No—I couldn’t read The Pale King because it was the book that killed him.
Prelude: First Encounter
David Foster Wallace died in 2008, a year before I encountered his work; but I didn’t know it at the time. I was nineteen, with a broken wrist that forced me to drop all of my courses and left me homebound and bored. I decided to revenge myself on these irritating circumstances by spending four months lying in bed, stoned, reading fiction and eating snacks.2 And I happened to have a copy of Infinite Jest.
By all rights, I should have hated it. Long, ostentatious, packed with dozens of characters, 90% of whom happened to be straight white males. As I read, I tallied the number of named female characters (3), imagining the tirades I would go on with my similarly politically-inclined friends.
No such tirades materialized. Infinite Jest overcame my ideological fervor, a rare feat at the time. I cared too much about the characters, many of whom spoke to internal experiences I recognized but had never put into words. The themes gestured at a worldview beyond my radical leftist ideology, one I wouldn’t fully articulate for many more years. Reading David Foster Wallace felt itchy, somehow, like his message was sideways to everyone else’s, like he was missing some important point, or else I was.
The Project of David Foster Wallace
Infinite Jest made Wallace a star. The book was both a literary sensation and cultural phenomenon, described by one commentator as “the central American novel of the past thirty years, a dense star for lesser work to orbit." Nonetheless, Wallace wasn’t totally satisfied. “I don’t think it’s very good,” he wrote, “some clipping called a published excerpt feverish and not entirely satisfying, which goes a long way toward describing the experience of writing the thing.” He grew determined to surpass Infinite Jest with something new.
Wallace aimed to write fiction that was “morally passionate, passionately moral.” He believed that “Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being.” His active period spanned the late 80s to the 00’s, cresting during the cynical 90s, the age of the neoliberal shrug, when on one hand,“Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy,” and on the other, the average American parked himself in front of the television for six hours a day. (...)
He believed contemporary fiction was stuck in two modes: cheap entertainment, or grim jeremiad. “Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?” He aimed to inspire a vision of another way of living, both with others and within our own minds. His third novel, the “Long Thing,” which eventually came to be titled The Pale King, was meant to be an articulation of that vision. (...)
Writing The Pale King
The novel that would eventually be titled The Pale King went through many stages, starting with an early draft focused on an IRS agent so obsessed with viewing himself from a third person perspective that he stars in his own porno. This plotline receded, with the book converging on its eventual focus: a group of IRS agents travel to an examination center in Peoria, Illinois, 1985, where a battle takes place over the philosophical and technological future of the agency.
As the years went by, Wallace got lost in the project. He described the writing process as “trying to carry a sheet of plywood in a windstorm,” and said, “The whole thing is a tornado that won’t hold still long enough for me to see what’s useful and what isn’t.” He worried he’d need to write “a 5,000 page manuscript and then winnow it by 90%, the very idea of which makes something in me wither and get really interested in my cuticle, or the angle of the light outside.”
By 2007, a decade in, he’d made progress, but the book was still far from any kind of final form, and he felt stuck. In the Spring of that year, he went to a Persian restaurant and was left with severe stomach pains. The culprit, of course, was Nardil.
His doctor advised him to switch to an SSRI. Nardil was, after all, a “dirty drug,” from another time. Wallace decided to go for it: after 22 years, he went off Nardil. According to Jonathan Franzen, the lack of progress on The Pale King wasn’t incidental to this decision: “That he was blocked with his work when he decided to quit Nardil—was bored with his old tricks and unable to muster enough excitement about his new novel to find a way forward with it—is not inconsequential.”
For the first couple weeks Wallace felt alright, but as Nardil receded from his system, so did his stability. He lost thirty pounds, stopped writing, and was hospitalized for major depressive disorder. He grew desperate: tried an array of antidepressants, underwent electroshock once again. He tried going back on Nardil, but the drug that had stabilized him for two decades no longer worked—it closed its doors, as often happens when a patient goes off a stable regimen and tries to come back.
It was 2008 and Wallace was down 70 pounds from the previous year. Franzen believed Wallace became obsessed with the idea of suicide, returning to compulsively, like an addict. Wrote Franzen: “[O]ne of his own favored tropes, articulated especially clearly in his story “Good Old Neon” and in his treatise on Georg Cantor, was the infinite divisibility of a single instant in time. However continually he was suffering in his last summer, there was still plenty of room, in the interstices between his identically painful thoughts, to entertain the idea of suicide, to flash forward through its logic, and to set in motion the practical plans (of which he eventually made at least four) for effectuating it.”
