Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory

I

The long-awaited publication of david foster Wallace’s fragmentary final text under the title The Pale King has created a situation that has certainly been vexed enough to divide critical opinion. The difficulties—critical, readerly, and otherwise—are myriad: the fragment’s editor, Michael Pietsch, despite his long association with Wallace, has made clear in the Editor’s Note that the task of finding (or imposing) an order for the complex draft was as much a difficulty as an honor (vii–viii). While this honesty, which stretches even to the point of subtitling the book “an unfinished novel,” is refreshing, it does inevitably raise the question of whether The Pale King should be read as “a David Foster Wallace novel” or as simply a tribute to its author and his untimely death. Complicating the issue is that in the case of Wallace, the health or completeness of a given text is more difficult to diagnose. (Wallace’s novels rarely offer the reader endings that would be easy to identify as endings were the reader to come across them in manuscript form.) For example, the early story “Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR” ends abruptly, with the representative still performing CPR and calling for help (“Girl with Curious Hair” 51–52). Similarly, Wallace’s magnum opus, Infinite Jest, refuses to wrap up even its most significant characters’ trajectories, prompting the author to comment in an interview with Anne Marie Donahue that “on the surface, it might seem like it just stops. But it’s supposed to stop and then kind of hum and project.” [End Page 167]

In short, this is hardly the first of Wallace’s works to stop short in an abrupt and at least superficially unsatisfying manner. Apart from the list of “Notes and Asides” appended by Pietsch as the book’s last few pages, the only way to tell how “finished” the novel might have been is to pass judgment upon its internal coherence. Reviewers, both impressed and otherwise, have not hesitated to do so; perhaps unsurprisingly, the unusual circumstances of publication have sharply divided these initial critics. For The New York Times, Tom McCarthy finds the book to have been “conscientiously and intelligently whittled down by Wallace’s editor” and declares the “outcome” of Wallace’s grappling with questions of boredom and destiny “as brilliant as it was sad” (1, 3). In his review for the Guardian, James Lasdun, though noting that the book contains some “fairly run-of-the-mill metafictional business” and shows Wallace’s “leadenly playful postmodernist” side, also argues that “the lack of development matters less than you might expect. For all his baroque plotting, Wallace was generally more interesting at the level of the part than the whole . . . the provisional nature of The Pale King adds to this montage-like effect.” Adding to the hesitant praise the novel has received, Richard Rayner writes in the Los Angeles Times that “much of The Pale King is indeed hard work, but it’s welcome rather than the reverse . . . a Spruce Goose of a book that barely achieves takeoff but glimmers and sparkles with sufficient suggestions of the grandeur that might have been” (3).

By contrast, Jonathan Segura argues that the novel is, in essence, hopelessly incomplete, only “a pile of sketches, minor developments, preludes to events that never happen (or only happen in passing, off the page), and get-to-know-your-characters background info that would have been condensed or chopped had Wallace lived to finish it” (n. pag.). Margaret Quamme’s verdict is even harsher; unwilling to grant that The Pale King is even a convincing draft for something better, she writes “as might be expected in a book about boredom, much of it is close to impossible to read without the eyes glazing over. . . . Something about the book remains oddly captivating—although, had Wallace finished it, that might not have been the case” (n. pag.). Finally, Jenny Turner, in her review for the London Review of Books, sees the work as “completely deadly,” noting of one of Wallace’s descriptions of boredom that “I can only say, I know the feeling, and know it better and more deeply and thoroughly after undergoing the immersive existential process of plodding through this book” (29).

None of these reactions is of necessity valid or invalid; a survey of [End Page 168] the reviews that have emerged to date gives one the impression that while most reviewers grant the quality of Wallace’s previous work, they are split in their responses: some delighted by the chance to read his last thoughts in The Pale King and others skeptical that it reflects his wishes or shows his talents at their finest. That few of them get far beyond the gut-level reaction only shows that Wallace retains his ability to disturb the reader, and that the publication of posthumous work is frequently vexed and emotionally fraught. What has to be done—and, in a nascent way, already has been by several of these reviewers—is to determine what in the text itself produces such reactions. It is easy to attribute these positive and negative accounts more to the author’s untimely death than to the intrinsic quality of the work. However, if The Pale King is to take its place as a Wallace novel and not a curio, a hopelessly rough draft, or (merely) a last will and testament, it is precisely the content and internal consistency of the text that must be evaluated. If my reading of the text is correct, then The Pale King is more than just a consistent and well-crafted work that continues where earlier Wallace works have left off; it is a profoundly complex text that stages tedium in order to make the higher point that tedium can be endured, and if endured, can be transcended and transcend itself.

To that end, I intend here to read the two great preoccupations that resonate throughout the entire text of The Pale King—boredom, tedium, and ennui, and apparent religious conversion—as profoundly unified and, indeed, inextricable from one another. Although the novel’s plot is not linear, and any understanding of characters or themes as a whole must come in a nonchronological fashion that nevertheless accepts Wallace’s deliberate fragmentation of narrative, the text sustains a fairly direct relationship between conversion or epiphany and encounters with tedium, a relationship that is instantiated time and again in the novel’s wide-ranging menagerie of characters. In brief, many of the characters experience a clear moment of epiphany, at times explicitly embedded in evangelical or yogic contexts, that results in immediately tangible changes, including the abandonment of former lifestyle and the assumption of a new vocation. The pragmatic, nonuniversal nature of these various conversions gives them a distinctly American, William Jamesian character: the various IRS agents and other ordinary individuals in the novel literally undergo many “varieties of religious experience.” At some subsequent point, these characters are then drawn not to the usual loci of religious transcendence, but instead to places of boredom, [End Page 169] tedium, or other stasis—usually the IRS, but Wallace makes it clear that other vocations can fill the same role. Although they are exposed to crushing boredom, it always seems that something “behind” or “beyond” the boredom maintains their interest and devotion.

