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Miscellaneous, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5
The antidote to Infinite Jest?
05.16.11 | Genno Kane | Permalink | 3 Comments

Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality — there is no audience…. Here is the truth — actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one.

— The Pale King, p. 229

I’m sure everyone else has already mined this irony: We’re reading a book about the extremes of boredom because we loved a book about the extremes of entertainment. At first, it was tempting to me to imagine The Pale King, with its I.R.S. employees doing literally rote work, as a study-in-contrasts companion to Infinite Jest, a story about anything but ordinary people. But the more we read of The Pale King, the more I’m thinking about the possibility of a more nuanced dynamic between the two novels. I think The Pale King might be the antidote to Infinite Jest.

One of the many powers of the Internet is its ability to stick a nice, sharp pin of non-originality into a person’s little thought balloons, so I’ll note immediately that D.T. Max’s masterful March 2009 New Yorker piece about Wallace, and about what would become The Pale King, observed that “properly handled, boredom can be an antidote to our national dependence on entertainment, the book suggests.” But I think there’s a way to unpack/explore/pointlessly riff off that concept and the synergy between the novels, if you’re in the mood. Which is already seeming like something of a sophomore-English-discussion-section mood, I know.

I’m thinking not only of Infinite Jest, the novel, but “Infinite Jest,” the monstrously entertaining opiate of a movie lurking just outside the narrative’s reach. There’s a smattering of talk in the novel about a potential “‘anti‘-Entertainment the film’s director supposedly made to counter the lethality: does it really also exist…. As some kind of remedy or antidote.” (p. 126). But Joelle, one of few characters in a position to know, suggests there’s no such thing: James O. Incandenza made the thing in (infinite) jest, and “even in jokes he never talked about an anti-version or antidote for God’s sake,” she says (p. 940). So we have to imagine that if there’s a way even to try to resist this fatally compelling movie, it’s by sheer force of will and concentration — by choosing to pay attention to something else. Something, comparatively, boring.

If only there were a book about people managing to knuckle down and concentrate on something boring.

Of course, Infinite Jest itself has plenty to say about the importance and difficulty of choosing what to pay attention to, from Marathe’s warning to “choose your attachments carefully” (p. 107) to the hospitalized Gately’s realization that “he could choose not to listen” to his fears (p. 860).

But The Pale King goes farther: It’s important not only to choose what you devote your mind to, but to be able to choose something that’s not compelling, seductive, interesting — in a word, not entertaining — at all. As the “substitute Jesuit” puts it in the thoroughly kick-ass “called to account” speech, which strikes me as ripe for comparison to the sermon in Moby-Dick by someone who’s got more Melville game than I do*:

Exacting? Prosaic? Banausic to the point of drudgery? Sometimes. Often tedious? Perhaps. But brave? Worthy? Fitting, sweet? Romantic? Chivalric? Heroic?…. gentlemen, here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is.” (p. 229)

Of course, there’s an obvious, probably-shouldn’t-have-waited-until-the-eighth-paragraph hitch in this notion. For all that it extols boredom, The Pale King is damned entertaining. Even when it’s stuck in traffic for 12 pages. Even Section 25, in which characters do little more than turn pages, becomes, well, a page-turner. (“Rosellen Brown turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Devils are actually angels.” Excuse me?) As Wallace’s editor, Michael Pietsch, put it in an interview with Canada’s National Post, Wallace aimed “to write a novel that looks straight at all of life’s most difficult, repetitious, tedious, overly complex minutiae, and try to make a novel that is powerful and hilarious and moving that’s about the subject matter that almost all writers just brush aside in order to get at the drama.”

I keep coming back to the passage in the Author’s Forward positing that “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 … and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling….” (p. 85). It doesn’t seem like an accident that this latent pain sounds a lot like the “great transcendent horror (of) loneliness” that Infinite Jest’s characters are eternally giving themselves away to something to avoid. I do think The Pale King is pointing to an antidote — a prescription for plugging your ears against the siren call of Too Much Fun in all its forms, a formula for making the difficult choice to focus instead on the dull, the necessary, the real. It’s just that, being Wallace, he’s making it easy for us.

