David Wallace is becoming funnier and less likable as each page turns. Does he have no idea what novel he’s in the midst of, which he is supposedly writing? Is he aware that this book, this text, this story, this novel is literally haunted – and not only by the ghost of the “real” author behind Wallace’s acne-scar-masked face -? Is he aware that he’s not the only character in this story? Is he aware that his real-life (now-dead) counterpart (and I don’t mean David Francis Wallace) made him into a character of ignorance, pettiness, and unwitting significance in what seems increasingly to be a pretty big fucking deal that we (readers) will likely never fully be able to grasp? Why is he still so bitter – this is twenty years later, mind you – about being falsely accused? I get why it would cause panic and anger and confoundedness in the face of bureaucratic idiocy of a high order at the time, and could keep one shell-shocked for a while thereafter, but surely if any D(F)W is instructing us, it is not this literally quote-unquote author of ours. DFW, on the other hand, keeps letting out these incredible gems, these very David Foster Wallacean gems, like the detail in the two footnotes on page 413 – n5 actually following up as an afterthought to n4. I keep wondering whether any of this stuff is true, which is to say accurately describes the way the IRS worked in the mid-80s. Because if Wallace actually came across the ‘ghost conflation’ somewhere along his research, I can easily imagine that causing his desire to create the David F. Wallace character(s). Making himself into an IRS agent in the mid-80s is one thing, but inserting himself into what may have in fact been a legitimately potential snafu of pretty hilariously serious proportions – that takes grace. But it seems especially interesting to have a character named after himself defending against the false charge that he purposely stole an identity that he, in fact, was unwittingly assigned. I’m not sure DFW was ever charged with being a copy-cat or an impostor by critics, but I don’t doubt he charged himself thus. I never thought about it before now, but this book has actually already been made into a movie. (That I saw this film first not more than a month after I first read any of David Foster Wallace’s work is, I guess, felicitous for me.)
But what I also really want to do is continue ac’s interrogation from last week. The incident itself is not immediately relevant and so can be recounted quite fast (416), rather than, say, not at all recounted. But it’s hard, because DFW/Pietsch keeps giving us more. Who, in fact, is the “Dave” in §43? (Also, when is he?) Is §44 the reason for, e.g., Lingan’s assertion re value system? Additionally, is this chapter not the clear indication that TPK finds the belief that the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy (437) is itself a great heaping problem – partly true, unfortunately, but not true enough to internalize and accept as given without further trouble – and that the solution to such a problem, i.e. the solution to a problem the problem of which is its framing something else to be the problem and thus demanding a solution that turns out to be beside the point, is the dissolution of seeing it as the primary problem in need of solving in the first place; which means, in simpler terms, that if seeing the world as a bureaucracy presents a problem, we can say that the solution is, as in §44, to figure out how to succeed in said bureaucracy, or we can say that the solution is, as in my worldview, to figure out how not to see the world as a bureaucracy in which to succeed. Maybe DFW is, through this interesting little voice, just being literal and serious and direct. Or maybe he’s hitting that peculiar tone of irony he tends to often hit, in which he says something the content and the expression of which are both true, but not true in some kind of universal or complete sense, but only as in accurately laying out how the world seems to work to the people living in it – which isn’t, when it comes to living and learning how to live, even half the battle.
And poor Toni Ware.
just a general warning here from someone who finished today;
there is a section after the main text of 2-3 pages of dfw’s notes on various chapters. Do not read these immediately after finishing!
Most distressingly they contain a 3 point “major themes” summary, as well as several just straight up character summaries.
i wouldn’t say don’t read it, but do digest the work on your own before looking at these.
Wendel, thanks for the warning. I’m not sure I believe that that section is there, but, well, we’ll see when we get there, if we get there (have you circled back to the beginning, Wendel? or’re you resting, man?).
jqmarks, while I remain at the moment pretty fully behind our choice to consciously say No to New readings of TPK — the kind that would have us impressively paying the David Foster Wallace who hanged himself in his garage no mind — I do think that the question of Who’s instructing us? doesn’t have to have an individual as its answer. No, it’s pretty surely not any of the tiring Davids; it’s more surely the text containing them. What I actually think is that TPK is a sort of exceptional example of something that must be true of tons of modern novels, namely, not so much that they’re unfinished (though they are that) but, even more, that they’re written by their readers. And that this exceptional case gives us (you and me, and a few others, not lord help us, Us) reading it (and especially like this, here) a sort of privileged look into just how much we are making the thing we’re reading; which if you link that back to TPK (not a DW) being the instructor would mean something like we’re instructing ourselves.
Are there any good adult teachers in this book?
