Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

by David Foster Wallace

  So you do an eight-part cycle of these little mortise-and-tenon pieces. 1 And it ends up a total fiasco. Five of the eight pieces don’t work at all—meaning they don’t interrogate or palpate what you want them to, plus are too contrived or too cartoonish or too annoying or all three—and you have to toss them out. The sixth piece works only after it’s totally redone in a way that’s forbiddingly long and digression-fraught and, you fear, maybe so dense and inbent that nobody’ll even get to the interrogatory parts at the end; plus then in the dreaded Final Revision Phase you realize that the rewrite of the 6th piece depends so heavily on 6’s first version that you have to stick that first version back into the octocycle too, even though it (i.e. the first version of the 6th piece) totally falls apart 75% of the way through. You decide to try to salvage the aesthetic disaster of having to stick in the first version of the 6th piece by having that first version be utterly up front about the fact that it falls apart and doesn’t work as a ‘Pop Quiz’ and by having the rewrite of the 6th piece start out with some terse unapologetic acknowledgment that it’s another ‘try’ at whatever you were trying to palpate into interrogability in the first version. These intranarrative acknowledgments have the additional advantage of slightly diluting the pretentiousness of structuring the little pieces as so-called ‘Quizzes,’ but it also has the disadvantage of flirting with metafictional self-reference—viz. the having ‘This Pop Quiz isn’t working’ and ‘Here’s another stab at #6’ within the text itself—which in the late 1990s, when even Wes Craven is cashing in on metafictional self-reference, might come off lame and tired and facile, and also runs the risk of compromising the queer urgency about whatever it is you feel you want the pieces to interrogate in whoever’s reading them. This is an urgency that you, the fiction writer, feel very… well, urgently, and want the reader to feel too—which is to say that by no means do you want a reader to come away thinking that the cycle is just a cute formal exercise in interrogative structure and S.O.P. metatext. 2

  Which all sets up a serious (and hideously time-consuming) conundrum. Not only have you ended up with only half of the workable octet you’d originally conceived—and an admittedly makeshift and imperfect half at that 3 —but there’s also the matter of the urgent and necessary way you’d envisioned the original eight belletristic pieces connecting to form a unified octoplicate whole, one that ended up subtly interrogating the reader w/r/t the protean but still unified single issue that all the overt, admittedly unsubtle ‘Q’’s at the end of each Pop Quiz would—if these queries were themselves fit together in the organic context of the larger whole—end up palpating. This weird univocal urgency may or may not make sense to anyone else, but it had made sense to you, and had seemed… well, again, urgent, and worth risking the initial appearance of shallow formal exercism or pseudometabelletristic gamesmanship in the pieces’ unconventional Pop Quiz–type structure. You were betting that the queer emergent urgency of the organically unified whole of the octet’s two-times-two-times-two pieces (which you’d envisioned as a Manichean duality raised to the triune power of a sort of Hegelian synthesis w/r/t issues which both characters and readers were required to ‘decide’) would attenuate the initial appearance of postclever metaformal hooey and end up (you hoped) actually interrogating the reader’s initial inclination to dismiss the pieces as ‘shallow formal exercises’ simply on the basis of their shared formal features, forcing the reader to see that such a dismissal would be based on precisely the same sorts of shallow formalistic concerns she was (at least at first) inclined to accuse the octet of.