*No pressure, Daren.
Miscellaneous, Week 2
On Desk Names, the job of identity and the identity of the job
05.05.11 | Genno Kane | Permalink | 3 Comments

Take everything ever written, thought or felt about the relationship between work and personal identity. Condense it into a page. That page is Section 18.

‘And Desk Names are back…. Instead of your name. There’s a plate on your desk with your Desk Name. Your Name de Gear as they say…. If you’re smart, you’ll use it as a tool. We rotate; seniority chooses the plate.’

Of course, Wallace’s IRS agents aren’t the only people who adopt different names on the job: just ask Francois-Marie Arouet, Norma Jean Baker, Curtis Jackson, your friendly global-neighborhood customer service call center employee or the Waldorf-Astoria waiter who says he was forced to wear name tags that proclaimed him to be John or Edgar instead of Mohamed because bosses didn’t “want to scare our guests.” His Name de Fear, as they say.

(Never mind this fellow’s situation — I, for one, could happily dispense with name tags for anyone over 7. None of those gummy peel-the-back buggers that left a chalk-body outline on a certain suede jacket. Nor the conventioneer’s pinned-on plastic sheath, with its cheap glint and oddly sharp edges. No more lanyards with a laminated plaque the size of a birthday card doing a do-si-do with your shirt buttons. And I realize the New Jersey Department of Transportation might disagree with me, but being vaguely invited to read a grown person’s name off her chest actually doesn’t improve the customer experience, for me.) (#it’snothingimpersonal)

But in describing a “Service” that replaces its employees’ names and even their Social Security numbers (p. 66) — for Americans, virtually the DNA of official identity — Wallace is showing us work that literally becomes its employees’ identity.

Here’s where a well-documented and learned analysis of the development of the post-industrial blur that is professional-as-personal identity clearly should go. And by all means, if you’ve got one handy. (#notasociologist) But it can’t hurt to mention The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, right, or this 2009 Wall Street Journal column about “the unmitigated identification of self with occupation, accomplishment and professional status,” and how the loss of a job can amount to a loss of a sense of self. Or this personal-meets-professional medical journal article by a British physician, who reflects on his own retirement while tracing the evolution of the western world’s fascination with work and discussing the pros and cons of linking what you do with who you are. For many people, he notes, work isn’t just about money but “may be the principal source of personal identity, mediating the sense of being a valued person necessary for self-esteem.”

But I get a feeling The Pale King might ultimately be pointing to the opposite of what it might seem on the surface to be saying about work and identity. The IRS of The Pale King might take names and treat you like a (reissued) number. It might bore and confine you to the point of paracatatonic fugues and “unexplained bleeding.” (p. 87-88) But this bureaucracy — so far — isn’t the cynical ONAN of Infinite Jest. The Service is portrayed as a place full of Leonard Stecyks and Lane Deans, an agency someone can describe as as full of “institutional heroes … trying to stitch or bandage the holes that all the more selfish, glitzy, uncaring, ‘Me-First’ people are always making in the community….” (p. 127). There’s a purposeful and honorable quality to it, a world of people who pay attention to details and see a bigger picture in them, the way taxes reveal societal and personal priorities. A wiggler? Not an identity that anyone might want, but one that might not be so bad to have.
Miscellaneous, Week 1
The Author’s Forward and the truth in fiction
04.28.11 | Genno Kane | Permalink | 1 Comment

What gets me about David Foster Wallace is how he gets into your head: “That’s what I was thinking! Only better. OK, that’s what I thought about thinking. Make that ‘had a thought that could have led to, given a very generous estimation of my intellectual horsepower.’ ” A concept that seems to be crying out for a word of its own, no? Partception, maybe? Dimtuition? Anyway.

