CONCLUSION

 

IN LINE FOR THE CASH REGISTER WITH WALLACE

“THERE YOU are at the market while your items are being tallied” (PK 343). To conclude, I leave Wallace there, where he has in a certain sense been his entire career, waiting for value to resolve itself into something other than the price tag on a commodity. His work is often quite Beckettian, but there is no blasted landscape, no Godot—one waits instead for reconciliation at the cash register. From the voice of Mindy saying “Total: seventeen-fifty” (B 380), to the Avis counter in “Westward” with a credit transaction stalled, from the notes on pennies for Infinite Jest and their sadistically generous cashier, to the supermarket queue of This Is Water and the atomized Illinoisans of The Pale King willing to wait in multiple lines rather than pay a bit more sales tax, Wallace places his characters often on the frustrating verge of purchases that seem more existential than incidental, more hidden opportunities for innate growth than external accumulation. He updates the Sartrean trope of endless tarrying in hell by moving it to the marketplace (with stops at the diving-board ladder and Tavis’s waiting room). In the cash register he sees the modern form of a device that would have been, in the ancient agora he has often hearkened back to, a balance scale, weighing goods and ensuring fair trades. In a long footnote the last novel even zooms in on grocery-store price tags to suggest an allegory for much of Wallace’s writing and its exploration of the difference between words and numbers: the letters (language) of the “Charleston code” tell the IRS-trained reader what the retailer paid for it and thus help reconcile the item’s value with the stated numerical price (PK 393n2).

Wallace’s supermarket scenes also respond to White Noise, perhaps particularly on his mind at Kenyon, since the novel appeared when he was a college senior. Wondering often what ancient mysteries of death the supermarket holds, White Noise ends in a “slowly moving line” at the checkout, “where we wait together…our carts stocked with brightly colored goods.”¹ But while he shares DeLillo’s sense of a spiritual hunger going unmet (“Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks” [White Noise, 326]), Wallace shifts the focus of DeLillo’s paradigmatic 1980s postmodern scenes away from the goods and their luster. Neither is Wallace exceedingly interested in commodities’ production, the class structure that leads to them, and all the elements of the Marxist critique underlying so much of U.S. postmodernism. His bounty is different.

In addition to being suitably boring, his checkout line has the advantage of being emptied of moral content: the clerk at the till totaling the sale is neither an industrialist nor the advertiser who carries, inside the project of “selling” the goods, an entire ideology. Taking the checkout line as a default mechanism of the culture, Wallace had a clear and original space in which to create for his reader a hidden realm not of capitalist oppression but of thwarted affect, of potential living transactions of real communication. The pennies passage for Infinite Jest that I quoted in chapter 3 ends, “Can you remember the last time a whole day went by without your buying something? No matter how small. Something. Is this a bit weird?”² With passages like the one in “Octet” on a “weird” “price” for the self in interaction with another, Wallace strove to insert into the mindless, everyday functioning of the market the uncanny, attention-arresting materials of the human, from Don’s graceful coin to the waste-based currency of The Pale King. There was conscious strategy in the distrust his oeuvre evinces for monetary forms of value but also, it seems, a sincere insecurity, an obsessive anxiety: in anecdotes that seem powerful in light of all the preceding analysis, his sister says that for some portion of adulthood he would not use ATMs,³ and Max describes Wallace’s girlfriend, when he was twenty-three, “help[ing] him to take the money he routinely kept in his sock drawer and open a bank account with it.”⁴ Wallace once analyzed his compulsive cleanliness by creating “hygiene anxiety research” (B 120), but an intricate value-anxiety theory, equally concerned with porousness, was an ongoing construction in his career, reflecting a culture often on the financialized brink, from 1929 to 2008.

By redescribing the cash register, Wallace made a counterinvestment in a low-level “market” free of neoliberal financial vagary, where Lenore’s grounding work-for-food equation was unimpeded and the Other Math of adding oneself to another could more readily assert itself. Revising the scene of endless consumer choice into one of what to “choose to pay attention to,” Wallace transformed computerized accounting into face-to-face encounters between persons who need sustenance and value not from products but each other, from sharing personal accounts (TW 54). They discover in the long line of his Dantean “consumer-hell” that, in paying with attention rather than despairing over the wait to pay with money, they can access the energy underlying all of Wallace’s explorations of commonwealth infrastructure: they tap into the “sacred,” “on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things” (TW 93), an allusion to the other end of Dante’s cosmology, Paradiso, as Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly show.⁵ Whitman’s iconic “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” seems another reference point. The possibility of such ecstatic or charismatic transfers of value I have documented throughout: the heat of physical touch, the communal effects of insurance, the plenitude of the gift, farmland, and even a coworker’s cyst. But these are, admittedly, exceptions: what rules instead is an unfulfilled desire for products, fetishes, and privative possession.

