Review by Choice Review
This posthumously published book was Wallace's undergraduate honors thesis in philosophy (titled "Richard Taylor's Fatalism' and for the Semantics of Physical Modality"), and he probably never intended for it to be published. It is obscure and covers Taylor's logic, semantics, and metaphysics. By the time Wallace was in his twenties, he was becoming a writer and moving away from Wittgenstein and Russell, the founders of modern logic, and from his father, a professor of philosophy. But when he wrote what was to become this book, he was still solidly in the world of philosophy and logic. What contextualizes the book is a thread of essays by people who knew Wallace and can explain how philosophy works. Students of philosophy will be at an advantage, but without the essays and endnotes one would sink. However Wallace always wanted his readers to swim, if not sink, in the world of ideas. For readers interested in Wallace, this book provides a look back at his early years--an experience rather like reading Sylvia Plath's juvenilia or finding out what Jesus did as a child or what happened during an individual's "lost years.. Summing Up: Optional. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. K. Gale University of Nebraska
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
It seems to me there are two ways of understanding the document assembled from a jumble of boxes, disks and printed or handwritten papers that, at the time of David Foster Wallace's suicide in 2008, ran into the high hundreds of pages - a document that, conscientiously and intelligently whittled down by Wallace's editor Michael Pietsch to 500-odd pages, is now being published under the title "The Pale King," and, just as significantly, the subtitle "An Unfinished Novel." The first is as a coherent, if incomplete, portrayal of our age unfolding on an epic scale: a grand parable of postindustrial culture or "late capitalism," and an anguished examination of the lot of the poor (that is, white-collar) individual who finds himself caught in this system's mesh. The setting that Wallace has chosen as his background (and foreground, and pretty much everything in between) could not be more systematic: the innards of the Internal Revenue Service - the sheer, overwhelming heft of its protocols and procedures. If, as one of Wallace's characters asserts, "the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy," then the I.R.S., "a system composed of many systems," not only represents that world but also furnishes the ultimate stage on which its moral dramas are enacted. In the words of Midwest Regional Examination Center Director DeWitt Glendenning Jr., one of the more shadowy (or pale) presences in this multicharactered and multivoiced book, "The tax code, once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of [human] life: greed, politics, power, goodness, charity." To its own agents and enforcers, the I.R.S. even offers a role and status akin to that of the lone, righteous gunslinger in the Wild West or the caped crusader in Gotham. "Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is," accounting students are informed with evangelical zeal by their instructor. "To retain care and scrupulosity about each detail from within the teeming wormball of data and rule and exception and contingency which constitutes real-world accounting - this is heroism." The proposition is comic (one of the novel's would-be heroes practices saying "Freeze! Treasury! " in front of his mirror) but sincere as well: the instructor is a Jesuit priest, and the scene is redacted with a genuinely epiphanic air. In a universe of veiled and veiling numbers, the task of drawing the true ones out into the light and holding them up for inspection, clear and remainder-less, really is a sacred one. "Gentlemen," the instructor rounds off his sermon by saying, "you are called to account." The problem, as I.R.S. recruits soon discover, is that neither moral nor heroic codes hold true anymore. The bulk of "The Pale King" takes place in the mid-1980s, as the Spademan Initiative is being implemented. Pure invention (as far as I can tell) on Wallace's part, the initiative nonetheless describes an all too recognizable shift in administrative culture, with the supplanting of a public service ethos (tax enforcement is an affirmation of all citizens' duties toward others) by a free-market one: the I.R.S. is a revenue-generating business and, as such, should audit only those returns that promise the highest yield-to-man-hour-spentinvestigating ratio. Post-Spackman, the tax agency is a godless space whose commandments are simply those of the profit motive, and whose driving logic is being automated at an alarming pace thanks to emerging software. "It was frightening," writes David Wallace (a character who shares his name not only with the author but also with another David Wallace at the I.R.S., causing yet further blurring of identities and voices), "like watching an enormous machine come to consciousness and start trying to think and feel like a real human." Machines will never feel, of course; nor do they allow for human agency and its offshoots (free will, ethics, compassion, love) to unfold and blossom in their arid data fields. By the time the software's up and running, those high up in the I.R.S. are questioning the very need for humans to administer its programs at