  Except—and now here’s the conundrum—even though you’ve tossed out and rewritten and reinserted the now-quartet’s 4 pieces almost entirely out of a concern for organic unity and the communicative urgency thereof, you’re now not at all sure that anybody else is going to have the remotest idea how the four 5 pieces the octet ended up with ‘fit together’ or ‘have in common,’ i.e. how they add up to a bona fide unified ‘cycle’ whose urgency transcends the sum-urgency of the discrete parts it comprises. Thus you’re now in the unfortunate position of trying to read the semi-quartet ‘objectively’ and of trying to figure out whether the weird ambient urgency you yourself feel in and between the surviving pieces is going to be feelable or even discernible to somebody else, viz. to some total stranger who’s probably sitting down at the end of a long hard day to try to unwind by reading this belletristic ‘Octet’ thing. 6 And you know that this is a very bad corner to have painted yourself into, as a fiction writer. There are right and fruitful ways to try to ‘empathize’ with the reader, but having to try to imagine yourself as the reader is not one of them; in fact it’s perilously close to the dreaded trap of trying to anticipate whether the reader will ‘like’ something you’re working on, and both you and the very few other fiction writers you’re friends with know that there is no quicker way to tie yourself in knots and kill any human urgency in the thing you’re working on than to try to calculate ahead of time whether that thing will be ‘liked.’ It’s just lethal. An analogy might be: Imagine you’ve gone to a party where you know very few of the people there, and then on your way home afterwards you suddenly realize that you just spent the whole party so concerned about whether the people there seemed to like you or not that you now have absolutely no idea whether you liked any of them or not. Anybody who’s had that sort of experience knows what a totally lethal kind of attitude this is to bring to a party. (Plus of course it almost always turns out that the people at the party actually didn’t like you, for the simple reason that you seemed so inbent and self-conscious the whole time that they got the creepy subliminal feeling that you were using the party merely as some sort of stage to perform on and that you barely even noticed them and that you’d probably left without any idea whether you even liked them or not, which hurts their feelings and causes them to dislike you (they are, after all, only human, and they have the same insecurities about being liked as you do).)

  But after the requisite amount of time-intensive worry and fear and procrastination and Kleenex-fretting and knuckle-biting, it all of a sudden strikes you that it’s just possible that the semi-octet’s interrogative/‘dialogic’ formal structure—the same structure that at first seemed urgent because it was a way to flirt with the potential appearance of metatextual hooey for reasons that would (you had hoped) emerge as profound and far more urgent than the tired old ‘Hey-look-at-me-looking-at-youlooking-at-me’ agenda of tired old S.O.P. metafiction, but that then got you into the conundrum by requiring you to toss out the Pop Quizzes that didn’t work or were ultimately S.O.P. and coy instead of urgently honest and to rewrite PQ6 in a way that seemed dangerously meta-ish and left you with an ablated and nakedly jerryrigged half-octet whose original ambient but univocal urgency you were now no longer at all sure would come through to anybody else after all the cuts and retries and general futzing around, painting you into the lethal belletristic corner of trying to anticipate the workings of a reader’s mind and heart—that this same potentially disastrous-looking avant-gardy heuristic form just might itself give you a way out of the airless conundrum, a chance to salvage the potential fiasco of you feeling that the 2+(2(1)) pieces add up to something urgent and human and the reader not feeling that way at all. Because now it occurs to you that you could simply ask her. The reader. That you could poke your nose out the mural hole that ‘6 isn’t working as a Pop Quiz’ and ‘Here’s another shot at it’ etc. have already made and address the reader directly and ask her straight out whether she’s feeling anything like what you feel.

  The trick to this solution is that you’d have to be 100% honest. Meaning not just sincere but almost naked. Worse than naked—more like unarmed. Defenseless. ‘This thing I feel, I can’t name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?’—this sort of direct question is not for the squeamish. For one thing, it’s perilously close to ‘Do you like me? Please like me,’ which you know quite well that 99% of all the interhuman manipulation
and bullshit gamesmanship that goes on goes on precisely because the idea of saying this sort of thing straight out is regarded as somehow obscene. In fact one of the very last few interpersonal taboos we have is this kind of obscenely naked direct interrogation of somebody else. It looks pathetic and desperate. That’s how it’ll look to the reader. And it will have to. There’s no way around it. If you step out and ask her what and whether she’s feeling, there can’t be anything coy or performative or sham-honest-so-she’ll-like-you about it. That’d kill it outright. Do you see? Anything less than completely naked helpless pathetic sincerity and you’re right back in the pernicious conundrum. You’ll have to come to her 100% hat in hand.

