‘Only the bored are free’: boredom as disruption and
resistance in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.
MA Thesis
Adrià Puértolas Pérez
Supervisor: Aylin Kuryel
Academic year: 2019-2020
Faculty of Humanities
Universiteit van Amsterdam
INDEX
1. Introduction
3
2. ‘Only the bored are free: boredom as resistance in The Pale King
8
3. ‘Awakening’: Embracing boredom against the cultural logic of
late capitalism in The Pale King
21
4. Boredom, metamodernism and narratives of reconstruction in
The Pale King
36
5. Conclusion
48
1. Introduction
In the movie Spring Breakers (2012), by Harmony Korine, a group of young college girls travel to Florida to participate to the Spring Break, the well-known mass party. It is an escape from the monotony of university, classes, routine and the world they’ve always known: “I’m tired of seeing always the same things”, they complain as a justification for the trip. During the break, their quest for adrenaline and limit experiences quickly escalates: once the excitement of the party ceases, they end up robbing a store at gun point and getting involved with an obscure drug dealer that leads them into a full-scale shooting against a rival criminal organization. The movie seems to suggest that even the most extreme and limit experiences, as exciting and powerful as they can be, are not able to provide a steady, authentic life, some substance to hold on to, just intense chaos and violence.
It is tempting to read the film as a growing realization of the limits the rebellious-Dionysian1 escape, one that seems central in the cultural logic of late capitalism; that it may
have become an exhausted or sterile path towards emancipation —what the characters of the movie ultimately seek—and that, perhaps, a comeback, an acceptance of an authentic, solid and monotonous existence is desirable. In other words, that the rush or euphoria of escaping the dullness of routine and boredom through excitement, the possibility to reinterpret to the limit one’s identity even in the most extreme cases, to breach the gap between common college students and criminal gang members, has become ultimately empty, maddening, an absurd trip toward a promised excitement that we can never really attain, one that is always receding. Perhaps it also embodies David Harvey’s warning that beneath the playfulness and excitement of the labyrinth of the postmodern city/world, laid “the grumbling threat of inexplicable violence, […] of the tendency of social life to dissolve into total chaos” (6), that, as inviting as they could be, it was very easy to “lose each other and ourselves” (5) in it.
It is this realization, this suggested exhaustion, that provides a very compelling framework to analyze the question of boredom in the contemporary. If we embrace this movement or cultural dynamic, a question arises: could the suggested exhaustion imply a shift in the apparent consensus on boredom? Could it have altered the idea that boredom was a
1 Gilles Lipovetsky attributes to the contemporary consumer under late capitalism the ‘Dyonisian impulse’
“avoid ourselves, plunging into chaos and a sea of limitless sensations” (159). A relation between the impulses that guide the main characters of Spring-breakers to the event and Lipovetsky’s analysis of the
psychological state to avoid at all costs, “plunging into chaos and a sea of limitless sensations” (Lipovetsky 159), to become something desirable, comforting?
The Pale King, David Foster Wallace’s posthumous and unfinished novel provides a
very suggestive material to answer these questions. Published in 2011 (although written between 2000 and 2008), the novel constitutes a very particular defense of boredom or, if we are to be more precise, a carefully crafted argument in favor of its potential as a disruptive feeling against the logic of late capitalist consumer culture, where the mandate of enjoyment and the process of commodification has reached the category of emotion. The main characters of the book are the agents of the American Internal Revenue Service, the agency responsible for collecting taxes and administering federal statutory tax law in the US, under one of the Ronald Reagan’s administrations. Their work routines are a pristine example of dullness and monotony, filling one tax form after another, struggling to focus. In the perspective of the novel, however, the agency and their members are a declining bastion where dullness, routine and monotony are welcomed and not buried in banal distractions or impulsive consumption acts; an example of control and moderation, of an existence with civic rules, purposes and beliefs, although it is sometimes grey and unappealing and it asks for significant efforts. They are unlikely ‘small-h heroes’, fighting against “this incredible political consensus that we need to escape the confinement and rigidity of conforming (Wallace 128). With Spring Breakers in mind, they seem a sort of reverse, a guiding model about how to live in the contemporary that forwards the opposite side of the spectrum, one where reign values that seemed to have been obliterated by the cultural changes of late capitalism. The archetype that the novels puts forward and the universe of the agency are a puzzling universe, fascinating precisely in its boring and ordinary nature, and a very original path on how to fight the malaise of late capitalism.
To conduct our analysis, we will cross-read the notion of boredom that the novel presents with the theorization by Guy Debord and the International Situationist of the psychological state as ‘counter-revolutionary’. Walter Benjamin’s idea of it as a ‘threshold to great deeds’ and its relation to the atrophy of experience under Modernity will also provide some of the theoretical grounds for the analysis. These classical approaches will be paired with theoretical analysis of boredom in the contemporary, that is, under the conditions of late capitalism, its cultural logic and its productive organization. The aim of the thesis is to contribute to explore how in the conditions of intensive consumption, commoditization of emotion, boredom can be used as a defensive tool to conquer an outside of “the endless cycle
of people’s desires for commodity objects” (Haladyn 123). In other words, how boredom has a disruptive potential in this context and how the novel uses it as a part of a narrative of transformation and belief. Therefore, in the discussion about whether boredom “drives us to perpetually seek ever-newer and more spectacular encounters” (Gardiner & Haladyn 3) or it is a powerful “means of resisting this drive” (3), The Pale King can be clearly identified with the second position.
At the side of the framework of boredom studies, the thesis will also rely on the framework provided by the Marxist critique of the logic of late capitalism. It will provide a richer perspective on how we can place boredom in its politics of emotion and in the relation between individual and consumption, in its “ensemble of intellectual, communicative, relational and affective” (62) commodities, in Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s words in
Empire. We will combine different methods from close-reading to concept analysis, that will
allow us to focus on a plurality of aspects of the novel, from its literary style, relevant to the experience of the reader and boredom, to the portrayal of its main characters and its allegorical significance.
Boredom, in The Pale King, becomes a “bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—” (Wallace 492); a psychological state that, when embraced, can bring us to a better, more conscious, fulfilling life, an idea that Wallace discussed beyond the book during his late career. However, this operation requires effort, training, to focus, not to succumb to banal distraction, etc., something that seems circumscribed to the individual. What is the particular perspective of boredom that the novel offers? How can we place The Pale King’s perspective on boredom in the discussion about the concept? How does it relate to the other theorizations of this psychological state across history? And how can it be read from the emergence of digital networks and our dependence on its permanent stimuli? These are the central questions that we will explore throughout the thesis, although they will be particularly relevant in the first chapter. In it, we will try to determine the conception of the psychological state present in the novel and its different dimensions. We will also discuss the use of an ‘aesthetics of boredom’, that is the inclusion of passages that seem determined to deliberately bore the reader, and we will cross-read them with Julian Haladyn’s analysis on the relation between artistic practice and boredom in Boredom and Art.