Wallace’s treatment of the tedious and boring elements of life is certainly idiosyncratic, since boredom is almost without exception seen as antithetical to literary value (Spacks 1). Most of the thinkers who have taken up the topic simply take it as axiomatic that boredom is to be resisted and shunned. For instance, although it is probably impossible to understand the religious intimations of The Pale King without recourse to William James’s philosophy, even he considered boredom a vice to be overcome, placing him in a tradition that includes earlier thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and Blaise Pascal. In the Pensées, Pascal does find a relationship between boredom and conversion, but it is nearly the opposite of Wallace’s relationship: conversion is, for Pascal, the sole means of escaping ennui. Indeed, only Martin Heidegger proposes a positive theory of boredom that begins to approach what Wallace is doing in this text. All of these thinkers are helpful in understanding Wallace’s curiously backward-seeming stance on boredom and the transcendent in The Pale King. In the end, the varied and strange collection of experiences in this novel points to an internal unity whose urgent concern is not to change or escape from the world of boredom, but to embrace it, be converted to it, and by means of that conversion, to experience transcendence through tedium.

II

In order to comprehend the connection between tedium and transcendence in The Pale King, it is necessary to understand the process by which its characters come to immerse themselves in tedium. Although James Lasdun, in his Guardian review of the text, highlights the presence of “suicidal despair” among the work’s characters, most of the tedium encountered in this novel is at least minimally “willed” or “chosen,” rather than being suffered passively or brought about by a crisis. Although the boredom is mostly endured without being understood as a vocation, many of Wallace’s characters do understand it in just such a way; this can be seen most clearly in “Irrelevant,” Chris Fogle’s autobiographical narrative (ch. 22); in the levitation of the incredibly boring character Shane Drinion (e.g., 468), who appears to transcend the laws of space and time through that very boredom; and [End Page 170] the story of the young boy who (quite painstakingly) attempts to touch his lips to every inch of his body (ch. 36). These individuals’ lives should be tremendously insignificant, yet they are described in terms that are either explicitly religious or highly reminiscent of religious discourse. To understand why the characters who are most obviously associated with boredom are also elevated to a transcendent plane requires some preliminary time on the idea of conversion or epiphany in The Pale King.

In the ninth lecture of The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), entitled “Conversion,” William James defines conversion as “the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right superior and happy . . . whether or not we believe that a direct divine operation is needed to bring such a moral change about” (189). The process is most suited to those who bear some psychological sense of inherent discord in the world, and by extension, the self (166–67). And while to the psychologist the conversion process may seem to be clearly internal to the subject, James’s wealth of examples show “how real, definite, and memorable an event a sudden conversion may be to him who has the experience. . . . He undoubtedly seems to himself a passive spectator or undergoer of an astounding process performed upon him from above” (226; emphasis added). Two aspects of James’s argument are relevant to The Pale King: first, the unshakable sense of calling or passivity in the presence of an other; second, the emphasis on the subjective nature of the experience, which may indeed seem insignificant to an outside observer. Indeed, James takes pains to note that the precise nature of the conversion event stems not from absolute truth, but through “suggestion and imitation” of the convert’s environment (200). Although several passages in The Pale King exemplify this intense, and intensely subjective, experience, none is more prominent than the conversion of “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle, narrated in the first person in one of the novel’s long, central chapters.

Fogle narrates what is in effect an extended spiritual autobiography for the duration of the long twenty-second chapter, and from the outset it is clear that his original condition is that of a sick or divided soul. He claims, on the very first page, “I was the worst kind of nihilist—the kind who isn’t even aware he’s a nihilist” (154). On this same page, he first describes himself as a “wastoid,” and although the word is not exactly his own coinage, Fogle (and, a fortiori, Wallace) makes it his own in his protracted self-critique.¹ He claims to have “had no motivation. . . . Everything [End Page 171] at that time was very fuzzy and abstract” (154–55). Perhaps most interesting, Fogle makes it extremely clear that his “wastoid” period was characterized, and exacerbated, by boredom: concerning an introductory accounting class, “the combination of difficulty and sheer boredom of the depreciation schedules broke my initiative”; immediately thereafter, he notes how he quit several “real jobs” because he “couldn’t handle the boredom” (155). It is stressed that any association with, or resistance to, tedium that he will eventually acquire is not innate; in this early part of his career, he is unable to cope with it. Along the way to his conversion, he finds a way to make himself “much more self-aware” via the drug Obetrol (181),² loses his father in a tragic accident (200–202), and finally comes to room with a “self-professed Christian” who, along with his equally evangelical girlfriend, annoys “the hell out of ” Fogle (209–12). Although Fogle notes, “my father . . . was raised Roman Catholic . . . and my mom’s family was originally Lutheran,” he himself “wasn’t raised as anything” (190). Even so, he leaves a trail of religious allusions here and there in the text, noting that in a period of self-awareness he felt like he was in “an empty church” (183) and that knowing one is loved by a parent is “not unlike the religious confidence that one is ‘loved unconditionally’ by God” (209). In short, he is intermittently preoccupied with religious experience, despite his own indifference and skepticism; all of this prepares him for a head-on collision with the religious point of view. This encounter, when doubled with his later “call to account,” can be seen as the defining moment of The Pale King’s wrestling with conversion and vocation.

