boundary 2

The Institution of Nothing:

David Foster Wallace in the Program

Mark McGurl

It was all nothing and a man was nothing too.

Ernest Hemingway, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
David Wallace disappearsbecomes creature of the system.
David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
1. From Region to Institution
Because its editor decided that it should be so, David Foster Wallaces unfinished, posthumously published novel, The Pale King (2011),
centered in the antiseptic offices of the Internal Revenue Service Regional
Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, begins instead with a prose-poetic
invocation of the landscape of the American Midwest. In this place, where
untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat, a long honor roll of species of
This essay has benefited from the input of the Post45 Group, meeting at Stanford University in November 2012, as well as from conversations with audiences at the University
of North Carolina, Rutgers University, and the University of Heidelberg. For bibliographic
and other suggestions, I am especially grateful for advice from Lee Konstantinou and
Sianne Ngai.
boundary 2 41:3 (2014)DOI 10.1215/01903659-2812061 2014 by Duke University Press

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

28boundary 2/Fall 2014

weedshattercane, lambs-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion . . .can be seen gently nodding in a morning
breeze like a mothers soft hand on your cheek.1 At first, it seems a sentimental choice for an openingaffirmative, reassuring, as though the fullness of nature can compensate up front for the authorial void that, in so
many ways, structures the text we hold in hand: A sunflower, four more,
one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All
nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine
and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all
business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs
in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers (PK, 3). Building on the editors lead, we
might read the novel as a belated work of midwestern regionalism, a literary
form not much seen since the early twentieth century but arguably relevant
to this writer, who grew up in the Midwest until going away to college in the
East, returned to teach writing for several years, and never fully cut loose
from its defiantly normal cultural moorings. If American literary modernism had been born, in part, in the revolt from the village of midwesterners like Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and Ernest Hemingway, and
postmodernism had paused only briefly in the region to have a few laughs,
here is one version at least of the next big move in the literary field: a strategic reembrace of rooted provinciality.2 We dont know the exact criteria of
membership in this humble brotherhooddoes it include all buzzing life or
only human beings; all human beings or only some?but we do know that,
grounded in a profoundly stable geology, and taking its cues from a profusely common, workaday ecology, it would give succor to the fragile individual ego, admonishing it simply to be present with others, to commune.
But, alas, it cant be that simple. Time starts up again, the first paragraph of the novel turning over into a second, where the situation is distinctly less reassuring: Some crows come overhead then, three or four, not
1. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel (New York: Little, Brown,
2011), 3. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as PK.
2. See Anthony Channell Hilfer, The Revolt from the Village, 10151930 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1969). On the postmodern in the Midwest, see, for
instance, Jane Smiley, Moo (New York: Ballantine, 1995). Elements of a more serious
midwestern postmodern literature can perhaps be found in the work of William Gass
and Richard Powers. For a more sophisticated discussion of the complex problem of
place in Wallaces fiction, see Paul Quinn, Locations Location: Placing David Foster
Wallace, in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Marshall Boswell and
Stephen J. Burn (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 87106.

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

McGurl/David Foster Wallace in the Program29

a murder, on the wing, silent with intent. . . . Your shoes brand incised in the
dew (PK, 3 4). They are not a murder, but of course they carry murder
into the text on the wings of their ominous intent, even as shoes begin to
mark a natural world with the imprint of a consumerist one. And now those
ominous crows can be found standing at angles, turning up the [cow] patties to get at the worms underneath (PK, 4). Their predation is not particularly dramatic; it is simply nature at its business, but it, too, leaves a record:
the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned dung and baked in by
the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in rows and
inset curls that do not close because head never quite touches tail. Read
these (PK, 4).
And so we shall, taking that arresting image of death-hollowed
inscription a bit further into the novel, and from there onward to a reading
of Wallaces lifes work as a whole. This work is unusual in the degree to
which, as presaged by those not quite closed-circuit worms, its description
seems insufficient without some account also of his readership, that social
body to which his works are directed and in which they seek completion.
Wallaces longtime editor, Michael Pietschwho literally assembled, if he
didnt quite complete, the novel we know as The Pale King from a pile of
fragments the author left neatly stacked on his desk before hanging himself
a few feet awaywas only the first of these. Pietschs assignment will be
familiar to anyone who has read Wallaces longer works, especially Infinite
Jest (1996), whose profoundly confusing structure has been generously
received as entirely intentional, an ingenious puzzle, whose gaps in coherence it is the readers responsibility to fill in on his or her own, or with the
help of a readers guide, or indeed any number of helpful scholarly readings
of the novel that have begun to appear in large numbers since the authors
death.3 If one does not see this structure, Wallace once said, then the
books failed for you, but canonization has a way of shifting the blame for
this failure, placing the novel beyond reproach.4
Not that the question of self-worth is simply one attaching to the
reader. That question is everywhere in Wallace, an ominously metaphysical dilemma one suspects might not be susceptible to solution by ordinary
means like fulsome praise. For instance, not twenty pages after Pale Kings
prose-poetic opening, when IRS employee Claude Sylvanshine steps off
3. See, for instance, Stephen J. Burn, David Foster Wallaces Infinite Jest: A Readers
Guide, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum, 2012).
4. Quoted in Roberto Natalini, David Foster Wallace and the Mathematics of Infinity, in
A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, 50.

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

30boundary 2/Fall 2014

a plane onto the tarmac on his way to his new post in Peoria, he sees a
landscape
so remarkably flat that it was as if the earth here had been stamped
on with some cosmic boot, visibility in all directions limited only by
the horizon, which was the same general color and texture as the
sky and created the specular impression of being in the center of
some huge and stagnant body of water, an oceanic impression so
literally obliterating that Sylvanshine was cast back or propelled back
in on himself and felt again the edge of the shadow of the wing of
Total Terror and Disqualification pass over him. (PK, 24)
What had seemed, however fleetingly, a space for warm embrace now
feels too open-ended, undifferentiated, annihilating. This is not one of the
weirdly ruined landscapes of Wallaces earlier novels, neither the Great
Ohio Desert of The Broom of the System (1987) nor the Great Concavity
of Infinite Jest, but it is in some ways more disturbing for its ordinariness.
Perhaps the landscape of the Midwest is not embracing after all, but only,
given time, an occasion for terrifying exposure, like something out of Alfred
Hitchcocks The Birds. Perhaps we had better be getting indoors, under the
shelter of institutions. Isnt this, after all, where we usually find Wallace?
Isnt this where his last novel wanted to take his readers?
And, more importantly for my purposes here, isnt his relation to
institutions what makes Wallace, in literary historical terms, most interesting? For me, in any case, this relation is more interesting than his critique
of American culture, which, while advanced with considerable verve, and
unusually well attuned to the vicissitudes of ironic distance, amounts finally
to a highly conventional morality tale about the ill effects of narcissism and
TV. So, too, is it more interesting than the chaotically ambitious forms of his
longer works, which bear a strong resemblance to the sprawling models of
literary endeavor offered by such novelists as William Gaddis, John Barth,
and especially Thomas Pynchon, all of whom make equal intellectual, if not
emotional, demands on their readers. Rather, Wallace is most interesting
precisely insofar as we think of him as a strong student of the likes of Pynchon and, more generally, as a highly reflexive inhabitant of the system of
educational institutions that indebted him to a certain version of literary
postmodernism.5 To insist upon the centrality of the role of studentand
5. For Samuel Cohen, Wallaces anxiety of influence is a version of historical experience
as such. See To Wish to Try to Sing to the Next Generation: Infinite Jests History, in The

