The Pale King, putting special focus on the representations of mental disorder, which arguably paint a multifaceted picture of autism spectrum disorders. In the course of doing this, I will set up the discourse by reviewing the existing interpretations and placements of David Foster Wallace’s prose, trying to locate and define the notions of postmodernity and literary postmodernism, and identifying the place of abnormal mental processes in postmodern fiction. I will also provide a survey of the theories that claim to observe a literary style that succeeds postmodernism, some of them citing Wallace as the key founding father of a style named New Sincerity.

Building on the existing critical discussion of The Pale King, the point of departure for this thesis is the issue of attention and its various connections to social anxiety, attention deficit disorder, executive dysfunction, and autism. It aspires to extend the discursive framework applied to this novel with a detailed look on the representation of mental pathology which causes social and behavioural dysfunction, including the discovery that most of it corresponds to the manifestations of mild forms of autism spectrum disorders.

Parallel to the social engagement of feminist and queer studies, this thesis attempts to employ and encourage a kind of “introvert studies” –

Wallace’s prose is arguably a major achievement in describing the workings of the minds of socially anxious, but highly intelligent and observant introverts, and one of its effects seems to be sensitization of readers to the specific

4 sufferings of people who constantly fear the gaze of others, overthink their decisions, who are unable to resist intrusive thoughts and navigate social situations, and who are often depressed as a result of all that. Felt and addressed throughout the world, in poor and affluent countries alike, social anxiety and depression are persistent problems faced not only by the afflicted, but also by many parents and educators – and sensitizing readers and academics to these problems might facilitate changes in the society that secure these people more understanding and empathy among the general population.

In terms of literary theoretical categories, based on this context and the text analysis itself, I hope to draw a conclusion that strikes a balance between placing The Pale King into the postmodern framework and allowing it to stand out, partially defining its own post-postmodern literary realm.

1. Terminological issues

First of all, it is necessary to stress the fact that all the derivatives of the term “postmodern” and, even more so, any term describing an era or a style that is supposed to succeed postmodernism, are “deeply problematical”, having been “applied at different levels of abstraction to a wide range of object and phenomena in what we used to call reality” (Bertens 3). Bertens illustrates this by juxtaposting postmodern painting (and, similarly, architecture), which moves from purely abstract modernism back toward “pictorial narrative, [and] representational practices” (3), and literary criticism, which observes a move away from narrative to further reinforce modernist self-reflexivity, sufficiently proved by Samuel Beckett, John Fowles, or John Barth. Consequently,

[depending] on the artistic discipline, […] postmodernism is either

a radicalization of the self-reflexive moment within modernism, a

turning away from narrative and representation, or an explicit

return to narrative and representation. And sometimes it is both.

Moreover, to make things worse, there are […] postmodernisms

that do not fit this neat binary bill.” (Bertens 4-5)

Brian McHale tries to name some of the more prominent postmodernisms, including frames based on writers and philosophers alike:

John Barth’s postmodernism, the literature of replenishment;

Charles Newman’s postmodernism, the literature of an inflationary

economy; Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodernism, a general

condition of knowledge in the contemporary informational regime;

Ihab Hassan’s postmodernism, a stage on the road to the spiritual

unification of humankind; and so on. There is even Kermode’s

construction of postmodernism, which in effect constructs it right

out of existence. (4)

However, McHale contends that since they are all fictional constructs, one should choose the useful one – neither too broad (which would explain all contemporary literature, thus losing value), nor too narrow (where a term heavy with connotations would become ineffective compared to an unequivocal or descriptive term).

Regarding post-postmodernisms: by implication, to define anything that supposedly replaces something which is not properly specified (and, importantly, constrained – any recent developments could be viewed as transformations of postmodernism instead) is bound to encounter severe criticism for either simplifying that which it buries (for example the notion of

New Sincerity basically reduces postmodernism to irony and evasion) or ascribing the totality and sweep of an era to something much less substantial.

Given these terminological difficulties, it is important to always have in mind that David Foster Wallace’s prose can only be linked to a whole network of contesting and sometimes even mutually exclusive notions of postmodernism and post-postmodernism.

2. Placement of David Foster Wallace

“The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years”

(McCaffery 150) – this is the ambivalent position Wallace himself assumes in relation to postmodernism.

David Foster Wallace wrote three novels that frame his literary career, interlaced with three short story collections and several essay collections. The novels include The Broom of the System, published in 1987, Infinite Jest, published in 1996, and The Pale King, published posthumously in 2011. The dates clearly say that if the heyday of postmodernism was not over by the publication of his very first novel, it surely was at the point when Infinite Jest, his most famous work with an almost cult status, came out in 1996. Following the lifespan of the notion of postmodernity, Connor concludes that, “[having] expanded its range and dominion hugely during the first period of separate accumulation in the 1970s and the syncretic period of the 1980s, the idea of the postmodern began for the first time to slow its rate of expansion during the

1990s” (“Introduction” 5). Moreover, as it “became generalized during its third phase in the 1990s, so the force of postmodernism as an ideal, or a necessary premonition of the good, seems also to have begun to dissipate”

(“Introduction” 10). In 2008, when Wallace was assembling the unfinished manuscript of The Pale King to be found after his suicide, several theorists had already declared postmodernism dead (Eshelman: “Performatism, or the End of

Postmodernism” (2000); Furlani: “Postmodern and after: Guy Davenport”

(2002); Crowther: Philosophy After Postmodernism (2003)). The temporal distribution of David Foster Wallace’s writing looks as if he had one foot in postmodernism (arguably, his style echoes it) and the other in its rejection and transgression (the philosophical turn to New Sincerity).

2.1 Critical literature on David Foster Wallace

In 2015, the historical distance is insufficient for a substantial body of criticism to have developed, but there are several essays and essay collections whose analyses are deep and narrowly specialized, in any case far from introductory.

James Annesley’s review essay in the Journal of American Studies offers a rounded picture of the writer, including Wallace’s literary ancestry - John

Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo, introducing to the reader the “search for a synthesis between the elaborate codes of literary experiment and a plain and unreflexive humanism” (Annesley 131) or, in Wallace’s own words, the combination of “neo-postmodern techniques” and “a genuine socio-artistic agenda” (“E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” 51). Annesley links

Wallace to several other significant writers – Wallace seems to share a certain degree of focus on emotion and compassion with Jonathan Safran Foer, but he manages to avoid the traps of intellectual naivety Foer falls into; on the other hand, Bret Easton Ellis and his American Psycho are the antithesis of Wallace’s work. The essay then follows the “persistent strain of melancholia” (Annesley

133) up to the concluding biographical reflection on Wallace’s depression and suicide.

Paul Giles identifies Wallace’s style as “sentimental posthumanism”

(327), where “flattened postmodern vistas familiar from the works of, say, Don

DeLillo are crossed with a more traditional investment in human emotion and sentiment” (330). Lee Konstantinou observes the disappearing cosmopolitanism and world-ness of American literature, and sees Wallace “redeploy the linguistic and cultural resources of this delimited, ‘average’ habitus to create a strange sort of negative map of the world” (68). Tom LeClair locates him within a group of young novelists, together with Richard Powers and William Vollmann, finding common patterns of sociological reflection and information age education, and juxtaposing the work of this group with that of Thomas Pynchon, the prodigy of the preceding generation. Adam Kelly collects evidence for the “widespread agreement […] that David Foster Wallace affirmed and embodied sincerity as a crucial value in his life and work” (131) and goes on to ask in what way this new sincerity might be different from sincerity as we know it – he suggests that

Wallace complicates sincerity by moving it away from representation, leaving it

“the kind of secret that must always break with representation” (143), a complex sincerity in the writer-reader transaction. Moving towards the conclusion, Kelly states that “being a ‘post-postmodernist’ of Wallace’s generation means never quite being sure whether you are one, whether you have really managed to escape narcissism, solipsism, irony and insincerity”

(145), and provides a short summary of what Wallace’s prose accomplishes: his

“’way of writing’ and his reconfiguration of the writer-reader relationship,

10 displaces metaphysics while retaining a love of truth, a truth now associated with the possibility of a reconceived, and renewed, sincerity” (146).

Introducing a volume on The Pale King, the main text of this analysis,

Marshall Boswell guides the reader through the complex half-finishedness of the novel - on the one hand, it is unfinished and assembled by his editor, on the other hand, the text “thoroughly develops a wide range of themes” and there would probably never be signs of finishedness: “although The Pale King never reaches a conclusion per se, it is clear that Wallace always intended to deny his readers any such satisfying sense of closure in any case” (Boswell 369).

2.2 Starting point and purpose of this thesis

Importantly, Boswell reminds us that Wallace’s “Embryonic outline” (The

Pale King 709) includes the issues of attention and ADD (attention deficit disorder) as the central elements of one of the “2 Broad arcs” (709) of the novel. In the very same volume, Ralph Clare links one of The Pale King’s central topics, boredom, to Infinite Jest’s boredom, “often linked to depression, clinical and otherwise” (Clare 434). He observes that in The Pale King, “free-floating angst, […] depression, or existential dread […] affects nearly every character in the novel, in one way or another” (435), and that nearly every character manifests an extraordinary focus on attention or lack thereof. Dorson reflects on The Pale King’s “focus on attention as a scarce resource in a world where distraction is pathologized” (227) and sees a “possible sanctuary” in “the old bureaucratic practices” (227). Even though it could not be located in academic literature at the point of writing this thesis, Ralph Clare is reported to have

11 briefly gone along a track similar to that of this project, identifying autistic traits in some of David Foster Wallace’s characters (Mak).

This is where this thesis comes into play, extending these relatively brief theoretical stopovers with a careful analysis of The Pale King’s representations of mental disorder, fitting most of them into the category of autism spectrum disorders. Apart from elucidating an important component of Wallace’s writing, this direction of research has the potential to sensitize the academic and cultural discourse to the suffering of people with social anxiety, executive dysfunction, or other symptoms, just as Wallace’s prose sensitizes its readers.

3. General aspects of the postmodern era, epistemology

The credit of having provided the most comprehensive description of the postmodern world is often attributed to Jean-François Lyotard and his essay

The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. In this cornerstone work,

Lyotard analyses the state of knowledge in the postmodern society and concludes that the postmodern differs from the modern in its “incredulity toward metanarratives” (xxiv) or grand narratives – a diminished impact of totalizing and all-encompassing systems of thought, in particular of teleological explanations of history such as Marxism or Enlightenment.

Parallels can be drawn to Rorty’s philosophy, especially his 1989 work

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, explicating the notion that it is impractical to postulate any truth beyond optimal “vocabularies” that are a product of contingency, and acceptance of ultimate contingency is one of the features of the “ironist” mindset. Since the notion of truth in historical or scientific explanation is rather close to the notion of the grand narrative, this mindset might be similar to the hypothetical postmodern mindset.

In a similar vein, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault engaged in deconstructive practices, challenging power structures that often resulted from universalizing conceptions of history and ethics. Notably, Foucault provided a methodological overview of his method in The Archaeology of Knowledge and famously applied it to the theoretical processes behind Western penal systems in Discipline and Punish.

Another related notion of the postmodern age comes from Jean

Baudrillard and his Simulacra and Simulation, which observes that simulacra in the form of symbols and signs, provided by culture and media, have come to constitute a “hyperreality” that forms truth in its own right and is at the same time completely divorced from any conceivable reality external to language and thought.

These conceptions are perceivably similar in many aspects, which led to the gradual emergence of a synthesis; Connor speaks of “the sense that important changes had taken place in politics, economics, and social life, changes that could broadly be characterized by the two words delegitimation and dedifferentiation” (“Introduction” 3) – with the demise of metanarratives, centers of authority lost their momentum and many oppositions they upheld, such as that between center and margin, or between high and low culture, started to crumble. A link can be drawn to the “leveling tendencies of cultural studies, with its emphasis on popular culture” (“Introduction” 5).