In this vitally important passage, Fogle is first subject to the “testimony” of his Christian roommate’s girlfriend. She narrates, in classic Jamesian fashion, how “she was feeling totally desolate and lost and nearly at the end of her rope” (211) and decided for “no discernible reason or motive she could have named” to enter an evangelical church in which the preacher was delivering a relatively stereotypical sermon about how someone “that is feeling lost and hopeless . . . needs to know that Jesus loves them very, very much” (212). In short, she is one of James’s “sick souls,” those whose experiences led James to write “here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! Help!” (162). Fogle goes on to record her conversion story:

The girlfriend testified as to how she had been stunned and deeply moved, and said she had instantly felt a huge, dramatic spiritual change deep inside of her in which she said she felt [End Page 172] completely reassured and unconditionally known and loved, and as though now suddenly her life had meaning and direction to it after all, and so on and so forth.

(212)

Fogle’s analysis of this story in hindsight—he is merely annoyed at the time—is supremely pragmatic: “It’s true that her story was stupid and dishonest, but that doesn’t mean the experience she had in the church that day didn’t happen, or that its effects on her weren’t real” (214). This assessment can hardly be distinguished from James’s position on the fruits of conversion, which he says, “must be decided on empirical grounds exclusively. If the fruits for life of the state of conversion are good, we ought to idealize and venerate it, even though it be a piece of natural psychology” (237). Like James, Fogle maintains his skepticism while focusing on the subjective gain from the conversion experience, and he remains consistent in his approach when describing his own, deeply parallel experience in an advanced tax class he stumbles into by mistake.

In short, Fogle enters “the wrong but identical classroom” in a building that is the mirror image of the one he was supposed to enter, which turns out to host an Advanced Tax course taught by a “fearful Jesuit,” and citing his desire not to disrupt the class, Fogle stays for the entire time (215–16).³ He is only faintly aware that this mistake is of some consequence for his future, noting both that “when the substitute accounting professor entered . . . this room’s whole voltage changed” and also that “unlike the Christian girlfriend, I never seem to recognize important moments at the time they’re going on” (217–18). Fogle summarizes, occasionally quoting, the actual text of the speech given by the “substitute Jesuit” (230): he “informs” the students that “the accounting profession to which you aspire is, in fact, heroic,” noting that the instructor has “said ‘inform’ and not ‘opine or ‘allege’ or ‘posit’” (228). Although the work will be “exacting,” “prosaic,” and “Banausic to the point of drudgery,” he continues, it will also be “brave,” “worthy,” “fitting, sweet,” “chivalric,” and “heroic” (229). This outcome, he insists, depends on the fact that “the less conventionally heroic or exciting or adverting or even interesting or engaging a labor appears to be, the greater its potential as an arena for actual heroism” (230). The speech covers several pages, and as the quotes above demonstrate, is exhaustive and accretive in form; this tedious piling on of adjectives on the part of the “Jesuit” ensures that the form of his speech reinforces and enacts the theme of its content, namely, that tedium contains in itself an opening or possibility for transcendence. [End Page 173]

Indeed, in a passage about which Fogle himself claims that “the metaphors seemed to be getting a bit jumbled,” the Jesuit presents the tedium of accounting and finance as a valid, potentially even transcendent, response to ennui:

In today’s world, boundaries are fixed, and most significant facts have been generated. Gentlemen, the heroic frontier now lies in the ordering and deployment of those facts. Classification, organization, presentation. To put it another way, the pie has been made—the contest is now in the slicing. Gentlemen, you aspire to hold the knife. Wield it. To admeasure. To shape each given slice, the knife’s angle and depth of cut.

(232)

The language is certainly economic—the talk of pies and slicing reminiscent of the era’s predominant supply-side economic theory—and directed at the students’ ambition. But in the first half of the quote, again, the reinforcement of the Jesuit’s former talk of heroism is significant: accountants can be seen, in a very American sense, as pioneers, explorers of the new frontier, which is now found not in (say) westward expansion, but rather in an endless, fractal-like elaboration of existing borders and limits.⁴ Looking at the speech in this way connects it, again, to the fragment near the end of the book in which Wallace insists that “pay[ing] close attention to the most tedious thing you can find” will allow one to transcend waves of boredom and move “from black and white into color” (546). Of course, as Fogle himself is canny enough to note, this transcendence-in-tedium also bears a direct relation, as an experience, to religious conversion. “What I’m trying to say,” he admits as a prologue to the Jesuit’s speech, “is that it was ultimately much more like the evangelist girlfriend with the boots’ own experience than I could ever have admitted at the time” (220). Just as the evangelical girl had felt “unconditionally loved” (212), so Fogle himself now feels “that much of what the Catholic father (I thought) said or projected seemed somehow aimed directly at me” (220). With the clarity of hindsight, he is able to apprehend what is most important about the situation: the equivalence between evangelical conversion and the punning “call to account” offered by the Jesuit (233).

