"The Pale King"

For at least one per­son with whom I’ve dis­cussed the book, the des­ig­nated Chapter 9 of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, headed “Author’s Foreword,” is a real uh-oh moment for the unfin­ished nov­el, par­tic­u­larly com­ing as it does after the very raw and straight­for­ward and har­row­ingly detailed Chapter 8, describ­ing the par­tic­u­lars of the worse-than-hardscrabble early years of Toni Ware, of whom it is said in Chapter 45, “do not mess with this girl; this girl is dam­aged goods.” For Wallace to offer up such a mag­ni­fi­cent and evoc­at­ive and straight­for­ward piece of prose, I have heard it argued, and then intro­duce him­self as a char­ac­ter in the nov­el, thus fall­ing back on one of the tired post­mod­ern­ist tropes/tricks that he him­self had often avowed to be well and truly fed up with, well, that is/should be kind of dis­ap­point­ing, what?

Well, without get­ting too much into the vexed issue of post­mod­ern­ism and lit­er­at­ure, to com­plain about post­mod­ern­ist tricks is indic­at­ive that post­mod­ern­ism has done a pretty shitty job of mak­ing itself under­stood. If we look at the post­mod­ern invest­ig­a­tion as at least in part and attempt to pull back the cur­tain of artist­ic arti­fice in order to get at cer­tain deep­er truths about the stor­ies we tell, then to express impa­tience with that invest­ig­a­tion could be seen as an admis­sion that we’d rather be lied to. But again, if we go there, we’re not going to get to the pre­cise point I want to go to here. So let’s look at the ostens­ible laying-of-the-cards-on-the-table in Chapter 9:

Right here is me as a real per­son, David Wallace, age forty, SS no. 975−04−2012, address­ing you from my form 8829-deductible home office at 725 Indian Hill Blvd., Claremont 91711 CA, on this fifth day of spring, 2005,to inform you of the following:

All of this is true. This book is really true.

The care­ful read­er famil­i­ar with cer­tain spe­cif­ics of the “real” author’s bio­graphy might notice some­thing right off the bat, which is that on the fifth day of spring, 2005, David Foster Wallace would have been age 43, not age 40; his birth date was in February of 1962. Readers who were for­tu­nate enough to have known Wallace per­son­ally will also recall that when announ­cing him­self on the phone or in a voice mail or what not, he did not very fre­quently at all refer to him­self as “David Wallace” but rather as “Dave Wallace,” so there’s anoth­er clue for you all that in ostens­ibly pulling back the cur­tain on fiction’s arti­fice Wallace is in fact con­struct­ing anoth­er fic­tion atop the premise that he’s pulling back the cur­tain, which becomes clear­er still once it’s under­stood that the whole busi­ness about get­ting your ori­gin­al Social Security num­ber with a spe­cial num­ber begin­ning with “9” once you enter the IRS as an employ­ee is a com­plete (and pretty funny) fic­tion. So who’s the real author of The Pale King, and what’s he really doing? A little later on in that chapter he refers to hav­ing had the “spe­cif­ic dream” of becom­ing a “great fic­tion writer à la Gaddis or Anderson, Perce or Balzac.” Note not just the names, but the “or” rather than “and.” All this counts.

Reading Wallace or someone like him assert that a clear fic­tion is in fact “really true” brought to mind work­ing with him on the piece that was ini­tially pub­lished as “Neither Adult Nor Entertainment, It Turns Out” in the September 1998 edi­tion of Première, and then prin­ted in expan­ded and unbowd­ler­ized form under its ori­gin­al inten­ded title “Big Red Son” in the essay com­pil­a­tion Consider The Lobster. Here is a pas­sage from the begin­ning of the piece:

Let us not for­get Vegas’s syn­ec­doche and beat­ing heart. It’s kitty-corner from Bally’s: Caesars Palace. The grand­daddy. As big as 20 Wal-Marts end to end. Real marble and fake marble, car­pet­ing you can pass on without con­tu­sion, 130,000 square feet of casino alone. Domed ceil­ings, clerestor­ies, bar­rel vaults. In Caesars Palace is America con­ceived as a new kind of Rome: con­quer­or of its own people. An empire of Self. It’s breath­tak­ing. The winter’s light rain makes all the neon bleed.