The post- prefix points to the important fact that a significant part of the notion of postmodernism is inherently an opposition to modernism, which is not entirely clear from the descriptive accounts mentioned above. In We Have

Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour argues that the modern is “doubly asymmetrical: it designates a break in the regular passage of time, and it designates a combat in which there are victors and vanquished” (10), which is later shown to be an abstract indication of the modernist tendency to separate with confidence, be it culture and nature, high and low art, self and the other, art and non-art, man and woman, or knowledge and chaos. Latour argues that

14 the symptom of postmodernity was implicated by the very construction of these sharp distinctions, because at that point the things in between start to assert themselves.

4. Literary postmodernism

Having become “one of the most important laboratories of postmodernism” (Connor, “Postmodernism and Literature” 62), the literary scene exhibited a rather loosely coordinated miscellany of manifestations.

Nevertheless, as pointed out by Connor, most of this happened within narrative fiction, which gained dominance during the transition from modernism (which was replete with poetry).

4.1 Philosophical orientation, complication of authorship

In Postmodernist Fiction, one of the key texts written about this subject,

Brian McHale admits that it is a “one-idea book” based on the proposition that

“postmodernist fiction differs from modernist fiction just as a poetics dominated by ontological issues differs from one dominated by epistemological issues”

(xii). He outlines how postmodernist fiction

deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions like

the ones Dick Higgins calls “post-cognitive”: “Which world is this?

What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?” Other

typical postmodernist questions bear either on the ontology of the

literary text itself or on the ontology of the world which it projects,

for instance: What is a world?; What kinds of world are there,

how are they constituted, and how do they differ?; What happens

when different kinds of world are placed in confrontation, or when

boundaries between worlds are violated?; What is the mode of

existence of a text, and what is the mode of existence of the

world (or worlds) it projects?; How is a projected world

structured? (10)

The first general hint at how to distinguish postmodernist writing seems to be that it takes much less for granted, be it in the form of distrusting Lyotardian metanarratives or simply questioning assumptions about the world and self prevalent in previous historical periods. McHale uses Beckett’s trilogy as an example, pointing out how Malone Dies changes the ontological status of Molloy by ascribing authorship to Malone, whose freedom is further demonstrated by allowing him to change the name of a character during the narrative, and how

The Unnamable does the same and much more with the narrator claiming authorship of all previous novels, deconstructing and reconstructing them, and also suggesting the possibility of himself being a character in someone else’s narrative, of an infinite ontological chain of worlds above the narrator (13).

Another example presented is Carlos Fuentes, who “converts the historical novel into a medium for raising ontological issues” (17). He accomplishes this by on the one hand extensively using historical context, on the other hand contradicting and re-constructing well-known historical facts, or by using the motif of a trans-historical party where people from different eras and, importantly, different texts, assemble to form something similar to Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (McHale 18). While tracing Nabokov’s development through limit-modernism (McHale’s name for the transition phase between modernism and postmodernism) to postmodernism, multiple explanations of the limit-modernist Pale Fire and the reliability of its unreliable narrator are

17 presented – the described Kingdom of Zembla might or might not exist, Kinbote might be Kinbote, Botkin, or he might not exist at all, and the same applies to

Shade and Shade’s poem, which might have the meaning Kinbote describes, or an entirely different one. Exhibiting mostly epistemological uncertainty, McHale points out how Nabokov held on to the ontological strain of existent and non- existent worlds and published Ada seven years later, using “displaced and superimposed spaces, […] skew place-names, and […] oddly juggled chronology” (19).

An important term in the context of this ontological transition is

Foucault’s heterotopia, denoting a space where incommensurable worlds exist along each other (possible relation to Lyotard’s local narratives). Foucault contends that this absence of a common locus makes them

disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language,

because they make it impossible to name this and that, because

they destroy “syntax” in advance, and not only the syntax with

which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax

which causes words and things (next to and also opposite to one

another) to “hold together. (Foucault, The Order of Things: An

Archeology of the Human Sciences xviii)

McHale places locates this tendency in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, with the

Empire of the Great Khan and its cities that do not have borders and often include the same territory. In such a discontinuous and inconsistent space, ontological uncertainty is inevitable: “Contradictions arise: how can three cities, each said to have absorbed the entire space of the Empire, coexist? … What

18 paradoxical kind of space does this Empire occupy? What kind of world is this?”

(McHale 43). He links philosophical heterotopia with its literary cognate, the

“zone”, as used by Julio Cortázar, William Burroughs, Alasdair Gray, or Thomas

Pynchon – each of these conceptions of the zone has a different way of placing and organizing the paradoxes and incongruities, but they ultimately reflect the

“collapse of ontological boundaries” (McHale 45) underneath.

4.2 Foregrounding structure, breaking the narrative illusion

McHale observes that in postmodernist literature,

the fictional world now acquires a visible maker, […] it has

become less the mirror of nature, more an artifact, visibly a made

thing. As a corollary, then, to the artist’s paradoxical self-

representation, the artwork itself comes to be presented as an

artwork. The devices of art are laid bare[.] (30)

Mahmoud Salami uses the example of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s

Woman to demonstrate this. Fowles seems to be further complicating this device: he foregrounds the process of writing the novel, the conventions at the time of writing and the conscious usage of late 20th century knowledge and perspective for a Victorian narrative, but at the same time, he claims that he does not know his characters and cannot predict their actions and thus seemingly “sustains [the narrative] illusion by making his fiction more real, more believable since he seems sincere in claiming that he really does not know his characters” (Salami 19). The resulting paradox is that the text attempts “to

19 authenticate and yet to ‘deconstruct’ the narrative, to create and yet to subvert its illusions” (Salami 19).

Another way of breaking the narrative illusion is the fact that Fowles gave The French Lieutenant’s Woman three possible endings – since the point of the illusion is that there should be only one narrative world within which the reader is submerged, this device literally forces the reader out of the narrative world into considering the ontological and textual aspects of what she had just read.

Connor finds another way of breaking the immersive illusion in poetry, in the form of a “focus on work that in various ways illustrates emergent force rather than completed form, working out rather than completed work”

(“Postmodernism and Literature” 66). Similarly, in Poetics of Indeterminacy,

Marjorie Perloff describes postmodernist poetry as deflating the ego-based lyric of modernism and tending toward contingency and improvisation.

4.3 Pastiche, parody

Related to breaking the narrative illusion, Barry Lewis highlights pastiche as an important technique of the postmodern literary condition. Arising “from the frustration that everything was done before” (125), echoing Frederic

Jameson’s observation that “the most unique [combinations in styles and worlds] have been thought of already” (“Postmodernism and Consumer Society”

168), Lewis claims that posmodernist pastiche is a spasmodic “miscegenation”, revivifying the dead novel “by stitching together the amputated limbs and digits in new permutations” (Lewis 125). He lists a number of instances of genre

“cross-dressing”: Richard Brautigan’s The Hawkline Monster, Ishmael Reed’s

Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, and William Burroughs’s The Place of Dead

Roads using the western template; Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, Italo Calvino’s

Cosmicomics, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five using tropes of science fiction; and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Paul Auster’s The New York

Trilogy, and Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor pastiching detective fiction (Lewis

126).

Studying parody and pastiche, Linda Hutcheon concludes that “[parody] is a perfect postmodern form, for it paradoxically incorporates and challenges that which it parodies” (A Poetics of Postmodernism 11). She links this aspect to questions of authorship in postmodern art – the inevitable historical input, hitherto unacknowledged, is exposed in the “frank confiscation, quotation, excerptation, accumulation and repetition of already existing images” (Crimp

53), which undermines notions of originality and authenticity.

4.4 Disjunction, interruption, fragmentation

Connor shows the reader several examples of disconnected narrative collections, manifestations of “the distinctively postmodern phenomenon of the book formed from suites or complex ensembles of separate fictions”

(“Postmodernism and Literature” 74), including Robert Coover’s A Night At the

Movies (1987), Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989),

Iain Sinclair’s Downriver (1991), and David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999). He observes the same logic of compiled tissue in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy and John Banville’s Frames trilogy.

Another variable is reading time; Connor draws an opposition between the modernist novel intended for reading at one sitting and the postmodern novel, the role of which is “no longer of keeping its reader in step with it, or of protecting itself against interruption, but of synchronizing with what can be called a ‘culture of interruptions’” (“Postmodernism and Literature” 77). He goes on to provide a quick survey of the different ways writers have assimilated the interruptiveness:

the recursive collisions of worlds in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

(1939); the proliferating, imbricated times of Gabriel Garcia

Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970); the shifting

time-frames of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses; the temporal

compendia contained in John Barth’s fiction, especially Chimera

(1972) and The Tidewater Tales (1987); the structured

interferences of Christine Brooke-Rose’s Amalgamemnon (1984);

and the interceptive procedures of Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s

Night a Traveller (1979), made up as it is of a series of part-

novels that keep cutting across one another (“Postmodernism and

Literature” 78)

Steve Katz’s interpretation of this phenomenon is that literature remains mimetic, but it turns to mirror reality on another level, having to “echo in its form the shape of American experience, the discontinuous drama, all climax, all boring intermissions in the lobbies of theaters built on the flight decks of exploding

747s” (LeClair and McCaffery 231). In McHale’s words, the object of mimesis is

“the pluralistic and anarchistic ontological landscape of advanced industrial cultures” (38) – again, postmodernist fiction ceases to focus on epistemological relations and steps up to the ontological level.

“[P]lot is pounded into small slabs of event and circumstance, characters disintegrate into a bundle of twitching desires, settings are little more than transitory backdrops, or themes become so attenuated that it is often comically inaccurate to say that certain novels are ‘about’ such-and-such” (Lewis 126) – this is how Barry Lewis summarizes postmodern fragmentation. As many other traditional aspects of literature, wholeness and completion are distrusted, producing works such as William Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife with its various page colors, typefaces, fonts, and text-picture arrangements, or Richard

Brautigan’s and Donald Barthelme’s broken-up short stories and novels. This seems to work in direct opposition to modernism: Lewis points out that a strong movement within modernism was striving “to find new forms of continuity in the absence of the old linear plots” (128), epitomized by E. M. Forster’s “Live in fragments no longer. Only connect” (Howards End, Chapter 22) – in this respect, postmodernism directly rejects and replaces the modernist textual paradigm. In his 1975 Surfiction: Fiction Now … and Tomorrow, Raymond

Federman concludes that “[i]n those spaces where there is nothing to write, the fiction writer can, at any time, introduce material (quotations, pictures, diagrams, charts, designs, pieces of other discourses, etc.) totally unrelated to the story” (12) – a rather extreme claim that indicates the direction, but also highlights the potential cul-de-sac this postmodern loosening of traditional structures might turn out to be.

Fragmentation is also partly related to what Lewis calls “looseness of association” – the introduction of randomness into the process of composition.

Examples include B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, the pages of which are literally loose and are to be shuffled by the reader into any order, attempting to

“render the workings of the mind more naturally” (Lewis 128), pointing out the contrast between modernist completeness and authority of the artworks and the actual human psyches that process them. Lewis cites Julian Cowley, having joined him in believing that “[r]eadiness to ride with the random may be regarded as a characteristically postmodern attitude” (Cowley 87-99). Another examples are the techniques of the cut-up and the fold-in, favoured by William

Burroughs – even though the original cut-up (cutting up selected texts, putting the pieces into a hat and randomly pulling out phrases to build a poem) is older than postmodernism, having appeared in Tristan Tzara’s famous manifesto “To

Make a Dadaist Poem” from 1920, its transfer from poetry to fiction

(Burroughs’s novels Nova Express, The Soft Machine and The Ticket That

Exploded) and its correspondence with other postmodernist strategies enable this Dadaist coinage to serve as an equally emblematic aspect of postmodernism.