  In other words what you could do is you could now construct an additional Pop Quiz—so the ninth overall, but in another sense only the fifth or even fourth, and actually maybe none of these because this one’d be less a Quiz than (ulp) a kind of metaQuiz—in which you try your naked best to describe the conundrum and potential fiasco of the semioctet and your own feeling that the surviving semiworkable pieces all seem to be trying to demonstrate 7 some sort of weird ambient sameness in different kinds of human relationships, 8 some nameless but inescapable ‘price’ that all human beings are faced with having to pay at some point if they ever want truly ‘to be with’ 9 another person instead of just using that person somehow (like for example using the person as just an audience, or as an instrument of their own selfish ends, or as some piece of like moral gymnastics equipment on which they can demonstrate their virtuous character (as in people who are generous to other people only because they want to be seen as generous, and so actually secretly like it when people around them go broke or get into trouble, because it means they can rush generously in and act all helpful—everybody’s seen people like this), or as a narcissistically cathected projection of themselves, etc.), 10 a weird and nameless but apparently unavoidable ‘price’ that can actually sometimes equal death itself, or at least usually equals your giving up something (either a thing or a person or a precious long-held ‘feeling’ 11 or some certain idea of yourself and your own virtue/worth/identity) whose loss will feel, in a true and urgent way, like a kind of death, and to say that the fact that there could be (you feel) such an overwhelming and elemental sameness to such totally different situations and mise en scènes and conundra—that is, that these apparently different and formally (admit it) kind of stilted and coy-looking ‘Pop Quizzes’ could all reduce finally to the same question (whatever exactly that question is)—seems to you urgent, truly urgent, something almost worth shimmying up chimneys and shouting from roofs about. 12

  Which is all again to say that you—the unfortunate fiction writer—will have to puncture the fourth wall 13 and come onstage naked (except for your hand’s hat) and say all this stuff right to a person who doesn’t know you or particularly give a shit about you one way or the other and who probably wanted simply to come home and put her feet up at the end of a long day and unwind in one of the very few safe and innocuous ways of unwinding left anymore. 14 And then you’ll have to ask the reader straight out whether she feels it, too, this queer nameless ambient urgent interhuman sameness. Meaning you’ll have to ask whether she thinks the whole ragged jerryrigged heuristic semi-octet ‘works’ as an organically unified belletristic whole or not. Right there while she’s reading it. Again: consider this carefully. You should not deploy this tactic until you’ve soberly considered what it might cost. What she might think of you. Because if you go ahead and do it (i.e., ask her straight out), this whole ‘interrogation’ thing won’t be an innocuous formal belletristic device anymore. It’ll be real. You’ll be bothering her, the same way a solicitor who calls on the telephone just as you’re sitting down to unwind over a good dinner is bothering you. 15 And consider the actual sort of question you’ll be bothering her with. ‘Does this work, do you like this,’ etc. Consider what she might think of you just for asking something like this. It might very well make you (i.e. the mise en scène’s fiction writer) come off like the sort of person who not only goes to a party all obsessed about whether he’ll be liked or not but actually goes around at the party and goes up to strangers and asks them whether they like him or not. What they think of him, what effect he’s having on them, whether their view of him coincides at all with the complex throb of his own self-idea, etc. Coming up to innocent human beings who wanted only to come to a party and unwind a little and maybe meet some new people in a totally low-key and unthreatening setting and stepping directly into their visual field and breaking all kinds of basic unspoken rules of party and first-encounter-between-strangers-etiquette and explicitly interrogating them about the very thing you’re feeling inbent and self-conscious about. 16 Take a moment to imagine the faces of the people at a party where you did this. Imagine the faces’ expression fully, in 3D and vibrant color, and then imagine the expression directed at you. Because this will be the risk run, the honesty-tactic’s possible price—and keep in mind that it may be for nothing: it is not at all clear, if the precedent quartet of little mortise-and-tenon quart d’heures hasn’t succeeded in ‘interrogating’ the reader or transmitting any felt ‘sameness’ or ‘urgency,’ that coming out hat in hand near the end and trying to interrogate her directly is going to induce any kind of revelation of urgent sameness that’ll then somehow resonate back through the cycle’s pieces and make her see them in a different light. It may well be that all it’ll do is make you look like a self-consciously inbent schmuck, or like just another manipulative pseudopomo Bullshit Artist who’s trying to salvage a fiasco by dropping back to a metadimension and commenting on the fiasco itself. 17 Even under the most charitable interpretation, it’s going to look desperate. Possibly pathetic. At any rate it’s not going to make you look wise or secure or accomplished or any of the things readers usually want to pretend they believe the literary artist who wrote what they’re reading is when they sit down to try to escape the insoluble flux of themselves and enter a world of prearranged meaning. Rather it’s going to make you look fundamentally lost and confused and frightened and unsure about whether to trust even your most fundamental intuitions about urgency and sameness and whether other people deep inside experience things in anything like the same way you do… more like a reader, in other words, down here quivering in the mud of the trench with the rest of us, instead of a Writer, whom we imagine 18 to be clean and dry and radiant of command presence and unwavering conviction as he coordinates the whole campaign from back at some gleaming abstract Olympian HQ.

