Abstract
Fiction writers and ethnographic researchers achieve and lose their audiences by writing (Booth, 1974; Booth et al., 2008). Whereas fictional narratives approach alterity’s self-experience through textual innovations, ethnography’s narrations of its other(s) are mediated by the requirements for plausibility and verifiability. This suggests a formal distinction between the craft of representing that which could have been experienced, in the case of the author, and of representing what’s required to have been experienced, in the case of the researcher.
Creative non-fiction must also be both plausible and verifiable. So when James Frey (2003) admitted he’d made a lot of A Million Little Pieces up, for dramatic effect, he wasn’t congratulated for his experimentalism but bludgeoned for his opportunism. And when Alice Goffman (2015) claimed she was justified in fabricating episodes of On the Run, upon political grounds, she visited disrepute upon both her person and her discipline. 1 Frey’s and Goffman’s genre infidelities weren’t trivialised as errors, mistakes or oversights. They were rather ostracised for mendacity, hypocrisy and, in Goffman’s case, potential criminality. Just how are we to distinguish creative non-fiction from well-written ethnography?
Let’s consider this question by focusing on David Foster Wallace. Throughout his career, Wallace wrote both fiction and non-fiction as well as about both fiction and non-fiction. Wallace’s fiction, non-fiction, writings about fiction and about non-fiction themselves – meta-alert – are now getting written about. From what I’ve been able to tell, Wallace never made sincere claims towards being an ethnographer. But his work and the work about his work both beg the comparison. I’ll substantiate this claim by reviewing three recent accounts of Wallace and/or his work: the first, fictional; the second, comparative; and the third, exegetical. I’ll then frame an invitation to what might be called speculative anthropology which comes not from me to you but from Wallace to us.
I.
What do you do when your husband’s autopsy report is on the internet and is deemed a subject worthy of fucking literary criticism? (Karen Green; cf. Adams, 2011)
Before securing the lead role in The End of the Tour, Jason Segel had ‘built a career out of deploying his hangdog countenance and aw-shucks manner to maximum comic effect’ (Buckley, 2015). The characters he played were goofy, kind and uncomplicated – a decent bunch of lads who had certainly not ever read and probably never even heard of Infinite Jest (Wallace, 1996). Segel seemed typecast not only by his portfolio but also by his appearance. The saleslady from whom he bought his copy of the book, to paraphrase his own example, immediately figured him to be the sort of disingenuous room decorating, spine non-cracking, bandana-wearer-to-be type she’d dated before (Buckley, 2015). Jason Segel, in fact, looks exactly like a guy who would act the Infinite Jest reader if he thought it would help him get the girl.
And what’s wrong with that?! Wallace’s intimidating novel, after all, stages a geographically and chronologically fragmented plot which develops over a thousand pages, featuring over 300 end notes – and even a few end-notes to end notes – only to lead the reader right back to its very first scene, the story’s very last. Segel just doesn’t look up to the task. Some of Wallace’s fans suspected his mastery of mimetic craft was similarly limited. Wallace’s family took an exception to the biopic itself and so The End of the Tour bears the conspicuous mark of non-authority (see Kenny, 2015).
James Ponsoldt’s film is not an adaptation of Infinite Jest. But it is an adaptation of David Lipsky’s (2010) Although of course you end up becoming yourself, itself a stylisation of discussions which took place between the two young writers during 1996’s Infinite Jest book tour. Early on in the film, we encounter Segel’s Wallace as the reluctant object of Jesse Eisenstein’s Lipsky’s journalistic treatment: standoffish, cutting and potentially hostile. The interviewer–interviewee format, he implies both early and often, is less a revelatory device and more a deceptive convention. The tape recorder, moreover, doesn’t so much capture reality as convolute it. And doesn’t even get him started on whether there’s such a thing as a non-leading question. Beckett fans, take solace. Social scientists, take note.
The film’s drama hinges on whether Lipsky can find a way of getting his subject to open up about what being the author of that book is like. The curiosity is only heightened for those who have already done some homework. Wallace, they’ll know, wasn’t just the difficult artist of biographizing cliché. He was also the product of a series of intellectual traditions which effectively required him to suspect any pretence to communicative transparency (on which see Max, 2013). Moreover, his was not a passive aggressive tourist’s opinion on the limits of interrogative journalism but a seasoned practitioner’s experience thereof. The End of the Tour’s audience roots for Lipsky because Wallace’s demystification depends on his investigative capabilities. The more you already know about Wallace, the more enormous you recognise Lipsky’s task to have been. And so the greater, in turn, becomes the drama.
