5

HIS CAPITAL FLUSH

DESPAIRING OVER WORK AND VALUE IN OBLIVION

Think of the letters given over to flames and garbage dumps, the unsorted boxes of papers lying in attics and basements, the notebooks scrawled in drunken, half-legible squiggles and codes, kept in fading ink, never to be deciphered. What glories, what banalities, what secrets!

—DONALD JUSTICE, “OBLIVION: VARIATIONS ON A THEME”

WHY DOES work often feel futile in a postmodern and neoliberal society? Why do even many highly rewarding jobs seem dehumanizing and attenuating amid superabundant wealth and leisure? Philip Mirowski argues, “Not only does neoliberalism deconstruct any special status for human labor, but”—in terms resonant with my readings throughout—“it lays waste to older distinctions between production and consumption rooted in the labor theory of value, and reduces the human being to an arbitrary bundle of ‘investments,’ skill sets, temporary alliances.”¹ These are some of the areas of a fully ascendant neoliberal culture that Wallace probes in Oblivion. “Probably all jobs are…filled with horrible boredom and despair and quiet little bits of fulfillment that are very hard to tell anybody else about,” Wallace said in an interview about Oblivion in 2004 (CW 129). As he read the post-9/11 American economy, Wallace was willing to extrapolate his own work conditions into another of his hoped-for universalisms, the notion that all jobs led to the despair that increasingly characterized the position in the office of literary art he had decided to take in 1985.

In this story collection Wallace begins mediating his observations on work and value through a system he had come to know well: being a relatively well-known novelist in the age of celebrity. Repeatedly, Oblivion describes what Wallace thought had happened to him upon reaching “the Show.” While only parts of Brief Interviews were first published after Infinite Jest and the fame it granted, all of Oblivion was; all of it postdates his 1997 MacArthur as well. Terry Schmidt, the murderous advertising man in “Mister Squishy,” is thirty-four, the age Wallace turned a few weeks after Infinite Jest was published (O 17). For Schmidt’s despair over his “smallness within a grinding professional machine you can’t believe you once had the temerity to think you could help change” (O 31–32) and his desire to be “superior, more…central, meaningful” (O 30), read Wallace’s worries about the place of Infinite Jest in the literary canon and his inability to transcend the commercialism in which Schmidt is enveloped. Wallace did not sign the story initially, using the pseudonym Elizabeth Klemm, his new attempt to write as a “NOBODY.”² The opening of “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” commingles spider, convict, and book “releases”: “Then just as I was being released in late 1996”—about the midpoint between Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Supposedly Fun Thing reading tours?—“Mother won a small product liability settlement and used the money” to get botched plastic surgery (O 182). The main result of a monetary influx here is vanity—and then worse consequences.³

One of Wallace’s typescript drafts of Oblivion’s title story included as its epigraph, “What glories, what banalities, what secrets!”—part of Justice’s examination of three poets who faded in their forties and were forgotten.⁴ Wallace turned forty in 2002, as some of Oblivion’s stories were first being published. “Forever Overhead” had taken entering the teenage years as a moment to contemplate death; now Wallace was in actual midlife. The Justice quotation points to an easily overlooked dimension of Oblivion’s title: its self-uncanonizing gesture, the state of forgottenness that Wallace let shadow him, whether as a chastening of his fame or an expression of fear that he could no longer produce top work (or both). Oblivion is united by this despair over aesthetic value, particularly as that value withers in a commodity culture. The final story begins “But they’re shit” (O 238) and ends with an artist of fecal matter tricked into appearing on a stage that obscures his creations. “Good Old Neon” suggests that “the infinitely dense and shifting worlds” inside oneself are “fully open and expressible” only after death (O 178). The title “The Soul Is Not a Smithy” rejects Joyce’s clarion call to the heroic modernist artist. However we ultimately judge these stories, they suggest we think twice (or more) about calling their creator an artistic “genius.” Writing pseudonymously, refusing to rest on his laurels (the cliché behind the satirical name of Laurel, a bad writer in “The Suffering Channel”), Wallace has found new ways to make us start at zero in assessing his (work’s) value.

Much of Oblivion also comes into being in a 1999–2004 period in which the country’s massive economic growth met with downturns, news to which Wallace had proven himself consistently sensitive: the dot-com bubble burst between 1999 and 2001, and after 9/11 the Dow Jones average lost more than 14 percent and a poor U.S. economy weakened further. At either end of Oblivion, Wallace catches office cultures suffused with optimism but on the brink of these downfalls: the newly formed Team Δy in “Mister Squishy” (set in 1995, published in 2000) wants to use web-based advertising methods to appeal to the “promising market” of Internet startups (O 61); in a far grimmer turn, the Style staffers of “The Suffering Channel,” housed in the World Trade Center, face not just potential downsizing because of media consolidation but 9/11, ten weeks after the story ends.

Oblivion signals that Wallace, while still holding work to be sacred, has largely given up his faith in the powers of the Protestant call to work that echoed throughout his writing up through Infinite Jest. Less prominent in Oblivion and after is the writer who allegorizes work in terms of Lenore’s switchboard and foot-pounds, while newly emergent are dull, long-term workplaces, rendered in detail and at length: advertising agencies, insurance offices, demographic systems. Jobs themselves now spread out to form characters’ mental ground, and work no longer really works for one’s well-being. As Walter Kirn writes in his review of Oblivion, “Often the jobs we do end up doing us.”⁵ If, in Infinite Jest’s Hegelian code, transcendence potentially lay in absorption, in Oblivion all is distraction; no one really forgets himself, except perhaps the narrator of “Smithy” (to his peril). Such despair about work derived primarily from Wallace’s writing desk, where jobs had always functioned as avenues for considering the creative process—and Wallace was struggling still with the dynamic he had described to DeLillo in May 1997 after news of his MacArthur: “If past experience holds true again I’ll lay stupid neurotic paralyzing trips on myself for several months, starting work and then getting scared/depressed and tearing the work up,” before getting so exhausted and scared he “can really…start working.”⁶ At the same time, having examined a postindustrious society in Broom and Brief Interviews and reconceived the cliché about the “sweat of one’s brow” in Infinite Jest, Wallace will move tentatively in Oblivion toward a ruddy-faced mental laborer, Skip Atwater, whose Kafkaesque depiction in “The Suffering Channel” mediates anxiety about (artistic) work and serves as a guardedly optimistic climax to this chapter’s readings.

Anticipating The Pale King at a few points, I judge Oblivion to be a difficult, transitional text in which, in no coincidence given these changed relationships to work, Wallace (with a few notable exceptions) largely abandons the portrayals of grounding in axiom and worth that had signaled the desired destination for the self throughout the previous seventeen years. No barefoot boys or supine men in this weightless world; that vocabulary is placed on hold until it reemerges transformed in The Pale King. The languages of workplaces and bureaucracies, often amoral or meaninglessly mathematicized, colonize the minds on display and thus Wallace’s prose. At the same time, key motifs return with new accents: coins (with their inscriptions read in greater detail, part of Wallace’s expanded attention to civics), the glow of energy producers, and indictments of minimalist aesthetics, all of which structure my linked readings. I attend also to Wallace’s intensified interest in what McHale calls the “ecologies of institutions”⁷ by extending chapter 2’s history of 1930s social welfare into a new area of contingencies: the U.S. health insurance and health-care industries. Lastly, I situate Skip as a figure reminiscent of Lenore, a counterforce to the workless and weightless image economy of “The Suffering Channel.” But first I must unpack the essay in which Wallace, a few years after Oblivion, retrospectively rationalized his new style while shifting his definition of a reader’s mental labor and the accompanying creation of values.

