The Death of David Foster Wallace
Over the course of David Foster Wallaceâs life our model of the mind was dramatically redrawn. We now understand that our consciousness, which seems to us to play such a central role in our lives, is in fact a very small, and not particularly powerful, part of the whole mind-body system. The âmind is what the brain doesâ (Pinker, How the Mind Works 21), and what the brain does is look after the body. Most of the mindâs activity, therefore, is regulatory and unconscious, outside of our awareness and out of our control. This marks a stark departure from earlier accounts of the human mind in the twentieth century, where the brain was thought to be âessentially the same thing as a general-purpose âuniversal computerâ that just happened to be connected to a bodyâ (Ramachandran 143). To try and draw a line between brain and body, or to go even further and separate mind from matter altogether, is to neglect the fundamentally interdependent relationship between the two. By the end of the twentieth century, in popular accounts such as Antonio Damasioâs Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994), the mind is understood to be âembodied, in the full sense of the term, not just embrainedâ (118).
As David Hillman and Ulrika Maude explain, however, in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature (2015), the âbody has always been a contested siteâ (1) and âapproaches to the body . . . tend to display an eclectic theoretical pluralismâ (2). For Arthur Kroker, for instance, âNothing is as imaginary as the material body. Circulating, fluid, borderless, with no certain boundaries or predetermined historyâ: we should not think of ourselves as âinhabit[ing] . . . a solitary body of flesh and bone but [as] the intersection of a multiplicity of bodies, with life itself as a fluid intersection of humans and plants and animals and mineralsâ (3; 15). For Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, our âbodies were never in the womb. Bodies are determined and operated by systems whose reproduction is . . . asexual: capitalism, culture, professions, and institutionsâ (17). We have to be careful about our terms, then. While I do not wish to be reductive, Wallace was reading and engaging with a very specific, scientific model of the body, brain, and mind throughout his work, and when I use these terms I am referring to the evolved human organism that came out of a womb and is made of skin and bone and synapse. Though I will address Wallaceâs engagement with this kind of literary theory, my use of a biological model of the material body in this chapter will set the precedent for this book as a whole.
The complicated workings of the embrained, embodied mind are front and centre in Wallaceâs final, unfinished novel, The Pale King. Ostensibly âmore like a memoir than any kind of made-up storyâ (69), The Pale King is apparently based on Wallaceâs own experiences in the Internal Revenue Serviceâs (IRS) Midwest Regional Examination Centre in Peoria, Illinois, and Wallace himself appears both as a character within a body within the novel, who observes and interacts with the other characters, and as the memoirist in the metafictive âAuthor Hereâ chapters: âAuthor here. Meaning the real author, the living human holding the pencil. . . . All of this is true. This book is really trueâ (68â69). Though the book is not really trueâWallace did not work at the IRSâthe narrative conceit that The Pale King is a factual account signals Wallaceâs intention to explore what it might entail if one were to be wholly factual, to actually write a narrative that accurately represents the experience of living inside a human body. In one memoirist footnote, Wallace explains that
Iâm not going to be one of those memoirists who pretends to remember every last fact and thing in photorealist detail. The human mind doesnât work that way, and everyone knows it; itâs an insulting bit of artifice in a genre that purports to be 100 percent ârealistic.â (259)
Wallace makes a distinction between reality and âartifice,â between the reality of âliving humanâ beingsâlike the author âholding the pencilââwho are constrained by their own physical limitations, and the artifice of a mind that can see and access everything, a mind that would have to be detached from its bodily constraints in order to do so. Wallace rejects this fantasy of the bodiless mind and the limitless narrator, and suggests that doing so is a necessary step in writing a narrative that represents how the mind really does work.1
As Chris Fogle, one of The Pale Kingâs better-read characters (who knows about theories of the mind, about âtype A personalit[ies]â and the âdominant superegoâ [176]), explains:
For myself, I tend to do my most important thinking in incidental, accidental, almost daydreamy ways. . . . I think this experience . . . is common, if perhaps not universal, although itâs not something that you can ever really talk to anyone else about because it ends up being so abstract and hard to explain. (192â93)
The problem for Wallace is that Fogleâs (and our) primarily unconscious, subliminal experience, is âhard to explainâ and dramatise because it frustrates both our common-sense conception of ourselves and the fundamental artifice that underlies what Wallace calls âcapital-R Realismâ (Conversations 129): the idea that fiction can be narrated by a single, unified, reliable consciousness.2 So when Wallace claims that The Pale King âis really trueâ (69), though on one level heâs playfully pointing to the statementâs untruth, he is at the same time setting up The Pale King as a self-conscious interrogation of exactly what having a mind really entails. How does one write about consciousness, authorship, and the world, when the âepoch of the Iââof the reliable observerââis drawing to a closeâ (Nørretranders ix)? This problem is keenly felt by Wallace because authors themselves, as he knew only too well, have bodies too.
