David Foster Wallace’s Balancing Books: Fictions of Value

Extremes of work are a tonic in parts of The Pale King (Fogle’s narrative most prominently), but Wallace seems to have been intent on using this ensemble of surveilled and manipulated accountants to explore further the ambivalence over work, will, and their potential futility that I documented in chapter 5—the kinds of feelings that led Wallace late in life to consider giving up fiction altogether and opening a dog shelter (Max, Every Love Story, 296). A reprisal of the father from “Smithy,” Frederick Blumquist—an examiner dead at his desk of a heart attack at fifty-three, undiscovered for four days—haunts this novel in more ways than one. “He was always absorbed in his work” (PK 30), a supervisor says, in an ominous echo of Hal’s belief in transcendence as absorption. For blooms like Blumquist (from the Swedish for flower branch), there is not necessarily any cultivation in tax work, and the sense that Wallace might salvage a Weberian calling for himself or for postmodern America seems again suspect here, with Fogle’s conversion to a work ethic ending on another ominous note: the recruiter gives him the “smile of someone who, on Christmas morning, has just unwrapped an expensive present he already owns” (PK 254).

The predicament of Wallace’s workers has, as usual, both personal and large-scale implications. For example, in the bleak outlook of the numismatically named Stu Nichols, a stewing man of low self-esteem who offers his “two cents,” issues of self-making are once again tied to political economy (PK 144). In the stalled elevator of §19, Nichols steers a conversation about American civic history toward the topics of “metaphysics”—“existential” feelings of “smallness,” “insignificance,” and “mortality” (PK 145)—and, as another voice succinctly summarizes for him, a reading of the service-consumer economy and neoliberalism’s effects similar to that offered in my foregoing chapters: “the move from the production-model of American democracy to something like a consumption-model, where corporate production depends on a team approach whereas being a customer is a solo venture,” has led to “consuming citizens” who feel metaphysically small and weightless (PK 148).² In one of many signs that his draft remained temporally ununified, Wallace sets this scene in 1980, with the characters predicting “a Bush-Reagan ticket” (not the other way around) that will push Jimmy Carter from office, and Nichols’s combined approaches of metaphysics, politics, and economics in effect theorize the rewriting of subjectivity and political choice under an atomizing neoliberal regime often taken to have been crystallized in Reagan’s 1980 election (PK 150). As Nichols says, “the post-production capitalist,” focused on ways to free up capital, increase consumption, and reduce taxes, “has something to do with the death of civics” (PK 146). As I argue in this chapter’s most extensive reading, Wallace evokes an antineoliberal currency that might have the kind of simultaneous civic value and consumer value that Nichols/Nickels calls for here: a coinage that truly reads E Pluribus Unum and supports civic identification rather than solipsistic citizenship via consumption.

Several critics have already recognized, in §19 and elsewhere, tensions between civic and economic values, underscored by the conversion of the IRS’s moral mission into a profit-based principle in the invented Spackman Initiative. Ralph Clare sees the novel “bring[ing] together economic, political, cultural, and social explanations as to why the neoliberal revolution came to be” in the 1970s and 1980s,³ and Godden and Szalay call The Pale King a “study in the neoliberal transformation of American governance,” focusing especially on rampant financial speculation as the main agenda of neoliberalism.⁴ Boswell hears in DeWitt Glendenning’s criticism of Vietnam War protesters echoes of Wallace’s lament of the commodification of rebellion.⁵ Like Boswell (and Shapiro), Kelly focuses on the civics dialogue in §19, examining Wallace’s ongoing effort to transcend “traditional liberal/conservative or left/right binaries” in search of democratic values.⁶ Turning to many untouched scenes for evidence and continuing in the vein (pun intended) of Skip’s capital flush, I reach down to the level of less rhetorical directness the novel also exposes in the challenges of everyday, embodied life. For through attention to waste, blood, wounds, and dirt, we see Wallace’s fusion of dark, psychoanalytic tropes with the novel’s many captivating rhetorical statements about public affairs and social duty, adding grotesque dimensions to Burn’s claim, based in Wallace’s research in neuroscience, that entering this IRS means probing the unconscious mind.⁷ My readings dialogue frequently with those of Godden and Szalay, who also find value to be the frequent subtext of the novel’s abject materials.

Confronting the unconscious and the bodily in The Pale King means seeing the self once more as fundamentally porous and unarmored, unable to engage in the fantasy of accumulation capitalism inspires. Wallace recapitulates a trope I have tracked throughout by locating the Peoria Regional Examination Center on “Self-Storage Parkway,” suggesting that, despite a focus on ascetics rather than hedonists, the logic here remains one of the self (and, more prominently than before, the mind) as storage receptacle (PK 29). Some treat the self and its senses as a canvas for totalizing feats, whether in the unnamed boy’s desire to kiss every inch of himself in §36 or, in a scene added to the paperback, the goal of Hovatter (mad as a hatter?) to watch every second of television for an entire month (PK 12–25). Such scenes extend the motif of living within Schtitt’s “second world inside the lines,” though now without the ecstasies of athletic achievement to leaven the pain (IJ 459).

From title on, The Pale King punctures personal enclosures, undoing dreams, like the self-kissing boy’s, of being “self-contained and -sufficient” (PK 403). Building on the stilus motif of “The Suffering Channel,” this late Wallace recommits himself to an art of making holes—to signifying absence. The pale of the title can mean a border, as in “beyond the pale”—appropriate for a book beginning in “the place beyond the windbreak” (PK 5), with “tilted posts” and wire “more a symbol of restraint than a fence per se” (PK 6). But the Latin palus also means stake, that which digs a hole in making a border. There is aggression in the image: another meaning of palus is the staff or stave used for fighting in ancient Rome, a meaning Wallace plays on in Sylvanshine’s memento mori description of an older plane passenger’s “staved-in face” (PK 12). In an example of the many great concavities of being, Dean has the “sensation of a great type of hole or emptiness falling through him and continuing to fall and never hitting the floor” (again, Wallace’s “agonizing interval” between fall and grounding) (PK 380). Dean realizes that “boring also meant something that drilled in and made a hole” (PK 380). The pale king, in one sense, would be the holder of the dangerous stylus, Wallace himself, called “the living human holding the pencil” (PK 68)—though in a book of odd bites (Dean realizes that the “strange indentations in rows on [his] blotter’s front edge were…the prints of teeth” [PK 382]), we should emphasize the moment David Wallace is seen “holding a ballpoint pen in my teeth” (PK 304). As Derrida writes in Spurs, illuminating some of Wallace’s assumptions about writing, “In the question of style there is always the weight…of some pointed object,” which “might be only a quill or a stylus” but “could just as easily be a stiletto, or even a rapier.”⁸ Abject materials, from feces to blood, come pouring out in this puncturing novel, and Wallace challenges us to find the glow of value in these flows.

As in “John Billy,” then, which I claimed in chapter 2 anticipated this novel, characters must get “stuck” to “g[e]t valuable.” For Wallace there is no other way. In the three main sections of this chapter, I attend to three subjects circulating around the issue of value and its relationship to Wallace’s porous and intersubjective bodies. First, in one last rendition, work: Wallace interprets work in ritual terms here, seemingly trying to restore the spiritual potency it once had for him and, in a newer development, illustrate work’s potential for codifying shared values. I conclude this section with a final comparison case, Dave Eggers, who expands Wallace’s critiques of neoliberalism into the age of social media and entrepreneurs’ displacement of the state. Second, forms of capitalist value: in the culminations of two obsessions I have examined throughout, Wallace places both the contracts that undergird his published books and the money that circulates through them on a human, often quite grotesque footing. Solemn versions of the AA wallet in the toilet come to dominate the Peoria landscape. Third, attention, the means by which a reader participates from afar in the uncanny forms of value production suggested by these first two sections: having intertwined bodies and money, Wallace constructs a final model of cognitive labor based on the attention our minds pay, our comparative valuation of the novel’s thousands of details. In all three sections I also portray this final axiological novel as a summation and rereading of the Wallace themes of value, ground, and balance—especially since the book revisits his mid-1980s acceptance of the vocation of fiction writing.

