Massive People
Criticism and The Pale King
Elegant but problematic write-up on The Pale King in GQ by John Jeremiah Sullivan. Read it for the elegance, but I’d like to unfairly isolate the review’s conclusion, which alarmed me for the reasons articulated below. Quote:
Wallace’s work will be seen as a huge failure, not in the pejorative sense, but in the special sense Faulkner used when he said about American novelists, “I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.” Wallace failed beautifully. There is no mystery whatsoever about why he found this novel so hard to finish. The glimpse we get of what he wanted it to be—a vast model of something bland and crushing, inside of which a constellation of individual souls would shine in their luminosity, and the connections holding all of us together in this world would light up, too, like filaments—this was to be a novel on the highest order of accomplishment, and we see that the writer at his strongest would have been strong enough. He wasn’t always that strong.
Insightful, or regurgitation of the “humanist” DFW diet? At what point will critics realize that there is not one single sense to DFW’s work–that is, Wallace as what Kyle Beachy, ironically or not, called the “empathy machine,” the brain with a heartbeat? There is no question that this caricature of Wallace suits our time, but it nevertheless should be considered as just that: a pitiful reduction of what Wallace demands, and the ensnaring of criticism in the dangerous matrix of “human values”–as if he awoke from his postmodern slumber merely to mourn the “souls who would shine”–which is, incidentally, my answer to Blake’s recent post. Answer: a critic should be critical, a problem which will be the challenge and measure of reviewing The Pale King.
Tags: david foster wallace, GQ, John Jeremiah Sullivan, the pale king
I don’t have any idea what you’re asking, here. Is it that the reduction of Wallace to suit critical ends is “pitiful,” and so when will critics stop? Is it that you prefer criticism without human values, and wonder when it’ll stop? Because I think, in fact, criticism has been rather free of human values for decades, a century, forever. And certainly that nature of criticism will come for this book, too.
Is this what you’re saying?
The reduction of Wallace to an empathy machine.
The reduction of Wallace to an empathy machine.
Or, that’s the reduction and problem that I’m identifying here…
Or, that’s the reduction and problem that I’m identifying here…
I wonder how exactly this is a reduction? Can you tell me what’s lost in this reduction? I’m trying to unpack the tautology you end with, here, re: a critic being critical.
I wonder how exactly this is a reduction? Can you tell me what’s lost in this reduction? I’m trying to unpack the tautology you end with, here, re: a critic being critical.
Well, I think Alec might mean that any “reduction” of any superb writer would be ‘regrettable’, ‘foolish’, ‘culturally destructive’, but that the particular reduction he spies in Sullivan’s review (which he’s tried to excerpt by way of exemplification:
blech) – the reduction to pathos engine – is especially egregiously pity-celebratory — in a here-resonant word: “pitiful”.
What’s so “free of human values” about being a nerdy fussbudget??
couldn’t figure out where your disagreement with sullivan began or ended
I think he’s just suggesting there’s a certain narrative many of the critical views take regarding Wallace, especially since his death, and that he is more or less tired/interprets DFW in a different manner. To which my response would be, the novel hasn’t even been released yet (officially). There’s been, what, 4 reviews on major sites/pubs.? And the 18 previous years of criticism only glancingly seem to take this view. Just look at how frothy-mouthed Kakutani got every time he released a book.
I think he’s just suggesting there’s a certain narrative many of the critical views take regarding Wallace, especially since his death, and that he is more or less tired/interprets DFW in a different manner. To which my response would be, the novel hasn’t even been released yet (officially). There’s been, what, 4 reviews on major sites/pubs.? And the 18 previous years of criticism only glancingly seem to take this view. Just look at how frothy-mouthed Kakutani got every time he released a book.
Well okay, sure, but then you’ve still got to define “reduce” for me if we’re gonna throw it around here. It’s an 8-page review Sullivan wrote, after all, and so to snaggle a few lines and holler “reductive!” seems both black and pottish.
Well okay, sure, but then you’ve still got to define “reduce” for me if we’re gonna throw it around here. It’s an 8-page review Sullivan wrote, after all, and so to snaggle a few lines and holler “reductive!” seems both black and pottish.
And for what it’s worth, that was about as unobtrusive a use of footnotes as I’ve seen in a review of Wallace. The information presented–a bit about Wallace’s interactions with the GQ editorial staff–was exactly where it should have been, in a footnote.
