The Pale King is, in the words of its editor Michael Pietsch, a "tornado": it lacks a clearly defined central narrative or even apparent connective tissue between its opening chapters. Characters appear and disappear, entire chapters are given over to arcane IRS regulations and formulae, and then there are the usual Wallacian feints like extensive footnotes and deliberately false information presented as fact, etc. etc. It's a glorious mess that occasionally misses and never fully coheres, but is never boring (more on that, later.)
As the details compound, some plot threads begin to emerge in the draft chapters. The IRS is about to undergo major restructuring based on a shift in principles, from the notion of civic duty to businesslike efficiency. Human beings are about to be replaced by computers. Into this environment a new set of examiners arrive, including a psychic, a psychotic, a guy who can't shut up, and a fictionalized version of the author himself who goes by David Wallace and assures us that it's really him (it isn't). Wallace's notes, compiled at the end of the book, promise some bonkers developments to come, especially an off-stage power struggle with forays into the supernatural. The narrator himself would disintegrate into the text, like something out of Pynchon.
Sadly, what we have doesn't come close to these ambitions, so let's get a few objections out of the way before diving into the meat of the thing. According to his notes this roughly-assembled draft consisted of less than half of the planned text. Most relationships aren't yet clear; some characters are underwritten and other overwritten. Some whole chapters fall flat - especially the last 'big' one, in which an attractive examiner teases her subordinate by unloading her whole history of physical self-abuse and mental rehabilitation. Wallace has examined this kind of character many times before with some success, but this time he gets carried away trying to squeeze his bigger themes into her rambling, inconsistent monologue. And I won't even go into the shoehorned levitation thing. In his notes Wallace identifies some of the chapter's problems, but I'd bet money that his editor would have gone after this one with a giant pair of scissors, and been right to do so.
There's also something deeply weird about reading a genuinely brilliant chapter, like the polyphonic introduction of Sylvanshine on his plane to Peoria, only to find in the endnotes that Wallace had planned to rewrite the chapter entirely due to continuity issues and later-developed ideas about who this character is.
Objections aside, there's nonetheless a lot to digest here.
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A important key to understanding The Pale King is Wallace's famous Kenyon College commencement address, "This is Water", which Zadie Smith rightly identified as "a diving board into a fiction, his fiction being the his truest response to the difficulty of staying conscious and alive, day in and day out" (while expressing annoyance that it'd been "repackaged as a Chicken Soup for the Soul-type toilet book".) Wallace begins the speech with an anecdote about a fish who, because it exists entirely in water, does not know what water is.
The point of the fish story is merely that most obvious, important realities are often the ones hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude. But the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence banal platitudes can have a life or death importance.
Easy enough, right? Circum spice! (h/t Michigan)
Well, that's an easy enough lesson if you're, say, stopping by woods on a snowy evening: your environment practically begs you to slow down and appreciate it. But can we apply this sense of awareness to our everyday lives? To our assumptions about ourselves and the world around us? To our jobs? To the most tedious part of our jobs?
That's the challenge Wallace took with The Pale King: whether he could apply his beliefs about awareness to the single most boring thing imaginable... the IRS. Imagine filling out your taxes, which is already bad enough. Now imagine having to examine your taxes, followed by hundreds of others', for five days a week, hour after hour. Having to know the byzantine sets of tax formulae and exceptions and regulations, breaking your day down into manageable increments while the minute on the clock refuses to budge, and the growing the terror that you may not be mentally equipped to handle it:
In four minutes it would be another hour, a half hour after that was the fifteen-minute break. Lane Dean imagined himself running around on the break waving his arms and shouting gibberish and holding ten cigarettes at once in his mouth like a panpipe. Year after year, a face the same color as your desk. Lord Jesus. (379)
The second prong of Wallace's critique has to do with the stunted nature of modern self-awareness, and this is where the late chapter I criticized above comes into play. Despite my misgivings about the unedited shape of the chapter itself, its main character Meredith Rand is the most important character in the book, a former cutter who created self-inflicted and self-perpetuating mental traps that allow her to both initiate and despair of her situation. Expecting unearned sympathy from the staff at the mental hospital, she's surprised that one gives her a brutally blunt prescription: grow up. Meredith eventually realizes
that "grow up" meant now, right this second, and quit being childish, because it would kill me. He said the girls who came through [the mental institution] were all the same, and none of us had any idea of what being a grown-up was. Which was totally condescending, and normally the totally wrong thing to say to an eighteen-year-old. So there was this little argument about that. His point was that being childish wasn't the same thing as being like a child, he said, because watch a real child play or stroke a cat or listen to a story and you'll see it's like the opposite of what we were all doing there... (497)
The immaturity that's trapped Rand in a cycle of self-fulfilling defeat is part of a larger problem that one sees throughout Wallace's work: the effect of living inside oneself, of the belief that the world exists only for oneself. The technical term for this is solipsism, and while it may be a fact of our neurological limitations, it's nonetheless a desperate trap.
All of this sounds perfectly reasonable and digestible in the abstract, but then you take the obvious solution - as E.M.Forster says, "Only connect!" (h/t) - and you filter it through a generation of cynicism and postmodern skepticism about things like authenticity, and you've got a big problem. The paradox that Wallace is constantly trying to work through is whether we can reconcile that basic truth about connectedness with the skepticism that is nonetheless our heritage, to recognize the platitude as banal while at the same time accepting its premise. Or to put it in Meredith's terms, you can recognize the pure pleasure that a child takes from stroking a cat, but you cannot be a child again, even if that pure pleasure is the only thing that can save us from true despair. That reconciliation, or at least the search for reconciliation, is the Big Theme of Wallace's literature.