In the second chapter, we will explore the social and political aspects of boredom in the novel, through a close reading of the two passages of the book where these are most explicitly discussed. It will help us in understanding how Wallace’s vindication of the psychological state
should be framed in the conditions of contemporary late capitalism. In the first part of this second chapter, we will analyze the relation between boredom and the declining of modern structures of meaning and on how, in the book, the boredom that the agents experience connects with the ‘ahistorical’ condition of the postmodern individual, and what is characteristic of this particular boredom, following Walter Benjamin’s theorization of it. In the second part, we will focus on how boredom seems to be a key element in an attempt to build a comprehensive ideological narrative that goes well beyond the concept and that entangles with the hypothetical exhaustion that we have suggested at the beginning of this introduction.
The Pale King’s vindication of boredom, the choice of the characters, middle-aged desk
workers of a federal agency that are characterized, in an almost ironic shift, as ‘heroes’, the use of an aesthetics of boredom and the perspective it gives on the ‘exhaustion’ discussed at the beginning of this introduction seem to share something, as if it were possible to identify a particular logic that goes across all of them, that articulates them. One way to see it is that they all express a fascination with a range of values that postmodernism had obliterated. In short, the novel displays an attraction for monotony, purpose, order, hierarchy, quietness, determinacy that seem to substitute the postmodern indeterminacy, anarchy, playfulness, openness, irony, relativism, as characterized in Ihab Hassan’s well-known table. From apathy and relativism, there is engagement, willingness to reconstruct. In other words, there seems to be crystalized in the novel a sort of pendular movement towards a different direction. Could then the novel’s perspective on boredom and of the world of the IRS Agency be the result of a different and new cultural logic, a new sensibility or structure of feeling that, at least partially, contradicts or moves beyond that of late capitalism and postmodernism?
In the third and final chapter we will try to answer this question. To do so, we will use the theoretical framework provided by the concept of metamodernism, developed by the Dutch scholars Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker in Notes on Modernism. In their argument, metamodernism is an emerging sensibility, an answer to the apparently well-accepted idea that the postmodern has become exhausted. What defines the new paradigm is an oscillation (the prefix ‘meta’ refers to this) between “a typically modern commitment and a markedly postmodern detachment; […] between modern enthusiasm and postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naiveté and knowingness” (Vermeulen & van den Akker 6). metamodern practices leave behind the aesthetic precepts of deconstruction, parataxis and pastiche in favor of notions of reconstruction, myth and metaxis.
Could then The Pale King’s apparent inclination or return to a certain characteristically modern values, that include a different regard on boredom, be, in fact, metamodern? Could the apparent attraction for purpose, order, hierarchy, quietness, determinacy actually display a willingness for ‘reconstruction’ or to recover the notion myth in a certain extent? To which point does Vermeulen and van den Akker’s concept and its artistic and cultural strategies suit the discourse of the novel? And how do they engage with the critique of the logic of late capitalism that the novel displays?
2. “Only the bored are free”: boredom and focus as resistance in The Pale
King
As the Canadian scholar and art critic Julian Haladyn and the Canadian sociologist Michael Gardiner acknowledge in The Boredom Studies Reader (2016), there are multiple ways to understand boredom as a psychological state. Boredom is “a complex, dynamic and ambivalent phenomenon, incorporating often contradictory experiences” (Haladyn & Gardiner 12). But at the same time, it is true that in and beyond popular culture and the collective imaginary, there has always existed a predominant idea —a strong yet not complete consensus— that boredom was something negative, a state of mind that one sought to avoid, sometimes at great costs. It is easy to think here about Baudelaire’s characterization of this psychological state in the prefatory poem of Les Fleurs du mal: “tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat […] Il en est
le plus laid, plus méchant, plus inmonde!2
” (Baudelaire 12). We can also cite Schopenhauer, describing boredom as an “empty longing” or Kierkegaards’s consideration that boredom was “the root of all evil” (7), a ‘disturbing challenge’ to the individual’s overall sense of a purposeful existence. In a similar way, we can also find examples of this line of thought in popular artistic expressions in the contemporary. “I've been in this fuckin' room so long/ My eyeballs are turning to dry wall”, sings the American rapper Tyler in a song called precisely ‘Boredom’. In literature, also in contemporary times, a wide range of writers, from Ben Lerner to Michel Houellebecq, seem to portray an intense feeling of void, a despair characteristic of the contemporary man. And they do it in unmistakably negative terms, associating the feeling with anxiousness, desperation and, ultimately, futility.
However, at the same time, there seems to be a growing feeling, along with some social practices and critical literature, that in the conditions of late capitalism intensive consumption, generalized distraction and permanent connectivity, boredom is a sort of unexplored tool towards a greater freedom; an effective form of resistance, playing dullness and grey against the colorful ‘theater’ of the contemporary city and its promises. That boredom can be used as an emancipating tool is not an entirely new idea. As Haladyn states in Boredom and Art (2015), for some of the Surrealists and their inheritors, as far as the decade of the 1920s, boredom was already contemplated as an “active strategy for resisting or frustrating the psychological pressures of consumer capitalism” (114). Yet the interest seems to have been renewed and transformed.
If we are to believe these contemporary cultural expressions and social practices, that range from critical essays to the success of mindfulness and digital detox retirements, stillness, dullness and even monotony may be preferable or, rather, necessary in front of the the anarchic ‘theater’ of the postmodern city, in David Harvey’s terms, where the Dyonisian desire to “avoid ourselves, plunging into chaos and a sea of limitless sensations” (Lipovetsky 59) reigns; in front of the incessant beeping of our devices and the constant stream of intrusive notifications and the information overload.
It is in this light that Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011), the last and posthumous novel of the American writer, asks for an attentive analysis. In the book, Wallace presents a particular and complex vindication of the potential of boredom framed through the lives and experiences of the agents of the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, destined to work with tedious forms and dull tax regulations. The action of the novel takes place during the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s second term, presumably between 1985 and 1986. Their experiences are presented as a proof that the predominant attitude towards this feeling may have been wrong for a long time, according to the author; namely, that the path to a freer, happier and more nourishing life is not trying to avoid boring moments and filling them with all kinds of activities, but rather confronting and embracing the feeling, learning to accept it and to cohabitate with it. It is in the notes left by Wallace besides the text of the novel, a key source to characterize some of its themes and intentions, where we can find perhaps the most explicit and unequivocal mention of boredom:
“Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious— lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.” (Wallace 546)
It is necessary to point out, again, that the recipe the passage offers is not exactly unheard of. Joseph Brodsky, the Russian writer, also advocated for a similar attitude to combat the feeling: “when boredom strikes, throw yourself into it. Let it squeeze you, submerge you, right to the bottom” (Svendsen 105). And the ability to cohabitate with the feeling was also something that Bertrand Russell stressed out, stating that “a generation that cannot endure boredom will be a
generation of little men” (Svendsen 105). But in the particular context of the contemporary, as we will see, Wallace’s vindication takes place in a different framework.
