The Return of the King, or Some Thoughts on Posthumous Publication

Today marks the official release of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, the highly anticipated novel that was in the works at the time of DFW's tragic suicide in 2008. The novel, weighing in at a lean 547 pages (lean, of course, in comparison to the 1000+ cramped and endnote-heavy Infinite Jest), comes to us via Michael Pietsch's painstaking work to compile DFW's papers and notes. Reviews and commentaries to debate have appeared measured, calm, and a bit evasive of the text itself--a touch of folk wisdom to this treatment, in that we should never speak ill of the dead. (Although, through books, some version of the dead still manage to speak to us.) The Daily Beast's piece on six novelists' reactions to The Pale King provides a fairly accurate glimpse at how people have treated the novel so far: They're reacting more to DFW as construct of novelist, of person, more so than the novel.

Because, as with any posthumous publication, we have dozens of critical/textual/metatextual conundrums to mull before even diving into the book. The most important aspect of The Pale King's publication is precisely that we remember DFW for his entire body of work; the publication is a monument to DFW, not to this book per se.

(So, go and buy The Pale King, a novel on taxes et al, after remembering to submit your tax forms. And if you've already received your return? Buy a copy of the book and put those returned tax dollars to good work, rejuvenating the publishing industry!)

I won't comment specifically about The Pale King here (I'm actually contracted to write on that specifically, elsewhere), but it forces us to consider what exactly a posthumous publication is, and what service it provides the author. It's clear with the pre-release work surrounding The Pale King that folks want to immortalize DFW.

But most posthumous publications are not so easy to pigeonhole--one only need to look at the reception of Nabokov's The Original of Laura and the treatment it receives at Sam Anderson's hands in New York Magazine. Anderson informs us of some popular wisdom--that Nabokov wanted the ms destroyed after his death, but his family kept it around for sentimentality. (A similar love led Leonard Woolf to publish Between the Acts--arguably Woolf's weakest novel--after her suicide during WWII.) Anderson enjoyed the book, saw it as a glorious study of a controlled master out of control, and David Gates's review in the New York Times concurs that the book was properly published--if it was proper to publish it at all. Aleksandar Hemon's review in Slate pushes us toward the understanding that The Original of Laura isn't a novel at all, and that the underdevelopment of voice does a disservice to Nabokov's famous penchant for control.

And it gets messier when you have antagonisms and relationships that aren't strictly family. Consider Sylvia Plath's Ariel--and the various hands that Ted Hughes and Plath's children and others have had in different editions of this, The Bell Jar, and Plath's collected poems--and suddenly what should simply be a book gets pickled in the variegated brine of love, contempt, depression, and sold to us in a package that contains, for instance, not Plath but the bottled chunks of whom Ted Hughes wanted Plath to be. So it's more Ted Hughes than Sylvia Plath.

So posthumous publishing isn't easy, but despite these difficulties, much good can come from it. These books can immortalize or slander authors, but what's most important is that we keep reading. So get The Pale King or any DFW title, get The Original of Laura or a Nabokov classic like Lolita or Pale Fire, or track down an edition of Woolf's novels or Plath's poems. Read, remember, and be remembered.

Throwing off the Casino Mindset: David Foster Wallace on Life, the Universe, and Everything

"Although of course you end up becoming yourself," David Foster Wallace tells David Lipsky on the promotional tour for Infinite Jest in 1996. They converse through the week about identity, self-actualization, when and why we eat certain meals, the relationships between writers at conferences, the effects of books reviews on writers' psyches, managing depression, the purpose of writing workshops, the dangers in stow for avant garde and experimental writers, and handling insomnia and book tour and the different brands of fame. (Btw, eggs in the morning--eggs are a nascent, transient form of life, just as we're gradually growing into our waking states--and meat in the evening--decomposing animal matter as we fade into unconsciousness.)

This/These is/are the subject(s) of Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, a transcript of Lipsky's time interviewing DFW for a 1996 Rolling Stone essay. Straight transcriptions of Lipsky's tapes, complete with Lipsky's notations telling us what they're doing, as they do it. This is a biography as only DFW could write it--a prolonged and rambling and brilliant account of DFW's history, his beliefs, and his values.

And refreshingly, the DFW in the transcript reads like the coy and insightful DFW of his books.

I was struck by many of the things appearing in DFW's rambling answers to Lipsky's questions and comments, as well as the way DFW flipped the interviewing role, often transforming Lipsky into the subject, scrutinized in DFW's witty asides and one-liners. And we cannot, of course, ignore the cultural references abounding throughout their repartee.

Most interesting, though, was how DFW attacks the casino mindset (he says it really latches on to writers at conferences, parties, and the like) and claims that fixating on that competition between writers simply ruins art and the ability of insightful and dedicated young artists by damaging their self esteem and their ambition: "And I don't know if Rolling Stone readers are interested, it's just—most bright people, something happens in your late twenties, where you realize that this other, that how other people regard you does not have enough calories in it, to keep you from blowing your brains out. That you've got to find, make some other détente."

