boundary 2 2014 mcgurl 27 54 libre

boundary 2 41:3 (2014) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2812061 © 2014 by Duke University Press

The Institution of Nothing:

David Foster Wallace in the Program

Mark McGurl

It was all nothing and a man was nothing too.— Ernest Hemingway, “A Clean, Well- Lighted Place”

David Wallace disappears— becomes creature of the system.— David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

1. From Region to Institution

Because its editor decided that it should be so, David Foster Wal-lace’s unfinished, posthumously published novel, The Pale King (2011), cen tered in the antiseptic offices of the Internal Revenue Service Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, begins instead with a prose- poetic invocation of the landscape of the American Midwest. In this place, where “untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat,” a long honor roll of species of

This essay has benefited from the input of the Post45 Group, meeting at Stanford Uni-versity in November 2012, as well as from conversations with audiences at the University of North Carolina, Rutgers University, and the University of Heidelberg. For bibliographic and other suggestions, I am especially grateful for advice from Lee Konstantinou and Sianne Ngai.

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Published by Duke University Press

28 boundary 2 / Fall 2014

weed— “shattercane, lamb’s- quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimson-weed, wild mint, dandelion . . .”— can be seen “gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.”1 At first, it seems a senti-mental choice for an opening— affirmative, reassuring, as though the full-ness of nature can compensate up front for the authorial void that, in so many ways, structures the text we hold in hand: “A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale- colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shape-less. We are all of us brothers” (PK, 3). Building on the editor’s lead, we might read the novel as a belated work of midwestern regionalism, a literary form not much seen since the early twentieth century but arguably relevant to this writer, who grew up in the Midwest until going away to college in the East, returned to teach writing for several years, and never fully cut loose from its defiantly “normal” cultural moorings. If American literary modern-ism had been born, in part, in the “revolt from the village” of midwestern-ers like Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and Ernest Hemingway, and postmodernism had paused only briefly in the region to have a few laughs, here is one version at least of the next big move in the literary field: a stra-tegic reembrace of rooted provinciality.2 We don’t know the exact criteria of membership in this humble brotherhood— does it include all buzzing life or only human beings; all human beings or only some?— but we do know that, grounded in a profoundly stable geology, and taking its cues from a pro-fusely common, workaday ecology, it would give succor to the fragile indi-vidual ego, admonishing it simply to be present with others, to commune.

But, alas, it can’t be that simple. Time starts up again, the first para-graph of the novel turning over into a second, where the situation is dis-tinctly less reassuring: “Some crows come overhead then, three or four, not

1. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel (New York: Little, Brown, 2011), 3. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as PK.2. See Anthony Channell Hilfer, The Revolt from the Village, 1015– 1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969). On the postmodern in the Midwest, see, for instance, Jane Smiley, Moo (New York: Ballantine, 1995). Elements of a more serious “midwestern postmodern” literature can perhaps be found in the work of William Gass and Richard Powers. For a more sophisticated discussion of the complex problem of place in Wallace’s fiction, see Paul Quinn, “‘Location’s Location’: Placing David Foster Wallace,” in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 87– 106.

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McGurl / David Foster Wallace in the Program 29

a murder, on the wing, silent with intent. . . . Your shoes’ brand incised in the dew” (PK, 3– 4). They are not a murder, but of course they carry “murder” into the text on the wings of their ominous “intent,” even as shoes begin to mark a natural world with the imprint of a consumerist one. And now those ominous crows can be found “standing at angles, turning up the [cow] pat-ties to get at the worms underneath” (PK, 4). Their predation is not particu-larly dramatic; it is simply nature at its business, but it, too, leaves a record: “the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned dung and baked in by the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in rows and inset curls that do not close because head never quite touches tail. Read these” (PK, 4).

And so we shall, taking that arresting image of death- hollowed inscription a bit further into the novel, and from there onward to a reading of Wallace’s life’s work as a whole. This work is unusual in the degree to which, as presaged by those not quite closed- circuit worms, its description seems insufficient without some account also of his readership, that social body to which his works are directed and in which they seek completion. Wallace’s longtime editor, Michael Pietsch— who literally assembled, if he didn’t quite complete, the novel we know as The Pale King from a pile of fragments the author left neatly stacked on his desk before hanging himself a few feet away— was only the first of these. Pietsch’s assignment will be familiar to anyone who has read Wallace’s longer works, especially Infinite

Jest (1996), whose profoundly confusing structure has been generously received as entirely intentional, an ingenious puzzle, whose gaps in coher-ence it is the reader’s responsibility to fill in on his or her own, or with the help of a reader’s guide, or indeed any number of helpful scholarly readings of the novel that have begun to appear in large numbers since the author’s death.3 If one does not see this structure, Wallace once said, then “the book’s failed for you,” but canonization has a way of shifting the blame for this failure, placing the novel beyond reproach.4

Not that the question of self- worth is simply one attaching to the reader. That question is everywhere in Wallace, an ominously metaphysi-cal dilemma one suspects might not be susceptible to solution by ordinary means like fulsome praise. For instance, not twenty pages after Pale King ’s prose- poetic opening, when IRS employee Claude Sylvanshine steps off

3. See, for instance, Stephen J. Burn, David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest”: A Reader’s

Guide, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum, 2012).4. Quoted in Roberto Natalini, “David Foster Wallace and the Mathematics of Infinity,” in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, 50.

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a plane onto the tarmac on his way to his new post in Peoria, he sees a landscape

so remarkably flat that it was as if the earth here had been stamped on with some cosmic boot, visibility in all directions limited only by the horizon, which was the same general color and texture as the sky and created the specular impression of being in the center of some huge and stagnant body of water, an oceanic impression so literally obliterating that Sylvanshine was cast back or propelled back in on himself and felt again the edge of the shadow of the wing of Total Terror and Disqualification pass over him. (PK, 24)

What had seemed, however fleetingly, a space for warm embrace now feels too open- ended, undifferentiated, annihilating. This is not one of the weirdly ruined landscapes of Wallace’s earlier novels, neither the Great Ohio Desert of The Broom of the System (1987) nor the Great Concavity of Infinite Jest, but it is in some ways more disturbing for its ordinariness. Perhaps the landscape of the Midwest is not embracing after all, but only, given time, an occasion for terrifying exposure, like something out of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Perhaps we had better be getting indoors, under the shelter of institutions. Isn’t this, after all, where we usually find Wallace? Isn’t this where his last novel wanted to take his readers?