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

McGurl/David Foster Wallace in the Program31

later teacherin understanding Wallace is to read him as a figure of what

I have called the Program Era, but not only that: it is to read him as one
whose situation marks a further step toward the thorough normalization of
the emergent conditions of institutionalization that that term tries to name.6
No one was more attuned to this historically novel state of affairs than
Wallace himself, who, in the 1988 essay Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young, written shortly after earning his own MFA, worries out
loud and at length about the many implications of the rise of creative writing
programs but without letting those worries impede his headlong entry into
the career of creative writing teacher a few years later.7
If the Program Era is characterized by an increasingly prolonged
intimacy of American writers with the ways and means of the institutions of
higher education; by the historically novel rise and multiplication of creative
writing programs and their staffing by writer-teachers; by the emergence, in
that evolving professional matrix, of a constellation of late modernist aesthetic formations registering by turns the advent of mass higher education, the recognition of diversity as a primary institutional value, and the
Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou (Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 2012), 5979. As several critics have noted, Wallaces eventual resistance to his inheritance from postmodernism was at best conflicted, requiring
both a misprision of the rampant cleverness exhibited by his own work and an uncharitably flattened account of his postmodernist peers and forebears. See, for instance, Mary
Holland, The Arts Hearts Purpose: Braving the Narcissistic Loop of David Foster
Wallaces Infinite Jest, Critique 47, no. 3 (Spring 2006): 218 42; Timothy Aubry, Infinite
Jest and the Recovery of Feeling, in Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction
Does for Middle-Class Americans (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 97126; and
Brian McHale, The Pale King, Or, The White Visitation, in A Companion to David Foster
Wallace Studies, 191210. The latter is an especially rich and persuasive documentation
of Pynchons pervasive, if complex, presence in Wallaces writingor, as I might leadingly
put it, of the schooling of that writing by Pynchon.
6. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
7. David Foster Wallace, Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young, in Both Flesh
and Not: Essays (New York: Little, Brown, 2012), 3774. Historically, many of the harshest critiques of creative writing have come from within the system. That, on some level,
Wallace obviously didnt need training in an MFA program, but got it anyway, is precisely
the point. A fine reading of the early story collection Girl with Curious Hair (1989), including the campus/road novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, in the
context of Wallaces time as an MFA student, is available in Kasia Boddy, A Fiction of
Response: Girl with Curious Hair in Context, in A Companion to David Foster Wallace
Studies, 23 41.

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

32boundary 2/Fall 2014

increasing prestige of big science and technology as crucial determinants

of postwar narrative form; and characterized, finally, by the systematic
centrality of authorial self-reference, or autopoetics, in generating those
forms, then Wallace was, indeed, a Program Man if ever there was one. As
a child of humanities academics, Wallace could not have been more deeply
embedded in the culture of the school, or more conversant with the folkways of university intellectuals. As, in turn, a superstar student at an elite
college, he could not have asked more from an educational institution in
officially recognizing his worth, including his worth as a fiction writer. His
first novel was written for course credit and, like much of his other schoolwork, given a grade of A+. When a career as a novelist became an obvious thing for Wallace to pursue after graduation, so did an MFA degree. It
apparently never occurred to him not to apply to creative writing programs
or, for that matter, once he had been accepted and entered into and completed the program at the University of Arizona, to find any way to pay the
bills other than to become a teacher in turn: I feel like teaching is my livelihood, he said.8 And so it was, with occasional timeouts to spend prize
money, from graduate school until the end of his short life.
But its not just the biography that makes Wallace seem a quintessential Program figure. There is also the work, born under the classroom
influence of the much-assigned Crying of Lot 49 (1966). More broadly, we
can speak of Wallaces fiction as having been launched within the postwar aesthetic formation that, in hopes of drawing out some of the contents
of the baggy term postmodernism, Ive called technomodernism. Here
the project of modernist experimentation with narrative form is continued
and conjoined to a relatively new fascination with science, technology,
and media. As distinct from earlier modernism, where an object such as
a phonograph had been interesting mainly as the correlative of the advent
of automated human spirits, here the writer suggests that he might actually know how the gadgets work. Whats more, knowing the language of the
gadgets is presented as a new form of gnosis, converting what might once
have been judged as mere know-how into a new and intimidating form of
cultural capital. For Pynchon, it was contemporary physics and engineering
that made themselves felt in his fiction, lending it authority as a response
8. These biographical details are gleaned from D. T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost
Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (New York: Viking, 2012); Wallace is quoted in David
Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster
Wallace (New York: Broadway, 2010), 14.

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

McGurl/David Foster Wallace in the Program33

to a world of interconnected technical systems. For Wallace, it was math,

poststructuralist literary theory, and the analytical philosophy of language,
in which discipline he wrote a second undergraduate thesis that earned him
a second A+.
Wallace was indeed a singularly high performance product of the
Program Era, although, as it turns out, one with all of the fragility and tendency to break down that that term implies. The obsessive self-reflexivity
of his work might be understood in just these termsthat is, as an institutional demand for self-reflection taken very seriously, made the very engine
of his hyperactively intelligent prose, but always threatening to careen
into the abyss or simply collapse. What Lee Konstantinou has usefully
described as Wallaces postironyhis desire to decouple the academic
and cultural association between metafictional form and ironic knowingness and cynicismcould then be described as an attempt to stabilize a
dangerously positive feedback loop by routing it through a stupefying jargon of authenticity and sincerity.9 It could also, of course, be described as
a moveas the seizure and addition to his portfolio of yet another form of
cultural capital, that of the popular moral educator. This is the role Wallace
plays in his well-known 2005 graduation speech, This Is Water, a call
to empathetic mindfulness as interesting to me for its institutional setting,
Kenyon College, as for its homiletic content.10 Adopting such an educative,
even middlebrow role was a safe bet for a writer of otherwise unassailably
high-tech literary sophistication. Magnified by the authenticating pathos of
his suicide, this combination of elements has succeeded in making him a
leading candidate for contemporary canonization, a term whose original
religious meaning, along with its literary one, is, in his case, very much to
the point.
Even so, there is something obviously wrong in reading the Wallace
phenomenon simply as a tale of success, or as evidence of the success of
the Program Era in generalas though coming indoors to collect a badge
9. Lee Konstantinou, No Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironic Belief, in The Legacy
of David Foster Wallace, 83112. See also Adam Kelly, David Foster Wallace and the
New Sincerity in American Fiction, in Consider David Foster Wallace, ed. David Hering (Los Angeles: Sideshow Media Group, 2010), 131 46. An excellent account of the
broader significance of the existentialist rhetoric of authenticity for American literature is
available in Abigail Cheever, Real Phonies: Cultures of Authenticity in Post-World War II
America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010).
10. David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2009).