“DECIDERIZATION” AND QUESTIONS OF WORK AND VALUE

Mocking aggrandizing news mechanisms as well as George W. Bush (who proclaimed in April 2006 regarding Donald Rumsfeld’s post–Abu Ghraib fate, “I’m the decider, and I decide what’s best”),⁸ Wallace gives the title “Deciderization 2007—a Special Report” to his introduction to The Best American Essays 2007. Ostensibly an account of Wallace’s selection process, the introduction expansively describes a method of excluding information that I showed ruling Brief Interviews’ stochastic moves toward reduced randomness and ordered lines: in a condition of “Total Noise,” seen from the “perspective of Information Theory,” Wallace writes, “the bulk of [his] labor actually consists of excluding nominees from the final prize collection” (BF 303–304n3). In typical Wallace metareflections of observer by system and vice versa, this same quality of careful exclusion marks the essays he chooses as best: the way they “handle and respond to the tsunami of available fact” (BF 312). The key maneuver is “deleting/discarding/resetting”—here and throughout, we are invited to think of humans as posthuman, as not entirely dissimilar from the “98.6° calculating machine” Wallace once feared he was (CW 41). We are again in the realm I defined in chapter 4, where human decision making can no longer disentangle itself from computing’s complexity. Wallace seems to have been led to this point by Tor Nørretranders’s The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, a book he heavily annotated and source of an idea central to his style in the last two books of fiction: “Every single second,” Nørretranders writes, “every one of us discards millions of bits [of sensory information]in order to arrive at the special state known as consciousness.”⁹

“Deciderization” justifies the creation of entropic minds like Schmidt’s, Randy Napier’s, and (in The Pale King to come) Claude Sylvanshine’s. They all try to think clearly within complex bureaucratic systems, resulting in prose that exponentially expands the task faced by the reader of The Broom of the System, that of having to “place” tagless phone calls along with Lenore. “Deciderization” should be seen in a lineage of Wallace statements on readers’ and writer’s symbiotic work going back to the 1993 interview comments from which I began chapter 1. While more dry than its predecessor, “Deciderization” could be critically mined in illuminating the more difficult later work in the way “E Unibus Pluram” has been for Wallace’s midcareer growth. Some have begun this process: Boswell regards the essay as the basis for the detail-rich style of Oblivion and the sermon of Fogle’s tax teacher in The Pale King, noting that “the pleasures that once emerged from the completion of the ‘hard work’” Wallace asks for are “abandoned in favor of a persistent confrontation with pain and suffering.”¹⁰ David Letzler applies “Deciderization” to the superfluity of Infinite Jest’s endnotes, arguing that they resemble “cruft,” excess programming code that forces readers to separate the necessary from the contingent.¹¹

But in defining Wallace’s strange prose machinery we should also question his ultimate moral purpose in invoking information sorting; we should ask how learning to value certain details over others leads to aesthetic value and, indirectly, to a strengthening of a reader’s moral values and civic responsiveness in an information-glutted world. In “Deciderization” the postmodern moralist comes to an impasse and tries to resolve it the Wittgensteinian way by testing out his central term in different contexts. Illustrating again the tug of war between tradition and innovation that defined him, Wallace lets his postmodern tendencies arise first in the way the essay keeps deferring the definition of aesthetic value (elaborate evasions seen as well in another take on prescribing standards, “Authority and American Usage”). Wallace says he tried “to use overall value” to sort the essays, but this “entitles you to ask what ‘value’ means here” (BF 311). His answer is indirect: as a term of adjudication, “‘value’ sidesteps some of the metaphysics that makes pure aesthetics such a headache” and admits to being dependent on “some limited, subjective human doing the valuing” (BF 311–312). Yet “there’s still the question of just what this limited human actually means by ‘value’ as a criterion” (BF 312). Thus does Wallace, in a display of postmodern technique, defer the question of aesthetic definition, instead describing value by considering certain criteria for it and then excluding them for not being all-encompassing: most of the essays “show a masterly awareness of craft,” but “others…don’t”—“but they have other virtues that make them valuable” (BF 312). About a page later, Wallace reminds himself, “The point is to try to explain part of what I mean by ‘valuable’” (BF 313). But I have been suggesting throughout that Wallace knew that the labyrinth of his fiction, with its permission to play associatively with different types of value, had long been the only place he could work out the problem of saying all that he meant by “value.” “Deciderization” makes vivid Wallace’s commitment to making this search for value a per-formative process for a reader—in fact, one in which differentiating one detail’s importance from another’s and being the “human doing the valuing” are, in effect, aesthetic value itself. No definition of it exists aside from the dynamic one that readers, with expert guidance, decide on for themselves.

Such is the implied ground of not just aesthetically pleasing writing but moral writing as well. In a multipage footnote, Wallace throws in a portentous postscript adding more layers to the value question, these arising from his “traditional human verities” side: “What exactly are the connections between literary aesthetics and moral value supposed to be? Whose moral values ought to get used in determining what those connections should be? Does anyone even read Tolstoy’s ‘What Is Art?’ anymore?” (BF 311n7). Despite his admiration for the Russian, Wallace in 2007 cannot be Tolstoy and cannot make any stabilizing proposal that (as he paraphrased from “What Is Art?” in a 1993 interview) the “purpose of art [is] to communicate the idea of Christian brotherhood from man to man” (CW 18). Wallace instead makes vivid for his reader postmodernism’s inexorable intertwining of moral values with the kind of information sorting that makes up these essays’ aesthetic contributions. The outcome here is a democratic deciding (not Deciderization) that previews the title of the novel he was working on: these essays are the best for 2007 America because they oppose the propagandistic writing that works “like the silky courtier’s manipulations of an enfeebled king,” also presumably pale (BF 316).

LUMINOUS GUYS AND LOW-VALUE COINS

“Deciderization” adds complexity to the role of the accountant of human costs that structured Brief Interviews, but in all cases, as Wallace thinks through models of moral computation, he does not lose sight of the central axiological act of keeping the glow of human worth visible, safe from wrongheaded valuations. He continues to seek in Oblivion a fiction that “reconciles,” that balance-book verb, the markers of external valuation with those senses of self-worth and health that may remain internal and hidden (O 181). This is the logic behind the volume’s most celebrated story, “Good Old Neon,” which brings to mind the hidden narrator of “Westward” and his quest for the terms in which to value Mark. In “Neon,” Neal is the new Mark, and the story climaxes with hidden narrator “David Wallace trying, if only in the second his lids are down, to somehow reconcile what this luminous guy seemed like from the outside with whatever on the interior must have driven him to kill himself” (O 181). As with other mise-en-abyme endings (like that of “Octet”), “Neon” is ultimately hard-pressed to assert fully a sense of unnumbered internal worth that emanates from a sincere core, “the realer, more enduring and sentimental part of” David: that internal voice’s oracular command, “Not another word,” draws the story into a sublime, silent closure that is then undercut by the number that is the real ending, a “.418” batting average—a statistic of athletic valuation, one thing Dave remembers about Neal (O 181). The story’s title, too, seems caught in nostalgia for the “good old” days and “the seemingly almost neon aura around [Neal] all the time of scholastic and athletic excellence and popularity and success with the ladies” (O 180). Neon, while known for producing a glow useful to ads, is itself colorless and odorless and has only two-thirds the density of air—insubstantial in the terms of weight Wallace uses to signify ontological stability.

