This will not be the first URL popping up in searches for The Pale King. It won’t even be near the top of a blogs search. Yet you’re here, and if not just looking for an image of a jail cell, you’re a devoted fan wading through 30 or so pages of Google links, or fishing for quotes so you don’t have to type them for your own blog. In this second regard I will not disappoint.
As I near the conclusion of The Pale King I’m once again awed by David Foster Wallace’s singular ability to express commonly held, but seldom spoken anxieties with such potency, eloquence and dizzying variety.
There are smutty gags; turgid lists of IRS-speak rendered to the point of high comedy; an overt sentimentality that manifests in both straightforward narrative accounts[1] and, at times, ornately detailed prose some have compared to Cormac McCarthy:
Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spine-cabbage, goldenrod, creeping Charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.
Approaching a posthumous novel by an author so beloved, a DFW fan knows that each page brings her closer to his final words. As a guy named Ed R. said on Twitter: “Take it slow. Enjoy the prose. There isn’t going to be anymore.” I tried to. I look forward to reading it a second time. Certainly my second (ongoing) reading of Infinite Jest has been fruitful; no longer do I try to impose narrative order on things, or hunt through footnotes hoping not to miss some massively important plot detail buried in a long aside. Now I just revel in the sprightly turns of phrase and the refinement of the multiple page recursive sentences.
Quickly, as it’s been discussed better elsehwere: it doesn’t matter that The Pale King is unfinished because DFW’s fiction doesn’t require A to B narrative cohesion that might, if not cohesive enough, mar other posthumous novels.
I did not realize[2] that Dr. Merrell Lehrl was luring examiners with supernatural abilities to the Peoria Regional Examination Centre until reading it in the Notes and Asides that editor Michael Pietsch generously included at the end, but it didn’t matter one bit. Each chapter stands on its own, speaks some necessary truth.
Much of it reads decidedly straight. Infinite Jest’s meth-addicted headline writers are nowhere near the premises. Given all that’s difficult about IJ, one might argue that DFW was using abstruse language and various means of “titty-pinching” to mask some shortcomings w/r/t to narrative flow.[3] Either way, IJ is deliberately difficult work to read.
Oblivion was a little closer to conventional fiction, but still very challenging. To paraphrase one critic: the stories make some preliminary sense, but frustration over missing some major structural planks leads diligent readers to approach it a second time. These readers discover the necessary elements were carefully provided to impose some higher order, but placed “on a high shelf” which required work to get at, making it that much more rewarding when you finally put the whole thing together the way DFW intended. He wanted people to read his stuff twice. Even the 4.5 pound Infinite Jest. That’s a man I can get behind.
Going forward, when I’m trying to sell someone on DFW it’s going to be The Pale King I recommend they read first. While arguably easier to read, it is no less important. Infinite Jest tackled subjects like loneliness and “standard U.S. anhedonia” in such a way as to reinvigorate clichés that of course became clichés only because they have always been important truths.
TPK confronts another of the great grinding struggles in contemporary life. Most snicker at it as they offer an, “Oh God Not Monday!” as a tired and somewhat “How about this weather”-type of pacifying meme, deep down knowing each week of tedious drudgery suffocates something vital in them. Few (writers or civilians alike) have the guts to face it head on because of its inescapability: the subject is boredom.
Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us² spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly . . . but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airports’ gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called “information society” is just about information. Everyone knows³ it’s about something else, way down.
Challenging segments depicting boring situations so languorous as to become sensual are offset by comedic bits par excellence, see: the “pathologically generous” Leonard Stecyk; the boy who wanted to touch every square inch of his body with his tongue; the vandalous subterfuge of Toni Ware. Or countless lines of observational brilliance like:
-“The sort who’s very shy and nervous around you but tries to be very bluff and hearty and outgoing but can’t manage it and so it’s excruciating.”
- “Sylvanshine, before the morning of travel, had forgotten to wash the shampoo from his hair. It was this that gave him the flame-shaped coiffure.”
- (and best) “The park’s boys wore wide crumpled hats and cravats of thong and some displayed turquoise about their person, and of these one helped her empty the trailer’s sanitary tank and then pressed her to fellate him in recompense…”
But the novel lives and breathes thanks to three long segments:
The death of ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle’s father and the speech from a Jesuit priest that “called [Fogle] to account”:
All right, then. Before you leave here to resume that crude approximation of a human life you have heretofore called a life, I will undertake to inform you of certain truths. I will then offer an opinion as to how you might most profitably view and respond to those truths.
To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood’s limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress—this will happen, mark me. Childhood’s end. The first of many deaths. Hesitation is natural. Doubt is natural.
I wish to inform you that the accounting profession to which you aspire is, in fact, heroic. Please note that I have said “inform” and not “opine” or “allege” or “posit.” The truth is that what you soon go home to your carols and toddies and books and CPA examination preparation guides to stand on the cusp of is—heroism.
Exacting? Prosaic? Banausic to the point of drudgery? Sometimes. Often tedious? Perhaps. But brave? Worthy? Fitting, sweet? Romantic? Chivalric? Heroic?