Immediately before the comment in which Fogle detects parallelism between his own experience and that of the despised evangelical girlfriend, he plants an oblique, but ultimately deeply important, allusion [End Page 174] to the work of James. Almost offhand, he writes that the Jesuit wrote “occasional statements and quotes” on the overhead projector and that he remembers one of them in particular: “What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war” (220). The quote is attributed to “James,” which Fogle “believed referred to the biblical apostle James, for obvious reasons” (220). Although nowhere in the text is the correct attribution given, and although the quote as recorded in the text is not exactly verbatim, it is clear that the allusion is to James’s essay “The Moral Equivalent of War.” In typically Jamesian fashion, this late essay argues for a pragmatic stance on the question of pacifism. James argues that “the military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade” (3; emphasis added). Again, diagnosing the failures of the pacifists with whom he sympathizes, James writes that they have failed to find a “moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat” (10). James’s idea of moral equivalency, mentioned immediately before Fogle’s realization that his accounting class experience mimicked that of the evangelical girlfriend, should be seen as a guiding metaphor for the section, and indeed, the entire text. What Fogle, along with several other characters, finds in his IRS job is a kind of “moral equivalent” of religion;⁵ a further understanding of the dialectical relationship between religion/transcendence and boredom/tedium will clarify the reasons Wallace may have chosen such a theme to govern what became his final manuscript.

III

Far more than pseudoreligious conversion, the intense focus on boredom in The Pale King’s narrative is perhaps its most noticeable feature and has not been lost on its first reviewers. James Lasdun, for example, notes that “the subject matter is as narrowly focused as that of Infinite Jest was richly profuse. It is, in a word, boredom. Boredom and its various effects on the spirit, ranging from suicidal despair . . . to a transcendent power of concentration.” This is made abundantly clear in one of the fragments that Pietsch has appended to the text, in which Wallace, elaborating on the character of IRS agent Shane Drinion, notes that if you “pay attention to the most tedious thing you can find . . . in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just [End Page 175] about kill you” (546). Even the first page of the text assaults the reader with a wash of individual facts that do not add up to a clear whole; this use of catalogue, which presents a considerable challenge to the reader’s attention, recurs at various points throughout the narrative.⁶ Echoing this theme in the Los Angeles Times, Richard Rayner insists that “the book dares to plunge readers deep into this Dantean hell of ‘crushing boredom,’ suggesting that something good may lie beyond” (n. pag.). This is hardly in doubt; what remains to be settled is why the book dwells at such length on boredom and tedium. Several of these critics have connected boredom and depression, making at least passing reference to Wallace’s own 2008 suicide: “at a certain point,” Lasdun argues, “it becomes impossible to resist the thought that under all the high talk about the place of boredom in modern life, what Wallace was really writing about was depression. . . . It is one of the strangest, saddest, most haunting things I’ve ever read.” While seeking an autobiographical impulse behind the work is understandable, it is by no means the end of the interpretive task. In order to read the text as a whole—as I hope to be able to do—and not simply a fragmentary account of some of Wallace’s last thoughts, it is necessary to find the bridge between the many passages fixated upon boredom and the equal priority of place given to conversion.

Fortunately, there is a good deal of writing on the connections between boredom and conversion specifically, and more on the dialectic between boredom and religion in general, or human being and the meaning of life. In particular, I will focus upon thinkers like James and Pascal, for whom the two concepts appear to be related in a unidirectional manner (i.e., boredom is a fertile precursor of religious fulfillment, and its function largely stops there) and then Heidegger, for whom the relationship is less straightforward. I mean to show that while Wallace’s text bears the marks of these predecessors, it largely goes its own way by inverting the directional relationship between the two statuses; in the world of The Pale King, one is just as likely to be converted to boredom as to be delivered from it by conversion, and it is possible to move back and forth between the states and combine them in multiple, dialectical manners. Although there is more to the text than this insight, I believe that in it can be found the unifying spirit behind an admittedly wide-ranging and fragmentary narrative torso.

To return momentarily to James, it is significant that Michael L. Raposa reads his exposition of the “sick soul” as “an acutely self-conscious boredom that reduces the human psyche to a state of numb indifference, [End Page 176] before plunging it into anxiety and despair” (32). He notes that for James, the most important action to take regarding such boredom is to “fight strenuously” against it, although James “agreed with his more orthodox Christian predecessors that the renewal of ‘interest,’ the rebirth of meaning, is itself somewhat gratuitous” (32). Of course, James does not necessarily attribute this gratuity to a really-existing supernatural source, but it nevertheless connects him, as Raposa argues, to the mainstream of medieval Christian thought, particularly that of Thomas Aquinas, for whom “persistence is the key to overcoming spiritual boredom” (25). In short, under this definition, boredom is considered to be a diffusion or dilution of attention, the only remedy for which lies in a dedicated fixation of attention upon the divine good (24). In some sense, Wallace evinces a kinship for this line of thought in the “Notes and Asides” attached to the end of the text, when he observes that “ability to pay attention” is what carries one beyond boredom to what “lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom” (546). However, the process here is far more recursive: it is not divinity to which one must pay close and persistent attention, as with Aquinas and James; rather, it is “the most tedious thing you can find” (546). The boredom itself, as in the case of the accretive speech of the “Jesuit,” eventually transcends itself through sheer, paradoxical effort, as though one could lift one’s own body off the ground simply by focusing enough effort and energy on the task (a metaphor that turns out to be far more than metaphorical in The Pale King). We have to conclude, then, that the superficial similarities to traditional spiritual antidotes to acedia are inadequate to explain Wallace’s program.