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

34boundary 2/Fall 2014

of honor is all it takes to avoid the Total Terror and Disqualification that
Sylvanshine experiences on the midwestern tarmac. Indeed, as we can
gather from the latent officialese of the term disqualification, his sensation
of being cast back or propelled back in on himself by the obliterating landscape is recognizably akin to the self-reflexivity demanded of individuals by
institutions. It is different only in that the inhuman scale of otherness which
that landscape presents cannot be incorporated into the psyche as easily
as the social other, the human other in relation to whom, and in dialogic
concert with, the individual experiences the world as potentially infinitely
meaningful. The blank inhumanity of the outside encloses the interior,
infiltrating it, threatening at any point to reveal that infinity of meaning as
nothing, as zero, perhaps even less than zero. This is the specter haunting
Tony Krause in Infinite Jest, who suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing,
a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he
occupied, and it haunts Wallaces antic verbosity at every turn.11
How, then, to read the Nothing back into Wallaces work at something approaching its actual force, even as we read him as the ultimate
success story of the program? The answer ventured here will be to read
it as practicing an existentialism of institutionswhich is to say, a commitment to the necessity of institutions in making and maintaining a meaning
of life. What separates such a project from a more ordinary commitment
to institutionswhat separates existentialism from institutionalismis the
profound philosophic import, and even agency, it grants to the meaninglessness outside the door.12 It has a clear, if partial, literary precursor in Ernest
Hemingway, as we see in the story A Clean, Well-Lighted Place (1933),
where an old man, a recently failed suicide, looks to a late-night caf as a
11. David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1996), 305. Hereafter,
this work is cited parenthetically as IJ.
12. The agency of nothingness is certainly evident in the emergence of Wallace Studies
itself, as suggested by a literal reading of the title of Adam Kellys sharp resume of the
critical work done on Wallace through about 2010, David Foster Wallace: The Death
of the Author and the Birth of a Discipline, Irish Journal of American Studies (online),
no. 2 (Summer 2010), www.ijasonline.com/Adam-Kelly.html. The best-known discussions
of the negative agency of nothingness in the realm of Being are, first, Martin Heideggers essay What Is Metaphysics?, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), 89110; Jean-Paul Sartres Being and Nothingness, trans.
Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992); and Alain Badious Being
and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2007). Systems theory would
quite reasonably put nothingness in scare quotes, thus to observe its paradoxically
positive systemic function in and as the operational distinction being/nothingness.

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

McGurl/David Foster Wallace in the Program35

refuge from the darkness outside.13 Asked why the old man tried to hang
himself, the more sympathetic of the two waiters in the caf reflects,
It was a nothing he knew too well. It was all nothing and a man was
nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain
cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew
it all was nada y pues nada y nada pues nada. Our nada who art in
nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada
as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our
nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver
us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with
thee.14
One could do much with this parodic prayer, whose nihilistic verbal excess
stands in stark contrast to the simple, ordered world inside the caf, a world
it is tempting to read as a projection of Hemingways literary values, his
minimalism. For our purposes here, all we need to say is that Wallace takes
Hemingways mostly empty existential shelter and fills it with people, giving
them rules to follow and things to say to each other. That is, he makes
Hemingways caf into an institution, a program in several senses. The
ur-version of this program is Alcoholics Anonymous, where the stakes of
getting with the program are as high as can be, but this is only the kernel
of broader commitment to institutional form. At its heart is the small group
meeting as an occasion for serial self-expression and listening. Staging
that formthat ritualagain and again, AA wraps the individual in two
layers of external authoritysocial, in the form of sponsor and group, and
transcendental, in the Higher Power to which the addict is asked to submit
his or her will. And behind both forms of authority lies the calendar on which
consecutive days of sobriety are counted.
Much changes in the move from Hemingway to Wallace, whose
stylistic managements of the nothing can seem perfectly opposed, the
terseness of one (highly influential on the early existentialist fiction of JeanPaul Sartre and Albert Camus) countered by the incessant talkiness of
the other. And yet, that surprising note of bourgeois propriety encountered
in Hemingways formulationclean, well-lightedpersists in Wallaces
updated version, bespeaking the conservatism they share. Not for them
13. Ernest Hemingway, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, in The Short Stories of Ernest
Hemingway (New York: Scribners, 1938), 379 83.
14. Hemingway, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, 383.

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

36boundary 2/Fall 2014

Sartres eventual gymnastic efforts to ally his version of existentialism with

revolutionary Marxism. Clinging to the institutional order, clinging for dear
life, Wallaces commitment is rather to a conception of therapeutic community in which what might have become political questionsand, by implication, motives for political contestationare obediently dissolved into a
series of individual ethical choices. If one believes that a more permanent
and pervasive improvement of our spirits can come only as the result of a
thoroughgoing transformation of the social order, this should mark a limit
to ones sympathy with Wallaces existentialism of institutions as a whole.
2. Infinitely Institutional Being
I am in here. This time we are reading the first page of Infinite Jest,
the second paragraph to be exact, encountering a sentence that literally
brings one up short. Although he was a highly accomplished writer of short
stories, Wallace was nothing if not a maximalist at heart, a devotee of what
he called the long thing at the level of sentence, paragraph, and work.
As is well known, the manuscript of Infinite Jest had been unfurling for
over 750,000 words before the authorities at his publishing house stepped
in and restricted him to 480,000 wordswhich still made for more than
1000 close-lined, small-font pages, including over 100 pages of endnotes.
Indeed, the sheer ordeal of time commitment presented to the would-be
reader of this doorstopping work is one of his most famous legacies.
Not in this sentence, though, in which narrator Hal Incandenza
speaks tersely of his occupation of a delimited space. Interestingly, its
more obscure in its meaning than most of Wallaces sentences, which are
difficult mostly in that it takes considerable mental energy to follow all the
zigzags of their amusingly agonized articulacy. The difficulty in this short
sentence is one of simple reference: What does Hal mean by here? In
the very first sentence of the book, he has told us, I am seated in an office,
surrounded by heads and bodies. My posture is consciously congruent to
the shape of my hard chair. This is a cold room in University Administration, wood-walled, Remington-hung, double-windowed against the November heat, insulated from Administrative sounds by the reception area outside (IJ, 3). Much effort is made to represent the sheer enclosedness of
this institutional enclosure at the University of Arizona, where the author
got his MFA in fiction writing, and we could be forgiven for momentarily
thinking that the I am in here that directly follows it refers to the same
space. But no, it must be that the enclosure is now Hals own cranium,