Consider for a moment the phrase “syn­ec­doche and beat­ing heart.” (By the way, the “Rome, conquer­er of its own people” riff is repeated, as it hap­pens, in The Pale King.) Wallace just dashes it off, but its implic­a­tions are kind of mind-boggling, par­tic­u­larly because of the use of “and” instead of “or.” We’re not just talk­ing about a part refer­ring to a whole, but that part being the driv­ing, essen­tial organ of the whole. It’s sig­ni­fic­ant, but that phrase isn’t the reas­on I’m repro­du­cing that par­tic­u­lar pas­sage; the reas­on is that one piece of data, that Caesars Palace con­tains “130,000 square feet of casino alone.” As it hap­pens dur­ing the fact-checking pro­cess lead­ing up to the pub­lic­a­tion of the art­icle, we couldn’t veri­fy that inform­a­tion. Dave didn’t give us a source for it, we couldn’t find a source, and so on. There were plenty of oth­er pieces of data in the art­icle that were entirely empir­ic­ally veri­fi­able for instance, the num­ber of men that Stephanie Swift per­forms ana­lin­gus on in Gang Bang Angels 1, and the num­ber of gobs of spit she takes in the face from those men some moments after. You could sit there in front of the TV watch­ing the tape and just tick them off. But the actions and the tales told by the fic­tion­al­ized com­pos­ite char­ac­ters Dick Filth and Harold Hecuba (based on myself and Evan Wright, then writ­ing for Hustler magazine and quite miser­able about it) were not entirely above board in the actu­al fact depart­ment; the whole bit about Hecuba get­ting throttled by porn star Jasmin St. Clair and his “spe­cial autotint tri­foc­als” dis­ap­pear­ing into the “for­bid­ding décol­letage of Ms. Christy Canyon, nev­er to be recovered (the glasses) or even seen ever again” becom­ing a source of par­tic­u­lar con­cern and con­fu­sion for our unusu­ally help­ful and coöper­at­ive leg­al depart­ment, mem­bers of which I did not pester with rationales con­cern­ing post­mod­ern prac­tice or ten­sions between prov­able fact and lar­ger truth or any such thing but merely said, “The author of this piece is a really big deal, it’ll be okay.”

Of course said author pub­lished the piece under a pseud­onym, or, to be more spe­cif­ic, two pseud­onyms, and wrote in the first per­son plur­al. The ini­tial reas­on for want­ing to use (one) pseud­onym had to do with Dave’s dis­in­clin­a­tion to lie, or be caught in a lie, or some­thing. As much as he had wanted to attend the AVN Awards and write about them he had told his agent to tell any edit­ors try­ing to get him to do magazine work that he was lay­ing off that stuff for a couple of years to com­plete a book. He figured that if he did a magazine piece and that magazine advert­ised it by put­ting his name on the cov­er he’d then “look like a douchebag” as far as all the mag edit­ors he’d been turn­ing down were con­cerned. That it would likely be evid­ent almost imme­di­ately that this was an art­icle by David Foster Wallace had not…well, I can’t say wheth­er it really had not occurred to him, but there you have it. In any event right now to me the sali­ent ques­tion is why he chose to write under a dual pseud­onym. I think it has some­thing to do what’s in fact a major theme in The Pale King and in much of Wallace’s oth­er work.

The epi­graph to The Pale King is from a text called “Borges and I,” but not the famed Jorge Luis Borges ultra short story of that name. Still, I will quote what I con­sider a per­tin­ent sec­tion of the Borges story first:

I shall endure in Borges, not in myself (if, indeed, I am any­body at all), but I recog­nize myself less in his books than in many oth­ers’, or in the tedi­ous strum­ming of a gui­tar. Years ago I tried to free myself of him, and I moved on from the myth­o­lo­gies of the slums and out­skirts of the city to games with time and infin­ity, but those games belong to Borges now, and I shall have to think up oth­er things. So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a fall­ing away—and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into obli­vi­on, or into the hands of the oth­er man.

I am not sure which of us it is that’s writ­ing this page.

“If, indeed, I am any­body at all.” Another short phrase full of implications.

As for the epi­graph for The Pale King, it is from “Borges and I,” a prose poem by Frank Bidart to be found in his 1997 col­lec­tion Desire. The epi­graph is “We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed” which is straight­for­ward enough and relates in a straight­for­ward enough way to The Pale King’s IRS milieu. But let’s have a look at some of the mat­ter around that sen­tence. This is the open­ing pas­sage of the poem:

We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.