Every value-earning adult has to figure his taxes (or sign and take responsibility for the amounts, if an accountant is hired). At the grocery store checkout everyone is instinctually an accountant, using their math to get good value on purchases that become energy with some immediacy. In such contexts, Wallace could play the clear-headed, witty high-school math teacher—our “Dr. Goris”—whom he clearly relishes ventriloquizing in Everything and More (23n10). Grocery-store math maintained the “interesting context” that college math had “stripped away” from a problem like Zeno’s dichotomy: “you don’t walk away bathed in relief at the resolution to the paradox” when you are shown the abstract solution, Wallace complains (CW 123). Relief, resolution, and paradox are terms suited to the catharsis of art, and in a sense his preoccupation with fictions of value, balance, and numerical characters emerges from the college notebooks he describes to McCaffery, with their “gnarly attempted solutions” to logical proofs: hoping to pass on the sublime “click” of a suddenly clear proof to his readers, Wallace created incongruous, gnarly aesthetic structures in which unexpected solutions might present themselves, outside of modern realism’s well-worn epiphany mechanism (CW 35). He remained confident that logical positivism’s cold project could be made warm and affective if value were allowed to bleed across the fact/value divide—bleeding that led him to compare human value transfers to the circulation of blood, that every day sacred fire rising to the surface and reddening the skin.

As he embraces moral precision but diverges from utilitarianism, as he advocates prescriptivism but recognizes the problems with enacting it, and as he wonders what allows various weights-and-measures experts to calibrate the pound and the dollar, Wallace sees that the only viable kind of postmodern moralism is ultimately what he defines in “Authority and American Usage” as a technocratic authority. This is the sort of authority a competent human cashier or accountant embodies, if we take him as a symbol of the adjudication of moral transactions always occurring in human life and language. The grammarian Bryan Garner in his dictionary, Wallace concludes, “casts himself as an authority not in an autocratic sense but in a technocratic sense.” The technocrat “is not only a thoroughly modern and palatable image of authority but also immune to the charges of elitism/ classism that have hobbled traditional Prescriptivism” (CL 122). Garner’s work is distinguished by “passionate devotion, reason and accountability,” “experience,” “exhaustive and tech-savvy research,” “an even and judicious temperament,” and “the sort of humble integrity” that not only makes him “likable but transmits the kind of reverence for English that good jurists have for the law, both of which are bigger and more important than any one person” (CL 123–124). This portrait will sound, to the long-term reader of Wallace, like a description of his own voice and thorough research, for it is intended to be that. In Garner’s “passionate devotion” there is an echo, too, of the call for “morally passionate, passionately moral” fiction in the mold of Dostoevsky. Among the professionals whom we do not label “elite” when they prescribe a course of action, Wallace includes doctors, lawyers, and those who tell us “how we should do our taxes” (CL 122). Here lies a real-life version of what Fogle, describing the tax teacher, is surprised to find: an “authority relation” that, while “not a ‘democratic’ or equal one,” still “could have value for both sides, both people in the relation” (PK 229). There are worthy, democratic moral authorities, as Wallace has been telling us since at least “E Unibus Pluram,” and the real move against political cynicism in a neoliberal age is to believe that they can lead effective governmental organizations, even huge and bureaucratic ones. Wallace the New Deal liberal could not see it otherwise.

Unlike “E Unibus Pluram,” “Authority and American Usage” names no literary predecessors to rebel against, but the high postmodernists’ minds would reel, Wallace knows, at the idea of advocating technocrats, much less calling their authority democratic. While his devotion to a punned-upon value leads Wallace to find great hope in the service of the moral by the technical mind, Pynchon, Coover, Burroughs, and DeLillo would almost certainly see technology as the primary referent for the “techno-” in “technocrat.” Wallace, by contrast, seems to see in that prefix the possibility, in postmodernity, of the ancient Greek virtue of techne, which he defines in his Tracy Austin essay as “that state in which…mastery of craft facilitate[s]a communion with the gods themselves,” a sublime version of the rewarding work I have examined throughout (CL 150).

In less momentous terms, across Wallace’s texts, the technician—kin of the technocrat but with a different sort of authority—is simply a trustworthy and grounding figure, one who lets us see how intricate work leads to the culture’s products. Franzen says aptly of the journalism that Wallace “did his best work when he was able to find a technician—a cameraman following John McCain, a board operator on a radio show—who was thrilled to meet somebody genuinely interested in the arcana of his job.”⁶ These are people, as Wallace says of a producer in “Host,” with “all-business competence and technical savvy” (CL 340). This tic of his journalism, perhaps born of a reluctance to interview the center of attention (as in the Lynch article), was connected to a larger philosophy: remaining peripheral could valorize the worker’s perspective and follow up on Infinite Jest’s theory of figurants, showing us how much of our mediated reality is framed and staged. The writer was fundamentally a technician too: Wallace’s admiration of Tom Clancy thrillers (Max, Every Love Story, 198) seems explainable if we think of Clancy as a good board-op, getting a thousand details right. And through his technicians, technocrats, bureaucrats, and mechanisms like the cash register, Wallace hoped to build up gradually a description of contemporary life showing readers that the romantic template of the moral artist as a “solitary, heroic figure wrestling with his own soul”—as he described it to Michael Silverblatt in 2006—could no longer be affirmed. Moral authority was now possible for fiction and essays only if they proved they had worked through some of the many calculations of the information age—proved they had gone to school in the boring balancing of books, wedding whatever objectivity was available in postmodernity to an empathic set of personal standards. In a time of Total Noise, these are the voices that need hearing.

