13 Apr 2012, 8:10am
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Pale Winter

The great DFW Italian site Archivio DFW is hosting a group read of The Pale King called “Pale Winter” (aka #palewinter). I contributed a short essay (here: “Always Another Word“) that was translated into Italian by Roberto Natalini. Below is the English version of that post. Many thanks to Roberto and Andrea Firrincieli.

 

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Like any posthumous novel, The Pale King comes to us from the hands of an editor. All novels are edited, but those assembled by editors after an author’s death face the dual burdens of shaping a narrative and a legacy. At their core, novels are sequences of words laid out end-to-end. The sequencing matters. Infinite Jest would be a different novel altogether if the first seventeen pages were moved to the end of the book—or if the end notes became footnotes. We have no way of knowing how David Foster Wallace wanted the various sections of The Pale King assembled. The version we have now was painstakingly assembled by his longtime editor, Michael Pietsch. Pietsch’s care and attention to detail are apparent—as are the challenges of his job.

 
The Pale King is made up of two long sections, several short-story-length sections, and dozens shorter fragments. There is basically no plot. There are scenarios and situations and parables and character-developing background stories, but The PaleKing defies any attempt at figuring out of what might be happening in this tax office in Peoria. In that sense, it feels unfinished. Yet, as a novel of characters and ideas, it feels full and rich.

 

 
In several notes to himself, Wallace referred to the novel as “tornadic” or having a “tornado feeling” with pieces flying at the reader from all angles, and I think, with Pietsch’s help, he achieves this. There are metafictional asides, voice exercises, fake news items, novellas, suspense, and civics lessons all swirling about. With a tornadic structure, the exact sequence matters less than the fact that the random pieces do fly at you, the reader, and feel random and real. The sections spin in and spin out, but ultimately move higher, deeper, building toward a more complete understanding. At the bottom of the tornado, in the smallest circles, there are backstory formulations of childhood naivete. The circle widens through adolescence and we follow the wider circles of life in the IRS. Then we spiral up to a wider circle of life outside of work and finally to the widest, most windblown, most adult territory: Truth. At the center of the cyclone is a calm hole of enduring boredom. Or maybe a better distillation of the idea of engaging with boredom is: what you give your attention to. Wallace talked about this in his Kenyon commencement address in 2005:
 
It is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. . . .”Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. . . . .The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline.
 
Attention is the holy grail. Our lives are collections of how we choose to spend our attention. The constant choices we face can seem overwhelming, but so can the monotony of everyday life. What is the responsible, adult way of coping with the boring and monotonous parts of life?
The tornadic/thematic structure of The Pale King bears some resemblance to Infinite Jest insofar as we see the lines build and blur between adolescent struggles and concepts of maturity and adulthood and responsibility. Both novels are ultimately about a search for Truth: What matters to you? Why does it matter? Stay focused on what matters, even if it is boring–especially if it is boring.

 
I don’t believe there are any real clues to Wallace’s suicide within the text of The Pale King. The related questions that arise seem far-fetched: Would Wallace have been a different person if he’d finished The Pale King in, say 2001, and published several more subsequent novels? Of course. Does that mean Wallace would still be alive in 2012? Who knows? There are too many variables in trying to re-imagine history, and the sad questions are just that: hypotheticals.
 
Part of the truth is that DFW always struggled with how to end things. One of his earliest stories published in The Amherst Review ends in the middle of a sentence, as does his first novel, The Broom of the System. The ending of Infinite Jest frustrated thousands of readers. The ending of The Pale King frustrates just as many, partly because it represents the ultimate frustration: the end of David Foster Wallace, the end of his novels. In his memorial tribute to Wallace, Don DeLillo said:
 
We see him now as a brave writer who struggled against the force that wanted him to shed himself. Years from now, we’ll still feel the chill that attended news of his death. One of his recent stories ends in the finality of this half sentence: Not another word.
 

But there is always another word. There is always another reader to regenerate these words. The words won’t stop coming. Youth and loss. This is Dave’s voice, American.