Sure. It’s not like Wallace ever attempts to salvage the soul from inhumanity. I don’t think the problem of The Pale King is illuminating what writhes behind the shroud of contemporary life–of discovering the stalwart Thoreau behind the bad infinity of, in Infinite Jest’s terms, the “Entertainment,” or in this case the numbing noise of bureaucracy. I think Wallace’s searchlight, whether he wants it to or not, shines on a different kind of soul, the one who asks: what does it mean to be bored? What does this drudgery mean? It’s not that “the bland and crushing” hides a human core, but let’s a core–not quite human, not quite not–live. I’m not that far into TPK, so I can’t be more specific as yet, but the problem I’m identifying here is the simple split between the “soul” and what crushes it, between the bland and the bright, between the nadir of “postmodern life” and its flip side, namely compassion. In just the same way, Wallace’s work does not evince a split between earnestness and irony, “true feeling” and emptiness. The relationship between the two is so complex that it almost abolishes both terms.
to me, dfw has always seemed like that girl/boy you fall in love with for no apparent rational reason, even as he/she messes up your life in ways you didn’t even realize until years and years down the line. could be just me.
i’m in the middle of this GQ essay. it’s good.
WHOA
the quotation just changed – and “pitiful”, too
now there’s
Alec, it was fine!
are you meaning that wallace wasn’t just a pathos engine, that, as a writer with the gift of causing, he was capable of being joyous and cruel and bookish and excessive and catering-to-an-image and ostentatious and lots of things other than a lyrical crybaby?
Oh no, I think it’s a great article–expertly written for sure–but to me exhibits a tendency with which the criticism of The Pale King will, I think, stand or fall.
ack – no no no – that last clump of bold face is ronk
Yeah, you’re right. I deleted the part about the footnotes because it’s irrelevant and wrong and I just wanted to make that claim about the future use of footnotes.
Again, this is a dark and symptomatic spot in an excellent–as I said, elegant–review.
Again, this is a dark and symptomatic spot in an excellent–as I said, elegant–review.
Good post, Alec. So tired of DFW as the prized literati vendor of human values. Notice how the review ‘takes to task’ the idea of Wallace as idolized dispenser of wisdom (the DFW industry) – and then proceeds on, having paid its dues, to the usual ‘non-conventional’ homilies about failing beautifully and his remarkable adeptness at rendering the brilliant, hurtful empathy machine of self-consciousness. Yawn. Swarms of souls, inside blandness, as filaments: it’s like the only way the cultural conversation can read DFW, no matter how hard it tries, is through the same stunted crypto-religiosity you find in neuroscience. And it’s also why, I think, you tend to always find in basically anything written on Wallace this “insert redeeming interpretive quotient here” moment that renders him beatific. You can see it in Sullivan’s prose: that. The presentation of Wallace as writer of an ecclesiastical but also appropriately scientific history of the “struggle to live a human life that is worth struggling to live”. I think anyone who really spends time with Wallace – or, at least, Wallace the fiction writer – should only ever come away feeling worse about “being human” not better. If they don’t, they haven’t really read him at all. The last thing there is in Wallace is free grace.
“reduce”, in this context and many like it, = ‘many facets unexplored in the course of attending one or a small few’
“reductive” is, indeed, often reductively hollered
here?
fixed
Holy shit! You guys are allowed to just swoop in and change the terms by which you make an argument? How perfectly convenient.
Totally interested in what you’re saying here, Alex, but it still doesn’t explain to me how the critical take on Wallace presented above in any way reduces the author’s work.
But I’m very glad to see that it’s no longer “pitiful.”
Sorry, I changed it back. I’m trying to be safe here because I don’t want to be misunderstood. But yeah, I did change the quote because I thought it was more exemplary. Sorry.
But yeah, that’s a more or less adequate list of predicates and lines of flight–the twists and binds that define him–of what I think he could be at any given time. He wasn’t our messiah, he who would save us from postmodernism. But he did change the future of fiction, a future with which we now have to reckon.
I think most of the reviewers thus far are actually pretty conscious of the DFW fanboyism that creeps into near anyone who’s read him’s writing.
you should be fixed.
Helpful, yes. Though I gotta wonder what such a non-reductive piece of criticism might look like, the all-encompassing, non-reductive map to the vast wilderness of a complex writer’s complex art.
I’m trying to write all this without being defensive, since the quote above, but I’m not sure it’s working completely.
Maybe I should go read all the comments on Blake’s post to get a better sense of what people want out of criticism.
Kyle, man, I’d give a little more credence to what you’re saying if you called the guy by his actual name.
Alec. Alec. Alec. Apologies to the author and a question for Franklin: Is your keyboard’s the “x” in the same place as mine?
Yes, this is what I meant and what I obviously should have emphasized. Wallace did not reject the postmodern position. But I think what he means to do is reject the notion of the soul in its war with the inhuman institution as an untenable battlefield, or as a radical anachronism; in his special way, we can see him mocking this reactionary struggle – the struggle of human life and its negation – in a story like “The Suffering Channel,” and precisely not mourning its loss.
