‘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

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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. 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.

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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?

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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.

2 “You know him reader, that refined monster […] There is one more ugly, more wicked, more filthy!”

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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

9 A.Puértolas 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

10 A.Puértolas 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

11 A.Puértolas 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

12 A.Puértolas 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 post- industrial life” (188). But this solution is based on the capacity of the individual to change itself

13 A.Puértolas 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:

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“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

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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

16 A.Puértolas 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

17 A.Puértolas 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

18 A.Puértolas 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 hold intert.

19 A.Puértolas 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.

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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 Ideology, or, similarly, “the medium in which social actors make sense of their world” (2). The

21 A.Puértolas 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

22 A.Puértolas 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

23 A.Puértolas 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

24 A.Puértolas 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

25 A.Puértolas 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),

26 A.Puértolas 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.

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However, the most relevant part comes at the end of the lesson and goes beyond its aesthetic quality. When the class finishes, as it the last of the semester, the professor is supposed to address the students to offer a brief general comment on the course. The young substitute does something different: he summarizes the importance of accounting as a discipline and the significance of the accountant in modern society in a lengthy speech that becomes a sort of moral preaching. He does not only address the course in itself, rather he gives the students, who are preparing to pass the state’s accountancy exam to being their careers, a precise set of instructions for their future lives.

“I whish to inform you that the accounting profession to which you aspire is, in fact, heroic. […] Exacting? Prosaic? Banausic to the point of drudgery? Sometimes. Often tedious? Perhaps. But brave? Worthy? Fitting, sweet? Romantic? Chivalric? Heroic? Gentlemen, here is a truth: enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. […] Actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. True heroism is you, alone in a designated work space” (229).

The professor draws a moral path or narrative, around a particular way of conceiving heroism. The most immediate connotation of the concept ‘hero’ is perhaps that it implies some kind of righteousness: the hero, as the definition of the Cambridge English Dictionary puts it, is someone admired “for doing something brave or good”4. Thus, by describing the accountant as a modern hero the speech is attributing to the job a moral quality. However, at the same time, there seems to be an inversion of the concept of heroism in the speech. The hero —here we can come back to the definition of the Cambridge English Dictionary— is someone always admired, even “by many people”. Heroism has a prominent social role that implies relevance and guidance, a sort of projection above the limitations of common people. Yet, the inversion here is that, “actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one” (230). Heroism is, as presented in the speech, a silent and almost invisible task. People with apparently irrelevant jobs and dull lives, forced to spent long workdays in front of a desk, as the accountants, are presented as the real heroes. There is, thus, a sort of glorification of the common experience, which continues:

4 https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/hero. Accessed on 5/05/2020.

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“Learn it now or later —the world has time. Routine, Repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, […] boredom, angst, ennui — these are the true hero’s enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.” (231)

The professor’s way of conceiving heroism becomes clearer. The task of the hero in contemporary America is to fight the most powerful enemies present in the common experience of the accountants: apathy, boredom and ennui.

“You have wondered perhaps why all real accountants wear hats? They are todays cowboys. As you will be. Riding the American range. Riding herd on the unending torrent of financial data […] Gentlemen, you are called to account”. (233)

Lastly, the accountants are presented as cowboys that do not wander alone dueling and killing, they “order the data, shepherd it, direct its flow” (233). The profession becomes no less than a moral imperative. Fogle receives the speech as if it were directed specially to him, accepting and adopting the ideas and it is from this transformative experience that he decides to apply for a job at the IRS and join the training program of the agency, leaving behind his “wastoid” behavior and what he perceives as general lack of direction. This hyperbolic vindication of accountancy and its relevance in the 80s American society seems no other than surprising. In this light, it is tempting to read it just as an ironic or sarcastic exercise, specially if we put our focus in the comparison with the idea of the ‘cowboy’. However, if we go back to Wallace’s comments in the essay Feodor’s Guide on the need to build again a morally prepositive fiction, even if it seems naïve or ingenuous, an ironic reading becomes very hard, as Wallace profusely stated the limitations of irony5 and the need to surpass it. This does not necessarily mean that we should understand the speech literally. Rather, it seems most important to focus on the direction of ‘inversion’ the speech is proposing: that real heroes may not have exciting and intense lives; that citizens that abide monotony and dullness, the grey space of the office, and learn how to transform the boredom of it into a meaningful existence can be actually heroic. In a very short chapter in the novel, one of the agents uses the concept of ‘small-h heroes”, to refer to the revenue workers of the IRS, which he equates to “those certain kinds of other institutional heroes, bureaucratic, like police, firemen, Social

5 The most explicit critique of postmodern irony by the American writer can be found in the essay Et Unibus Pluram (1993).

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Service workers, etc.” (127). The concept of heroism that the professor’s speech puts forward can be then understood in a wider exploration of a concept of virtue related to civic normality, to the job of individuals that live “trying to stitch or bandage the holes that all the more selfish, glitzy, uncaring, ‘Me-First’ people are always making in the community” (127). This idea of ‘small-h heroism’ seems to be related with Gardiner’s analysis of the boredom of the neoliberal subject: common heroes, in the perspective of the novel, are the individuals able to find something “to give meaning to and actively shape, on a continuous basis, our individual and collective life” (236), even if it is a seemingly old-fashioned concept of civic virtue; the ones able to fill the vacuum and the atrophy of experience experimented by individuals such as Chris Fogle. But why would an apparently boring, joyless and monotonous task be presented as a desirable path? A first quick answer here is that perhaps the vindication of the common, unexceptional, and dull life experience is, in fact, a sort of compensation of a perceived excess: a pendular movement, a reaction against a set of values that glorified precisely the opposite, that is, a Dionysian impulse of liberating and exploring one’s pleasure, to listen to one’s desires beyond the coercion of duty, work, obligation or social regulations, to search for an individual truth beyond the constriction of the collective. In front of what could be regarded as an exhaustion of this impulses or the idea that they have reached its limit, boredom and a concept of civic virtue tied to normality and the common experience could have emerged, for the employees, again as desirable elements. “I wanted to be one [hero]. The kind that seemed even more heroic because nobody applauded or event thought about them” (127) says the same unidentified agent. That is precisely the perspective that arises in the light of the second passage we will close read in the chapter. This second passage is a conversation between the different agents that work in the Illinois Center of the IRS in which they debate the state of the American citizenship in the moment where the action of the novel takes place, the decade of the eighties. It is perhaps the part of The Pale King in which we can most explicitly see the existence of a historical perspective and in which particular political and ideological ideas are discussed. At the center of the discussion between the agents there is the state of the civic culture in the US.

“Here in the US, we expect government and law to be our conscience. […] Americans are in a way crazy. We infantilize ourselves. We abdicate our civic responsibilities to

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the government and expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality” (130), says one of the agents.