The des­ol­at­ing land­scape in Borges’ “Borges and I”—in which the voice of “I” tells us that its oth­er self, Borges, is the self who makes lit­er­at­ure fals­i­fies and exag­ger­ates, while the self that is speak­ing to us now must go on liv­ing so that Borges may con­tin­ue to fash­ion literature—is seduct­ive and even oddly com­fort­ing, but, I think, false.

And this is the con­clud­ing pas­sage of the poem:

We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.

Everything in art is a form­al ques­tion, so he tried to do it in prose with much blank white space.

Many of the char­ac­ters in The Pale King are afflic­ted with what you might call crip­pling self-consciousness. There are what “David Wallace” con­siders to be his hor­rible facial dis­fig­ure­ments, which are such that in all of his ini­tial meet­ings with heretofore-unfamiliar people he’s per­petu­ally gauging their reac­tions to them. A fel­low named Cusk sweats too much, which leads to such par­oxysms as the one described in this passage:

The worse it got, the colder the air from the over­head vent should have felt, by con­trast. But per­versely it didn’t—the hot­ter Cusk’s intern­al tem­per­at­ure got, the warm­er the downdraft felt, until at a cer­tain point it was like a sci­rocco or the air from an opened oven—positively hot. Cusk was not exactly hav­ing an attack, which in cer­tain ways was worse because it could go either was. He had broken a light sweat, but this was not the problem—the nearby girl was behind him, and as long as the heat and sweat didn’t escal­ate into a full-fledged attack, his haircut’s rear would dis­guise any droplets of sweat. Only if it escal­ated into a real attack where the bits of sweat on his scalp beneath his hair grew and accreted into a dens­ity where they became actu­al droplets and fol­lowed grav­ity down over his exposed neck was there any real chance of the woman behind him noti­cing and see­ing him as repuls­ive or weird. There was, by way of pro­phy­lax­is, the option of look­ing back and determ­in­ing the age and attract­ive­ness of the female exam­iner whose per­fume and the faint leath­er scent of what was prob­ably a purse envel­oped Cusk. Since the room’s clock was on the room’s rear wall, there was an obvi­ous excuse for turn­ing quickly and look­ing backward.

Claude Sylvanshine’s psych­ic abil­it­ies cause him not-untold (to the read­ers, at least, for what would be the point) agon­ies. Lane Dean, Jr.’s obses­sion with being a “good” per­son is also a prob­lem. And so on. One char­ac­ter who is utterly unself­con­scious, Leonard Steyck Stecyk, is con­tinu­ally undone and sub­jec­ted to hor­ribly cruel humi­li­ations because of this qual­ity. But the joke is, because he’s THAT unself­con­scious, he does not per­ceive the humi­li­ations as such. And so on. But the most fas­cin­at­ingly self-conscious char­ac­ter is Fogle, whose mono­logue takes up a full 98 pages of this 538-page text and whose “voice” is more like David Foster Wallace’s than the voice of the “David Wallace” who speaks as the “Author” of this nov­el which he insists is a mem­oir. Fogle, whose pen­chant for going into things in incred­ible termite detail earns him the nick­name “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle from his col­leagues, is the double of Wallace in The Pale King. In the lengthy pas­sage below, Fogle describes the state of consciousness/being he exper­i­enced in col­lege while abus­ing the drug Obetrol. I think there’s a lot here that’s key to not just Wallace’s themes through­out his work but to the par­tic­u­larly phe­nomen­o­lo­gic­al per­spect­ive his writ­ing takes, its struggle through all of its con­vo­lu­tions to finally get to some­thing really “real” in spite of or maybe because of all the lay­ers and con­vo­lu­tions per­tain­ing to one’s impossible and often impossibly pain­ful rela­tion to one’s self:

And nor was it just good or pleas­ur­able things you were aware of, on Obetrol or Cylert. Some of the stuff it brought into aware­ness wasn’t pleas­ant, it was just real­ity. Like sit­ting in the UIC dorm room’s little liv­ing room and listen­ing to the roommate-slash-social-rebel from Naperville in his bed­room talk­ing on his phone—this so-called non­con­form­ist had his own phone line, paid for by guess who—talking to some coed, which if there was no music or TV on, you couldn’t help over­hear­ing through the walls, which were notori­ously easy to put your fist through if you were the type that punched walls, and listen­ing to his rap of ingra­ti­at­ing pat­ter to some coed, and not only sort of dis­lik­ing him and feel­ing embar­rassed for him at the affected way he talked to girls—as if any­body who was pay­ing atten­tion could miss see­ing how hard he was try­ing to pro­ject his idea of him­self as hip and rad­ic­al without being the slight­est bit aware of how he really looked, which was spoiled, insec­ure and vain—and listen­ing and feel­ing all this, but also being uncom­fort­ably aware that I was, mean­ing hav­ing to con­sciously feel and be aware of these inner reac­tions instead of just hav­ing them oper­ate in me without quite admit­ting them to myself. I don’t think I’m explain­ing it very well. Like hav­ing to be able to say to your­self, ‘I am pre­tend­ing to sit here read­ing Albert Camus’s The Fall for the Literature of Alienation midterm, but actu­ally I’m really con­cen­trat­ing on Steve try­ing to impress this girl over the phone, and I am feel­ing embar­rass­ment and con­tempt for him, and am think­ing he’s a poser, and at the same time I am also uncom­fort­ably aware of times that I’ve also tried to pro­ject the idea of myself as hip and cyn­ic­al so as to impress someone, mean­ing that not only do I sort of dis­like Steve, which in all hon­esty I do, but part of the reas­on I dis­like him is that when I listen to him on the phone it makes me see sim­il­ar­it­ies and real­ize things about myself that embar­rass me, but I don’t know how to quit doing them—like, if I quit try­ing to seem nihil­ist­ic, even just to myself, then what would hap­pen, what would I be like? And will I even remem­ber this when I’m not Obetrolling, or will I just go back to being irrit­ated by Steve Edwards without quite let­ting myself be aware of it, or why?’ Does this make sense? It could be fright­en­ing because I could see all this with uncom­fort­able clar­ity, although I would not have used a word like nihil­ism dur­ing that peri­od without try­ing to make it sound cool or like an allu­sion, which to myself, in the clar­ity of doub­ling, I wouldn’t have been temp­ted to do, as I did things like this only when I wasn’t really aware of what I was doing or what my real agenda was, but rather on some kind of strange, robot­ic auto­pi­lot. Which, when I did Obetrol—or once, at DePaul, a vari­ant called Cylert, which only came in 10 mg. tab­lets, and was only avail­able one time in a very spe­cial situ­ation that nev­er repeated—I ten­ded to real­ize again that I wasn’t even really aware of what was going on, most of the time. Like tak­ing the train instead of actu­ally driv­ing your­self some­where and hav­ing to know where you were and make decisions about where to turn. On the train, one can merely space out and ride along, which is what it felt as though I was doing most of the time. And I’d be aware of this too, on these stim­u­lants, and aware of the fact that I was aware. The aware­ness was fleet­ing, though, and after I came off of the Obetrol—which usu­ally involved a bad headache—afterward, it felt as though I barely remembered any of the things I’d become aware of. The memory of the feel­ing of sud­denly com­ing awake and being aware felt vague and dif­fuse, like some­thing you think you see at the out­er peri­phery of your vis­ion but then can’t see when you try to look dir­ectly at it. Or like a frag­ment of memory which you’re not sure wheth­er it was real or part of a dream. Just as I’d pre­dicted and been afraid of when I’d been doubled, of course. So it wasn’t all fun and games, which was one reas­on why Obetrolling felt true and import­ant instead of just goofy and pleas­ur­able like pot. Some of it was uncom­fort­ably vivid. As in not merely wak­ing up to an aware­ness of my dis­like of the room­mate and his den­im work­shirts and gui­tar and all of the so-called friend who came around and had to pre­tend to like him and find him cool in order to get a gram of hash from him or whatever, and not just dis­lik­ing the whole room­ing situ­ation and even the nihil­ist­ic ritu­al of the foot and the Hat, which we pre­ten­ded was a lot cool­er and fun­ni­er than it was—as it wasn’t as though we did it just once or twice but basic­ally all the time, it was really just an excuse not to study or do our work and instead be wast­oids while our par­ents paid our tuition, room , and board—but also being aware, when I really looked at it, that part of me had chosen to room with Steve Edwards because part of me actu­ally sort of enjoyed dis­lik­ing him and cata­loguing things about him that were hypo­crit­ic­al and made me feel a sort of embar­rassed dis­taste, and that there must be cer­tain psy­cho­lo­gic­al reas­ons why I lived, ate, partied, and hung out with a per­son I didn’t even really like or respect very much…which prob­ably meant that I didn’t respect myself very much, either, and that was why I was such a con­form­ist. And the point is that, sit­ting there over­hear­ing Steve tell the girl on the phone that he’d always felt today’s women had to be seen as more than just sex objects if there was going to be any hope for the human race, I would be artic­u­lat­ing all this to myself, very clearly and con­sciously, instead of just drift­ing around hav­ing all these sen­sa­tions and reac­tions about him without ever being quite aware of them. So it basic­ally meant wak­ing up to how unaware I nor­mally was, and know­ing that I’d be going back to sleep like that when the arti­fi­cial effect of the speed wore off. Meaning it all wasn’t fun and games. But it did feel alive, and that’s prob­ably why I liked it. It felt like I actu­ally owned myself. Instead of rent­ing or whatever—I don’t know. But that ana­logy sounds too cheap, like a cheap wit­ti­cism. It’s hard to explain, and this is prob­ably more time than I should take to explain it. Nor am I obvi­ously try­ing to give any pro-drug-abuse mes­sage here. But it was import­ant. I like now to think of the Obetrol and oth­er sub­types of speed as more a kind of sign­post or dir­ec­tion­al sign, point­ing to what might be pos­sible if I could become more aware and alive in daily life. In that sense, I think that abus­ing these drugs was a valu­able exper­i­ence for me, as I was basic­ally so feck­less and unfocused dur­ing this peri­od that I needed a very clear, blunt type of hint that there was much more to being an alive, respons­ible, autonom­ous adult than I had any idea of at the time.