Yeah, it’s irresponsible behavior but, again, I don’t want to distract from the subject – Wallace: empathy machine or not? – by offending anyone’s work, and please note that I don’t mean to offend. Your review was moving and spurred me to begin reading TPK, so don’t think I’m undermining its force. And I’m sure you’ll be disappointed to know that I changed “sad” back to “pitiful,” in part because I really do think it’s simply a poor reading of Wallace, but, maybe against what David says below, it’s also the “obvious” side of Wallace that’s not simply the cloying sensibility of Wallace “fanboys,” but also the critical/popular reputation that his postmortem notoriety has earned him: as the grand spokesman for the lost island of humanity.
Not at all. The defensiveness is my own giant smelly bouquet of ego and vanity and all the rest — not a factor of offensiveness. Just trying to get to the heart of what you think is lost by such a critical tack, and I’m starting to understand.
The proverbial x is now on your back, sir. You have been warned. I kid with friends.
does anyone else think it’s kind of strange or wrong to release a book an author never finished after his death?
sure, many people are interested. it has an audience. is that good enough reason to publish it?
I feel like part of the problem is that readers and reviewers have mapped out a trajectory of both Wallace and his writing. They’ve found or created conclusions, answers to the variety of…issues…that he raises.
Even so, this idea of “feeling worse about being a human being” just strikes me as wrong. My feelings during and after finishing Infinite Jest were varied, and there’s no way I can do what the book does justice. But I do think there are answers, there are developments suggestive of progress.
For instance, Marathe and Steeply constantly return to the question of choice, whether it is right for an informed authority to exercise control over an uninformed people (like, parents and their children), or just let them make their own decisions.
What’s so fucking awesome is that the issue is big, too big to fit into an easy answer.
And yet an answer is at least implicitly suggested, that being that we need to both be given the right to choose by this controlling authority, but also, before we can ever really choose, we have to BE, and to KNOW who we are, what we’re choosing, and why it matters. Knowledge is Power, yeah?
For me, and I’m just going to throw out these banal words because they fit, that’s an exciting, uplifting, inspiring thought, that really, basically, what we have to be capable of doing is choosing, “choosing” being much more than simply saying “yes” or “no.”
And part of choosing is knowing everything, yeah? So, this criticism of criticism is awesome, because it is a new/different way of seeing. It’s what I was thinking back at Kitchell’s ideology of art post, that ideologies should help us see new things, but we should recognize there can be equally valid ways of understanding something, that different and opposing stances can enrich our experiences.
I didn’t start reading Wallace until after he died, but at this point in time I haven’t read a novel that has impacted me more than Infinite Jest. I’m being sincere when I say that. I’m totally willing to admit that my understanding of him falls under the umbrella of “fan boy,” though I hope not, because, as is the case with subjective experience, I feel valid in how I feel, how I understand him.
Still, I’m excited about the potential of seeing him in new ways. I’m not saying he can’t make me feel worse about humanity, and one particular instance of great tension for me is in Brief Interviews, when one of the hideous men is talking about how being in the holocaust or being raped can actually enable real, true self-discovery. Holy shit. I mean, it’s…yeah, that’s true. And, holy shit.
But yeah, still, there is a grace. It may not be an easy grace. But there is a grace.
I feel like part of the problem is that readers and reviewers have mapped out a trajectory of both Wallace and his writing. They’ve found or created conclusions, answers to the variety of…issues…that he raises.
Even so, this idea of “feeling worse about being a human being” just strikes me as wrong. My feelings during and after finishing Infinite Jest were varied, and there’s no way I can do what the book does justice. But I do think there are answers, there are developments suggestive of progress.
For instance, Marathe and Steeply constantly return to the question of choice, whether it is right for an informed authority to exercise control over an uninformed people (like, parents and their children), or just let them make their own decisions.
What’s so fucking awesome is that the issue is big, too big to fit into an easy answer.
And yet an answer is at least implicitly suggested, that being that we need to both be given the right to choose by this controlling authority, but also, before we can ever really choose, we have to BE, and to KNOW who we are, what we’re choosing, and why it matters. Knowledge is Power, yeah?
For me, and I’m just going to throw out these banal words because they fit, that’s an exciting, uplifting, inspiring thought, that really, basically, what we have to be capable of doing is choosing, “choosing” being much more than simply saying “yes” or “no.”
And part of choosing is knowing everything, yeah? So, this criticism of criticism is awesome, because it is a new/different way of seeing. It’s what I was thinking back at Kitchell’s ideology of art post, that ideologies should help us see new things, but we should recognize there can be equally valid ways of understanding something, that different and opposing stances can enrich our experiences.
