“We—under our own nihilist spell—appear to require of our writers an ironic distance from deep convictions or desperate questions, in order that contemporary writers must…make jokes of profound issues.”
-David Foster Wallace (Review of Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky)
“‘Irrelevant Chris’ is irrelevant only with reference to himself?”
-David Foster Wallace (notes for The Pale King)
David Foster Wallace strung gallows humor throughout much of his final, unfinished novel The Pale King. A brief section entitled “IRS Employee Dead for 4 Days” queries “why nobody noticed that one in all their employees had been sitting dead at his desk for 4 days before anyone asked if he was feeling all right.” The deceased’s supervisor supplies the painful punch line: “He was very focused and diligent, so nobody found it unusual that he was in the identical position all that point and didn’t say anything.”
Something to Do With Paying Attention, a standalone novella culled from The Pale King’s 1,100 pages, is decidedly not dedicated to bureaucracy’s banal hilarities. As an alternative, it renders the improbable-but-believable reformation of “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle, a self-described Seventies “wastoid” who discovers his calling to the I.R.S. when he mistakenly wanders right into a DePaul University tax class taught by a “fearful Jesuit.”
David Foster Wallace strung gallows humor throughout much of his final, unfinished novel The Pale King.
The priest summons his students to a latest species of valor found inside the invisible army of I.R.S. accountants. Here, stripped of fanfare or histrionic pomp, heroic feats are achieved by “you, alone, in a chosen work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, 12 months upon 12 months of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with nobody there to see or cheer.”
Within the wake of his own father’s horrific accidental death on a Chicago Transit Authority train, the restless Fogle finds solace and direction through the priest, the “first real authority figure I had ever met.” The priest was someone who proved that “real authority was not similar to a friend or someone who cared about you, but nevertheless might be good for you….” Such authority, though not “‘democratic’ or equal…could have value for either side.”
Judith Shulevitz of Slate considers Fogle’s experience “essentially the most unusual conversion experience in confessional narrative,” and she or he could also be right. But Wallace weighs down the graceful arc of conversion, making us ponder whether grand retellings of impactful past events are reliable or driven by self-delusion. The text is tempered by contrapuntal tensions; almost continuously the reader is pulled in two directions—sincere belief and resigned skepticism—inducing a sort of elevated attention.
Wallace deliberately parallels “irrelevant” Chris Fogle’s own dramatic reorientation with the conversion story of his college roommate’s girlfriend. “Fervent Christians,” Fogle claims, “are all the time remembering themselves as…lost and hopeless and just barely clinging to any sort of interior sense of value or reason to even go on living before they were ‘saved.’”
In response to the roommate’s (nameless) girlfriend, prior to her conversion, she too was a “wastoid.” Listless, in the future she wandered into an evangelical service just because the preacher announced that “there may be someone on the market with us within the congregation today that’s feeling lost and hopeless and at the tip of their rope and wishes to know that Jesus loves them very, very much.”
In her shared dorm lounge, the girlfriend describes her spiritual rehabilitation, her certainty of being unconditionally known and loved. Fogle pushes back, reminding her that “just about every red-blooded American” throughout the “late Vietnam and Watergate era felt desolate and disillusioned and unmotivated and directionless and lost.” To him the preacher’s proclamation that somebody within the congregation “is feeling lost and hopeless” dovetails with a drugstore horoscope, whose “universally obvious” prophecies exploit that “special eerie feeling of particularity and insight…. Most individuals are narcissistic and liable to the illusion that their problems are uniquely special.”
Something to Do With Paying Attention, a standalone novella culled from The Pale King’s 1,100 pages, is decidedly not dedicated to bureaucracy’s banal hilarities.
Here, just as Fogle’s college-age sneering reaches the high point of demystification, his grown-up, retrospective self questions the motives of his youthful, knee-jerk nihilism. In hindsight, Fogle concedes, he “actually liked despising” the convert, a sport that sharpened his own cynicism and delivered the dopamine rush of feeling “superior to narcissistic rubes like these two so-called Christians.”
Like a latter-day Augustine looking back at adolescence, “Irrelevant” Fogle finds that he—though a “feckless” failure—was in some way “nearly all the time the hero of any story or incident I ever told people,” something that “makes me almost wince now.”