Pascal, likewise, describes in the Pensées a kinship between boredom and the process of conversion, one that depends, like the thought of Aquinas and James, on a negative valorization of boredom and a vision of conversion as a means of escape therefrom. Pascal, though, speaks of boredom not so much as a limited species of temptation (like acedia) nor an exceptional condition of the soul (as in James), but simply as the background condition of human life. “All our life,” he writes, “passes in this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces” (40). Boredom is uncaused and unmotivated in Pascal’s world, to the point that man “would be bored even if he had no cause for boredom, by the very nature of his temperament,” and likewise can be diverted by the most trivial differences—but only [End Page 177] momentarily, as this satisfaction always spawns yet more ennui (40). There is a kinship here with the pre-IRS life of “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle, when he was a nihilistic and bored “wastoid” always strung out on drugs, not to mention the Christian girlfriend, who describes her preconversion self as “lost and hopeless and just barely clinging to any kind of interior sense of value or reason to even go on living” (211). The differences arise, once again, with the moment of conversion. While the central conversion narrative in The Pale King is a kind of sidestep from ennui into a higher, “heroic” tedium (228), conversion in Pascal is more conventionally a deliverance from ennui into heavenly rest. Man, before conversion, is “seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are”; the reality is that the “infinite abyss” that lies at the heart of bored humanity “can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself ” (45). Put simply, only one species of boredom exists for Pascal, although it takes many forms; there really is just the endless terrestrial scramble for diversion, and the only antidote is a kind of Augustinian donec requiescat in te, where rest and relief can be found in the Christian deity alone. As Michael Raposa writes, for Pascal, “boredom is an experience of emptiness, [but] it is nevertheless a meaningful emptiness” (47). This progression describes fairly well the trajectory of the evangelical girlfriend in The Pale King, but it fails to account for the higher tedium of both the Jesuit’s lecture and the fragment included near the end of the text.

In short, while these traditional considerations of boredom do shed light on The Pale King in some sense—largely by reinforcing the lesson of Fogle’s original transition from “wastoid” to dedicated student—they fail to illumine the more puzzling and central contention of this chapter: that tedium can be a vocation itself, that conversion can lead not only away from but to boredom. They also fall short of explaining the character of Shane Drinion, himself both boring and bored, but capable of levitation through intense attention (e.g., 468) and the nameless young boy who focuses all possible attention on touching his lips to every part of his body (401) and is compared to both Padre Pio (398–99) and a “Bengali holy man” (402). These characters are not just “types” who can be grouped simplistically with Chris Fogle, but despite their considerable differences, they certainly share with him a capacity for—even, in some way, a love for—systematic and tedious attention. Furthermore, all are surrounded in religious epiphenomena: Fogle receives his “call” from a Jesuit priest (at least a stand-in for one), Drinion [End Page 178] is capable of levitation (which is precisely the kind of thaumaturgy that can warrant a claim to valid mysticism or sainthood), and the auto-osculating boy is likewise explicitly described in hagiographic terms. In order to tackle this strange nexus of boredom, attention, and a sense of the holy or transcendent, it is necessary to spend time with Heidegger’s discussion of boredom in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics and his essay “What Is Metaphysics?” In the latter essay, Heidegger writes that understanding Being “as a whole” is possible “precisely when we are not actually busy with things or ourselves . . . for example in genuine boredom” (99). This is possible because boredom “removes all things and human beings and oneself along with them into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals beings as a whole” (99). Here, finally, is an analysis of boredom that does not revolve around the means for terminating boredom; in Heidegger’s view, it is no longer something to fight, deny, stimulate, or replace.

Heidegger insists on this point in his most sustained treatment of boredom, to be found in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. “Boredom in the ordinary sense,” he writes, “is disturbing, unpleasant, and unbearable . . . Becoming bored is a sign of shallowness and superficiality” (158). Quite the contrary, he insists that boredom is the “fundamental attunement” toward an understanding of our being in the world that, far from being resisted, must indeed be “awakened” (77). There are, he asserts, three different possible types of boredom, each of increasing profundity. These three types are fairly self-explanatory, each less specific in its provocation: the first is “Becoming Bored by Something,” the second “Being Bored with Something and the Passing of Time Belonging to It,” and finally, “Profound Boredom as ‘It is Boring for One’” (78, 106, 132). Perhaps most important for this discussion, these boredoms can lead to one another, and while Heidegger clearly privileges the third form, the others are by no means useless toward a fundamental insight into Dasein. Ultimately, he provides a definition of boredom as

the entrancement of the temporal horizon, an entrancement which lets the moment of vision belonging to temporality vanish. In thus letting it vanish, boredom impels entranced Dasein into the moment of vision as the properly authentic possibility of its existence, an existence only possible in the midst of beings as a whole, and within the horizon of entrancement, their telling refusal of themselves as a whole.

(153)

This writing is by no means transparent, but its mysticism alone should [End Page 179] give us pause: the idea that boredom can give rise to, rather than impede, the mystical or spiritual experience of the subject is itself radical. Boredom is not only a way, but the fundamental way to the revelation of beings as a whole (via indifference to any one given being). As Raposa comments, “the experience of boredom [for Heidegger] is potentially revelatory, much like the experience of great love” (58). Thus Heidegger strongly demarcates his position from that of Aquinas or James, for whom boredom must be strenuously overcome, and Pascal, for whom it is an abyss that only God can fill.

