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.

The Art of the Essay

Over the weekend, I finished Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own, where Woolf concludes that for a woman to be an artist (or, really, if a woman's to pursue her own dreams and ambitions) she needs to have money and a room of her own. Basically, women need the same kinds of resources and respect that have traditionally been given to men. Only then can they have the opportunities to write, create, invent, etc. that the feminist movement has sought to instill.

But what struck me the most about A Room of One's Own was that it was an essay that was actually fun to read. Woolf ties in personal anecdotes, and she uses these with a dash of wit, humor, and research to flesh out her argument. And in writing the essay, she builds several small stories into her larger argument. She recalls when women received the vote, a time at which she just inherited from an aunt a large sum on money; she recalls at the time being more excited about the money than the vote, because it was money that would enable her to pursue her artistic ventures.

And then there's Woolf's hypothetical situation--what if Shakespeare had a sister, Judith, who was as talented as Shakespeare? Woolf tells us the story about Judith's life, about how she gets disparaged for reading books and never receives the education that her brother did, about how her attempts to follow in his footsteps get her ridiculed.

So yeah, A Room of One's Own reads like a piece of modernist prose, but it's engaging. Part of the problem that we find with essays is this thing that gets drilled into our brains in middle and high school, and it really screws our ability to write well: the five paragraph essay, "In this essay I will...." But Woolf tells us stories, she tells us jokes, and peppers anecdotes throughout to spice up her language and make the entire argument personal.

A good essay should do these things; a good essay should be engaging and fun and informative. In reading it, we should get an idea of exactly why this means so much to the author and why, therefore, it's important that we hear about it. Having personality isn't just for the personal essay.

And seriously, read A Room of One's Own.

(Star Trek review on Friday! Poetry on Wednesday!)