Author Here: The Legal Fiction of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King

Abstract

One of the more striking and, at times, off-putting features of David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King, are the three allegedly “autobiographical” chapters narrated directly by “David Wallace” and, in the first two cases, introduced by the casual announcement, “Author here”. Although we have no way of knowing exactly how much of this material would have constituted the finished novel, the “Author Here” sections are polished enough to provide fairly clear and decisive hints as to their larger purpose within the novel's thematic whole. Although part of their purpose is to raise many of the standard questions about the instability of truth and reality generally associated with novels featuring the named author—such as Philip Roth's Operation Shylock, one of Wallace's possible source texts—the “Author Here” sections also raise those questions within the larger rubric of The Pale King's focus on bureaucracy, civic duty and the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) painful transition from, in Wallace's words, a bastion of “social justice and civic virtue” to something closer to a “for profit business” run by machines. By complicating—in admittedly somewhat routine metafictional ways—the distinction between the fictional and the real, and by presenting itself essentially as a “nonfiction memoir”, with all that genre's attendant blurring of the line between “the personal and public, or rather between private vs. performance”, the David Wallace narrative asks its readers to weigh the value of fictional truth over that of supposed non-fiction. This process of evaluation mimics both the information processing performed by the IRS computers as well as the novel's sustained dramatization of information overload and relevant versus irrelevant data. What ultimately emerges is a nuanced exploration of truth and an affirmation of fiction as a way to recover the essential human amid a culture devoted increasingly to automation and data.