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

McGurl/David Foster Wallace in the Program37

the self he is stuck inside. Years earlier, Wallace had spoken of the reader
as being sort of marooned in her own skull and had famously offered
his own fiction as a tunnel out of the kind of isolation that Hal seems to
be experiencing in the office of University Administration.15 In that case,
the enclosure of consciousness was already in effect even in Hals laborious description of the office as enclosure. And yet, we have no reason
to think that the space of University Administration is merely a projection
of Hals. And so what do we do with this doubling of interiors? In order to
answer this question, we need to reach for a fully dialectical understanding of the form of enclosure we encounter here and throughout this novel,
and indeed throughout Wallaces entire institution-obsessed oeuvre, one
that pays heed to its thorough coarticulation of the spaces of individual and
institutional consciousness.
One has to work for this dialectical interpretation of the imagery of
inhabitation in Infinite Jest, but in the final novel it has become the whole
game. The institution at issue in The Pale King is, to be sure, a specific
onethe Internal Revenue Serviceand that specificity matters to the
crowd of characters whose arrival, induction, and initiation into its ranks
makes up the lions share of whatever plot the novel can be said to have.
Like Infinite Jest before it, but in an even purer form, it is a novel of institutionalization and marks a definitive reversal, in literary historical terms, of
the generally grim post-1960s implications of that term. The institution in
Wallace is not a place of gothic entrapment and abuse, as it had been in
Ken Keseys One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest (1964) or, a more resonant
example, Sylvia Plaths The Bell Jar (1963), with their harrowing tales of
shock therapy punishment. What in Plath is a continual shuttling between
the bell jar as patriarchal social structure, on the one hand, and as the
frightening enclosure of individual self-consciousness, on the other, in
Wallace comes to rest on the latter, which mirrors the predatory nothingness of the Great Outdoors. Ideallybut alas only ideallythe institution
is the safe space in between interiority and exteriority, a kind of turnstile
where one is continually converted into or meshed with the other.
We can already see Wallace beginning to turn the corner on the
paranoid understanding of institutions in The Broom of the System, whose
plot takes off from the escape of Lenore Beadsmans 92-year-old greatgrandmother, a former student of Ludwig Wittgensteins, from a Shaker
15. Larry McCaffery, An Interview with David Foster Wallace, Review of Contemporary
Fiction 13, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 127.

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

38boundary 2/Fall 2014

Heights nursing home.16 Was hers a 1960s-style flight over the cuckoos
nest, an act of self-liberation from the Combine? Not really, at least not
according to her son, who, having heard her Wittgensteinian-pragmatist
discourses upon the meaning of, say, a broom, which meaning only derives
from its use, decides that she has disappeared because she feels useless.
She feels, felt, as if she has no function, over there, in the nursing home.17
So, by implication, if she had been a broom of that system, if she had had
the function that the Chief had in Keseys mental hospitalremember, he
did the sweepingshe might have been willing to stay. Even better, perhaps, if she had been Infinite Jests Don Gately, whose heroic sense of
purpose springs directly from his being on the staff of the halfway house for
addicts that sits near the center of the novel. In a profound reversal of the
usual rhetoric of liberation, what we have here is profound desire to be a
tool, to be useful like Sisyphus, who at least has a job.
It seems fair to call this the existentialization of Wittgensteinian
pragmatism and to describe The Pale King as its culmination. The existential heroes in this novel are indeed functionaries, the theory of their heroism laid out in full in a college lecture class that future IRS examiner Chris
Fogle stumbles into by accident: I wish to inform you that the accounting
profession to which you aspire is, in fact, heroic, says the professor in
his final peroration, a kind of inverse Henry V. The truth is that what you
soon go home to your carols and toddies and books and CPA examination preparation guides to stand on the cusp of isheroism (PK, 228).
And I think this point can be cautiously generalized: whether it is a nursing
home, a halfway house, Alcoholics Anonymous, a tennis academy, mammoth federal bureaucracy, or the university, the institution in Wallace is
first and foremost a communal antidote to atomism, a laboriously iterated
wall against the nihilism attendant to solitude.18 The antirebels who commit to the function and furtherance of these institutions are to be admired,
not reviled.
Michael North was the first to note how one of the primary themes
of Infinite Jest is continued in the primer Wallace wrote on the history of the
mathematics of infinity, Everything and More (2003), which establishes the
16. David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (New York: Penguin, 1987).
17. Wallace, The Broom of the System, 150.
18. I say cautiously because, of course, these institutions are also importantly specific
in their social ends. In conversation, Stefan Weger helpfully pointed out to me how, for
instance, the tennis academy in Infinite Jest must, at a minimum, be held under suspicion
for the way it sets its inmates in mutually alienating competition with one another.

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

McGurl/David Foster Wallace in the Program39

existential risk awaiting those who attempt to chase infinity to the point that
it decomposes any sense of the solidity of the real.19 This is what is sometimes described, after Hegel, as a bad infinity, the infinity of one damn
thing after another endlessly. In Wallace, as Roberto Natalini reminds us,
bad infinity is called Vicious Infinite Regress, or VIR, and its solution was
sought within math itself, in the good infinity of a completed concept.20
(This duality is mirrored in the concept of the zero, infinitys twin, which can
function either as a useful mathematical limit or portal to the abyss.) The
hero of the primer is Georg Cantor, the mathematician who tamed infinity
and conducted it as a bound quantity into the human institution of mathematics. Natalini has several excellent suggestions for how the mathematics of infinity can be thought of as informing the novels form, but I would
venture a simpler account, one that emphasizes the capacity of math to
describe the ideal form of a literary institution. Here, the verbosity of Infinite Jest becomes visible as an exercise in bound infinity, a volume that
would shelter its inhabitants in a building of words.21 This is the maximalist
version of the clean, well-lighted place, a social medium for the inversion of
points of view, of reversals between inside and outside, that Natalini sees
as driving Wallaces project. In an interview, Wallace agreed that the form
of the novel could be described as fractalmore particularly as the fractal
geometrical figure called a Sierpinski gasketsuggesting an effort on his
part to devise a formal mechanism for the novel that could make it count
as a bound infinity (Figure 1).22 Note how the Sierpinski gasket maintains
its original classic geometric outline, the triangle, but fills it with more and
more detail. The outermost triangle is the initial act of human aesthetic will,
defining the artwork as distinct from the outside world, while the largest
subtriangles of the original transformation might be understood in terms of
the novels three main plots. Finally, the potentially endless accumulation of
19. Michael North, A More Than Infinite Jest, in Machine-Age Comedy (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009), 16383; David Foster Wallace, Everything and More: A Compact
History of [Infinity] (New York: Norton, 1993).
20. Natalini, David Foster Wallace and the Mathematics of Infinity, 4358.
21. For Alain Badiou, Cantors transfinite mathematics has something like the opposite significance: since the completed concept of infinity cannot be justified intuitively, it
comes to represent the radical disconnection of math from human interest; the nothingness of the mathematically describable realm of Being floats as an invisible remainder
in any situation, awaiting the Event of its destructive intrusion into the status quo. It is not
a game one plays.
22. David Foster Wallace, interview by Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm, April 11, 1996,
www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw081127david_foster_wallace.