Observing a certain loosening of linguistic constraints in postmodernism,

Connor identifies a change in how the limitedness of language is perceived in the transition from modernism to postmodernism:

Where modernist literary texts acknowledged their linguistic

constitution in a blushing or grudging manner, postmodernist

texts candidly embraced and celebrated their wordedness in the

form of wordiness. Postmodernist texts turned modernist worries

about the limits of language into a chattering polyglossary.

(Connor, “Postmodernism and Literature” 69-70)

This could be seen as a turn to accepting contingency in the use of language

(related to Rorty), with renewed interest in “the illegitimate, the unspeakable, and the unknowable” (“Postmodernism and Literature” 70).

4.5 Temporality and temporal disorder

Connor observes a certain “dissatisfaction with [the] atemporal temper” of modernism and the consequent “disposition to attend to that which registers the passage of and exposure to time rather than its gathering up”

(“Postmodernism and Literature” 63). On the field of theory, Andrew Gibson’s

Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative focuses on forces that disrupt the linearity of time, introducing irregularities and randomness. Barry Lewis’s notion of postmodern temporal disorder is even wider – it includes meddling with historical time, using Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day as an example of revisiting and rewriting historical facts, Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada as an example of the usage of anachronisms, and Graham Swift’s Waterland as an example of blurring actual history and fantasy (Lewis 124). Lewis also notes that postmodern fiction starts to warp both chronos, the realistic, linear time, and kairos, the moments of “significant” time, demonstrating this on Robert

Coover’s Gerald’s Party’s compression of numerous significant events into one night, and Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine with its meditations on one snapping of a shoelace.

5. Post-postmodernisms

In The Politics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon concludes that

The postmodern moment has passed, even if its discursive

strategies and its ideological critique continue to live on-as do

those of modernism-in our contemporary twenty-first-century

world. Literary historical categories like modernism and

postmodernism are, after all, only heuristic labels that we create

in our attempts to chart cultural changes and continuities. Post-

postmodernism needs a new label of its own, and I conclude,

therefore, with this challenge to readers to find it-and name it for

the twenty-first century. (181)

As an indirect response to this challenge, surfacing around the beginning of the

21st century, there have been several attempts at constructing a unified theory of the developments taking place after postmodernism. The terms, apart from the automatic post-postmodernism, include performatism, digimodernism, hypermodernism, metamodernism, altermodernism, pseudomodernism, remodernism, or, on a more specific and localized scale, New Sincerity and post-irony. Often solitary endeavours, they exhibit similar imperfections, appearing

to radicalize the postmodern rather than restructure it. They pick

out and unpick what are effectively excesses of late capitalism,

liberal democracy, and information and communication

technologies rather than deviations from the postmodern

condition: cultural and (inter) textual hybridity, ‘‘coincidentality’’,

consumer (enabled) identities, hedonism, and generally speaking

a focus on spatiality rather than temporality. (Vermeulen and van

den Akker 3)

As indicated in the section “Terminological issues” of this thesis, these conceptions can never be fully relied upon, but they still contain valid observations of culture, whatever the utility of calling it a different name, and they constitute the most recent body of critical treatments of postmodernity, which is in turn the most recent theoretical handle that is stable enough to base a thesis on.

5.1 Performatism

Performatism was coined by Raoul Eshelman in 2000 and he developed it into a monograph titled Performatism, or The End of Postmodernism in 2008. If it were necessary to select one sentence to characterize its central premise, it would be the following: “Performatist works artificially ‘frame’ readers in such a way that they have no choice but to accept the external givens of a work and identify with the characters within it” (“What Is Performatism”). The name might be confusing, since it appears to be rather close to dramatic and performance art – but the etymology of Eshelman’s term, rather than

“performance”, derives from the Latin per formam, meaning “using form” to achieve the framing effect. Eshelman further elaborates on the specific use of the subject:

Performatism revives the subject by closing it off formally from

the world of signs and discourse that in postmodernism determine

subjectivity (this is why there are so many autistic characters,

fools, or naïfs in performatist narratives). The performatist subject

is not "authentic" but is formally "out of it." This allows him or her

to resist outside influence and act autonomously, against the logic

of prevailing discourse. (“What Is Performatism”)

Consistent with several other notions of post-postmodern developments,

Eshelman believes in a certain extension of modernist enthusiasm built on the postmodern absence of metanarratives. In his version, the seeming truth and authenticity are achieved through a consciously limited local narrative. There is a unique situation separated from the context and a compulsory solution is imposed on the reader “using dogmatic, ritual, or some other coercive means”

(Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism 3). Identification makes sense only within the confines of the work. A paradoxical double awareness ensues:

In this way performatism gets to have its postmetaphysical cake

and eat it too. On the one hand, you’re practically forced to

identify with something implausible or unbelievable within the

frame-to believe in spite of yourself-but on the other, you still feel

the coercive force causing this identification to take place, and

intellectually you remain aware of the particularity of the

argument at hand. Metaphysical skepticism and irony aren’t

eliminated, but are held in check by the frame. (Performatism, or

the End of Postmodernism 3)

Obviously, Eshelman’s theory could be accused of selective simplification and postulating a distinct category of works where integration into the modern or postmodern framework would be comparatively easy (a universality which is not flattering for the utility of both terms). However, taking this perspective, even if with a grain of salt, might be rather useful for analyzing literary representations of mental disorder – apart from explicitly mentioning autism,

Eshelman’s notion of removing the subject from the “logic of prevailing discourse” by itself suggests the extreme where an abnormal psyche is

“removed” from the discourse of rationality.

5.2 Digimodernism

Another author who was rather bold in declaring postmodernism dead was Alan Kirby in Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the

Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture, claiming that “[since] its first appearance in the second half of the 1990s under the impetus of new technologies, digimodernism has decisively displaced postmodernism to establish itself as the twenty-first century’s new cultural paradigm” (1). Its manifestations should include “onwardness, haphazardness, evanescence, […] anonymous, social and multiple authorship [, and also] infantilism, earnestness, endlessness, and apparent reality” (1). Using examples such as reality shows,

Web 2.0, videogames and crossover fiction, Kirby stresses the possibility of reader/viewer intervention; adding to or shaping the existing text, often digitally (which also denotes usage of fingers). Since a complicated notion of authorship was an important element in postmodernity as well, one must ask

29 what the relationship between postmodernism and digimodernism is supposed to be – Kirby quickly addresses these doubts by positing a “modulated continuity” (2) between the two. (However, the rhetoric still advocates a semantic rupture by describing the early years when “a burgeoning digimodernism coexisted with a weakened, retreating postmodernism” and arguing that “the flaws of early digimodernism derive from its contamination by the worst features of a decomposing postmodernism” (2).)

5.3 Hypermodernism

In Hypermodern Times, Gilles Lipovetsky talks about a “modernist renaissance”, in which the modernist enthusiasm and faith in progress are, so to say, in hyperdrive – there is hyperconsumerism, new individualism, narcissism, and need for control, only this time without the metanarratives of belief systems annihilated by postmodernism. It is said to have been gaining power in the background of postmodernism in its heyday, looking through its dismissive and detached quality at the new set of the only “real” problems of the Western world, questions “of protection, security and defense of social benefits, of urgent humanitarian aid and safeguarding the planet” (Lipovetsky

39). There seems to be a particular capacity about modernist faith in progress without any belief system indicating where to go:

The less one has a teleological vision of the future, the more that

future lends itself to being manufactured in a hyperrealist way:

science and technology in combination aspire to explore the

infinitely great and the infinitely small, to reshape life, to

manufacture mutants, to offer a semblance of immortality, to

resurrect vanished species, to programme the genetic future.

(Lipovetsky 43)

Henrik Anckarsäter connects the notion of hypermodernity with a resurrection of psychiatry after its alleged death in the 1960s and 1970s, observing the growing presence and acceptability of mental disorder in the post-postmodern social and cultural discourse:

Books like ‘Prozac Nation’ and ‘Listening to Prozac’ introduced

‘cosmetic pharmacology,’ opening the way for medicating

undesired psychological characteristics, such as shyness or

inattentiveness, without being ‘disordered’ in any more general

sense. […] Widespread awareness of psychiatric diagnoses has

led to significant increases in the prevalence not only of diagnoses

assigned in the health care system (especially autism spectrum

disorders, ADHD, depression, bipolar disorder, and the cognitive

disorders related to aging), but also of self-identified labels for

people who recognize their problems or peculiarities as related to

psychiatric disorders (like web-communities for “Aspies”). (128)

For the needs of this thesis, this is a significant observation, offering a partial explanation of why David Foster Wallace had so much space and energy to devote to constructing characters with symptoms of various mental disorders, and also why the reader community gave such a warm welcome to novels where mental disorder arguably occupies a central position, Infinite Jest and

The Pale King.

5.4 Metamodernism

Vermeulen and van den Akker’s argumentation is comparatively modest, suggesting that contemporary culture exhibits an oscillation between known tendencies, namely modern commitment and enthusiasm, and postmodern detachment and irony. In 2010, they link their concept to the neoromantic movement, stressing the ambivalence of romanticism, as aptly put by Isaiah

Berlin, describing romanticism as:

unity and multiplicity. It is fidelity to the particular [...] and also

mysterious tantalising vagueness of outline. It is beauty and

ugliness. It is art for art’s sake, and art as instrument of social

salvation. It is strength and weakness, individualism and

collectivism, purity and corruption, revolution and reaction, peace

and war, love of life and love of death. (18)

The authors suggest that this bipolarity is symbolical of contemporary culture’s position between the enduring modernist sensibility and the processes of postmodernity, in many respects viewed as a dead end for meaning and art itself (if we should extend the disappearance of authorial authority and the increasing temporality and temporariness to their extremes, the result would hardly be reconcilable with any presently conceivable notion of art). They find that

new generations of artists increasingly abandon the aesthetic

precepts of deconstruction, parataxis, and pastiche in favor of

aesth-ethical [stress on separating the word ethical] notions of

reconstruction, myth, and metaxis. These trends and tendencies

can no longer be explained in terms of the postmodern. They

express a (often guarded) hopefulness and (at times feigned)

sincerity that hint at another structure of feeling, intimating

another discourse. History, it seems, is moving rapidly beyond its

all too hastily proclaimed end. (2)

In other words, what looked as the end of history from the postmodernist perspective, seems to offer considerable space for further progress, if culture allows itself to believe in some kind of it:

The current, metamodern discourse also acknowledges that

history’s purpose will never be fulfilled because it does not exist.

Critically, however, it nevertheless takes toward it as if it [did]

exist. Inspired by a modern naiveté yet informed by postmodern

skepticism, the metamodern discourse consciously commits itself

to an impossible possibility. (5)

Vermeulen and van den Akker link their findings to, among others, Eshelman’s performatism, because its conscious self-limitation by framing the subject is similar to the notion of wanting progress despite knowing that there is no metanarrative within which it could happen.

5.5 New Sincerity

The conception most tightly interconnected with David Foster Wallace’s prose is the one he himself helped creating, hypothesizing that rebellion in post-postmodern literature might take on the form of a new generation of “anti-

33 rebels” who “dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction” (“E Unibus

Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” 192-93). In the already mentioned essay

“David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction”, Adam Kelly confirms this placement, observing the “widespread agreement […] that David

Foster Wallace affirmed and embodied sincerity as a crucial value in his life and work” (131) and suggesting that Wallace’s reconceived sincerity retains the love of truth, but at the same time moves away from representation and displaces metaphysics (146).

Apart from this Wallace-specific analysis, the idea of New Sincerity as a general category in literature does not seem to go beyond a simple shift toward a less metaphysical and more ethical preoccupation. In his outline of a university course on New Sincerity, Adler lists Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, and Jeffrey Eugenides as the major authors who share this label with Wallace.

Informal accounts also include Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, and other writers related to Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. The natural relatability of the name, as opposed to the prefixed modernisms, secured New

Sincerity some discussion in popular media as well, such as Jonathan

Fitzgerald’s article in The Atlantic titled "Sincerity, Not Irony, Is Our Age's

Ethos".