I didn’t start reading Wallace until after he died, but at this point in time I haven’t read a novel that has impacted me more than Infinite Jest. I’m being sincere when I say that. I’m totally willing to admit that my understanding of him falls under the umbrella of “fan boy,” though I hope not, because, as is the case with subjective experience, I feel valid in how I feel, how I understand him.
Still, I’m excited about the potential of seeing him in new ways. I’m not saying he can’t make me feel worse about humanity, and one particular instance of great tension for me is in Brief Interviews, when one of the hideous men is talking about how being in the holocaust or being raped can actually enable real, true self-discovery. Holy shit. I mean, it’s…yeah, that’s true. And, holy shit.
But yeah, still, there is a grace. It may not be an easy grace. But there is a grace.
[…] Outraged Over Pale King Ebook Release is understandable…lawsuits coming? And here is some early criticism of the soon to be posthumously published book—”The reduction of Wallace to an empathy […]
Yes, I do.
But, then again, you know: Kafka.
i think there was no audience for kafka when he died, which would, imo, put him in a different class than wallace. but if your point is, “if we can make an audience for an unfinished/undiscovered work, then we should.” then i am not so sure.
maybe reading The Pale King will change my mind.
not necessarily; this reviewer sounds supremely familiar with the dfw oeuvre (as well as something of a fantod), and as generous as he is in this article — essentially calling it the unrealized premonition of an undeniable masterpiece — readers without as much emotional investment in dfw as a person with likely read into the novel with a much different eye.
from the way he described its structure, actually, i’m not sure why they just didn’t release it as a collection of short stories.
if you don’t want pale king to be your dfw terminus, i highly recommend the bigger books of writers he was emulating on his abortive ride up the mountain of Literature: pynchon, gaddis, faulkner, post-portrait of an artist joyce, and the less pulpy version of mccarthy. chop up and sauté those guys, sprinkle on some vonnegut, and you’ve got most of dfw’s fiction.
well, thanks for ‘fixing’ the grafix; the content is probably in addition to or beyond fixation
I think it’s strange but okay to publish writing after the author’s death, so long as the publication is what the person wrote. Editorial emendation that would’ve been run by the author should be treated as gently as possible – or it’s not that writer, but rather an unauthorized pseudo-collaboration. Dickinson’s public career is an excellent example of why writers should be left to say their say their way.
Declarations of wanting the work to be destroyed after the writer’s death – that’s trickier. I think the uncanniness and simultaneous empirical factuality of death give dying wishes their hold over the living, and, to me – who doesn’t understand ‘death’ – , dying wishes are strongly compelling.
– but look at Brod’s argument for his preserving Kafka’s novels and other papers: ‘if he’d really wanted them to be burned, he’d have given them to someone else’ – or, one could justly say, ‘ – he’d have done the burning himself’. Even if the writing is, according to the executor, lousy, the fact that its author allowed it to survive her/him means its desired destruction is something outside of, say, plans for the dispersal of an estate among family and others. I don’t think I’d scruple to preserve any piece of art that I’d been asked to destroy by someone in extremis of dying, even if she or he weren’t Vergil or Kafka.
But lookit: How finished was The Pale King? are the pages or chapters (?) numbered? are Wallace’s corrections and re-writes clear as to his preferred expressions? how ‘finished’ did he think the thing was/is?
At some point, the variety of changes indicated but not finalized forces a scrupulous editor to put out a variorum edition – and not to co-authorize a speciously ‘final’ version.
It sounds like you might be suspicious that the The Pale King roll-out smacks of a gruesome ripping off of a defenselessly dead person – and that’s how the presentation strikes me – perhaps totally unfairly.
Don’t forget Mailer. Hugely unmentioned in terms of influence.
i am suspicious of a “gruesome ripping off of a defenselessly dead person.”
if it were me publishing the “novel,” i would just publish the notes in their entirety in the order in which i found them or just make them available in a library for interested people (and scan them for people who can’t afford to travel to texas).
but maybe his wife needs money. that’s probably a good enough reason to publish the work in this way. the publication will likely (re)generate interest in his other books as well…
if kafka trusted me to burn his shit, i would burn his shit. i would feel compeled to do so, duty bound and such. but that’s just me.
concerning the finishedness of The Pale King: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2062341-2,00.html (end of 1st page beginning of 2nd page esp.) for those not following the link, here is a representative quote: “When Pietsch finished his survey, he had found a total of 328 chapters and drafts and fragments from The Pale King, but Wallace had left no clues as to how they fit together.”
any of the heady, tome-y, XY-chromosome ones, really..