This opening statement sets the tone of what is the general idea that impregnates the beginning of the discussion: that Americans have lost the civic culture and moral responsibility they once had. In the opinions of some of the agents, there is a particular element that can be held accountable for that: the social and political changes of decade of the sixties. For one of the agents —they are barely identified all throughout the discussion— the sixties “did a lot for raising people’s consciousness in a whole lot of areas, such as race and feminism” (132). Yet, at the same time, they eroded the civic morale of a generation, that developed the idea that “their highest actual duty was to themselves” (132); “I think it’s no accident that civics isn’t taught anymore or that young man like yourself bridles at the word duty” (132), says the same agent. In the core of the decline of the American civic culture, the respect for the task of the government and a sense of belonging to a collectivity “the sixties idea of personal freedom and appetite for moral license has something to do with it” (133). Thus, the perspective the agent shares here is that the American citizens have abdicated of their individual responsibility towards a ‘common good’ to pursue self-interested business and struggle to gratify their ‘appetites’ inspired by a particular idea of freedom. The same agent that stated the ‘regression’ of American citizens puts it very clearly:

“It seems like citizens did feel like they were part of Everything, that the huge Everybody Else that determined policy and taste and the common good was in fact made up of a whole lot of individuals just like them” (139)

It is hard not to think here at the “sense of futility and disconnection from the world” (264) that Gardiner sees in the main character of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and that prompts his despair. But also at the idea that boredom in the context of late capitalism could be explained by the difficulty of the individual “to give meaning to and actively shape, on a continuous basis, our individual and collective life” (236), to see himself as a part of the historical ‘force field’ that Benjamin referred to. In the light of this conversation, the attraction for the dutifulness, regularity and effort of the accountancy job as the result of a sort of pendular movement, a shift in a particular set of values, emerges as a sensible answer again to the questions raised by the professor’s speech.

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The idea discussed in the chapter seems to be, then, that the political transformations of the 60 created a new type of citizen, anti-authoritarian, individualistic and self-centered that eroded the sense of collectivity or belonging. The exploration of self-interested business and the struggle to gratify their own individual ‘appetites’ characterized, in the novel’s perspective, the generation that emerged from the sixties a generation in which we can clearly circumscribe Chris Fogle. His “wastoid” behavior during his youth seems to embody these elements. On the other side of the generational gap, his father, the obedient middle-class businessmen with a regular job and a family in a very materialistic oriented culture performing a sometimes tedious job (the ‘man in the grey flannel suit’ archetype, following Sloan Wilson’s well known novel of 1955, suits him perfectly). The underlying interest of the story of Chris Fogle’s conversion is that, partly thanks to the professor’s speech in the accountancy class, he realizes that the nihilistic pose of his college years is, ultimately, a hypocritical and sterile one. In the novel’s general perspective, the agent’s individual conversion and his journey from a college “wastoid” to joining the IRS seems to ask us to read it as a generational or historical fable. Fogle’s realization, in Wallace perspective, is not an individual one, it has a generational dimension: “the 60s and early 70s did a marvelous job of just showing how ridiculous and hypocritical, you know, the old authoritarian Father’s-always-right, don’t- question-authority stuff was. But nobody’s ever really come along and given is anything to replace it with” (168), he stated in Although of course you end up becoming yourself. The writer is clearly echoing here the opinions expressed by the agents in the conversation. Boredom and the professor’s speech, then, seem a key element to build something to ‘replace’ the vacuum left, in Wallace’s perspective, by the deconstruction of the “old authoritarian values”. The nature of this something is a narrative that gives a new value to the common experience and the effort of a joyless occupation, that recovers the meaningfulness of duty and to give for the benefit of the collective, of ‘small-h heroism’, which is, in this kind, the maintenance of the fiscal order. “The age of rebel is over. It’s the eighties now. […] Spit with the wind, it goes a lot further” (105), says an unidentified agent in an interview. In parallel, however, there is another very interesting perspective present in the discussion: that this individualistic citizen of the mass consumer society and his apparent ideological or moral vacuum is somewhat a deformation or a cooptation of the original intentions of the rebellious movements of the sixties decade: “corporations got in the game and turned all the genuine principles and aspirations and ideology into a set of fashions and attitudes— they made Rebellion a fashion pose instead of a real impetus” (140), states one of

32 A.Puértolas the agents. “You make buying a certain brand of clothes or pop or car or necktie into a gesture of the same level of ideological significance as wearing a beard or protesting the war”, he later says. (143). Marshall Boswell coincides with this perspective stating, in Trickle Down Citzenship, that, as much as he discusses the erosion of the civic sense, “Wallace confronts directly the very real political rebellions, and concurrent expansion of rights and opportunities, of the 1960s and the insidious way that the corporations co-opted this rebellious impulse for the purposes of marketing” (216). Thus, the conversation between the agents seems to outline another inversion: that ‘rebellion’, which in the sixties was a legitimate and powerful political impulse, has become, in the world of ‘post-production’ or late capitalism, a sort of empty and superficial imperative. This is perfectly condensed when one of the agents expresses his fears about a coming future: “there’ll be this incredible political consensus that we need to escape the confinement and rigidity of conforming, of the dead fluorescent world of the office and the balance sheet” (146). Here we seem to face a similar conversion or inversion, as in Fogle’s story: the office and the routine of work are not perceived as boring spaces where to scape from. In the conversation between the agents, it seems to be the opposite. The fear of the agent is that they will be forced to escape the ‘rigidity of conforming’, of their workplace, to ‘enjoy’ life and find pleasure, instead of performing the boring tasks of their job. This is why Zizek’s analysis of the shift in the functioning of the ‘postmodern superego’ seems here relevant. As the agent that fears being forced to enjoy, Zizek states that in the contemporary that is the reversed role that the superego adopts6. The superego, as a partial expression of the dominant ideology of late capitalism, is not anymore an obstacle or an inhibition that prevents the individual from seeking pleasure and forces him into sacrificing for some greater cause, it commands him to enjoy. “It is your duty to achieve full self-realisation and self-fulfilment, because you can”7. In the light of Zizek’s analysis, boredom becomes an element of resistance against the ‘forced’ enjoyment. It is in this inversion that the importance of the significance of boredom in the contemporary, as presented in the novel’s analysis emerges. If enjoyment is the norm, the logic of power, boredom, and more precisely, embracing and accepting it becomes a path to become disruptive

6 In Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (2008) pp. 30-39, we can find an explanation of the nature of the superego in the contemporary according to the philosopher, specially referred, in this case, to sexuality. The same idea is explicitly discussed in other parts of Zizek’s work; a condensed example is the article ‘You May’, published already in 1999 in the magazine London Review of Books. 7 Zizek, Slavoj. You May, London Review of Books. Vol. 21 NO. 6. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the- paper/v21/n06/slavoj-zizek/you-may!. Acessed on 11/05/2020.