The Pale King does not specifically mention in the same explicit form the ideas of the
passage, but it is true that it does not seem difficult to try to figure out what ‘riding out’ the waves of boredom in order to access the ‘bliss’ of being alive mean in the book. As Ralph Clare writes in The politics of boredom in The Pale King, the hope that boredom can be converted into something positive or productive “is entangled with the novel’s preoccupation with concentration” (440). The capacity to completely focus on even the most monotonous and repetitive action is actually one of the greatest achievements in the life of the IRS agents, the undisputable main characters. They are forced to face what is presented as extremely dull and unappealing tasks, mainly examining tax declarations and filling long forms and cheat sheets. “The thing here is the [tax] returns never stop. There’s always a next one to do. You never really finish” (236), complains one of the agents. Thus, being able to do focus for long periods of time becomes a central factor of their work.
The book extensively narrates their daily struggles trying to perform the daily assignments of their routines. Lane Dean Jr, a young agent recently incorporated to the IRS examinations team, tries to cope with the ‘unbelievable tedium’ of the job in a long and immersive chapter: at the prospect of an infinite amount of additional tax returns waiting to be filled, he holds “to a count of ten and imagines a warm pretty beach with mellow surf as instructed in orientation the previous month” (Wallace 376). But yet, time seems to go too slow and he feels a ‘plummeting’ inside when he realizes that that it hasn’t been as long as he expected when he last checked the wall clock of the office. “The rule was, the more you looked at the clock, the slower time went. None of the wigglers wore a watch, except he saw that some kept them in their pockets for breaks”, he explains (377). Another agent reveals that to intellectually cope with the repetitiveness of the job he uses the same technique that his father did to mow the lawn: “my dad used to mow in little patches and strips […] He did this because he liked the feeling of being done. Well, some of the same thing is at work here” (115).
As they struggle, the novel emphasizes the idea that, as in Wallace’s mindset, the capacity to remain focused, even facing deeply boring tasks is a highly valuable one in contemporary times. Stecyk, a veteran IRS agent, is revered by his colleagues because he is said to be capable to reach a concentration state so deep that he ‘levitates’; in a very short chapter, an unidentified agent claims that “the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy” (437) and that the underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom: “if you are
immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish” (438) he solemnly states. The agent’s take is an almost hyperbolic perspective on the virtues of concentration that echoes some of Wallace’s own thought, particularly This is water, the speech he gave to the Kenyon College graduates in 2005, when he had already been working for several years in The Pale
King. In his address, the writer identifies the ability to choose to what one pays attention as one
of the keys for a meaningful adult life: “if you really learn how to pay attention […] it will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars” (4).
It is interesting to note, that, paradoxically, The Pale King’s preoccupation with attention came in a time (the novel was written between 2000 and 2008) where the Internet was just starting to become the platform that we know today, there were no smartphones, the current levels of connectivity were still unknown and of course there was no social media; a time, when the ‘intensification’ of the modern tendencies that made boredom possible—“fragmentation, repetitiveness, standardization and commodification” (Hand 2)— was significantly lower than in present times. It is today that the Wallace’s worries that we see portrayed in the lives of the IRS agents have become somewhat generalized, especially in the field of boredom studies. Eric Ringmar writes in Attention and the cause of modern boredom that “we are more than ever dependent on a constant stream of external stimuli which can hold us and carry us along” (Ringmar 14). It is in the digital environment of the 21st
century that we are required, more than ever, to pay attention, as we have at our reach, infinite small and apparently insignificant activities that allow a “continual filling in of time” (Hand 2), but that yet seem to “exacerbate the feelings of ‘being bored’” (Hand 2).
It is easy to see, then, how attention came to be, for some scholars, as in The Pale King, something that “gives us control and allows us to defend ourselves against the vagaries of life in capitalist society” (Ringmar 13). And also how it reached larger parts of western society and fuelled practices such as ‘mindfulness’ and ‘digital detox’. In a world of “information overload” and “constantly accelerating hyper-stimulation” (Gardiner 240), the choice of not paying attention —or to carefully choose to what we pay attention— seems a powerful one. In Ringmar’s opinion, this becomes the only possible form of resistance in front of the dictates of digital capitalism: “we must embrace boredom” (14) he states, echoing Wallace’s words, “revel and luxuriate in it” for, in the twenty-first-century, “only the bored are free” (15). According to Ringmar, the key practice here is “to refuse to pay attention”, to “sign off, if we dare” and to “not keep up with the news” (14). That may seem to contradict Wallace’s idea that keeping
attention was the right antidote to the monotony of adult life. However, it is not if we understand that Ringmar’s words imply something partially different: signing off, not keeping up with the news does not mean that we fully stop paying attention to things, as that may be even impossible, but to reject our dependency of constant external stimulus provided by devices and feeds, to choose more carefully to what we dedicate our attention. It seems too far fetched to take Ringmar’s words literally and to understand that there is the possibility to dedicate our focus to absolutely nothing, that boredom and nothingness go hand in hand. A more reasonable perspective is that when Ringmar advocates for “letting our bodies take over and relying on our semi-conscious motor routines” (14) he is, like Wallace, emphasizing the need to refuse insubstantial activities and inputs and to dedicate our attention to something beyond the hyper stimulating network created around the late capitalist individuals; that ‘embracing boredom’ does not mean that this psychological state is a place where we should stay but a middle step towards a better one.
The emphasis on attention in relation to boredom implies key distinction, necessary to proceed in the analysis: in The Pale King, boredom is not portrayed as a positive or pleasant feeling per se. It is more a sort of ‘empty’ given phenomenon that we all have to deal with. What is here suggested is that how we address this state of mind makes all the difference: that the way in which we choose to deal with it is what will ultimately determine if it becomes a load or, in Walter Benjamin words, a ‘threshold’ for achieving something significant and nourishing. Still, as we have previously mentioned, the responsibility on how to address the psychological state is portrayed in the novel as one basically individual: it is the agents individually, as Lane Dean Jr. at his desk, that ultimately have the duty to confront boredom and develop a high capacity to maintain focus to overcome it.