I take comfort in that. There is always another word and another reader. And today that reader is you.

22 Jun 2011, 12:46pm
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Shattercane & Lamb’s Quarter

I’ve written here about how I’m interested in dating the various sections of The Pale King–when they were written, what else DFW might have been working on concurrently, and how the other might have influenced The Pale King (or how The Pale King might have influenced what else he was working on at the time). I think some of that might be discernible from some of the small details that show up in other works (more on this), but of course we’re likely to know more when The Pale King materials make their way from Little, Brown down to the Ransom Center. The HRC tells me that the Pale King materials will arrive in Austin after the paperback is released. Typically the paperback comes out a year after the hardcover (so maybe April 2012), but perhaps Little, Brown will release the paperback in time for Christmas? Either way, I doubt the Pale King materials will be indexed and accessible to researches before Fall 2012.

In any case, there might not be any meaningful connection that shows Wallace was working on more than one thing at once, but just that, like most writers (and professors), he had a lot of things that continued to interest him, and in many cases he retold the same things multiple times. Some of the same motifs show up in all his work and many of the same details get recycled and slightly retold.

I mentioned in the recent contest here that I was surprised no one chose any of the words from The Pale King‘s opening section as the “best” word.

I was a little surprised that no one submitted any of the words from the opening page of the novel: shattercane, sawbrier, muscadine, vetch, invaginate, chert, corn-bound.

Honestly, I didn’t think much of this passage when it appeared in Tri-Quarterly under the title “Peoria (4).” And I thought it was a curious choice for Michael Pietsch to use as the opening of this particular novel. But lately, I’ve begun to wonder what inspired Wallace to write it in the first place. Is it just a paean to his “home” state of Illinois? Was he trying to do his best Cormac McCarthy impersonation? Did he really intend to use this passage in TPK or had he written it for some other purpose? Am I overthinking this?

And then the other day I was listening to the audiobook of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, read by The Man Himself (get it here: http://www.sonn-d-robots.com/dfw/readings/), specifically, I was listening to the long (55 minutes), closing chapter of the book: BI #20, The Granola Cruncher. Toward the end of the story, when the girl is driven to a remote location and is forced out of the car by the predator, and then forced to lay in the grass, face down, this passage suddenly sounded terribly familiar to me:

Lying there helpless and connected, she says her senses had take on the nearly unbearable acuity we associate with drugs or extreme meditative states. She could distinguish lilac and shattercane’s scents from phlox and lamb’s quarter, the watery mint of first-growth clover.

Compare that to the opening sentence of The Pale King:
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, spinecabbage, 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.
 
So there is a basic similarity of using “shattercane” and “lamb’s quarter” and “mint” as floral descriptors, but does that mean the two pieces were composed anywhere near the same period of time? Who knows? Let’s look at the terms, though.
Shattercane (sometimes “shatter cane” or “wild cane”) is just another name (albeit more poetic) for an invasive variety of sorghum (sorghum bicolor). It is a weed.
Lamb’s Quarter (or lambsquarters) is a type of goosefoot or pigweed (also great names)–another weed.
Now listen, as good as The Pale King is, to me, there is nothing in it as powerful as Brief Interview #20. Nothing. Wallace always struggled with how to end a story–and a book. But I believe he mastered it with Infinite Jest (although many people hated that ending) and then got better with it by ending Brief Interviews with #20, and then even better by ending Oblivion with “The Suffering Channel.”
 
Go read BI #20 again. The whole thing is on The Paris Review‘s site:
The ending of the story is just devastating.

