The reception of his posthumously released The Pale King in 2011 seems to have been foretold by David Foster Wallace’s appearance on the Charlie Rose Show in 1997:
If one were to go only by the elegiac non-review reviews written shortly after The Pale King’s release in early 2011, it would appear that Wallace’s unfinished novel was not intended as a bookend to the author’s career, but rather to put a cap on the man himself. While the debate over the book’s merit certainly received its share of attention, most of the write-ups seemed more determined to coin that one lapidary statement, the memorial phrase to be chiseled on to the author’s two-year-old tombstone. It was almost as if the disjointed stories and narrations of The Pale King’s despondent IRS workers were published solely to provide the final clues to a real life climax that had so inconveniently (i.e. rudely) foregone its clarifying dénouement.
Considering that the crux of its author’s intent will remain forever up for interpretation, this pseudo-psychological approach to The Pale King isn’t at all surprising. Neither is it entirely unwarranted. Upon the author’s suicide, the literary world had lost its only licensed refuter against any misinterpretations of the links between the man’s work and his personal life. Wallace’s death gifted reviewers and essayists carte blanche to fearlessly wax poetic.
Any writer with a mild interest in the literary world has been anxiously awaiting the day Wallace once again made his way into the news cycle. And how could they not? Like authors, journalists too are “oglers.” And if the critics play the role of the Peeping Tom, then Wallace made for the perfect Lady Godiva. While he never rode his steed through the town buck-naked, the armor he did wear was mostly transparent, unable to hide what was going on beneath it.
Like most in the ranks of the chronically insecure, Wallace seemed to defend himself against what he thought were his own shortcomings by invoking open disclosure. He wrote essays on depression, on failure, on admiration, all in an extremely candid, self-effacing sort of way. He fueled fascinated critics and contemporary biographers with beautiful and enlightening nonfiction, all of it either reacting to or inciting the same sort of speculation that seemed to bother him.
In short, he gave them something to talk about.
This very phenomenon is a common thread in the author’s own fiction. This is particularly evident in Infinite Jest where J.O. Incandenza, the creator of the eponymously named “entertainment,” spends an entire phase of his career setting up elaborate japes on waffling critics. Despite his chronic depression and inveterate drinking, the film director seemed perpetually one step ahead of the people who sought to define him. And until his demise he’d been mostly successful in his duplicity.
Wallace’s character benefited from a certain luxury that the author himself was never allowed. Incandenza worked mysteriously from behind the scenes. Wallace, interminably uncomfortable in front of the camera, was quite contrastingly forced directly out of his shell and into a increasingly transparent world.
For authors, public discourse serves in equal parts as a portraitist, a biographer, and an arbiter. Through happy hour debates, classroom squabbles and internet ramblings, speculative conversation consolidates information and then it lets its participants build a consensus. It first paints a picture and then, by some mystifying coup, itself becomes responsible for judging what the picture is worth.
Which brings us back to the author on the the Charlie Rose Show. At the time of the 1997 interview, Infinite Jest had barely made it to paperback and already the author was visibly wrought with helplessness as he watched the image being painted of him slowly begin to take shape. As the man himself once put it: ”Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.”
Unfortunately, this discord between the artist and his admirers seems to be at the very heart of his legacy. Wallace the man will always be a topic of discussion. While this is neither disputable nor entirely tragic, the real kicker is that Wallace’s own irrevocable actions have destined the conversation to be interminably one-sided. While all of us, writers and fans alike, can spend the rest of our lives hypothesizing over the inspiration of the author’s work, we’ll have to do so with the sobering knowledge that we’ve lost the one, solitary voice, capable of reminding us that we’ve got it all wrong.
DEEPER DIVE
Revisit Part One of inDepth: Respect, Privacy & David Foster Wallace.