And, more importantly for my purposes here, isn’t his relation to institutions what makes Wallace, in literary historical terms, most interest-ing? For me, in any case, this relation is more interesting than his critique of American culture, which, while advanced with considerable verve, and unusually well attuned to the vicissitudes of ironic distance, amounts finally to a highly conventional morality tale about the ill effects of narcissism and TV. So, too, is it more interesting than the chaotically ambitious forms of his longer works, which bear a strong resemblance to the sprawling models of literary endeavor offered by such novelists as William Gaddis, John Barth, and especially Thomas Pynchon, all of whom make equal intellectual, if not emotional, demands on their readers. Rather, Wallace is most interesting precisely insofar as we think of him as a strong student of the likes of Pyn-chon and, more generally, as a highly reflexive inhabitant of the system of educational institutions that indebted him to a certain version of literary postmodernism.5 To insist upon the centrality of the role of student— and

5. For Samuel Cohen, Wallace’s anxiety of influence is a version of historical experience as such. See “To Wish to Try to Sing to the Next Generation: Infinite Jest ’s History,” in The

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later teacher— in understanding Wallace is to read him as a figure of what I have called the Program Era, but not only that: it is to read him as one whose situation marks a further step toward the thorough normalization of the emergent conditions of institutionalization that that term tries to name.6 No one was more attuned to this historically novel state of affairs than Wallace himself, who, in the 1988 essay “Fictional Futures and the Con-spicuously Young,” written shortly after earning his own MFA, worries out loud and at length about the many implications of the rise of creative writing programs but without letting those worries impede his headlong entry into the career of creative writing teacher a few years later.7

If the Program Era is characterized by an increasingly prolonged intimacy of American writers with the ways and means of the institutions of higher education; by the historically novel rise and multiplication of creative writing programs and their staffing by writer- teachers; by the emergence, in that evolving professional matrix, of a constellation of late modernist aes-thetic formations registering by turns the advent of mass higher educa-tion, the recognition of “diversity” as a primary institutional value, and the

Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 59– 79. As several critics have noted, Wallace’s even-tual resistance to his inheritance from postmodernism was at best conflicted, requiring both a misprision of the rampant cleverness exhibited by his own work and an unchari-tably flattened account of his postmodernist peers and forebears. See, for instance, Mary Holland, “‘The Art’s Heart’s Purpose’: Braving the Narcissistic Loop of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” Critique 47, no. 3 (Spring 2006): 218– 42; Timothy Aubry, “Infinite

Jest and the Recovery of Feeling,” in Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction

Does for Middle- Class Americans (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 97– 126; and Brian McHale, “The Pale King, Or, The White Visitation,” in A Companion to David Foster

Wallace Studies, 191– 210. The latter is an especially rich and persuasive documentation of Pynchon’s pervasive, if complex, presence in Wallace’s writing— or, as I might leadingly put it, of the schooling of that writing by Pynchon.6. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).7. David Foster Wallace, “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” in Both Flesh

and Not: Essays (New York: Little, Brown, 2012), 37– 74. Historically, many of the harsh-est critiques of creative writing have come from within the system. That, on some level, Wallace obviously didn’t need training in an MFA program, but got it anyway, is precisely the point. A fine reading of the early story collection Girl with Curious Hair (1989), includ-ing the campus/road novella “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” in the context of Wallace’s time as an MFA student, is available in Kasia Boddy, “A Fiction of Response: Girl with Curious Hair in Context,” in A Companion to David Foster Wallace

Studies, 23– 41.

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increasing prestige of big science and technology as crucial determinants of postwar narrative form; and characterized, finally, by the systematic centrality of authorial self- reference, or “autopoetics,” in generating those forms, then Wallace was, indeed, a Program Man if ever there was one. As a child of humanities academics, Wallace could not have been more deeply embedded in the culture of the school, or more conversant with the folk-ways of university intellectuals. As, in turn, a superstar student at an elite college, he could not have asked more from an educational institution in officially recognizing his worth, including his worth as a fiction writer. His first novel was written for course credit and, like much of his other school-work, given a grade of A+. When a career as a novelist became an obvi-ous thing for Wallace to pursue after graduation, so did an MFA degree. It apparently never occurred to him not to apply to creative writing programs or, for that matter, once he had been accepted and entered into and com-pleted the program at the University of Arizona, to find any way to pay the bills other than to become a teacher in turn: “I feel like teaching is my liveli-hood,” he said.8 And so it was, with occasional timeouts to spend prize money, from graduate school until the end of his short life.

But it’s not just the biography that makes Wallace seem a quintes-sential Program figure. There is also the work, born under the classroom influence of the much- assigned Crying of Lot 49 (1966). More broadly, we can speak of Wallace’s fiction as having been launched within the post-war aesthetic formation that, in hopes of drawing out some of the contents of the baggy term postmodernism, I’ve called technomodernism. Here the project of modernist experimentation with narrative form is continued and conjoined to a relatively new fascination with science, technology, and media. As distinct from earlier modernism, where an object such as a phonograph had been interesting mainly as the correlative of the advent of automated human spirits, here the writer suggests that he might actu-ally know how the gadgets work. What’s more, knowing the language of the gadgets is presented as a new form of gnosis, converting what might once have been judged as mere know- how into a new and intimidating form of cultural capital. For Pynchon, it was contemporary physics and engineering that made themselves felt in his fiction, lending it authority as a response

8. These biographical details are gleaned from D. T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost

Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (New York: Viking, 2012); Wallace is quoted in David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster

Wallace (New York: Broadway, 2010), 14.

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to a world of interconnected technical systems. For Wallace, it was math, poststructuralist literary theory, and the analytical philosophy of language, in which discipline he wrote a second undergraduate thesis that earned him a second A+.

Wallace was indeed a singularly “high performance” product of the Program Era, although, as it turns out, one with all of the fragility and ten-dency to break down that that term implies. The obsessive self- reflexivity of his work might be understood in just these terms— that is, as an institu-tional demand for self- reflection taken very seriously, made the very engine of his hyperactively intelligent prose, but always threatening to careen into the abyss or simply collapse. What Lee Konstantinou has usefully described as Wallace’s “postirony”— his desire to “decouple the academic and cultural association between metafictional form and ironic knowing-ness and cynicism”— could then be described as an attempt to stabilize a dangerously positive feedback loop by routing it through a stupefying jar-gon of authenticity and sincerity.9 It could also, of course, be described as a move— as the seizure and addition to his portfolio of yet another form of cultural capital, that of the popular moral educator. This is the role Wallace plays in his well- known 2005 graduation speech, “This Is Water,” a call to empathetic mindfulness as interesting to me for its institutional setting, Kenyon College, as for its homiletic content.10 Adopting such an educative, even middlebrow role was a safe bet for a writer of otherwise unassailably high- tech literary sophistication. Magnified by the authenticating pathos of his suicide, this combination of elements has succeeded in making him a leading candidate for contemporary canonization, a term whose original religious meaning, along with its literary one, is, in his case, very much to the point.

Even so, there is something obviously wrong in reading the Wallace phenomenon simply as a tale of success, or as evidence of the success of the Program Era in general— as though “coming indoors” to collect a badge

9. Lee Konstantinou, “No Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironic Belief,” in The Legacy

of David Foster Wallace, 83– 112. See also Adam Kelly, “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction,” in Consider David Foster Wallace, ed. David Her-ing (Los Angeles: Sideshow Media Group, 2010), 131– 46. An excellent account of the broader significance of the existentialist rhetoric of authenticity for American literature is available in Abigail Cheever, Real Phonies: Cultures of Authenticity in Post- World War II

America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010).10. David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occa-

sion, about Living a Compassionate Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2009).