33 A.Puértolas an instrument of opposition and not the ‘counter-revolutionary’ element in Debord’s theorization. The lives of the IRS agents and the preoccupation with duty, civics and morality make them a sort of declining bastion where dullness, routine and monotony are welcomed and not buried in banal distractions or rebellious impulses; an example of control and civic preoccupation, of an existence with rules and purposes. The agents seem to feel that their existence, in the confines of their desk and their repetitive tasks, is a ‘free’ one, echoing Eric Ringmar’s words in the first chapter. However, this ‘freedom’ seems to come from opposing the logic of the world they live in (condensed here in the logic of the new superego. It is in this light that the professor’s speech seems to ask to be read as an attempt by Wallace to imagine an ideological narrative dialectically opposed to the cultural logic of neoliberal America and the prevailing conditions of postindustrial or late capitalism. And boredom has a key part in this narrative, as embracing it becomes a way of resisting the commanded impulse of the individual satisfaction and a way of finding a meaningful way to relate to the collective, to the ‘Everything’. In other words, the underlying ideological construction of the novel seems to be that in the world of late capitalism, where pleasure and enjoyment and rindividualistic rebellion have, in Zizek’s words, become an ‘imperative’, a condensation of its ideological apparatus, rejecting this logic and embracing dullness and monotony has become somewhat the path to a better existence. A boring life in front of a desk dealing with endless tax forms, of common and regular dutifulness, without the excitement of recognition or limit experiences, may be, after all, emancipatory, the novel seems to propose. At the same time, the narrative around accountancy in the professor’s speech can also be seen, in the light of Benjamin’s work as an attempt to re-found time and experience, to escape from the atrophy of Erlebnis and reencounter an experience connected to memory and community, to the historical force field of Erfahrung. It is very tempting to identify in this narrative an attraction for a set of ‘modern’ values that seemed to have lost relevance in the aftermath of the sixties, tied with the political transformations the decade brought and the emergence of postmodernism; dutifulness, monotony, regularity, stability, precision, control, determinacy, purpose, willingness to sacrifice for a greater cause, etc. They seemed to have been replaced, if we use Ihab Hassan’s well-known table, by postmodern playfulness, openness, anarchy, indeterminacy, desire, chaos, immanence, etc. Yet in The Pale King and in Wallace late work and imaginary they seemed to have carved back into the arena as desirable, necessary: the determinacy of the

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‘small-h heroes’ lives, the stability of the monotonous job of IRS agents, the clear purpose of their tasks, the ‘centring’ of their identities.

The question seems to be here how to understand Wallace’s projected new narrative in the book and his conception of boredom. Is it perhaps a proof, evidence of an exhaustion of something? Of the postmodern values, of the values that the decade of the sixties brought with it, in its combination with the developments of late capitalism? An expression of nostalgia for some of the principles of modernism, for a lost form of experience? Is it just a concrete generational critique or should it be considered as an expression of a new cultural logic or a new ‘structure of feeling’? We will try to address these questions in the following chapter.

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4. Boredom, metamodernism and narratives of reconstruction in The Pale King

Boredom, as we have analyzed in the previous chapter, is, in The Pale King, a key element in what seems to be the proposal of a new ideological narrative that partially counters the logic of late capitalism. This proposal, as occurred with the concept of ‘hero’ in the professor’s speech we have close read, stems from a significant inversion within the margins of the late capitalist consumer culture. The Pale King presents a (re)turn to a set of values that we could characterize as intrinsically modern that function as a disruption of the dominant logic of late capitalism where, in the novel’s analysis, rebellion has become a fashionable and emptied attitude rather than a legitimate and effective political impulse and where the seek for a never- ending and limitless enjoyment has become a tyranny in consumer culture. It is in this light that embracing boredom or a boring, dull and monotonous job seems to be a tool that enables us to stop and counter the attraction of an endless promise of satisfaction of needs, to build a shield against its alienation through a sort of pendular or dialectical move. These values, however, seem to be articulated into something different that we will explore in this chapter. At the same time, this narrative can also be regarded as an attempt to escape from the atrophy of experience, of an accentuated Erlebnis and its constant shocks, towards the “re-founding of time and experience” or a connection with memory and community that Benjamin envisioned (Salzani 144). In the first part of this chapter, we will contextualize the willingness to counter the attraction and dependency of consumption through boredom by analyzing further the condition of late capitalism. We will use the theoretical framework provided by the Marxist critique of late capitalism and its attention to the productive transformation and the development and commodification of immaterial areas of social functioning, mainly emotion and experience, in relation to boredom. This characterization will help us in further understanding the reasons behind the novel’s perceived need or willingness to counter the dependency of consumption, offer what seems to be an alternative universe to the chaos and playfulness of the postmodern city/world and rebuild or recover a different kind of experience. In the second part, we will explore the terms or the direction in which this narrative or this defense is constructed. We will understand The Pale King’s way to conceive boredom, its fascination with the ‘small-h heroism’ and the use of an aesthetics of boredom as elements of a new structure of feeling, a new logic beyond postmodernism, as they challenge some of its

36 A.Puértolas central values. We will use as main theoretical framework the concept of metamodernism, developed by the Dutch scholars Thimotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker in the essay Notes on Metamodernism (2010). Our aim is to explore how its characteristics relate to the novel’s narrative on the concepts of boredom, accountancy and heroism, mainly focusing in the notions of metaxis, myth and reconstruction and to try to determine what is the role boredom can play in this new cultural logic.

Boredom and the ‘consumer’s game’

As we have described, first it would be interesting to explore further the condition of late or consumer capitalism and its relation to boredom. Zygmunt Bauman describes the logic of late capitalism as result of a shift from the ethics of work to the aesthetics of consumerism that “puts a premium on the sublime experience” (32). “In an economy based on consumption rather than in production, the commodity becomes a vehicle for emotional frisson it generates: the excitement of the new and unprecedented sensation is the name of the ‘consumer game’ draws all emotions – even supposedly oppositional or radical ones – into the orbit of the commodities that radiate through late capitalist consumer culture” (32), he writes in Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (1998). The process that Bauman describes can be identified as a metamorphosis of the social and economic organization of emotion, in which emotion as a category becomes a commodity that can be consumed, an object of productive labor. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire (2000) develop a similar perspective through the concept of ‘immaterial labor’, describing late capitalism as an “ensemble of intellectual, communicative, relational and affective” (62) commodities. In this light, the attraction that moves the consumer is an experience, an enjoyment, that it is not limited in the object in itself, rather in an experiential act attached to it. It is also interesting to relate the notion of pleasure and consumption to boredom within the framework of the imperative of enjoyment of late capitalism cross-reading these ideas with Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (2009). Although it is certainly not the main focus of the essay, boredom still has a place in Fisher’s analysis. Describing his experience as a high school teacher, Fisher states that “many of the teenagers that I’ve encountered seemed to be in a state of what I would call depressive hedonia” (22). In his perspective, depression is usually characterized as a state of ‘anhedonia’, that is, being incapable of obtaining pleasure. But the condition he refers to “is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it is by an