Among many other identities, The Pale King, as a “vocational memoir,” is Wallace’s metafictional elegy for a lost relationship to a magical labor (PK 72). By portraying 1985, the novel toys with what Wallace knows had become, through the literary celebrity system, well-known facts for his core readership. To avoid confusion, I refer here to the author-persona as David Wallace, with just Wallace reserved for the writer himself. The 1985 leave of absence David Wallace must take from college because of his paper-writing business postdates the leave Wallace took in the fall of 1983 for mental-health reasons (the business may be true to life but was not the reason for a leave).⁹ The 1983 leave, his second from Amherst, was a time during which he suddenly “found [him]self writing fiction” (CW 35). As for the actual May 1985, it must have been a moment of both celebration and resignation for Wallace: he had become a serious writer over the previous year by drafting Broom, but now revision awaited (CW 35). Like so many of his characters, he had come to his own end-as-true-beginning, his Cavellian second birth. David Wallace’s arrival at the REC occurs “sometime in mid-May” and “quite probably on or very near Wednesday, May 15,” dates that place the novel in the midst of Wallace’s final days at Amherst (PK 258–259).¹⁰ Such renderings of Wallace’s mid-1980s life, even if interpreted without this precision, create a peripheral zone in which the novel can, freed from but still linked to autobiography, metaphorize mental-health problems (by exploring inauthentic paper writing and the boredom of many depressives) as well as salutary old work habits (by exploring super powers of concentration and self-forgetting).¹¹

Wallace consistently recalled the mid-1980s as a period when he naturally achieved a seemingly effortless relationship to writing work, time passing without his notice. “Writing fiction takes me out of time,” he says in 1987 (CW 7). In 1990, recovering at Granada House, he recalls “times in 1984, 85, 86, 87 when I’d sit down and look up and it would be hours later and there’d be this mess of filled up notebook paper,” leaving him feeling “well fucked and well blessed.”¹² Now struggling again, Wallace devised a metafiction that reimagined his early writing days through the lens of an alien profession, one in which time’s slow passage could be transfigured by miraculous concentration, as it had been in the real 1985. The hole bored in Dean, one of Wallace’s numerous alter egos, is in effect the destruction of that magical temporality, record of a writer who could no longer fathom “doing this day after day”: Dean does a return, “then another one, then a plummeting inside of him as the wall clock showed that what he’d thought was another hour had not been. Not even close” (PK 378–379). A relapsing Lenz had no embodied relation to a time he always asked for in exact numbers, a personified “Time spread [Poor Tony] and entered him roughly and had its way” (IJ 303), and Gately only beat drugs’ temptation by somehow living within each second’s passage. Fraught relationships to time are what bind Wallace’s disparate narrative worlds together.

How to regain a magical relationship to time? The answer seems to be attending to ritual, “a structured interval of communion with both neighbor and space,” as the state-fair essay says it (SFT 92). Ritual, a natural extension of his interest in games and work, has been a subject for Wallace since Sykes’s travesty of religious speech and J.D.’s plans for a Dionysian “altar” rigged to “shower U.S.D.A. Grade A blood” (GCH 310). Infinite Jest may be marked by what Greg Carlisle calls the “obsessive rituals” of addicts, scenes of secrecy and shame,¹³ but daily or near-daily AA sessions become a therapeutic social ritual that comforts the addicts. The ritual aspects of both Infinite Jest and The Pale King owe the most, though, to a story I did not discuss in chapter 4, “Church Not Made with Hands,” a favorite of Smith¹⁴ and an example of what George Saunders registers when he describes reading Brief Interviews as a “ritual stripping away of the habitual.”¹⁵ In “Church,” a Joycean account of an art therapist named Day, Wallace writes a first draft of Fogle’s riveting tax teacher (in “Church” it is an actual Jesuit rather than a presumed “Jesuit” in “‘mufti’” [PK 217]), and mental superpowers form an analogue to the reader’s experience of the text (Day’s colleague Yang, who may need a Yin to balance him out, can mentally rotate any object). With Day’s name suggesting that his godliness (dei) depends on his embodied relationship to time’s passage (one day at a time), “Church” ends with the command to “Rotate” (BI 210). In Wallace’s symbolism, the lost are those debilitatingly fearful of time’s cyclical passage; see Rick inexplicably “in the edge of the Erieview shadow, moving gradually with it,” at the end of The Broom of the System (451). The imperative to rotate is also prevalent in The Pale King, where inner narratives of ritual redemption are joined by external depictions of bodies performing the gestures of Wallace’s quirky civic religion.

“The thing to do, I thought, is to walk in circles. This is demanded by the mythology of all deserts and wasted places,” Gary says in End Zone.¹⁶ Wallace’s sense of how to write ritualism in the postmodern context is hugely indebted to DeLillo, who, Amy Hungerford argues, “imagines the ritual aspects of language—of conversation, especially—in sacramental terms modeled by the Latin mass.”¹⁷ For Wallace, who lacks grounding in any specific tradition like DeLillo’s childhood Catholicism (see Neal sifting through spiritual alternatives in “Good Old Neon”), ritualism is often signaled by a generic, unremarked turning in a circle, a shape Burn sees recapitulated on numerous scales in The Pale King (“Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness,” 155). The contrast is with nihilists who reject ritual turning by saying J.D.’s panning “big No” to the cornfields.

The opening of The Pale King, also on farmland, asks readers to make a very different kind of rotation, an atavistic sort that seems designed, like the rain ritual of “John Billy,” to give life to a dry, “untilled” field (PK 5). This “very old land” (PK 5) is “the imaginative geography,” says Burn, “of ancient Greek myth” (“Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness,” 161). The reader is invited to describe a circle with her gaze: “Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers” (PK 5). With the reiterated “past” of the novel’s first sentence connoting deeply embedded memory, like that of “a mother’s soft hand on your cheek,” we enter, if not the unconscious per se, a psychically vulnerable space (PK 5). The way the arresting claim that “We are all of us brothers” arises without rhetorical lead-in suggests that it too, liberated in the ritual air of bodily motion, exists as an instinctual (“innit”) feeling more than a reasoned claim. There are echoes of Emerson’s essay “Circles,” a text emblematic of the “sentiment of ‘union’ and fellow-feeling” that Giles finds Wallace’s earlier work adapting.¹⁸ Here that reading complements the general Transcendentalist vibe and the Whitmanian associations, stylistic and thematic, of a catalog of grasses. As the narrative eye descends to inspect the ground and cow patties, like Lynch’s camera finding bugs or a severed ear in Blue Velvet, we are reminded of humans’ humble standing and prepared for characters who will find the ground unstable or in upheaval, such as Toni Ware. Her childhood traumas in §8 will be coupled with Wallace’s newly realistic turn on ecological exploitation, gypsum mining that blows up trees and makes “it rain[] fine ash” (PK 56), transforming place, or “where,” into commodity, or “ware.”¹⁹

In §1 Wallace juxtaposes primitive relationships to the ground’s natural plenitude with the modern system of bureaucratic valuation that will be the book’s subject, playing Campbell and Eliot again and getting us to see April 15 as an annual American ritual of return(s) and sacrifice. Having rewritten Veterans Day in Infinite Jest as a celebration of American solipsism, in The Pale King (featuring several actual war veterans and always allowing for misprision in the meaning of being recruited into “the Service” [PK 73]) Wallace orbits a day of national sacrifice that seems, as the title suggests, to have been bled nearly dry. Examining sacrifice in a 2000 review of bad novels about math, Wallace, unpacking a metaphor for a mathematician refusing to publish his findings, underscores a reference to Ovid’s story of King Minos’s refusal to “return…via religious sacrifice” the bull Poseidon captured for him (BF 234). Wallace glosses this “alienated selfishness” (BF 234) through a quotation of Campbell, who writes, “By the sacrilege of the refusal of the rite [of sacrifice],” Minos “cuts himself as a unit off from the larger whole of the community…. He is the hoarder of the general benefit.”²⁰ While Minos is far from the only analogue for the pale king of the title, his refusal to “return” reflects the reluctance of many twentieth-century Americans (little kingly solipsists) to send in a fair tax return. They too “hoard[]…the general benefit.”

Idiosyncratic rites require a cast of unorthodox priests, The Pale King’s Christian subtext repeatedly suggests—not the Priethts, heartless Harts, or even bedesmen a less mature Wallace created in the actual 1985. The Jesuit tax teacher who may not be a Jesuit is a treatment of tax examining as holy office, as are the “Immersives” (a religious term) that David Wallace glimpses, each working, monklike, “in a small tight circle of light at what appeared to be the bottom of a one-sided hole,” one of many moments suggesting transcendence through immanence (PK 292). I noted in chapter 3 the translation of Stecyk into sick saint; also unstably righteous is the Christian examiner Lane Dean, whose name reads as street-cleric, suggesting the profane commingled with the sacred. Father Karras, the movie exorcist who is challenged in his faith, would have found himself at home here had “Smithy” become part of The Pale King. A surprising reading recommendation Wallace once made to Franzen—Brian Moore’s Catholics, about a remotely located Irish priest continuing to celebrate the Latin mass after Vatican II—further suggests that unorthodox priests and reinvigorated ritual were important subjects for Wallace (Max, Every Love Story, 164).