Wallace ascends to a higher level of value analysis in “Another Pioneer,” an echo of Gaddis’s The Recognitions and Kafka’s “Josephine the Singer” that makes an important point about the relationship between language and economy as Wallace perceives it: through our language and our treatment of human potential, we make choices about what kind of economic exchange we have. In other words, while language may be exchange, Wallace must strip away the trappings of modern economies so that we see language as the foregrounded term in that analogy, not a mere servant to money. In parallel with the growth of an economy around a stationary woman in “Westward,” “Pioneer” places a boy on a dais and has economy grow up around him, beginning with gifts exchanged for his wisdom. Villagers come with a yam, for example, and leave with an answer, and in the “mythopoeic cycle” the story supposedly draws on, “this arrangement is represented as the origin of something like modern trade in the villagers’ culture…. [T]here was evidently nothing like actual barter or trade until the advent of this child” (O 122). Wallace again employs quasi-anthropological language to illustrate language as commonwealth, as an edenic, peaceful sharing of wisdom that persists beneath economic striving.

The villagers, though, instrumentalize the boy: a “consultant caste” arises, easily read as a parody of the contemporary financial-information industry as well as Arrighi’s regime of accumulation (O 123). The shamanic consultants’ “rhetorical skill” and self-consciousness in language focus on converting the boy’s words from their truth value to another system of valuation, as a second order of trade develops, not in goods but information: the consultants structure “a monthly question in such a way as to receive a maximally valuable answer from the extraordinary child,” selling “these interrogatory skills to ordinary villagers who wished to extract maximum value for their monthly question” (O 123). The villagers seek a guarantee on the utility of language, when Wallace wants to expose contingency and inutility. “Pioneer” thus recasts “Crash of ’69”: the words of another gifted but vulnerable young man exist at the nexus of truth value and economic value, and as with Karrier, the clear statements of logical proofs, with 1 (true) or 0 (false) to be assigned to them, are again put to the test of a complex narrative context.

The coin image Wallace has used so often before also helps synthesize parts of Oblivion, though now Wallace remakes the motif along lines of rarity, inscription, and poison. In “Philosophy,” where money has led to paralysis, the narrator’s repeated mentions of poisonous spider “species” (O 191, 192, etc.) quietly pun on “specie,” or coins, an association made, as Shell points out, in “The Gold-Bug” by Poe, whose horror fiction is an animating force throughout Oblivion.¹² The narrator’s briefcase, often a carrier of cash in literature and film but here a home for deadly spiders, suggests this connection to money while recalling many previous uncanny wallets and purses. In “Mister Squishy,” currency is also linked to poison: Schmidt, a focus-group expert conversant in ultimately meaningless statistical values, has turned to rare-coin collecting and a subscription to “Numismatic News” in search, it seems, of values with some weight (O 51). What results, though, is moral valuelessness—the great Wallace enemy of nihilism—and a revisiting of Infinite Jest’s killer pleasures. For Wallace the rare coin represents not just money but money hoarded, removed from circulation in pursuit of greater value. In a link between numismatics and terror, Schmidt finds that injecting the poison into Felonies! snack cakes “turned an area the size of a 1916 Flowing Liberty Quarter” into “sludge” (O 57). The castor beans needed for ricin he weighs down in their soaking pan using “low-value coins combined and tied in an ordinary Trojan condom” (O 52)—an image of awful weight and the sterility Schmidt represents. These coin metaphors reflect the subversion of civic responsibility’s (and flowing liberty’s) language throughout: an ad focus group treated as jury duty, for instance, with “voir dire” procedure (O 14).

The “coin” of “Smithy,” even more hidden, extends Oblivion’s subjects from derangement by monetary value to the unexpected means by which counteracting moral values are inscribed on consciousness. Throughout “Smithy,” an Oedipal drama set in 1960, patriarchs fall: in addition to the narrator’s father there is Ruthie’s dad (his arm’s dismembering a symbol of castration) and the deranged civics teacher—a “substitute[]” in Freudian terms, he is shot through the eyes, a nod to Oedipus’s fate (O 75). An extension of Wallace’s indictments in “E Unibus Pluram” and his Updike essay of the 1960s’ “brave new individualism” (CL 54), “Smithy” laments the passing of a 1950s family-values-driven Lassie episode (a clear analogue for the enframed windows tale) and a future of destroyed communal bonds in the Vietnam War, deadly for some of the students. Wallace summarizes this fall of treasured icons by having the narrator recall his abbreviated adult viewing of The Exorcist, a 1973 film rife with Vietnam-era anxieties. He remembers “a lengthy, slow motion view of a Roman Catholic medal falling through the air, as if from a great height, with its thin silver chain undulating in complex shapes as the coin rotates as it slowly falls” (my italics), intercut with “a brief flash of Father Karras’ face, terribly transformed,” “the face of evil” (O 96–97). Karras’s horrifying visage signifies the toppling of religious values in The Exorcist and, in “Smithy,” the unraveling of the U.S. Constitution in the insertions of “KILL THEM ALL” by the psychotic Richard Johnson (named for the U.S. presidents from 1963 to 1973, leaders of the Vietnam War) (O 91). In this compressed social history in symbols, the fragility of all values arises in the way this falling “coin” slides from associations with divine control to the arbitrariness of a coin flip—“rotat[ing]as it slowly falls.”

Both medallions and coins are imbued with religious or monetary values through a process of stamping, engraving, or embossing. But in this passage Wallace—in accord with the “peripheral” and “incongruous” nature of the most powerful memories in Oblivion (94, 97)—inverts associations of stamping with permanence, saying instead of the subliminal film frame, “its very brevity serves to stamp it on the viewer’s consciousness” (O 97). Evil, this image suggests, writes itself on the mind more readily than the ego’s more noble values. In addition to prescriptivism in many spheres, Wallace took interest in the often comic ways the engraved wisdom of cultural mores failed to transmit to the minds it targeted (for more on his made-up Latin mottos, see chapter 6). The idea that a split-second’s horror-film frame could “stamp” itself upon the mind, when more didactic wisdom seems easily sloughed off (especially by post-1960 culture), vindicates Wallace’s mining of popular culture for deep meanings as well as his embrace of Wittgenstein, Kafka, and Lynch as models of apothegmatic representation. They shock us into recognition, rather than being didactic.

Etymological links are always worth pursuing with the dictionary-reading Wallace, and “coin” is no exception: it derives from the Old French (twelfth-century) coing meaning wedge, stamp, or the money made with such tools (the Latin cuneus means wedge, as in cuneiform writing), but also corner, angle, or nook—a sense preserved in the modern French coin and the English “quoin,” both for cornerstone (a meaning used in Infinite Jest, where a building has “granite quoins” [IJ 797]).¹³ A principle for the construction of Oblivion—and almost all of Wallace’s multiperspectival, multistranded books—presents itself here: Burn, drawing on archival evidence that Wallace placed importance on the abbreviations he used for his titles, suggests that the initials of “Good Old Neon”, G.O.N., connote “gone,”¹⁴ but the more direct invocation is of -gon from the Greek gonia, meaning angle. Oblivion, giving minute proof for its major claims about the “peripheral” nature of perception, contains many shifting angles: “Mister Squishy” has “blinding pockets of reflected sun that changed angle as one’s own angle…changed” (O 15), the boy of “Smithy” is deeply sensitive to the squares and rectangles overlaying any view, Neal tries to describe himself “from several different angles” (O 167), and the list could go on. I discussed in chapter 4 the “off-angled” and stochastic methods of “Little Expressionless Animals,” “Westward,” and “Order and Flux,” which gives a pithy motto for this method: “Look from just one angle: things seem aimless, disordered. Flux reigns. Change the angle: illumination. Pattern. Order.”¹⁵ Knowing the angle-based etymology, Wallace gets us to see the values that various coins instantiate as products of particular inscriptions, particular angles, particular “subjective human[s] doing the valuing.” In other words, values are the contingent products of human writing, as poststructuralist theory teaches us. But that does not mean values can be dismissed or eluded.

