Life & Wisdom Quote by David Foster Wallace

Wallace is poking at a very contemporary anxiety: the fear that a story might have to do emotional labor for us. “Sharing its valence” sounds clinical on purpose, like he’s mocking the workshop-era impulse to keep fiction “clean” of authorial insistence - no nudging, no obvious moral charge, no sentiment that might feel like coercion. The phrasing is a little chilly, and that chill is the tell: he’s describing a stance he finds both fashionable and evasive, a way for writers (and readers) to dodge embarrassment by pretending art can be value-neutral.

Then he flips it. Even if a story refuses to “share” its emotional voltage, the reader brings their own battery. The subtext is that interpretation isn’t just an intellectual exercise; it’s biography leaking into aesthetics. Your grief, your boredom, your hangover, your political moment - all of it edits the text in real time. Wallace’s “outside” in scare quotes matters: he’s insisting the boundary between art and life is a convenient fiction, not a real wall.

Contextually, this sits squarely in his larger project: a critique of postmodern cool, irony as armor, and the desire to be unreachable. He’s arguing that trying to keep the story from “contaminating” the reader is itself a value choice, one that often flatters the writer’s detachment. The kicker is democratic and unnerving: the story doesn’t get to control its own meaning, because it’s completed in a mind that is already in progress.