There's some great stuff in this book—and it's not hard to draw connections between the thoughts here and DFW's other stories and novels—but this idea, handling fame, reoccurs often. DFW argues throughout that his exchanges with Lipsky that fame can destroy, that pride can be equally fatal. The dialogue is often tragic, especially since we approach the transcript with knowledge of DFW's suicide.

But we also have to consider that DFW postulates here something he describes much more eloquently in This Is Water: some thoughts on leading a compassionate life. A compassionate life consists of more than considering what others feel, think, and believe; DFW tells us, as he speaks to Lipsky and masticates plugs of chewing tobacco, that we have to remember that we are human beings as well, and we should never let ourselves decline back into the darkest, most threatening times of our lives.

Cleaning out the House, or It Is All Interrelated and Interconnected

In The Broom of the System, David Foster Wallace sweeps aside any misconceptions about precisely just how screwed up this entire world is, and really, how much would it be worth saving this one, or should we just brush it off to the side and start up from some previous option?

For starters, The Broom of the System drops us in a slightly altered Cleveland, OH, where the phone switchboard console at the publishing firm Frequent & Vigorous has started channeling a number of phone calls all together. At the center of this mess of wires and misdirected phone calls is Leonore Beadsman, the daughter of baby food-tycoon Stonecipher Beadsman III. After a visit to the nursing home (bought, BTW, by the Beadsman clan) that Leonore's great-grandmother (also named Leonore) inhabits, Leonore the younger finds that her namesake--and a number of other patients/residents of the retirement facility--have seemingly vanished.

Add to this mix a strange brew of past coincidences, Leonore's jealous lover/employer Rick Vigorous (who has more penis envy because of his rather deficient member than Freud could ever imagine anybody having), Leonore's cockatiel Vlad the Impaler (who's rising to stardom on the evangelical TV scene because of a sudden penchant for spouting Christian messages that contain amusing double entendres), and a slew of clever yet witty philosophical references and a number of sharp jabs at the BS of psychoanalysis, and you might have used The Broom of the System to scrape all the insanity of this hyperrealist novel into the proverbial dustpan, for our--that is, the readers'--inspection.

And have I mentioned that Ohio has a desert in this novel? Yes--the Great Ohio Desert, referred to by the acronym "G.O.D." And East Corinth, OH--where Leonore lives--has a streetplan that looks like Jayne Mansfield.

Wallace drops us into a veritable wasteland of details, of overlapping stories that are often over the top but blisteringly relevant to the reality of the narrative. But so too are these flurries of activity that tire, exhaust, and frustrate Leonore as she sifts through the seemingly unrelated detritus of a dozen lives. Leonore discovers, in the process, that there's something quite seriously off-kilter about the whole layout of things, at least as her life is currently situated. It's not until she steps above her circumstances, sees through the sand, and looks down onto her own life, a little distanced from it, that she can observe precisely how all of these things--like the East Corinth streets--are situated to show us who or maybe what Leonore Beadsman is or isn't.

Upon observing that, upon choosing a different life path, things can finally start over again.

Wallace, David Foster. The Broom of the System. Viking-Penguin. Paperback/$16.00. 467 pp.

Some Thoughts on a Compassionate Life

Ten o’clock on Monday is still a Monday update. ☺

So this one’s a bit behind schedule, since I’ve been following a few things in the news and been a bit all over the place. But things are settling down.

Following David Foster Wallace’s suicide in September of 2008, his publisher (Little, Brown & Co.) announced that they were publishing in book form David Foster Wallace’s commencement address to the Kenyon College class of 2005 under the title of This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. It was the only such address that Wallace would ever give.

But what Wallace reminds us of in this speech is that everything that you are at the absolute center of everything that has ever happened in your life. And so we’re always stuck at the middle of our own experiences. But he stresses that life is about more than meeting our own simple needs. He corrects misconceptions about how a liberal arts education “teaching you how to think” is more than simply a platitude; Wallace says, “‘Learning how to think’ really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”

So in short, I’ve been thinking a lot about the health care debacle, since I--like millions of other Americans--am without health insurance. Whereas I don’t think it goes far enough--it's more health insurance reform than it is health care (and that’s a necessary first step, I feel)--I still feel that the idea behind the whole push was to get outside of narrow, individualist thinking. That government can make a conscious choice from the experiences of people to provide, to pay attention.

Both sides of the debate have used a bit of fop logic and a lot of catch phrases (don’t get me started on those), but what’s important here is moving beyond this shallow, self-interested, self-promoting nature of business as usual. It’s about actually looking at the circumstances and observing the world beyond one’s self. “Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life,” Wallace cautions, “you will be totally hosed.”