WALLACE AND THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY

If value is fundamentally contingent for Wallace, then he was bound to become interested, especially as Oblivion sifts through various institutions, in the systematic means by which people build up shared value against contingency and risk, such as the governmental insurance detailed in chapter 2. Two stories in Oblivion with links to The Pale King explore insurance anew, now on the more difficult terrain of the private U.S. insurance industry, a field Wallace knew well. He worked for the longest continuous stretch of his writing career (1993–2002) in Normal, Illinois, twin municipality to Bloomington. Bloomington-Normal’s largest employer by far is State Farm Insurance, specialists in home, auto, fire, and health. In his 9/11 essay, “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s,” Wallace writes of Bloomington as “the national HQ for State Farm, which is the great dark god of US consumer insurance and for all practical purposes owns the town” (CL 133). The corporation’s influence on the area mirrors what the essay as a whole registers in the local response to 9/11, the community-building effects but also a sense of division—with Wallace as an alien, unable to find an American flag to buy and separated from his “innocent” neighbors by his politics and knowledge of New York (CL 139). State Farm has over many years written versions of such schisms onto Bloomington, in “smokedglass complexes and Build to Suit developments,” the “beltway of malls and franchises that’s killing off the old downtown,” “plus an ever-wider split between the town’s two basic classes and cultures,” emblematized by SUVs and pickup trucks (CL 133). State Farm has the opposite of the local bonding effects its history as an alliance of Illinois farmers seeking better car-insurance prices in 1922 would suggest. Saying State Farm “owns” this small town (while possessed of profits from consumers in thousands of other locales) suggests there is irony for Wallace in a corporation with a public mission of sorts failing to integrate itself into the community from which it grew eighty years earlier.¹⁶ Such tensions are especially important, this background implies, as the nation enters a postdisaster period of repair and self-redefinition.

Insurance has been overlooked as one of the several boring and antidramatic institutional structures through which Wallace marks out his distinct path within postmodernism. His insurance narratives—focused on intimate and melancholy effects and expressing a nostalgia for older social orders—provide an alternative to the bracing, sometimes thriller-oriented views of risk in writers such as DeLillo and Richard Powers, whose novels of environmental anxiety are the prime examples of postmodern literature in Ursula K. Heise’s influential discussion of risk perception and narrative form.¹⁷ Wallace also operates in Oblivion with awareness of how the risk-management models of contemporary insurers come freighted with ideology and resist valorization as embodiments of the communal interest that he sought through governmental insurance in chapter 2. Building on Ulrich Beck’s concepts of risk communities and a reflexive modernity, Heise writes of risk perception as culturally determined, not objective; risk perceptions become intertwined with the “self-perpetuation of certain social structures” and, of course, corporate profit structures (Sense of Place, 127).¹⁸

An insurance-based view of life proves to be crucial to “Smithy.” Among the falls of patriarchs in the story, the most pathos laden is the early heart attack of a father the narrator never really knew, an actuary. In climactic ruminations on that fact, we come to see the boy’s comic-book vision of a noble dog, child, and father as a prodigious lie when compared to the inherently antidramatic nature of adult life, which plays out in an insurance office. Of his father’s work, the narrator says,

I knew that insurance was protection that adults applied for in case of risk, and I knew it had numbers in it because of the documents that were visible in his briefcase when I got to pop its latches and open it for him, and my brother and I had had the building that housed the insurance company’s HQ and my father’s tiny window in its face pointed out to us by our mother from the car, but the actual specifics of his job were always vague…. Looking back, I suspect that there was something of a cover-your-eyes and stop-your-ears quality to my lack of curiosity about just what my father had to do all day.

(O 105)

Using the same “HQ” language that described State Farm in “Mrs. Thompson’s,” Wallace has the narrator, though a retrospecting adult, maintain his boyish naïveté of his father’s insurance work, as though the pathos of the disconnection between father and son includes in its weight a neglect of certain social principles. We have just heard at remarkable length of the narrator’s “cover-your-eyes and stop-your-ears” response to the classroom trauma, but in the oblique way in which “Smithy” and almost all the stories in Oblivion expose life’s real traumas through seemingly tangential remembered events, it is the daily challenges of the adult world that this narrative evokes—a realm in which the unnoticed risks of everyday life take precedence and instill a lasting terror.

“Smithy” thus presents Wallace’s highly intimate approach to the theoretical categories of risk perception and risk management. It is not the classroom hostage crisis, the window daydream, or the movies that bring the narrator to a psychic bottom; rather, he cannot handle the notion of insurance and remaining systematically vigilant about a grim view of the future. His chronic “nightmare” from childhood is not a recurrence of the classroom scene but an anticipatory vision of the insurance-office desk order that awaits him—a room the size of a soccer field, “utterly silent” and with “a large clock on each wall,” counting out an unbearable time (O 103). This insurance office is not just a workplace but an existential landscape, complete with a bygone sense of ethical duty.

As I argued in chapter 2, Wallace showed how the alignment of irony and advertising in the 1960s had left his 1980s generation without access to the values of FDR’s New Deal. Roosevelt is subtly present in “Smithy” as well. It ends with a memory of the class President’s Day presentation, in which one of the four hostages, Chris DeMatteis, plays FDR at the 1933 inauguration (occasion for announcing many parts of the New Deal agenda) but fails to remember his lines and, “thrust[ing] his lower jaw…out further,” simply repeats “‘Fear itself, fear itself,’ over and over” (O 113). This forgetful Chris, who often sleeps in class and has no time to study because he is a child laborer on his father’s paper route, is Wallace’s nod to the deep background from earlier in American history and his own career that informs “Smithy”: a forgetting of (an obliviousness to) the communal confidence and New Deal programs needed to overcome economic disaster and child labor.¹⁹

Pietsch reveals that Wallace began “Smithy” as part of The Pale King,²⁰ and Burn uses the archive to show that much of Oblivion emerged in symbiosis with the tax novel.²¹ Indeed, the father’s dreamt-of workplace, containing ordered rows of actuaries, strongly resembles Peoria, and Fogle will also be given the “Smithy” narrator’s word-counting ability. Moreover, this 1960 moment would have set the narrator of “Smithy” up to join the many tax examiners who have been recruited to the Regional Examination Center (Sylvanshine speculates in Wallace’s notes) because childhood “trauma or abandonment” somehow grants them the concentration tax work requires (PK 545). Did Wallace see this insurance job as complementary to the tax accountancy that the narrator of “Smithy” (had he gone into The Pale King) presumably would take up after his trauma and daydreaming, potentially remedying the violent undoing of civics class? Or did Wallace shift from tax to insurance once “Smithy” became a separate fictional world? Regardless of the unknowable answers, I have reached a point in my account where the last two books bleed together, and some of their pieces benefit from simultaneous interpretation—the case, too, with insurance in “Oblivion,” which brings Wallace’s treatment of the actuarial into the twenty-first century of neoliberalism and financialization.

In the neoliberal economic order that gives the lie to any nostalgia for a sharing of value, State Farm’s ownership of Bloomington and larger swaths of the nation has been an increasingly normative practice, aligned with the general dismantling of the U.S. welfare state in favor of free-market principles in social services. Harvey argues that neoliberalism’s touting of personal responsibility and choice is exposed, in the case of health insurance, as an “authoritarianism in market enforcement,” resulting in “exorbitant premiums to inefficient…but also highly profitable insurance companies.”²² Mirowski describes a life-insurance industry that “has become ‘securitized’ in much the same way as most other personal income streams have been financialized” (Serious Crisis, 125).