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

40boundary 2/Fall 2014

Figure 1. Fractal form: The Sierpinski gasket.

detail is the visual equivalent of the novels incessant verbalization within a
bound fictional space.
Ideally, institutions such as Ennet House or the IRS would be the
occasions of a kind of benignly bound infinity like this, the inverse of the
nauseatingly unbound infinity of the midwestern landscape. That binding
would be, in turn, a benign form of disciplining. This is the account of tennis given in Infinite Jest by the academys paragon of drill and discipline,
Gerhardt Schtitt, who is presented in the novel as a sort of Hollywood Nazi
in tall black boots and epaulets but is admired by the novel all the same.
For him, the beauty of the sport of tennis is not about discovering patterns
in an unbound infinity of potential variables but rather about orienting oneself effectively to the Cantorian continuum of infinities of possible move
and response, Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained, this
diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of
self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill
and imagination . . . that made it, finally, a game (IJ, 82). Mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained: which is to say, unbound infinity
trumped by institutional power. The ultimate authority here is not math but
humanity. Neither Wallace nor Wallaces novel has any serious problem with
the yes, OK, granted . . . whiff of proto-fascist potential hovering around
Schtitts regime, which values anchor nicely the soul and course of a life,
or with the idea that it is only in submission to the human institutional order
that individuals have a chance to survive and thrive (IJ, 82). Wallace would

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

McGurl/David Foster Wallace in the Program41

almost certainly have agreed with mile Durkheim when the latter claimed,
in the essay The Spirit of Discipline (1903), that human conductbeing
no longer constrainedloses itself in the void, the emptiness of which is
disguised and adorned with the specious label of the infinite.23 His only
disagreement with Durkheim might have been in holding out hope for the
different kind of infinity, the infoliate infinity one might discover in the existential shelter of institutions.
Its no surprise, then, to find Wallace, in the role of college teacher,
making no apologies for being hard-ass in the challenging syllabus he
drew up for English 67, which he taught at Pomona College in California in
the spring semester of 2005. Much has been made of the quirky humanity
of these artifacts of the pedagogical situation, but I would point more simply
to their surprisingly firm and unapologetic embrace of institutional discipline. On the first page of the syllabus, Wallace described the class as a
kind of boot camp that helps prepare you for more advanced and/or specialized lit courses down the line and made clear that his standards for
writing were going to be high: Take another look at Course Rules & Procedures Items 4 and 7 and page 4 of the syllabus. I know that many professors say this kind of hard-ass stuff at the beginning of the term but dont
actually mean it or enforce it as the course wears on. I, however, do mean
it, and I will enforce it.24 Not Gerhardt Schtitt, perhaps, but assertive in the
role of educational disciplinarian, a role which, in a sense, he continues to
perform from beyond the grave whenever his readers attempt to live up to
the demands of his novels.
How else to describe his spectral spiritual role in the great collective self-binding that became known as Infinite Summer, in which thousands of readers came together online in 2009 to coordinate and reflect
upon their experience of reading the novel at a rate of seventy-five pages a
week over a total of ninety-two days?25 Kathleen Fitzpatrick has intelligently
analyzed this event in light of Wallaces fears for the atomizing effects of
media technology, noting how, as a thoroughly interactive medium, the
affordances of the Internet might seem to contravene those fears.26 I would
23. mile Durkheim, Moral Education, trans. Everett K. Wilson and Herman Schnurer
(New York: Dover, 2002), 48.
24. David (Foster) Wallaces Syllabus, la Sophia (blog), September 17, 2008, alasophia
.blogspot.com/2008/09/david-foster-wallaces-syllabus.html.
25. Infinite Summer, infinitesummer.org/.
26. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Infinite Summer: Reading, Empathy, and the Social Network,
in The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, 182207.

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

42boundary 2/Fall 2014

instead emphasize the events disciplinary dimension, keyed to the rigorous

keeping of a calendar. Convening a virtual community of endurance bibliophiles, these people would take shelter inand shelter fromthe novel as
a group, motivating each other to keep forging ahead through its seemingly
endless difficulties. The constant temptation here was to drop out, that
is, to quit reading the novel, and Infinite Summer was meant to offer mildly
coercive motivation to the individual to keep going.
One common emphasis in the commentary posted on the site is on
the necessity of the readers participation in making meaning in Wallaces
text; but, marking another turn away from the sixties, this sort of popularized poststructuralism is interesting more for how it seems to burden
readers with responsibilities than for how it liberates them to make of the
text what they will. Another, reciprocal discussion goes to the question of
Wallaces genius, whether the now-empty biographical center of the textual institution can be trusted with so much of the readers time and effort.
I would never have guessed Infinite Jest would become such a large part
of my life, wrote Nick Maniatis, the proprietor of the Wallace-centered website Howling Fantods. In fact, I rarely consider just how much time I have
spent with this novel, because honestly, sometimes it scares me.27 So,
too, is Wallaces wisdom questioned in his representation, via a heavily
dialectical first-person narration, of African Americans, which they worry
might be racist, evidence that Wallaces infinity of sympathetic imagination is terminally white middle-class suburban. But all in all, the impression
seems to be, as put by Maniatis, that (despite the tens if not hundreds of
solitary hours needed to finish it) this book makes me feel connected to
other people.
As the summer came to an end, one reader was inspired to credit
the founder of the virtual book club with creat[ing] an Ennet House environment for us right here at Infinite Summer.28 The sense of collective
achievement in having finished the book was unmistakable, a triumph for
this virtual institution and for the institution of literature as such. But, of
course, this was just the triumphal procession of those who came through.
A fuller picture of the event would not forget the manyand apparently
there were a great manyreaders who in fact dropped out of this virtual
institution along the way, by turns shamefully and defiantly unequal to the
27. Nick Maniatis, In Search of Firm Ground, Infinite Summer, September 4, 2009,
infinitesummer.org/archives/1633.
28. Matthew Baldwin, Sincerely Yours, David Foster Wallace, Infinite Summer, September 14, 2009, infinitesummer.org/archives/1741.

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

McGurl/David Foster Wallace in the Program43

challenge of a confusing, boring, outrageously time-consuming novel. Perversely, but appropriately, their departure from the program was a distant
echo of the authors own more conclusive departure and a similar testament to the limits of any institutional success.
3. The Whiteness of the Pale King
So who were the people who became present to each other through
the mediation of Infinite Summer? One can examine the online commentary for clues, but, hidden by a veil of mediation, their exact demographic
nature is unknown. And yet, the hesitancy one experiences on this question, as one attempts to coordinate the technical anonymity of his readers
with a strong, if furtive, suspicion that they are largely young, educated,
middle-class white people, is not extrinsic to the work itself. In fact, I would
say that this hesitation, or toggling, between anonymous technicality,
on the one hand, and racial specificity, on the other, is a hallmark of the
technomodernist aesthetic formation. Writing in this vein, Wallace did not
simply participate in the aesthetic system of the Program Era. He also distinguished himself from other denizens of that system who had different
resources of cultural and experiential capital to work with and hewed to different models of literary value.
For instanceas one feels most intensely, ironically, in reading
the black dialect sections of Infinite Jest but also in reading his early,
coauthored book on rap music, Signifying Rappers (1990)Wallace did
not feel empowered to ground his fiction in the cultural capital of ethnically or racially marked experience, the project I have called high cultural
pluralism.29 Instead, he wrote as what he might have called a weenieAmerican, a category inclusive of what he described, referring to his collegiate self, as a complete just total banzai weenie studier30 or, in another
29. Near the beginning of Signifying Rappers, we find: Please know were very sensitive
to this question: what business have 2 white yuppies trying to do a sampler on rap? The
answer lies not in familiarity with black experience but in the authors felicitous discovery
of a shared, detailed knowledge of the history of this musical form, that is, in a nerdy
command of detail: This was all just data. We agreed on it, and on how it was curious
that we both had such strange, distant facts down cold. Refusing, narratively, to maintain the cautious sense of cultural distance expressed here, the dialect sections of Infinite
Jest have difficulty differentiating themselves from the long tradition of disrespectful racial
mimicry in US culture. See Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace, Signifying Rappers:
Rap and Race in the Urban Present (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1990), 20, 23.
30. Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, 150.