37 A.Puértolas inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure” (22). Thus, the problematic seems to be that in the consumerist logic of late capitalism, our “intellectual, communicative, relational and affective” (62) gratifications, in Hardt and Negri’s words, have been colonized by the logic of capital; that the contemporary individual has at his disposal a whole network of commodities that encompass the totality of his life experience. It is in this environment that Fisher places boredom under late capitalism as a state that we can very easily reach, that can be caused by anything that does not provide us with an easy and quick sense of gratification. Perhaps we can go back here to the International Situationist analysis that outlined boredom as “a motivating factor in the endless cycles of people’s desires for commodity objects […] a total submission to the domination of the spectacle” (123). Fisher draws a dependency that echoes the IS perspective. However, at the same time, this dependency seems to have reached another stage, perhaps a more troubling one. As capital has been able to colonize also the immaterial, affective or communicative, flooding this dimensions with commodities, the dependency seems to have also been totalized to the whole life experience of the individual; under the conditions of late capitalism our ‘desire for commodity objects’ can be directed towards new areas and dimensions and so is the addiction. Perhaps here the concept of ‘real subsumption of life under capital’, that Hardt and Negri use in Empire can be helpful to characterize capital’s dominion extension from labor to the totality of society, to the disappearance of an ‘outside’ to it. If the ‘outside’ of capital disappears, the cycle that the International Situationist describes, the endless attraction, seems to accelerate, to be all-present, as the space to reencounter the ‘subjective will’, in Haladyn’s terms, is reduced. Embracing boredom and creating an ideological narrative through the notion of hero attached to accountancy, can be easily read as a way to reject the constant dependency of a ‘newness’ and the consumerist its parasitization of all aspects of life: a way to conquer a space for a free or emancipated existence. If we examine the image of the IRS workplace that the novel constructs, it becomes easy to see the agency as a sort of sanctuary, away from the cycle, the sort of ‘outside’ that capital menaced.

“This was my first glimpse of an Immersives Room […]. The most striking thing about it was the quiet. There were at least 150 men and/or women in that room, all intently occupied and busy, and yet the room was so silent that you could hear an imperfection in the door’s hinge. […] I know that there was something about the silent, motionless

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intensity with which everyone in that instant was studying the tax documents before them that frightened and thrilled me” (290).

With this description, by one of the training agents that visits the IRS center during his training, an opposition between the chaotic, inviting and pressing universe of the postmodern city where the consumption cycle takes place and the peaceful, dominated by straight lines and columns of tables and desks world of the IRS office seems to be drawn; between what David Harvey characterizes as “a theater, a series of stages”, “a labyrinth honey-combed by such diverse networks of interaction oriented to such diverse roles that the encyclopedia becomes a maniacal scrapbook ” (5) and the “silent, motionless, intensity” of the Immersives Room. Wallace’s attraction for boredom and the world of accountancy can be seen, thus, a dialectical move that brings us to a partially obliterated set of values to the other side of the spectrum of the postmodern. To proceed in the analysis is important to assert that we will understand the postmodern as the cultural logic of late capitalism, following Jameson’s characterization of it; as the cultural expression of the material and historical changes of capitalism in the second half of the 20th century. The question becomes here to which extent or what nature can we give to this pendular or dialectical move, or this attempt to develop an ideological narrative in opposition to the cultural logic of late capitalism. As we have explored at the end of the previous chapter, it seems that, at the same time, The Pale King’s way to conceive boredom, its fascination with the job of the IRS agents and the use of an aesthetics of boredom are hard to fit into a postmodern framework. The will to return to complex narratives, including concepts such as ‘hero’, a sort of Romanization of common experience and the attraction for values such as monotony, regularity, stability, effort, or duty seem to place the novel into a different ‘structure of feeling’8, if we use Raymond Williams’ term. To explore this new sensibility, we will use the concept of metamodernism developed by the Dutch researches Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker as a characterization of the aftermath of postmodernism.

8 Raymond Williams coined the phrase in Preface to Film (1954) to discuss the relation between dramatic conventions and written texts. Structure of feeling refers to the different ways of thinking vying to emerge at any one time in history.

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Boredom as myth, metaxis and romanticization

Metamodernism is what we could call one of the answers to the question “what happened to postmodernism?”. It was an answer developed by the Dutch scholars Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, who coined the concept in the essay “Notes on Metaodernism”, published in 2010. In his analysis, it has become clear —in fact they argued that it had been already clear for many years— that what was labelled as ‘postmodernism’ has reached its end. The reasons for this conclusion are multiple: material events, such as climate change or the 2008 financial crisis, a gradual halt caused by the appropriation of critique by the market, the integration of différance into mass culture, etc. Metamodernism is, then, a new ‘structure of feeling’ that has replaced the postmodern, leaving behind the aesthetic precepts of deconstruction, parataxis and pastiche. According to Vermeulen and van den Akker, what characterizes the metamodern is an oscillation “between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony or detachment” (3); that is, between utopism, the unconditional belief in Reason, grand narratives and formal purism and nihilism, the distrust and deconstruction of grand narratives. The metamodern manifests in “a return of strategies such as myth, metaxis melancholy for hope and exhibitionism for engagement” (3), to replace pastiche and parataxis; in “new political narratives of longing, structured by and conditioned on a belief that was long repressed, for a possibility that was long forgotten” (5); in a kickstarting of history, after Fukuyama’s proclamation that, with the global triumph of western liberalism, it had ended. It also engages with “an emergent neoromantic sensibility” (8) that echoes Romanticism’s oscillating between attempt and failure and an inclination towards “the tragic, the sublime, the uncanny […] and aesthetic categories lingering between projection and perception, form and the unformable, coherence and chaos” (8). Identifying oscillation, that is the negotiation between two opposite poles, as a defining or articulating operation of a ‘structure of feeling’ or a particular sensibility, that by definition is supposed to have a fixed conceptual structure that allows its identification, may seem troubling. Yet, if we apply this oscillation, this swinging between enthusiasm and irony to The Pale King, it provides a very interesting framework from where to work. In this framework, the vindication we can find in some passages of the novel for a set of values that postmodernism seemed to have obliterated is articulated into something coherent. Let us go back to the novel’s idea of heroism that we have explored in the previous chapter, for example. Although it is actually applicable to the conception of boredom in itself