In the second act, the mutual suspicion between the protagonists starts to thaw. Wallace recognises that Lipsky’s certainly no hack. And Lipsky witnesses Wallace’s counter-intuitive attachment to the non-literary consolations of the everyday. So when the writer isn’t writing, we are invited to observe him praising TV explosions out of his popcorn stuffed mouth, un-ironically sitting on roller-coasters with his friends, allowing his dogs to slobber all over his handsome beard-face. And, when the interviewer isn’t interviewing, he opens up to the writer about his own literary ambitions, achievements and anxieties. We sense the initial birth pangs of acquaintance, friendship, maybe even bromance.
But we’re fated to return to the authorial enigma with which we began. Eisenstein’s Lipsky goes on to confront Segal’s Wallace about the impossible juxtaposition between his affectations of regular dudeness, on one hand, and the extraordinary demands which the creation of such a book must be predicated upon, on the other. No matter how skilled a looker this journalist is, we realise by the end what we already knew at the beginning. The author of Infinite Jest won’t ever get to be a regular guy, no matter how much he might seem to want it. Our protagonists leave our screens knowing a little about each other, and we about them, but not really that much more.
We close with the spectacle of David Foster Wallace dancing around a local community centre seeming like – although surely not really being – one of his village’s many idiots (on which see Ellis, 2015). But this is not the resolution which most audience members will recognise. For The End of the Tour’s audience, as Matt Bucher (2016) indicates, already knows how the story actually ends. The real end of the tour, as it were, is not the implausible farce of an inelegantly dancing spirit but the literal tragedy of a silently swaying corpse. As the suggestively wistful closing ballad begins, we admire this film for telling us about Infinite Jest’s author’s ambivalence towards his book’s dissemination by showing us a character who wrote a remarkable novel and committed suicide not completing another.
II.
it has become impossible to love Wallace’s work without reckoning with his ghost, how he ghosted himself. (Jamison, 2012)
A. O. Scott’s (2008) obituary opened by acknowledging one of Wallace’s own articulations of the biographical fallacy. The temptation to read something ‘other than a private tragedy’, into the manner of this author’s death, Scott (2008) affirmed, ‘must be resisted’. This was a plea for restraint born out of a mixture of etiquette and erudition: a tribute in at least two senses of the term. But it was also a self-denying plea, the guilty expression of a temptation which Scott himself could not resist. As the piece continues, Scott cannot not ponder how Wallace’s manners of self-expression, so often resembling ‘the voice in your own head’ (Scott, 2008), became irreversibly de-materialised. Wallace scholars had long been familiar with the theological subtleties and metaphysical niceties of literary de-fetishisation (e.g. Boswell, 2003), but Scott was surely the first to bring theoretical erudition to bear upon this author’s own spectre. ‘Wallace Studies’ remain shrouded in such acts of speculative clairvoyance (e.g. Groenland, 2012; Kelly, 2010).
Motivated grave-digging, morbid ventriloquism and impossible communication: Infinite Jest’s readers will already know something of these. To engage with Wallace’s work, after his death, is to find it very difficult not to follow Scott’s reluctantly pursued poetic lead.
Cool Characters provides a formidable platform for any subsequent assessment of Wallace’s place in the literary canon. There have been demonstrable shifts in the stylistic logic of US literary production since the 1950s, argues Konstantinou, and Wallace’s work bears significant responsibility for this trend’s recent developments. Much of Konstantinou analysis pivots on the question of how much responsibility authors can be said to bear for their creations. Authors die and their characters outlive them. Immaterial bastards, their creators have come to distance themselves from them, just as they have come to distance themselves from their canonical predecessors. Authorial responsibility and characterological sincerity have subsided, Cool Characters demonstrates, because irony has come to the fore, historically, technically, ethically and politically.