To help understand what Wallace is proposing in The Pale King in a broader context, it may be useful to bring out, as Haladyn does in Boredom and Art, the position on the issue of the International Situationist (IS) and the comments made by the French philosopher Guy Debord about the relation between boredom and the notion of ‘spectacle’. According to Haladyn, what defined the position of the IS on the issue was the motto: “boredom is always counterrevolutionary”. For the Situationists, being bored implied an ‘end point of the subjective will’: when bored, the subject was driven to alleviate the state through the spectacles of the capitalist consumer society, with the incessant flow of entertainment products, recreating itself in this dependency. Boredom, in this perspective, was just “a motivating factor in the endless cycles of people’s desires for commodity objects […] a total submission to the domination of
the spectacle” (123). Similarly, Debord defended that boredom increased the dependency of the subject to a ‘newness of products’, as a void that had to be filled with ever-new spectacles. However, Haladyn’s point is that both the IS and Debord failed to see that boredom could, in fact, “represent a form of resistance to the seductive nature of the spectacle” (123), as it constitutes a failure to distract the individual from the interrelated forces and powers that constructed his reality. That is the prism in which Haladyn’s notion of ‘the will to boredom’ is based.
The sociologist acknowledges the existence of a second position, that confronts the SI’s idea that boredom is in fact counterrevolutionary. According to this position, “the state of subjective boredom represents the potential for a positive turnaround, which in turn becomes a key motivating factor in the social and political critique of capitalism through a strategy of the will not to will” (124). When bored, Haladyn argues, we become especially aware of the events that surround us, a sort of awakening that can be seen as a way to penetrate beyond the “glitter of spectacle’s distraction” (129). Thus, in this perspective, boredom is not the end of subjective will and the desire to act upon reality, but a potential beginning for a deeper consciousness of it, a motivating factor in the social and political critique of capitalism. “For those individuals who are willing to go beyond the meaninglessness of boredom, the limitations of consumer capitalism are seen as the impositions they are […] and therefore a barrier that can be breached” (130), he states.
Returning to Wallace and The Pale King, it is easy to see how Haladyn’s position, opposed to the IS and Debord, partially relates to that of the American writer. Like Haladyn, Wallace believes that boredom can be a catalyst of the subjective will. As in the case of the IRS agents, being forced to constantly perform boring and monotonous tasks, boredom can work as an awakening, a way to achieve a superior ‘bliss’ and what the writer seems to conceive as a better and more conscious form of existence. In the case of The Pale King and of Wallace mindset, however, it is difficult to contemplate boredom as an explicit “motivating factor in the social and political critique of capitalism” (130) itself, in the terms that Haladyn defends. As we will explore further in the following chapter of the thesis, the ‘awakening’ that boredom can trigger, offers, to the individual subject a path towards a more meaningful existence, but this path seems mostly constricted to the confines of the power structures of the late capitalist society. For Wallace, boredom and the ‘awakening’ it can trigger is, as Ralph Clare states in
The politics of boredom in The Pale King, “a possible solution to the apparent malaise of
and conduct differently in a given environment, rather than his capacity to inflict change upon the reality in which he lives. That doesn’t mean that for Wallace, in the novel, boredom does not have a collective dimension. However this dimension and the limitations of this individual salvation will be discussed in the second chapter.
It is here useful to notice, though, that the principle of the individual responsibility in front of the temptation of distraction powerfully resonates in other parts of Wallace’s work and thought. In Although of course you end up becoming yourself, the book by the journalist David Lipsky that collects conversations with the author during Infinite Jest tour, he defends a very similar position in relation to entertainment, which we can easily relate to Debord’s notion of the ‘spectacle’: “the technology is going to get better at what it does, which is seduce into being incredibly dependent on it so that advertisers can be more confident that we will watch their advertisements. And the technology system is amoral. It doesn’t have a responsibility to care about us […] The moral job is ours” (Lipsky 100). In the writer’s analysis, one that we are going to find as well in the opinions of the IRS agents that fill The Pale King, mass forms of entertainment are comforting and distracting, but, at the same time are missing something vital and nourishing. “There is something really vital about food that candy’s missing, although to make up for what is missing, the pleasure of masticating and swallowing goes way up” (Lipsky 97).
Anti-entertainment and the aesthetics of boredom
The idea of the individual responsibility to combat some of the tendencies of the late capitalism and achieve a more meaningful and less distracted existence is also a very interesting prism from which to address the question of the aesthetics of boredom and its relation to The Pale
King. As some of the reviews outlined when it came out, the book seems to make a point
through its form. Michiko Kakutani, in the New York Times, stated that the novel was straightaway ‘boring’ and wondered if Wallace, at times, “wanted to test the reader’s tolerance for tedium”. The book is filled with passages that seem to be intentionally written to bore the reader: long digressions on tax mechanisms and schemes, obscure explanations on economic policies, and even a three pages long chapter where he monotonously narrates every movement of the working IRS agents:
“Irrelevant Chris Fogle turns a page. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. ‘Groovy Bruce Channing attaches a form to a file. Ann Williams turns a page. Anan Singh turns two pages at once by mistake and turns one back which makes a slightly different sound.” (310).
It is in this light that a question arises: could Wallace have been consciously writing a boring novel, as if to put the reader in the same position than the characters of the book?
If the writer had survived, toured and given interviews about the book the answer to both these questions would be far clearer. But yet the notes of the novel and Wallace’s statements in other works shed some light on the issue. In one of the notes attached to the novel, he writes: “Central Deal: Realism, monotony. Plot a series of set-ups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens” (Wallace 546). As the ending of Infinite Jest, where Don Gately quietly lies in the hospital bed or The broom of the system, that has no ‘proper’ ending as such, the author seemed to want to explore the possibility of a novel where nothing actually happened, when there was almost no action, just the hint of it. “There is no bomb. It turned out that an actual load of nitrate fertilizer had been blow up. Again, something big threatens to happen but doesn’t actually happen” (544), one of the other notes states. Wallace’s attempt to keep the novel away from any kind of substantial action could be seen as an attempt to turn fiction into an itemization practice — that is, listing psychic and physical events in fiction as an item list—, the concept that Jameson uses to describe Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My struggle (2009). But in Jameson’s perspective itemization has to do with a postmodern giving up on the attempt to “estrange our daily lives and see it in new, poetic or nightmarish ways. And this is hardly the case for The Pale King. For the novel to want the reader to experience boredom, to put him in front of the feeling, is a way to actually explore new forms of expression.
In Wallace’s mindset The Pale King appears as a novel not written to be enjoyed in the classic consumption-entertainment parameters. He seems to be trying to imagine a different relationship between the reader and the book: there has to be effort and work by the reader and there won’t be any easy rewards like the comfort of ‘sugary’ entertainment, to go back to the writer’s words on the issue. But what is exactly this relationship and what is the role of boredom in it?