40 A.Puértolas present in the book, it is very compelling to interpret the idea of ‘small-h heroism’, the rediscovering of a civics of common experience and the developing of an ideological narrative around it as the return of strategies such as myth and metaxis and the exhibitionism for engagement that Vermeulen and van den Akker attribute to metamodernism. In other words, it is easy to see the building of this narrative as a ‘swinging’ towards a return of a certain notion of myth, understood here as a complex narrative, a tale or a story that articulates on a continuous basis the individual and collective life. And also a willingness to ‘reconstruct’ instead of ‘deconstructing’, a willingness to find ideological coordinates, as banal as joyless as they may seem, that can work as a path to escape the atrophy of disconnection and purposelessness, that the agent Chris Fogle embodies in the novel. With metaxis as an intrinsically metamodern discursive strategy, something very similar happens. Vermeulen and van den Akker define metaxis as the tension between irreconcilability of man’s participatory existence between finite processes on the one hand, and an unlimited, intracosmic or transmundane reality on the other’’ (6). Applied to metamodernism, metaxis takes place between “modern desire for sense and a postmodern doubt of the sense of it all” (5). In other words, in a pendular movement: “each time the metamodern enthusiasm swings towards fanaticism, gravity pulls it back towards irony; the moment irony swings to apathy, gravity pulls it back towards enthusiasm” (6). This oscillation is captured in a very interesting manner by the leading American art critic Jerry Saltz that identified, in an article published in the New York Magazine in 2010, a new approach to art making in recent museum and gallery shows. According to him, “it is an attitude that says: I know that the art I’m creating seems silly, even stupid […] but that doesn’t mean it isn’t serious” (6). The artists that embrace this new approach that Saltz analyses “grasps that they can be ironic and sincere at the same time, and they are making art from this compound- complex state of mind” (6). This in-between space, placed amid irony and sincerity seems exactly the position from which the moral narrative around boredom, accountancy and heroism in the novel stems. In the professor’s speech, there clearly seem to be a productive opposition between the two poles, a metaxis constructed between sarcasm and solid ideological or moral/ideological engagement. We can focus, for example, in the cowboy metaphor that the professor uses to define the position of the accountant in the contemporary: “You have wondered perhaps why all real accountants wear hats? They are todays cowboys. As you will be. Riding the American range. Riding herd on the unending torrent of financial data” (233). The mix between the two

41 A.Puértolas imaginaries —the lonesome and fearless cowboy that roams around engaging in armed duels and violence, defining his own code, and the dull accountant stuck all day in front of his desk filling tax forms—triggers an ironic reading of the speech, almost inevitably. However, at the same time, it seems clear that this ironic or sarcastic reading is not really accurate with the novel’s intention or purpose; that it is possible to identify in it also an almost desperate attempt to create ‘sincere’ art, to find solid grounds for a useful and re-signifying narrative in which, as we have previously identified, boredom is a key element. Other statements or ideas that the agents put forward work in a similar way. “I don’t believe I have anything to say that isn’t in the code or Manual” (116), sates one of them in an interview about his job. They are mixed in the same level with insightful comments on the experience of living that seem to have a different nature: “dullness is associated with physic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from other deeper type of pain that’s always there” (88). It exemplifies the attitude described by Saltz of knowing that the art created may seem ‘silly’ or ‘stupid’, but that does not mean that it shouldn’t be considered serious. But also an oscillation between two poles. Vermeulen and van den Akker cite in “Notes on Metamodernism” the description used in the opening of an exhibition in the Gallery Tanja Wagner, in Berlin, that echoed Saltz idea of a new art “between irony and sincerity” (6): “the works at display convey enthusiasm as well as irony. They play with hope and melancholy, oscillate between knowledge and naivety” (7). Again, the pendular movement, the idea of metaxis, seems a very interesting discursive strategy from which to read the novel. The attraction and perhaps admiration for the IRS agents, the main characters of the book, and their monotonous lives is enthusiastic and ironic at the same time as if swinging between a sarcastic and a meaningful approach. The agents represent a sort of turn to the past, a (re)turn to an identity —perfectly exemplified by Sloane Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) — that seems to be long gone. If postmodernism had an effect over identities that was, as Harvey put it in The Condition of Postmodernity, an opening of the closed and narrow frontiers of modernism. On the one side, in the postmodern city/labyrinth, “personal identity had been rendered soft, fluid, endlessly open” (5), as the city invited the individual to choose what he wanted to become. But postmodernism’s attention to “other worlds and other voices that had for too long been silenced (women, gays, blacks, colonized people)” (42) also opened a pluralism of personal identities, sometimes playful and chaotic. The Pale King displays a curious nostalgia for this archetype, the middle class, desk- job based, suburban American. It can be extended to all ‘small-h heroic jobs’ —“police,

42 A.Puértolas firemen, Social Service workers” (127), etc., that also appear characterized as a bastion of the past against the logic of late capitalism. But they constitue a hopeful impossibility. If we go back to Saltz words, Wallace seems to be conscious that the archetype he is putting forward “may seem silly, even stupid” (6), extremely naïve, a craving for something that belongs to the past; yet, he cannot help putting it forward, trying to read something beyond the apathy of irony and sarcasm. The conclusion in Notes on Metamodernism offers a very suitable conceptualization for this nostalgia and hopefulness. The metamodern takes place as a “deliberate out of time, an intentional being out of place, ant the pretense that that desired atemporality and displacement are actually possible even though they are not” (12), what Vermeulen and van den Akker conceptualize as ‘atopic metaxis’. A very compelling way to read the space of the IRS agency –this sort of ‘outside’– and the nostalgia for the ‘man in the grey flannel suit’/ desk worker middle class ‘small-h hero’ as a pursue of this ‘atopic metaxis’, a way to express hopefulness and enthusiasm at the same time as impossibility. To clarify the argument: the archetype or the way of life of the agents that the novel puts forwards is one that belongs to the past. There is no effort to imagine a contemporary or future world where boredom could play a different social role, but a projection of a world that is timely ‘out of place’, suspended, a world that invites us to read it as an analysis of the present but that belongs to another temporality. Thus, it is possible to identify in the novel a dive for sincere engagement, ideological and moral, that connects to the metamodern; a willingness of ‘reconstruction’. But it is formulated as a futureless past, as “a place (topos) that is no (a) place” (12). At the same time, a certain paradox seems to take place with Wallace’s choice about the decade of the eighties as the time of the novel and about the IRS agents as characters along with the vindication of other ordinary civic-oriented jobs. Under the postmodern city, the exciting ‘theater’, the ‘labyrinth’, the individual could choose and experiment with his own identity towards margins and away of conventions, embracing “the malleability of appearances and surfaces” (7), in Harvey’s words. A place where established and closed identities could be ‘deconstructed’ in order to reveal in them the oppression and constriction of power. In opposition, Wallace’s choice for the main characters of the novel turns to one of the most central, banal and previously explored archetypes, as if this exploration and deconstruction had exhausted or ceased to be interesting. It almost seems to be confirming Harvey’s warning of the dangers of the postmodern city in The Condition of the Postmodern: “too many people lost their way in the labyrinth, it was simply too easy for us to loose each other as well as ourselves”