In fact, The Pale King seems like a direct response to a passage from Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, so closely does it track with the novel’s search for spiritual power among tax collectors. Kierkegaard writes about seeing the knight of faith and “instantly push[ing]him” away:

[I] say half aloud, “Good Lord, is this the man? Is it really he? Why, he looks like a tax collector!” However, it is the man after all. I draw closer to him, watching his least movements to see whether there might not be visible a little heterogeneous fractional telegraphic message from the infinite…No! He is solid through and through. His tread? It is vigorous, belonging entirely to finiteness…He belongs entirely to the world…He tends to his work. So when one looks at him one might suppose that he was a clerk who had lost his soul in an intricate system of bookkeeping, so precise is he.²¹

By invoking the tax collector, Kierkegaard brings Christ’s challenges into modernity; for “truly, I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.”²³ So too does The Pale King, a book about recruitment, rework the Gospels by the light of Wallace’s coupling of materialism and belief. Several of the examiners live at an apartment complex called “Angler’s Cove,” marking them as fishermen, a profession leading to disciplehood (PK 24): “I will send you out to fish for people” (Matt. 4:19). Just as Wallace was leery of using religious language with any piousness or certainty in Infinite Jest, though, The Pale King, while more forthright in its portrayal of a postmodern charisma and asceticism, refrains from associating these workers unequivocally with the holy. With apostolic recruitment and infusions of energy under scrutiny, Wallace’s plan for the plot to be a “series of set-ups” where “nothing actually happens” may reprise the pointed exclusion of Thanksgiving from Infinite Jest: the mid-May day of arrival in which action is concentrated places the novel (as we have it) short of May 26, 1985, the date of Pentecost on the Christian liturgical calendar, when the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles.²⁴ As Evans suggested about Infinite Jest, Peoria’s religious meaning, whatever it is, will be made by individuals on the ground, not forces from above.

And made too by readers—for reading, the mystery Wallace so often probes in portrayals of work, is the ritual action under scrutiny from the moment “Look around you” couples with “Read these” in §1 (PK 6). While still always writing metafiction, Wallace also fashions a meta reading in describing the examiners continually scanning and turning over papers. He seeks new ways to escape the traps of self-consciousness that beset metafiction by attempting a form of other-consciousness—that is, consciousness of the eyes that will stare down at the page once his work is through, forming a community of their own, making the rote into ritual, and potentially sharing values as well. In the strangely structured §25, which, in two columns, mimics the accountant’s ledger, “‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle turns a page. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page,” and so on (PK 312). A return to the themes of coauthorship and the commonwealth of anonymous stories that concluded chapter 3, this section holds a mirror up to its reader, who also repeatedly “turns a page.” Pietsch reveals that Wallace at one point considered this section as the novel’s opening;²⁵ in that position, shortly after the title page, these names (and, by implication, the reader’s own) might have registered as coauthors to David Foster Wallace. “Jay Landauer and Ann Williams turn a page almost precisely in sync though they are in different rows and cannot see each other” (PK 313): causing intimates and strangers to be “precisely in sync”—whether in a church chant or a dance formation—is what rituals do, including the quite individuated task of silent reading. For you and Jay Landauer may be turning the same page of The Pale King in sync—and thinking similar silent thoughts about it—right at this moment.²⁶ With the book incomplete it is impossible to know, but it seems likely Wallace would have included names in this section that he focused on or used nowhere else, to reinforce the sense that the anonymous many (the figurants?) who made up his audience had a place in his text. In this way he hoped to show readers once again the stakes and necessity of their work—and how they too might be operating “in sync” and “unalone” (CW 62), overcoming solipsism through reading.

Those are readings of Wallace’s utopian vision of ritual participation, which seems to promote sharing and common values, but most often we are among hoarders of the general benefit. The prevailing negative definition of ritual arises in Fogle’s §22, where the potential for grace is enfolded into what reads as a spiritual conversion narrative, one clearer in import than Gately’s search for Dei Gratia. Fogle’s tale, its trauma centered in the subway, is a series of ground-based signs: the foot, the base, and the shoe structure this axiological narrative of values being fitfully born and the personal becoming political.

(Dis)identifications with value strongly assert themselves at §22’s beginning. Fogle’s name suggests “fog” or perhaps a corruption of “focal” (hazy on details, he lacks focus); “fogle hunter” is nineteenth-century slang for a pickpocket—a fogle is a silk handkerchief, but we should draw links to purses, wallets, and Gately the thief.²⁷ Fogle calls his younger self “the worst kind of nihilist—the kind who isn’t even aware he’s a nihilist” (PK 156). He is the character in the corpus most clearly under what Wallace, describing contemporary writing’s lack of Dostoevskyan moral engagement, calls a “type of Nihilist spell” (CL 271n28). Fogle’s preferred drug of abuse is Obetrol, an anorexiant or weight-loss pill (recall Laurel and the interns). Before his conversion, he stops his accounting studies at “depreciation,” which he calls “fatal” (PK 157)—as though he cannot handle the entropic implications of cost accounting and the eternal overhead of his “wastoid” ways (PK 160).

These associations are far from simply personal, though. Part of Fogle’s narrative occurs in 1977, and here Wallace plays one last time with presidential rhetoric on commonwealth themes. In one scene, Fogle’s father returns home unexpectedly to find his son and friends stoned and with the heat turned up, creating another hothouse, perverting the oikos and hoarding the general benefit. Fogle scrambles “to turn the thermostat back down to sixty-eight,” feeling “like a spoiled little selfish child” (PK 173). The reference is to the “energy conservation” (PK 172) policies of not just Fogle’s father—who Wallace of course notes “grew up during the Depression” (PK 169)—but the United States as a whole. In one of the most enduring memes associated with his presidency (and with 1977 in particular), Jimmy Carter gave his “sweater speech” on February 2, 1977, shortly after his inauguration. In it he called for “cooperation,” “mutual effort,” and “modest sacrifices” from the American people, who by keeping thermostats at 65 in the daytime and 55 at night could “save half the current shortage of natural gas.”²⁸ The nationally televised speech (a latter-day version of FDR’s fireside chats, in spirit and setting, with Carter appearing next to a roaring fire) is remembered for the president’s sartorial choice: he wore a cardigan, implying it was the clothing of civic caring (especially for those without big fireplaces?). Appropriately, Fogle at the beginning of his memoir vaguely recalls “Jimmy Carter addressing the nation in a cardigan,” a memory that slides in the same sentence into apathetic gossip about Carter’s brother (PK 166). In a finished Pale King, revisiting 1970s energy politics might have developed into a captivating dialogue with the Iraq War, tense U.S./Middle East relations, and climate-change denial amid which Wallace worked on the novel—which Pietsch says “came alive” again for him in spring of 2005,²⁹ the period of the “Author’s Foreword” and a time with no shortage of chicanery from “the Decider” and his cabinet in the news. With Spackman’s changes proving “attractive[]…to the free-market conservatives of the current administration” looking to “deregulate” the IRS like any other business, Wallace may associate sweater-clad Carter with a last gasp of commonwealth values before neoliberalism took command (PK 115).

In the central images of his college years, Fogle describes devising an anti ritual: rather than structure time and solidify values, he destroys them. In the “nihilistic ritual of the foot,” exercising none of the choice Wallace’s heroes must move toward, Fogle lets a podiatrist’s rotating sign determine his fate, looking to it every night to determine whether he and his roommate study or drink at a bar called the Hat (PK 187). Rather than centering the rotating self, Fogle’s ritual replays Infinite Jest’s externalized organs, from Lung to Brain, and substantiates the belief in a second, virtual existence outside embodied reality. Lit by good old “neon,” the imposing foot is another instance of weightless gas masquerading as solidity. And in another image of imperceptible entropic depletion and a malignant relationship to time, the “sign’s rotation didn’t stop all at once. It more like slowly wound down, with almost a wheel-of-fortune quality about where it would finally stop” (PK 163). Fogle thus accepts an externalized and mechanical temporality, a system of the arbitrary. Chance must be acknowledged in Wallace’s world, but not like this. The foot is a gigantic idol, an example of the “worship” that “everybody” engages in, most often mindlessly (TW 100).

To move Fogle toward the transformative ritualism of the REC, Wallace creates a mythical space in the Chicago subway system—importantly, a publicly funded resource. Fogle follows his father into the underworld and emerges from this journey to serve his nation: Wallace is revising Aeneas’s famous encounter with his dead father in the underworld, part of the hero’s journey toward founding Rome. With early scenes of taxation’s breakdown set in Rome, New York, The Pale King portrays the decline of a decadent American empire for lack of social cohesion—and, potentially, the refounding (the regrounding) of a better nation. In the gruesome death of Fogle’s father, Wallace returns as well to his mythos of the founding of Collision, Illinois, but now with less hope for a “settlement way beyond legal.” At stake once more are the foundations of community financial value, emblematized by an invented 1977 moment of threatened commonwealth: the Illinois progressive sales tax “disaster” (PK 197), based on a policy that, while attempting to increase revenue and discourage inflation-causing overconsumption, leads Nichols’s “consuming citizens” (consumers first, citizens second) to divide up retail transactions into values lower than $5.00. The absurd retailers’ slogan of “Subdividable!” retools Marathe’s tale of the undividable good and exposes consumption as an inevitably atomizing force (PK 198). In the postproduction age of Spackman and manipulable financial data, the IRS has the same logic: Fogle’s teacher says, in an image that slides from homey to violent, “The pie has been made—the contest is now in the slicing,” and “you aspire to hold the knife” (PK 234). “Subdividable!” becomes the book’s dark countercredo to “We are all of us brothers,” upsetting the footing, or base, of Illinois society. For as Fogle ruefully notes after reviewing the equation T[ax] = B[ase] x R[ate], the “base, B, of a progressive tax cannot be something which can be easily subdivided” (PK 195).