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

44boundary 2/Fall 2014

context, a born tech-science wienie (IJ, 154). In either case, it is an identity category produced in and by the culture of the school. To be a weenieAmericanor geek American, or nerd American, in this context the subtle
differences between these terms is not importantis the technomodernists version of having a cultural identity, a paradoxically nonethnic ethnicity,
or technicity. In Benjamin Nugents illuminating American Nerd: The Story
of My People (2008), white nerd identity is born in the partial erasure of the
immigrant ethnicity of the early-twentieth-century greasy grind, the hardworking type called on to play foil to the hale and hearty WASP jock whose
most famous avatars were Teddy Roosevelt and, later, George Plimpton.31
Indeed, in having been, and in advertising himself as, so good at tennis,
and in lavishing so much attention on sport, Wallace risked the implosion of
the binary opposition of nerd and jock so crucial to the culture of the school.
This calamity is avoided only by the relative nerdiness of his chosen sport,
in which human bodies are never in dangerous contact, only connected
through geometric lines and points of force exerted at a safe distance. And
yet the patina of jock that Wallace puts on the nerd tends to whiten that
nerd, removing the figure all the farther from any substantive identification
with an ethnic culture. At its extreme, in its fixation on the ways and means
of technical systems, this version of identity begins to look robotic (IJ,
694), like Hal in Infinite Jest, who is reminiscent of the partly humanized
computer of the same name encountered in the novel and film 2001 (1968).
Thus, while technomodernism strongly identifies with the impressive
intellectual authority of science, it is subject to being exposed as lacking,
a pale substitute, as it were, for the richly emotionally resonant communities and traditions that guide the work of writers such as Philip Roth or Toni
Morrison. Hence the particular appeal, for a white kid, of rap music, whose
literary version is the verbal racial mimicry of Infinite Jest. In the high cultural pluralist mode, the debt one owes is to family and ethnic tradition,
whose funds of experiential capital are used (not without agony) to generate an epic literature of cultural establishment. In Wallace, by contrast, the
debt is to the system or institution itself, with its purely formal markers of
success. Hence his fear of being nothingnothing, at any rate, that will be
recognizable in positive terms in the literary field.
Until he began to write The Pale King, Wallaces accessions to a
more positive form of ethnic pride were conducted in private. For instance,
according to his biographer, for many years he kept a poster on his wall of
31. Benjamin Nugent, American Nerd: The Story of My People (New York: Scribner, 2008).

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

McGurl/David Foster Wallace in the Program45

his namesake, the Scottish warrior-hero William Wallace, going into battle,
as captured again in Mel Gibsons film Braveheart (1995). In meandering
conversation with David Lipsky, visiting on assignment from Rolling Stone
around the time of the publication of Infinite Jest, the two writers turn to
their respective tastes in movies. Finding nothing to respond to in a film Lipsky admired, Schindlers List (1993), Wallace makes the question of his own
ethnicityand the racial fantasies attached theretoobvious:
Braveheart I really liked. Cause thats my fucking ancestor. . . . I
would goI think I saw that four times. Just to hear guys in kilts
going, Wal-lace, Wal-lace! (Laughs).
Even though it was not, it was not probably the most sophisticated.
But the analogy is, I think probably, if youre Jewish, and youve got
all that ethnic history like in your consciousness, Spielberg dudnt
have to do much. To push your buttons. And that thing . . . I mean
Braveheart, I wept, as he cried Freedom. Which Im sure from the
outside looks cheesy.32
Here we have the makings of reading Wallace as a Scottish American
writer, linked across the distance of decades to Thomas Dixons The Clansmen (1905) and D. W. Griffiths Birth of a Nation (1915), also inspired by
the heroism of William Wallace.33 Except that the dynamics of identification with the hero are now almost immediately short-circuited, redirected
toward something more modest: He was perfect, though: he was never
weak, he was never cowardly, he was never . . . There was no, there was
nothing in thereI couldnt recognize myself in him at all, you know.34
But to say that he cannot recognize himself in the perfect nothing
of Gibsons William Wallace is not to say that this figure is canceled as an
object of emulative desire, only that to identify with him is to identify with
nothing. The nothingness in Sartres Being and Nothingness (1943) had
designated the freedom of the human subject, vested by this indeterminate
negativity with the wretched capacity for free will, but Wallace saw it otherwise.35 For Wallace, nothing is the seductive objector nonobjectof
32. Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, 168.
33. These links are traced into the recent past of the Hollywood studio system in J. D.
Connor, The Projections: Allegories of Industrial Crisis in Neoclassical Hollywood,
Representations 71 (Summer 2000): 48 62.
34. Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, 169; emphasis in the
original.
35. Wallaces second undergraduate thesis was a recognizably Sartrean critique

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

46boundary 2/Fall 2014

a death drive, a destination of pure authenticity. Its fatal attraction can be

avoided only by getting with the program, submitting to a Higher Power, ad
infinitum. The problem being that, ultimately, the program, too, is revealed
as nothing, a congeries of empty formalities. This was already visible to
the close reader of Hemingway, whose story does not, after all, position
the clean well-lighted place in perfect opposition to the nada outside, as
we see already in the first sentence: It was late and every one had left the
caf except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made
against the electric light.36 There are shadows even within the well-lighted
place. Whats more, we shouldnt miss the subtle (but once you notice it,
obvious) link between cleanliness and nothingness, where the latter is, in a
sense, a radicalized version of the former, emptied even of light. To put it in
old-fashioned deconstructive terms, an institution against nothing is always
also an institution of nothing. The antimatter of existence is everywhere,
utterly indifferent to human distinctions between inside and outside.
Wallaces last-minute swerve from a positive identification with his
Scottish ancestor is important, and not only for how it divests him of a
white pride the literary field could not, in its current configuration, abide.
It occurs at the hinge between racial community and a different conception altogether, strongly reminiscent of the community theorized by a
series of European thinkers, including Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot,
Giorgio Agamben, and Roberto Esposito.37 The keynote of all these theorizations is their refusal of the idea of community as shared property
whether of land, spirit, culture, or blood, all considered to have been dis(though conducted within the protocols of Anglo-American analytic philosophy) of Richard
Taylors famous 1962 paper, On Fatalism. Taylors paper had argued that, logically, since
any statement we make about the future right now is already either true or false, nothing
we do in the present could possibly influence that future. The young Wallace was deeply
disturbed by this surprisingly defensible conclusion and mounted a long technical argument in favor of our freedom to make the future. In the latter stages of his career, the value
of individual freedom persists but now in the narrower sense that one can and should
choose what to pay attention to. Wallaces thesis was posthumously published as Fate,
Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
36. Hemingway, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, 379.
37. See, for instance, Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor
et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1988); Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993); and Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community,
trans. Timothy Campbell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