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(9); that is, a swing of the pendulum towards a stabilized and solid identity. “If there was something liberating about the possibility of playing many and diverse roles, there was also something stressful and deeply unsettling about it” (9), Harvey also stated. That is why the renewed interest in the aesthetical notion of ‘reconstruction’, that Vermeulen and van den Akker, identify as a trait of metamodernism seems a useful concept to interpret the turn. The “maniacal scrapbook filled with colorful entries that have no relation to the others” (5) of the postmodern city, the ‘schizophrenic’ quality of postmodernity, in Fredric Jameson’s words, the inclination to indeterminacy, disorder and chaos may have become too ‘unsettling’ and ‘distressful’, may be exhausted. In this light, the attraction for the archetype embodied for the agents and boredom are closely related, linked by what seems to be a willingness to ‘reconstruct’ something solid and fixed, after the postmodern preference for disorder and playfulness: a willingness that the metamodern is able to explain. This willingness to ‘reconstruct’, to center, this nostalgia for stability, to encounter something solid and fixed can also be easily related to Benjamin’s project about the “re- founding of time and experience” (144), which echoes the story of Chris Fogle that we have analyzed in the previous chapter. In the novel’s projection of the quiet and peaceful space of the IRS Agency, the professor’s narrative around boredom and in the preoccupation about how difficult it has become in the world that the agents inhabit to concentrate or focus in demanding activities, we can also see a willingness to reconstruct the experience in itself, to overcome the ‘atrophy’ of Erlebnis, and its “broken immediate, limited and disconnected from memory and community” (129) nature. It is easy to see here Fogle years as a ‘wastoid’ as a succession of Erlebnis, as an example of an atrophic experience, one disconnected from real meaning or purpose. Thus, the concept of ‘small-h heroism’ — “actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. True heroism is you, alone in a designated work space” (229) — and the social role given to the accountants in it can be equated in a way to Benjamin’s project. In this case, the attempt is not as much to rebuild a temporality which is not ‘empty’, or a mere repetition outside history, as it is to find a narrative “to give meaning to and actively shape, on a continuous basis, our individual and collective life” (236), a problematic that Gardiner signals as specific to the neoliberal subject. However, both projects are closely related, as it is easy to see any complex narrative as an element that can place the subject into a linear sort of historical time progression and counter the atrophy of experience. But again, the novel’s formulation of the project takes the form of a projected impossibility.

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The question that we are forced to raise here is: can the notion of atopic metaxis and its underlying ‘hopeful impossibility’ also explain the novel’s approach to boredom? In other words, could Wallace’s idea that embracing boredom can lead us to a profound bliss, or that it can be a trigger for a kickstarting of the subjective will towards a more conscious existence a ‘hopeful impossibility’? And does that cancel the willingness to become the sort of guidance that we have identified in the first chapter? It is hard to give a closed answer to these questions. If we were to circumscribe our analysis to the novel, it is certainly true that the perspective it gives on boredom can be seen as a hopeful aspiration rather than a plan or a path to be implemented. Literally, the alternative The Pale King seems to give to the endless cycle of consumption and distraction under late capitalism is a turn back to the past, to a universe that is already gone. But still, the discussion about the importance of focus and concentration and the transformative experience of the agents and their lives works as a model, a sort of aspirational one in which the reader can be reflected, questioning his own relation to the psychological state. We can go back to the use of the aesthetics of boredom that we had analyzed in the first chapter here. As we have noted, with the fabricated convergence between the experience of the IRS agents and the inclusion of boring long passages, the novel does not seem to be worried to be just propositive as much as transforming the reader, inflicting change upon him. In other words, the novel puts forward an atopic universe, but it does so in hope that it will have a transformative effect. Thus, the discussion about the impossibility seems to be transferred to the reader in hopefulness. There is another aspect of the metamodern, in Vermeulen and van den Akker’s proposal, that perhaps can give us another perspective to answer the questions about boredom as a ‘hopeful impossibility’ in the novel . It is what the two scholars call “an emergent neoromantic sensibility” (7). According to them, the metamodern “appears to find its clearest expression” (8) in this sensibility. In his characterization, the Romantic attitude, as the metamodern one, can be essentially defined as well by an oscillation between opposite poles: “Romanticism is about the attempt to turn the finite into the infinite, while recognizing that it can never be realized” (8). The scholars identify in this cultural discourse the same movement, between attempt and failure, irony and enthusiasm, an endless drive that cannot be really fulfilled. Beyond this metaxis, however, the classical definition of Romanticism by Novalis already provides a surprisingly interesting perspective on The Pale King. The poet’s idea that “the world must be romanticized” (8), in order to discover or reveal an ‘original’ meaning,

45 A.Puértolas seems to suit, for example, the perspective expressed by the professor’s speech. It is easily arguable that the concept of heroism that the professor coins, attached to the profession of accountancy is in fact a romanticization of it, as a new meaning is revealed and applied to the modern accountant. But in Novalis’ definition, in this process of romanticization, “the lower self is identified with a better self […] Insofar, as I present the commonplace with significance, the ordinary with mystery […] I romanticize it” (8). The echo with the concept of ‘small-h heroism’ is very clear. The identification between the figure of the modern accountant and the figure of the hero seems to perfectly embody the identification between the ‘lower self’ and the ‘better self’. But the matching between ‘commonplace’ and ‘significance’ also applies to the operation. The commonplace of an apparently banal, monotonous and dull job is given a new and almost epic meaning, one that resignifies the experience: “enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is […] True heroism is you, alone in a designated work space” (229). The commonplace of the middle class, white, suburban desk job worker is resignified as heroic, marginal, a declining bastion, the ordinary of his life becomes extraordinary (or it is precisely its ordinariness what makes the agents something extraordinary, under a cultural discourse that turns rebellion and the margins into a new normality). In this conceptual procedure, in the resignification of ‘heroism’, boredom becomes a central element in relation to the hero’s value and condition. The main achievement of the hero depends precisely on its ability to endure boredom, to repetitively perform a boring, yet, civically meaningful task. Is perhaps the same process applied to boredom in the novel? Can the perspective on the potential of the psychological state be a result of a romanticization? We could indeed identify a similar proceeding or conceptual operation with boredom: the ‘lower self’ of a traditionally unpleasant and unsettling feeling is transformed into a ‘better self’ when a different imaginary is applied to it, when it is conceived as a kickstarter of the subjective will, a path towards a more conscious and fulfilling life, and a superior ‘bliss’. In the same light, the ‘commonplace’ of boredom, a psychological state almost everyone in the contemporary experiences in their daily bases, without paying attention to it, becomes a ‘significant’ one, an ordinary experience is revealed as extraordinary, resignified. This neoromantic sensibility that we do seem to find in The Pale King is directly linked to the notions of reconstruction and myth that the metamodern structure of feeling displays; to a willingness to offer an ideological narrative that moves away from notions of deconstruction, pastiche or the postmodern fascination with indeterminacy, playfulness and chaos towards