The nihilism of Fogle’s tawdry foot ritual continues resonating in the demise of his father’s value system, with Wallace finding in feet a peripheral locus for unendurably traumatic memories. Among “vivid but fragmentary details,” Fogle remembers a man being “interviewed while holding my father’s right shoe, a tasseled Florsheim loafer, of which the toe portion and welt were so abraded by the platform’s cement that the sole’s front portion had detached” (PK 205).³⁰ We are witnessing the building of Fogle’s sharpened memory and attention from the ground up, even as the anonymous man’s attachment to the shoe’s totemic pathos allows Wallace to inject emotions of trauma into the scene without betraying Fogle’s glazedness, so essential to the voice of this section. A parallel muted encounter with the father’s shoes occurs after the accident, though earlier in the section, when Fogle recounts cleaning his father’s closet and finding shoe trees, “some of them…inherited from his own father”: Fogle does not “know what they were for, since I never took care of any of my shoes, or valued them” (PK 176). Here, the doubled image of rootedness (shoes and trees) combines with the discovery of shoe-value, forming an axiological counter to Fogle’s unthought Oedipal struggles against elders’ authority. Later preparing for employment under the “man of style” and civic idealist Glendenning (PK 436), Fogle buys suits, shirts, and “Nunn Bush leather wing tips” after turning to tax, an act of redemptive consumption attaching him to his father’s legacy (PK 236). These shoes redeem the nihilistic foot, and “prepar[ing] to wear the hat” the tax teacher holds “aloft” (a new object of worship) remakes the bar where Fogle wasted time (PK 235).

DePaul is Fogle’s college because he finds there a Pauline moment of “‘put[ting] away childish things,’” as he quotes from 1 Corinthians (PK 174). Footwear is again our expressionist guide to the internal transformations of spirit and axiology: Fogle, not yet having taken up his father’s attention to shoes, wears fashionable Timberland boots in “dogshit yellow,” “with laces untied and dragging” (PK 192), in contrast with the “neatly tied” leather business shoes of the accounting students and the “dazzling” “shine” of the teacher’s dress shoes (PK 217). The “dogshit” boots allow Wallace to align multiple moments of unorthodox ritual and spiritual transformation: like the reader in §1 who rotates before looking to the cow patties at her feet, Fogle, through the tax sermon’s imperatives, can get in touch with the values at the base of a strong social order and the waste (Wallace’s general emblem for trauma) on which he stands. In a way that recalls Gately’s unassuming spiritual path, the chanced-upon classroom ritual and dogshit boots displace the parallel story of a Christian woman who suddenly turns into a church parking lot and is “‘born again,’” supposedly saved (Fogle sneeringly recounts) from “barely clinging to any kind of interior sense of value” (PK 213). Her cowboy boots have on them “a rich, detailed, photorealist scene of some kind of meadow or garden,” making them look “like a…greeting card” (PK 213). While “greeting card” broadens the satire, note that the “photorealist” has always signified the abstractions of “Tractatusized” picture theory for Wallace, and here he signifies Fogle’s departure into the more personalized and existential values this novel attempts to realize—away from prefabricated rituals and pretty pictures of completed, unchallenging Christian cultivation.³¹

During the teacher’s rousing speech about becoming “cowboys” of information (PK 235), reminiscent of Ahab’s incitements on the quarterdeck, Wallace reconfigures the American call to work by drawing on one of the greatest scenes of communal labor in the nation’s literature, also from Moby-Dick: “A Squeeze of the Hands,” chapter 94, on which Wallace wrote a three-page close-reading essay his first year at Amherst.³² Echoing Melville’s homoerotic language, Wallace writes,

A sudden kind of shudder went through the room, or maybe an ecstatic spasm, communicating itself from senior accounting major or graduate business student to senior accounting major or grad business student so rapidly that the whole collective seemed for an instant to heave—although, again, I am not a hundred percent sure this was real, that it took place outside of me, in the actual classroom, and the (possible) collective spasm’s moment was too brief to be more than sort of fleetingly aware of it.

(232–233)

If this moment contains hopes for the American workplace in the 1970s and 1980s, what of work in the 2010s? Fogle’s insights into work mark an occasion for a final interlude on another key Wallace follower, Eggers, who, as Konstantinou suggests, has through McSweeney’s and associated activist ventures fashioned from Wallace’s anti-irony an “optimistic ethos that mixes an offbeat aesthetic with…philanthropy and…alternative institutional structures.”³³ Eggers’s writing has also been marked everywhere by Wallace’s approach to value: the early work, for example, arises from stories of wealth, expenditure, and gifts, themes uniting A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, in part about spending his parents’ life-insurance settlement, and the round-the-world giveaway of You Shall Know Our Velocity!. It is in The Circle, though, that Eggers finally writes his Infinite Jest, the book he had the honor of introducing in its 2006 edition. The Circle, set in a near-future world, is a “campus” novel where an E.T.A.-like structure at a huge social-networking company keeps employees, constantly likened to children, unquestioningly competing with one another and charting their status and plateaux. The Circle also expands Wallace’s videophony into an era of body cameras and the cloud-ing of everything. Eggers reveals his source when a character with a history of abuse inexplicably has “a papiermache mask he’d made as a child” hanging above his bed; moments later, he takes video of sex play that is uploaded, irrevocably, to Circle servers.³⁴ Meanwhile, the intricacies of The Circle’s data-gathering procedures owe something to “Mister Squishy,” which Eggers edited for McSweeney’s. And an unlikely shark-feeding scene that reflects on Web ecologies and predation pays further homage to Wallace when a lobster is gruesomely eaten alive (PK 317) (Wallace’s shark fears—revealed in Max’s biography, which Eggers blurbed—add another layer to the scene [Every Love Story, 5–6, 53]).

In a country that builds endless opportunities for “connection” but no longer makes anything, The Circle’s endorsement of essentially Thoreauvian economic values comes through Mercer Medeiros, the protagonist Mae’s Luddite ex-boyfriend, who stands for inefficient artisanship (he makes antler chandeliers) and rants about what The Circle does to in-person interactions. Mercer is Eggers’s tribute (as Alan Clay was in A Hologram for the King) to the American small businessman standing against the huge corporation: for “Mercer,” read merchant in the old, face-to-face sense. With his “Me—— Me——” name, Mercer signifies Eggers the small publisher, obsessing over a low-profit venture in beautiful artifacts. But in his hulking, “Sasquatch”-like appearance, Mercer also resembles the physical Wallace, with whom he shares several opinions about media’s sacrifice of the interpersonal (The Circle, 370). Mercer is in effect driven to suicide by the constant visibility that Wallace lamented in “E Unibus Pluram” and that Eggers shows expanding a hundred-fold in the age of live-streaming video.

The Circle is among the first Pale King–influenced novels as well, applying Wallace’s insights into mechanized labor to the fully digital era. While there are no “Tingle tables” here (PK 276), Eggers satirizes the endless streams of stressful, pointless, and self-obliterating work in a supposedly hyperefficient age: Mae’s desk goes from one screen of customer help requests, to two screens bursting with emails and fake intimacies, to a computerized bracelet and wearable camera that make her every reaction and perception an object of worldwide surveillance and profit. Eggers projects a near-future enslavement to a system of “likes,” customer surveys, and data generation that makes Mae’s purchases and online image the seat of her value creation, all plausible extensions of current Facebook saturation. The Circle can seem implausible much of the time, too, but that quality arises from the credulousness and willing acceptance of every Circle incursion by its protagonist, whom Eggers pointedly names after a word of permission. A feckless and Fogle-like character, Mae-as-May embodies the perverse new liberty implied by the word neoliberal: applied to technological formations, liberal now essentially refers not to citizens’ rights but to the freedom they grant corporate systems to instrumentalize their tastes and habits. Crime prevention and many other civic domains are soon to fall as well under The Circle’s corporate control. If Infinite Jest told us in 1996 where digital entertainment “choices” would lead us, The Circle predicts the neoliberal dystopia to which today’s wave of (social) media saturation is headed. It also offers a far more detailed account of the technocorporate methods by which the American social contract is being sundered, a subject The Pale King addresses in much more mysterious terms.

While the design of The Pale King will remain forever indeterminate, Wallace was clearly developing a tension between its two first-person narrators: Fogle and David Wallace, who no doubt surprises readers by disparaging Fogle as his “logorrheic colleague[]” in a section Pietsch places soon after the rather moving §22 (PK 261).³⁵ Their differences on valuing “Irrelevant” (PK 261) details will be the concern of this chapter’s final section, but here I draw attention to the legal-economic term that divides them: the contract, fetish object of a neoliberal society that purports to reduce every relationship to monetary balance and legal consent. Fogle endures a legal imbroglio after his father’s death that shows the severance of contractual reciprocity from justice: the family’s lawyers try to use “some ambiguity in the legal language” to nullify an obligation, while loopholes in the very sort of contracts the father helped broker for the city complicate assigning ethical responsibility for the train doors’ malfunction (PK 206). Fogle senses, too, that, in the late-twentieth-century United States, any notion of a social contract that arises from Locke or Rousseau figures as an afterthought, overshadowed by a more readily understood quid pro quo: Americans are only really “free” in a contract-based society in relation to “strangers,” and “buying or selling something doesn’t obligate you to anything except what’s written in the contract—although there’s also the social contract, which is where the obligation to pay one’s fair share of taxes comes in” (PK 194–195).