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of honor is all it takes to avoid the “Total Terror and Disqualification” that Sylvanshine experiences on the midwestern tarmac. Indeed, as we can gather from the latent officialese of the term disqualification, his sensation of being “cast back or propelled back in on himself” by the obliterating land-scape is recognizably akin to the self- reflexivity demanded of individuals by institutions. It is different only in that the inhuman scale of otherness which that landscape presents cannot be incorporated into the psyche as easily as the social other, the human other in relation to whom, and in dialogic concert with, the individual experiences the world as potentially infinitely meaningful. The blank “inhumanity” of the outside encloses the interior, infiltrating it, threatening at any point to reveal that infinity of meaning as nothing, as zero, perhaps even less than zero. This is the specter haunting Tony Krause in Infinite Jest, who “suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre- tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied,” and it haunts Wallace’s antic verbosity at every turn.11

How, then, to read the “Nothing” back into Wallace’s work at some-thing approaching its actual force, even as we read him as the ultimate success story of the program? The answer ventured here will be to read it as practicing an existentialism of institutions— which is to say, a commit-ment to the necessity of institutions in making and maintaining a “meaning of life.” What separates such a project from a more ordinary commitment to institutions— what separates existentialism from institutionalism— is the profound philosophic import, and even agency, it grants to the meaningless-ness outside the door.12 It has a clear, if partial, literary precursor in Ernest Hemingway, as we see in the story “A Clean, Well- Lighted Place” (1933), where an old man, a recently failed suicide, looks to a late- night café as a

11. David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1996), 305. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as IJ.12. The agency of nothingness is certainly evident in the emergence of “Wallace Studies” itself, as suggested by a literal reading of the title of Adam Kelly’s sharp resume of the critical work done on Wallace through about 2010, “David Foster Wallace: The Death of the Author and the Birth of a Discipline,” Irish Journal of American Studies (online), no. 2 (Summer 2010), www.ijasonline.com/Adam- Kelly.html. The best- known discussions of the negative agency of nothingness in the realm of Being are, first, Martin Heideg-ger’s essay “What Is Metaphysics?,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Fran-cisco: HarperCollins, 1993), 89– 110; Jean- Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992); and Alain Badiou’s Being

and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2007). Systems theory would quite reasonably put “nothingness” in scare quotes, thus to observe its paradoxically positive systemic function in and as the operational distinction being/nothingness.

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refuge from the darkness outside.13 Asked why the old man tried to hang himself, the more sympathetic of the two waiters in the café reflects,

It was a nothing he knew too well. It was all nothing and a man was nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.14

One could do much with this parodic prayer, whose nihilistic verbal excess stands in stark contrast to the simple, ordered world inside the café, a world it is tempting to read as a projection of Hemingway’s literary values, his minimalism. For our purposes here, all we need to say is that Wallace takes Hemingway’s mostly empty existential shelter and fills it with people, giving them rules to follow and things to say to each other. That is, he makes Hemingway’s café into an institution, a “program” in several senses. The ur- version of this program is Alcoholics Anonymous, where the stakes of getting with the program are as high as can be, but this is only the kernel of broader commitment to institutional form. At its heart is the small group meeting as an occasion for serial self- expression and listening. Staging that form— that ritual— again and again, AA wraps the individual in two layers of external authority— social, in the form of sponsor and group, and transcendental, in the Higher Power to which the addict is asked to submit his or her will. And behind both forms of authority lies the calendar on which consecutive days of sobriety are counted.

Much changes in the move from Hemingway to Wallace, whose stylistic managements of the “nothing” can seem perfectly opposed, the terseness of one (highly influential on the early existentialist fiction of Jean- Paul Sartre and Albert Camus) countered by the incessant talkiness of the other. And yet, that surprising note of bourgeois propriety encountered in Hemingway’s formulation— clean, well- lighted— persists in Wallace’s updated version, bespeaking the conservatism they share. Not for them

13. Ernest Hemingway, “A Clean, Well- Lighted Place,” in The Short Stories of Ernest

Hemingway (New York: Scribner’s, 1938), 379– 83.14. Hemingway, “A Clean, Well- Lighted Place,” 383.

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Sartre’s eventual gymnastic efforts to ally his version of existentialism with revolutionary Marxism. Clinging to the institutional order, clinging for dear life, Wallace’s commitment is rather to a conception of therapeutic commu-nity in which what might have become political questions— and, by impli-cation, motives for political contestation— are obediently dissolved into a series of individual ethical choices. If one believes that a more permanent and pervasive improvement of our spirits can come only as the result of a thoroughgoing transformation of the social order, this should mark a limit to one’s sympathy with Wallace’s existentialism of institutions as a whole.

2. Infinitely Institutional Being

“I am in here.” This time we are reading the first page of Infinite Jest, the second paragraph to be exact, encountering a sentence that literally brings one up short. Although he was a highly accomplished writer of short stories, Wallace was nothing if not a maximalist at heart, a devotee of what he called the “long thing” at the level of sentence, paragraph, and work. As is well known, the manuscript of Infinite Jest had been unfurling for over 750,000 words before the authorities at his publishing house stepped in and “restricted” him to 480,000 words— which still made for more than 1000 close- lined, small- font pages, including over 100 pages of endnotes. Indeed, the sheer ordeal of time commitment presented to the would- be reader of this doorstopping work is one of his most famous legacies.

Not in this sentence, though, in which narrator Hal Incandenza speaks tersely of his occupation of a delimited space. Interestingly, it’s more obscure in its meaning than most of Wallace’s sentences, which are difficult mostly in that it takes considerable mental energy to follow all the zigzags of their amusingly agonized articulacy. The difficulty in this short sentence is one of simple reference: What does Hal mean by “here”? In the very first sentence of the book, he has told us, “I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. My posture is consciously congruent to the shape of my hard chair. This is a cold room in University Administra-tion, wood- walled, Remington- hung, double- windowed against the Novem-ber heat, insulated from Administrative sounds by the reception area out-side” (IJ, 3). Much effort is made to represent the sheer enclosedness of this institutional enclosure at the University of Arizona, where the author got his MFA in fiction writing, and we could be forgiven for momentarily thinking that the “I am in here” that directly follows it refers to the same space. But no, it must be that the enclosure is now Hal’s own cranium,

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the self he is stuck inside. Years earlier, Wallace had spoken of the reader as being “sort of marooned in her own skull” and had famously offered his own fiction as a tunnel out of the kind of isolation that Hal seems to be experiencing in the office of University Administration.15 In that case, the enclosure of consciousness was already in effect even in Hal’s labori-ous description of the office as enclosure. And yet, we have no reason to think that the space of University Administration is merely a projection of Hal’s. And so what do we do with this doubling of interiors? In order to answer this question, we need to reach for a fully dialectical understand-ing of the form of enclosure we encounter here and throughout this novel, and indeed throughout Wallace’s entire institution- obsessed oeuvre, one that pays heed to its thorough coarticulation of the spaces of individual and institutional consciousness.