On September 12th, 2008, Wallace wrote a letter to his wife, arranged the unfinished manuscript of The Pale King on his desk, and hanged himself. He was 46 years old.
The Pale King: Central Concerns
After Wallace’s death, his editor Michael Pietsch assembled the manuscript, winnowing it down to a set of consistent characters and generally forward-moving narrative. Infinite Jest famously ends before the climax, major plot threads dangling, and so does The Pale King—but while the former is cruelly deliberate, The Pale King remains unfinished through tragic happenstance, major themes underdeveloped, story nascent.
The plot: a group of IRS hires converge on an examination center in Peoria, Illinois, circa 1985. There’s the sense that once they’re there, things will start happening, but nothing really does. The chapters alternate between the 1985 story, character background, debate/discussion of the deeper philosophical meaning of the IRS, metanarrative written in the voice of 2005 David Foster Wallace, scraps of trivia/world building/slices-of-life. (...)
The characters are monumentally well-developed. We follow IRS bureaucrats as they suffer childhood abuse in dusty trailer parks, struggle with “attacks” of copious sweating, watch a father die in a subway accident. And these lives—which feel so human and so real—are juxtaposed with the tedium of their work at the IRS.
We can’t help but be reminded that faceless bureaucrats are real people, as real as us. But there’s a feeling, while reading (I was feeling it, at least), that I wanted these characters to become more than IRS agents. To be artists or firemen or—something. Something more interesting.
But Wallace suggests this impulse is wrong. He’s not trying to depict these IRS examiners as being in any way exceptional, despite our identification with them—rather, he’s trying to show that every human being is that deep, and that interesting, if we take the time to know them. He enjoins us to avoid relating to others as “the great gray abstract mass,” even if they form part of some tedious and unappealing bureaucracy. To take on the burden of always, in every moment, relating to others as fully human.
This injunction is central to Wallace’s approach to transcending postmodernism. His great innovation was to use the tools of postmodern writing (meant to remind the reader that they’re reading words, not experiencing reality) to create work that loops back around and becomes as immersive and convincing as the finest of realist prose. His writing embodies the nerve-fraying and frenetic pace of modern life, with the technical jargon and long sentences and footnotes capturing something of the feel of the internet. And through it all, his characters shine through, heartbreakingly human, capable not only of cruelty9, but of goodness that surprises even themselves.
Wallace’s writing is maximalist in that he forces you to deal with all of it: the difficulty in escaping the web of discourse, the fact that you’re reading a novel, the fragmented nature of modern life, the fact that the IRS asshole auditing you has as rich and deeply felt a human experience as your own.
Pale King: Themes
The plot builds towards a war over the future of the IRS: with one side wanting the IRS to remain committed to civic virtue, its tax examinations carried out by humans; and the other wanting the IRS focused on maximizing profits, its examiners to be replaced by computers. The IRS here is standing in for all institutions where people operate both as individuals and as part of a larger collective: the conflict between the IRS as civic organization and the IRS as corporation reflects a general conflict taking place in the 80s,10 and arguably still today.
Wallace is, of course, on team human. His criticism of the profit motive parallels his rejection of minimalism, the aesthetic of postmodernism: when we reduce reality to a thin, abstract variable, whether that be profit or discourse, we mutilate it. And once we’re there , all that’s left is our role as solipsistic consumers.
One of the most moving sections of the book is a 100-page novella smack in the middle, written from the perspective of wastoid11-turned-accountant Chris Fogel. Chris’ 1970s youth was spent in partying and shallow rebellion, once again, papering over a deep emptiness: “I think the truth is that I was the worst kind of nihilist—the kind who isn’t even aware he’s a nihilist. I was like a piece of paper on the street in the wind, thinking, ‘Now I think I’ll blow this way, now I think I’ll blow that way.’ My essential response to everything was ‘Whatever.’”12
The emotional core of the story is Chris’ relationship with his father, who’s sardonic, dutiful, and old-fashioned: “His attitude towards life was that there are certain things that have to be done and you simply have to do them—such as, for instance, going to work every day.” Chris resents his father’s conformity, while blind to his own: “I was just as much a conformist as he was, plus a hypocrite, a ‘rebel’ who really just sponged off of society in the form of his parents.”