6. Mental disorder and postmodern literature

Postmodernism, introducing various splits and interruptions on multiple levels of perceiving and understanding literature, has been observed by many to increasingly portray the irrational and pathological processes of the human mind (for example, Beckett’s connection with mental illness is pointed out in

Barry, Broome and Heron’s “Not I: Beckett and psychiatry – psychiatry in literature”). A major volume testifying to this effect, Pathology and the

Postmodern: Mental Illness as Discourse and Experience, edited by Dwight Fee, was published in 2000.

Given the widespread agreement that one of the characteristics of postmodernism is a “denial of self as a central presence in experience”

(Gubrium and Holstein 685), the self might be a good starting point in discovering the place of mental disorder within postmodern literature. Even though schizophrenia does not necessarily threaten the self (it often does), it is a popular and rather versatile concept of split mental functions, occasionally used as a catch-all diagnosis for the postmodern psyche. Importantly, in

Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, possibly the most referenced book attempting to grasp postmodernism, Fredric Jameson follows the trace of schizophrenia in postmodern culture:

I have found Lacan’s account of schizophrenia useful here not

because I have any way of knowing whether it has clinical

accuracy but chiefly because— as description rather than

diagnosis— it seems to me to offer a suggestive aesthetic model.

[…] Very briefly, Lacan describes schizophrenia as a breakdown in

the signifying chain, that is, the interlocking syntagmatic series of

signifiers which constitutes an utterance or a meaning.

(Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 26)

The language-based perspective makes the concept implicitly useful in interpreting literature, resulting in the term “schizophrenic writing” (26). Based on Saussurean structuralism, meaning “is generated by the movement from signifier to signifier. […] When that relationship breaks down, when the links of the signifying chain snap, then we have schizophrenia in the form of a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers” (26), rubble being a notorious metaphor of postmodern art. The implication for self as individual identity is that given that

“personal identity is […] the effect of a certain temporal unification of past and future with one’s present [… and this] active temporal unification is itself a function of language”,

If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the

sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present,

and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life. With

the breakdown of the signifying chain, therefore, the

schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material

signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated

presents in time. (26-27)

Jameson goes on to demonstrate this reduction to disconnected material signifiers on a passage from Marguerite Séchehaye’s Autobiography of a

Schizophrenic Girl and a poem by Bob Perelman (Language Poetry/New

Sentence).

Another diagnosis connected with the self as identity seems to be depersonalization disorder: as documented by Conor Michael Dawson in his article “The Fractured Self: Postmodernism and Depersonalization Disorder”, some texts show how “the postmodern condition induces a depersonalized identity leaving the protagonists in a state of existential insecurity and disconnection from their sense of self” (33). Dwight Fee describes the socioeconomic condition in the United States during the postmodern age, where

“‘[m]ental hygiene’ movements in the early twentieth century, based on more holistic and preventative approaches, were phased out” (4) and at the same time there was an “almost complete demise of community and publicly funded mental health care” (5). This background further adds to the gravity of grand- scale destabilizations of historical institutions and customs – drastically altering

“gender, family, sexuality, work, [or] intimacy” (5), new skills are required of the self:

Persons must contend with an environment with less and less

discursive and institutional foundations for living, requiring active

interpretation of ‘local,’ situated meanings. It amounts to having a

self that is always one step outside of things, and, in the relative

absence of sustaining traditions, being forced to engage meaning

on relatively unpredictable terms. … Amidst the flows of electronic

and visual significations, positioning one's self as a stable unit with

rational grounding in the world becomes difficult and perhaps

purposeless. (Fee 5-6)

Fee draws on Lyotard and Baudrillard to link mental illness to the de-centered world of simulations, where the self has to hold discordant, often incommensurable contents. Gottschalk, surmising that specific epochs “foster distinct types of mental disorder in [their] members” (18), directly asks the question what the postmodern set of mental disorders might be. He presents the reader with a major collection of diagnoses of the postmodern self found in existing theory (18-19), including anxiety (Massumi), schizophrenia (Jameson,

Levin), multiphrenia and fragmentation (Gergen), paranoia (Burgin, Frank), depression and nihilism (Levin), self-possession (Kroker), postnomia (Frank), anti-sociality (Gottschalk), narcissistic pathology (Frosh, Langman), schizoid dichotomy (Kellner), terror and chronic boredom (Grossberg, Petro), panic and envy (Kroker, Cook), and strained casualness and ecstatic violence

(MacCannell). Observing the various paradoxes and juxtapositions this collection provides, Gottschalk suggests that the original notion of self itself is considered an obsolete concept inherited from modernity as “a finite, rational, self-motivated and predictable entity which displayed consistency with itself and others across contexts and time” (21). The question is whether the poststructuralist/postmodern self, a “fluid, liminal and protean selfhood” (21), is sufficient to maintain mental health in a biological organism. Gottschalk’s essay is introduced with a pessimistic summary of postmodern mental health:

The self-inflicted psychotic pollution by a culture will not respond

to any psychiatric treatment as long as its main symptoms

(regression, dissociation, de-individualization) are systematically

nurtured and encouraged by surrounding cultural milieux. . . .

Those of us who live today in Europe and the US suffer from a

chronic psychosis whose intensity is still mild. If the manifestly

paranoid and schizoid characteristics of our daily behaviors are

not experienced for what they really are, it is simply because we

all share them. (Laplantine 112, trans. Gottschalk)

Thus, it is not only institutions that are destabilized, but also diagnoses – in postmodernity, it is impossible to posit a center of normality defined by certain criteria, failing which would clearly mark disorder as excentric.

In “Postmodernism and Literature (or: Word Salad Days, 1960-90)”, one of the key short summaries of literary postmodernism, Barry Lewis highlights paranoia as one of its major characteristics – a “panic of identity” (130) brought on by the “threat of total engulfment by somebody else’s system” (129). Lewis uses Randle McMurphy of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,

Yossarian of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Billy Pilgrim of Kurt Vonnegut’s

Slaughterhouse-Five to demonstrate how the authors study engulfment by confining their characters into their plots (meaning piece of ground) by external authorities which often misuse their power. A common symptom of paranoia is belief in conspiracy theories – Lewis points out that Thomas Pynchon’s V., The

Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Vineland all contain characters that

“stumble upon subterranean schemes and cabals which threaten the rights of the individual” (131).

Lewis also attempts to outline the more abstract connection between postmodernism and mental disorder, drawing on Lyotard, Deleuze, Guattari, and Jameson. Importantly, he reminds us that modernism did employ

“distortions of narrative time, pastiche, fragmentation and so on” (133), but while modernist authors retained a belief in the recoverability of a coherent system of cultural values, postmodernists gave up hope and only “delighted in delirium”

(133).

7. Mental disorder in the works of David Foster Wallace

7.1 Autism spectrum disorders

What is most often referred to as autism is a heterogeneous (taking on various forms), pervasive (present in multiple areas) developmental disorder

(Veague 4-6) that causes “social and behavioral problems that affect [one’s] ability to communicate with others” (2), with a prevalence of 3 to 6 in every

1,000 children (3). There is a “vast difference in severity” (4) of the symptoms, which may range from complete disability to almost unnoticeable nuisance. The two major deficit areas are “social interaction and verbal and nonverbal communication” with occasional occurrence of “unusual, repetitive, or severely limited activities and interests” (5), such as a child’s seemingly obsessive preoccupation with a single toy. Because of the vast differences in severity,

“autism is best described using a spectrum approach” (Veague 10), viewing the disorders on a continuum.

A closely related pervasive developmental disorder is Asperger’s syndrome, the sufferers of which “have problems in social interaction and restricted interests in activities, but lack the speech delay often seen in autism.

Further, people with Asperger syndrome demonstrate normal intellectual development and are able to care for themselves in ways appropriate to their age” (7), which is also why it is sometimes referred to as “high-functioning autism”. There is ample anecdotal evidence of the so-called “autistic savant skills”, where the syndrome seems to have made way for extraordinary abilities to memorize or calculate. But even without savant skills, it is important to

41 understand that the afflicted people can become “experts on something like astronomy or mathematics, [since t]opics with complicated patterns allow someone with Asperger syndrome to work alone for extended periods of time”

(10); notice the attention requirements implied by solitary, focused work with complex systems. This fact is especially significant for this thesis – in The Pale

King, David Foster Wallace explicitly states that attention is the object of his study and he often puts his characters precisely in the position of a working professional whose mental processes are inefficient, obsessive, or positively dysfunctional.

7.1.1 Autism and attention

Veague lists the ten characteristics that form Schopler’s notion of the

“culture of autism” (problems faced by autistic people), including:

- “2. Frequent attention to details but difficulty understanding the

meaning of how those details fit together”

- “5. Difficulties with attention—some individuals are very distractible,

others have difficulty shifting attention when it’s time to make

transitions” (57)

Attention is obviously a significant variable in autism spectrum disorders. In mild autism or Asperger’s syndrome, a major obstacle of everyday life is impaired executive functioning (Hahn, Bentley), a large part of which consists in impaired cognitive flexibility, which is only another term for attention shifting

(“Cognitive Flexibility”, Wikipedia).

Having outlined autism spectrum disorders and their relationship with attention, it is time to proceed to David Foster Wallace’s thought, where attention, and attention shifting in particular, seem to have occupied a central position.

7.2 This Is Water and David Foster Wallace’s philosophy of the everyday

7.2.1 Attention in This Is Water

An emotionally charged expression of Wallace’s personal philosophy (or so it seems), almost the entire message of This Is Water is based on acquiring control over what one pays attention to. Wallace sees the value of liberal arts education in “the choice of what to think about” (“Transcription of the 2005

Kenyon Commencement Address” 2), as opposed to it being driven by the

“default setting”:

everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep

belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest,

most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think

about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so

socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is

our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. (3)

He goes on to specify his understanding of the ideal/desired mechanism of education:

learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some

control over how and what you think. It means being conscious

and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to

choose how you construct meaning from experience” (4)

While this is an intellectually stimulating speculation, the fact that Wallace targets specifically the component of the human mind that is usually impaired out of proportion in autism spectrum disorders is at least intriguing. At this point, the biographical fact that Wallace suffered from depression for most of his life should be mentioned. One interpretation of the focus on attention might be that the author, feeling traces of the autistic tendencies in his own mind or simply being able to understand them very well, created an experimental theory that education could partly aid in repairing these tendencies, even though attention problems, a neurological issue, are unlikely to be solved by means of liberal arts education. This way, the message of This Is Water might be dual – on the one hand, it is a motivational reminder to the healthy of the possible benefit to be acquired by training their attention, while on the other hand, considering the context, it could be a manifesto of the people with slight autistic tendencies introducing an idea of the degree of control over their attention they would like to have but they do not and they suffer as a result. The only certain fact is that what Wallace describes as the biggest mental struggle that human beings face is exactly the aspect of mind because of which so many people with autism spectrum disorders get stressed and frustrated leading to difficulties concentrating, obsessive thoughts, and finally depression.