It is a book in which the Death of the Author and the deaths of authors meet. The Death of the Author, shows Konstantinou, hasn’t had the last word on the textually mediated dialogue between writers and readers. Booth has long suggested this and Konstantinou follows his lead, both with and against Wallace’s examples. An authoritative survey of the development of American fiction since the Second World War, then, the book tracks the literary deployment of irony as an ethos, an expression of character, a form of life. Just as it was for Aristotle, ethos, for Konstantinou, is expressed not so much through words or principles as through habits and actions. Contemporary fictional characters provide us with role models in the art of pushing our brows to our scalps and prodding our tongues to our cheeks. But irony’s cultural prominence has become much more than gestural choreography. Irony’s skilful articulation has also become an indispensable aspect of what we off the page have become. It ‘cuts to our core’, Konstantinou writes, because it is more than a trope or a figure. Irony is also, as the dissident intellectual Randolph Bourne put it in a 1913 Atlantic Monthly essay, a life, a specific (often oppositional and critical) way of being in and interpreting the world … At the most general level, the ethos of irony is a dialectical model of mental or moral character that invites us to seek disjunctions, contradictions, or mismatches within what we (or our interlocutors) most cherish. (p. xi)
So if irony ‘is best understood as a canonical form of life’ (p. 45), rather than as the privilege – or curse – of any particular cause, what is the relationship between the literary canon and real life? Konstantinou’s answer follows from his methodology. Between an extensive introduction and a cautious conclusion, there are four ‘characterological’ chapters within Cool Characters, one each devoted to the Hipster, the Punk, the Believer and the Coolhunter. Konstantinou analyses each of these literary character types with respect to what might be called their double-existence. On one hand, they each ‘appear as representative characters within fictive worlds’ (p. 44). In this sense, the Hipster, the Punk, the Believer and the Coolhunter exist only on the page, as textual epiphenomena. But on the other hand, the creators of these sorts of characters do more than showcase different models of ethos in imagined worlds. They also conceive of literary style as a vehicle through which to transform the reader’s orientation toward the world. To read literary texts a certain way (or to read the world as a special class of literary texts) is, they assume, the prerequisite for becoming a certain kind of person. (p. 44)
The post-war literary canon as such, then, whether it is ‘ironically’ articulating the Hipster and the Punk, or ‘postironically’ articulating the Believer and the Coolhunter, shows its readers what their lives might be like, by looking with them into common worlds. Ironic characterology, according to Konstantinou, doesn’t so much annul fiction’s representative appeals as deepen their resonance. And postironic characterology doesn’t so much abandon ironic modes of expression as stylise both the impossibility of any such abandonment and that impossibility’s consequential anxieties. Cool Characters grants Wallace’s work a crucial role in this transition from ironic to postironic ethos. There are at least two important upshots of this diagnosis for contemporary social scientists.
First, in his diagnosis of the post-post-modern predicament characterised by the Believer and the Coolhunter, Konstantinou presents the literary articulation of ethos as one potential antithesis to an otherwise universalised relativism. Our culture’s supposed incredulity towards grand narratives, postironic fiction suggests, need not become synonymous with a universal capitulation to the postmodern condition. Against the meticulously stylised pessimism and impeccably crafted solipsism produced by many of his contemporaries, one of Wallace’s (1993) principal innovations was to have made the ‘naïve and anachronistic’ case for a ‘new sincerity’ (see also Kelly, 2015). Fiction, he argued, could do a lot more than merely ‘dramatize how dark and stupid everything is’ (McCaffery, 1993: 131). His case for a rejuvenated sense of authorial commitment was both a product of just so many experimentations in irony’s communicative capacities, as well as his response to these. Influential as Wallace’s case for a new sincerity against yet more postmodern irony both was and remains, however, it also was, according to Konstantinou, based upon a misreading of ‘the political history of irony’ (p. xii). Contemporary social scientists would do very well to consider the role played by irony and sincerity within their own writing.
Second upshot: Konstantinou’s book enables the pursuit of social scientific ends through the means of fictional analysis. For it is in its very disavowal of reality, ironically undertaken or otherwise, that fiction makes its most realistic appeals to its readers. Consider Infinite Jest, for example. As biographer D. T. Max (2016) recently puts it, the book juxtaposes some of life’s winners to some of its losers: Tennis Academy occupants, on one hand, Halfway House residents, on the other. One group of people, institutionalised towards perfection. Another group of people, institutionalised away from annihilation. In providing multiple perspectives upon how separate worlds might be experienced, the book gestures towards a universal human predicament. The pre-apocalyptic corporatocracy … the post-modern entertainmentosphere … the proto-paranoiac predicament … whatever! The book produces a shared culture both upon its pages and in its persistent gesturing outside of itself. That the events it describes never really happened doesn’t make them any less plausible. Cool Characters instructs social scientists how to walk the line between fiction and fact.
These two upshots are to be appreciated methodologically, not metaphysically. Social scientists must continue to observe the formal distinction between the craft of representing that which could have been experienced and that of representing what’s required to have been experienced. We can deploy both ethnographic research and speculative anthropology for as long as we’re clear about how much argumentative burden we’re entitled to put upon each. We don’t need to choose between the axioms of verifiability and plausibility, in other words, because Cool Characters enables us to pursue both.
