"A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness": Closing Time in the Pale King

Abstract

And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did inscrutable creatures at center freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments ... so, amid tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm. --Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (424-25) Everything in art is a formal question. --Frank Bidart, Borges and I (11) With barely five months passed since novel's publication, (1) we are clearly still in prototype phase of Pale King criticism, where task is perhaps not yet to definitively categorize novel, but rather to prepare a blueprint for a larger and later critical project. This project involves trying to separate our judgments from sometimes distorted claims that since 2008 have circled around Wallace's name in mass media, so that we can tease out logic of what Wallace was trying to do in his final novel. For all established orthodoxies of intentional fallacy and death of author, to some extent it is only when we can start to disentangle what Wallace originally planned from published text (heroically and painstakingly reconstructed, as it is, by his editor) that we can begin critical project of understanding The Pale King in earnest, and plot its place on rising curve of Wallace's career. As we might expect, The Pale King itself provides best model that we have for this task: end of list poem that begins book describes the shapes of worms incised in overturned dung and baked by sun all day until hardened ... tiny vacant lines in rows and inset curls and concludes with instruction to Read these (4). This is, of course, an allegory for reading process, especially process of reading a posthumous novel--the lines of imprinted marks are not themselves sign of a present maker, but are a message that only becomes visible once creature that created them has passed by. At same time scene uncomfortably resembles a disinterment: worms' bodies emerging from ground, hungry crows waiting for carrion. To undertake critical project of reading lines that Wallace left behind is not to deny that Michael Pietsch has performed a remarkable service for readers by assembling text of The Pale King, but rather to recognize novel's hybrid quality, and to begin to think about kinds of approach that will yield a greater depth of insight as we move out of prototype phase. Part of Wallace's importance in history of novel, in my view, is his skill as a narrative architect, and his fiction's layered design is often underpinned by a logic of juxtaposition that drives it forward. At level of sentence this logic concentrates upon polyphonic effects sought by Wallace's prose, contrast between different voices and elasticity of his rhetorical register. At level of a work's total architecture, by contrast, same logic underpins mosaic effect that Wallace created in each of his novels through carefully juxtaposed episodes and fragments. But because Wallace's manuscripts for The Pale King have not yet been made available to scholars, our reading of book's total architecture is necessarily speculative at this stage; and it may forever be speculative. We know that Wallace left a 250-page manuscript on his desk, but Michael Pietsch told me that: None of Sylvanshine chapters [were] in partial manuscript that David had assembled as a possible portrait of work in progress. The two Author here chapters were first, followed by explanation of Personnel snafu that led to David Wallace/David Wallace confusion. Then turns a page piece and long Chris Fogle monologue and a bunch of childhood stories. think David's goal was to send chapters that were very polished and that gave a sense of book's main strands and themes. …