The result of successfully paying attention is referred to as awareness, and the speech ends with this rather simple philosophical position which acquires entirely new layers of meaning when considered together with the situation of people who are deficient in attention:

the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do

with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness;

awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain

sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding

ourselves over and over: "This is water." "This is water." It is

unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the

adult world day in and day out. (9-10)

7.2.2 Attention in The Pale King

Suffice it to quote the “Notes and Asides” section that contains what looks like Wallace’s personal note about the composition of the planned novel:

Embryonic outline:

2 Broad arcs:

1. Paying attention, boredom, ADD [(attention deficit

disorder)], Machines vs. people at performing mindless

jobs. (The Pale King 709)

Wallace’s philosophy of the everyday, indicated in This Is Water, seems to pervade his fiction as well as non-fiction. The Pale King is a strange hybrid of these two approaches, containing both text intended for publication and text of unknown intentions, serving most probably as a kind of research for the needs

45 of the novel in the form of concept analysis and argumentation. As such, it occasionally reiterates the thesis of This Is Water. Some instances are carried out in colloquial language, using the metaphor of life as a “ball game” several times: “The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not. Sylvanshine viewed himself as weak or defective in the area of will.” (The Pale King 16) In this case, the obstacle is found in the category of will, at other points the importance of filtering is stressed: “The whole ball game was perspective, filtering, the choice of perception’s objects.” (21) The importance of filtering is augmented by viewing it from the perspective of physics and entropy:

“Reynolds’s dictum was that reality was a fact-pattern the bulk of which was entropic and random. The trick was homing in on which facts were important”

(22). Attention is also ascribed power and an emotional valence: “It was in public high school that this boy learned the terrible power of attention and what you pay attention to.” (120)

However, its length and the fact that unlike This Is Water (which is a speech), The Pale King was supposed to be read, enable it to grow these propositions to a literary structure of impressive dimensions – if we are to believe his note to himself, Wallace has undertaken the task of making an exhaustive study of the social and psychological implications of various degrees of (in)ability to control one’s attention.

7.2.3 Clarification of stance on biographical hypotheses

Unlike a couple of voices on the internet who made that conclusion, I do not intend to suggest that Wallace himself necessarily suffered from some sort of mild high functioning autism, even though such a scenario is possible. In

“Authority and American Usage”, he admits that he sometimes appears “semi- autistic” (97) because he is unable to manage the common social situation of asking someone to leave his apartment, a situation he sees as “delicate and fraught with social complexity” (97). Landau points out the “obsessively observed detail”, “hypersensitivity and constant rumination” of his prose – qualities that correspond to the symptoms of autism in multiple places. Finally, it is well-known that Wallace committed suicide because of his depression, but there is some space to hypothesize what associated conditions might have existed along with it; depression itself might be triggered by stress (Veague 40) that comes from another source, possibly from the many pressures reality puts on the autistic mind.

In any case, Wallace seems to understand the problems of mildly autistic people extremely well, and in The Pale King, he challenges these problems using his characters. Additionally, his descriptions show an incredible amount of detail, resembling eidetic, or more simply, photographic memory, which is probably the closest one can get to the perspective of a person with highly functioning autism.

7.3 Autism spectrum disorders in The Pale King

7.3.1 Context of creation and themes

The Pale King is the last, unfinished novel of David Foster Wallace. After estimating that it was “one-third complete” (Max) in 2007, Wallace committed suicide in 2008. His editor, Michael Pietsch, had to compose The Pale King from a “pile of nearly two hundred pages” (Max), which was a part of the actual story that Wallace planned for publication, and “hundreds of other pages— drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel” (Max). It is therefore reasonable to expect that the volume published in 2011 contains much rumination and overly detailed subject treatment that Wallace would not be willing to publish while alive. As such, it offers extraordinary insight into the mind of the author – especially what it was researching and dealing with in the process of producing an integral literary artifact.

Content-wise, the fragmented plot of The Pale King revolves mostly around the Internal Revenue Service (tax authority in anglophone countries) and its various employees with their life stories. A significant part of the text consists of specific psychological observations about boredom (using tax law both to examine it and to elicit it in the reader), attention control, social interaction, anxiety, and depression.

7.3.2 Character analysis

I will now go through some of the major characters in The Pale King and examine how their mental struggles resemble problems related to autism spectrum disorders.

7.3.2.1 Claude Sylvanshine

The character with a psyche that is arguably the farthest from the generally accepted criteria of normality is Claude Sylvanshine – Wallace devotes the entire second chapter to an exhaustive presentation of the processes of his mind. He exhibits a variety of behaviours commonly associated with autism, some pervading every aspect of this chapter’s narrative, some limited to brief but unequivocal episodes.

7.3.2.1.1 Repetitive behaviour

One of the central characteristics of autism, we can see repetitive behaviour in the scene where Sylvanshine “mentally repeated the word illiterate several dozen times until the word ceased to mean anything and became just a rhythmic sound” (7-8). To make sure that the reader does not interpret it as a manifestation of an avant-garde, original personality, it is stated right away that

“[it] was something he did when he was under stress and did not want an incursion” (8). This corresponds with the role of repetitive behaviour in autism, where it might serve both as “an attempt to reduce sensory input, eg. focusing on one particular sound may reduce the impact of a loud, distressing

49 environment” and as “a way to deal with stress and anxiety and to block out uncertainty” (“Repetitive Behaviour and Autism”).

Another instance of this kind of phonetic repetition suddenly occurs a few pages later:

If you spell it fast with stress on the h and the a and then the

second a and the h again then headache becomes a lilting

children’s rhymed refrain, something to jump rope to. Look down

your shirt and spell attic. (The Pale King 13)

The unexpected remembrance of a prank (looking down your shirt and saying what sounds like “a titty I see”) chained to the previous sentence only because of its relation to children and spelling leads us to the section about

Sylvanshine’s inability to concentrate.

7.3.2.1.2 Difficulty concentrating

The first chapter about Sylvanshine is written in a way that the stream of thought constantly switches between exam material (he travels to take an exam) and a mix of personal thought processes, often random observations of things and happenings in his environment (even though it is written in third person, the perceptions are obviously centered around him). The very first page of Sylvanshine contains an example of this:

Sylvanshine’s window seat was in 8-something, an emergency

row, beside an older lady with a sacklike chin who could not seem

despite strenuous efforts to open her nuts. The core accounting

equation A = L + E can be dissolved and reshuffled into

everything from E = A – L to beyond. The craft rode the updrafts

and downdrafts like a dinghy in a gale. (7)

We can see the sharp divides where the stream of thought changes focus – the utter absence of both coherence and cohesion (this does not necessarily apply to individual focal points, the description of the flight would be coherent if separated) simulate Sylvanshine’s inability to think productively, leave alone learn efficiently. Even though he has the motivation to stay focused – the outcome of the exam has important consequences for his job and salary – he is unable to control his attention. There is a vicious circle of distraction:

When Sylvanshine studied for the exam now the worst thing was

that studying any one thing would set off a storm in his head

about all the other things he hadn’t studied and felt he was still

weak on, making it almost impossible to concentrate, causing him

to fall even further behind. (12)

He is also being constantly distracted by sensory stimuli, which is dealt with in the next section.

7.3.2.1.3 Sensory hypersensitivity

In the flight scene, the surroundings of Sylvanshine are described in an exhaustive and highly attentive manner. That alone might be merely a question of literary style – the evidence pointing to hypersensitivity can be found in the instances where the character is irritated or intrigued. For example, his imagination completes a simple smell with an obsessive degree of physical detail when it is said that “[the] darkly gray head ahead of him gave off a scent

51 of Brylcreem that was even now surely soaking and staining the little paper towel on the seat top” (9). In another instance, he cannot help focusing on a very small area on a person’s body:

Sylvanshine had once been on a first date with a Xerox rep who

had complex and slightly repulsive patterns of callus on her

fingers from playing the banjo semi-professionally as her off-time

passion; and he remembered […] the pads’ calluses deep yellow

in the low dinnerlight as he’d spoken to the musician” (21)

“all the while watching the calluses as the woman worked her knife and fork, and that he’d been so nervous and tense that he’d yammered on and on about himself” (21)

7.3.2.1.4 Planning

It is explicitly stated that Sylvanshine’s “great weakness was strategic organization and apportionment of time” (15). This seems to be partly caused by his inability to concentrate and disregard unimportant thoughts, resulting in an absurd learning paralysis:

Even the sight of a mop, rollable bucket, or custodian […] rattled

Sylvanshine to the point where precious time was lost before he

could even think about how to set up a workable schedule for

maximally efficient reviewing for the exam, even mentally, which

he did every day. (15)

However, his problem with intrusive thoughts manifests itself most severely when he is trying to come to terms with his future actions. Planning, a stressful

52 and exhausting activity for autistic people, is by definition a “complex, dynamic process, wherein a sequence of planned actions must be developed, monitored, re-evaluated and updated” (“Executive Dysfunction”). Four pages of The Pale

King are taken up by Sylvanshine being in “a kind of paralysis” caused by his reflecting on the logistics of his trip, imagining the worst possible outcomes at all points of his plan and what sequences of action they would trigger:

the issue of whether the REC sent a van for transfers or whether

Sylvanshine would have to take a cab from the little airport had

not been conclusively resolved – and then how to arrive and

check in and where to store his three bags while he checked in

and filled out his arrival and Postcode payroll and withholding

forms and orientational materials then somehow get directions

and proceed to the apartment that Systems had rented for him at

government rates and get there in time to find someplace to eat

that was either in walking distance or would require getting

another cab (29)

While doing this, he even fleshes out a scenario of trying to defraud the cab driver which he never considered trying – his planning anxiety makes him go to such detail that he imagines other people’s perspective:

how exactly would he reassure the cabbie that he really was

coming right back out […] instead of it being a ruse designed to

defraud the driver of his fare, Sylvanshine ducking out the back of

the Angler’s Cove apartment complex or even conceivably

barricading himself in the apartment and not responding to the

driver’s knock […] or the driver’s queries/threats through the

apartment door (29-30)

Since the analyzed characteristics of autism are tightly interconnected, the distracting aspect of Sylvanshine’s planning anxiety would qualify as obsessive thoughts, but he exhibits more clear-cut symptoms as well, as outlined below.

7.3.2.1.5 Intrusive thoughts

The impairment of Sylvanshine’s planning abilities and his problems with concentration are obviously parts of the larger attention issue, and both overlap with inability to resist intrusive thoughts (which in turn mirrors the inability to resist intrusive sensory stimuli). This excerpt reveals both a kind of phobophobia (fear of fear) and a self-diagnosis of “not knowing the trick” of not thinking about something:

Knowing that internal stress could cause failure on the exam

merely set up internal stress about the prospect of internal stress.

There must be some other way to deal with the knowledge of the

disastrous consequences fear and stress could bring about. Some

answer or trick of the will: the ability not to think about it. What if

everyone knew this trick but Claude Sylvanshine? (19)

This collection of conditions suffices for us to proceed to the necessary repercussions of constant distress and the consequent fatigue.

7.3.2.1.6 Depression

Even though depression is the result of autistic tendencies rather than a tendency in and of itself, it deserves to be considered in the light of previous sections. Sylvanshine attempts to self-diagnose:

He frequently had this feeling: What if there was something

essentially wrong with Claude Sylvanshine that wasn’t wrong with

other people? What if he was simply ill-suited, the way some

people are born without limbs or certain organs? The neurology of

failure. (19-20)

Because of all the mental clutter of sensory hypersensitivity, obsessive thoughts, and planning anxiety, Sylvanshine, not being able to cope with the time-constrained and social-rules-regulated capitalist environment where even perfectly normal people are struggling to survive and replicate, is under constant stress and he often thinks that his inability to control his attention is a medical condition. Such is his intimate relationship with depression that “he tend[s] to conceptualize some ultimate, platonic-level Terror as a bird of prey in whose mere aloft shadow the prey [i]s stricken and paralyzed, trembling as the shadow enlarge[s] and bec[omes] inevitability” (19). The names of the emotions present in his depression are consistently capitalized, Sylvanshine is

“destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair” (20) and he “fe[els] again the edge of the shadow of the wing of Total Terror and Disqualification”

(33). Importantly, these emotions have a strong social component as the tendencies that lead toward it are often aggravated by social interaction, the impairment of which is the central symptom of autism. The word

“disqualification” implies that there are qualified others that may judge this and the very last words of Sylvanshine’s stream of thought express fear that it will be “made manifest to all those present in the moment that Sylvanshine finally, and forever, lost it.” (33)

7.3.2.2 David Cusk

While Sylvanshine exhibits a rather diffuse attention issue, David Cusk’s problems are centered around a very specific issue: in his adolescence, he starts suffering from sweat attacks.