One has to work for this dialectical interpretation of the imagery of inhabitation in Infinite Jest, but in the final novel it has become the whole game. The institution at issue in The Pale King is, to be sure, a specific one— the Internal Revenue Service— and that specificity matters to the crowd of characters whose arrival, induction, and initiation into its ranks makes up the lion’s share of whatever plot the novel can be said to have. Like Infinite Jest before it, but in an even purer form, it is a novel of institu-

tionalization and marks a definitive reversal, in literary historical terms, of the generally grim post- 1960s implications of that term. The institution in Wallace is not a place of gothic entrapment and abuse, as it had been in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1964) or, a more resonant example, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), with their harrowing tales of shock therapy “punishment.” What in Plath is a continual shuttling between the “bell jar” as patriarchal social structure, on the one hand, and as the frightening enclosure of individual self- consciousness, on the other, in Wallace comes to rest on the latter, which mirrors the predatory nothing-ness of the Great Outdoors. Ideally— but alas only ideally— the institution is the safe space in between interiority and exteriority, a kind of turnstile where one is continually converted into or meshed with the other.

We can already see Wallace beginning to turn the corner on the paranoid understanding of institutions in The Broom of the System, whose plot takes off from the “escape” of Lenore Beadsman’s 92- year- old great- grandmother, a former student of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s, from a Shaker

15. Larry McCaffery, “An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” Review of Contemporary

Fiction 13, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 127.

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Heights nursing home.16 Was hers a 1960s- style flight over the cuckoo’s nest, an act of self- liberation from the Combine? Not really, at least not according to her son, who, having heard her Wittgensteinian- pragmatist discourses upon the meaning of, say, a broom, which meaning only derives from its use, decides that she has disappeared because “she feels useless. She feels, felt, as if she has no function, over there, in the nursing home.”17 So, by implication, if she had been a broom of that system, if she had had the function that the Chief had in Kesey’s mental hospital— remember, he did the sweeping— she might have been willing to stay. Even better, per-haps, if she had been Infinite Jest ’s Don Gately, whose heroic sense of purpose springs directly from his being on the staff of the halfway house for addicts that sits near the center of the novel. In a profound reversal of the usual rhetoric of liberation, what we have here is profound desire to be a tool, to be useful like Sisyphus, who at least has a job.

It seems fair to call this the existentialization of Wittgensteinian pragmatism and to describe The Pale King as its culmination. The existen-tial heroes in this novel are indeed functionaries, the theory of their hero-ism laid out in full in a college lecture class that future IRS examiner Chris Fogle stumbles into by accident: “‘I wish to inform you that the accounting profession to which you aspire is, in fact, heroic,’” says the professor in his final peroration, a kind of inverse Henry V. “‘The truth is that what you soon go home to your carols and toddies and books and CPA examina-tion preparation guides to stand on the cusp of is— heroism’” (PK, 228). And I think this point can be cautiously generalized: whether it is a nursing home, a halfway house, Alcoholics Anonymous, a tennis academy, mam-moth federal bureaucracy, or the university, the “institution” in Wallace is first and foremost a communal antidote to atomism, a laboriously iterated wall against the nihilism attendant to solitude.18 The “antirebels” who com-mit to the function and furtherance of these institutions are to be admired, not reviled.

Michael North was the first to note how one of the primary themes of Infinite Jest is continued in the primer Wallace wrote on the history of the mathematics of infinity, Everything and More (2003), which establishes the

16. David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (New York: Penguin, 1987).17. Wallace, The Broom of the System, 150.18. I say “cautiously” because, of course, these institutions are also importantly specific in their social ends. In conversation, Stefan Weger helpfully pointed out to me how, for instance, the tennis academy in Infinite Jest must, at a minimum, be held under suspicion for the way it sets its inmates in mutually alienating competition with one another.

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existential risk awaiting those who attempt to chase infinity to the point that it decomposes any sense of the solidity of the real.19 This is what is some-times described, after Hegel, as a “bad” infinity, the infinity of one damn thing after another endlessly. In Wallace, as Roberto Natalini reminds us, bad infinity is called Vicious Infinite Regress, or VIR, and its solution was sought within math itself, in the “good” infinity of a completed concept.20 (This duality is mirrored in the concept of the zero, infinity’s twin, which can function either as a useful mathematical limit or portal to the abyss.) The hero of the primer is Georg Cantor, the mathematician who “tamed” infinity and conducted it as a bound quantity into the human institution of mathe-matics. Natalini has several excellent suggestions for how the mathemat-ics of infinity can be thought of as informing the novel’s form, but I would venture a simpler account, one that emphasizes the capacity of math to describe the ideal form of a literary institution. Here, the verbosity of Infi-

nite Jest becomes visible as an exercise in bound infinity, a “volume” that would shelter its inhabitants in a building of words.21 This is the maximalist version of the clean, well- lighted place, a social medium for the inversion of points of view, of reversals between inside and outside, that Natalini sees as driving Wallace’s project. In an interview, Wallace agreed that the form of the novel could be described as “fractal”— more particularly as the fractal geometrical figure called a Sierpinski gasket— suggesting an effort on his part to devise a formal mechanism for the novel that could make it count as a bound infinity (Figure 1).22 Note how the Sierpinski gasket maintains its original classic geometric outline, the triangle, but fills it with more and more detail. The outermost triangle is the initial act of human aesthetic will, defining the artwork as distinct from the outside world, while the largest subtriangles of the original transformation might be understood in terms of the novel’s three main plots. Finally, the potentially endless accumulation of

19. Michael North, “A More Than Infinite Jest,” in Machine- Age Comedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 163– 83; David Foster Wallace, Everything and More: A Com pact

History of [Infinity] (New York: Norton, 1993).20. Natalini, “David Foster Wallace and the Mathematics of Infinity,” 43– 58.21. For Alain Badiou, Cantor’s transfinite mathematics has something like the oppo-site significance: since the completed concept of infinity cannot be justified intuitively, it comes to represent the radical disconnection of math from human interest; the “nothing-ness” of the mathematically describable realm of Being floats as an invisible remainder in any situation, awaiting the Event of its destructive intrusion into the status quo. It is not a game one plays.22. David Foster Wallace, interview by Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm, April 11, 1996, www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw081127david_foster_wallace.

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detail is the visual equivalent of the novel’s incessant verbalization within a bound fictional space.

Ideally, institutions such as Ennet House or the IRS would be the occasions of a kind of benignly bound infinity like this, the inverse of the nauseatingly unbound infinity of the midwestern landscape. That binding would be, in turn, a benign form of disciplining. This is the account of ten-nis given in Infinite Jest by the academy’s paragon of drill and discipline, Gerhardt Schtitt, who is presented in the novel as a sort of Hollywood Nazi in tall black boots and epaulets but is admired by the novel all the same. For him, the beauty of the sport of tennis is not about discovering patterns in an unbound infinity of potential variables but rather about orienting one-self effectively to the “Cantorian continuum of infinities of possible move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained, this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncon-trolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and imagination . . . that made it, finally, a game” (IJ, 82). “Mathemati-cally uncontrolled but humanly contained”: which is to say, unbound infinity trumped by institutional power. The ultimate authority here is not math but humanity. Neither Wallace nor Wallace’s novel has any serious problem with the “yes, OK, granted . . . whiff of proto- fascist potential” hovering around Schtitt’s regime, which values “anchor nicely the soul and course of a life,” or with the idea that it is only in submission to the human institutional order that individuals have a chance to survive and thrive (IJ, 82). Wallace would

Figure 1. Fractal form: The Sierpinski gasket.

