‘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 A.Puértolas 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 6. Bibliography 54 2 A.Puértolas 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 late-late capitalist societies in Le Bonheur Paradoxal can be drawn here. 3 A.Puértolas 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 4 A.Puértolas 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 5 A.Puértolas 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.