My favorite part of The Pale King so far is the Author’s Forward. I’m a sucker for fiction that messes with your head about the relationships among authors, characters and readers — two of my favorite novels are Don Quixote and Pale Fire. If I were smarter, I probably could write a whole post about the fact that the author’s “forward” purports to starts on page 79 of the narrative but in fact appears on page 62. (#inyourfacemetafiction) (#Iknowyoudon’tblogwithhashtags #andbutwhynot)

But it’s Wallace, so, of course, nested in this thing that very pleasantly messes with your head is something that insists on very pleasantly messing with the thing that just messed with your head: his (or “David Wallace’s,” or his by means of the character “David Wallace,” or the author’s as “the author’s” — #stopme #fortheloveofGod) decision not only to tell you that what you’re reading is a “memoir,” but to discuss with you his motives for writing it as a “memoir,” and what that says about truth, fiction and you.

Take this passage:

“One disadvantage of addressing you here directly and in person in the cultural present of 2005 is the fact that as both you and I know, there is no longer any kind of clear line between personal and public, or rather between private vs. performative. Among obvious examples are web logs, reality television, cell-phone cameras, chat rooms … not to mention the dramatically increased popularity of the memoir as a literary genre.”

First things first: I enjoy reading people’s accounts of their lives as much as much as does the next person who hasn’t had the life of say, Malcolm X. I also understand the place of the lyrical, meditative little memoir that doesn’t change the course of world events but stays with you; as far as I can tell, it helps to be French if you want to write this sort of thing (#jenesaisquoi). And I totally get the democratic appeal of the idea that everyone has a story to tell, a life that deserves attention. The New York Times Book Review can declare that the fact “that you had parents and a childhood does not of itself qualify you to write a memoir,” and I might want to put that on a T-shirt, but I can’t dismiss people feeling touched or helped by others’ experiences precisely because they aren’t extraordinary.

I can even appreciate the place _ a place I picture like the literary equivalent of a cunningly laid out studio apartment _ of “memoirs” in which the writer has the premise, and maybe even the advance, before the experience (#premoirs). I’ve got no inherent beef with people setting out to spend a year in Botswana/skydiving school/the lotos position/a basement listening to P-Funk so they can write about it. All I’d ask of them is the same question I’d ask of virtually any book: Is this an unusual, important or interesting story that tells a truth about life, and is this the best way to tell it?

Obviously, the idea that a memoir is guaranteeing you a truth about life has been exploded into a million little pieces. (There’s a litany of famous fudgers, dating back centuries, in this excellent New Yorker review of a history of the memoir genre.) It’s worth noting that James Frey has said he couldn’t get a publisher for “A Million Little Pieces” when he pitched it as fiction, so it was recast as a memoir — a (#presumably) true story about the publishing game that is stranger than fiction, indeed. Frey would eventually say he plumped up his actual experiences because he “wanted the stories in the book to ebb and flow, to have dramatic arcs, to have the tension that all great stories require.” Then there’s the intriguing, and tragic, theme that runs through the remarks of several memoirists caught faking: that the life story they made up was the one they wanted to believe or even convinced themselves was true.

So, for what it’s worth, I don’t think Wallace is really trying to get us to accept the Author’s Forward as an entirely “true” story. I think he’s trying to use the device of “truth” to make a point about the enduring ability of fiction to illuminate the truths that life doesn’t quite live up to. (A better way to put this, courtesy of rock singer-songwriter Stew: “Life is a mistake that only art can correct.”)

Consider that The Pale King is all about attention and making conscious choices about directing it. And that the Author’s Forward is certainly an attention-grabber, abruptly blurring the borders between “personal and public, personal and public, or rather between private vs. performative” even as it’s describing them. It seems to me he’s saying that even readers of a book about paying attention could stand to be conscious about where they’re paying it, on what terms and why.

» Next Entries

Posts

Miscellaneous, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5

The antidote to Infinite Jest?

Miscellaneous, Week 2

On Desk Names, the job of identity and the identity of the job

Miscellaneous, Week 1

The Author’s Forward and the truth in fiction

Pale Spring

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