Four “previously unpublished scenes” accompany the paperback edition of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel, “The Pale King,” which arrives in bookstores this week. Three of them are nice for any Wallace fan to read and keep, but are not essential to our understanding of the novel about a group of I.R.S. agents working in Peoria in the nineteen-eighties. The last literary “bonus track,” though, is a keeper. And, at fourteen pages, it’s also the longest new piece of unpublished Wallace fiction to emerge since “The Pale King” itself.
In this excerpt, Claude Sylvanshine, a “special assistant” to a Human Resources Systems Deputy, observes and lightly interacts with a group of low-level rote examiners who are on a lunch break. Though Sylvanshine appears at several junctures in the novel, most of the other characters in the scene do not. In addition to being hilarious, the conversation at this lunch table is a device that Wallace uses to riff on a variety of the novel’s concerns. In the scene, readers are introduced to an examiner with the last name of Hovatter, who is practicing a form of “ascetic frugality” in his personal life, so that he can afford to take off a full year of work. His stated, presumptive purpose is to watch “every last second of television broadcast in the month of May 1986.”
What at first seems mathematically straightforward—twelve cable channels on offer, multiplied by twenty-four hours of watching each signal in its daily entirety, thus equalling a year of marathon at-home viewing—is quickly complicated by the gaggle of tax assessors at the lunch table. How will Hovatter record all of May’s television programs? How many VCRs will be required? How often will tapes need to be changed—and can Hovatter budget the seconds needed to change and archive every VHS cassette against his schedule of actually needing to watch television? The forecasting becomes a fearsome zone of accounting contention, with some of the lunch-hour hangers-on becoming visibly upset by realities that the group has failed to consider.
The scene also expresses Wallace’s ideas about mindfulness, spectatorship, and the philosophical consequences that derive from the act of choosing one’s fascinations. A character named K. Evashevsky asks: “Does it seem to anyone else that Hovatter’s overcomplicating this? Type of thing… With all the tapes being changed right there, bing bang, type of thing. Why overcomplicate it with all these friends and the TVs at different points all over that Terry has to service type of thing?” (The “type of thing” verbal tic identifies this speaker as the novel’s Ken “Type of Thing” Hindle.) Another lunch-table interlocutor gets at the metaphorical import of Hovatter’s insane scheme: “It’s not choice if it drowns you in choices so you can’t meaningfully choose because there’s too many options to choose from,” he says, adding later: “This may be the last time a lone man can absorb it all.”
In this way, the argument tracks with one made by the fictional narrator of “The Pale King”—who is named, in a po-mo fillip, David Wallace—and who observes in Chapter 9 how potentially controversial issues of tax reform can be hidden in plain sight via the government’s ability to make the data-dump insurmountable. In the Hovatter scene, Wallace makes the reader aware of the impending information morass in a much more tactile way, with a load of pure-fact accretion that prompts Evashevsky to plead with his colleagues not to overcomplicate the television scheme.
The author hardly pulled these abstruse accounting complexities from thin air. Last week, after speaking at the David Foster Wallace Symposium at the University of Texas at Austin, I looked at Wallace’s own accounting-class notes with this new excerpt in mind. (Wallace attended tax courses as research for “The Pale King”; those notes make up a part of his archive, which is housed at the university’s Harry Ransom Center.) These papers, which are mostly related to in-class lectures and problem-set solutions, occasionally became a place for Wallace to observe his classmates, who were taking the classes for credit toward a degree. “ACCOUNTING STUDENTS ARE INCREDIBLY ORGANIZED NOTE-TAKERS,” reads one jotting that found its way into “The Pale King.”
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That same page of Wallace’s notebook also contains what looks like a plea regarding the author’s own boredom: “God please help me—Pain, captain.” The mood suggested here is evoked by another unnamed examiner in the Hovatter scene, who at one point “made as if to cover her ears and asked whether please might they be spared listening to this all again.” Submitting to the grind of tax scholarship wasn’t merely a method by which Wallace tried to empathize with the more distractible I.R.S. agents, though. He was also working to understand tax dodges. “An avoidance scheme, perhaps?” Syvlanshine asks the lunch crowd in the new paperback scene, regarding Hovatter’s proposed year-long TV-watching project. “Passive losses?” he then adds, as a reference to a type of deduction that can be used to offset passive gains—but which results in a penalty if abused. During a class that Wallace described in his notes as a “Scam-Fest,” he scribbled the phrase: “PASSIVE a big word for IRS.”