46 A.Puértolas notions of stability, fixedness, even order, as if they had ceased to be constrictive and coercive to become comforting and guiding. Thus, it is hard not to see the novel as an example of a different ‘structure of feeling’ or sensibility and its vindication of boredom as an expression of this new sens. These notions are however countered by the oscillation between enthusiasm and the presence of irony or sarcasm, by what seems to be an acute self-consciousness in the problematic of these aspirations, that differentiates them from the modern optimism on the transforming potential of a totalizing view of the world based on the unchallenged potential of reason.

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5. Conclusion

With the discussion about the concept of boredom the novel displays, the use of an aesthethics of boredom and how The Pale King relates to metamodernism, completed, we can draw the conclusions of the thesis. In the first chapter, we have focused on exploring the particular idea of boredom present in the novel, to try to determine what was the concept of boredom displayed in it. As we have seen, the novel presents the idea that at the other side of boredom lies a “a- second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious” (546), that riding out the waves of boredom can lead us to ‘bliss’, in short, to a better existence. This idea is closely paired, as Ralph Clare explores in The politics of boredom in The Pale King, with the preoccupation with focus and concentration, also a central theme of the novel. In Wallace’s perspective, to attain this ‘other side’ requires a sort of training, building the capacity to do so, as the agents do in their daily basis. As we have previously emphasized, in spite of what could generally be thought, The Pale King does not put forward the idea that boredom is a positive psychological state per se, it is rather a sort of given phenomenon in the conditions of late capitalism, something that we are forced to deal with. It is the way in which we choose to address it that can turns it into a catalyst for a less alienated consciousness. If in the International Situationist’s perspective boredom was always ‘counterrevolutionary’, as it constituted “an end point of the subjective will” (Haladyn 123), the novel offers the opposite idea; that is, it acknowledges the possibility that being bored, followed with the right effort and training, can actually kickstart the subjective will. In other words, it may not be necessarily “a motivating factor in the endless cycles of people’s desires for commodity objects” (124), as Guy Debord stated, but a path to stop the subject’s dependency on the ‘newness of products’ or the cycle of consumption and submission to the spectacle; that it can stop the willingness to resort to it as a sort of ‘temporal fix’. There is, thus, a convergence between the novel’s perspective on boredom and Haladyn’s idea that “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). Boredom can be then “a possible solution to the apparent malaise of post-industrial life” (Clare 188), but the responsibility to act in this direction, is basically circumscribed to the individual.

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With the use in the novel of an aesthetics of boredom, that is, the inclusion of passages that seem written in order to make the reader explicitly experience boredom, the novel transfers the discussion on the psychological state beyond the margins of fiction. As other artistic forms that engage with the same strategies, the cited passages and the exploration of a plot where “nothing actually happens” (546) are intended to provoke the reader in order to make him elaborate on what he is forced to face, in order to trigger his subjective will and thrust him into creating meaning of the experience. There is, then, a replication between the experience of the IRS agents in the novel, that struggle in their routines to make something out of the boredom and dullness they experience, and the experience Wallace wants to create for the reader. That is why we can differentiate The Pale King’s use of boredom from Andy Warhol’s experimental practices in films such as Poor Little Rich Girl (1967); in the case of the novel, the reader’s reaction and experience is framed and directed by its own content. 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. At the same time, Wallace seems to be trying to create a relationship between the object of art and the reader that goes beyond the traditional parameters of entertainment forms in the sense that the novel renounces to one of the most fundamental aspects of this category, that is, the willingness to fight for the attention of the spectator. In the light of the convergence between the IRS agents and reader, The Pale King appears as a sort of ideological or moral manual that seeks to have a transformative effect. Boredom is then, in the novel, 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 willingness for fiction to seek this transformative effect can be explained through Wallace‘s idea in Feodor’s Guide that it was necessary to “dare try to use serious art to advance ideologies” (Wallace 9). However, in the light of the characterization of metamodernism we have seen in the third chapter, the use of an aesthetics of boredom also entangles with the metamodern ‘pragmatic idealism’ or the ‘hopefulness’ of this new structure of feeling, as it expresses a belief in the transformative effect of art in a particular and specific direction. In opposition to Warhol’s Poor Little Rich Girl, it is easily arguable that the use of boredom in The Pale King takes place as a part of a ‘myth’, in the sense, that the world of the IRS agents works as a vision, as a desirable universe that, paradoxically is historically set in the past (here the idea of ‘metaxis’ is useful once more).

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In the second chapter we have explored the collective dimensions of boredom in The Pale King, departing from the idea that 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” (Clare 429). As Lars Svensen states, there is a close link between boredom and meaning, as the psychological state becomes spread when traditional structures of meaning disappear. Thus, an “an underlying sense of futility, insignificance and disconnection from the world” (Gardiner 236) could be something that triggered or enhanced the boredom the agents experienced. Is it compelling, then to relate this feeling to the ahistorical condition of the postmodern individual, as described by Jameson. Gardiner’s idea that the neoliberal subject struggles with the capacity “to give meaning to and actively shape, on a continuous basis, our individual and collective life” (236) is a key one, in the relation between boredom and meaning in this chapter. As we have seen in the close reading of the two passages in the second chapter, the college professor’s speech that the agent Chris Fogle witnesses becomes then an attempt to build a narrative that could effectively orientate and shape the individual and collective life of the agent. The use of the concept of ‘hero’ or ‘small-h heroism’ implies the existence of an ideological path for the characters to follow as a sort of imperative —“Gentleman, you are called to account” (230). The image of the accountant as the ‘modern cowboy’ works in the same direction: it constitutes a way of overcoming the ‘sense of futility’ or disconnection to the world that Gardiner refers to, by providing a moral or ideological narrative able to fill an underlying vacuum. It is a conceptual operation that gives meaning to the agent’s boredom, to their daily struggle with it. It can also be seen in the line of Walter Benjamin’s project to overcome the atrophy of experience of the Erlebnis, to ‘re-found’ it, connecting it to memory and community. The preoccupation about this incapacity or the underlying sense that there is something missing —that Americans had abdicated their civic responsibilities, that they are “infantilized”, or that a few decades in the past “citizens did feel like they were part of Everything” (139) and not anymore — can be seen, in the light of the analysis of the last chapter and the framework of Metamodernism as another proof of the exhaustion of postmodernism. The discussion about the death of civics and responsibility and the commodification of rebellion by capital that we have explored in the second chapter displays a craving for a narrative, a need for ‘reconstruction’ or a reencounter with some kind of ‘myth’. In the novel’s perspective and following the framework of the pendular movement and the inversion that we have suggested