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almost certainly have agreed with Émile Durkheim when the latter claimed, in the essay “The Spirit of Discipline” (1903), that “human conduct— being no longer constrained— loses itself in the void, the emptiness of which is disguised and adorned with the specious label of the infinite.”23 His only disagreement with Durkheim might have been in holding out hope for the different kind of infinity, the “infoliate” infinity one might discover in the exis-tential shelter of institutions.

It’s no surprise, then, to find Wallace, in the role of college teacher, making no apologies for being “hard- ass” in the challenging syllabus he drew up for English 67, which he taught at Pomona College in California in the spring semester of 2005. Much has been made of the quirky humanity of these artifacts of the pedagogical situation, but I would point more simply to their surprisingly firm and unapologetic embrace of institutional disci-pline. On the first page of the syllabus, Wallace described the class as “a kind of boot camp that helps prepare you for more advanced and/or spe-cialized lit courses down the line” and made clear that his standards for writing were going to be high: “Take another look at Course Rules & Pro-cedures Items 4 and 7 and page 4 of the syllabus. I know that many pro-fessors say this kind of hard- ass stuff at the beginning of the term but don’t actually mean it or enforce it as the course wears on. I, however, do mean it, and I will enforce it.”24 Not Gerhardt Schtitt, perhaps, but assertive in the role of educational disciplinarian, a role which, in a sense, he continues to perform from beyond the grave whenever his readers attempt to live up to the demands of his novels.

How else to describe his spectral spiritual role in the great collec-tive self- binding that became known as “Infinite Summer,” in which thou-sands of readers came together online in 2009 to coordinate and reflect upon their experience of reading the novel at a rate of seventy- five pages a week over a total of ninety- two days?25 Kathleen Fitzpatrick has intelligently analyzed this event in light of Wallace’s fears for the atomizing effects of media technology, noting how, as a thoroughly interactive medium, the affordances of the Internet might seem to contravene those fears.26 I would

23. Émile Durkheim, Moral Education, trans. Everett K. Wilson and Herman Schnurer (New York: Dover, 2002), 48.24. “David (Foster) Wallace’s Syllabus,” à la Sophia (blog), September 17, 2008, alasophia .blogspot.com/2008/09/david- foster- wallaces- syllabus.html.25. Infinite Summer, infinitesummer.org/.26. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “Infinite Summer: Reading, Empathy, and the Social Network,” in The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, 182– 207.

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instead emphasize the event’s disciplinary dimension, keyed to the rigorous keeping of a calendar. Convening a virtual community of “endurance biblio-philes,” these people would take shelter in— and shelter from— the novel as a group, motivating each other to keep forging ahead through its seemingly endless difficulties. The constant temptation here was to “drop out,” that is, to quit reading the novel, and Infinite Summer was meant to offer mildly coercive motivation to the individual to keep going.

One common emphasis in the commentary posted on the site is on the necessity of the reader’s participation in making meaning in Wallace’s text; but, marking another turn away from the sixties, this sort of popu-larized poststructuralism is interesting more for how it seems to burden readers with responsibilities than for how it “liberates” them to make of the text what they will. Another, reciprocal discussion goes to the question of Wallace’s “genius,” whether the now- empty biographical center of the tex-tual institution can be trusted with so much of the reader’s time and effort. “I would never have guessed Infinite Jest would become such a large part of my life,” wrote Nick Maniatis, the proprietor of the Wallace- centered web-site Howling Fantods. “In fact, I rarely consider just how much time I have spent with this novel, because honestly, sometimes it scares me.”27 So, too, is Wallace’s wisdom questioned in his representation, via a heavily dialectical first- person narration, of African Americans, which they worry might be racist, evidence that Wallace’s “infinity” of sympathetic imagina-tion is terminally white middle- class suburban. But all in all, the impression seems to be, as put by Maniatis, that (despite the tens if not hundreds of solitary hours needed to finish it) “this book makes me feel connected to other people.”

As the summer came to an end, one reader was inspired to credit the founder of the virtual book club with “creat[ing] an Ennet House envi-ronment for us right here at Infinite Summer.”28 The sense of collective achievement in having finished the book was unmistakable, a triumph for this virtual institution and for the institution of literature as such. But, of course, this was just the triumphal procession of those who came through. A fuller picture of the event would not forget the many— and apparently there were a great many— readers who in fact dropped out of this virtual institution along the way, by turns shamefully and defiantly unequal to the

27. Nick Maniatis, “In Search of Firm Ground,” Infinite Summer, September 4, 2009, infinitesummer.org/archives/1633.28. Matthew Baldwin, “Sincerely Yours, David Foster Wallace,” Infinite Summer, Septem-ber 14, 2009, infinitesummer.org/archives/1741.

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challenge of a confusing, boring, outrageously time- consuming novel. Per-versely, but appropriately, their departure from the program was a distant echo of the author’s own more conclusive departure and a similar testa-ment to the limits of any institutional “success.”

3. The Whiteness of the Pale King

So who were the people who became present to each other through the mediation of Infinite Summer? One can examine the online commen-tary for clues, but, hidden by a veil of mediation, their exact demographic nature is unknown. And yet, the hesitancy one experiences on this ques-tion, as one attempts to coordinate the technical anonymity of his readers with a strong, if furtive, suspicion that they are largely young, educated, middle- class white people, is not extrinsic to the work itself. In fact, I would say that this hesitation, or toggling, between anonymous technicality, on the one hand, and racial specificity, on the other, is a hallmark of the technomodernist aesthetic formation. Writing in this vein, Wallace did not simply participate in the aesthetic system of the Program Era. He also dis-tinguished himself from other denizens of that system who had different resources of cultural and experiential capital to work with and hewed to dif-ferent models of literary value.

For instance— as one feels most intensely, ironically, in reading the black dialect sections of Infinite Jest but also in reading his early, coauthored book on rap music, Signifying Rappers (1990)— Wallace did not feel empowered to ground his fiction in the cultural capital of ethni-cally or racially marked experience, the project I have called high cultural pluralism.29 Instead, he wrote as what he might have called a “weenie- American,” a category inclusive of what he described, referring to his colle-giate self, as a “complete just total banzai weenie studier”30 or, in another

29. Near the beginning of Signifying Rappers, we find: “Please know we’re very sensitive to this question: what business have 2 white yuppies trying to do a sampler on rap?” The answer lies not in familiarity with black experience but in the authors’ felicitous discovery of a shared, detailed knowledge of the history of this musical form, that is, in a nerdy command of detail: “This was all just data. We agreed on it, and on how it was curious that we both had such strange, distant facts down cold.” Refusing, narratively, to main-tain the cautious sense of cultural distance expressed here, the dialect sections of Infinite

Jest have difficulty differentiating themselves from the long tradition of disrespectful racial mimicry in US culture. See Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace, Signifying Rappers:

Rap and Race in the Urban Present (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1990), 20, 23.30. Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, 150.