McGurl/David Foster Wallace in the Program47

credited by fascismand its replacement by an idea of community as a

gathering around a void, a nothing, an unpayable debt. For Esposito, the
thing shared in community is not characterized by what is proper but by
what is improper, or even more drastically, by the other; by a voiding, be it
partial or whole, of property into its negative; by removing what is properly
ones own that invests and de-centers the proprietary subject, forcing him
to take leave of himself, to alter himself.38 Emptied of positive content, but
still giving structure to human life, this conception of community might even
be represented as an abjectly featureless bureaucracy.
Although incomplete, The Pale King is more consistent in texture
than its Pynchon-addled predecessor and gains coherence from putting
a single institution at its core. But not any institution: what makes the
IRS interesting as a center of thematic gravity is the way its binding disciplinary energies move both inward, toward its employees, and outward to
the nation from which it collects money. The IRS is, first of all, a bureaucratic world unto itself, and the very fact that it is largely loathed by the citizens it serves draws its inmates into closer camaraderie. In this the novel
approaches the condition of fictional workplace ethnography, taking reams
of individual testimony and shaping it into a larger picture that both humanizes and generalizes the experience of a certain class of workers. Through
the plot contrivance of a public relations initiative meant, so it is said (in
fact, it is occupational therapy, a secret exercise in the talking cure), to
humanize, demystify the Service, help citizens understand how hard and
important their job is (PK, 100), several examiners in succession sit before
a video camera and tell their stories.
And this, in a way, is the novel in miniature: it has no protagonist, resolving the competitive struggle for dominance Alex Woloch has
described as typical of the classical realist character system.39 Instead,
the novel reaches toward the idealvery much a Program Era ideal, and
one shared by AAof serial self-expression, of everyone finding his voice
and having his or her say in turn. Of course, given his special relationship
to the author, we might be tempted to make an exception for the figure of
one David Wallace, who (although his nonfictional counterpart never did)
has gotten a job at the IRS while taking a leave of absence from college.
It would be perfectly conventional for this author-character to function as
38. Esposito, Communitas, 7.
39. Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

48boundary 2/Fall 2014

a crypto-protagonist, the individual sensibility through which the life of the

institution will be experienced. And yet, this is not the form taken by the
published version, and the pile of notes and manuscript left on his desk
makes it clear that this was not the plan. The one called Embryonic Outline reads in part:
2. Being individual vs. being part of larger thingspaying taxes,
being lone gun in IRS vs. team player.
David Wallace disappears 100 pp in.
Central Deal: Realism, monotony. Plot a series of set-ups for stuff
happening, but nothing actually happens.
David Wallace disappearsbecomes creature of the system. (PK,
appendix, 546)
Note how disappearing from the novel is tantamount to disappearing into
the system it represents; how becoming a creature of the system is offered
not as an insult but as a kind of ideal of institutional being. Of course, this
apotheosis of belonging has been profoundly ironized by the event of the
authors death, which, as Brian McHale has noted, confers an unsettling
added significance upon the phrase David Wallace disappears.40 After
that event, and reading this phrase, the IRS fades as the contemporary
institution of literature suddenly snaps into focus, the whole package of
objects and ritual practices of which it is made. In that dimension, the real
death of the author is what makes way for the readers meaningful labor of
mourning, which would fill Wallaces death-hollowed inscriptions with complete significance.
4. The Debt to Nothing
Not least of the reasons to accentuate the nothing in a reading of
Wallace is in how it provokes us to find the limits of his seductively fine mind,
all the better to defend ourselves from it. If the very idea that we might want
or need such a defense seems strange, a violation of hagiographic protocol, or even simple decency, this may be because Wallaces canonization is
occurring in a time of widespread rejection of the negative in literary studies,
a general foreclosure on the possibilities of dialectical thinking in favor of
cheerleading. Responsive to a general sense of duress in the humanities
disciplines, and in literary culture at large, scholars have increasingly been
40. McHale, The Pale King, Or, The White Visitation, 208.

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

McGurl/David Foster Wallace in the Program49

dissuaded from exercising the critical function, instead setting themselves

the task of what Eve Sedgwick called reparative reading.41 In this context,
the unusually intense connections Wallace seems to make with readers can
serve as an emblem of the continuing possibilities of literature as such, of
its capacity to matter. Why would anyone (any literary scholar, in particular)
want to mess with that? Why not simply join the celebration?
And yet, quiet as it might be kept, there is much to be gained from
our refusal, as readers, to enter into Wallaces project and finish it on his
terms. This is true, I think, on several levels, but especially true insofar as
one considers a work like The Pale King as a political, and not simply therapeutic, fiction. Actually, decoding the politics of the novel is not that hard:
Wallace admires the IRS as the mechanism by which the indebtedness
of individuals to the nation-state is measured and periodically discharged.
Set in the 1980s, it would, on this level, seem to present a straightforwardly
liberal critique of Reaganomics as promoting an ethos of rampant marketization and social irresponsibility. Not only have marginal rates been
lowered while defense spending has increased, a new regime of compliance has been installed that will focus not on civic responsibility but on a
pure calculation of the rate of return for every audit: Distilled to its essence,
the question was whether and to what extent the IRS should be operated
like a for-profit business (PK, 83). Given the novels obvious revulsion at
this prospect, the liberal reader is likely to forgive Wallace for his credulity
in the face of maverick Senator John McCain, whose 2000 candidacy
for the US presidency he respectfully followed for Rolling Stone, only to
see the straight talker insist repeatedly, eight years later, that Sarah Palin
was the single most qualified person he could think of to hold the office of
vice president of the United States.42
The question is whether Wallace could forgive himself for his error in
judgment. While it is fair to describe his investment in the institutional order
of things as conservative, and to note that his investment in the symbolic
value of ordinary whiteness is very much shared by the Republican Party, a
book celebrating the secular culture of IRS bureaucracy could hardly have
been more resistant to contemporary right-wing sensibilities. Indeed, if, as
seems to be the case, Wallace is the author of an anonymous online testi41. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, Youre So
Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You, in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 12351.
42. David Foster Wallace, Up Simba, in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New
York: Little, Brown, 2006), 156234.

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

50boundary 2/Fall 2014

monial to the value of Granada Housethe halfway house in Allston, Massachusetts, where, in 1989, he began his long engagement with twelvestep therapyhe can be counted an explicit apologist of the welfare state.
Speaking at length of the benefits of the disciplinary environment at Granada, he concludes the testimonial by calculating the investment made in
his mental health by the state as against the taxes he was eventually able
to pay as a functional and reasonably well-paid writer and teacher:
I am . . . a productive member of [my] community. Citizens or government agencies that are considering financial support of Granada
House might be interested in the following breakdown. From 1983
to 1989 I paid almost no taxes, cost two different health insurance
companies almost $100,000 in treatments, institutionalizations, and
psychiatric care, cost myself and my parents another $70,000
$80,000 when insurance ran out, and cost two different states thousands of dollars when my own support ran out and I had to declare
myself indigent. In 1990 and 1991, I paid no real taxes but also didnt
cost anyone anything. From 1992 to present, I have cost family, government, and charitable institutions nothing, have paid well over
$325,000 in federal, state, and municipal taxes, and have donated a
least another $100,000 to various charities. I dont know what it cost
to put me through Granada House for six months (I myself paid $20
a week in rent, though this was sliding-scale because I was broke),
but by even the coldest type of cost-accounting, it appears to me
that it was worth it for everyone.43
In this instance, liberal technocracy, and not traditional morality, gets the
last word: by supporting organizations such as Granada House, the state
is making a sound long-term financial investment in its citizens and thus in
itself.
Even so, the conservatism of Wallaces embrace of institutional
authority does point to some obvious limitations in the perspective taken in
his last novel, which, given the nature of the organization at its center, can43. An Ex-Residents Story, posted on the website of Granada House, www.granada
house.org/people/letters_from_our_alum.html. While no name is attached to the entry,
the author is generally assumed, due to striking stylistic and other correspondences, to
be David Foster Wallace. A discussion of the provenance of this letter is available in Maria
Bustilloss illuminating discussion of Wallace and the genre of self-help. See Maria Bustillos, Inside David Foster Wallaces Private Self-Help Library, The Awl, April 5, 2011, www
.theawl.com/2011/04/inside-david-foster-wallaces-private-self-help-library.