Sensitive to such trends and set in the present, “Oblivion” transforms the positive (even awe-inspiring) insurance-associated elder of “Smithy” into a grotesquely powerful figure of the for-profit insurance industry—changes in Wallace’s idiom that seem appropriate to the particular cruelties of U.S. health insurance. “Oblivion” narrates the attempted repair of a deeply troubled marriage in a surreal sleep-clinic setting that is revealed, in the final page’s dialogue, to be the dream creation of Hope, a woman who is in fact dreaming in the parodic voice of a projected version of her husband, Randy. Dream logic and dream fears suffuse the narrative, which Wallace so loads with psychoanalytic tropes that he seems intent on capsizing any Freud-inspired method of interpretation. For instance, Hope projects a Randy who has pedophilic desires for his stepdaughter Audrey, Hope’s child from a previous marriage. Is Randy his actual name or Hope’s dream-pun for an excessively sex-minded husband? Hope is also mediating an attitude toward her own stepfather, Dr. Sipe, referred to throughout, in a remaking of “Crash of ’69,” as “Father,” even by Randy (or, to play the story’s own game of attenuated signification, “Randy”) (O 191). Does Randy’s desire for Audrey recapitulate the implied incestuous rape of Hope as a child by Dr. Sipe? Does Audrey even exist? Doubling, sexual innuendo, and disintegrating identities abound. “Sipe,” the family name, means to seep—which is what happens to every identity and self-sameness here, from Hope’s voicing of her husband to the endless bleeding of words into multiple near-synonyms and recontextualizations.

In its hall of mirrors “Oblivion” also narrates a version of contemporary health care and insurance that, while horrifically surreal, seems (like all well-interpreted dreams) to hold deeper truths about these institutions. “Father” is a physician but makes his living in “something called ‘Demographic Medicine,’ which involved his evidently not ever once, during his entire career, physically touching a patient” (O 211). Demographic Medicine may not actually be a field, but we readily recognize in it an only slightly exaggerated version of the profit-oriented practices of health-insurance conglomerates. Randy (in dream terms, an inadequate substitute for Hope’s powerful Father) exists farther down insurance’s long bureaucratic chain, an “Assistant Systems Supervisor” (read: A.S.S.) for a company called “Advanced Data Capture,” “which provided out-sourced data and document storage facilities and systems for a number of small-and mid-sized insurance providers in the Mid-Atlantic region” (O 194). Randy encapsulates Wallace’s new vision of the subject determined by work. Exemplary of what Boswell calls Oblivion’s preference for narrators “controlled, sometimes to the point of madness, by…layered, nested, entropic” idioms (“Constant Monologue,” 151), Randy seems to have no thought truly free of his employer’s systems: he speaks of a decision made with Hope as “a compromise or [in the language of insurance regulation] ‘Technical compliance’ with this priority” (O 203; brackets in the original). Upon seeing his own brain activity represented on an EEG machine, he describes his very consciousness in terms of the money pried from a larger demographic body: the lines seem “trended with dramatic troughs and spikes or ‘nodes’ suggestive in appearance of an arrhythmic heart or financially troubled or erratic ‘Cash flow’ graph” (O 228). “Oblivion” depicts neoliberal health care’s version of the posthumanism Giles finds across Wallace’s works, this story included.²³ Such posthumanism, though, Giles argues, is balanced by a sentimental traditional value system—which, in my reading, correlates with Wallace’s idealized, antineoliberal vision, beneath all the absurdity, of what collective militating against risks might become in a less market-oriented world (“Sentimental Posthumanism,” 330).

That view of for-profit insurance’s very different tradition emerges in traces Wallace leaves in the story of the history of Dr. Sipe’s employer, Prudential Insurance, which played a more decisive role in earlier drafts. Dr. Sipe makes “a point of referring to a draft Feigenspan lager as ‘[a] P.O.N.’” (O 191) because he knows its Newark, New Jersey, origins:

A career Medical executive for Prudential Insurance, Inc.—or, ‘The Rock,’ as it is often popularly known—as his own father before him evidently was, as well, as well as being a ‘Fourth Ward’ historical district native born and bred, [Sipe] knew Feigenspan lager by its original trademark, ‘Pride of Newark’ (or, ‘P.O.N.’), and made rather a point of referring to it in no other way.

(O 194–195)

In a note in a handwritten draft of “Oblivion,” Wallace directly attributes the “P.O.N.” detail to Kurt Eichenwald’s Serpent on the Rock, which Randy brings to the sleep clinic as (appropriately disturbing) bedtime reading, reinforcing the sense that the true nightmare is that of corporate insurance’s degradations.²⁴ Eichenwald’s book exposes 1980s securities fraud at a subsidiary of Prudential-Bache (the name of the new company after Prudential expanded into investments) that cheated 340,000 investors of eight billion dollars, resulting in fines but no jail time for the perpetrators. Eichenwald shows the fraud to have been a result of Bache Securities, seeking a merger partner in 1981, trying to wrap itself in the “blanket of respectability” provided by Prudential’s “unwavering integrity” as an insurance provider.²⁵ Prudential was more than a century old, founded by John Fairfield Dryden in 1875 in Newark on the basis of his “Widows and Orphans Friendly Society, a nonprofit [group] that would sell insurance [primarily burial insurance] to its members” and pave the way for a for-profit business. This description comes from the same page of Eichenwald’s book on which the “P.O.N.” beer detail Wallace exported appears (Eichenwald, Serpent on the Rock, 95).²⁶ Another of Wallace’s handwritten drafts of “Oblivion” even begins with a sentence referring to Dryden and Prudential Insurance’s 1875 origins—as though Wallace considered making the perversion of the insurance company’s mission more explicit in the story (Wallace, “‘Oblivion’: handwritten draft, undated”). In a tale of suburban New Jersey luxury built on Demographic Medicine, Wallace also implicitly links the transformation of Prudential from a civically proud insurance company into a financialized moneymaker with the concomitant decline of Newark (long ago fled by “Father”) into one of the U.S.’s poorest cities.

Let me look “ahead,” again briefly, to The Pale King. Prudential-Bache’s fraud, as Eichenwald details, emerged from the expanded selling of investments known as tax shelters, the demand for which exploded with 1970s inflation, facts Wallace may have been intending to add to the complex matrix of economic history in which The Pale King’s fictional 1985–1986 is situated. One Sylvanshine goal is “to enhance Peoria 047’s ability to distinguish legitimate investment partnerships from tax shelters whose entire purpose was to avoid taxes” (PK 13). Later, the young David Wallace learns that the “Immersives” he witnesses at work are “shelter specialists” “engaged with anti-shelter protocols” (337–338). The Tax Reform Act of 1986 eliminated the advantages of tax shelters, “gut[ted]” the business, and led to Prudential-Bache’s eventual prosecution (Eichenwald, Serpent on the Rock, 279). The Pale King mentions the 1986 TRA once, claiming that the profit-based logic of the Spackman Initiative (a Wallace invention) was “ostensibly” a product of this 1986 Act, though in development long before that (PK 71). Does Spackman, though, amount to the government’s reflection of Prudential’s shift from the insurance business to nefarious finance that in effect undermined the tax code’s moral purpose? Would Prudential-Bache have played a central role had Wallace completed the puzzle that was The Pale King? He must have sensed an alignment between, on the one hand, the market-based logic of Spackman and, on the other, Prudential-Bache’s financialized expansion, at the expense of tax returns, into investment capitalism (away from its core business of consumer insurance and far away from nonprofit services for widows and orphans). While these conjectures may be unconfirmable, it seems clear that the complexity of economic causation examined in chapter 4 was to be followed in The Pale King by an investigation of the networking of taxation, government interest, and private maneuvers in a just and prosperous society—and that the mixing of insurance’s social mission and investment capital represented for Wallace a sharp ideological conflict.²⁷

But to return to the more tractable domain of “Oblivion,” the health-care institution toward which Dr. Sipe leads Hope and Randy in the story’s resolution is a travesty of care that seems not to serve patients at all. The “Darling Memorial Sleep Clinic” (O 215)—its name suggesting a loved one’s death—is a dystopian scene of surveillance. This nightmare of a sleep clinic inexplicably has the cacophony of Prudential’s capital at work in the near background: a blender makes frozen drinks, and “some type of construction, maintenance or related activity,” with loud power tools, is also “under way” (O 227). No quiet rest, no space free of capitalist relations, is to be had. While the Darling Clinic is affiliated with a university and devoted to research, the profit motive shadows the staff as well, and Wallace may indirectly criticize the interaction of research and the pharmaceutical industry: Dr. Paphian, “the Sleep specialist’s cognomen or sur-name,” later slides into lowercase with mention of “the young, forbiddingly nubile or ‘paphian’ technician[]” (O 230). While “paphian” primarily pertains to illicit love in general, a secondary meaning is prostitute.