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context, a “born tech- science wienie” (IJ, 154). In either case, it is an iden-tity category produced in and by the culture of the school. To be a weenie- American— or geek American, or nerd American, in this context the subtle differences between these terms is not important— is the technomodern-ist’s version of having a cultural identity, a paradoxically nonethnic ethnicity, or technicity. In Benjamin Nugent’s illuminating American Nerd: The Story

of My People (2008), white nerd identity is born in the partial erasure of the immigrant ethnicity of the early- twentieth- century “greasy grind,” the hard-working type called on to play foil to the hale and hearty WASP jock whose most famous avatars were Teddy Roosevelt and, later, George Plimpton.31 Indeed, in having been, and in advertising himself as, so good at tennis, and in lavishing so much attention on sport, Wallace risked the implosion of the binary opposition of nerd and jock so crucial to the culture of the school. This calamity is avoided only by the relative nerdiness of his chosen sport, in which human bodies are never in dangerous contact, only connected through geometric lines and points of force exerted at a safe distance. And yet the patina of “jock” that Wallace puts on the “nerd” tends to whiten that nerd, removing the figure all the farther from any substantive identification with an ethnic culture. At its extreme, in its fixation on the ways and means of technical systems, this version of identity begins to look “robotic” (IJ, 694), like Hal in Infinite Jest, who is reminiscent of the partly humanized computer of the same name encountered in the novel and film 2001 (1968).

Thus, while technomodernism strongly identifies with the impressive intellectual authority of science, it is subject to being exposed as lacking, a pale substitute, as it were, for the richly emotionally resonant communi-ties and traditions that guide the work of writers such as Philip Roth or Toni Morrison. Hence the particular appeal, for a white kid, of rap music, whose literary version is the verbal racial mimicry of Infinite Jest. In the high cul-tural pluralist mode, the debt one owes is to family and ethnic tradition, whose funds of experiential capital are used (not without agony) to gener-ate an epic literature of cultural establishment. In Wallace, by contrast, the debt is to the “system” or institution itself, with its purely formal markers of success. Hence his fear of being nothing— nothing, at any rate, that will be recognizable in positive terms in the literary field.

Until he began to write The Pale King, Wallace’s accessions to a more positive form of ethnic pride were conducted in private. For instance, according to his biographer, for many years he kept a poster on his wall of

31. Benjamin Nugent, American Nerd: The Story of My People (New York: Scribner, 2008).

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his namesake, the Scottish warrior- hero William Wallace, going into battle, as captured again in Mel Gibson’s film Braveheart (1995). In meandering conversation with David Lipsky, visiting on assignment from Rolling Stone around the time of the publication of Infinite Jest, the two writers turn to their respective tastes in movies. Finding nothing to respond to in a film Lip-sky admired, Schindler’s List (1993), Wallace makes the question of his own ethnicity— and the racial fantasies attached thereto— obvious:

Braveheart I really liked. ’Cause that’s my fucking ancestor. . . . I would go— I think I saw that four times. Just to hear guys in kilts going, “Wal- lace, Wal- lace!” (Laughs).

Even though it was not, it was not probably the most sophisticated. But the analogy is, I think probably, if you’re Jewish, and you’ve got all that ethnic history like in your consciousness, Spielberg dudn’t have to do much. To push your buttons. And that thing . . . I mean Braveheart, I wept, as he cried “Freedom.” Which I’m sure from the outside looks cheesy.32

Here we have the makings of reading Wallace as a Scottish American writer, linked across the distance of decades to Thomas Dixon’s The Clans-

men (1905) and D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), also inspired by the heroism of William Wallace.33 Except that the dynamics of identifica-tion with the hero are now almost immediately short- circuited, redirected toward something more modest: “He was perfect, though: he was never weak, he was never cowardly, he was never . . . There was no, there was nothing in there— I couldn’t recognize myself in him at all, you know.”34

But to say that he cannot recognize himself in the perfect “nothing” of Gibson’s William Wallace is not to say that this figure is canceled as an object of emulative desire, only that to identify with him is to identify with nothing. The “nothingness” in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) had designated the freedom of the human subject, vested by this indeterminate negativity with the wretched capacity for free will, but Wallace saw it other-wise.35 For Wallace, “nothing” is the seductive object— or nonobject— of

32. Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, 168.33. These links are traced into the recent past of the Hollywood studio system in J. D. Connor, “‘The Projections’: Allegories of Industrial Crisis in Neoclassical Hollywood,” Representations 71 (Summer 2000): 48– 62.34. Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, 169; emphasis in the original.35. Wallace’s second undergraduate thesis was a recognizably “Sartrean” critique

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a death drive, a destination of pure authenticity. Its fatal attraction can be avoided only by getting with the program, submitting to a Higher Power, ad infinitum. The problem being that, ultimately, the “program,” too, is revealed as nothing, a congeries of empty formalities. This was already visible to the close reader of Hemingway, whose story does not, after all, position the clean well- lighted place in perfect opposition to the nada outside, as we see already in the first sentence: “It was late and every one had left the café except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light.”36 There are shadows even within the well- lighted place. What’s more, we shouldn’t miss the subtle (but once you notice it, obvious) link between cleanliness and nothingness, where the latter is, in a sense, a radicalized version of the former, emptied even of light. To put it in old- fashioned deconstructive terms, an institution against nothing is always also an institution of nothing. The antimatter of existence is everywhere, utterly indifferent to human distinctions between inside and outside.

Wallace’s last- minute swerve from a positive identification with his Scottish ancestor is important, and not only for how it divests him of a “white pride” the literary field could not, in its current configuration, abide. It occurs at the hinge between racial community and a different concep-tion altogether, strongly reminiscent of the “community” theorized by a series of European thinkers, including Jean- Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, Giorgio Agamben, and Roberto Esposito.37 The keynote of all these theo-rizations is their refusal of the idea of community as shared property— whether of land, spirit, culture, or blood, all considered to have been dis-

(though conducted within the protocols of Anglo- American analytic philosophy) of Richard Taylor’s famous 1962 paper, “On Fatalism.” Taylor’s paper had argued that, logically, since any statement we make about the future right now is already either true or false, nothing we do in the present could possibly influence that future. The young Wallace was deeply disturbed by this surprisingly defensible conclusion and mounted a long technical argu-ment in favor of our freedom to make the future. In the latter stages of his career, the value of individual freedom persists but now in the narrower sense that one can and should choose what to pay attention to. Wallace’s thesis was posthumously published as Fate,

Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).36. Hemingway, “A Clean, Well- Lighted Place,” 379.37. See, for instance, Jean- Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Maurice Blanchot, The Unavow-

able Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1988); Giorgio Agam-ben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); and Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy Campbell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).

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credited by fascism— and its replacement by an idea of community as a gathering around a void, a nothing, an unpayable debt. For Esposito, the thing shared in community “is not characterized by what is proper but by what is improper, or even more drastically, by the other; by a voiding, be it partial or whole, of property into its negative; by removing what is properly one’s own that invests and de- centers the proprietary subject, forcing him to take leave of himself, to alter himself.”38 Emptied of positive content, but still giving structure to human life, this conception of community might even be represented as an abjectly featureless bureaucracy.