David Wallace, by contrast, becomes not just a “creature of the system” (PK 548) but a creature of contract—with individual words omitted from his account if they are not allowed by the corporate lawyers said to be hovering over the text. In the “Author’s Foreword” of §9, which takes metafictional self-consciousness to a new extreme in order to evoke realms beyond it, Wallace brings to bear on his agitated persona all the malign effects of language taken as contractual object and authorship taken as an avenue to sales figures, on which §9 provides much hard data. David Wallace even lets contracts intrude directly on the writer-reader relationship that is Wallace’s holy ground, as the “Foreword” finally turns Wallace’s long-standing critique of contracts on his own products, expanding the satire of Little, Brown’s ownership in “The Suffering Channel.” As Godden and Szalay argue, §9 represents the general American ceding of personhood to the “imperatives of corporate finance” (“The Bodies in the Bubble,” 1279). But Wallace also mediates here a more idiosyncratic neurosis over signing a contract and taking any money before a book was complete. In 1996 he said he only reluctantly signed a contract and took an advance partway through Infinite Jest because he needed time for research: “It would have been a lot more fun if I hadn’t taken any money” (Lipsky and Wallace, Although of Course, 2). Of a potential contract for his next book he said, “It would just be pain. And I’d be being paid to undergo pain, which I don’t want to do”—another suggestion that somatic costs and monetary compensation do not balance (Lipsky and Wallace, Although of Course, 124). Wallace maintained this anticontract stance until his death. Pietsch describes the heartbreaking note he left on the disk containing 250 pages of The Pale King: “For LB advance?”—a sign that Wallace was still uncertain about Bonnie Nadell’s encouragement to send her chapters so that she could negotiate a contract (PK x). Reflecting principles visible since Broom, Wallace was reluctant to convert his words into money too soon.

In §9, David Wallace, sounding like the frustrated axiom-seeking Day in Infinite Jest, tries to go back to the text’s unnoticed grounding in legal disclaimer, setting up the entire novel as a liar’s paradox—“if you believe one you can’t believe the other, & c., & c.” (PK 69)—or what Wallace calls in Everything and More a “Vicious Infinite Regress,” an unhealthy circling that contrasts with ritual repetition (EM 49). Wallace has played before, though never so daringly, with publisher boilerplate and its implicit statements about the mimetic effects of his figurations. As in “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” the story this section resembles, Wallace is reacting to his drama as legal subject when he writes, “Like many Americans, I’ve been sued—twice, in fact, though both suits were meritless” (PK 73n5). Boswell documents the connections between Girl’s legal troubles, its rewritten disclaimer, and §9 ³⁶ but omits Infinite Jest, where Wallace went further, and with real-world legal consequences: “Any apparent similarity [of characters] to real persons is not intended by the author and is either a coincidence or the product of your own troubled imagination,” that book’s disclaimer reads. None of the satirized corporations or celebrities objected, but the real Kate Gompert, who played junior tennis with Wallace, claimed defamation and brought a suit that was dismissed before going to trial.³⁷

Inspiring the writing in §9 is, again, Gaddis, named as one of the sort of “immortally great fiction writer[s]” David Wallace wanted to become (PK 75). This section builds upon both Gaddis’s entropic style and Oscar Crease’s lawsuits in A Frolic of His Own and may even offer Wallace’s response to his best friend’s controversial rejection of their mutual influence. Demonstrating that he saw conjunctions between Gaddis’s fiction and the Gompert case (and thus §9 as well), Wallace complains to DeLillo in 1998 of “having to get deposed for a lawsuit filed by some loon with the same name as a book-character who alleges an entire 1000-page novel was written to harm her (the EGO in people’s sense of injury—I thought Gaddis’s Frolic was kind of nasty-spirited when I read it [recently], but now I’m starting to see what he was talking about…).”³⁸ In The Pale King’s “Foreword,” Wallace, imitating Gaddis’s legalisms, is also responding to Franzen’s argument for a novel of “Contract” over one of “Status” in his infamous 2002 criticism of Gaddis, “Mr. Difficult”: Franzen prefers “Contract” books that “sustain a sense of connectedness” and reader “pleasure,” whereas “Status” works like Gaddis’s, sure of their “art-historical importance,” do not worry about the “average reader.”³⁹ Wallace argues the inverse, disdaining Contract models of reading; he aligns himself again with Gaddis, who in J R (in words Franzen has in mind but never directly cites) writes repeatedly that “the whole God damned problem’s the decline from status to contract.”⁴⁰

Among Wallace’s purposes in his “Foreword” is to juxtapose controlling contracts with what David Wallace calls, in reference to the rules of memoir reading, “unspoken codes” (PK 75). “Code” is a word of simultaneous regimentation and mysticism that applies to much in the novel, from unspoken civic bonds that transcend the legal to code in the computer programmer’s sense, retail’s “Charleston code” (PK 393n2), and, most importantly, the “tax code”—an emblem of novelistic language itself that, “once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of [human] life: greed, politics, power, goodness, charity” (PK 84; brackets in the original). David Wallace’s attempts to define human relationships through contract rather than code become, in the terms from Wittgenstein I quoted in chapter 1, misbegotten efforts to name language’s “operations and boundaries.” For David Wallace is trying to redraw the borders of a text in which readers have already become immersed, have already taken as immanence. Consider his description of the “codes and gestures” (both words with connections to ritualism) that make up the “unspoken contract” defining memoirs as “true”:

What I’m trying to do right here, within the protective range of the copyright page’s disclaimer, is to override the unspoken codes and to be 100 percent overt and forthright about the present contract’s terms…Our mutual contract [of memoir] here is based on the presumptions of (a) my veracity, and (b) your understanding that any features or semions that might appear to undercut that veracity are in fact protective legal devices, not unlike the boilerplate that accompanies sweepstakes and civil contracts, and thus are not meant to be decoded or ‘read’ so much as merely acquiesced to as part of the cost of doing business together, so to speak, in today’s commercial climate.

(PK 75)

As chapter 1 argued, writing contracts to govern human relationships violates Wittgenstein’s maxim on (dis)agreements that is worth repeating here: “It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.”⁴¹ With that edict in mind, Wallace, quite surprisingly, undermines a well-worn and seemingly democratic trope for reading: the author-reader relationship is too enigmatic to be reduced to a business contract. At his most ambitious, in the ecstatic, quasi-religious mystery with which he treats civic bonds, Wallace sought a path from the articulated philosophy of social contract to something like an unspoken code of democracy. That would be the biggest bounty he could hope for from years of treating all the unspoken values and bonds—from weights and measures to common experiences of embodiment, illness, and waste—that each gestured toward a broad, lived agreement, toward the social contract as a form of life.

David Wallace does find peace, though, by the end of the “Foreword,” which subtly transforms into a calm meditation—and comes to rest on another image of grounded value. The section’s last long footnote, on David Wallace’s reading of the IRS’s archives, pays homage to DeLillo’s Libra, where the historian Nicholas Branch, reading through the massive Warren Report that prefigures Wallace’s metafictional tax code, calls the government analysis “the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.”⁴² Wallace’s echoing moment is, characteristically, oriented toward empathic acknowledgment of how much reading effort is shared by reader and writer—coworkers, al-ways—and an implied promise of the sacred satisfaction that reading his own Joycean Warren Report can produce:

Wallace has long seen the rewriting of Latin on U.S. currency as a way of undermining neoliberal views of cash as a neutral medium unaffected by what is exchanged or who profits. In “Westward,” J.D. has a complex scheme in which, giving money away in exchange for word of a person’s greatest fear, he surveils subsequent purchases with a silicon transmitter embedded in the bills, “what looks vaguely like a monocle over the eye that separates Annuit from Coeptis on The Great Seal” (GCH 283). To the right of the pyramid is the seal’s obverse, an eagle holding in its beak a banner with E Pluribus Unum. Annuit Coeptis means “He nods at the undertaking,” a claim of divine approval of the United States, now broken up by J.D., god of mammon and a new iteration of the Freemason conspiracy associated with the pyramid’s eye. Thus do the fears that Wallace thought bonded his readers become, in the birth of the neoliberal age “Westward” documents, a way of turning a community medium into an exploitable form. Pynchon remade stamps; Wallace rewrites currency.