Finally, in the saddest angle on a satiric tale, “Oblivion” reads as Wallace’s surreal allegory of his own journeys through the U.S. mental-health-care system and its treatments—most, unlike AA, not free. Max details Wallace’s course of electroconvulsive therapy in 1988, his 1989 breakdown in Boston (spent at Harvard’s McLean Hospital, “ensconced within the teaching hospital” of a university, like the Darling Clinic at Rutgers),²⁸ and his ongoing relationships with therapists he sometimes paid in cash, lacking health insurance (Every Love Story, 117, 134–137, 169). In 1989, Max writes, Wallace was twenty-seven and still dependent on his parents: his “encounters with the mental health system had cost his insurance company a lot of money, and when the insurance ran out, his family had had to foot the bill, filling Wallace with guilt” (Every Love Story, 118). He went to graduate school at Harvard in part for the health insurance and viewed some of his teaching jobs in similar terms (Every Love Story, 50, 118–119). “Oblivion” seems to be coded revenge against a system that treated him like a point on a demographic cash-flow graph rather than part of a commonwealth of individual/universal stories.

Wallace’s baroque recastings of his life caution against any naïve transposition of biography into fiction, but “Oblivion” calls out for some associative interpretations. “Snoring,” along with the obsessive insistence that one is not doing it and does not need treatment for it, is a grotesque, expressionist form through which to explore the spirals of mental illness as well as, more broadly, the problem of limited, solipsistic minds, a problem that always moved Wallace to metaphor. “Oblivion” thus describes through sleep and snoring two intimates’ ultimately opaque relationship to each other, mediated by language or unconscious, incommunicative noises, somewhat like Hal’s in the opening of Infinite Jest. Perhaps Wallace’s ECT experiences are limned in the story’s EEG leads and wires (O 222). In general, in its recursive and intersubjective intricacies, “Oblivion” points toward something U.S. health care as Wallace experienced it does not foster: he opposes an ethic of reader attention to the technologized “brain ‘reading’” of data-dependent health care and those who speak its language for valuing the human (O 225).

NEW BRAT PACK (STILL CAN’T WRITE)

Wired, graphed, and made demographic object in “Oblivion,” the post-human body is made more subtle in “The Suffering Channel,” which, in another exploration of metastasizing institutions, documents media consolidation under the invented German conglomerate Eckleschafft-Böd Medien A.G., owners of “three of the six major” big soft glossy magazines (O 296). A “-schafft-Böd” evokes a dystopian “shaft bod(y)” suggestive of posthumanism and the widespread anorexia and body disgust among the characters. This is a vision of the social body, too—schaft is German for “society,” perhaps here with an ironic echo of Weber’s Gemeinschaft (community). Wallace is skewering the German conglomerate Bertelsmann A.G., the world’s second-largest media company and owners of Knopf, Random House, and many other houses. But when Wallace writes of the Suffering Channel being “in the late stages of acquisition by AOL Time Warner…involved in talks with Eckleschafft-Böd over a putative merger” (O 290), he puts under scrutiny his own literary product. “The Suffering Channel” is indeed an “acquisition” of AOL Time Warner, a media giant that eclipses Bertelsmann in size and includes among its holdings Little, Brown, Wallace’s publisher since Infinite Jest. The story thus meditates on what distinguishes artistic fiction like Wallace’s from the products of a massive entertainment-and-data corporation, much like the title Infinite Jest forced us to separate novel and film.

While more words are published at Style than at The Frequent Review, “The Suffering Channel” still marks Wallace’s return to the specter of writers idling and failing to free themselves of corporate frames. Rather than editing or composition, the New York scenes portray ambidextrous typing, lunch, looking at photos, and workouts, as though Style’s writing work is stuck within the consumerist and image-driven economy it covers. Like any Wallace investigation of workers, this one evokes slavery in the Hegelian sense: the Style scenes portray unpaid interns, most of whom “traditionally come from Seven Sisters colleges” (which include Mount Holyoke and Smith, consortium partners of Amherst) (O 261). Wallace is documenting class immobility (Mirowski laments the alliance of neoliberal practices and many forms of unpaid labor, especially internships [Serious Crisis, 142–144]) but also again drawing a boundary between his Midwestern work ethic and the poseurs of his college years. Titles like “executive intern” make this story another philosophical allegory of action, agency, and the internal, troublingly unstable here: the interns are disgusted when Brint Moltke’s shit sculptures provoke thoughts of their insides becoming external (O 323). Laurel, who assimilates many of the body lessons for the reader, wonders why one’s own saliva, when placed in a glass for drinking, becomes automatically “disgusting”: “But why? When it’s in your mouth it’s not gross, but the minute it’s outside of your mouth and you consider putting it back in, it becomes gross” (O 307).²⁹ In this metafiction, Wallace tries to reclaim style from Style by drawing on the puncturing force of the Latin etymology: stilus means a “stake or pale” (an image to be seen again) or a “pointed instrument for writing,” analogues to the cuneus glimpsed in “coin” (“Style”). Wary of the “upbeat angle” Style prefers, Wallace is again on the lookout for unexpected, cutting angles (O 245).

These unpaid workers living on parental funds struggle, naturally, in the discernment of value, here probed in monetary, aesthetic, and bodily senses. Laurel is another Wallace anorexic, denying herself and evoking a spiritual scarcity. She is one of many: Skip Atwater complains of the “sucking cheeks and starved eyes of Manhattan’s women” and of seeing, in a perversion of Wallace’s favorite motif, “interns weighing their food on small pharmaceutical scales” (O 250). A mature Wallace can now find the sadness and suffering within his allegorical characters, and thus with Laurel he portrays not John Beadsman or Kopek Spasova but a person in denial, the creator of a personal economy of work for food: she is “slender almost to the point of clinical intervention,” and her “caloric regimen,” recalling the addicts’ perversions of the Protestant ethic, “included very precise rules on what parts of her Nicoise salad she was allowed to eat and what she had to do to earn them” (O 264). While the interns eat at a restaurant named “Tutta Mangia,” they hardly eat it all (O 260).