There’re a smiley face and a check mark at the beginning of n4 on my 413 — “was not enough to distinguish him” — which are there, mainly, because it gave me a moment not just of beholding on a bus DFW’s pulling off of a well-timed trick (which, mark, has me feeling a bit like it were my achievement, too) but also a nice realization of just how overloyal we (no “I” in team, marks) have been to him on this blog. Anyway, is it just me or could the “who” that ends §38 actually, if you tracked everything purely in terms of facts, be David Francis Wallace? David Fucking Wallace? §38 takes the joke one ugly, deflating step too far (just like giving us the murder of Toni’s mom does – when we first meet Toni, it’s not a joke strictly speaking, but it is enough. Getting her mom’s murder is like getting a sequel noone asked for. We did not need an example of playing dead literally working. There wasn’t even a hint we’d get one. I don’t think this is an effect of TPK not being finished or whatever. Which means, then, that DFW took these stories within his story too far on some purpose – all I can think of [not a good sign] is that the less and less funny dragging on of a short story [which many of these §s were before appearing in TPK] is a pretty accurate of analogously insisting upon what it is, and is, like to be the subject of one of these stories), I think, which was almost what was called for. Isn’t it part of how father Karamazov can’t help himself (I wrote “us” for “himself,” first) in that the seeds of his going-too-far are planted right in the very first move (which was enough) he makes? What if you had to believe David Francis Wallace was our author? Do you think about where he got “Francis”?
It is, I need it to be, but it also is, hilarious that (self-) suspected copycats inspire nothing so much as fucking copycats.
I haven’t yet seen the movie, I will (I’m afraid), but I wonder if you’re meaning to include in your allusion the boy who aims to press his lips to every part of his body. If you’re not, motion to do so.
It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish. (438) What makes this line true is that the person writing it said it. And likely believes it, that is, insofar as he has felt and feels it work for/on him. (Let’s not, btw, forget the old relationship b/t character development and catch phrases. We imagine the person saying this says this.) The “key to modern life” having a “There’s no place like home” ring to it. Done right (rare) this is a hard hard way of thinking about truth — of squeezing yourself into a place of taking the eyes-squinchingly empty shit people say to be (in the only sense of the word worth working with, maybe, i.e., in terms of how it means for the sayer) true. But it’s also clearly not true. Or, true in terms of effect, but not cause. Who cares? What I care about is the same old thing we’ve been saying: it’s true AND it is not true, for TPK (if our man). Let’s keep on exploiting this impasse. Capital T True existing, yes, but only insofar as it’s particular and ephemeral, i.e., lower case. Because, look, separated into its own paragraph like that, the word “literally” (an automatic inside joke, you know) inserted like that … no, just no way, we’re right to say, This is straightforward, but this is not — this is not DFW being literal and serious and direct. This is not, I mean, his being literal and serious and direct about §44′s message; about, for example, the key to modern life (which you can get promised to you, and so promised to you delivered to you [why do you want more, then?], 24 times in three minutes in any given B & N). He’s doing the voice for us. That little interesting voice, btw, almost forgetting to sound human. It’s formal. So yes, then, to “a peculiar tone of irony he often tends to hit” — and, yes, to it being less than even half the battle. §44 is a gesture. An opening move. A question back at you then: as a peak in, does §44 open up onto the world? As a bodiless interpolation in the dark, does the little interesting voice give way to a chorus (all those people you were excited to meet, jq), or does it seal back up the second you’ve nodded at it? Is what’s left stilled and smalled in a way you want to sit with? It leaving you with the tiring skipping of your own personal thinking?
I guess I both like and am troubled by the notion that we are the instructors (we’ve been waiting for). Not that that parenthetical necessarily explains why I’m troubled (nor, so it happens, why I like it), but I do think it says something about DFW’s project as outlined in This is Water (sorry, one of us had to call the Kenyon speech that sooner or later). Okay, enough of parentheses.
So far as I can tell, TPK instructs its reader to do the instructing in virtue of failing to come up with anything sufficient to instruct. I.e., so far as we take the whole be attentive even to tedium thing as sufficient, we’re satisfied, can write our little review, and go on our way. But if we read the book further, we realize more and more that that instruction is, in addition to being earnestly instructed, also made into the butt of numerous jokes about human foolishness, attachment, and suffering. DFW, then, makes his work’s central claim into both an instruction and a farce. But is this what I like about your suggestion, or am troubled by? Hard to say. Maybe what I like about it is that I’m troubled by it. It’s troubling. It evokes anxiety by stirring that which hides beneath it. It may not, on its own, uncover that hidden world, but it suggests its existence by laying bare what’s important about expressing, and what’s hideously deformed about, daily anxious human life. It’s that I’m troubled that signifies to me that I need instructing. There may be no freedom in TPK. Can it teach us, though, to desire freedom? Can it teach us to strive for it? Can it teach us – even if not how to achieve it – how to achieve what’s necessary to start striving to achieve it?
If DFW were to have made DW to give narrative authority, even temporarily, to DFrancisW, I might be annoyed.
[...] little “Notes and Asides” section at the end of the book. (Thanks, Wendel, for the warning.) DFW himself says the book is about boredom and paying attention and the happiness that gets [...]