7.3.2.2.1 Social anxiety

Starting at the point where “he became self-conscious about the sweating thing” (121), Cusk’s thought processes and even physical actions almost never leave the topic of how to prevent other people from noticing his sweating:

Without trying to or wanting to, he started to imagine what his

sweating might look like in class: his face gleaming with a mixture

of sebum and sweat, his shirt sodden at the collar and pits, his

hair separated into wet little creepy spikes from his head’s running

sweat. It was the worst if he was in a position where he thought

girls could maybe see it. (121)

The paralysis in front of other people is especially well described in the scenes where minute details of Cusk’s decision processes are described:

torn between the desire to wipe the sweat from his face before it

actually began to drip and someone saw it dripping and the fear

that any kind of wiping movement would draw people’s attention

and cause those in the desks on either side of him to see what

was happening (123)

Social anxiety alone rarely has anything to do with autism, but Cusk’s cognitive flexibility issues aggravate it to a point where the individual becomes socially dysfunctional – even though, ironically, his grades improve because he spends more time studying alone in his room.

7.3.2.2.2 Intrusive thoughts

Sylvanshine was stressed about stress and Cusk is not different with regard to creating emotional vicious circles because of sheer inability to control his attention. He has a fear of fear, described claustrophobically as an “endless funhouse hall of mirrors of fear” (126). The intrusive thoughts begin with one irrational idea:

a terrible thought rose as if from nowhere inside him: What if I all

of a sudden start sweating? And on that one day this thought,

which presented mostly as a terrible sudden fear that washed

through him like a hot tide, made him break instantly into a

heavy, unstoppable sweat (123) and then proceed to dominate the boy’s existence, coming without his “trying to or wanting to” (121), and rendering ordinary life exceedingly difficult.

7.3.2.2.3 Isolation and concentration as a remedy

The psychological pressure experienced by Cusk is so strong that negative health consequences are inevitable:

It was by far the worst feeling he had ever had in his life, and the

whole attack lasted almost forty minutes, and for the rest of the

day he went around in a kind of trance of shock and spent

adrenaline, and that day was the actual start of the syndrome

(124)

Health, when threatened to this extent, obviously requires regular alleviation of the symptoms and rest - there is a particular information about Cusk that indicates autism not because of approaching it in symptoms, but rather in treatment - the description of the conditions where this boy does not suffer could be textbook advice for calming down a mildly autistic child: “it was only when he was in private and totally absorbed and concentrating on something else that he was OK” (127).

7.3.2.3 Lane Dean

The character of Lane Dean, displaying less dysfunction than both

Sylvanshine and Cusk, is used to analyze one of the more subtle characteristics of autistic children, which is a debilitating inability to make a decision, a

“terrible weakness or lack of values” which to him “felt like a muscle he just did not have” (53) – which, as in Sylvanshine (Wallace reused this and many other images of anxiety in multiple characters), basically refers to the absence of willpower as a medical condition. Dean’s girlfriend has an appointment for

58 abortion and he cannot decide whether he loves her or not, and his frustration and anxiety are not caused primarily by the situation, but rather by his paralysis by indecision:

he felt like he could see the edge or outline of what a real vision

of hell might be. It was of two great and terrible armies within

himself, opposed and facing each other, silent. There would be

battle but no victor. Or never a battle – the armies would stay like

that, motionless, looking across at each other and seeing therein

something so different and alien from themselves that they could

not understand (53-54)

This could qualify as a theory of the internal dynamics of autistic indecision.

7.3.2.4 David Wallace

Even though the character with Wallace’s own name is made seem the least afflicted with mental issues, he makes a pedantic observation of a scene happening on the parking lot at one of IRS’s offices that might be fruitfully interpreted as a metaphor of the internal anxiety that complex logistical or social situations cause in the autistic mind:

the main cause of the excruciating slowness […] was what

emerged as the even worse, more costive and paralyzed jam of

vehicles on the access road itself. This was chiefly caused by the

fact that the access road’s appended parking lots were already

quite full, and that the farther along the access road the lots

were, the fuller they were (366)

This is the static part of the description – there is paralysis and frustration of driving in “extreme heat and humidity” (367) and seeing the paralysis worsen with decreasing distance to the desirable point of arrival. In addition to this, there is dynamic description of the traffic situation summed up as

“phenomenally bad planning, resulting in gross inefficiency, waste, and frustration for everyone involved” (368-369):

the incoming vehicles could not backtrack out the way they came

in order to settle for spots in the progressively more distant and

less desirable lots they had passed on their way in quest of the

best lots – for, of course, the access road was one-way all the

way around its curve, so vehicles that couldn’t find a spot in the

best lots had now to proceed forward all the way back out away

from the REC to the EXIT ONLY sign, turn left without any kind of

light onto Self-Storage, drive the several hundred yards east back

to the REC entrance with its ENTRANCE ONLY sign, and then try

to turn left (against oncoming traffic, which obviously further

slowed our own, westbound lane’s tortured progress (368)

Traffic jams are special in the respect that the vehicle basically becomes a part of one’s body that cannot be left behind – therefore, being blocked by other cars can amount to claustrophobic feelings despite the fact that one’s biological body would easily make its way out of the place.

The counterpart of this in the mind of an autistic person might be a social situation where settling for an immediate, partial solution (parking in lots that are not desirable) leads to something highly uncomfortable and dangerous

(walking among the cars in the heat “along the access road’s unpaved edge” with one person even “slip[ping] and cartwheel[ing] into the drainage ditch by the road’s side” (367)), but trying to reach a distant, ideal solution (parking near the entrance) will probably lead to failure and repetition of the whole process, with constant stress about what to do and what will happen. This kind of planning anxiety echoes that of Claude Sylvanshine and resembles David

Foster Wallace’s own self-reported semi-autistic tendency:

in real life I always seem to have a hard time winding up a

conversation or asking somebody to leave, and sometimes the

moment becomes so delicate and fraught with social complexity

that I’ll get overwhelmed trying to sort out all the different

possible ways of saying it and all the different implications of each

option and will just sort of blank out and do it totally straight – “I

want to terminate the conversation and not have you be in my

apartment anymore” – which evidently makes me look either as if

I’m very rude and abrupt or as if I’m semi-autistic and have no

sense of how to wind up a conversation gracefully. (“Authority

and American Usage” 97)

Formulations like “all the different possible ways” and “all the different implications of each option” mirror precisely the obsessive preoccupation with possible future negative situations that we saw in Claude Sylvanshine’s fear of logistics, David Cusk’s fear of sweat attacks, and (fictional) David Wallace’s painstaking detail of perception of a frustrating traffic situation.

7.3.2.5 “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle

Up to a certain point, Fogle’s reasonably sane and balanced narrative of his own life does not cast doubt on his mental well-adjustedness, maybe except for occasional experimentation with drugs. Then we suddenly learn about a stereotypically autistic trait that even started in childhood and, like a proper pervasive developmental disorder, reversed the development of certain skills for a couple of years:

a sudden period where I could not read. I mean that I actually

could read – my mother knew I could read from when we’d read

children’s books together. But for almost two years at Machesney,

instead of reading something I’d count the words in it, as though

reading was the same as just counting the words. (209)

When the onset of autism is delayed until the age when speech and language skills are acquired, the scenario where the child suddenly recedes and seemingly loses a number of skills that it already had is very common (find sources). And counting is precisely the kind of repetitive, concentrated activity that autistic children use to reduce anxiety. Fogle admits the neurological nature by saying that “[it] was a strange problem in [his] developmental wiring”

(209) and remembers the involuntary nature of the impulse to count: “the feeling of not especially wanting to count words or intending to but just not being able to help it – it was frustrating and strange. It got worse under pressure or nervousness, which is typical of things like that.” (209) An interesting aspect of most Wallace’s characters with suspected Asperger’s syndrome is that they are capable of advanced introspection, which elevates

62 their descriptions of the condition from inside to an almost scientific status.

Fogle’s condition perseveres and he “sometimes lapse[s] into counting words, or rather usually the counting goes on when I’m reading or talking, as a sort of background noise or unconscious process, a little like breathing.” (210) While counting to ten does not require any special ability, Fogle quickly proves that any autistic tendency he has is indeed a high-functioning one: “I’ve said 2,752 words right now since I started.” (210) – this extent of memory, even though neurologically different, necessarily indicates inefficient usage of cognitive energy and major capacity to distract.

Fogle’s worrying mother “had an aunt who had a thing of washing her hands over and over without being able to stop, which eventually got so bad she had to go to a rest home” (210), an unambiguous symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder, which often complements autism (“just over two-thirds of children with autism have been diagnosed with one or more psychiatric disorders. The most common include anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder

(OCD) and ADHD.” (“Treatment for Associated Psychiatric Conditions”)). She shows some psychological intuition by mentally associating Fogle’s counting with the condition of this relative.

7.3.2.5.1 Attention-altering drugs

One specific substance Fogle experiments with, Obetrol (a “kind of speed”), has an interesting effect on attention and awareness. This does not have a direct relation to autism, it is only a variation of the mental faculties affected by it, a kind of remedy at best. Fogle introduces the effect like this:

it did make me much more self-aware. If I was in a room, and

had taken an Obetrol or two with a glass of water and they’d

taken effect, I was now not only in the room, but I was aware

that I was in the room. In fact, I remember I would often think,

or say to myself, quietly but very clearly, ‘I am in this room,’ It is

difficult to explain this. At the time, I called it ‘doubling’ (237-238)

In a way, the verbal confirmation of awareness echoes This Is Water and its advice to “keep reminding ourselves over and over: ‘This is water.’ ‘This is water.’” (“Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address” 9)

Interestingly, the substance-induced awareness is brought to a functionally disabling extreme:

past a certain point, the element of choice of attention in doubling

could get lost, and the awareness could sort of explode into a hall

of mirrors of consciously felt sensations and thoughts and

awareness of awareness of awareness of these. This was

attention without choice, meaning the loss of the ability to focus

in and concentrate on just one thing, and was another big

incentive for moderation in the use of Obetrols (The Pale King

247)

This turn is interesting because awareness is being unexpectedly separated from attention – at a certain degree of intensity, the psychologically desirable awareness is shattered into paralysis, sensory hypersensitivity, intrusive thoughts, and inability to concentrate, which is basically a return straight back to almost all of the autistic tendencies identified in this thesis.

8. Synthesis

By this point, I hope to have sufficiently demonstrated that David Foster

Wallace’s unfinished novel is deeply permeated with representations of mental disorder, especially those of autism spectrum disorders. Now what does this say about the novel’s postmodernist and post-postmodernist qualities?

In the perspective of epistemological versus ontological focus outlined by

McHale, a large part of The Pale King does not seem to be very postmodernist

– in line with Wallace’s hypothesis about the next generation of literary rebels,

“anti-rebels” who “dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction” (“E

Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” 192-93), there is a rather stable ontological platform of psychological, sociological, and public administration problems, an escape from which is not attempted. Most narratives of individual characters’ life stories are surprisingly realistic and immensely tragic events are not evaded, quite the contrary, as can be seen for example in the following two passages: one of them is a description of a girl’s poverty- and violence-stricken childhood in the trailer park, the other is the scene in which “Irrelevant” Chris

Fogle’s father is killed in a railway accident. As to postmodernist experimentation with language, both are undeniably wordy and with many tangents. In the beginning of Chapter 8, the 16 pages of which are devoted to picturing the dire economic conditions the girl was born into, there is a portion of the description emblematic of the style of the entire chapter:

two bottles and bright plastic packet impaled on the mulberry

twig, seeing through shifting parallax of saplings’ branches

sections then of trailers along the north park’s anfractuous roads

and lanes skirting the corrugate trailer where it was said the man

left his family and returned sometime later with a gun and killed

them all as they watched Dragnet and the torn abandoned

sixteen-wide half overgrown by the edge of the copse where boys

and their girls made strange agnate forms on pallets and left

bright torn packs until a mishap with a stove blew the gas lead

and ruptured the trailer’s south wall in a great labial tear that

exposes the trailer’s gutted insides to view from the edge of the

copse and the plurality of eyes as the needles and stems of a long

winter noisomely crunch beneath a plurality of shoes where the

copse leaves off at a tangent past the end of the undeveloped cul-

de-sac where they come now at dusk to watch the parked car

heave on its springs. (68-69)

The uninterrupted flow of highly perceptive description does not leave any space for ontological questions; this chapter appears to be a demonstration of social awareness with clear ontological grounding. Moving to the other passage: consistent with other instances of Fogle’s wordy but smooth autobiographical style, the description of the accident uses completely different language.