The âAuthor Hereâ sections of The Pale King have received a lot of critical attention, perhaps because one of the key areas of interest in Wallace studies has been Wallaceâs metafiction, and the âAuthor Hereâ sections bookend a line of Wallaceâs metafictive stories: âWestward the Course of Empire Takes its Way,â âOctet,â and âGood Old Neon.â Yet despite a considerable volume of work on Wallace the writer, Wallaceâs consistent descriptions of the authorâs body, and of the embodied relationship between author and their work, has been largely undiscussed. Because the Wallace character in The Pale King âdisappears,â as Wallace put it in one of his notes, to become a âcreature of the systemâ (548), critics such as Mark McGurl, Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Mike Miley, Stephen Taylor Marsh, and Toon Staes do not comment on the authorâs body but have instead interpreted the novel as enacting, in different ways, what Barthes famously called âthe death of the Authorâ (Image 148).
The critical consensus is that Wallace appears in the novel only to die and leave his work in the hands of the reader and the reading public (a move that has been âprofoundly ironized,â as McGurl writes, by Wallaceâs actual death [48]). For McGurl, the author-characterâs âdisappearing from the novel is tantamount to disappearing into the system it represents,â which in Wallaceâs case is âthe contemporary institution of literatureâ itself (48). Mike Miley has argued that the disappearance of the author-character in The Pale King is a way for âDavid Wallaceâ to try and kill âDavid Foster Wallace,â the âpersonaâ which, with his rising fame, had overshadowed the real man (202). Like McGurl, Miley argues that Wallace can never really kill the version of himself that is âa creature of the literary systemâ (203). Jeffrey R. Di Leoâfor whom a theoretical âresurrection of the author is simply not acceptableâ (123)âclaims that Wallace never wanted The Pale King published, and that his intentions and presence as an author have been manufactured by his publishers for cynical reasons: âFunny how the sovereignty of the dead conveniently emerges when there is an opportunity for corporate profitâ (132). Like Miley, Di Leo says that the persona of âDavid Foster Wallaceâ is the only one the reader can ever know. Stephen Taylor Marsh and Toon Staes trace a similar line, making a distinction between the fleshy David Wallace, who is necessarily absent from the text, and the paper David Foster Wallace, to whom we have access. For Marsh, âWallace, the physical one, cannot be found inâ The Pale King (115), just as we should not try to find âthe flesh-and-bloodâ author in Wallaceâs other works: âWallaceâs background . . . does not alter the underlying creative labor or final artistic drive of the novel, arising out of the implied author David Foster Wallaceâ (117, my emphasis). Staes uses the same language as Marsh in his essay on The Pale King, arguing that âReaders construct an image of the author while they read that in all likelihood differs widely from the flesh-and-blood personâ (âWork in Processâ 81, my emphasis).
Each of these critics explicitly rehearses the same Barthesian paradigm about the death of the author and the birth of the reader (McGurl 48; Di Leo 124; Miley 196; Marsh 122; Staes, âWork in Processâ 81). Though the death of the author is, unfortunately, a fact for Wallace studies following Wallaceâs death, and while I share the view of these critics that we should not chase crude biographical readings of Wallaceâs work, what I will argue in this chapter is that we are wrong to ignore the flesh-and-blood author completely. When Wallace writes about the act of writing he describes, very specifically, an embodied self, an authorial consciousness that writes from inside a body and brain. As Wallace puts it in one interview: talking about the work after the fact is âvery different than what itâs like to actually do thingsâ (Conversations 135). â[S]itting in a bright, quiet room in front of the paper itâs much more, uhhh does this make me want to throw up? . . . Itâs much more boneheaded and practical thanâ the âcritical discourseâ that happens in interviews after-the-fact (135). However we want to frame the work, it emerges in the first place from inside a bone head.
