“I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of generalization of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with characters’ pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might be just that simple.”
David Foster Wallace, from an interview with Larry McCaffery for The Review of Contemporary Fiction, collected in Conversations with David Foster Wallace but also available online
He says this often in different words, sometimes dubbing “suffering” with “loneliness.” In nearly every interview in this collection of them this same idea—at least in the early nineties of his career, I haven’t gotten to IJ & beyond—recurs, and I experience a thrill of sympathy every time despite the repetition.
Notes
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