To answer the question, we can compare the novel to other examples of works of art that have taken boredom as a central theme in its form. A few interesting of these are the artistic creations that Haladyn explores in the later chapters of Boredom and Art, one of which is Andy
Warhol’s Poor Little Rich Girl (1967). Conceived as the first part of a series of other films,
Poor Little Rich Girl is one of the particular films that Warhol created during the decade of the
sixties. It presents a motionless shot of the actress Edie Sedgwick performing a series of apparently unordinary everyday activities: talking on the telephone, getting dressed, doing exercise, etc. There is music occasionally and Sedgwick talks to the camera. None of the shots seem to be selected with a particular intention and there is no identifiable narrative thread. As Haladyn outlines, in one of his many iconic statements on the film, Warhol declared that “I just switched on the camera and walked away” (131). In a major part of the film, the image is even strongly blurred, making it hard for the viewers to distinguish what is going on in front of the camera.
Haladyn explains that, when he went to watch the film at the Cinametheque Ontario in Toronto, the blurred opening shot of the film caused noticeable restlessness among the attending crowd. As the movie went along and people realized that they could expect nothing more than an almost random conglomerate of shots, they started talking, nervously moving in their seats and some even left the cinema, a recurrent reaction in front of other Warhol’s movies such as Eat (1963) or Sleep (1964). What Poor Little Rich Girl did, then, is to challenge the viewers, forcing them to focus into something apparently meaningless and monotonous. It is easy to experience despair in front repetitive shots with little information that seem to go nowhere; to endure the experience, it is necessary to fight the impulse to loose focus or to stop watching, to actively engage with the images. It is in this effort that, according to Haladyn, the interest of the film resides: “rather than being sources of meaning that we are given, Warhol’s films are catalysts meant to encourage us to create a meaningful experience” (132), he argues. Thus, in front of the meaning void of the images, the viewers are pushed to “take a primary role in the creative act and produce the experience and meaning of the film” (134) or resign to the meaninglessness of the experience and walk out. To conclude, for the spectator “what is left is a merely subjective experience that actively provokes rather than passively engages or entertains […] functioning as a test of our willingness to go beyond what we are given” (137). This willingness to push the spectators to take a primary role in the creative act is what seems to lay beyond some of the passages of the Pale King. If we go back to the chapter cited at the beginning of this section, where the American writer lists the actions of the IRS agents at their workplaces, Wallace seems to be trying to make the reader go beyond what lays on the page, to fabricate his own meaning about a repetitive and monotonous text. In front of the repetitiveness and itemized nature of the narrated actions and the absence of a clear narrative
thread —“Irrelevant Chris Fogle turns a page. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page.”— the reader is forced to elaborate on his own experience to surpass boredom, or to stop the interaction with the work of art, as the spectators of the Cinametheque Ontario in front of Warhol’s film.
However, Wallace seems to be trying to frame this provocation in a different way. Warhol argued that he was primarily interested in how the audience reacted to his works: “my films now will be experiments, in a certain way, of testing their reactions” (137), he stated. The artist seems to have given more importance to the shock and the reaction than to the direction of this reaction. The mentioned Warhol’s films were committed to the ‘blank paper’ idea, as giving a completely raw artistic matter, barely articulated. The reaction of the spectator, the meaning they would create with the experience was, therefore, very open. In the case of The
Pale King, the provocation of the boring passages or the projected lack of narrative events, the
“plot a series of set-ups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens” (546), the novel directs the reader towards making a particular meaning. The Pale King does provide a distinctive and fixated meaning, unlike Warhol’s cinematic experiences; the reader is not faced by a tabula rasa of content upon which he is forced to construct a particular meaning from nothing. Wallace seems to be trying to shock the reader but, at the same time, he wants to control the results or the direction of this shock. He is giving a particular perspective on boredom and, at the same time, he is giving the reader passages through which he can experience in first person the implications of this perspective, how what the writer proposes on boredom actually works. Bluntly, the novel seems to be trying to make the reader experience the same that the IRS Agents do in their daily routines at their workplaces.
We can see an example of how this operates in the novel looking at the following passage:
“The easiest way to define a tax is to say the amount of the tax, symbolized as T = B x R, so you can then get R = B x R, which is the formula for determining whether a tax rate is progressive, regressive or proportional. This is very basic tax accounting. It is so familiar to most IRS personnel that we don’t even have to think bout it. But anyhow, the critical variable is T’s relationship to B”. (Wallace 193)
In it, the narrator of the book, that in a metafictional game is called David Wallace gives a half-page long complex explanation about the nature of taxes, almost as if he was transcribing a tax
accounting class. The information provided is not necessary at all for the development of the plot, nor does it help the reader orientate better in the world of the IRS agency. It could easily be spared without any detrimental consequence. The use of formulas and the style employed by the narrator also makes clear that the information it is not meant to be accessible for the reader. The novel confronts the reader with a monotonous and, in his perspective, almost meaningless text (with no specific knowledge on accounting, it is extremely hard to transform the passage into substantial meaning), to make him struggle to try to make something out of it, out of the boredom he may experience.
As we have previously mentioned, being forced to confront a complex and monotonous text is something that all the IRS agents have to go through in their training. This same character, David Wallace, also narrates his struggles and his doubts about concentration and distraction all through his life: “I’d always felt frustrated and embarrassed […] about how much I sort of blinked in and out while trying to absorb or convey large amounts of information” (292), he confesses. Later he adds, “It took me all the way up to the age […] of entering a highly selective college to understand that the problem with stillness and concentration was more or less universal” (292). So, the problem of being bored and maintaining focus in front of large amounts of information is presented as a universal one and discussed by the characters as if they were directly addressing the experience of the reader.
During his training to join the agency another one of the agents, Chris Fogle also discusses the same ideas even in a more specific way. After a very long meeting with the recruiters of the IRS, to continue the instruction process, he is barely asked about himself of his motivation, but he receives with surprise a binder full of homework and a manual he is meant to read. “It was so unbelievably dry and obscure that you essentially had to read each line several times to derive any sense of what it was trying to say” (248), he notes. When seeing the difficulty of the material and the challenge it is to fully read it without being bored, discouraged and abandoning it, Fogle concludes that the homework he is given was “some kind of test or hurdle to help determine who was truly motivated and serious and who was just drifting around […], a type of diagnostic tool for seeing who could sit there, hour after hour, and who couldn’t” (249). What this passage make clear is that Fogle’s struggle in front of the manual, full of formulas and barely comprehensible information, is the same one the reader has to undergo in front of the novel. Wallace deliberately puts the reader in a position that replicates the one of the IRS agents and, at the same time, offers a concrete perspective, a sort
of guidance, on how to confront the challenge, how we can use it to achieve a different experience of our daily lives.