50 A.Puértolas during the thesis, the absence of narratives capable of giving meaning and actively shaping is not regarded anymore as an emancipation from a totalizing and oppressive discursive or cultural system, a structure that should be deconstructed, but as a problematic and, ultimately an impoverishment of the individual’s life and experience. In Wallace’s perspective, this absence becomes the grounds for the spread of boredom, as it means an incapacity to actively engage in actions or activities meaningful enough to provide an alternative path to our dependency of entertainment and our difficulties with focus. This analysis reveals, as we have previously seen, an attraction for a set of characteristically modern values that had been buried by their postmodern counterparts, following Ihab Hassan’s characterization of it (hierarchy by anarchy, determinacy by indeterminacy, mastery/logos by exhaustion or silence, etc.). However, this does not mean that the novel displays a modern sens or structure of feeling, rather, that there seems to be in it an ‘oscillation’ between “modern enthusiasm and postmodern irony” (Vermeulen & van der Akker 5), an operation that seems to take place in the framework of a different cultural discourse. That is, that the new logic, is defined by a fluctuation, by a pendular movement: “each time the metamodern enthusiasm swings toward fanaticism, gravity pulls it back toward irony” (6). Metamodernism becomes a framework that seems able to explain the discourse that The Pale King is entangled with and that seems able to contextualize the novel’s vindication of boredom. The belief that boredom can work as a ‘kickstarter of the subjective will’ or that it has a disruptive potential against the logic of late capitalism converges with the “new political narratives of longing, structured by and conditioned on a belief that was long repressed, for a possibility that was long forgotten” (5) of metamodernism, with the hopefulness of the structure of feeling that is constructed between seriousness and engagement and a hint of irony and sarcasm. How well the metamodern seems to suit or to be able or explain and articulate in a wider logic The Pale King’s discourse on boredom and the contemporary raises some questions. One of them is inevitably about the nature of the oscillation. The attraction that the novel displays for the archetype of the middle-class, white, desk-job workers, the perspective of the space of the IRS Agency as an alternative bastion to the postmodern city/labyrinth, the perspective on boredom as kickstarter of the subjective will, seem to incline the pendulum away from a postmodern structure of feeling, as a dialectical opposite, rather than to offer a real oscillation or a negotiation between the two. The oscillation takes place in the way the universe of the agency and the ideological discourse around boredom and the job of the accountant is

51 A.Puértolas presented, in the epic and hyperbolic to the point of irony imagery that the novel employs and in the projected world of the characters as a nostalgic ‘hopeful impossibility’ rather than a model for a real political transformation. It is very compelling to see the novel as an expression of the exhaustion of postmodernism and its substitution by something new. However, the question remains if metamodernism can be considered an already crystalized paradigm or one still in construction, especially if we focus on ‘oscillation’. Could oscillation or the constant pendular movement between sides, such as enthusiasm and apathy, be simply a transitional quirk, meant to disappear once the postmodern fades in time? Although it certainly suits the fragmentation and schizophrenic nature of the contemporary, could it be explained as a proof that the new paradigm has not yet fully emerged or consolidated? In any case, The Pale King seems to illustrate how in the context of late capitalism and their “ensemble of intellectual, communicative, relational and affective” (62) commodities or in the real subsumption of life under capital, boredom seems to become not only a disruptive psychological state, one that can counter its logic when embraced, or a path to a better and more conscious existence in an individual level, but also a tool to conquer some space, to limit the intrusion of the promises of consumerism and the stimuli of digital networks, a material with which to build an ‘outside’. In the ongoing discussion about the experience of boredom in present times, the thesis shows how the novel seems to be moving in very particular coordinates. If Gardiner’s analysis of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station described boredom in the age of the ‘generation meh’ as a consequence of a sense of futility of disconnection with the events of the present, The Pale King not only already acknowledges this, but it already chooses to focus in how to overcome this vacuum, in Benjamin’s words, how to reencounter a sort of ‘force field’ to reconnect the experience of the individual into a ‘Everything’. It seems to be one step further. In Lerner’s novel, the reaction of the main character in front of the impossibility to ‘feel intensely’ about a geopolitical event is to become “idle and reclusive […] a virtual shut-in, chain smoking and reading obsessively” (235). It is a reaction that perhaps entangles with Ottesa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) in which the main character willingly decides to try to spend a year confined in her home trying to sleep as much as she can with the help of psychopharmacs. Both show how the sense of disconnection from the present can lead to a sort of individual shutdown, an extreme exploration of the ‘will not to will’ or ‘will to boredom’ in Halady’ns terms. This exploration can be read as a defensive Bartlebyesque reaction to the impositions of late capitalism and the anarchic and

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‘schizophrenic’ experience of the postmodern city/labyrinth. Lerner’s and Mosgfegh’s novels seem to share with The Pale King the notion that this ‘will to boredom’ becomes a means of resisting the drive “to perpetually seek ever-newer and more spectacular encounters” (Gardiner & Haladyn 3) under capitalism. However, in the novel’s perspective boredom is not only a defensive element, it is also offensive: it fuels an impulse of reconstruction, to counter the pressure with an articulated narrative and universe. The Pale King offers, then, a very interesting perspective on the significance of the psychological state in the contemporary and in the role it can play to build an outside to the parasitization of capital and the commodification of emotion and experience. The question remains if it is possible to breach the gap between ‘hopeful impossibility’ and viable sociopolitical project.

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5. Bibliography

Bauman, Zygmunt. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor . Buckingham: Open University Press, 1998

Clare, Ralph. “The politics of boredom and the boredom of politics in David Foster Wallace’s ‘The Pale King.’” Studies in the Novel 44.4. (2012): 428–446.

Dalle Pezze, Barbara, and Salzani, Carlo. Essays on Boredom and Modernity. Amsterdam [etc: Rodopi, 2009. Print.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism : Is There No Alternative? . Winchester, UK ;: Zero Books, 2009.

Gardiner, Michael E. & Haadyn, Julian Jason. Boredom Studies Reader. London: Routledge.

Hand, Martin. “#Boredom: technology, acceleration and connected presence in the social media age” in Gardiner, M.E. Haladyn, J.J. (eds.) (2016) Boredom Studies Reader: Frameworks and Perspectives, New York: Routledge

Haladyn, Julian Jason. Boredom and Art: Passions of the Will to Boredom. Zero Books, 2015.

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