Musing on Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist,” Wallace examines “tropes like starved for attention or love-starved” and the “innocent…factoid” (or not so innocent) “that the etymological root of anorexia happens to be the Greek word for longing” (CL 63). In “The Suffering Channel” Wallace pursues these implications, generalizing states of vacuity among characters of both genders, interested (as he was with disabled bodies in earlier works) in the metaphysics the physical states express. Skip, who experiences lightheadedness at the sight of his blood, frequently has “the queer sense that he was in fact not a body that occupied space but rather just a bodyshaped area of space itself…with a certain vacuous roaring sensation we tend to associate with empty space” (O 313). Laurel recalls an associate editor in the WTC elevator who, during her orientation, put “his arms up over his head and made his hands sharp like a diver’s and said: ‘Up, up, and away’” (O 286). Describing these rapid rides, Wallace returns to Doony Glynn’s bricks, aligning characters’ lack of value-creating work with reliance on technological lifting and an ignorance of weight: through “some principle of physics she didn’t understand, the box in [Laurel’s] arms felt slightly heavier when the elevator was in motion. Its total weight was only a few pounds at most” (O 286). In the context of 9/11, the elevator scenes (especially that upward dive) become more ominous, evocative of those who leapt rather than being burned to death—and, notably, were kept out of media averse to showing certain gruesome forms of suffering.³⁰

Like Lenore, Laurel is often seen handling office communications, but Wallace makes her a terrible writer (“She was…all but incapable of writing a simple declarative sentence”) and shows her staring at her computer screen, much like an oblivious TV watcher (O 252). While her first name suggests the false fulfillments of the American winning streak Wallace often describes, Laurel’s surname, Manderley, is a mangled form of the mandala, an ancient eastern symbol of balance and a parallel with the yin-yang symbol. Mandala literally means “circle,” and it is Brint Moltke who (with an echo of the Zen archer imagery in “Westward”) projects circularity: in “the arrangement of the artist’s hands…thumbs and forefingers formed a perfect lap level circle, which Moltke held or rather somehow directed before him like an aperture or target”—signals that the Keatsian living hand resides in Indiana, away from Wall Street and global capital’s invisible one (O 248). Wallace’s prose also subtly registers Laurel’s insubstantialness, echoing “The Depressed Person” by referring repeatedly to “Laurel Manderley” (O 239, 243, 244, etc.). One of five interns “named either Laurel or Tara,” she is an interchangeable part (O 261).

Wallace fights an old battle through these young women, one he probably ought by this point to have sensed he had won, in cultural standing if not in sales (though how early in his career he began “The Suffering Channel” is an unanswerable question). Boswell finds the early Wallace satirizing the “thin, anemic work” of “Brat Pack” writers,³¹ led by Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney. Here, the dull narcissism of the Style scenes stirs up associations with the low-level magazine work of “you” in Bright Lights, Big City and with the meals in American Psycho at which Wall Streeters compare assets. At his lunch, Wallace’s satire of minimalist style through Style comes into focus: “The Style interns all still possessed the lilting inflections and vaguely outraged facial expressions of adolescence,” contrasting with “their extraordinary table manners and…the brisk clipped manner of their gestures and speech.” Meanwhile, “their outfits’ elements were nearly always members of the same color family, a very adult type of coordination that worked to convey a formal and businesslike tone to each ensemble” (O 261). As the vocabulary of voice, “manners,” “color,” and “ensemble” hints, these are, symbolically, immature artists, authors of “brisk, clipped,” minimalist sentences, monochrome in form. They descend from the narrator of “Westward,” who promised to “get economically to business.” These rule followers, were they actual artists, would produce a “careful, accomplished national literature, mistake-free, seamless as fine linoleum” (BF 61). The staffer most focused on, Ellen Bactrian, who has initials mirroring E-Böd’s, facilitates media capitalism’s conversion of text into image, coming up with the Suffering Channel idea with a mind that (in a narrative of mysterious arrows) constructs “flow charts” with “actual boxes” and “Roman numerals” (O 334). No ragged, “Host”-like flowcharts for these folks (CL 275ff.).

The deeper question behind this veiled sniping concerns literary art’s ability to propose alternatives to commodity value. Consider the description of a jacket meant to contrast with the molting (the shedding of an outer skin) suggested by Moltke’s name and art:

There was also something just perfect about the editorial intern’s jacket’s asymmetrical cut, both incongruous and yet somehow inevitable, which was why Yamamoto was generally felt to be worth every penny. At the same time, it was common knowledge that there was something in the process or chemicals used in commercial dry cleaning that was unfriendly to Yamamotos’ particular fabrics, and that they never lay or hung or felt quite so perfect after they’d been dry cleaned a couple times; so there was always a kernel of tragedy to the pleasure of wearing Yamamoto, which may have been a deeper part of its value.

(O 262–263)

Parodying minimalism in the first sentence, Wallace loads in the vagueness of “something just perfect,” “somehow inevitable,” and “generally felt”—all leading up to the implicit claim that minimalism, with no “deeper” sense of value, can only affirm the “worth” of the brand-name jacket dictated by its inflated price in the luxury marketplace. Wallace wants fiction to follow the jacket into its entropic decline, focusing on the true “tragedy” in consumption’s aftermath, something beyond the “sense of tragedy” At-water has sought since being told by an editor that he lacks it. Titling his two big novels after Hamlet and a waning king, Wallace locates his “kernel of tragedy” in art objects and unmasked bodies that are truly “incongruous” and “asymmetrical.”

SKIP’S CAPITAL FLUSH

Finally, at the center of “The Suffering Channel” are Brint and Skip. Having shown the fallout of attempting to turn waste into productive energy with annular fusion in Infinite Jest, Wallace returns to miraculous but dangerous value and energy creation in Brint. Central to this story’s mythos is artwork that symbolizes the United States as readily as the stars and stripes: “The Moltkes’ side’s front door had had a US flag in an angled holder and an anodized cameo of perhaps a huge black ladybug or some kind of beetle attached to the storm door’s frame” (O 247). Next to the official flag Wallace places a signifier of national fantasy. In a story of “miraculous poo” (O 262), this ambiguous insect must be the scarab beetle worshiped in ancient Egyptian mythology, a dung beetle that rolls its own waste into a ball, hides it underground, and either eats the ball itself or, laying an egg on it, leaves it for larva to feed on. The Egyptians thought the beetle a manifestation of the sun god Ra, and Wallace sees in it a model of energy replenishment and the overcoming of waste’s disorder that Moltke’s art embodies—that second pun in his name, on the “molten,” the source of the “steam from a fresh new piece” (O 273). Again, we are led by Wallace to reassess what we regard as glowing and warm, what contains energy and value. Moltke as scarab beetle offers audiences a miraculous vision—one the interns reject even as they remain drawn to, and awed by, the great dream of limitless energy, reminiscent of capitalism’s promises, that the sculptures suggest. “The Suffering Channel” is thus yet another attempt to expose unacknowledged, contradictory objects of American worship.

Wallace once called the voice for his mock-epic of mythological figures in a TV age “the fuzzy Hensonian epiclete Ovid the Obtuse,” accompanied by the “tragic historian Dirk of Fresno” (BI 235, 237). But here there is greater seriousness in the storytelling of Virgil Skip Atwater, whose real first name and initials (VSA—that is, USA as it would be rendered on a monument) evoke antiquity and its epic poetry. Setting the action over the few days before July 4 and playing again at being Joseph Campbell, Wallace confronts the mythic origins of America—and poses Moltke’s metamorphosis (to nod to the Ovidian as well) as a possible epic rebirth or reconstitution of the nation and its definitions of value and beauty.

But Wallace also portrays in Moltke’s “strange and ambivalent gift” (O 255) a myth closer to home, one he knows himself to have shared in at times: a romanticized version of the effortless modern artist, founded in the philosophy of Kant. Consider Kant’s formulations on the ideal of effortlessness in fine arts such as sculpture in Critique of Judgment:

The purposiveness in the product of fine art, intentional though it must be, must not have the appearance of being intentional; i.e. we must be able to look upon fine art as nature, although we recognize it to be art. But the way in which a product of art seems like nature, is by the presence of perfect exactness in the agreement with rules prescribing how alone the product can be what it is intended to be, but with an absence of laboured effect (without academic form betraying itself), i.e. without a trace appearing of the artist having always had the rule present to him and of its having fettered his mental powers.³²

As Kai Hammermeister explains, Kant’s analysis is affiliated with the Renaissance ideal of sprezzatura, “the seemingly effortless production of works of art” that appear “uncontrived, natural.”³³ Consider the seeming consonance between such descriptions and the miraculous traits Wallace grants to Moltke: his art is an effortless product of “nature,” and he suffers not at all from “academic form,” as “a person with maybe like a year or two of community college” who is highly unlikely to “know Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” (O 319). Brint thus seems to have overcome that debilitating self-consciousness that made Himself’s films so cold. Yet Moltke the untutored genius also produces art that is wholly imitative, always of known figures, if in absolutely precise detail (O 328). What Wallace ultimately questions here is the paradoxical role of will in the production of art.