The Pale King is far too incomplete to get us there, but at its best we can see it reflected in its grappling with boredom, attention, and relationship between the individual and the rest of the world.
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That being said, there's a lot to love about these fragments shored against his ruins. The best chapter in the book, a mere four pages long in split newspaper-style columns, begins like this...
'Irrelevant' Chris Fogle turns a page. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Matt Redgate 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. David Cusk turns a page. Sandra Punder turns a page. Robert Atkins turns two separate pages of two separate files at the same time. Ken Wax turns a page. Lane Dean Jr. turns a page. (310)
...and continues in that vein for its entirety. Wallace does a couple of neat things in this chapter that are so simple, and so obvious, that it's easy to miss them. One is the slight variations that practically force you to pay closer attention - two pages instead of one, a flip backwards instead of forwards - and they get progressively weirder and more thoughtful as the chapter goes on. The effect is not unlike listening to a Phillip Glass piece, with tiny variations against a repetitive background. The other is a mix of assorted characters whose names we've never heard before with characters whose backstories we know in full, all granted equanimity in their drudgery. Our eyes wander across the unknown names and stop in surprise when we recognize one, as if we'd just run into an old friend in a crowd.
Another tour de force is the early chapter, mentioned above, about Sylvanshine's flight to Peoria. Wallace uses the disconnected stream-of-consciousness of Ulysses's Bloom - that is, short sentences whose succession is organically suggestive rather than transparent, rather than the endless sentences of Molly - and ratchets them up in three ways: 1) Sylvanshine's 'intended' line of thought is highly technical, as he rehearses information for his CPA exams; 2) Sylvanshine is psychic, and cursed with spontaneous epiphanies about unrelated facts; and 3) Wallace integrates the two lines of thought without any clear sense of relationship, which eliminates the organic flow keeping Joyce's together. The only constant anchor, the only thing that exists outside Sylvanshine's head, is the cramped and unpleasant plane ride he's enduring at the moment.
And yet, it works, in part because Wallace commits fully to the conceit, and because it contributes (albeit in a roundabout way) to the novel's major theme: the inability to focus, which in Sylvanshine is elevated to the supernatural level by his psychic abilities. Sylvanshine recognizes this, and compares himself unfavorably to his friend, idol, and possibly lover (according to the endnotes) Reynolds:
Reynold's dictum was that reality was a fact-pattern the bulk of which was entropic and random. The trick was honing in on which facts were important - Reynolds was a rifle to Sylvanshine's shotgun. The feeling of a slight trickle of blood from his right nostril was a hallucination and to be ignored absolutely; the feeling simply did not exist. Aurelius of ancient Rome. First principles. Exemptions vs. deductions, for AGI vs. from AGI. A loss sustained from a nonbusiness bad debt is always classified as a short-term capital loss and may therefore be deducted on Schedule D as per the following IRC §: One building's roof had what was either a marked helipad or a complicated visual signal to the planes descending overhead. (16)
Note how Sylvanshine's mind wanders back to what's outside his window: he is incapable of a steady train of thought, and the frequently outstanding prose follows him in kind.
Another stand-out chapter follows one of the book's few 'normal' characters - Lane Dean Jr., a young guy who got his girlfriend pregnant and married her and is trying to support them both - as he deals with the one of the IRS regional complex's dirty secrets: the fact that it's haunted. Dean's struggles to stay focused on his work are interrupted by, and comically undercut by, a "phantom" named Frederick Blumquist, onetime IRS examiner who died at his desk (and no one noticed). Blumquist taunts Lane with the etymology of the word he's trying so hard to ignore: boredom. (One of the earliest chapters to reach a publishable level of polish, it's available at the New Yorker website under the title "Wiggle Room".) Lane has been doing his job with quiet desperation, but Blumquist refuses to let him ignore the obvious: he's bored.
They don't ever say it, though. Have you noticed? They talk around it. It's too manifest. As if talking about the air you're breathing, yes? It would be as if saying, I see so-and-so with my eye. What would be the point? (376)
If that sounds familiar, it should: we've returned to Wallace's "This is Water" speech and the problem of recognizing, and of coming to terms with, the very context in which we lead our lives.
And so we're back where we started: what is boredom? And how do we react when someone tells us what's right in front of us all along? Wallace knows that boredom can kill - Lane's thoughts range from comically manic to suicidal - and that the worst of it "precludes everything vital and human". From this emerges something like the thesis of the novel, and while I'm not sure if it's sufficiently developed at this point to be convincing, it's nonetheless there, bluntly stated:
It's the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish. (438)
This has been an unofficial installment of my occasional series "Literature for Kossacks", which has its own nifty nonnie9999-created image. Thanks to Unitary Moonbat for reminding me that I still had this little icon saved, although it's gotten a little dusty over the past few months.
If you're interested in previous entries, you can find them by the Literature for Kossacks tag.
Thanks for reading!
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7:16 PM PT: Also check out this excellent article from The Nation that says everything I wanted to, with perhaps more clarity and efficiency. (h/t david mizner)
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