And I didn’t think you were actually accusing anybody of killing DFW, BTW. (Smiley face here.)

I never accused anyone of suggesting that all interpretations of any work are always valid; rather, the following statement perfectly illustrates what I find problematic about your position: Every novelist knows (or should know) that once his work is in the hands of a reader his unspecified intentions are irrelevant to that reader. How would you like a novelist to specify her intentions? Hoping that readers would try to understand his sincere intentions may have made DFW a bit naive (E Unibus Plurum: The new literary “rebels” will risk being accused of naivete), but refusing to acknowledge a responsibility to try to understand the intentions of an author/interlocutor just makes the reader a son of a bitch. No one believes any longer that we can perfectly reconstruct authorial intent, but we have a responsibility–especially when a book is written out of an urgent need, as IJ may have been–to at least attempt to understand what an author was trying to say. Maybe this is reading as subjective enjoyment vs reading/writing as sincere communication.

Take is easy, Kevin. I don’t believe that anyone killed DFW but DFW. I thought the last line of my comment was clearly more humorous than the rest. Note the change in tone–the short sentences, the lack of commas, the silly colloquialism; these are some of the subtle resources we have to signal authorial intent.

As has been repeated several times, I don’t think anybody here is suggesting that all interpretations of any work are always valid. But the act of reading is the act of interpretation. This isn’t controversial. Every novelist knows (or should know) that once his work is in the hands of a reader his unspecified intentions are irrelevant to that reader. And to write a novel that needs to be subsequently explained by the author on Charlie Rose in order for it to be understood “correctly” (as you seem to be suggesting is the case here) would be absurd. We have a medium for people with a specific point to make who want to be very sure they aren’t misunderstood, and that’s the op-ed page of the newspaper. I haven’t seen the interviews you’re talking about. When I’m done reading I’ll seek them out. But if DFW really couldn’t tolerate people trying to figure out what Infinite Jest is about (and occasionally getting it wrong) then he shouldn’t have written it. I really don’t believe he was that naive.

And finally, nobody on this particular thread has even offered an interpretation of the book, good or deadly.

Thanks a lot. You all killed David Foster Wallace.