This seems like a poisonous lesson for a would-be artist to grow up with. And one consequence is that if the artist is excessively dependent on simply being LIKED, so that her true end isn’t in the work but in a certain audience’s good opinion, she is going to develop a terrific hostility to that audience, simply because she has given all her power away to them.”

DFW, 2007 (paraphrased from personal conversation with some random on the DFW mailing list): “Look, I really want to sit down and pick your brain about this, because I’m really developing the conviction that the best writing being done in America today is being done for The Wire. Am I crazy to think that?”

The Wire specifically is a great, unique example of postromanticism that displays the above-mentioned capacity for evocative forms of “darkness.” So much had changed!

McCaffery, in addition to attempting to defend Ellis, perceptively reminds Wallace that he already has peers in the literary world, pointing to William Vollmann. Vollmann’s career was only beginning. By 2010 he’s emerged as among the foremost post-romanticists—the first volume of his six-volume, 3000+ page treatise on violence is on its way to me right now, thanks to Inter-Library Loan, so I’ll be able to talk more about him soon.

“I think I had kind of a mid-life crisis at twenty, which probably doesn’t augur real well for my longevity.”—DFW (1962-2008.) Yikes!!!

DFW: “We’ve all got this ‘literary’ fiction that simply monotones that we’re all becoming less and less human, that presents characters without souls or love, characters who really are exhaustively describable in terms of what brands of stuff they wear, and we all buy the books and go like ‘Golly, what a mordantly effective commentary on contemporary materialism!’”—Is this maybe a dig at Coupland/”Generation X” specifically? Obviously also Ellis, but I don’t know that there’s any record of DFW’s opinion of Coupland—clearly this description could be (somewhat crankily) applied to “Generation X,” though the book also clearly bears traces of the post-romanticism to come.

Ooh, another thing I wanted to mention here: Daniel Grassian has published an academic account of what he calls “Hybrid Fictions” which look very similar to what I’m trying to describe here. He discusses a slate of “po-ro” (god help me) authors including DFW, Coupland, Eggers and Vollmann. I’m considering buying it and discussing it in addition to everything else. Next time, I’ll talk about how DFW’s hostility to the end results of postmodernism come through in Infinite Jest, which I would argue is even the main subject of the book. Fun!