III.
All of this is true. This book is really true. (Wallace, 2011: 69)
Whereas Infinite Jest brings its readers into privileged and protected institutional spaces, The Pale King (2011) happens at desks, in offices and on the way to or from work. It tells the story of a major civic transformation project by paying particular attention to the banal, the tedious, the mundane and the unremarkable. Tax, audits, accounts, handbooks, gossip, the guy at the office who mimics the girl in The Exorcist, cost accounting sub-clauses, chain of command, the straight-line depreciation method, after work drinks, category errors, concentration, ‘wastoid’ existentialism, distraction, sexual politics, professional commitment, uni-browed devil children, the rest of it. Michael Pietsch (2011), Wallace’s editor, called it a book about ‘the hulking, terrorizing demons of ordinary life’ (p. ix) and it has already been analysed for its persuasive articulations of organisational reality (e.g. Michaelson, 2016; Parker, 2016; Styhre, 2016).
The Pale King rivets its readers to their work and its role in their lives. There’s that self-loathing realisation, for example, that it is you earnestly discussing roof repair options, chicken salad recipes, furniture arrangements, and the like. Or the apparently sincere attribution of personal meaning which you grant to – of all things – your bureaucratic competence. And the mind-tricks you play with yourself just so that you can hold it together till clocking off time. Where else, if not within the organisational humdrum, could Wallace have explored the inner-experiences and outer-expressions of contemporary boredom, sanctified these, and maybe even beatified them? And how else, if not through the speculative expression of organisational duty, could he have presented boredom as both our ontological affliction and the very basis for any sort of secular salvation?
I’m not putting it very well. But if ‘anybody could make taxes interesting’, according to Pietsch (2011: vii), Wallace could. Taxes aren’t ‘interesting’ here in the way they are for Prem Sikka and Richard Murphy, for enthusiasts of ‘The Panama Papers’ investigation, or for followers of the pre-Brexit Jolyon Maughan QC’s Twitter account. They are ‘interesting’, rather, in the way that they might be to a practicing Lutheran, to a scholar of deontology, or to a historian of askésis. The tax with which The Pale King deals is ‘interesting’, that is to say, in the same way that boredom itself is interesting. Early in the novel, we encounter a tax auditor silently poised above his paper work. It takes 4 full days for his colleagues to realise that he wasn’t working but that he was dead. And but so what’s the difference anyway? Wallace’s unfinished book interests us to ask such a question.
The Pale King will also interest its readers to ask what it might have become. For the available version is, as the subtitle to Form and Fiction’s final chapter puts it, ‘not even close to complete’. It was to be a story of death, taxes and boredom, but the author didn’t live to finish the tale. Many of Wallace’s revised plans for completion are held at the Ransom Centre archive in Austin, Texas, however. Hering’s forensic study takes its lead from these as well as from ‘Wallace Studies’ (p. 1–13) more generally. Whereas Konstantinou specifies Wallace’s contribution to irony’s articulation in his survey of the canon, Hering provides an exegetical ‘history of key formal and structural motifs that are of sustained importance to Wallace’s fiction’ (p. 4). These motifs provide the organising principles for Form and Fiction and so there’s a chapter devoted to Wallace’s evolving articulation of voice, of space and of vision, respectively. Taken individually, these three chapters deepen our appreciation of Wallace’s work and its development. Taken together, they provide Hering with grounds for specifying, in the final chapter, just how ‘incomplete’ the published version of The Pale King can be taken to be.
The voice chapter tracks Wallace’s responses to the Intentional Fallacy in general and to Roland Barthes in particular. Within The Broom of the System (Wallace, 1987), his first novel, we read an author in thrall to the vicissitudes of solipsism’s self-experience. By telling the story of a character which – as the plot develops – comes to suspect that she (it?) exists merely as an effect of language, Wallace is conspicuously clever here, far past the point of self-congratulation. Broom therefore provides Hering with an example of the ‘monological’ mode of communication against which he, following Harold Bloom (1997) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), distinguishes Wallace’s mature work. After Broom, Wallace’s narrators compete with characters for the reader’s attention, voices talk alone and on top of one another, ghosts appear and disappear and mutual recognition is thematised in the form of an aspiration. So, this is a chapter about the voices which fiction both stages and mediates. ‘Wallace’s revenant author’, Hering writes, ‘accepts “the birth of the reader,” but refuses to submit to its own effacement, instead proposing an author-reader relationship that is explicitly dialogic’ (p. 38).
