The Avant-Garde of The Pale King
Landmarks of conceptualism include the novels of James Joyce and the paintings and sculptures of Marcel Duchamp, icons of the 20th century. The avant-garde in the Western tradition today focusses upon globalization, the value of literature and escaping conceptualism and modernism for the next era (assuming post-modernism is modernism, modernism heretofore distinguished from postmodernism by a shift in aims, but not in style). David Foster Wallace was fusing the North Star of the next literary age in a galaxy illuminated by lights whose sources are distant enough to have already died though their lights still inspire. The Language Poets, Flarfists, Remodernists, and other presences in the American avant-garde seem aimless, if there be purpose in the plotless and unfinished novel of the late recluse.
Wallace fictionalizes a society representing the demography of Western literature whose artistic movements anchors, by the white-culture, from coalescing with the politic of Eastern literature in Arabic, Bengali and Chinese. However, the avant-garde novel deals with global culture, often featuring a travelling protagonist. Furthermore, if considered as an epic, The Pale King ascends the Western canon which includes Moby Dick. In comparison to Herman Melville’s magnum opus, The Pale King removes the explicit components of the muses of love, war and elegy: yet the structure is undeniably the modern epic; as much as Ulysses was an epic whose vehicle was quotidian life overlayingthe Odyssey, The Pale King’s vehicle was the IRS and in the words of Joyce “In the particular is contained the universal.” Yet, Wallace’s denial of physically running his characters through the globe so as to affirm a global application of his themes runs contrary to the fiction of Bolaño, Nicolas Dickner, Paulo Coelho, each very much so part of developing the novel.
Furthering the modern connotation of poetry to mean beautiful language by incorporating a prose-poem vocabulary throughout his œuvre, Wallace endorses pragmatically the value of literature. Wallace’s works were not entirely ornate words: employing Americanisms signifies the use of literature to contemporize language like Dante did for Modern Italian. In these ways he promulgates an appreciation of earlier eras of literature. Consistent with the hemisphere’s style of allusion, mentioning names of artists sparingly implies a pragmatic use of knowledge like in Bolaño’s 2666 and Nicolas Dickner’s Nikolski, as opposed to the heavy allusion in the pretext of Don Quixote, the prose of Chbosky, in the poetry of Ezra Pound and the later prose of Joyce.
Wallace’s narrative also employs Jungian ideology on archetypes and association to ignore classical reference instead of embracing it like celebrated works of modernism (arguably, works celebrated for exemplifying successfully archetypal significance, contemporizing at once Jungian philosophy, affirming his concept pragmatically). Yet Irrelevant Chris is the Quixote of the Information Age; David Foster Wallace a Dante ascending from l’Inferno, the writer within his own writing; the perspiring aesthete of §13 the one distracted Dorian Gray (page 99)in a society who’s surrounded by billboards by airbrushed models for every product and service, from toothpaste to insurance ads. This way, Wallace keeps with the modernist tradition.
David Foster Wallace, whether unwittingly, uses realism in a new way, as a weapon against conceptualism. Conceptualism demands art as product of a concept, which results in reproducible paintings or sculptures (like readymades), and in prose, a plotted idea which is explained in prose produced via a schema. Because of conceptualism, one can divine “Soylent Green” to be about people being turned into food without ever having read the text of Harry Harrison; this is a problem which the anti-conceptualistic avant-garde tackles. In denying a plot, David Foster Wallace denies the reading community an easy way to discuss the book. By eliminating plot, he forces the description of the novel as “About the IRS”, and makes null conceptualism’s bane of letting a literary community discuss matters literary without reading the discussed works. Knowing this, he could comfortably let plot be forgotten, for he knew the plotless work must be discussed and therefore his need for conclusion on themes was unnecessary, as made clear by his minimalist’s schema titled “Embryonic outline” (available in the notes section at the end of the novel).
It makes you wonder about the concept of a conceptualistic play as described in §14, page 106:
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‘I had an idea I’d try and write a play. Our stepmother always went to plays; she’d drag us all down to the civic centre all the time on weekends for matinees. So I got to know all about the theater and plays. So this play, because they’d ask me – family, fellows at the driving range – to give an idea what it was like. It would be a totally real, true-to-life play. It would be unperformable, that was part of the point. This is to give you an idea. The idea’s that a wiggler, a rote examiner, is sitting poring over 1040s and attachments and cross-filed W-2s and 1099s and like that. The setting is very bare and minimalistic – there’s nothing to look at except this wiggler, who doesn’t move except for every so often turning a page or making a note on his pad. It’s not a Tingle – it’s just a regular desk, so you can see him. But that’s it. At first there was a clock behind him, but I cut the clock. He sits there longer and longer until the audience gets more and more bored and restless, and finally they start leaving, first just a few and then the whole audience, whispering to each other how boring and terrible the play is. Then, once the audience have all left, the real action of the play can start. This was the idea – I told my stepmom all about it, it was going to be a realistic play. Except I could never decide on the action, if there was any, if it’s a realistic play. That’s what I tell them. It’s the only way to explain it.’