Hovatter likely wouldn’t experience many passive gains in his year of TV-watching—even though one character in the new scene suspects that “Hovatter’s got some way of cashing in.” But there’s evidence that Wallace was fascinated by the prospect of passive material gains: both in the tax-owed sense and the philosophical one, which he kept close accounting of, using his own personal ledgers and guides. During an accounting class that dealt with tax-deferred exchanges of property and gifts, Wallace wrote to himself: “Need I pay FICA on grants, fellowships?” (Nearby, once again, is the marking, “God help me.”) In a separate paragraph, running down the left margin of this same page, Wallace added: “I am a MacArthur Fellow. Boy am I scared. I feel like throwing up. Why? String-free award—nothing but an avowal of their belief that I am a ‘Genius.’ I don’t feel like a Genius.”
An additional clue about his thoughts regarding what genius may be obliged to owe is also included with the notes: a two-page Web-site printout of Schopenhauer’s essay “On the Vanity of Existence,” in which the following paragraph receives special attention from Wallace’s pen:
After the massive success of “Infinite Jest”—and the MacArthur committee’s public crowning of Wallace as a “genius”—the author was at frequent pains to describe himself as not so all-fired smart as his reputation had it. Whether or not Wallace sought out the cognitive pain of tax-class difficulty to humble himself and his other well-fêted gifts in some manner, it’s not difficult to see “The Pale King” as part of a project that sought to correct the public’s accounting of any heroic valor flowing from genius that seeks an audience. It’s as if Wallace tried to adjust the burden he felt—the one that made him feel sicker in tax class than any accelerated-depreciation schedule could.
Another Wallace observation regarding terms-of-accounting art was preserved like so: “ ‘You’re home free, you did it,’ says teacher. Accounting is sea of disparate data threatening to drown us. One ‘escapes,’ ‘gets out safely’ from a closing cycle.” This same feeling, a relief related to one’s blissful victory against a world of data that needs heroic taming, is inseparable from one of the great arias in “The Pale King,” when a spectral substitute teacher issues a peroration ahead of the final exam by proclaiming: “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.” Regardless of whether anyone notices the heroism of the work conducted within a bureaucracy, the instructor alleges that accountants “are today’s cowboys.” Wallace first tested this unusual metaphor during a tax class, filling up the bottom of a page with the phrase: “ACCOUNTANTS ARE COWBOYS OF INFORMATION.” It’s as though the anonymous heroism of the lone I.R.S. agent, struggling, like Hovatter, to “absorb it all,” is the author’s proposed antidote to the curse of vanity that the Schopenhauer passage identifies.
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In the “notes and asides” pages that append the unfinished novel, Wallace lets on that his fictional namesake eventually “disappears—becomes creature of the system.” And in Footnote 19 to Chapter 9, the fictional Wallace character reveals that he worked in a pod along with the character given to the “type of thing” tic. During the Hovatter scene, in which the “type of thing” speaker spouts off a great deal, the reader is told that a certain number of members from this group are sitting and listening, silently—though the character of David Wallace is never mentioned. Taken together, it’s tempting to think of a Wallace who escaped into a more blissful, transcendent focus on his work, becoming less self-conscious about what he had gained in the process and what he might yet owe the world over a little word like “genius.”
Now, however, it tends to feel as though we may owe Wallace something—even if only the time to read him closely. The passionate audiences I encountered last week, at the Austin symposium dedicated to Wallace’s work and memory, illustrated how some readers still conceive of a large debt due to his posthumous account. We know that at least one book-length volume of uncollected Wallace pieces is scheduled to come our way. And that may not be the final compilation effort. Though first, with the availability of a long new scene from “The Pale King” available to read in the week before taxes are due, Wallace’s fans have another payment of attention to schedule.
Photograph by Gary Hannabarger/Corbis.
Notebook pages: © David Foster Wallace Literary Trust. Image courtesy of Harry Ransom Center.