Consider The Pale King again. It represents dialogues, interior monologues, memoirs, cacophonies, tax legislation, narrator overview, and more. It also invites readers to delineate the grounds of plausible and implausible testimony in the course of their relation to itself. So the gradual appearance of a David Foster Wallace character and a David Foster Wallace narrator, the latter of these claims, need not be understood as a playful wink made by the real author to the hip reader. On the contrary, fiction’s conventional legal refrain: the promise that the characters and events it describes can only bear coincidental resemblance to reality, evokes the real author lurking behind the fictional façade. So the two Wallaces are delineated within The Pale King, the narrator one insists, not in order to cleverly reveal the necessary limits of fiction’s claims upon reality – a monological task – but rather in order to erode the space between the author and the reader by drawing the latter’s attention towards this disembodied dialogue’s once embodied condition of possibility. But so, then, we can ask whether The Pale King’s complicated invitation to dialogue is annulled by the fact that its author took his own life before completing it, or not. Such ‘oscillations between character, author and reader’, according to Hering, ‘form an essential element of the fiction’ (p. 162). Death of the author indeed!
Fiction and Form’s voice chapter will speak to linguistically inclined organisational analysts while its space chapter centres in on the interests of institutional theorists. Berger and Luckman are discussed here. So is Goffman. Systems theorists too. Baudrillard, even. The chapter isolates four strategies pursued by Wallace’s pre-Pale King institutional analyses: separatism, co-operation, symbiosis and cannibalism (p. 50). Personal salvation, in Infinite Jest, is very often located within acts of institutional or political submission. There is an air of Spinozism in the suggestion of an apparent non-contradiction between freedom and determination. But this peculiar form of optimism disappears later on so that only the determinism remains. In Oblivion, a series of short stories which Wallace finished while was working on The Pale King, the ‘institution is indeed the only viable space’, Hering writes, ‘but it is not a shelter. It is a trap, a “captured shop”’ (p. 77). Wallace’s eventual capitulation to institutionally colonised life resembles Spinozist Marxism’s ‘real subsumption’, then, minus all revolutionary impetus. Hering continues, As the progressive material and cultural elision of extra-institutional space in Wallace’s later fiction demonstrates, the rapacious nature of the institution leads not only to a figurative and cultural geographical colonizing, but also a generation of the area outside itself as toxic and predatory. (p. 78)
The book’s third chapter thematises the dynamics of linguistic voyeurism by producing a distinction between the reciprocity of dialogue and the narcissism of spectatorship. It begins by mentioning a short story Wallace drafted in 1988, Las Meninas. This ‘invocation of Las Meninas at this juncture in his career’, Hering writes, ‘is a matter of some serious significance’ (p. 79). Form and Fiction’s third chapter, then, is about mirrors, surfaces, screens and cameras. It works with Foucault’s analysis of Velazquez’s painting in order to substantiate a distinction between modes of representation which reflects reality and those which refract it. Television, for Wallace, is comparable to a mirror in its reflection of ‘what people want to see’ (Wallace, 1993: 22). This characterisation, Hering writes, recalls the ambiguous monologic/dialogic status afforded to reciprocity in Foucault’s analysis of Las Meninas, Wallace suggests that in the case of television this ambiguous spatial position is potentially harmful because of the ultimate lack of reciprocity engendered in the audience by contemporary televisual entertainment. (p. 92)
So television is comparable to a mirror in that it reflects the viewer’s sense of self by being looked at. Wallace, by the contrast Hering is working with here, invites his readers to instead see beyond the play of mirrors and look through the screen. This is why Hering characterises Wallace’s writing as refractive rather than reflective: it ‘proceeds not from a narcissistic position on behalf of the writer but from an urge to communicate dialogically with the reader’ (p. 103). Wallace’s dialogical mode of communication, it follows, isn’t to be understood along either optical or acoustic lines. It is rather to be appreciated in the way that an ongoing collaboration might be, that is, as a partnership which requires each party to make a contribution to the shared enterprise. It requires the reader, in other words, to put in some work. And so Wallace’s readers are left with the challenge of interpreting the self-insertions of ‘David Foster Wallace’ into The Pale King either as a series of reflections of the artist on their own public persona: a public ‘working out’ of a personal problem. (p. 118)
Or they can follow Hering’s lead and look through them instead as part of an earnest attempt, on Wallace’s own part to retain the refractive relationship with the reader, by couching this metapresence within a series of enquiries about the ethics of seeing and reporting (p. 118)
I’m thinking that we’d be right to agree with Hering and opt for the second option. Only I’m not quite sure.
IV.
What do you reckon?