What to make of this correspondence between the experience of the agents and the reader then? Perhaps the most relevant answer is that, as we have previously noted, The Pale
King asks a particular attitude from the reader, different from the one created by what we could
call, using Wallace own perspective, mass entertainment forms. As the mentioned Chris Folge in front of the obscure manual he has to read to complete his training, there is no place for passiveness or comfort. In the same words that Haladyn uses to describe Warhol’s cinematic production, The Pale King “actively provokes rather than passively engages or entertains” (137). That is why the term “anti-entertainment” could function as a label that helps us characterize the relation it wants to create with the reader.
It is true, the term may be vague and too simplistic without a larger context; Frances Colpitt’s comments in the essay Entertainment: contemporary art’s cure for boredom may be helpful in this chapter. According to Colpitt, the emphasis on entertainment is “the most significant transformation in art since the 1960s” (Colpitt 71). She also cites the words of the art curator Jens Hoffman, that stated that “art has become generally not much more than entertainment, commodity production and spectacle” (71). Therefore, the scholar identifies a trend, that she circumscribes to the way museums have planned their exhibitions in the last decades, by which the priorities of art have shifted. In an article reviewing an exhibition by the German artist Carsten Holler at the New Museum in New York in 2011, the art critic Randy Kennedy criticized that the exhibition just seemed to care that “visitors must never be bore, must not be aware of the passage of time” (Colpitt 72).
The definition of entertainment is complex and can be conflicting, as Stephen Bates and Anthony J. Ferri explain in What’s Entertainment. However, the idea that entertainment forms always try to obtain and maintain the attention of the spectator seems a constant, specially among the traditional definitions of the term3
. It is also useful to reproduce Frances Colpitt’s idea in the essay Entertainment: contemporary art’s cure for boredom that the emphasis on entertainment is “the most significant transformation in art since the 1960s” (Colpitt 71). If we take as a common element of all entertainment forms a willingness to catch the spectator, to fight for their attention it can be easy to see that how the novel positions in relation to the concept. It is hard to see, in The Pale King, this willingness to hold the focus of the reader, to
3 As an example, the Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb ‘entertain’ as t "[t]o hold mutually; to
catch it and make it easy for him to abandon the text. While reading the novel, or focusing on the inextricable passages it is hard to have the feeling of ‘being entertained’. Wallace does not seem to worry if the reader will have fun with the book, if he will forget about the passing of time. He seems to want to trigger a sort of the subjective will, in Haladyn’s terms, that will actually have a transformative effect in the life of the reader. In the light of the fabricated convergence between the experience of the IRS agents and the reader, The Pale King appears as a sort of moral or prescriptive manual: the novel does not seem to be worried to provide an entertaining experience to the reader as much as transforming him, inflicting change upon him.
It may be useful here, to contextualize this intention, to think about Wallace words in the essay Feodor’s Guide, in which the American author discusses the interest and value of Feodor Dostoievski’s work. What made Dostoievski’s novels invaluable, according to Wallace, was not only the creative genius of the Russian writer, rather, the braveness of its moral positions: “what makes Dostoevsky invaluable is that he possessed a passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we, here, today, cannot or do not allow ourselves” (Wallace 8). In his contempt for what he saw as postmodern ‘congenital skepticism’ Wallace, specially in the latter part of his life, became committed to the importance of a morally and philosophically engaged fiction: fiction that, as Dostoievski’s, “dare try to use serious art to advance ideologies” (Wallace 9). He envisioned a fiction that could openly and committedly discuss the central themes of human life, although he was doubtful about how to do it, or that it would be seen as naïve and ingenuous.
Therefore, it is hard not to see the novel’s use of the aesthetics of boredom and its ‘anti-entertainment’ nature as an active and sharp way to defend a particular philosophical perspective on boredom and life. But the highlight here is that Wallace does not seem to settle with exposing or defending this perspective through the stories of the agents and a particular fictional plot: he seems to seek a more direct contact with reader, to actively engage with the text, and he wants to teach him. Boredom is, in The Pale King, a category in a complex discourse that the fiction draws, but also an aesthetic element used by the text as a path to bring the discourse into practice, a way to exert a particular transformation upon reality. The novel explores the idea that fiction may not have to be necessarily entertaining: fiction can be boring as the aesthetics of boredom are a path into aggressively influencing the reader, a trigger to a transformative awakening of the subjective will, in Haladyn’s terms.
3. ‘Awakening’: Embracing boredom against the cultural logic of late
capitalism in The Pale King
In The Pale King and in Wallace’s mindset, boredom is conceived as a kickstarter of the subjective will, a psychological state that, when consciously embraced, can guide us towards a more conscious and meaningful existence. This requires effort, a sort of training, to learn how to address boredom and to resist the temptation of distraction and the attraction of banal entertainment; a process and a responsibility that seem to be circumscribed to the individual. The emphasis on individual responsibility, however, does not mean that, in the novel, boredom does not have a collective, social or historical dimension. As Clare states in The politics of
boredom in The Pale King, the book documents a variety of boredoms, “from the existential
life-crisis to those of the daily grind and those resulting from stultifying political and economic systems” (Clare 431). The novel seeks to “conduct a thorough analysis of how boredom has functioned and continues to function, socially, culturally and politically in the age of neoliberal capitalism” (429).
As Lars Svendsen argues in A philosophy of boredom, it can be difficult to establish “a clear distinction between psychological and social aspects” of it (Svendsen 12) and, in the novel, these aspects frequently are intertwined. The social, political and cultural aspects of boredom that The Pale King presents appear to be an interesting and complex field, one that will be most helpful in understanding the reasons behind Wallace’s vindication of it in the conditions of the contemporary. In other words, as we have already partially seen, the writer does not embrace boredom as a positive state per se or in an ontological way; it is the social, cultural and political conditions of American late capitalism that turn boredom, in his perspective, into a particularly useful element. We have already seen how embracing boredom is a way to resist the attraction of sugary or cheap entertainment in a reality, in Wallace’s perspective, that turns it into an enjoyable and plausible ‘addiction’, a hint of the potential of boredom in a collectivity. We have also seen how it seems a protection for the individual of late capitalism from the “constant stream of external stimuli” (Ringmar 14) of the digital world. But there is another dimension we have yet left unexplored: how boredom can be used as a tool towards a consistent ideological narrative and meaningful moral guidance.
We will understand ideology in this analysis as a particular set of beliefs “which offers a position for a subject” (2), one of the definitions of the term that Terry Eagleton gathers in
idea of ideological or moral narrative (or moral guidance) that we will use thought the chapter can be, in this sense, equalized to the gramscian concept of ‘culture’ or ‘conceptions of the world’, that is, a particular understanding of the world and the place of a particular individual in it. The emphasis in both concepts here is that they include beliefs, explanations, perceptions values and mores, that they are “practical and philosophical, relational and political” (3) at the same time.
