David Foster Wallace Part 3:3

Last post on David Foster Wallace.  I suggest that you read the three previous parts prior to reading this post, which will focus mainly on Wallace’s writing and what he tried to accomplish through it.

The ideas behind his third novel, The Pale King, only of which a third he completed before his death, matriculated into his commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005.  He addressed the students on the meaning of true liberty, “[it] means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to construct meaning from experience.  Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.” 

The Pale King deals with a group of employees who work at the Internal Revenue Service center in Illinois and how they deal with the monotony of their work.  If Infinite Jest broadcasts our addiction to entertainment, it is his last novel that suggests the antidote.  One character comments, “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 of our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from.”

It is ironic then that the character Chris Fogle, a college student, gains his moment of epiphany through television: “There was certainly always reading and studying for finals I could do, but I was being a wastoid…Anyhow, I was sitting there trying to spin the ball on my finger and watching the soap opera…and at the end of ever commercial break, the show’s trademark shot of the planet earth as seen from space, turning, would appear, and the CBS daytime network announcer’s voice would say, “You’re watching ‘As the World Turns,’” until the tone began to seem almost incredulous –“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns’” –until I was suddenly struck by the bare reality of the statement…It was as if the CBS announcer was speaking directly to me, shaking my shoulder or leg as though trying to arouse someone from sleep –“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns.’”… I didn’t stand for anything.  If I wanted to matter –even just to myself –I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some kind of definite way.”  Perhaps, what he found so frustrating was that the realizations he composed for his characters seemed so hard to grasp for himself.  As if he had some kind of intellectual idealization of enlightenment that played out accordingly in his fiction but not in his reality.

Could it be that life is an unraveling of the intertwinement of our greatest gift tangled within our Achilles heal: that the gift of language can be equally destructive?  An emerging field of Psychology, ACT, a branch of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, links language to one of our root causes of our suffering.  The paradox, which the founders are quick to point out is that our survival is deeply indebted to language: that while we are inferior to most other animals in speed, in size, and strength, we are cognitively superior.  Coincidentally, there has been no other known species that has been scientifically proven to commit suicide. 

Wallace, cognitively superior to the cognitively superior, saw language as a means of nourishment.  While he found a comfortable discomfort in irony, he attempted to escape it because although he claimed it could critique it was a voice incapable of nourishing or redeeming and ultimately, impeded him from creating: “morally passionate, passionately moral fiction.”  His language would turn to the use of extensive footnotes and parentheses, which allowed him he wrote, “a discursive, authorial intrusive style w/o Finneganizing the story.”  And in the wake of authors who wrote to flaunt and impress, for recognition and wealth, his attempts were to discover a voice that could convey truth. In an interview with Larry McCaffrey, English Professor at San Diego State, he said, “It seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies…in be[ing] willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow.  Even now I’m scared how sappy this’ll look in print, saying this.  And the effort to actually do it, not just talk about it, requires a kind of courage I don’t seem to have yet.”  “It [fiction], Wallace goes on to say, “should help readers to feel less alone inside.”

        

And as I sit here writing this, two brothers, one obviously out-aged by the other, lead an army (I can’t see anyone else) into a courageous battle hurling grenades (unripened crab apples) at the approaching army (a stagnant shed that contains restrooms and janitorial supplies).  Outnumbered, they retreat (manifested by frequent explosive noises and hands flailing in the air), and they are forced to retreat to their trenches (behind a fence made of two levels of logs laying horizontally against evenly spaced posts).  One has been hit in the leg (I don’t know by what) and crawls toward the trenches. Nonetheless, his valiant brother risks his safety to drag him off the battlefield (the younger brother seems to be struggling to free himself).  The excitement is interrupted by a distant battle cry summoning them for bed and this band of brothers is forced to relinquish its citadel in order to appease their mother.  It’s a question that’s been asked too many times before to circumvent cliche–and I know happy sappy this will look in writing –but is ignorance bliss?