It is fairly obvious that earlier models of understanding boredom do not account for Wallace’s thinking about tedium in The Pale King; the question now remains whether Heidegger is any more helpful. Certainly, there is little question that to the extent that both writers are captivated by the potential to find transcendence through tedium, both are on similar wavelengths. For example, when the Jesuit instructor insists that “the less conventionally heroic or exciting or adverting or even interesting or engaging a labor appears to be, the greater its potential as an arena for actual heroism, and therefore as a denomination of joy unequaled by any you men can yet imagine” (230), he is temperamentally not far from Heidegger’s exaltation of boredom: it compels us to listen, and thus “the ‘it is boring for one’ has already transposed us into a realm of power over which the individual person, the public individual subject, no longer has any power” (136). The pragmatic value in each case is high, and privileged in an almost Gnostic way: the route to such transcendence, knowledge, and so on is difficult—“strait is the gate, and narrow is the way” (The Holy Bible, Matt. 7:14)—but the reward is sufficient to transport one away from the realm of l’homme moyen sensuel, onto a higher plane. In a word, both authors are describing an authentic conversion event, even though it is by no means of a religious or cultic nature. Finally, it would appear, we have discovered the inverse of Pascal: boredom does not lead one to the remedy of religious conversion, by which boredom can be cast out; rather, when we can awaken it, we can be converted into it, and thereby have Being disclosed to us (Heidegger) or achieve heroism (the Jesuit).

Less clear is whether The Pale King offers a vision of what Heidegger calls “profound” boredom, the third and essential kind. For Heidegger is quite explicit that reaching the depths and essence of boredom “is possible only if profound boredom bores as such” (134). But when discussing Shane Drinion’s “happiness,” Wallace recommends that one “pay attention [End Page 180] to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you” (546). The result (“constant bliss in every atom”) bears a direct relationship with Heidegger’s higher power and increased perception of being, but the mechanism does seem different. After all, with Wallace, one is stuck in Heidegger’s phase one, “Becoming Bored with Something,” or at best phase two, “Being Bored by Something and the Passing of Time Belonging to It.” In other words, Wallace is “skipping a step,” in Heidegger’s schema. However, two things must be borne in mind here. First, Heidegger himself sees the boredoms as progressive, not necessarily as separate, static realities:

Superficial boredom is even meant to lead us into profound boredom, or, to put it more appropriately, the superficial boredom is supposed to manifest itself as the profound boredom and to attune us through and through in the ground of Dasein. This fleeting, cursory, inessential boredom must become essential.

(82)

It could simply be that the third step is elided in Wallace’s late, fragmentary account, or that he and Heidegger are talking about a similar process using slightly divergent terms. Second, there is a strong sense of unmotivated tedium in The Pale King’s account of the boy who strives to press his lips to his entire body. “There is little to say,” the narrator insists, “about the original animus or ‘motive cause’ of the boy’s desire to press his lips to every square inch of his own body” (394). Indeed, this is all that is said, in spite of the strange tedium of the task. Similarly, Claude Sylvanshine, whose story comprises the first episode in the novel, is described as a “fact psychic” who possesses “Random-Fact Intuition,” in which one has special knowledge “structurally similar to but usually far more tedious and quotidian than the dramatically relevant foreknowledge we normally conceive as ESP or precognition” (118). Wallace lists at great length things that random-fact intuiters might suddenly know, including “The number of frames in Breathless,” “The exact (not estimated) height of Mount Erebus, thought not what or where Mount Erebus is,” or “the Toltec god of corn, except in Toltec glyphs” (119). While a novel, being laid out sequentially, could never precisely mimic Heideggerian profound boredom, this does seem to be nearly as close as one can get, novelistically, to the indifferent totality of Being revealed through boredom: the sheer weight of trivial accumulation begins to take on a kind of universal poetry. [End Page 181]

Despite these strong similarities between Heidegger and Wallace, it is inescapable that Wallace’s various meditations on tedium in The Pale King have a more pragmatic focus than do Heidegger’s. Not only is boredom almost always mentioned in the context of some boring subject matter (mainly, but not exclusively, the operations of the IRS), but the above examples of tedious or repetitive writing in the text itself are by definition concrete: while a text can attempt to provoke Heideggerian “profound boredom,” it cannot really be profound boredom itself. If one is bored with a text, rendered bored by its structure or content, one is in Heidegger’s more trivial levels of boredom: “Becoming Bored by Something” (78). Once again, this strange text escapes precise identification with a single philosophical system, even though it does share many characteristics with Heidegger’s meditation on boredom in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics—more characteristics, I would say, than with any other model proposed to account for boredom in life or literature. Much as Heidegger can help us to properly understand the “conversion” of Chris Fogle to a higher kind of tedium, the twenty-fifth chapter of The Pale King, with its sudden two-column format and obsessive, hypnotic fixation on “turning a page,” inhabits a different kind of interpretive space (310–13). If we are to think an alternative to Quamme’s initial evaluation of these passages—that “much of it is close to impossible to read without the eyes glazing over”—it is useful to consider the form of the novel, occasionally breaking as it does into cascades of repetitious prose, in terms of mantra or religious exercise.⁷ As Raposa notes, “the element of redundancy is ubiquitous in religious practices. . . . [I]n extreme examples, redundancy is a defining feature of the practice, its key structural element, as in the Roman Catholic recitation of the rosary, or Hindu japam, with the constant repetition of a mantra” (109–10). The syncretistic nature of this comparison is common; in an Italian study of repetitive prayer on cardiovascular health, the researchers looked at both “the Ave Maria in Latin” and the “typical yoga mantra ‘om-mani-padme-om’” and found, in each case, the same effect: “a feeling of wellbeing, and perhaps an increased responsiveness to the religious message” (Bernardi et al. 1447). Even Jenny Turner, one of The Pale King’s harshest critics, picks up on its religious and ritualistic aspect, noting “how similar this movement is—through ‘crushing, crushing boredom’ to ‘constant bliss in every atom’—to the meditative practices of so many of the world’s religions.” In this [End Page 182] context, it is impossible not to think of The Varieties of Religious Experience and James’s thesis on the general fungibility of religious insights.