Chris’ story is located close in the book to a philosophical dialogue concerning the nature of the IRS and the moral crisis in society. As one character expounds:
“‘It’ll all be played out in the world of images. There’ll be this incredible political consensus that we need to escape the confinement and rigidity of conforming, of the dead fluorescent world of the office and the balance sheet, of having to wear a tie and listen to Muzak, but the corporations will be able to represent consumption-patterns as the way to break out—use this type of calculator, listen to this type of music, wear this type of shoe because everyone else is wearing conformist shoes. It’ll be this era of incredible prosperity and conformity and mass-demographics in which all the symbols and rhetoric will involve revolution and crisis and bold forward-looking individuals who dare to march to their own drummer by allying themselves with brands that invest heavily in the image of rebellion. This mass PR campaign extolling the individual will solidify enormous markets of people whose innate conviction that they are solitary, peerless, non-communal, will be massaged at every turn.’” (Emphasis mine)
This speech is set in the 80s, but was written in the 00s, when the internet was nascent and social media hadn’t yet taken off. Wallace’s diagnosis is prescient: between Quiet Quitting and Live to Work, young people are rejecting the tedium of office life and embracing the life of the influencer, which does indeed involve both the trappings of rebellion and conspicuous consumption.
It hasn’t gone down exactly as Wallace predicted. He was concerned about the withering effects of hedonism (which true to his predictions have persisted), but he underestimated the resurgence of doctrinaire political ideology.
The Pale King is in many ways revanchist, arguing for reclamation of territory lost to hedonism in the name of old-fashioned ideals like civic responsibility, neighborliness, and going to work every day. And revanchism has certainly made a comeback: today we face a proliferation of conservative/Trad movements, but very few seem interested in rehabilitating old fashioned civic virtue.13 Cynicism in societal institutions is endemic on both the right and the left, perhaps with good reason: while a bureaucrat in the 80s could expect to own a home and support a family, these days an ‘ordinary’ job doesn’t cut it. The IRS’s of the world have taken the path that Wallace warned against, embracing automation and the bottom line, and neglecting the real, human realities of the people they’re meant to serve.
The Millennial/Gen Z complaint is real: the economic conditions are harder than they were in the 50s/70s/90s; the world of our parents no longer exists; starting a family is exorbitant. So why should we subject ourselves to bureaucratic tedium and keep society running, when society doesn’t seem to care much about us? (...)
The Path Forward
Wallace suggests that boredom, far from being something to avoid, might point the way to deeper self-knowledge. “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 us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.” Boredom might even gesture towards enlightenment: “It turns out that bliss—a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.”14
In Wallace’s conception, boredom isn’t only personally enlightening—it can also be a heroic sacrifice for the collective good. At one point Chris Fogel wanders into the wrong classroom and ends up in the exam review for Advanced Tax, taught by a capable and dignified Jesuit (possibly the eponymous “pale king”). The Jesuit makes a speech which sparks an epiphany in Chris, where he declares the profession of accounting a heroic one: “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.’”
There it is: the vision, the cure, the path forward. We accept the burden of adult responsibility, go to work every day and engage in the important but unglamorous work that keeps society running. We orient our institutions not towards money but principle. We refuse to treat people like numbers or cogs or some great undifferentiated mass—we treat them as fully human, always, even and especially when they’ve chosen to subsume some part of their individuality to a soul-killing institution, because we recognize this as a heroic sacrifice they’re making for the good of the collective. And we withstand our negative emotions, embrace them fully, travel through their every texture until we transform and open to a deeper and richer experience.
The problem with all this, of course, is that in the middle of writing the book, Wallace killed himself.
by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten | Read more:
Image: Amazon
[ed. There are probably only a handful of people that have read The Pale King in its entirety and it's nice to discover a fellow traveler. I also subscribe to the view that boredom can be, or is, one of the greatest motivators in our lives. Btw, from the footnotes:]
"The IRS really did shift its focus from compliance to maximizing profit during the Reagan era, a significant ideological reordering that The Pale King explains as politically necessary: Reagan ran on a platform both of reducing taxes and increasing defense spending. The only way this was possible was if the IRS got more efficient at collecting. Reagan could even capitalize politically on the IRS’s new methods: “‘The Service’s more aggressive treatment of TPs, especially if it’s high-profile, would seem to keep in the electorate’s mind a fresh and eminently disposable image of Big Government that the Rebel Outsider President could continue to define himself against and decry as just the sort of government intrusion into the private lives and wallets of hardworking Americans he ran for office to fight against.’"