In The Pale King Wallace mediates his analysis of E Pluribus Unum through the invented, varyingly legible seal and motto of the IRS, parts of the text’s effort to alienate us from automatic practice and teach us (from the ending of §1 forward) to “read” language anew (PK 6). In §14, the orientation film ends with the “incised seal and motto that flank the REC’s north façade. ‘Just like the nation’s E pluribus unum, our Service’s founding motto, Alicui tamen faciendum est, says it all—this difficult, complex task must be performed, and it is your IRS who roll up their sleeves and do it,’” yet another encounter with the clichéd signifiers of hard work (PK 104).⁴³ Examiners joke about the “failure to translate the motto” for average taxpayers, who are “presumed to know classical Latin” (PK 104). The narrative voice suggests that the Director of Personnel may be “testing whether the prebriefed examiners catch this error”—apparently referring to leaving the Latin untranslated (PK 104). But what error and nontranslation really occur here? The film’s translation of the Latin is embellished—a strict word-for-word translation might read, “Still, someone has to do it”—and Wallace is setting up his string of different, subjective readings of the seal’s statement about work. But the examiners engage in a productive misreading in a different sense: the film does paraphrase the IRS motto but not the national-unity motto—assumed to be well known but, Wallace implies, actually unknown in American civic practice. He wants both the country’s and the tax agency’s foundational values to remain untranslated, alien, and in a process of making. Here he thus reinvests in the tension between fleeting consciousness and “stamped” coin values discussed in chapter 5.

Despite not having Wallace’s choices as to the novel’s sequence (as Pietsch’s preface explains [PK x–xi]), we can see that a game is afoot with this IRS seal. In §22 Fogle studies it at a recruiting center and gets a closer look and a new translation: a print of the seal, hanging “askew” above the recruiter’s desk, shows “the mythic hero Bellerophon slaying the Chimera, as well as the Latin motto on a long unfurling banner along the bottom”; the IRS motto “essentially means ‘He is the one doing a difficult, unpopular job ’” (PK 246). The italics that usually set off foreign phrases are intentionally given to both the Latin and its English rendition, for Wallace wants to keep the English of the civic value foreign to us as well (recall here value being a foreign word for Hal). Bellerophon is the IRS’s “official symbol,” “rather the way the bald eagle is the United States as a whole’s” (PK 246). Bellerophon and the Chimera were also subjects inscribed on coins in ancient Greece, like many mythical figures, and Wallace works once more with “mediated myths” in contemporary settings (CW 41). Bellerophon’s story, also a subject in Barth’s Chimera, is told in the Iliad, and it speaks to The Pale King’s theme of chastened heroism and remaining grounded: Bellerophon is born of humans and, upon riding the Pegasus and slaying the Chimera, tries to ascend to Mount Olympus and become a god, but he falls to earth. In more of his signature groundward movement—away from “some gleaming abstract Olympian HQ” (BI 160)—Wallace’s IRS heroes hew toward transcendence through immanence, down in their holes.

David Wallace, in §24, shows us the IRS seal in context, as part of an entrance baroquely made to look like a giant tax form, but here the seal shifts shape again, as though, like the doubloon of Moby-Dick, it is a metatextual sign that admits only the varied interpretations of individuals, part of a mirrored building reflecting the viewer back at himself. Like a group coming into uneasy alignment on an important sign’s meaning, the reader and the diegetic viewers of the seal work toward synchrony on an object that seems (like all political representations) quite striated, rife with characteristics Wallace has given the text: “shifting p.o.v.s, structural fragmentation, willed incongruities” (PK 74). Enacting multivalent meaning and suggesting the mirrored IRS building admits of many views (for is the edifice another attempt to represent language itself?), David Wallace in a passing car “had to move and twist my own neck awkwardly to make out the Exam Center’s various features” (PK 277). The associations with the unconscious that Burn senses elsewhere present themselves forcefully at the REC’s entrance, in “coded signs” (another association of the IRS with codes), “complex and disorienting” shifts of appearance, and the fact that “the REC’s ostensible rear was really the front” (PK 283)—with “rear” here connoting both a repressed anality (an association Godden and Szalay make as well [“The Bodies in the Bubble,” 1302]) and the more primitive parts of the brain behind the lately evolved frontal cortex.

In discussing Wallace’s searches for new currency and value, I have referred to Freud’s demonstration of the buried psychic associations between feces and money; such conjunctions are ascendant as never before in The Pale King. Freud could well be describing the atavistic atmosphere this novel creates when he writes that “wherever archaic modes of thought have predominated or persist—in ancient civilizations, in myths, fairy tales and superstitions, in unconscious thinking, in dreams and in neuroses—money is brought into the most intimate relationship with dirt.”⁴⁴ Let me return here to the incredible richness of §1, set on the “very old land” Freud’s words almost perfectly describe. The passage’s many value associations begin with the “coins of sunlight” glinting on the river in the first sentence, pointing to the elemental economy of the nitrogen cycle preceding the monetary. This is not just typical nature symbolism but nature in direct contestation of money economies. In this zone, insects, not companies, are “all business all the time” (PK 5). While Wouters says §1 “suggests that our technologically-driven, human-organized present has…superimposed itself on an eternal environment,” Wallace allows us to see nature strongly asserting itself in this scene of competing economies.⁴⁵

Unearthed as the narrative eye zooms in on the axiological ground are wholly unexpected, waste-based versions of the U.S. and IRS seals, as well as coinage. The “shapes of…worms [are] incised in the overturned dung and baked 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” (PK 6). “Incised” is used multiple times to describe the IRS seal. In this opening section, which Wallace published as a separate story,⁴⁶ there is no rough-draft mistake in his use of the word twice in quick succession to link readers to the dung: “Your shoes’ brand incised in the dew,” a few lines before the worms, suggests a loss of dewy innocence while also hinting that it is grounded human beings—you, reader—who are the pale or stylus that make the cuts of civic seals (and must do so repeatedly, perhaps every workday, since this incision in the dew is sure to be quickly erased). The nontouching “head” and “tail” of the worm connote the two sides of a coin and, once again, contingency: flip a coin, heads or tails. But in the syncretic ritual context this cow patty also brings to mind the baked-in designs of the oracle bones of ancient China (heated until they cracked, with the cracks read for prophecy). The near head-to-tail of the worm points to the yin-yang symbol as well. These images are still not done with us: the “lines in rows” (PK 6) foreshadow the examiners in their desks and the tax forms they examine, telling us that accounting’s abstractions, too, will be put in touch with the direct energy cycles of fertilization. So rich are the associations here that the reader is almost inevitably already “[r]ead[ing] these” in many senses before reaching that potent last sentence (PK 6). Rather than imitating Pynchon’s or Coover’s use of similar materials to repulse the reader and indict society, Wallace tones down the gross-out factor, as he did with Moltke’s sculptures, hoping we will look closely at the glow of value in this waste.

Sylvanshine, a failed Emersonian at the end of §2, weakly repeats §1’s ritual, “turning 360° several times and trying to merge his own awareness with the panoramic vista, which except for airport-related items was uniformly featureless and old-coin gray and so remarkably flat that it was as if the earth here had been stamped with some cosmic boot” (PK 26). Here again is the nuance-obliterating sign of the monetary, “old-coin gray” (no vivifying coins of sunlight here), while a distant, impersonal force, parallel to Fogle’s nihilistic foot, substitutes for “your shoes’ brand.” This boot-stamping has no potential for instilling collective value. Sylvanshine has the “impression of being at the center of some huge and stagnant body of water”: fertility, flow, and ritual cyclicality have fled with his systems’ arrival (PK 26).

As Wallace moves throughout The Pale King from the level of civic doctrine to more intimate views of his characters’ minds, he enforces an approach to the beauty and preciousness of art and money through the subterranean routes of the childhood traumas emblematized by waste and other abject body products. Godden and Szalay offer a riveting (if at moments dense and rigidly Marxist) reading of many similar alignments of waste, blood, and semen with money in The Pale King, extending a reading of Marx’s doubled body of the commodity throughout the book to argue that Stecyk, Bondurant, Cusk, Drinion, and others, in their resemblance to money, comment on “the failure of financial liquidity” and on “the unstable relation between corporeality and the forms of abstraction inherent in finance capital” (“The Bodies in the Bubble,” 1274, 1276). For Godden and Szalay, money, in the period of financialization that bridges The Pale King to the present, is always “derivative money,” money made from money rather than production, money no longer guaranteed by the state and fundamentally based in debt (“The Bodies in the Bubble,” 1275). Wallace’s IRS in this period is thus “best understood as a factory for debt processing,” and the IRS agents are preoccupied with waste because “shit” invariably represents deficit, debt, and the “money emptied of value” they spend their days examining (“The Bodies in the Bubble,” 1286, 1289). Even The Pale King itself becomes in their interpretation expressive of financialization’s dominance, “a literary version of derivative money” (“The Bodies in the Bubble,” 1275). Yet as my reading of §1’s waste (unexamined by Godden and Szalay) has suggested, I find Wallace’s embodied money fundamentally more hopeful, drawing on broader domains of social and psychic life and expressive of an axiological invitation to the reader to recognize a new ground for commonwealth, the living transaction of communication, and elements of infrastructure that Godden and Szalay do not countenance.