I displayed far more affect than she did. She learned more about love that day with the sex offender than at any other stage in her spiritual journey, she said. Let’s both have one last one and then that will be it. That her whole life had indeed led inexorably to that moment when the car stopped and she got in, that it was indeed a kind of a death, but not at all in the way she had feared as they entered the secluded area. That was the only commentary she indulged in, just at the anecdote’s end. I did not care whether it was quote true. It would depend what you mean by true. I simply didn’t care. I was moved, changed—believe what you will. My mind seemed to be moving at the quote speed of light. I was so sad. And that whether or not what she believed happened happened, it seemed true even if it wasn’t. That even if the whole focused-soul-connection theology, that even if it was just catachretic New Age goo, her belief in it had saved her life, so whether or not it’s goo becomes irrelevant, no? Can you see why this, realizing this, would make you feel conflicted in realizing that your entire sexuality and sexual history had less genuine connection or feeling than I felt simply lying there listening to her talk about lying there realizing how lucky she’d been that some angel had visited her in psychotic guise and shown her what she’d spent her whole life praying was true? You believe I’m contradicting myself. But can you imagine how any of it felt? Seeing her sandals across the room on the floor and remembering what I’d thought of them only hours before? I kept saying her name and she would ask What? and I’d say her name again. I’m not afraid of how this sounds to you. I’m not embarrassed now. But if you could understand, can you see why there’s no way I could let her just go away after this? Why I felt this apical sadness and fear of the thought of her getting her bag and sandals and New Age blanket and leaving and laughing when I clutched her hem and begged her not to leave and said I loved her and closing the door gently and going off barefoot down the hall and my never seeing her again? Why it didn’t matter whether she was fluffy or not terribly bright? Nothing else mattered. She had all my attention. I’d fallen in love with her. I believed she could save me. I know how this sounds, trust me. I know your type and I know what you’re bound to ask. Ask it now. I felt she could save me I said. Ask me now. Say it. I stand here naked before you. Judge me, you chilly cunt. You dyke, you bitch, cooze, slut, gash, cunt. Happy now? All judgments confirmed? Be happy. I do not care. I knew she could. I knew I loved her. End of story.

27 May 2011, 8:57am
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Pale King Contest Winners

I’ve received a ton of great submissions for the Pale King contest I announced a couple of weeks ago. I want to thank everyone who submitted entries and put thought and energy into these ideas. I was really impressed by the quality of the answers. Many of the responses to the contest about themes and ideas were lengthy and sophisticated. I truly enjoyed reading all of them. I hope you enjoy them as well.
(Winners will receive copies of David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, courtesy of Random House, copies of David Hering’s Consider David Foster Wallace, courtesy of SSMG Press, Infinite Jest posters from the amazing Sam Potts and other small prizes.)

Contest #1: Did any theme or idea in The Pale King remind you of Wallace’s earlier work?

Winner:

Matt King

The Pale King, approximately p. 270-284 vs. Infinite Jest, approximately pg. 601-619.

“The connection I have in mind concerns Wallace’s use of needlessly complicated and poorly planned (or deliberately planned to be inconvenient) parking situations and bureaucratic demands placed on specific individuals as a means of gaining insight into these characters. In the relevant section of The Pale King, David “Author Here” Wallace has to balance the (past) anxiety of his new job and the (current) demands of narration against the poorly planned parking situation at the Peoria REC. In the relevant section of Infinite Jest, Don Gately has to balance the rules of the halfway house and the consequences of Lenz’s shenanigans while also trying to make sure that the residents get their cars moved to the other side of the street. For Wallace, there seems to be a sense in which both submitting oneself to bureaucratic rules (of the halfway house, of the IRS) and enduring situations made needlessly complicated (in these cases, specifically with reference to parking) makes one stronger, or at least serves as a sort of test of Don’s and Dave’s abilities to let go of a sense of self. In other words, these scenes are about Don’s and Dave’s capacity to respond, not only to other people but to situations that test their patience and limits of boredom and annoyance.”

 

Runners Up:

James McAdams: “I noticed a direct accounting link between Sylvanshine’s observation that ‘the core accounting equation A=L+E can be dissolved into everything from E=A-L to beyond’ (The Pale King, p. 5) and one of the super long footnotes that rupture “Octet,” i.e. where the narrating author admits that ‘the Quiz spends five lines constructing a possible analogy between the world’s joy/misery ratio and the seminal double-entry A=L+E equation of modern accountancy, as if more than one person out of a thousand could possibly give a shit.’  (Brief Interviews, 150).”