All of Wallaceâs fiction, from his first published story âThe Planet Trillaphon As it Stands in Relation to the Bad Thingâ (1984) to The Pale King, is animated by the problematic relationship between conscious mind and boneheaded body, and his essays and reflections on authorship are no different. As SeĂĄn Burke puts it in Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern (1995), âAuthorship, like cosmology, remains a source of fascination for believers and non-believers alike since the issues which it raises reflect any given societyâs sense of being in the worldâ (xv). Wallaceâs understanding of the nature of authorship comes from the same place as his understanding of human beings more generally. Once we recognise how central a role the sciences of the brain and embodied mind play in the work that Wallace has produced, then we can understand how central a role embodiment plays, for Wallace, in the process of production itself. Where Wallace studies have until now tread familiar ground regarding the death of the author, I suggest that Wallaceâs model of the embodied author is best understood as part of a society-wide shift in what Burke calls our âsense of being in the world,â a shift that challenges Barthes in particular, and postmodern theories of authorship and selfhood more broadly.3
While some critics have discussed the significance of the body in Wallaceâs work, only Jeffrey Severs and Stephen J. Burn have (briefly) discussed the connection in Wallaceâs writing between the body and the authorial self. Severs, drawing on Wallaceâs biography, persuasively argues that the John Keats poem about âThis living hand, now warm and capableâ (qtd. in Severs 20) was Wallaceâs âstandard for a textâs ability to offer an embodied relationship to the readerâ (20), though this is a small point in Seversâs larger argument that the authorial hand is markedly different from the ââInvisible Handâ of self-correcting capitalist marketsâ (20). Burn is the only critic to emphasise the centrality of the material brain in Wallaceâs work, and argued in ââA Paradigm for the Life of Consciousnessâ: Closing Time in The Pale Kingâ (2012) that, in the light of Wallaceâs own reading in contemporary neuroscience, the novel can be read as a âdissociative projection of the mind that dramatizes the unconscious, rather than the consciousâ (386). Neither critic dwells on the role of Wallaceâs own body and brain in the writing process. In this chapter I want to build upon Burnâs work on the neuroscientific sources for The Pale King, and explore the undiscussed but significant connection between the body and authorship for Wallace both in that novel and throughout his work.4 To understand Wallaceâs role as a bodied author-character in The Pale King, we first have to understand how Wallace engaged with models of the mind throughout his career.
The Mind behind Wallaceâs Work
The contemporary model of the embrained mind governs all of Wallaceâs writing. This is the case even at the level of setting: each of Wallaceâs three novels is literally set inside the human head. In The Broom of the System, first of all, most of the action takes place in âEast Corinth, Ohio,â which has the âluxuriant and not unpopular shapeâ of the âprofile of Jayne Mansfieldâ (45). Wallace explains that if one looks down onto the town from âShaker Heights,â one sees âa nimbus of winding road-networks,â âa sinuous . . . curve of . . . highway,â and âa huge, swollen development of factoriesâ (45). Like the underlying veins and musculature of a human face, the complicated road ânetworks,â âsinuousâ (we might also read: sinew-ous) highways, and swollen developments are all very bodied descriptions of the constituent bits and pieces that go together to make up the whole town. Just as our individual cells and neurons have no knowledge of the larger system in which they play a part, the constituents of the townâthe roads and residents that make it upâare âunaware of the shape of their townâ (46) from the inside. Though from the outside one sees the shape of the head, it is the sum of its parts, as the human head is the sum of its internal workings.
As Wallace writes later in the novel, the âheadâ is
positively dominated and defined by the shape of the skull underneath. The skin stretched tight over that skull. A skull that seems to me perhaps to threaten to burst through and end the whole charade. Yecch. (300)
The human face is mere âcharade,â another artifice. The reality that we try to avoid seeing is that we are all boneheaded biology underneath. For Wallace to set the action of his first novel inside an enormous human head emphasises both how central boneheadedness is to his aesthetic, and the extent to which the contemporary model of the embodied mind is, at the end of the twentieth century, in the zeitgeist: the idea that the mind is skull-bound is literally what Wallaceâs characters live inside. As Wallace would later write, as the epigraph to Everything and More: A Compact History of â (2003), âIt is not whatâs inside your head, itâs what your headâs insideâ (ix). Just as Wallaceâs head was inside an intellectual climate where it was understood that the mind is embodied, so too are the characters and settings inside Wallaceâs head necessarily shaped by what Wallaceâs head was inside: itâs bone heads all the way down.5
Though Wallace hints at something more ethereal inside East Corinthâs head with the word ânimbus,â which can mean a âhaloâ (Oxford English Dictionary, OED), we can also read the description of a ânimbus of winding road-networksâ as one that roots that nimbus to the ground. The interconnecting highways do not make a single circleâa âhaloââbut instead wind together to make up a kind of cloud, a complex weather system comprising discrete, interflowing parts. This mind/weather metaphor is one that Wallace picks up again and again throughout his writing. In âLittle Expressionless Animalsâ Wallace sets the scene with the âgray cloudsâ that look brainlike, âbulbous and wrinkled and shiny. The sky looks cerebralâ (Girl 3). We see it again in Wallaceâs essay, âGetting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away from it All,â in which he charts his cognitive experienceâgiven his âbasic neurological makeupâ (Supposedly 132)âof the Illinois State F...