Although incomplete, The Pale King is more consistent in texture than its Pynchon- addled predecessor and gains coherence from putting a single institution at its core. But not any institution: what makes the IRS interesting as a center of thematic gravity is the way its binding disci-plinary energies move both inward, toward its employees, and outward to the nation from which it collects money. The IRS is, first of all, a bureau-cratic world unto itself, and the very fact that it is largely loathed by the citi-zens it serves draws its inmates into closer camaraderie. In this the novel approaches the condition of fictional workplace ethnography, taking reams of individual testimony and shaping it into a larger picture that both human-izes and generalizes the experience of a certain class of workers. Through the plot contrivance of a public relations initiative meant, so it is said (in fact, it is occupational therapy, a secret exercise in the talking cure), to “humanize, demystify the Service, help citizens understand how hard and important their job is” (PK, 100), several examiners in succession sit before a video camera and tell their stories.

And this, in a way, is the novel in miniature: it has no protago-nist, resolving the competitive struggle for dominance Alex Woloch has described as typical of the classical realist “character system.”39 Instead, the novel reaches toward the ideal— very much a Program Era ideal, and one shared by AA— of serial self- expression, of everyone “finding his voice” and having his or her say in turn. Of course, given his special relationship to the author, we might be tempted to make an exception for the figure of one “David Wallace,” who (although his nonfictional counterpart never did) has gotten a job at the IRS while taking a leave of absence from college. It would be perfectly conventional for this author- character to function as

38. Esposito, Communitas, 7.39. Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protago-

nist in the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

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a crypto- protagonist, the individual sensibility through which the life of the institution will be experienced. And yet, this is not the form taken by the published version, and the pile of notes and manuscript left on his desk makes it clear that this was not the plan. The one called “Embryonic Out-line” reads in part:

2. Being individual vs. being part of larger things— paying taxes, being “lone gun” in IRS vs. team player.David Wallace disappears 100 pp in.Central Deal: Realism, monotony. Plot a series of set- ups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens.

David Wallace disappears— becomes creature of the system. (PK, appendix, 546)

Note how disappearing from the novel is tantamount to disappearing into the system it represents; how becoming a “creature of the system” is offered not as an insult but as a kind of ideal of institutional being. Of course, this apotheosis of belonging has been profoundly ironized by the event of the author’s death, which, as Brian McHale has noted, confers an unsettling added significance upon the phrase “David Wallace disappears.”40 After that event, and reading this phrase, the IRS fades as the contemporary institution of literature suddenly snaps into focus, the whole package of objects and ritual practices of which it is made. In that dimension, the real death of the author is what makes way for the reader’s meaningful labor of mourning, which would fill Wallace’s death- hollowed inscriptions with com-plete significance.

4. The Debt to Nothing

Not least of the reasons to accentuate the “nothing” in a reading of Wallace is in how it provokes us to find the limits of his seductively fine mind, all the better to defend ourselves from it. If the very idea that we might want or need such a defense seems strange, a violation of hagiographic proto-col, or even simple decency, this may be because Wallace’s canonization is occurring in a time of widespread rejection of the negative in literary studies, a general foreclosure on the possibilities of dialectical thinking in favor of cheerleading. Responsive to a general sense of duress in the humanities disciplines, and in literary culture at large, scholars have increasingly been

40. McHale, “The Pale King, Or, The White Visitation,” 208.

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dissuaded from exercising the critical function, instead setting themselves the task of what Eve Sedgwick called “reparative” reading.41 In this context, the unusually intense connections Wallace seems to make with readers can serve as an emblem of the continuing possibilities of literature as such, of its capacity to matter. Why would anyone (any literary scholar, in particular) want to mess with that? Why not simply join the celebration?

And yet, quiet as it might be kept, there is much to be gained from our refusal, as readers, to enter into Wallace’s project and finish it on his terms. This is true, I think, on several levels, but especially true insofar as one considers a work like The Pale King as a political, and not simply thera-peutic, fiction. Actually, decoding the politics of the novel is not that hard: Wallace admires the IRS as the mechanism by which the indebtedness of individuals to the nation- state is measured and periodically discharged. Set in the 1980s, it would, on this level, seem to present a straightforwardly liberal critique of Reaganomics as promoting an ethos of rampant mar-ketization and social irresponsibility. Not only have marginal rates been lowered while defense spending has increased, a new regime of compli-ance has been installed that will focus not on civic responsibility but on a pure calculation of the rate of return for every audit: “Distilled to its essence, the question was whether and to what extent the IRS should be operated like a for- profit business” (PK, 83). Given the novel’s obvious revulsion at this prospect, the liberal reader is likely to forgive Wallace for his credulity in the face of “maverick” Senator John McCain, whose 2000 candidacy for the US presidency he respectfully followed for Rolling Stone, only to see the straight talker insist repeatedly, eight years later, that Sarah Palin was the single most qualified person he could think of to hold the office of vice president of the United States.42

The question is whether Wallace could forgive himself for his error in judgment. While it is fair to describe his investment in the institutional order of things as “conservative,” and to note that his investment in the symbolic value of ordinary whiteness is very much shared by the Republican Party, a book celebrating the secular culture of IRS bureaucracy could hardly have been more resistant to contemporary right- wing sensibilities. Indeed, if, as seems to be the case, Wallace is the author of an anonymous online testi-

41. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Peda-

gogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 123– 51.42. David Foster Wallace, “Up Simba,” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown, 2006), 156– 234.

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monial to the value of Granada House— the halfway house in Allston, Mas-sachusetts, where, in 1989, he began his long engagement with twelve- step therapy— he can be counted an explicit apologist of the welfare state. Speaking at length of the benefits of the disciplinary environment at Gra-nada, he concludes the testimonial by calculating the investment made in his mental health by the state as against the taxes he was eventually able to pay as a functional and reasonably well- paid writer and teacher:

I am . . . a productive member of [my] community. Citizens or gov-ernment agencies that are considering financial support of Granada House might be interested in the following breakdown. From 1983 to 1989 I paid almost no taxes, cost two different health insurance companies almost $100,000 in treatments, institutionalizations, and psychiatric care, cost myself and my parents another $70,000– $80,000 when insurance ran out, and cost two different states thou-sands of dollars when my own support ran out and I had to declare myself indigent. In 1990 and 1991, I paid no real taxes but also didn’t cost anyone anything. From 1992 to present, I have cost family, gov-ernment, and charitable institutions nothing, have paid well over $325,000 in federal, state, and municipal taxes, and have donated a least another $100,000 to various charities. I don’t know what it cost to put me through Granada House for six months (I myself paid $20 a week in rent, though this was sliding- scale because I was broke), but by even the coldest type of cost- accounting, it appears to me that it was worth it for everyone.43

In this instance, liberal technocracy, and not traditional morality, gets the last word: by supporting organizations such as Granada House, the state is making a sound long- term financial investment in its citizens and thus in itself.