Matthew Ritter: “Meredith Rand has a history of grappling with the classic objective/subject (or being-for-itself vs. being-for-others if you want to get existential) distinction. On page 484, she says, “I mean starting to see yourself as a piece of meat, that the only thing you’ve got is your looks and the way you affect boys, guys. You start doing it without even knowing your doing it. And it’s scary, because at the same time it also feels like a box; you know there’s more to you inside you because you can feel it, but nobody will ever know–not even other girls, who either hate you or are scared of you, because you’re a monopsony […]”

This discussion, the problem of being a body and, therefore, an object for others’ consumption/use is reminiscent of B.I. 46 in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (pages 98-105) [The story in which the narrator asks “How would you feel about me tying you up?”]. In both, the point seems to be that humans are both subject and object, but object much more so. We cannot deny our embodiment, our being seen by/thought of/addressed by others, that we are not simply just who we think we are inside our own heads, but that the lion’s share of the self resides in the intangible, private, and unseen world. When being-for-others/objectivity casts too great a shadow, the eclipse of self is frightening, dangerous, and destructive.”

 

Philip Miletic: “One of the themes in Wallace’s The Pale King that has been a recurrent and rolling stone picking up moss is Trauma and the formative features of trauma on individuals or groups of individuals. Thomas Tracey, in his essay “Representations of Trauma in David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion” in Consider David Foster Wallace, draws attention to Wallace’s peaking interest in trauma: “In Oblivion…the experience of trauma touches especially on human memory, dream, and fantasy” (173); and calls Infinite Jest‘s focus on AA as “a precursor to the detailed exploration of psychological trauma we later encounter in Oblivion” (172). In a New York Times review of The Pale King, Michiko Kakutani writes, “Wallace is focused on how various characters came to work at the I.R.S. — what combination of psychological tics, childhood trauma, financial circumstance and random luck propelled them into the rat race and tossed them onto the hamster wheel that is life as accountants there, pushing paper and numbers in a deadeningly generic office fitted with fluorescent lights, modular shelving and the ceaseless “whisper of sourceless ventilation.”” The exploration of trauma as a formative function in an individual’s development is abundant in The Pale King w/ the numerous back stories (the boy who sweats, the boy who is incredibly nice and thus hated by everyone, Meredith Rand’s exhaustive retelling of her past trauma that elevates Drinion, captures his attention although some would find it drastically dull, and etc.) that may not seem overly traumatic in a blown-up magnitude kind of way, but are the little instances of trauma, sometimes subconsciously, that form character, that is unique to an individual and can be revealed to others if these small (or big) trauma are given attention. The narrator in “The Soul is Not a Smithy” calls their “unwitting” trauma “the original trauma” (Oblivion, 67) that is similar to the original sin of Adam and Eve, the original sin that is responsible of human existence. InInfinite Jest, the site of trauma is not just the AA center, but Hal too experiences trauma, discovering his father’s dead body, that forms his current identity; Joelle’s acid accident possibly gives birth to Madame Psychosis: Trauma here creates an entirely new identity. And even in The Broom of the System, Lenore Beadsman goes the traumatic experience of an identity crisis due to the shared name w/ her Grandmother, Lenore Beadsman. (This calls to attention the two David F. Wallaces in The Pale King. Because of the unfinished state of the novel, we can only imagine what traumatic experience both David Wallaces will go through, that is, from what we have only glimpsed from their displacement.) Trauma becomes for Wallace something that is overlooked, which is depressing because it is trauma that is wholly specific to an individual (even within a shared traumatic experience) and is what really creates an individual unique within a society that clumps people within groups, organizations, jobs, classes, etc.”