That’s the new postmodernist regard towards conceptualism, a regard of eyelids drooped with odium. Bolaño was more sardonic, more reflective of the feeling of the altruistic avant-gardiste when he wrote a response to the concept of a conceptualistic painting in 2666, page 53 of the Natasha Wimmer translation, Picador edition:
The point is, he set to work more eagerly than ever. A year later he had a show at the Emma Waterson gallery, an alternative space in Wapping, and it was an enormous success. He ushered in something that would later be known as the new decadence or English animalism. The paintings in the inaugural show of this school were big, ten feet by seven, and they portrayed the remains of the shipwreck of his neighborhood, awash in a mingling of grays. It was as if painter and neighborhood had achieved total symbiosis. As if, in other words, the painter were painting the neighborhood or the neighborhood were painting the painter, in savage, gloomy strokes. The paintings weren’t bad. Still, the show wouldn’t have been so successful or had such an impact if not for the central painting, much smaller than the rest, the masterpiece that years later led so many British artists down the path of new decadence. This painting, viewed properly (although one could never be sure of viewing it properly), was an ellipsis of self-portraits, sometimes a spiral of self-portraits (depending on the angle from which it was seen), seven feet by three and a half feet, in the center of which hung the painter’s mummified right hand.
It happened like this. One morning, after two days of feverish work on the self-portraits, the painter cut off his painting hand. He immediately applied a tourniquet to his arm and took the hand to a taxidermist he knew, who’d already been informed of the nature of the assignment. Then he went to the hospital, where they stanched the bleeding and proceeded to suture his arm. At some point someone asked how the accident had happened. He answered that he had cut off his hand with a machete blow while he was working, by mistake. The doctors asked where the amputated hand was, because there was always the possibility that it might be reattached. He said he’d thrown it in the river on his way to the hospital, out of sheer rage and pain.
Although the prices were astronomical, the show sold out. The masterpiece, it was said, went to an Arab who worked in the City, as did four of the big paintings. Shortly thereafter, the painter went mad and his wife (he was married by then) had no choice but to send him to a convalescent home on the outskirts of Lausanne or Montreux.
He lives there to this day.
Other painters, meanwhile, began to move into the neighborhood. Mostly because it was cheap, but also because they were attracted by the legend of the man who had painted the most radical self-portrait of our time. Then came the architects, then some families who bought houses that had been renovated and remodeled. Then came the boutiques, the black-box theaters, the cutting-edge restaurants, until it was one of the trendiest neighborhoods in London, nowhere near as cheap as it was reputed to be.
“What do you think of that story?”
“I don’t know what to think,” said Morini.
The urge to weep—or else, faint—persisted, but he restrained it.
Yet, I am unsure whether The Pale King is a landmark of conceptualism, anti-conceptualism or of the two. In one light, it appears that Wallace wanted the reader to divine the concept by reading an entire document; the other, to be without concept of the direction or purpose of order in the text, and thence divine something greater from the text than what it deals with, but instead, how and why. I am sure of one thing, that David Foster Wallace reached what Marcel Duchamp said of his Large Glass, ”l’inachèvement définitif”, the “definitive stage of incompletion.”
2 comments
Somebody’s swallowed a thesaurus, and it’s not David Foster Wallace. Some of your sentences make no grammatical sense whatsoever, and nor do the ideas behind them. Nice try, though.
I’ve already posted a comment decrying this Web site as a sham. (The comment appeared briefly, then mysteriously vanished.) Disbelief that a human being could consciously write such nonsense leads me to assume that the whole thing is a hoax; the prose is a near parody of bad academese, as if the writer is channeling Fredric Jameson after botched spinal surgery. Not only has the author of this essay never read Wallace, he seems never to have read anything at all. If this is not a hoax, those responsible should seek medical attention, because you are clearly not well. For the sake of real literary scholarship, and, moreover, for the sake of Wallace himself, whose memory you muddy each time you trod over it with filthy boots, please stop publishing this garbage.