Such are the ideas that structure my reading of §16, Dean’s break (which Godden and Szalay also leave unexamined). There, Wallace asks us to think of value alongside a wound, returning to the claim in “Mister Squishy” that there is madness in rare-coin collecting. Like “Mister Squishy,” §16 is one of Wallace’s many multitrack narratives in which an oral discourse describes one thing while a wandering mind (despite being engaged by the external talk) explores something else entirely; our mission as readers—reconciling incompatible ideas, as in Freud’s unconscious—is to ferret out the connection between the two tracks. Here, an unnamed examiner tells the other of a dinner at Hank Bodnar’s. The talk is of barbecued salmon and the satisfactions of food—use value—but also the hoarding of exchange value: Bodnar is “a serious coin collector,” a “hobby” Dean, a Christian, perhaps invoking biblical maxims about God and mammon, finds “debased and distorted” (PK 126). That is a description a normative view would apply to his keen interest in the listening man’s “benign cyst or growth on the inside of his wrist,” which the listening man openly contemplates (PK 124). “Composed of what looks almost like horn or hard, outgrowthy material,” the cyst “appears reddened and slightly inflamed” (PK 126). With Dean’s Christianity in mind, the cyst raises associations with Christ’s stigmata, but this is everyday martyrdom, appropriate to the empathy for low-level suffering that Wallace points to in This Is Water: Dean imagines the man’s shirt “cuff’s movement back and forth over the growth throughout the day might…hurt in a tiny, sickening way each time” (PK 127).

“Inflamed” (PK 126) and possessing a “penumbra” (PK 127), the cyst is like the sun, or perhaps a coin of sunlight. In this same vein, the “horn” of the cyst is (PK 126), like the bird instincts on display here, part of the book’s interest in humans’ animal history, the “tail” that might touch the “head.” This horn, in the context of value, stigmata, and a plentiful dinner, also connotes the horn of plenty, which Shell shows is associated in Arthurian legend with the Holy Grail and Christ’s body.⁴⁷ Shell also notes that the communion wafer was historically “understood as the coin that is Christ.”⁴⁸ The cyst, then—“something to hoard,” possessed of a “career”—is quite the source of ecstatic value; it is indeed “benign,” as Wallace inscribes his idiosyncratic sense of the sacred potential in everyday suffering and empathy (PK 124). Given this conjunction of flesh, food, and psychic disturbance, no wonder Dean asks “What do you mean?” at the mention of “get[ting] eaten alive” by mosquitoes at the barbecue, “hysteria in his voice” (PK 128).

Blood escaping the body and being eaten—being taken as valuable energy—is what accounts for Dean’s alarm and conjoins mosquitoes and the glowing “penumbra” he sees in this cyst, an outer ring of blood welling under the skin’s surface. Mythologizing bodily fluids, Wallace tropes again, as with Skip’s head, on the circulation of blood (particularly blood’s nourishing quality) and the circulation of unexpected forms of value. This motif also partly explains a traumatic scene of an arm’s incision that, like many in The Pale King, seems tangential until we see Wallace’s allegory of embodied value at work. Stecyk in §5 may be the sick saint, but he grows up some in §39, administering heroic first aid to his teacher, Mr. Ingle, a pale king “gray with shock” who has sliced off his thumb with the circular saw and bleeds in great spurts (PK 421). An ingle is a fireplace: Wallace is exploring another character who embodies the heat of the hearth and oikos. But Ingle’s warm blood is also trumping money, in this contest of economic forms: Wallace’s Ing- names—Inge (Steeply’s discarded name), Ingersoll (commenter on “E Unibus Pluram”), Ingle—frequently suggest juxtaposing humans with ingots, synonymous with money but technically the blank metal discs from which coins are struck.

This scene makes the connection when classmate torturers of nerdy Stecyk ask him to fetch “an ingot of cast iron [secretly heated] red-hot with an acetylene torch” (PK 418). Stecyk’s swift, precise saving of the blood of a living hand (like Keats’s) is clearly a premonition of his tax work keeping the nation’s “lifeblood” pulsing through the “body politic” (PK 103). Stecyk relies on the attention to protocols that will “transform[]” him into a “brilliant and able Service administrator[]” (PK 418). That is why the scene comments on Stecyk’s value, leaving the word somewhat vague, to indicate the deep rethinking going on (for onlookers and readers): Stecyk reveals “the distinctions between one’s essential character and value and people’s perception of that character/value” (PK 419) and upsets expected “relations between coolness and actual value” (PK 423). To have value(s), as with Skip, is to be uncool. So too does Stecyk, like the examiners/writers throughout, embody what Wallace describes as “art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness” (CW 26). Luckily, this future accountant knows CPR, and a completed novel might have shown Stecyk finding still more alternatives to “pathological generosity,” as Wallace continued wrestling with the possibility of gifts.

The coin-shop-surveillance team tells three stories in the car, all infantile and scatological narratives of “seared-in memories” (PK 351). The first, reprising §1’s footprint of dewy innocence lost, recounts stepping in dog feces as a crisis of existential guilt, such that it is “embedded in the sole,” an obvious pun on “soul” (PK 349). The stories move up a bodily ladder from here, with the next rung being the hands, which are “especially close to your idea of your identity of who you are” (PK 351–352). This storyteller, having fallen hands-first into a pile of dog waste, remembers playing the “horrible shit-monster” (PK 351) and chasing his friends, the kind of base horror that makes Lynch’s movies so unnerving for Wallace; so too does Wallace tie back into his gothic uses of “This living hand” by underscoring how the waste-covered hands reach out, “as far out away from [the storyteller] as was humanly possible,” adding “to the monster-aspect” (PK 352).

From the hands, finally, Wallace goes to the face, the real seat of identity, and also returns to money. The third story, Bondurant’s, is of “Fat Marcus the Moneylender” (PK 352), his pants down, sitting on unsuspecting sleepers in Bradley dorm rooms as they are held down, until “Diablo the Left-Handed Surrealist” (adding to the motif of strange bites) sinks his teeth in and gets the perpetrators, including Bondurant, expelled and sent to serve in Vietnam (PK 355). While §1 led us to get closer to the ground and read waste without disgust, Fat Marcus is the travesty of that delicately constructed moment, pressing down unbearably from above, like the “cosmic boot” Sylvanshine imagined. Fat Marcus does this just for kicks, not in the collection of debts, but his behavior and recurring epithet (“Fat Marcus the Moneylender”) suggest a fascism and nihilism within money logic, usury specifically. David Wallace is a figure of debt, worried over repayment of his student loans after his own expulsion from school, and in a completed novel we might have seen still more attention to the Fat Marcuses of the debt system squashing American lives in the neoliberal age.⁴⁹

Interpreting Fat Marcus leads naturally to a figure who contrasts with his, well, asshole behavior: the examiner who levitates rather than sitting on people, Shane Drinion, intense listener to Meredith Rand’s suffering and an avatar of the type of extraordinary shared value The Pale King urges us to contemplate. For Drinion Wallace invents the job title “UTEX” or “utility examiner[]” (PK 460)—a traveling agent who goes where needed—to suggest an association with public utilities, those elements of commonwealth infrastructure evoked by the Quabbin Reservoir in chapter 3. As he listens, Drinion builds up a miraculous energy able to lift him out of his chair in defiance of physics’ laws. Such power is associated with both a direct relationship to “you” the reader and a public utility: “having [Drinion’s] eyes and attention on you…is intense, a little bit like standing near the high-voltage transformer park south of Joliet Street” (PK 504). Drinion resembles the flushed, heated Skip and another character associated with infrastructure, Fogle’s father, who “seems to give off a slight hum when at rest” (PK 176). But Drinion’s SD initials also point to a more abject public utility: they are a common U.S. city abbreviation for Sewer District, the waste system that annular fusion and giant catapults sought to replace in Infinite Jest. Drinion shifts the associations with the horrors of waste I have developed here by accepting and “process[ing]” (PK 452) Rand’s “shit,” the trauma of her mental illness beneath a cosmetic perfection. With Brint Moltke’s BM a clever shorthand for bowel movement, Wallace has played before with initials and waste.

Waste is another “return” to a central handling facility, a flush that Americans wish not to think about in psychic or civic terms, making it a good site for considering dreaded taxes and what they pay for. While Drinion is the public-waste figure in the novel, Lane Dean’s name suggests not just grounded priesthood but a sacred command over public roadways and traffic, topics David Wallace considers at appropriately boring length in §24. Wallace gave his characters new names “constantly,” writes Pietsch (PK xiii), but other REC names—the forest (sylvan) in Sylvanshine, the land and river valleys (glen) in Glendenning, the bloom in Blumquist, the fish in Fisher, the deer (hind) in Hindle, the bus in Bussy, and the bond (to pay for public works) in Bondurant—suggest that a finished Pale King might have had much to say about many different public resources, natural and infrastructural. After a novel featuring names of deletion and death (Blott, Struck, Schacht [i.e., shocked], Axford), Wallace was writing a story with glimpses, amid the paleness, of a glowing plenitude.