all. Thus, by backtracking to the "Flintstonianly remote" era of mainframe computers, tape-and-card-based data storage and so on, Wallace identifies a watershed moment, a kind of base layer in the archaeology of the present - rather like Thomas Pynchon tracing the origins of the 1970s to 1945 in "Gravity's Rainbow." There's a lot of Pynchon in "The Pale King," in fact: the I.R.S.'s deployment of agents gifted with psychic powers, its harnessing of the occult for political ends, surely owe something to the White Visitation research facility in "Gravity's Rainbow." That ghosts roam the audit booths surprises none of Wallace's characters; they even sit through lectures on the etymology of the word "boredom" given by spirits whose voices slip into and out of audibility against the Examination Center's monotonous background hum. Like Wallace's breakthrough novel, "Infinite Jest," "The Pale King" is pervaded by an air of melancholia, an acute sense of loss. Nostalgic images of childhood lakes and ponds, since algaed or cemented over, crop up repeatedly. There's a dead father, who, like James Incandenza in "Infinite Jest," met a baroque end before the novel's outset (dragged to his death along a subway platform through a jumble of Christmas shopping bags, the clutter and paraphernalia of consumerism). There's lingering teenage depression everywhere. Wallace could be called an "adolescent" writer: one whose characters, like the worlds they inhabit, find themselves in states of transition, prone to all the awkwardness this entails. David Wallace (the character) is cursed with awful acne; another figure has a propensity to sweat profusely. I don't use the term pejoratively here - far from it: adolescence is about being trapped in bodies, in between, half-formed. It's Gregor Samsa's state. And then, perhaps, there's a MacGuffin, peeping through this networked novel like James Incandenza's lethally seductive film through "Infinite Jest." Agent Chris Fogle, it is rumored, has concocted an algorithm that bequeaths to those who intone it a state of pure, impenetrable concentration - and the I.R.S.'s chiefs, for obvious reasons, want to prize this from him. But the formula, rather than accelerating the system's ends, might instead allow the semi-enslaved worker to slip his shackles even as he dons them, to achieve a kind of mystical, if beleaguered, enlightenment. The novel's final image sends us back to a 19th-century factory, in which a woman counting loops of twine is shown enjoying Zen-like immersion in her task. A transcendent ergonomics of the assembly line is, perhaps, the best that we can hope for, Wallace seems to conclude. I say "perhaps" and "seems" because a good portion of this framework comes in the final "Notes and Asides" section tacked onto the main, patently partial manuscript. Which brings me to the second way of understanding the whole document: as a much rawer and more fragmented reflection on the act of writing itself, the excruciating difficulty of carrying the practice forward - properly and rigorously forward - in an age of data saturation. The Jesuit presents "the world and reality as already essentially penetrated and formed, the real world's constituent info generated . . . now a meaningful choice lay in herding, corralling and organizing that torrential flow of info." He could just as well be describing the task of the novelist, who, of course, is also "called to account." It's hard not to see in the poor pencil-pushers huddled at their desks an image of the writer - nor, given Wallace's untimely end, to shudder when they contemplate suicide. Lost childhood pools, by this reading, would constitute a kind of pastoral mode cached (or trashed) within the postmodern "systems" novel - which, in turn, is what the systems-within-systems I.R.S. really stands for. The issues of emotion and agency remain central, but are incorporated into a larger argument about the possibility or otherwise of these things within contemporary fiction. The datapsychic character Sylvanshine can glean trivia about anyone simply by looking at him, but is "weak or defective in the area of will." Nor, due to endless digressions, can he complete anything. No one can; in "The Pale King," nothing ever fully happens. That this is to a large extent a metaphor (for the novel in general, or this novel in particular) becomes glaringly obvious when we hear one unnamed character describe the play he's writing, in which a character sits at a desk, doing nothing; after the audience has left, he will do something - what that "something" is, though, the play's author hasn't worked out yet. WALLACE'S own father was - and is - very much alive. He's a professor of philosophy, the discipline that almost became Wallace's own (a breakdown shortly after embarking on his graduate career at Harvard led to the son's pursuing fiction instead). Where James Wallace wrote about Kant and Plato, David found himself drawn to analytical philosophy, once chuckling in an interview about his father's dismissal of mathematical logic and semantics as "gibberish." Now, as a kind of tie-in to "The Pale King," Columbia University Press has published the younger Wallace's undergraduate thesis on Richard Taylor.'a semantician par excellence. I have to say, I'm with Dad here: the world of analytical philosophy appears to me as so much bean-counting - or, rather, enumeration of the ways in which