  So decide.

  ADULT WORLD (I)

  PART ONE. THE EVER-CHANGING STATUS OF THE YEN

  For the first three years, the young wife worried that their lovemaking together was somehow hard on his thingie. The rawness and tenderness and spanked pink of the head of his thingie. The slight wince when he’d first enter her down there. The vague hot-penny taste of rawness when she took his thingie in her mouth—she seldom took him in her mouth, however; there was something about it that she felt he did not quite like.

  For the first three to three-and-a-half years of their marriage together, this wife, being young (and full of herself (she realized only later)), believed it was something about her. The problem. She worried that there was something wrong with her. With her technique in making love. Or maybe that some unusual roughness or thickness or hitch down there was hard on his thingie, and hurt it. She was aware that she liked to press her pubic bone and the base of her button against him and grind when they made love together, sometimes. She ground against him as gently as she could force herself to remember to, but she was aware that she often did it as she was moving towards having her sexual climax and sometimes forgot herself, and afterwards she was often worried that she had selfishly forgotten about his thingie and might have been too hard on it.

  They were a young couple and had no children, though sometimes they talked about having children, and about all the irrevocable changes and responsibilities that this would commit them to
.

  The wife’s method of contraception was a diaphragm until she began to worry that something about the design of its rim or the way she inserted or wore it might be wrong and hurt him, might add to whatever it was about their lovemaking together that seemed hard on him. She searched his face when he entered her; she remembered to keep her eyes open and watched for the slight wince that may or may not (she realized only later, when she had some mature perspective) have actually been pleasure, may have been the same kind of revelational pleasure of coming together as close as two married bodies could come and feeling the warmth and closeness that made it so hard to keep her eyes open and senses alert to whatever she might be doing wrong.

  In those early years, the wife felt that she was totally happy with the reality of their sexlife together. The husband was a great lover, and his attentiveness and sweetness and skill drove her almost mad with pleasure, the wife felt. The only negative part was her irrational worry that something was wrong with her or that she was doing something wrong that kept him from enjoying their sexlife together as much as she did. She worried that the husband was too considerate and unselfish to risk hurting her feelings by talking about whatever was wrong. He had never complained about being sore or raw, or of slightly wincing when he first entered her, or said anything other than that he loved her and totally loved her down there more than he could even say. He said that she was indescribably soft and warm and sweet down there and that entering her was indescribably great. He said she drove him half insane with passion and love when she ground against him as she was getting ready to have her sexual climax. He said nothing but generous and reassuring things about their sexlife together. He always whispered compliments to her after they had made love, and held her, and considerately regathered the bedcovers around her legs as the wife’s sexual heartrate slowed and she began to feel chilly. She loved to feel her legs still tremble slightly under the cocoon of bedcovers he gently regathered around her. They also developed the intimacy of him always getting her Virginia Slims and lighting one for her after they had made love together.