Repetitive tedium is connected, moreover, to the subject of conversion, which, as we have seen, is so central to The Pale King. Indeed, Pascal, in the passage of the Pensées where he makes his famous “wager,” is thinking of habitual practice. To the individual who wants “to be cured of unbelief,” he recommends to “follow by the way” of other believers: “They behaved,” he argues, “just as if they did believe, taking holy water, having masses said, and so on. That will make you believe quite naturally, and will make you more docile” (125). Later in the same passage, he notes, “Custom is our nature. Anyone who grows accustomed to faith believes it, and can no longer help fearing hell, and believes nothing else” (125). For Pascal, this plodding habituation has a specifically Christian content, but it need not be so. As Raposa notes, in pursuit of insight, one must “be attentive to the manner in which one pays attention,” and among these manners, he gives honorable mention both to contentless meditation and to the Ignatian exercises, with their “experimental” method (156–61). Once again, it is hard to ignore the commonality between this cultivated and habitual paying attention and Wallace’s injunction to “pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find,” a way of life that renders Shane Drinion “happy” (546). The result of this is that “in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom” (546). This is, unquestionably, language of conversion. The content is nonreligious, unlike that of the predecessors discussed above, but this is the exact process by which Chris Fogle’s “call” mirrors, in a secular way, the evangelical call of his roommate’s girlfriend. In short, just as James sought the “moral equivalent of war,” so Wallace in The Pale King finds something like the “secular equivalent of conversion” and the “literary equivalent of Heideggerian boredom,” then proceeds to unite them, to show how one implies the other and vice-versa. Neither analogy is exact; if one were, it would mean that The Pale King is less than unique. But to gaze at the novel through these imperfect lenses will, I believe, deliver it from its most ruthless critics and go some way toward explaining why it does lapse into such lengthy and repetitious interludes, and why certain otherwise unrelated stories are juxtaposed. [End Page 183]

IV

It is difficult to ignore these tropes of boredom and conversion, and considering the book itself as a meditative exercise meant to awaken an almost Heideggerian “profound boredom” is the most convincing way to understand the preoccupations and formal techniques of The Pale King. It remains to be asked, though, where this leaves The Pale King within the history of the novel—a word that I have almost successfully avoided in discussing this fragmentary, somewhat centaur-like textual object. Aside from its unfinished status, its open embrace of tedium—whole chapters full of irrelevant details!—leaves it in an awkward position vis-à-vis traditional narrative theory. As Patricia Meyer Spacks writes in her literary history of boredom, “as action and product, writing resists boredom, constituting itself by that resistance. . . . The act of writing implicitly claims interest (boredom’s antithesis) for the assertions or questions or exclamations it generates” (1). This is hardly good news for Wallace’s text, which in places seems designed to mimic or even engender boredom in the reader. Similarly, according to Spacks, the “ideal dynamic between writing and reading” does indeed require the presence of boredom, but only “as displaced, unmentioned, and unmentionable” (1). She cites examples from, among others, Roland Barthes, for whom the writer and reader enter an “implicit contract” to show an intentional interest toward one another, and William Wordsworth’s preface to the Lyrical Ballads, in which he sets up his and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetry as deliberately more exciting than preceding poetic work (2). Interestingly enough, Pietsch’s Editor’s Note to The Pale King, which he refers to as “an unfinished novel,” takes a similar tone when describing the text. In writing it, he argues, Wallace created “a vividly complex place . . . and a remarkable set of characters doing battle there against the hulking, terrorizing demons of ordinary life” (vii). The martial metaphor is far from unusual; just as a long religious tradition, from Aquinas through Pascal to James, took upon itself the mission of combating boredom (or acedia) as a kind of spiritual malaise, so literary history and theory tend to see the text itself as a locus antithetical to boredom, even as an object that militates against “ordinary life.”