beans might be counted. Literary types tend to be drawn more to the poetic visions of a Heidegger or a Blanchot than to the logical conundrums of a Russell or an Ayer. What is interesting, though, is to see what Wallace does with (or to) this clinical arena. Taylor caused some consternation in the 1960s when he published his essay "Fatalism," in which he asserts that a naval captain, faced with the option of engaging or not engaging in a sea battle, cannot actually choose to do other than he will have done tomorrow, given that a state of affairs already exists whereby tomorrow it will be incontrovertibly true that yesterday he - you get the picture. That the assertion is ridiculous isn't the issue: what troubled Taylor's peers was that its logic is sound - a logic that, as Wallace writes, "does violence to some of our most basic intuitions about human freedom." The precocious future novelist sets about dismantling that logic by showing that Taylor has assumed a single-lined, inevitable flow from past to future - whereas, even considered logically, each point in this progression in fact splits, along the lines of possibility, into divergent strands. He draws them; and Io and behold, we have a web, a network - yet, crucially, one that allows for human agency again. It is, as James Ryerson, an editor at The New York Times, points out in his introduction, "a moral victory." Elsewhere in his essay, Ryerson characterizes Wallace as having resisted a "theoretical paradigm" of modernism. In fact, Wallace's writing is haunted by modernism's (very plural) legacy. One of the nicknames for the David Wallace character in "The Pale King" is "the young man carbuncular," a moniker straight from Eliot's "Waste Land." Kafka's "Castle" is explicitly invoked; and so, implicitly by the unfinished clerk-at-desk play, is the entirety of Beckett's drama. But there's an older ghost haunting "The Pale King" even more, I think, one whose spectral presence combines both the political and metafictional ways of reading the book: Melville's Bartleby, the meek and lowly copyist who cannot will himself to complete the act of copying - or, to put it another way, the writer who cannot will himself to complete the act of writing. In effect, all the I.R.S.'s clerical serfs are Bartlebys; through them, and through this book, he emerges as the melancholy impasse out of which the American novel has yet to work its way. America's greatest writer, the author of "Moby-Dick," spent his final 19 years as a customs officer - that is, a tax inspector. To research "The Pale King," Wallace trained in accounting. We're moving beyond haunting to possession here. Bartleby, of course, ends up dead, leaving a stack of undeliverable papers. This is the inheritance that Wallace earnestly, and perhaps fatally, grappled with. The outcome was as brilliant as it was sad - and the battle is the right one to engage in. In the I.R.S., a universe of veiled and veiling numbers, the task of drawing the true ones out into the light really is a sacred one. Tom McCarthy's most recent novel, "C," was published last year.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 24, 2011]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A progression of ordinary-seeming premises that would obliterate free will is challenged on its own grounds by the late, celebrated author of Infinite Jest. Written in the mid-1980s as one of Wallace's two undergraduate theses at Amherst College (his first novel, The Broom of the System, was the other), it addresses a "logical slippage"-as James Ryerson puts it-in Richard Taylor's six famous presuppositions that contend that man has no control over his fate. The paper, a survey of Taylor's argument and its influence on late-20th-century philosophy, is reprinted in its entirety, and the language of modal logic can be heavy going at times-be prepared for pages of highly specialized discussion on logic that necessitate accompanying diagrams. Still, as an early glimpse at the preoccupations of one of the 20th century's most compelling and philosophical authors, it is invaluable, and Wallace's conclusion-"if Taylor and the fatalists want to force upon us a metaphysical conclusion, they must do metaphysics, not semantics"-is simply elegant. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This is the late Wallace's previously unpublished senior undergraduate philosophy thesis (1985, Amherst Coll.). He writes on the classical philosophical problem of fatalism, which is essentially the problem of asserting individual free will. As an undergraduate Wallace learned the logic needed to refute a claim of fatalism and the need to propose new logical systems for making his argument against fatalism. This book includes New York Times Magazine editor James Ryerson's introductory essay to establish context; a republication of philosopher Richard Taylor's essay to which Wallace was specifically responding; and a number of previously published papers that feature objections to fatalism or refutations by fatalists, e.g., an essay by coeditor Cahn (philosophy, Columbia Univ.). VERDICT Wallace's senior thesis is accessible to all who have a basic understanding of logic. This book is for any reader who has enjoyed the works of Wallace and for philosophy students specializing in fatalism.-Jim Hahn, Univ. of Illinois Lib., Urbana (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