WRITING THE UNWRITTEN WALLACE

Wallace’s work teaches us at every turn to be its co-creators, and so even as I have looked throughout to Lethem, Wayne, Smith, and others, perhaps the greatest example of Wallace’s legacy is Wallace himself—or his many dedicated readers, imagining the books he did not live to write. Over many pages I have resisted the urge, which occurs to anyone writing about him since September 2008, to consider his suicide as a text itself to be read or as the personal telos he was evoking in narratives like “Good Old Neon.”⁷ But eschewing readings of his work as an extended suicide note does not eliminate the aching sense of literature lost—the desire to speculate about what The Pale King would have become, as well as what fictions and essays might have followed it, had Wallace won this battle (and future battles) with mental illness. To identify writers who dialogue with his work is admittedly to seek surrogates for the books we wish we could look forward to from him—which is not to reinscribe the singular “genius” model Wallace rejected at every turn but to see what in his work was, if not prophetic in the sense De-Lillo is often credited with being, still tuned to tremors occurring beneath the surface of the culture. The demise of videophony can teach us about the strange discomforts of Skype, and we can and should ask how well Wallace’s TV-centric understanding of media culture will hold up in the age of smartphones, Web 2.0, and children kept quiet in restaurants with tablet computers. But throughout I have shown him responding as well to the big movements of political economy—productivity anxieties, NAFTA, the Asian currency crisis, and more—and we would expect a finished Pale King and other hypothetical works to have given insights into, say, the 2013 scandal of the IRS targeting conservative nonprofits or the huge impact of the Tea Party and tax resistance on U.S. electoral politics. Likewise, David Wallace’s claim in The Pale King that his authorial “persona” is “mainly a pro-forma statutory construct,” “like a corporation,” would have set Wallace up for moral opposition to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which defines corporations as people and—in an equation everything in Wallace and this book argues vehemently against—money as speech (PK 68).

In the weeks before he committed suicide, Wallace cancelled plans to attend the Democratic National Convention to profile Barack Obama for GQ (Max, Every Love Story, 299). What might Wallace’s account of the candidate have looked like? Universal health insurance would almost certainly have figured. But how would Wallace have positioned single-payer versus the private-insurer-friendly model that has prevailed with Obamacare? On September 12, 2008, when Wallace hanged himself, the federal government had taken over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac four days earlier, and Lehman Brothers would file for bankruptcy four days later, one in a string of bank failures in the ensuing months. While his suffering and death are no national allegory, it does seem uncanny that, just as Wallace left the world with his critique of value unfinished, his society began to undergo one of the greatest crises in the meaning and stability of value it has ever endured. Moreover, some of the attractiveness of Wallace’s difficult works to an Occupy generation should be attributed to his understanding of the dire emotional consequences of a cultural environment in which value has been emptied out and financialization made ascendant, a world in which the most plentiful riches ever somehow produce dissatisfaction and perceived scarcity, not to mention unconscionable class stratification. Has Bernie Sanders’s presidential candidacy marked a resurgence of New Deal values for a new generation of liberalism? Wallace might have shown us the answer.

With his canonization increasingly secure, where will the legacy of Wallace take literature, in the United States and among his many disciples around the globe? Certainly away from irony and toward earnestness and sincerity, areas critics will continue to use his bold claims to define. He is likely to figure in the future of American literary studies as an example of fiction writing turned essentially inward, away from the transnational and the global, for even when he attends obliquely to the forces leading up to 9/11, as Konstantinou argues, Wallace proves exemplary of a “postmodern parochialism,” sequestered in middle America.⁸ Yet as I have shown here, he always sought the symmetries between impoverished inner economies and the world with which they were symbiotic. By resolving on value as his major subject he tied the processes of metaphysical and moral development to the fluctuating fates of global currencies and prices. The language of sincerity was just one aspect of his quest to find true coinage in which the relationships of a moral society could be transacted. To let values remain unresolved and attention unfortified was to take the human coin and flip it into the air, waiting for a fall beyond our control, whether into unnourishing aesthetics or civic dissolution. Grounding in the axiomatic was possible, Wallace showed, but only as a collective venture of readers, who might build from silent synchrony to conversations that acknowledge the agreements on which the very possibility of those conversations is based. A balance of mouth and ears, head and heart, upper and lower, must rule. None of this work is easy, it is all heavy lifting, and to do it we will need, as he once wished his audience, way more than luck.