To continue focusing on this latter idea and to explore how, in The Pale King, boredom seems to become a key element in an effort to develop a comprehensive moral or ideological narrative that goes well beyond the concept, we will first focus on the plurality of boredoms present in the book. Then, we will perform a close reading of two sections of the novel in which the collective dimensions of the psychological state are more explicitly discussed.
Boredom as ontological despair
Boredom as frustration in front of a monotonous task and the importance of focus and attention as instruments to counter it, also in the experience of the reader, are what we could call the first level of this psychological state in the novel. The Pale King, though, presents us with several boredoms; they are intertwined and sometimes difficult to distinguish, but there is a plurality of them nonetheless. As Clare points out in The politics of boredom and the boredom of politics
in The Pale King, “the boredom of foot tapping and clock watching […] quickly balloons into
a second type of boredom, that of full existential terror” (Clare 432). In other words, the simple and univocal boredom of struggling in front of tax forms and returns, which we have explored in the first chapter, easily “becomes a revelation of the reality of existential Time” (432). In the passages dedicated to Lane Dean Jr.’s introspection that we have explored in the first chapter, the agent’s despair and craving for time to go faster, quickly turns into something more: “He knew what he’d really do on the break was sit facing the wall clock and count the seconds tick off until he had to come back and do this again. And again and again and again” (379). The prospect of infinite repetitiveness produces a sort of ontological terror, transforming experience into a sort of grey, blurred continuum. “He knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops. Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform a rote task just tricky enough to make him have to think […] and just leave the man there to his mind’s own devices” (379). The existential terror is such that the agent starts thinking about suicide as the solution to stop this apparently infinite circle of time: “Unbidden came ways to kill himself
with Jell-O. […] He wondered if with enough practice and concentration you could stop your heart at will the same way you hold your breath” (329). In another chapter, an agent of the Service recalls frequently feeling, as a child, “the sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry (253).
Lane Dean’s and the other agent free-floating terror powerfully echoes Kierkegaard’s notion of ‘bad infinite’. As Gardiner writes in Not your father’s boredom: ennui in the age of
generation meh, the ‘bad infinite’ is what occurs when time stretches and “appears to
immanently self-contained, as static or dilated […] a vacant temporality, a duration without a duration” (235) as a consequence of boredom. Under the bad infinite, moments of real passion or interest are hinted, but, as in the narrative continuum of The Pale King, end up being forever deferred. Gardiner uses Kierkegaard’s concept to analyze Ben Lerner’s novel Leaving the
Atocha station (2011), but some of the experience of the main character of the book, an
American writer living temporally in Madrid, seems to have a lot in common with that of the IRS agents. As Lane Dean Jr., who is forced to repeat the same action over and over again, Adam, the American writer on Lerner’s book, “seems mired in an eternal present, condemned to tiresomely repeat the same actions” (236). However, in Gardiner’s words, there is something more. Adam’s boredom also comes from “an underlying sense of futility, insignificance and disconnection from the world” (236), from his incapacity to take part as an active subject in the flow of historical time. And that could be cited, in part, as another underlying cause of the agent’s boredom. As Wallace points out in This is water, paying attention is a way to construct meaning from experience and meaning seems a powerful force to escape ennui: it carries us, it inspires guided actions and prevents despair and moments in which we do not know what to do. A difficulty to construct meaning seems to facilitate, then, the appearance of boredom. Svendsen writes that “boredom becomes widespread when traditional structures of meaning disappear” (Svendsen 114). And the Romanian writer Emil Cioran expresses a similar perspective when he states that “boredom is our normal state, humanity’s official mode of feeling, once it has been ejected from history” (Gardiner 237). Therefore, could the agent’s ontological despair as an ultimate form of boredom also stemming from its difficulty to construct constant and durable meaning that could harmonize and guide their existence or from their difficulty to see themselves as part of a historical force field?
The answer to the question is not simple, as the problem of meaning in relation to boredom in The Pale King is a complex one. We could easily argue that the agents of the IRS are ‘neoliberal subjects’, as most of the action of the novel takes place during the first two years
of Reagan’s second term, 1985 and 1986. As such, they take part in what we could call the postmodern vacuum left by the ‘end of metanarratives’ diagnosed by Lyotard that Fukuyama’s doctrine of the ‘end of history’ would echo later; that could be seen as a difficulty to see themselves as part of a historical development. As Jameson analyzed in Postmodernism: the
cultural logic of late capitalism the postmodern condition is characterized by a weakening of
history “both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality” (Jameson 6), defined by a ‘schizophrenic’ experience of time and by the tendency to experience reality as “a series of unrelated presents in time” (27) (as in the ‘bad infinite’). It is no surprise, then, to see Gardiner stating the neoliberal subject struggles with the capacity “to give meaning to and actively shape, on a continuous basis, our individual and collective life” (236): “we might bear direct witness to decisive events […] but what is lacking is any real expectation that they may form an integral part of some grand arching narrative” (238). As a consequence of the weakening of his relationship with History or the perception that it has ended, the postmodern subject faces a time that doesn’t seem to have depth, an experience that seems to be close to Lean Dean Jr.’s introspective chapter.
However, Walter Benjamin’s analysis on boredom and how modernity changed and impoverished experience already significantly resembles Gardiner’s idea that Adam’s boredom in Leaving the Atocha Station comes from a sense of futility and disconnection to the world. To define the experience of the modern individual Benjamin uses, in the Arcades project, the term Erlebnis. In opposition to the pre-modern Erfahrung, the experience that Erlebnis defines is already “broken, immediate, limited and disconnected from memory and community” (129), as Carlo Salzani states in The Atrophy of Experience: Walter Benjamin and Boredom. Benjamin seems to engage in a perspective which echoes Jameson’s idea of the ‘ahistorical’ condition of the postmodern individual and his schizophrenic experience of time. In the section D of the Arcades project, the German philosopher states that “in the single and disconnected shocks of Erlebnis, the individual loses its capacity for experiencing and thus feels as though he has been dropped of the calendar” (134). In other words, modern boredom can be explained, partially, by the “loss of the historical ‘force field’ which characterizes Erfahrung”(134), explains Salzani. The social changes Modernity brought with it create an experience that resembles an ‘eternal Sunday’, one that “excludes history, tradition and memory, and thus also any sense of future” (134).