 

Jeff Stern: “The thing that struck me was the “what’s wrong?” device – the way the smoother of the tax guys would insert that phrase in a conversational pause strategically in order to be seen as insightful and attentive, while actually being less attentive and attuned to the person he’s listening to than he might be otherwise.  This reminded me a lot of the way that Orin would approach subjects in IJ, with the same story, the fake wedding band, and seem to connect in a way with them that other men were unable to accomplish. That sense of personal connection that is so rare – a feeling that someone really knows you, cares about you, has an instant connection in a way that others you have known your whole life have failed to make. And the parallels here are profound, I think. It’s not just the contrivance that fakes a true connection. It’s not just the way that the social con artist preys upon the ego and fragility of the subject. It’s also the newness. The way that we attach importance and profundity to someone who is able to show insight connection immediately. In fact, it seems all the more powerful that a stranger can tell you things and know things about you that those you have lived with all your life have failed to see. This is the power of fortune tellers, the power of Dr. Phil. They cut through the bullshit of everyday life in seconds and see into your soul, precisely because you are so desperate to have someone recognize you – the real *you* inside that you always keep partially hidden from the world for fear of ridicule (or worse, hurt or death due to exposure). And as a subject you don’t realize that these devices are so successful because you are just like everyone else. You don’t realize that those around you know these things too, but don’t say them out of politeness or out of fear or out of being absorbed in their own neuroses. You wouldn’t accept your friend saying this stuff to you anyway, precisely because of the shared history you have. You need to hear it from a stranger – you give them that power over you and the benefit of every doubt both because you crave that recognition and intimacy and yet are unable to deal with it on a regular basis because then that requires facing icky truths about yourself on a regular basis, and ewww.  And so whether it is the hook up artist or the professional networker, you are able to accept it then and imbue this experience with meaning and assign to this person a preternatural ability to see deep within your soul. And the nature of this exchange with a stranger or near-stranger – the social anxiety involved – helps to make it happen. And we would never do this in our regular lives with the regular people we love because we have to keep telling ourselves “this is water. this is water.” just to keep from exploding at that guy with the bad comb-over who has too many items in the express line at the grocery store, and our family – well, don’t get me started. Actual intimacy does breed contempt to a degree, and we’d much rather believe in magical intimacy even though it’s actually just pure trickery that leaves us cold and empty in the aftermath. So I guess that I think this is sort of a repetition of the theme of false intimacy trumping actual intimacy, and a sort of individualized version of the entertainment/boredom issues that Wallace addresses in IJ and TPK, flip sides of a coin on micro and macro levels, but really just talking about what it’s like to be human.”

Several folks submitted this one:  toward the end of Meredith Rand’s long monologue, she talks about “all the terrible country songs my dad used to listen to” and how if you change “the you to me, like, you understand that what they’re really singing about is losing some part of themself or betraying themself over and over for what they they think other people want.” (TPK, page 508). Wallace talks about this same phenomenon to David Lipsky in Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, page 198: “I remember just being real impatient with it [country music]. Until I’d been living here about a year. And all of a sudden I realized that, what if you just imagined that this absent lover they’re singing to is just a metaphor? And what they’re really singing to is themselves, or to God, you know?”

The Menace of Insects – Glendennings obsession with mosquitoes as it relates to fear of insects (spiders) in Infinite Jest and “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.”

 

Contest #2: What is the single best word in The Pale King?

Winner: banausic, page 229, submitted by Jesse Hilson

“Banausic” is defined as serving utilitarian purposes only or mechanical or practical. The word and concept  (banausos) have an impressively complex etymology related to Greek mythology, economic insults, Plato, and philistinism. So much of The Pale King concerns the class of people who appear to actively choose to serve utilitarian purposes only—the practical, mechanical, routine tasks necessary that keep the nation’s finances flowing.

Runners Up:

scirocco

blancmange

neurospiritual

Other words submitted:

titty-pincher

dyadic

agnate

anfractuous

jejune

obtundated

hypoxic

Q-tipless

[I was a little surprised that no one submitted any of the words from the opening page of the novel: shattercane, sawbrier, muscadine, vetch, invaginate, chert, corn-bound. Read these.]

Congratulations again to all the winners. I will contact you about the prizes.

18 May 2011, 9:43pm
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Contest Update