Gentlemen—by which I mean, of course, latter adolescents who aspire to manhood gentlemen, here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. Such endurance is, as it happens, the distillate of what is, today, in this world neither you nor I have made, heroism. Heroism.
By which I mean true heroism, not heroism as you might know it from films or the tales of childhood. You are now nearly at childhood’s end; you are ready for the truth’s weight, to bear it. The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theater. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose outcome resolves all—all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify an audience. An audience.
Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality—there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth—actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.
True heroism is you, alone, in a designated work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.
A bureaucratic mix-up involving two David F. Wallace’s during IRS orientation; of which no one quote will do any justice, but suffice it to say this segment would have been the finest story in Oblivion and if you give Oblivion a hard read you might realize it’s actually on par with Wallace’s more celebrated essays and one very serious Jest.
And the beautiful Meredith Rand explaining her self-abuse issues stemming from her high school “Fox” status and how she met her dying husband. While the climax to this self-standing effort comments deftly, with depth, on death and mental illness, it ultimately serves to reinforce the Jesuit’s whole “Say goodbye to childhood” theme. However, because it’s one of the funniest paragraphs in the book, I instead offer the prelude to the Meredith Rand story:
“Suffice it that Meredith Rand makes the […] males self-conscious. They thus tend to become either nervous and uncomfortably quiet, as though they were involved in a game whose stakes have suddenly become terribly high, or else they become more voluble and conversationally dominant and begin to tell a great many jokes, and in general appear deliberately unself-conscious, whereas before Meredith Rand had arrived and pulled up a chair and joined the group there was no real sense of deliberateness or even self-consciousness among them. Female examiners, in turn, react to these changes in a variety of ways, some receding and becoming visually smaller (like Enid Welch and Rachel Robbie Towne), others regarding Meredith Rand’s effect on men with a sort of dark amusement, still others becoming narrow-eyed and prone to hostile sighs or even pointed departures. […] Some of the male examiners are, by the second round of pitchers, performing for Meredith Rand, even if the performance’s core consists of making a complex show of the fact that they are not performing for Meredith Rand or even especially aware that she’s at the table. Bob McKenzie, in particular, becomes almost manic, addressing nearly every comment or quip to the person on either the right or left side of Meredith Rand.”
*
When people sometimes make snide or derisive remarks about Wallace’s suicide I usually go into a long defense about how he tried every possible alternative including electro-convulsive shock treatment, which had to have been the last resort for someone with his legendary intellect. But perhaps the better defense would be to say: Look how sad he was, trapped in the pit of depression he wrote so acutely of, and look how funny he remained!
And what of his immense compassion? I am a religious person of the Roman Catholic faith and you better believe that when debating a dismissive atheist, DFW tops my list of individuals with superior minds who were somehow “duped” into believing in God.
Saddest of all: this was in many ways David Foster Wallace’s finest work. These are the words of a dyed-in-the-wool Infinite Jest cultist. They are very different novels. Perhaps they’ll come to be regarded as 1 and 1a. People who prefer that their titties be left alone, or at most, caressed, and certainly not pinched, may lean towards TPK[4] because it at least apologizes for the pinching; more adventurous readers can take a little pain with pleasure, and will hold IJ closer to their swollen areolae.
As one reviewer stated, Wallace had found a new concision. This novel, set in IRS offices and jam-packed with jargon, is a surprisingly fluid read. Relative to IJ, it’s practically Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy except without all the Herring sandwiches and also except the fact that TPK is the beautifully written work of a virtuoso.
DFW is in each of these characters, which has taught me something about writing. Having read Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, I recognize many of the characters’ traits (uncontrollable sweating, pathological self-consciousness) as belonging directly to Wallace. Yet here he’s made David Foster Wallace into not just the one narrator who shares his name, but each of these intricately realized people. Now, I’m sure this is something that could be abstractly conveyed in creative writing workshops, but to observe a master in action, that’s the way to learn.
So say goodbye to Muhammad Ali. Hulk Hogan and Ric Flair rolled into one[5]. The Bob Dylan of textual expression, the author of Fate, Time, and Language, a man who spoke mostly about forgiveness…Jonathan Franzen said of him, “Somebody could write a long monograph on how deliberately and artfully he deploys the modifier ‘sort of.’” Mario Incandenza asked, “How can you tell if somebody is sad?”
A quote from Milton speaks best to what David Foster’s writing has done for so many people, “What is dark in me Illumine, what is low raise and support.”
Thanks.
[1] E.G. Lane Dean Jr. and Irrelevant Chris Fogle.
[2] Not sure if it was even possible to.
[3] Then again the short story My Appearance from Girl with Curious Hair way back in 1989 suggests Wallace could stand on his own two feet without so much “titty-pinching” when he chose to.
[4] Even though by anyone else’s standard it’s full of fuckery: dozens of different narrators and tones, chapters that begin, “Author here,” several pages divided into columns that say little more than, “Howard Cardwell turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. ‘Groovy’ Bruce Channing attaches a form to a file. Ann Williams turns a page. Anand Singh turns two pages at once by mistake and turns one back which makes a slightly different sound.”
[5] For non-wrestling fans, this conveys the bombastic showmanship of Hogan combined with the peerless technical proficiency of Ric Flair.