Together with technical and legal details of subsequent investigation, it starts on page 259 and ends somewhere around page 273, dissolving in memories of the father not directly related to the accident. The extremely slow progression

66 of Fogle’s narrative is almost unquotable (as it is length what needs to be shown, not specific wording), but I will include the factual core of the 14 pages long section’s realist description saturated with tragedy:

the official ‘scene of the accident’—which, in a fatality, is legally

deemed to be ‘[the] location at which death or injuries causing

death are sustained’—was listed at 65 yards off of the subway

platform, in the southbound tunnel itself, at which point the CTA

train was determined to have been traveling at between 51 and

54 miles per hour and portions of my father’s upper body

impacted the iron bars of a built-in ladder protruding from the

tunnel’s west wall—this ladder had been installed to allow CTA

maintenance personnel to access a box of multi-bus circuitry in

the tunnel’s ceiling (266-267)

The circumstances are described using a neutral tone and each detail is painstakingly elaborated, seemingly without preference for emotionally relevant content. “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle’s realism certainly does not seem to be grounded in ontological doubts, and arguably the same can be said about The

Pale King as a whole.

On the other hand, there certainly is some degree of experimentation with form, announced by Wallace himself as a kind of contemporary writer’s toolbox in Chapter 9, which is also the “Author’s Foreword” that is not really a foreword. The reader is advised to

regard features like shifting p.o.v.s, structural fragmentation,

willed incongruities, & c. as simply the modern literary analogs of

‘Once upon a time…’ or ‘Far, far away, there once dwelt…’ or any

of the other traditional devices that signaled the reader that what

was under way was fiction and should be processed accordingly

(94)

This way, we learn that Wallace not only signals quite often that what we are reading is “an artifact, visibly a made thing” (McHale 30), thus breaking the narrative illusion, but he goes one step further and breaks the postmodernist illusion as well, exposing the artificiality of the very use of such features.

Furthermore, authorship and the existence of the fictional world are complicated in a logical cul-de-sac: Wallace sets up

an irksome paradox. The book’s legal disclaimer defines

everything that follows it as fiction, including this Foreword, but

now here in this Foreword I’m saying that the whole thing is really

nonfiction; so if you believe one you can’t believe the other, & c.,

& c. Please know that I find these sorts of cute, self-referential

paradoxes irksome, too[.] (87)

As a result, the reader knows less than she knew before – she is aware of the half-truth a legal disclaimer usually implies when referring to something as autobiographical as narrative fiction, but she also cannot help suspecting that the overly sincere address is ironic play and the characters are all more or less reflections of Wallace himself and do not bear resemblance to any specific personae he knew (an idea not to be dismissed). She is unable to place the text ontologically. The announced and executed structural fragmentation is reminiscent of Steve Katz’s picture of the “shape of American experience, the

68 discontinuous drama, all climax, all boring intermissions in the lobbies of theaters built on the flight decks of exploding 747s” (LeClair and McCaffery

231) – partly delivered by Wallace himself, partly by his editor Michael Pietsch, the structure of interlacing narratives (and descriptions) randomly being returned to or cut off without notice resembles the wide-scale incredulity towards Lyotardian metanarratives, resulting in a skeptical, disconnected space of partial endeavours. As far as breaking the narrative illusion, fragmenting belief and experience, and introducing basic ontological uncertainty are concerned, The Pale King could be said to be postmodernist.

Recalling Fee’s and Gottschalk’s studies of mental disorder, discussing socioeconomic conditions in combination with destabilizations of traditional institutions, one major de-individualizing element of The Pale King is the

Internal Revenue Service, suppressing any possible original actions, requiring monotonous, machine-like activity. One could argue that occupational de- individualization started much sooner, back in the factories of the industrial revolution – however, that was happening within a completely different discourse. One of the first scenes with Sylvanshine is on a plane paid from corporate money and one of the things he muses about are salaries in the IRS

– even though they “barely buy cat food”, they are still salaries in the affluent

United States of the 1970s. IRS workers are de-individualized, but with enough money and leisure time to realize that this is happening, to fully experience the loss of self in the postmodern capitalist economy luring everyone precisely with promises of manifest individuality acquired through products and services. Also,

Wallace’s style incorporates a fair amount of superfluous information that

69 disrupt narrative flow, and this is exaggerated to a point where Sylvanshine’s mind generates random facts that cloud and overwhelm his attention. Looking at The Pale King from this perspective, seeing the dehumanizing/de- individualizing machinery of the IRS at the center and affluence connected with excessive amounts of information all around it, it also fits into the conceptions of postmodernism that include consumerism, de-individualization, and excessive verbosity (Lewis’s “word salad”, Connor’s “chattering polyglossary”).

Having drawn a couple of links between The Pale King and some significant conceptions of postmodernism, and finding that the correlation is not extensive enough to make a simple statement, we should now turn to the search for markers of the various post-postmodernisms described at the outset.

First of all, the obvious link is between Wallace’s fascination with characters with autistic tendencies and Eshelman’s definition of performatism, which describes usage of agents separated from the discourse, often autistic or naïve. However, Wallace’s way of discourse management is rather different from that in Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain, one of Eshelman’s demonstrative examples of performatist cinema, where the protagonist either does not or forces herself not to see outside the simple frame of her playing

God to make random people happy – a “performance that creates ethical beauty or sublimity and occludes meaning” (“Performatism in the Movies 1997-

2003”). Wallace’s characters seem to be aware of the discourse, often exceedingly and painfully – Claude Sylvanshine and David Cusk overthink every possible future consequence of their actions, causing themselves extreme anxiety based on how other people will perceive them, and Wallace takes care

70 that the object of this anxiety is as realistic and psycho- and sociologically accurate as possible, there is very little delusion involved. We could say that

The Pale King involves a kind of inverse performatist framing, where the subject is not only not “[closed] off formally from the world of signs and discourse”, but it is entirely dependent on it and completely unable to “resist outside influence and act autonomously, against the logic of prevailing discourse” (Eshelman,

“What Is Performatism”). The discourse overwhelms the subject, which could by itself constitute a certain separation from the psychological reality of other people. Wallace separates the psyche of his characters from the general population by having them drown in a vortex of discourse-bound introspection, possibly creating a kind of performatist frame that forces readers to identify with the characters by means of solid argument (accepting the external givens of the work), even though they must be aware of the fact that excessive introspection and anxiety about future actions are impractical and unnecessary.

The concept of performatism, together with those of hypermodernism, metamodernism, and New Sincerity, share the notion that there is a renaissance of modernist enthusiasm. As indicated earlier, Wallace explicitly endorses the return to sincere treatment of real human troubles and emotions in one of his essays from 1993. Does he practice this in his last novel? It seems so – realism prevails and important psychological and sociological issues are addressed: poverty, mental disorder, existential anxiety, depression, or the emptiness and boredom of working a certain kind of jobs. But how do we distinguish a reborn modernist enthusiasm from that of James Joyce and T. S.

Eliot? Vermeulen and van den Akker believe that the trace of postmodernism

71 lies in the absence of metanarratives, as a result of which “the metamodern discourse consciously commits itself to an impossible possibility” (5). It could be hypothesized that the excessive descriptiveness and wordiness of otherwise realist chapters signify an absence of a target, of an organizing principle, of the traditional belief in the usefulness of relevance and narrative progression.

Wallace’s own depression might have been a factor: the texts certainly seem to be enthusiastic about the problems being real and at least partial solutions being available, but they are skeptical of any hints of a way out - they could be interpreted as constantly rummaging through reality and language, committed to the impossible possibility of improvement. Unfortunately, since the concept of metanarrative requires belief and it is notoriously hard to identify unquestioned beliefs in literature, the problem here is not only identifying an absence of metanarratives in The Pale King, but also demonstrating their presence in traditional modernist texts, which is an enterprise too marginal for the needs of this thesis to devote adequate space to.

Even though unrelated to autism, there is an interesting device in The

Pale King that needs to be mentioned among its innovative aspects. In the long passages describing the history and particulars of the tax system or the Internal

Revenue Service itself, Wallace seems to be inducing intended feelings of boredom in the reader. In the “Author’s Foreword”, which in the fragmented and disordered structure of the book corresponds to Chapter 9, Wallace attempts to analyze the connection between dullness and psychic pain and suggests that boredom might be unpleasant “because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other,

72 deeper type of pain that is always there” (111). Having introduced existential anxiety as a possible cause of the discomfort caused by boredom, he proceeds to generate tens of pages full of completely impersonal (and arguably uninteresting in a work of fiction targeted at readers with various specializations) information about, for example, tax laws. He also fills several pages with sentences that all have the structure of “X turns a page” with occasional variation of the pattern. It seems that in order to prove his point,

Wallace’s goal might have been to make the reader actually experience a feeling of boredom similar to that of an IRS employee, think about its effects on herself, and maybe link it to existential feelings as suggested in Wallace’s foreword. This effect is unique due to the fact that it does not depend on textual elements, but rather on their absence – it is precisely the non-existent textual cues that can be related to and connected with one’s embodied experience, a peculiar emptiness for sensory imagination, that is disturbing to the psyche of the reader. Is there any link between this device and either postmodernist or post-postmodernist tropes? The creation of feelings of boredom could be also named an embodied “performance” of boring a person, happening each time someone reads the passage. Arguably, the cognitive correlates of boredom are grounded in very basic biological emotions, making the experience comparable with, if not superior to aesthetic experience in terms of strength and specificity. In the title of his article, Michael Sheehan draws attention to this primal aspect of The Pale King by linking boredom to religious experience. While outlining performatism, Eshelman describes the device of framing the reader as “dogmatic, ritual, or some other coercive means”

(Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism 3). I argue that this coercion to experience continuous boredom, changing the terms on which the reader identifies with the characters, qualifies as a performatist trait, and possibly defies categorization altogether and forms a unique experiment in reader psychology.

9. Conclusion

In the course of this thesis, I attempted to first approximate the discourse that received The Pale King, looking at fading postmodernism, vague notions of succeeding literary paradigms, and the place of mental disorder in these. Then I introduced David Foster Wallace’s oeuvre, his philosophy, and finally his last, unfinished novel The Pale King. The close reading part focused on the presence of autism spectrum disorders in The Pale King, and the synthesis aimed to connect the context with the text at hand.

Thanks to the originality of David Foster Wallace’s writing, its complex aesthetic and ethical functions, and the unusual process of submitting, editing and publishing, it has proven to be exceedingly difficult to apply a set of characteristics observed on a different generation of writers, or any pre- conceived notions about contemporary tendencies in literary fiction, to his work.

Interesting as that may seem from the point of view of natural sciences, this difficulty (and often incommensurability) contributed much more intellectual stimulation than could ever be achieved by simply identifying all the markers of postmodernism and making a unanimous conclusion that Wallace perfectly fits into the outlined context. As a conclusion, I would like to encourage further readings of Wallace’s texts focused on social anxiety, borderline autism, and depression, because these are real causes for concern in the Western world, and, if you excuse this brief episode of biographical fallacy, the reports about

David Foster Wallace’s life and death, both by himself and others, give us numerous reasons to believe that the psychological veracity of these texts is

75 rather close to actual case studies. In any case, why not use the space of a literary analysis to also contribute to our knowledge of the psychological trouble faced by many introverted and extremely perceptive readers?