It is easy to see here the resemblance between the images of the ‘eternal Sunday’ or being ‘dropped out of the calendar’ that Benjamin uses to describe the experience of the modern
individual with Kierkegaard’s notion of the ‘bad infinite’ as they coincide in the idea of a time that becomes a “duration without a duration” (Gardiner 235), as time is suspended and the notion of the future cancelled. “Outside of history, time is merely a repetition” (134), in Benjamin’s words. The monotony and boredom that the agents experience and their struggle to find meaning in his repetitive actions can appear, once again, enhanced by their ‘ahistorical’ nature, the ahistorical way in which they experience time, as Lane Dean Jr. introspective chapter shows. They daily routines and the tasks they perform on their desks are clearly a form of Erlebnis, in Benjamin’s characterization.
What seems noteworthy here is that, in terms of experience in itself and the experience of time, Benjamin’s idea of the modern Erlebnis as impoverishment of the experience and the loss of the historical force field seems to match Gardiner’s analysis of the experience of the main character of Leaving the Atocha Station, Adam. The German philosopher is applying already to the modern experience the idea of ‘futility’, ‘disconnection’ and ejection from history, although this idea challenges the linear conception of time that characterized Modernity, a conclusion that can be conceptually troubling. In terms of temporality, we seem force to conclude that the modern and postmodern experience of time in itself in relation to boredom, in Benjamin and Gardiner’s characterization, have strong resemblances; or perhaps that the sense of disconnection from the world, or the feeling of existing outside history and a sense of disconnection from memory and community was already present in some degree in the modern experience.
Perhaps, what we can determine, especially if we use Jameson’s idea of the postmodern individual tends to experience “a series of pure and unrelated presents in time"(27) and his trouble harmonizing past, present and future, is that under postmodernism the sense of loss of the of the historical ‘force field’ and the brokenness and disconnection of the experience in itself are increased and, at the same time, that they are related to the loss of ‘grand arching narratives’ and their capacity to “actively shape, on a continuous basis, our individual and collective life” (236). That is, that postmodern boredom is a product of both the fragmentation and brokenness of time and the disappearance of a grand narratives that could still partially brace the historical force field. Modern metanarratives, although the experience of time would be that of the Erlebnis, accelerated and constituted by shocks, seemed capable to provide a belonging to memory and community and a certain notion of future, that could balance the cancellation of ‘any sense’ of it. Without them, the individual’s feeling of ‘existing outside history’ is increased. And that is the state that defines the agents. In the IRS agents’ experience
in front of their desk, we can perceive the same presence of the ‘bad infinite’ of the ‘vacant temporality’ that Benjamin attributed to the modern Erlebnis. But the despair and the presence of boredom is enhanced by their struggle to make something out of the experience, to place it in a narrative that would attach a meaning to it and that would project it into the future.
This impossibility is what inspires the attempt, by the novel, build a strong and comprehensive ideological narrative that seems precisely aimed at countering the despair of this vacuum of meaning. We will examine this attempt through the close reading of the two sections of the The Pale King in which the collective and historical dimensions of boredom are more explicitly addressed. They will also provide a wider perspective on Wallace’s analysis of neoliberal America and the role of boredom in it.
Boredom as ‘awakening’
The first section we will put our focus on is a rather long chapter placed in the middle of the book in which Chris Fogle, one of the agents of the IRS that work in the Peoria Regional Examination Center, recalls how he arrived to this particular career. The story of the character has a formative connotation, as an ironic Bildungsroman. It narrates a discovery journey by which the agent acquires and consolidates the values and principles that will guide his adult life. It also provides some background that helps the reader understanding the life experiences of the IRS employees and characterize their relationship with the job and with boredom. Here the use of the concept ‘awakening’ sends us again to Benjamin’s work. ‘Awakening’, Salzani states is a “key concept” for the philosopher, in relation to the idea that boredom, as a ‘threshold’, could be a step beyond the ‘phantasmagoria’, the “childish dream of the arcades and the dream of progress and consumerist plenty” (143), and, thus, a way out of the atrophy of experience and the Erlebenis. In short, in Benjamin’s perspective the ‘awakening’ thorugh boredom could lead to a “re-founding of time and experience” (144), an idea that will metaphorically echo the story of Chris Fogle.
An American citizen raised in Libertyville, an “upper-bourgeois northern suburb” (Wallace 156) of Chicago during the decade of the 70s, Fogle describes himself as the son of a middle class family: his father was a cost systems supervisor for the City of Chicago and his mother worked at a bookshop. But his emphasis when telling his story is mainly that in his college years he essentially was what he calls a “wastoid”: “I had no motivation. […] I drifted for several years in and out of three different colleges, one of them two different times” (154),
he explains. Having no discernible motivation or direction in his studies or in life was something shared: “everyone I knew and hung out with was a ‘wastoid’, and we knew it. It was hip to be ashamed of it, in a strange way. A weird kind of narcissistic despair. Or just to feel directionless and lost—we romanticized it” (164). He recalls: “I was just as much conformist as my father was, plus a hypocrite, a ‘rebel’ who really just sponged off of society in the form of his parents” (154).
In this direction, the interest of the story is that it presents what Fogle calls a ‘dramatic event’, that is, a cathartic episode, presented as an almost mystical experience, that deeply transformed his life, prompting him towards a career in the IRS. The contrast drawn here is clear: tax accounting, the occupation all the agents of the IRS perform, is generally regarded as a tedious and dull job, not a particularly appealing one for a student that enjoys drifting from one thing to another without a fixed path and that enjoys a sort of nihilist or apathetic attitude. Accounting is also the occupation of his father, someone he sees as “a robot, a slave of conformity” (167). How could he then become interested in it? How could a demanding job that requires a high degree of concentration and long and joyless workdays in front of a desk filling tax forms become attractive to him?
The answer, as narrated in the book, begins with a mistake: Fogle accidentally attends to the final review day of Advanced Tax “a famously difficult course” (190) at the university in which he was enrolled in Chicago, instead of the American Political Thought class he intended to go to. The class consists of a brief summary of the content already given in the course: diagrams, complex distinctions between tax deductions and income and other explanations about modern individual taxpaying strategy. But Fogle experiences everything in it in a particular or different way. For starters, he is very surprised by the teacher, a young substitute: “his expression had the same burnt, hollow concentration of photos of military veterans. […] His eyes hold us whole, as a group. He had good posture and as he came briskly in with his accordion file filled with neatly organized and labeled course materials” (218). He is not focused on the content of the class itself, which he barely understands, but on the “effects the lecture seemed to be having on me” (220). He seems fascinated by what we could call, echoing the previous chapter, the aesthetics of the class, which seem to be a sort of aesthetics of boredom: the formal and looks of the teacher and the other students in the class, a lot of them wearing suits and carrying briefcases, even how all of them had “multiple pencils lined up on their desks, all of which were extremely sharp” (219), etc.