Even so, the conservatism of Wallace’s embrace of institutional authority does point to some obvious limitations in the perspective taken in his last novel, which, given the nature of the organization at its center, can-

43. “An Ex- Resident’s Story,” posted on the website of Granada House, www.granada house.org/people/letters_from_our_alum.html. While no name is attached to the entry, the author is generally assumed, due to striking stylistic and other correspondences, to be David Foster Wallace. A discussion of the provenance of this letter is available in Maria Bustillos’s illuminating discussion of Wallace and the genre of self- help. See Maria Busti-llos, “Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self- Help Library,” The Awl, April 5, 2011, www .theawl.com/2011/04/inside- david- foster- wallaces- private- self- help- library.

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not help but come off as narrowly nationalist in focus, a regression of sorts from the weird new map of North America imagined in Infinite Jest. Set in the white heartland, the more recent novel accepts the nation as a naturally bounded unit of mutual obligation, as expressed by the payment of federal taxes, while the rest of the world more or less falls away. In his book Debt:

The First 5,000 Years (2012), David Graeber summarizes a body of recent economic thought, called “primordial debt theory,” that seems uncannily consonant with the community- in- debt imagined by Wallace.44 Here, gov-ernments, imposing taxes, are understood to “have become the guardians of the debt that all citizens have to one another,” which “debt is the essence of society itself.” Indeed, for primordial debt theorists, as in postproprietary conceptions of community, “human existence is itself a form of debt.”45

But for Graeber, the metaphysical “existence = debt” equation must be recast as a historical description of the global political domination of the indebted. This flip in perspective cannot be managed within the imagi-native enclosure of The Pale King, leaving a large blind spot in its relation to the world in which it was posthumously published. Personal obligations are one thing— they have always structured social life. By contrast, the lan-guage and practice of “debt” is a problem for Graeber because it quantifies and abstracts these social bonds from their context, enabling the indiffer-ence of the creditor to the debtor’s well- being. More pointedly, as argued by Maurizio Lazzarato, in The Making of the Indebted Man (2011), the “debtor- creditor relationship . . . intensifies mechanisms of exploitation and domina-tion at every level of society. . . . Everyone is a ‘debtor,’ accountable to and guilty before capital.”46 In poorer countries, the people are controlled by the states that hold debt in their name, payable ad infinitum to people they will never meet. In the United States, whose immense debt burden is anoma-lously a form of power— as creditor nations become, in a sense, indebted to American debt for their own economic growth— it nonetheless justifies the bipartisan dismantling of the institutions of the welfare state. In the wake of this dismantling, the social role of “student,” so important to Wallace’s career, goes hand in hand with a notoriously large debt burden, unforgiv-ingly enforced by the US federal government, which now profits from it.

44. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011), 43– 71.45. Graeber, Debt, 56.46. Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal

Condition, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2012), n.p. See also Richard Dienst, The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing against the Common Good (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2011).

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The Pale King offers a simple and powerful, if implicit, answer to the problem of divestment in the welfare state: we should pay more taxes! And if it arguably shows insufficient interest in who “we” are exactly, beyond the human- American norm, it would be wrong to miss the sheer quixotic glory of this message, as impressive in its way as the whole idea of writ-ing a long novel about a painfully boring institution. That said, a whole new vista on the novel’s contemporary political context opens up when we juxta-pose it with a text substantially more radical in conception and execution than itself, one of the more interesting works of so- called Conceptual Poet-ics (Figure 2). Mathew Timmons’s eight- hundred- page antiepic CREDIT (2009) is a compilation, in its first part, of scans, labeled A through Z, of the many credit card and other solicitations the author received over a short period in 2007.47 The second part consists of increasingly strident demands for payment of his debts, labeled 1 through 10, that he received a few years later, after the Great Recession had begun. In a sense, with the cheerful come- on of the credit card solicitation, this brings us back to the consumer-ist world of Infinite Jest, except insofar as that novel remained stuck on the problem— a First World problem if ever there was one— of consumer pleni-tude. In that context, the role of the disciplinary institution is to produce

47. Mathew Timmons, CREDIT (Los Angeles: Blanc Press, 2009).

Figure 2. CREDIT for sale.

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an artificial scarcity, depriving the addict of the destructively entertaining substances he would otherwise certainly find a way to get. In CREDIT, by contrast, as credit turns into debit, letters to numbers, it appears that the author suddenly can’t afford anything. The largest of his debts, appropri-ately enough, is for student loans totaling more than $78,000, which he is warned are about to be turned over to the Department of Education Debt Collection Service and perhaps also referred to the Department of Jus-tice. Although on its face exceedingly bland, a stack of scanned junk mail, including torn envelopes, with much of its identifying information redacted, the author claims for his work the pathos of self- expression: “A large for-mat, full color, hardbound book, CREDIT is a highly revealing and emo-tional work chronicling a personal tale of credit. In 2007 irrational exuber-ance and promises of financial fortune hung in the air, mailboxes were filled with gracefully worded offers of credit. But in 2009, the shape of the financial environment changed radically and mailboxes still filled up with statements of credit. Something had to change, offer turned to obligation.” This was the pitch made at the only place CREDIT (nominally published by Timmons’s own Blanc Press) can be acquired, an online, on- demand self- publishing company called Lulu.com, where it can be purchased for $199, or $299 for the electronic version.48

Where Infinite Summer called out to endurance bibliophiles every-where, inviting them to bind themselves in virtual community, Timmons repels any community of readers with a deliberately unreasonable sales price— the maximum that Lulu.com allows its authors to charge, just as eight hundred pages is the longest it allows books to be.49 This recasts an otherwise relatively worthless- seeming text as an unattainable liter-ary luxury item, even as it ingeniously reinvents a weird form of artistic autonomy in the least prestigious precincts of the publishing industry. As an art- object, it is something beautiful to behold— most likely from afar, as an idea. As a literary work, as something to read, it is kind of a nothing, and we

48. See www.lulu.com/shop/mathew- timmons/credit/hardcover/product- 18692829.html. Timmon’s promotional language was subsequently moved to the website of Insert Blanc Press, www.insertblancpress.net/products/credit- by- mathew- timmons, although the book is still available from Lulu.com.49. That said, a different sort of community is called forth in the unusually many promo-tional blurbs that appear on the back cover and first page of the book, mostly from mem-bers of the Los Angeles experimental poetry scene, of which Timmons is one. The “blurb economy” so noticeable in book publishing, but perhaps especially noticeable in small press poetry, has its own nonmonetary structures of personal credit and personal debt, which would appear to be part of Timmons’s point.

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owe it nothing even if we do take distant note of the pathos of the author’s financial situation. In this literary transaction, at least, everyone comes out debt-free. Keeping faith in irony, the payoff of this conceptual project is not literary experience as we usually think of it, and as Wallace doles out in positive gobs, but the mordant negativity of critique: baldly laying bare the documents of the debtor- creditor relation, CREDIT refuses the idealization of debt as the price we should gladly pay for community, national or other-wise. Out there in the space of the market, in the United States and beyond, where the office- bound Pale King cannot quite see it, there’s a kind of war going on.

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