The Pale King and the unweeded garden

I am often slow of study. Only today did it occur to me that it's entirely appropriate to publish on April 15th a novel that's set in an IRS facility. Moreover, it's very appropriate this tax season due to the fact that, though the 15th fell on a Friday this year, this year's deadline is the 18th due to the Washington, D.C. holiday. For weirdness within an allegedly coherent, even boring system is, apparently, one of this unfinished work's big subjects.

I've not read this yet (that will have to wait a little while) and I've certainly not read all the reviews, but while all sorts of modern and contemporary "systems-novelists" (think Pynchon, DeLillo, Gaddis) have been named-checked in those reviews, the link I'm surprised no one has made is with Hamlet--which, of course, is also the origin of the phrase "infinite jest." The phrase "pale king" does not appear in Shakespeare's play, but a pale king certainly does (as does a dead father in The Pale King)--and, moreover, to reveal that the outwardly-tranquil (read: boring, bureaucratic) world of Elsinore is, in fact, as corrupt as Hamlet's image of the unweeded garden hints that it is. And, as in Hamlet, a big theme of The Pale King is delayed action: this review of the novel quotes from Wallace's notes identifying its "central deal": “Realism. Monotony. Plot a series of set-ups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens.”

I've probably over-speculated on this novel that I have yet to read a page of, so I'll stop here for now. But by way of parting (and in celebration of tax season), I'll leave you with this pondering of an existential dilemma:

“Our tax system, as it currently exists, faces challenges,” [Evanston, Ill., accountant Stephen] Lacy wrote [to Wallace], before offering a “philosophical analogy”: “Imagine someone who wants to have a purely realistic and Aristotelian outlook and metaphysic and wants to avoid thinking of how some of the radical insights of Gödel, Wittgenstein, Davidson, Derrida and Deleuze might chip away at his system. The complexity of language and its nature of being contradictory and deconstructing are there all the time. . . . Sooner or later this person’s world view will have major problems. Our tax system wants to be a ‘modernist’ enterprise in an increasingly ‘postmodernist’ world.”

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W(h)ither the Novel?

Inasmuch as concepts, including the concepts Fiction and Necessity, are more or less necessary fictions, fiction is more or less necessary. Butterf_ies exist in our imagination, along with Existence, Imagination, and the rest. Archimedeses, we lever reality by conceiving ourselves apart from its other things, them from one another, the whole from unreality. Thus Art is as natural an artifice as Nature; the truth of fiction is that fact is fantasy; the made-up story is a model of the world.

Yet the empire of the novel, vaster once than those combined of France and England, is shrunk now to a Luxembourg, a San Marino! Its popular base usurped, fiction has become a pleasure for special tastes, like poetry, archery, church-going. What is wanted to restore its ancient dominion is nothing less than a revolution; indeed, the Revolution is waiting in the wings, the 2nd Revolution, and will not stay for the Bicentennial of the 1st . . .

--John Barth, LETTERS (1979), 33.

And an updated take, found while Googling about for something David Foster Wallace says somewhere about serious literature having always been "in trouble":

And I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose the Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

--Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

Wallace and Barth, while agreeing here on the cultural ghettoizing of the novel, don't agree on what the contemporary novelist's response--that is, his/her approach--should be to this circumstance. Each, though, argues in his own way that merely replicating contemporary culture and its responses to itself is at least an aesthetic dead-end, if not a moral one as well (Wallace's comments on irony in "E Unibus Pluram" are especially instructive on this point). Without this post's turning into a disquisition on how some recent writers have (or have not) risen to this challenge, I'll content myself for now with encouraging my reader(s) to think on what they've read recently and how what they've read can be seen as a response (or a surrender) to our particular cultural moment.

Supplemental readings: a summary of Barth's essay "The Literature of Exhaustion," here, another summary of that essay in conjunction with its later companion essay, "The Literature of Replenshment," and the transcript of Wallace's 2005 Kenyon College commencement address.

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A language really spoken by men . . .

The Cumbria Tourism Board notes that this is the 200th anniversary of William Wordsworth's poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" (to refresh your memory, here is the text of the poem). Hmm, they wondered as they wandered over there . . . how to get people up here to see some daffodils . . . ?


(Hat-tip: NPR)

Will this hasten or delay the arrival of Spring? Will M. C. Nuts cause Wordsworth to spin in his grave even as he joins Lucy in rolling

round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees[?]

I'm not horrified by this, but I do think, though, that the Board's choosing to do this represents, at the very least, a mistrust of Wordsworth's poem to move a new audience these days. Do not our postmodern hearts with pleasure fill, too, upon looking upon hosts of golden daffodils? Is emotion also one of those Grand Narratives that Lyotard warned us about, a ride that needs pimping so that we are moved by its coolness and thus keep our distance from that nasty ol' emotion?

I'm asking half-seriously, just so you know. Perhaps pure, unalloyed, tranquility-recalled emotion is passé, too, unrecognizable, or perhaps something to be suspicious of, lest our cool, sophisticated critical faculties be seduced into shutting down just this one time. Perhaps this at least partly explains my suspicion and loathing of Thomas Kinkade.

Something (else) to ponder . . .

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