Given Drinion’s public-works associations, it seems telling that Rand is the name of both a conservative think tank usually dedicated to private-sector solutions (to problems like waste management) and of the objectivist Ayn who inspires many of them.⁵⁰ While he appears robotic to Rand (like “an optical reader scanning a stack of cards” [PK 455]), Drinion represents a key synthesis in the novel’s man/machine dialectic: he connotes an objective, detached but involved empathy that models not only good therapy but the reading of a stack of cards/pages we ourselves are doing. He is another example of metareading eclipsing metafiction.

In §23 an unnamed narrator has a nightmare of the two-dimensional existence tax examining might produce: in the “rows of foreshortened faces,” “one or two, the most alive, looked better in an objectless way,” but “many others looked blank as the faces on coins” (PK 255). Many examiners also see blankness in themselves or (often more horrifying) in others, including Dean’s fear that Sheri is “blank and hidden” (PK 42), Ware’s eerily “blank eyes” when playing dead (PK 66), and the fear of David Wallace (who wants to present himself in Keatsian terms as “the living author”) that corporate legal strictures may render his memoir of Peoria “some enormous, unexplained, and unmotivated blank” (PK 80n16). All these instances resonate with both the blank stares of boredom (e.g., the “blank absent” look of an agent on the stakeout [PK 354]) and the compensatory drive to—in the Frank Bidart quotation of the epigraph—“fill” the blank tax forms that make up the examiners’ work (PK 3).

Yet with Drinion, who excels at recognition of the other and resisting the mowing of Other Math, Wallace works against associations of a coin’s blankness with coldness and distance, finding one last way to make coinage human and based in sharing rather than privation. Having begun his career with an idealized reader-analogue named LB for the British pound, Wallace ends it with an idealized SD, named for shillings and pence (thus completing the abbreviation £.s.d., for librae, solidi, denarii—Wallace’s guide here may be Joyce’s Leopold B loom and Stephen Dedalus, central characters in a novel with much to teach about human expenditure). The Pale King’s bar scene offers multiple replies to the blank dream sequence, suggesting Drinion’s listening risks an erasure of ego that holds great value in this (communicative) exchange: his face “isn’t blank, but it’s bland and neutral in a way that might as well be blank for all it tells you”; “his face isn’t very defined or structured” (PK 457–458, 453). His nickname, “Mr. X” (PK 448), links him to the impressionable nature of the mirror-inspecting ghost Garrity, whom Dean calls “Mr. Wax.” Garrity’s body makes “X-shaped rotations” in repeating an inspection routine that, while deforming for him, provides so many others with unwarped mirrors in which to find a clear identity, much as tax examiners are thanklessly charged with wielding common standards to support a well-run community (PK 386). Moreover, Drinion’s blank but “intense” face, as it stares at “you,” is Wallace imagining the staring eyes of readers taking in his text (PK 504).

The simple machines Cusk’s metaphors suggest contrast with the type of technology the systems camp favors, just as Gately’s “Gratitude battery” contrasted with the addict’s “motherboard” understanding of self. Cusk’s metaphor thus turns a treasured Wallace motif—the physical illustration of metaphysical processes through manual labor—toward the social world. The Pale King was to be Wallace’s most social novel yet, in which themes of commonwealth and shared values that I have often had to extract from hiding places in earlier work had become manifest. An extensive group discussion of democratic political philosophy takes place in a stalled elevator (PK §19)—also readable as a failed act of weight lifting by pulleys—and here too Wallace retunes Lenore’s, Laurel’s, and others’ individual explorations of how to rise, making the quest for fulfilling ontology an even more difficult collective venture. But such widespread rising seems at least possible: a short section (§10) suggests that the outward ripples of hundreds of small acts of inner pulleys like Cusk’s are key to understanding the special “physics and imperatives of cause” in bureaucracy, a form of workplace organization that Wallace—searching for charismatics at the IRS and again working against the grain of Gravity’s Rainbow—wants not only to understand but even lionize, defending it from being defined as a “parasite” larger than the body from which it feeds. Instead, bureaucracy may be “a large and intricately branching system of jointed rods, pulleys, gears, and levers radiating out from a central operator such that tiny movements of that operator’s finger are transmitted through that system to become the gross kinetic changes…at the periphery” (PK 88). The Pynchon school would surely see this operator as cause for paranoia, but the postparanoid Wallace instead explores authority figures like Glendenning—who, a figure of “balance” (PK 436) rather than a “tyrant” or “fake friend” (PK 435), treats his employees “both as human beings and as parts of a larger mechanism” he governs (PK 436).⁵¹ There is definitely hope for a democratic, humane bureaucracy pulling the levers of society in The Pale King.

Attention has the potential to become, like sincerity for an earlier moment in Wallace studies, a concept that closes off arguments rather than opening his images up to more minute scrutiny. Let me conclude this chapter, then, by suggesting that we can open up attention in The Pale King, as both ethical imperative and antidote for depressed solipsism, by regarding it as synonymous with the act of comparative valuation, the mental act I have been tracking since Karrier in chapter 2. Boswell gives a brief glimpse of one of these themes: “Whereas for a tax examiner in the new, machine-driven, for-profit IRS…value will be fiduciary—that is, which data will yield the most tax revenue?—for Wallace’s readers,…value will be the human element that the data have obliterated and replaced” (“Author Here,” 35). Relevance, as Boswell shows, is the relevant category here, and that word provides a means of expanding his claim and another way into the rivalry between Fogle and David Wallace.

When he returns in §24, David Wallace expresses his disdain for the other narrator by nicknaming him “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle (PK 261). A submerged definition for Fogle’s nickname may lie in a 2004 review of Ed-win Williamson’s Borges: A Life, which Wallace criticizes for reducing mystical complexities to autobiographical exposition. That Borges’s model of the self’s multiple consciousnesses is important to The Pale King is apparent from its epigraph, which adds another layer to the bifurcation of the writer in “Borges and I” by quoting not Borges’s story with that title but Frank Bidart’s prose poem about it (PK 3). Wallace ends his book review, “Even if Williamson’s [biographical readings] are true, the stories so completely transcend their motive cause that the biographical facts become, in the deepest and most literal way, irrelevant” (BF 294). In transmuting his own autobiography through David Wallace and calling the emotional life-story of Fogle “Irrelevant,” Wallace allows for the kind of daring reading Williamson avoids, leaving open peripheral paths by which the reader might identify and thus transcending the strictures authors of autobiographical fictions or straight memoirs unconsciously impose. In this way Wallace imitates Borges, who “collapses reader and writer into a new kind of aesthetic agent, one who makes stories out of stories, one for whom reading is essentially—consciously—a creative act” (BF 293–294).⁵²

Inviting the reader into that act, David Wallace dilates on Fogle’s nickname in a claim about the “value” of details:

What logorrheic colleagues like Fogle failed to understand is that there are vastly different kinds of truth, some of which are incompatible with one another. Example: A 100 percent accurate, comprehensive list of the exact size and shape of every blade of grass in my front lawn is ‘true,’ but it is not a truth that anyone will have any interest in. What renders a truth meaningful, worthwhile, & c. is its relevance, which in turn requires extraordinary discernment and sensitivity to context, questions of value, and overall point—otherwise we might as well all just be computers downloading raw data to one another.

(PK 261)

Wallace chooses those words—“discernment” and “sensitivity”—because they are used to describe both aesthetic and moral judgments and values. Taking a cue from the continual deferral of a definition of value in “Deciderization,” we should draw lines from David Wallace’s information theories to more conventionally mimetic scenes of moral values in action, such as Dean’s moment with Sheri. As he worries over what to say to her, the abstraction of “values” seems to assume for him a solidity they previously lacked: faced with the abortion decision, Dean feels “some terrible weakness or lack of values,” as though they are “a muscle he just did not have” (PK 42). With the fallen tree dominating the scene, Dean is trying to figure out what can root solid values—and where his own shoe tree might lie.

In a final instance of metareading, Wallace transfers his discourse on value and relevance to the consumer context. Mentioning a progressive sales tax, an IRS trainer’s metaphor describes a method of consumer computation that might have saved the civic values of Fogle’s father.

Wallace drew this grocery passage, changing the wording only slightly, from Nørretranders’ The User Illusion, where it serves as a general illustration of information sorting.⁵⁴ But imported into The Pale King the metaphor serves as a meditation on an archetypal commercial transaction that Wallace once again wants us to compare to the “living” one of art, ideally beyond the marketplace but never, Wallace knew, wholly separated from its mechanics. The reader is the cashier, making her way through a range of “individual items” (read: the multifarious stories of The Pale King). The reader is, like this cashier, working toward “the one piece of information that’s valuable—the total, plus tax.” Wider discourse communities and critical schools are acknowledged: “Different groups and teams within groups are given slightly different criteria that help inform what to look for” (PK 342). But all focus on the total, which becomes a symbol for a calming view that can combat “Total Noise” as well as for the universal meanings and experiences Wallace so often sought: “the individual price” (read: individual person) “has value only in the context of the total.” This total, like the “B” for base in Fogle’s equation, ought not to be subdivided into “individual items.”