Works cited

Adler, Dan. "Irony and (the New) Sincerity." Medium. 23 Feb. 2015. Web. 20

Nov. 2015.

the-new-sincerity-5901a67a5b6c#.19zmvzrt0>.

Anckarsärter, Henrik. “Forensic Psychiatric Cybernetics in a Hypermodern

Time.” Web. 23 Oct. 2015.

cybernetics-in-a-hypermodern-time.pdf>.

Annesley, James. “David Foster Wallace.” Journal of American Studies 43.1

(2009): 131-4. Web. 14 Nov. 2015.

Barry, Elizabeth, Matthew Broome, and Jonathan Heron. “Not I: Beckett and

Psychiatry – Psychiatry in Literature.” The British Journal of Psychiatry

Mar 2014, 204 (3): 239. Web.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. 1981. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser.

Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995. Print.

Berlin, Isaiah. The Roots of Romanticism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. Print.

Bertens, Hans. The Idea of the Postmodern. 1995. London: Routledge, 2005.

PDF e-book.

Boswell, Marshall. “Introduction: David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.” Studies

in the Novel 44.4 (Winter 2012): 367-70. Web. 15 Nov. 2015.

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 (Winter 2012):

428-46. Web. 15 Nov. 2015. .

"Cognitive Flexibility." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 25 Aug. 2015. Web. 20

Nov. 2015. .

Connor, Steven. “Introduction." Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism. Ed.

Steven Connor. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 1-19. Print.

---. "Postmodernism and Literature." Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism.

Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 62-81. Print.

Cowley, Julian. “Ronald Sukenick’s New Departures from the Terminal of

Language.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. 28.2 (1987): 87-

99. Web. 8 Nov. 2015.

Crimp, Douglas. “On the Museum’s Ruins.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on

Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983.

43-56. Print.

Crowther, Paul. Philosophy After Postmodernism: Civilized Values and the Scope

of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 2003. Print.

Dawson, Conor Michael. “The Fractured Self: Postmodernism and

Depersonalization Disorder.” Aigne (2011): 33-42. Web. 17 Oct. 2015.

Dorson, James. “The Neoliberal Machine in the Bureaucratic Garden: Pastoral

States of Mind in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.” Rereading the

Machine in the Garden: Nature and Technology in American Culture. Eds.

Eric Erbacher, Nicole Maruo-Schröder, and Florian Sedlmeier. Frankfurt:

Campus Verlag, 2014. Print.

Eshelman, Raoul. “Performatism in the Movies (1997-2003).” Anthropoetics 8.2

(Fall 2002 / Winter 2003). Web. 21 Nov. 2015.

---. Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism. Aurora: Davies Group, 2008.

Print.

---. „Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism.“ Anthropoetics - The

Electronic Journal of Generative Anthropology 6.2 (Fall 2000 / Winter

2001). Web. 10 Oct. 2015.

---. "What Is Performatism?" Performatism.de. 9 Apr. 2015. Web. 7 May 2015.

"Executive Dysfunction." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia

Foundation. Web. 27 June 2015.

Federman, Raymond. Surfiction: Fiction Now … and Tomorrow. Athens:

Swallow Press, 1975. Print.

Fee, Dwight. “The Broken Dialogue: Mental Illness as Discourse and

Experience.” Pathology and the Postmodern: Mental Illness as Discourse

and Experience. Ed. Dwight Fee. London: Sage, 2000. 1-17. Print.

Fitzgerald, Jonathan D. "Sincerity, Not Irony, Is Our Age's Ethos." The Atlantic.

Atlantic Media Company, 20 Nov. 2012. Web. 20 Nov. 2015.

not-irony-is-our-ages-ethos/265466/>.

Forster, E. M. Howards End. 1910. Project Gutenberg. Web. 8. Nov. 2015.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 1975. Trans.

Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995. Print.

---. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. 1969.

Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. Print.

---. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York:

Pantheon, 1970. Print.

Furlani, Andre. “Postmodern and After: Guy Davenport.” Contemporary

Literature 43.4 (Winter 2002): 709-35. Web. 10 Oct. 2015.

Gibson, Andrew. Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative. Edinburgh:

Edinburgh UP, 1996. Print.

Giles, Paul. “Sentimental Posthumanism: David Foster Wallace.” Twentieth

Century Literature 53.3 (Fall 2007): 327-44. Web. 13 Nov. 2015.

Gottschalk, Simon. “Escape from Insanity: ‘Mental Disorder’ in the Postmodern

Moment.” Pathology and the Postmodern: Mental Illness as Discourse

and Experience. Ed. Dwight Fee. London: Sage, 2000. 18-48. Print.

Gubrium, Jaber F., James A. Holstein. “Grounding the Postmodern Self.” The

Sociological Quarterly 35.4 (Nov. 1994): 685-703. Web. 17 Oct. 2015.

Hahn, Erik von, and Bernadette Murphy Bentley. "Executive Functions in

Children with ASDs." Autism Consortium. 9 Dec. 2013. Web. 20 Nov.

2015.

functions-in-children-with-asds>.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New

York: Routledge, 1988. Print.

---. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.

Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.”

Modernism/Postmodernism. Ed. Peter Brooker. New York: Longman,

1992. Print.

---. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso,

1991. Print.

Kelly, Adam. “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction.”

Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays. Ed. David Hering. Los

Angeles: Sideshow Media Group Press, 2010. Print.

Kirby, Alan. Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern

and Reconfigure Our Culture. New York: Continuum, 2009. Print.

Konstantinou, Lee. “The World of David Foster Wallace.” boundary 2 40.3

(2013): 59-86. Print.

Landau, Elizabeth. "Experts Ponder Link between Creativity, Mood

Disorders." CNN. Cable News Network, 2 Apr. 2009. Web. 20 Nov. 2015.

ssion/>.

Laplantine, F. L’Ethnopsychiatrie. Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1973. Print.

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. 1991. Trans. Catherine Porter.

Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Print.

LeClair, Tom. “The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and

David Foster Wallace.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 38.1

(1996): 12-37. Web. 13 Nov. 2015.

LeClair, Tom, and Larry McCaffery. Anything Can Happen: Interviews with

American Novelists. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1983. Print.

Lewis, Barry. “Postmodernism and Literature (or: Word Salad Days, 1960-90).”

Routledge Companion to Postmodernism. 1998. Ed. Stuart Sim. London:

Routledge, 2001. 121-133. Print.

Lipovetsky, Gilles. Hypermodern Times. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005. Print.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.

1979. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester:

Manchester UP, 1984. Print.

Mak, Ariane. "Random Factoids 2: Turdnagels, Ghosts and Autism." The

Howling Fantods. 22 Sept. 2014. Web. 19 Nov. 2015.

turdnagels-ghosts-and-autism.html>.

Max, D. T. "The Unfinished." The New Yorker 9 Mar. 2009, Life and Letters sec.

Web. 27 June 2015.

McCaffery, Larry. “An Interview with David Foster Wallace.” Review of

Contemporary Fiction 1.3 (Summer 1993): 127-50. Print.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. 1987. London: Routledge, 2004. PDF e-

book.

Perloff, Marjorie. Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Evanston:

Northwestern UP, 1981. Print.

"Repetitive Behaviour and Autism." The National Autistic Society. Web. 27 June

2015.

behaviour/obsessions-repetitive-behaviours-and-routines/repetitive-

behaviour.aspx>.

Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,

1989. Print.

Salami, Mahmoud. John Fowles’s Fiction and the Poetics of Postmodernism.

London: Associated U Presses, 1992. Print.

Sheehan, Michael. "Boredom as Religious Experience: David Foster Wallace’s

The Pale King." The Rumpus. 13 Apr. 2011. Web. 26 Oct. 2015.

foster-wallace%E2%80%99s-the-pale-king/>.

"Treatment for Associated Psychiatric Conditions." Autism Speaks. Web. 30

June 2015.

autism/treatment/treatment-associated-psychiatric-conditions>.

Tzara, Tristan. "Dada Manifesto On Feeble Love And Bitter Love." 391: Archive.

12 Dec. 1920. Web. 8 Nov. 2015.

bitter-love-tristan-tzara.html>.

Veague, Heather Barnett. Psychological Disorders: Autism. New York: Infobase

Publishing, 2010. Print.

Vermeulen, Timotheus and Robin van den Akker. “Notes on Metamodernism.”

Journal of Aesthetics and Culture Vol. 2, 2010. Web. 23 Oct. 2015.

304>.

Wallace, David Foster. "Authority and American Usage." Consider the Lobster

and Other Essays. New York: Little, Brown, 2005. 67-127. Print.

---. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” Review of Contemporary

Fiction 13.2 (Summer 1993): 151-94. Print.

---. The Pale King. 2011. New York: Back Bay Books, 2012. Print.

---. “Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address - May 21,

2005.” Web. 11 Nov. 2015.

Résumé (Czech)

Centrálním textem analyzovaným v této práci je román Davida Fostera

Wallace The Pale King. Speciální pozornost je věnována reprezentacím mentálních poruch, které zdánlivě tvoří rozmanitý obraz poruch autistického spektra. Postupujíc k cíli, práce nejprve shromáždí existující interpretace a umístění Wallacovy prózy, pokusí se identifikovat a definovat pojmy postmoderny a literárního postmodernismu, a určí místo abnormálních mentálních procesů v postmoderní literatuře. Zahrnut je též přehled teorií tvrdících, že rozeznávají literární styl nahrazující postmodernismus – některé citují Wallace jako klíčového zakladatele stylu jménem Nová Upřímnost (New

Sincerity).

Stavějíc na existující kritické diskusi románu The Pale King, startovacím bodem pro tuto práci je problematika pozornosti a její různorodé propojení se sociální úzkostí, syndrómem snížené pozornosti, exekutivní dysfunkcí, a autismem. Práce se snaží rozšířit diskurzivní rámec výzkumu tohoto románu detailním pohledem na reprezentace mentální patologie, která způsobuje sociální a behaviorální dysfunkci, včetně objevu, že většina odpovída manifestacím mírných forem poruch autistického spektra.

Paralelně se sociální angažovaností feministických a queer studií, tato práce se snaží aplikovat a podnítit něco jako „introvert studies“ – Wallacova próza je důležitým milníkem v popisu mentálních procesú sociálně úzkostných, ale vysoce inteligentních a pozorných introvertů, a jedním z její účinků se zdá být sensitizace čtenářu ohledně specifických problémů lidí kteří se neustále bojí

85 pohledů cizích, přehnaně přemýšlejí o jednoduchých rozhodnutích, jsou neschopní odolávat nutkavým myšlenkám a manévrovat v sociálních situacích, a

často jsou z těchto (a mnoha jiných) důvodů v depresi.

Práce je ukončena syntézou toho, co kombinace teoretického kontextu a textové analýzy naznačuje o umístění románu The Pale King v současné literatuře.

Résumé (English)

The central text analyzed in this thesis is David Foster Wallace’s The Pale

King. Special attention is being paid to representations of mental disorder, which arguably paint a multifaceted picture of autism spectrum disorders. In the course of doing this, I set up the discourse by reviewing the existing interpretations and placements of David Foster Wallace’s prose, trying to locate and define the notions of postmodernity and literary postmodernism, and identifying the place of abnormal mental processes in postmodern fiction. I also provide a survey of the theories that claim to observe a literary style that succeeds postmodernism, some of them citing Wallace as the key founding father of a style named New Sincerity.

Parallel to the social engagement of feminist and queer studies, this thesis attempts to employ and encourage a kind of “introvert studies” –

87 sufferings of people who constantly fear the gaze of others, overthink their decisions, who are unable to resist intrusive thoughts and navigate social situations, and who are often depressed as a result of all that (and many other factors).

I conclude with a synthesis of what the combination of the theoretical context and the analysis indicates about the placement of The Pale King within the landscape of contemporary literature.