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

McGurl/David Foster Wallace in the Program51

not help but come off as narrowly nationalist in focus, a regression of sorts
from the weird new map of North America imagined in Infinite Jest. Set in
the white heartland, the more recent novel accepts the nation as a naturally
bounded unit of mutual obligation, as expressed by the payment of federal
taxes, while the rest of the world more or less falls away. In his book Debt:
The First 5,000 Years (2012), David Graeber summarizes a body of recent
economic thought, called primordial debt theory, that seems uncannily
consonant with the community-in-debt imagined by Wallace.44 Here, governments, imposing taxes, are understood to have become the guardians
of the debt that all citizens have to one another, which debt is the essence
of society itself. Indeed, for primordial debt theorists, as in postproprietary
conceptions of community, human existence is itself a form of debt.45
But for Graeber, the metaphysical existence = debt equation must
be recast as a historical description of the global political domination of
the indebted. This flip in perspective cannot be managed within the imaginative enclosure of The Pale King, leaving a large blind spot in its relation
to the world in which it was posthumously published. Personal obligations
are one thingthey have always structured social life. By contrast, the language and practice of debt is a problem for Graeber because it quantifies
and abstracts these social bonds from their context, enabling the indifference of the creditor to the debtors well-being. More pointedly, as argued by
Maurizio Lazzarato, in The Making of the Indebted Man (2011), the debtorcreditor relationship . . . intensifies mechanisms of exploitation and domination at every level of society. . . . Everyone is a debtor, accountable to and
guilty before capital.46 In poorer countries, the people are controlled by the
states that hold debt in their name, payable ad infinitum to people they will
never meet. In the United States, whose immense debt burden is anomalously a form of poweras creditor nations become, in a sense, indebted to
American debt for their own economic growthit nonetheless justifies the
bipartisan dismantling of the institutions of the welfare state. In the wake
of this dismantling, the social role of student, so important to Wallaces
career, goes hand in hand with a notoriously large debt burden, unforgivingly enforced by the US federal government, which now profits from it.
44. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011), 4371.
45. Graeber, Debt, 56.
46. Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal
Condition, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2012), n.p. See also
Richard Dienst, The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing against the Common Good (Brooklyn, NY:
Verso, 2011).

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

52boundary 2/Fall 2014

Figure 2. CREDIT for sale.

The Pale King offers a simple and powerful, if implicit, answer to the
problem of divestment in the welfare state: we should pay more taxes! And
if it arguably shows insufficient interest in who we are exactly, beyond
the human-American norm, it would be wrong to miss the sheer quixotic
glory of this message, as impressive in its way as the whole idea of writing a long novel about a painfully boring institution. That said, a whole new
vista on the novels contemporary political context opens up when we juxtapose it with a text substantially more radical in conception and execution
than itself, one of the more interesting works of so-called Conceptual Poetics (Figure 2). Mathew Timmonss eight-hundred-page antiepic CREDIT
(2009) is a compilation, in its first part, of scans, labeled A through Z, of the
many credit card and other solicitations the author received over a short
period in 2007.47 The second part consists of increasingly strident demands
for payment of his debts, labeled 1 through 10, that he received a few years
later, after the Great Recession had begun. In a sense, with the cheerful
come-on of the credit card solicitation, this brings us back to the consumerist world of Infinite Jest, except insofar as that novel remained stuck on the
problema First World problem if ever there was oneof consumer plenitude. In that context, the role of the disciplinary institution is to produce
47. Mathew Timmons, CREDIT (Los Angeles: Blanc Press, 2009).

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

McGurl/David Foster Wallace in the Program53

an artificial scarcity, depriving the addict of the destructively entertaining

substances he would otherwise certainly find a way to get. In CREDIT, by
contrast, as credit turns into debit, letters to numbers, it appears that the
author suddenly cant afford anything. The largest of his debts, appropriately enough, is for student loans totaling more than $78,000, which he is
warned are about to be turned over to the Department of Education Debt
Collection Service and perhaps also referred to the Department of Justice. Although on its face exceedingly bland, a stack of scanned junk mail,
including torn envelopes, with much of its identifying information redacted,
the author claims for his work the pathos of self-expression: A large format, full color, hardbound book, CREDIT is a highly revealing and emotional work chronicling a personal tale of credit. In 2007 irrational exuberance and promises of financial fortune hung in the air, mailboxes were
filled with gracefully worded offers of credit. But in 2009, the shape of the
financial environment changed radically and mailboxes still filled up with
statements of credit. Something had to change, offer turned to obligation.
This was the pitch made at the only place CREDIT (nominally published by
Timmonss own Blanc Press) can be acquired, an online, on-demand selfpublishing company called Lulu.com, where it can be purchased for $199,
or $299 for the electronic version.48
Where Infinite Summer called out to endurance bibliophiles everywhere, inviting them to bind themselves in virtual community, Timmons
repels any community of readers with a deliberately unreasonable sales
pricethe maximum that Lulu.com allows its authors to charge, just as
eight hundred pages is the longest it allows books to be.49 This recasts
an otherwise relatively worthless-seeming text as an unattainable literary luxury item, even as it ingeniously reinvents a weird form of artistic
autonomy in the least prestigious precincts of the publishing industry. As an
art-object, it is something beautiful to beholdmost likely from afar, as an
idea. As a literary work, as something to read, it is kind of a nothing, and we
48. See www.lulu.com/shop/mathew-timmons/credit/hardcover/product-18692829.html.
Timmons promotional language was subsequently moved to the website of Insert Blanc
Press, www.insertblancpress.net/products/credit-by-mathew-timmons, although the book
is still available from Lulu.com.
49. That said, a different sort of community is called forth in the unusually many promotional blurbs that appear on the back cover and first page of the book, mostly from members of the Los Angeles experimental poetry scene, of which Timmons is one. The blurb
economy so noticeable in book publishing, but perhaps especially noticeable in small
press poetry, has its own nonmonetary structures of personal credit and personal debt,
which would appear to be part of Timmonss point.

Published by Duke University Press

boundary 2

54boundary 2/Fall 2014

owe it nothing even if we do take distant note of the pathos of the authors
financial situation. In this literary transaction, at least, everyone comes out
debt-free. Keeping faith in irony, the payoff of this conceptual project is not
literary experience as we usually think of it, and as Wallace doles out in
positive gobs, but the mordant negativity of critique: baldly laying bare the
documents of the debtor-creditor relation, CREDIT refuses the idealization
of debt as the price we should gladly pay for community, national or otherwise. Out there in the space of the market, in the United States and beyond,
where the office-bound Pale King cannot quite see it, theres a kind of war
going on.

Published by Duke University Press