But he explores that question most thoroughly, and surprisingly, through nonartistic Skip. The story’s allegiances rest not with either of its clearly juxtaposed locales of Indiana or New York but with this “salaryman” (O 239), a Hermes figure who shuttles between the two, much like Wallace bringing Midwestern scenes to New York–centered magazines. Let me close this chapter by examining Skip as an ingenious attempt to resurrect aspects of the ethos of work, especially cognitive labor, that Wallace does not wholly give up on despite the despairs of Oblivion. A dorky, overweight exception at Style, Skip marks a partial return to the balancing and information-sorting efforts of Lenore. He has mastered a version of the writing that “Deciderization” calls for, constructing pieces by “pouring into his notebooks and word processor an enormous waterfall of prose which was then filtered…down to 400 words of commercial sediment”—more images of stochastic exclusion to find dirty ground. While Skip may not have Lenore’s penchant for clarity, “The Suffering Channel,” much of it narrated through him, balances with relatively straightforward prose the mental frenzies of Schmidt, Napier, and the spider collector of “Philosophy.” The “salaryman” appellation, used ten times, even places Skip outside American labor altogether: the term refers to the stereotypically boring, white-collar Japanese worker willing to pull long hours, showing Wallace has not entirely left behind the imagery of Reagan-era east-west competition that influenced “Westward” (and there are more U.S. salarymen to come, in the 1980s of The Pale King).

In Skip, the agential hand of work meets symbolic frustration: his tic is to make “a waist level fist and move[] it up and down in time to his stressed syllables” (O 239). He is awed by the Buddha-like Moltke in part because the latter’s “digital mudra” offers a contrasting vision of calm, free of striving and fists (O 305). Counting in time with syllables, Skip’s is a metafictive writer’s hand as well, and Wallace may be meditating on lines he marked in Hyde’s The Gift, follow-ups to the passive labor of gratitude and grace I quoted in chapter 3 and, in a sense, a more practical form of Kant’s aesthetic standards: Hyde writes, “When the will dominates, there is no gap through which grace may enter…and for an artist, no moment of receptiveness when the engendering images may come forward.”³⁴

In one other embarrassing feature of Skip, Wallace finds a solution of sorts to the impasse at which he found himself and his society with work: since childhood, “a deep perfusive flush to Atwater’s ears and surrounding tissues was the chief outward sign that his mind was working to process disparate thoughts and impressions much faster than its normal rate,” producing “heat coming off [his] ear itself” (O 286–287). Here is a mind hard at work; he seems to be a model of willed attention, literally uncool when attentive and engaged. Wallace puns here and throughout “The Suffering Channel” on “flush,” juxtaposing its toilet-bowl meaning and blood meaning (other links include the card player’s winning hand—heir to Lenore’s lottery metaphor—and the idea of being “flush with cash”). Moltke’s art off ends most people because it goes public with what is made “in a special private place, and flushed,” Laurel insists. “People flush so it will go away” (O 244). Blood is like waste, meant to remain inside: “We don’t…want to see our blood” (O 308). Skip, no pale king, is thus a more palatable, flexible Moltke: Skip makes abject bodily material public, moving around in the world with a kind of MRI on display, occasion for a “‘brain’ reading” different from Napier’s. His flush presages David Cusk’s sweating in The Pale King but marks a manageable grotesqueness, the working mind not overwhelmed by self-consciousness.

We see in Skip’s blood too a retreat from the Christ-figure dramatics that marked Gately’s bloody sacrifice; the red head is an image more in line with being able “to sacrifice for [people] over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, day after day” (TW 120). That blood rushes to Skip’s ears as well as his “forehead,” the site of the frontal cortex that has damned so many in Wallace’s work, is especially important: listening must support rational thought (O 241).

Wallace may not have been politically minded enough in Oblivion to offer a coordinated solution to the degradation of work under neoliberal capitalism, unpaid internships, and minds drowning in an information economy, but he does suggest that Skip’s form of hard-won attention has broad implications for the social world. Wallace caps his series of flush puns by tying them to large-scale economic terms: he refers to Skip’s red head as his “capital flush” (O 323). Art is a capital flush in interlocking senses: a product of labor that is irrational in its expensiveness to the producer, Wallace’s art denies capitalism’s pervasive logic of accumulation and profit and replaces that value with the savory warmth of thought that remains in the bodily plain, away from “coldly cerebral” abstraction (CW 41). “The Suffering Channel” thus finds a contained, more work-oriented means of achieving the arrow through the heart that “Westward” so melodramatically called for: Skip’s head, working hard, grants Wallace a sustainable symbol of “being willing to sort of die in order to move the reader” (CW 50). Consider Skip’s flushed head as one more version of Keats’s living hand that wants the reader’s blood to fill it: if Wallace’s text succeeds in getting us to think so hard that our brains must receive more blood, we all become red-headed Skips, “process[ing] disparate thoughts.” Another pithy formulation of Wallace’s postpostmodern ambition—to “mak[e] heads throb heartlike”—is symbolized here as well (BF 74).

Skip’s “quite large or protrusive” ears also pay homage to Kafka, the writer who, as Toon Staes demonstrates, defines the artist in “The Suffering Channel.”³⁵ But Wallace pays tribute to Kafka’s body (rather than simply his texts) because he seeks to exploit a particular element of Kafka’s expressionism that will carry forward into The Pale King and mark a victory in a longstanding philosophical battle. Wallace’s interest in mental labor, from Broom to “Deciderization,” has always been about finding a partial solution to the problem of minds’ opacity to each other, the lack of physical proof that the other is thinking and remains unknown, just like oneself. As Wallace writes regarding the refutation of Descartes’ Cogito argument in his Markson essay, “the truth of ‘I think’ entails only the existence of thinking, as the truth of ‘I write’ yields only the existence of text. To posit an ‘I’ that’s doing the thinking/writing is to beg the very question Descartes had started out impaled on” (BF 84). In response, Markson chose portraying the malign consequences of a “Tractatusized world” occupied by a solipsist, as many earlier Wallace texts also would (BF 77). But in “The Suffering Channel,” building on the grotesques of Infinite Jest, Wallace chooses a protagonist who seems to be trying to embody mental states that usually remain opaque to others. Skip offers a proof of thinking that uses the undeniable materiality of blood to sound those old Wallace refrains of good writing: “I am in here,” “I EXIST.”

Skip’s red head, likely sign of high blood pressure, also foreshadows a novel, The Pale King, where hard, perhaps pointless (and even deadly) work will abound. Blood’s circulation will also often be at issue (particularly in the hypertensive flush of the man most valorized for his civic values, Fogle’s father), and the pale of the title will serve as both sign of poor circulation and its counter, the pricking, aggressively wielded stylus, a “hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us,” as Kafka defined good literature (CL 61). Might the blood released by a hatchet-pen’s cuts, in addition to further images of waste, be an unexpected form of abject American value that literary writing can show us how to exchange, a new form of commonwealth connection and living transaction? Wallace spent his final years asking that question in grand, tornadic fashion.