Consider for a moment the phrase “if I quit try­ing to seem nihil­ist­ic, even just to myself, then what would hap­pen, what would I be like?” Think about “try­ing” to “seem” “nihil­ist­ic.” This isn’t just the hes­it­ancy of an unre­li­able nar­rat­or here. This is very much in keep­ing with how Dave worked things out mentally/philosophically, and also wrote; as in, for example, his descrip­tion of one­time porn mag­nate Al Goldstein in “Big Red Son:” “Goldstein is a porn icon. He was dis­trib­ut­ing NYC’s Screw on Photostat when most of the people in this room were still play­ing with their toes. He’s been a First Amendment ninja. He drinks in the applause and loves it and is hard not to sort of almost actu­ally like.” Again: “hard not to sort of almost actu­ally like.” “[Q]uit try­ing to seem nihil­ist­ic.” And when read­ing Fogle’s com­plaints on room­mate Steve, I flash to Dave’s descrip­tion in “Big Red Son” of the Vegas din­ner with one­time child act­or Scotty Schwartz.

Anyway, the point is that yr. cor­res­ps. were on Thursday night lured to this sup­per meet­ing by Hecuba’s reports that S. Schwartz had become sort of the unof­fi­cial mas­cot of the adult industry, and knew abso­lutely every­body, and was a near-manic chat­ter­box: We figured that he’d be a good source of back­ground and con­text and gos­sip. H.H. had already pre­pared us for Schwartz’s per­son­al man­ner (which is ticcy and breath­less and neur­ally irrit­at­ing in the same way that a music­al note held much too long is irrit­at­ing) but what Hecuba neg­lected to men­tion was that Scotty Schwartz is also totally incap­able of talk­ing about any­thing but him­self. Two course and half an hour are spent on Scotty’s main­stream résumé and the fucking-over he got from fate’s fickle fin­ger (allit­er­a­tion and ana­tom­ic­ally mixed meta­phor Schwartz’s) and the com­par­at­ive injustice of the arcs of his and C. Feldman’s careers, and then anoth­er 20 minutes on Schwartz’s bud­ding and allegedly pla­ton­ic rela­tion­ship with a born-again Christian girl he met on the Internet (dur­ing which whole ini­tial 50 minutes one of yr. cor­res­ps. kept hav­ing to put his nap­kin in his mouth). Nor did Schwartz seem able or dis­posed to tell any story of which he him­self was not the hero. Here—as close to ver­batim as stu­pefac­tion permitted—is Scotty’s tale of his intro­duc­tion to Mr. Russ Hampshire, head of VCA Inc. and what Scotty terms “a very big fish: like this if you know what I’m say­ing to you here” in the adult industry:

“So I’m at this part and hanging and schmooz­ing up the girls and there across the room is Russ Hampshire and Russ catches my like eye if you know what I’m say­ing and goes, like, you know, ‘Hey kid, c’mere’ and so I do I go over I mean this is Russ fuck­ing Hampshire you know what I’m say­ing here and I do I like go on over to where Russ is at and Russ comes over to me and goes, ‘Scotty, I been watch­ing you. I like your style. I’m a good judge of people, and Scotty, you’re good people. I nev­er heard one per­son say one bad thing about you.’ [Keep in mind that this is Scotty telling this story. Note how ver­batim he gets Hampshire’s dia­logue. Note the altered timbre and per­fectly timed deliv­ery. Note the way it nev­er even occurs to Scotty that a nor­mal US cit­izen might be bored or repelled by Scotty’s lengthy recit­a­tion of someone else’s praise of him. Schwartz knows only that this inter­change occurred and that it sig­ni­fies that a big fish approves of him and that it redounds to Scotty’s cred­it and that he wants it widely, widely known.] ‘Kid, I just want you to know that you’re fuck­ing OK in my book, and if there’s any­thing I can do to, you know, help you, any­thing at all, I just want you to say the word.’”

…End of vign­ette, and now Scotty—like Max, like Jasmin, like Jenna and Randy and Tom and Caressa—looks around the table, examin­ing his aud­it­ors’ faces for the admir­a­tion that can­not pos­sibly fail to appear. What is the socially appro­pri­ate response to an anec­dote like this—a con­text­less anec­dote, apro­pos noth­ing, with its smugly unsubtle (and yet not unmov­ing, finally, in its naked insec­ur­ity) agenda of get­ting you to admire the tell­er? The few seconds after, with the vign­ette hanging there and Scotty’s eyes on your cor­res­pond­ents’ faces like fin­gers, were the first of count­less such moment over the AAVNA’s week­end. How is one expec­ted to respond? It was very uncom­fort­able. One of yr. cor­res­ps. opted for “Gosh. Wow.” The oth­er pre­ten­ded to have a brus­sels sprout go down the wrong way.

Now des­pite the state­ment fact that the per­son who “lured” “Willem de Groot and Matt Rundlet” to this din­ner is said to be one Harold Hecuba, and Hecuba was the name that Dave had delib­er­ately bestowed on Evan Wright as a way of assur­ing him that he, Wright, would someday get off the island (I’m sure all of you know your Gilligan lore, right?) it was in fact I, rep­res­en­ted in the piece as Dick Filth, who arranged the sup­per with Scotty (as you can ima­gine, my rela­tion­ship with the fel­low suffered a fatal blow once the piece saw print), at one of the then-two Ruth’s Chris steak houses in Vegas (and of course I ini­tially went to the wrong one) and so can tell you that I’m not even sure wheth­er the sin­gu­lar David Foster Wallace had Brussels sprouts with is meal, let alone choked on one. But I can tell you that the David Foster Wallace who suffered through that week­end in early ’98 bat­tling the flu and abso­lutely unable to take any kind of medi­cine to deal with it or its symp­toms, the Wallace whose pre­oc­cu­pa­tions with porn were very humane and had a mor­al dimen­sion that was genu­inely pro­found and not cheesy, this Wallace also developed a pretty much imme­di­ate dis­like of Scotty Schwartz and kind of rel­ished the idea of need­ling him a bit over the week­end. “I noticed that Scotty Schwartz really didn’t like my bandana, I think I’m gonna wear it tonight,” I recall Dave say­ing as we sep­ar­ated to change into our “good” (such as they were) clothes for the awards ceremony.

So I think that The Pale King is ABOUT…apart from the IRS…that it is very much about one’s rela­tion­ship to one’s self, to the dif­fer­ent aspects of one’s self, and to the abject self-torture that can come of that rela­tion­ship. Just as in Infinite Jest Dave’s selves are divided between Hal and Gately, here they’re divided not just between Fogle and David Wallace but also appor­tioned out in bits to the oth­er self-conscious char­ac­ters. In one of the “Notes and Asides” edit­or Michael Pietsch sup­plies at the end of what is, after all, Pietsch’s own assembly of a David Foster Wallace book, there’s this line: “David Wallace disappears—becomes creature of the sys­tem.” One is reminded of Kafka, or of that old Ultravox song “I Want To Be A Machine.” Because, among oth­er things, being a machine will likely remove you from the pain of being human. One knows that The Pale King is unfin­ished, and the more I look into it the more I do have to won­der wheth­er or not it was, in fact, by its very design unfinishable.