However the central query that the novella leaves artfully unanswered is whether or not Fogle’s own “conversion” from nihilist to accountant was founded on premises as vulnerable as those advanced by the “so-called Christian.” Fogle’s arc, too, opened on the “lost and hopeless.” Wasting away slouched on a couch, spinning a soccer ball on his finger while watching “As The World Turns,” Fogle became lucidly cognizant of the world turning around him, of individuals “with direction and initiative” who didn’t squander hours readjusting the antenna with hopes of siphoning televisual treats.
“Whatever a potentially ‘lost soul’ was, I used to be one—and it wasn’t cool or funny,” says Fogle. Without delay he knew, “sitting there, that I is perhaps an actual nihilist”—a condition defined by being, “in a way, too free, or that this sort of freedom wasn’t actually real—I used to be free to decide on ‘whatever’ since it didn’t really matter.”
Then Fogle stumbles across the Jesuit lecturer (that the Jesuit is a substitute teacher underscores the possibility nature of the encounter). A priest whose hands help turn unleavened bread into the Light of the World, he can also be an authority on advanced taxation—combining in a single person each the secularly dull and the sacrosanct sublime. While Wallace describes the Jesuit as “pale in a way that seemed luminous as a substitute of sickly,” the priest’s focus is entirely this-worldly.
A Ciceronian orator of impressive stature, the priest displays the “same burnt, hole concentration” as veteran soldiers who’ve seen “real war, meaning combat.” The A/V projector within the dimmed DePaul classroom lights his face from below, “which made its hole intensity and facial structure much more pronounced.” With absolute poise, the Jesuit delivers a “hortation” of haunting, exhilarating pathos. Accounting, a supposedly soul-crushing job that demands submission to incalculable boredom, is, he insists, the positioning of “true heroism.”
True, “nobody queues as much as see it.” True, “there isn’t any audience.” But “enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is.” It is because, declares the priest, “the less conventionally heroic or exciting or adverting and even interesting or engaging a labor appears to be, the greater its potential as an arena for actual heroism, and due to this fact as a denomination of joy unequaled by any you men can yet imagine.” Souls “called to account” spend their lives “serv[ing] those that care not for service but just for results.”
This peroration marks a high point within the novella: after that the story keeps at bay any unconditional celebration of Fogle’s “calling.” It doesn’t glorify the vocation of the I.R.S. worker. Fogle’s own sentiments eerily echo those of a standard religious convert. He concludes that “much of what the daddy said or projected”—in regards to the liberating “lack of options,” in regards to the “the death of childhood’s limitless possibility”—“seemed in some way aimed directly at me.’”
In establishing an affinity between the novella’s two conversion narratives, Wallace juxtaposes the emotional subjectivism of the girlfriend’s fundamentalism with a distinctly Catholic devotion to reasoned truth (“Please note,” the priest clarifies, “that I even have said ‘inform’ and never ‘opine’ or ‘allege’ or ‘posit.’”) If Fogle finds authentic authority and ethical self-abasement inside the structures of the I.R.S., though, he lacks the reliably-transcendent religious categories by which the pale kingdom he enters have to be measured. The fateful speech gains persuasive power from the priest’s cadence and “carriage” reasonably than his priestly collar. Does Wallace thereby mean to alert us to the gap between moral and spiritual conversions? The Jesuit’s diagnosis of Fogle’s false freedom is totally accurate, but does he unduly spiritualize secular work? When “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle enters the Service looking for the Jesuit’s promised “denomination of joy unequaled,” he seems destined to return up short, as only the beatific vision could bestow such peerless bliss.
Celebrating “Irrelevant’s” deliverance from “wastoid” nihilism, moved by a priest’s perfectly-pitched hard truths, we yet have reason to fear that throughout the glad holidays, Fogle wears a face akin to the “exhausted and disheveled” I.R.S. recruiter who appears late within the book. Within the novella’s final, mysterious metaphor, the recruiter receives the aspirant Fogle’s filled-out forms with “the precise sort of smile of somebody who, on Christmas morning, has just unwrapped an expensive present he already owns.” To the posthumous end, Wallace animates our attention: What wealthy gift does the recruiter already possess, and does it write off—within the balance sheet—his bedraggled appearance?