In principle, I do not disagree with Pietsch’s claim that Wallace makes his exploration of “sadness and boredom” into a “dramatic, funny, and deeply moving” text (ix–x). However, this is not accomplished by the standard route of providing the reader with the textual pleasures of suspense, delayed gratification, and a steady crescendo of [End Page 184] character development. Indeed, as Wallace writes in the final notes to the text, “something big threatens to happen but doesn’t actually happen” (544). Chapter 25 of The Pale King, with its obsessive pageturning ad nauseam, may not be long in comparison with the entire text, but it remains a monument (and not a solitary one, either) to boredom that cannot be ignored. It is, in short, an invitation to the reader to enter the world of the middle-American IRS agent, to become at least as bored with the voyeuristic observation of the agent’s life as the agent is bored with the tax code (310–13). Far from militating against tedium, Wallace offers it as an immersive reading experience. Nor is this simply unintentional tedium, of which numerous authors—usually those of the generation immediately preceding—can be and have been accused (Spacks 2). Finally, it cannot either be explained away, as much boredom can, with recourse to an analysis like Bertrand Russell’s, in which he argues that boredom “has been, I believe, one of the great motive powers throughout the historical epoch, and is so at the present day more than ever” (56). In this view, boredom is only useful as a means, never as an end. Unquestionably, though, much like Heidegger, Wallace offers chunks of crushing boredom seemingly as its own end—they are not otherwise rationalized as either episodes to be overcome or as mere spurs to innovation and action. The process of reading the text, I argue, is thus analogous to the experiences of characters like Fogle, Drinion, and the nameless young boy pressing his lips to his own body. In the world of The Pale King, boredom is never a prelude to something else, to something more noble, spiritual, or useful. The only distinction made is between tedium and the life of the “wastoid,” and even this distinction is fairly subtle: the only really clear difference between Fogle’s life before and after his experience with the “Jesuit” is the intentionality with which he understands and accepts the tedium of his life. In the first case, tedium leads to ennui (a species of boredom of which Wallace does not seem to approve); in the second, it leads to “constant bliss in every atom” (546). Thus, if Pietsch is right about the narrative being affirmative and humorous, it must be in the same way that Fogle’s and Drinion’s jobs are somehow fulfilling—not in any superficial way, or even in a way that is easily accessible. The crucible of boredom itself must become, through close attention, its own reward as a meditative, mantralike exercise in higher awareness.

It behooves us to ask why this might be. Is there a reason that boredom should be seen as such a fundamental condition? As something [End Page 185] that has to be embraced for its own sake, something with an even spiritual value? Spacks, in her treatise on the subject, suggests that the so-called postmodern condition has seen an increase in boredom as a given. It has become, she writes, “a generalized sign of dissatisfaction, challenging elucidation and remediation. . . . The pursuit of happiness implies boredom’s threat” (252). The proliferation of advertising in society relies upon it, and upon the myth that it can be alleviated by a single remedy (251). Perhaps most important, boredom may be entirely inescapable; in what she calls “a condition . . . familiar to twentieth-century humanity,” the entirety of human existence “presents itself as uniformly gray. Many consider such grayness implicit in the postmodern situation” (252). The more stimuli become available to ordinary human beings—in short, the less reason one has ever to grow bored—the more fundamental human discontent stands out, as against a stark backdrop. Even formerly powerful calls, such as that to political action, are transformed into, and expressed via, boredom (249–53). It makes good sense that, assuming the world itself is presented to postmodern humanity as fundamentally boring, the only meaningful coping strategy involves not just a turn from boredom to “something else” but a transformation of that which is boring through mindfulness and attention. Indeed, Wallace himself makes much the same point in his Kenyon College commencement address, published under the name This Is Water. There are vast swaths of life, he argues, that involve “boredom, routine, and petty frustration” (65), a theme that is easily recognizable from the thematic universe of The Pale King. While the default position is simply to accept and perhaps rage against this frustration, he offers an alternative: “If you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience, a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things” (92–93). Again, the similarities to The Pale King’s claims are striking, and as this address was meant for college graduates in general, it is clear that Wallace meant to articulate this transcendence-through-tedium as a kind of universal advice, not just a strategy for his IRS-agent characters. The tedium itself is inescapable; what remains in our control is learning “how to think” (92).

As can be seen clearly in This Is Water, when Wallace thinks of religion and conversion, it is in terms of learning to cope with the [End Page 186] tedium and terror of daily existence. “Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true,” he writes. “The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education. . . . You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship” (94–96). His description of the nature of this worship is strictly Jamesian: “And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive” (102). The test is solely empirical; as James reminds us, conversions are to be judged entirely upon their “fruits for life,” and when they produce good ones, we can judge them to be worthy and true (237). This pragmatic attitude toward the sacred has remained a constant in Wallace’s work, and he attributes it to Alcoholics Anonymous in Infinite Jest: noting that those truly committed to the 12-step program “keep getting ritually down on [their] big knees every morning and night asking for help from a sky that still seems a burnished shield against all who would ask aid of it”—and that they must wonder “how can you pray to a ‘God’ you believe only morons believe in”—he notes the wisdom of the “old guys” in the program: “it doesn’t yet matter what you believe or don’t believe, Just Do It” (350). These passages get to the heart of why boredom is so insistently connected with seemingly positive tropes of conversion and transcendence in The Pale King: they are united by the concept of coping. As Spacks and Wallace have both argued, contemporary life is simply saturated with boredom; there is no option of not coping with it. One merely does so more or less successfully, and doing so successfully through a “transcendent power of concentration,” as Lasdun writes in his review, “[is] the nearest thing to heroism left in a world where there are no more frontiers to push back.” From this position, Wallace, across his career, has asked the pragmatic and Jamesian question, “What can help us cope with this boredom?” The answer is expressed most formally in This Is Water, but perhaps fleshed out most completely in The Pale King: a kind of conversion, an attentiveness so intense that it amounts to a practical religion, is the only method that works. This is the process that The Pale King both describes and formally enacts, and it is the process that shows it to be a vital, unified, and, in spirit, complete novel. [End Page 187]