Throughout this discussion of the ethical material found in Wallace's fiction I have discussed the central forms of post-postmodernism (intensification, totalization, hollow-centeredness) only tangentially. This has allowed a positive picture of Wallace's ethics to emerge, one in which his negotiations with the implied ethics of metafiction build, eventually, to a coherent
articulation of an ethical system in his final novel; a system that operates through the centrally anti-relativistic critique in his fiction, but that only
coheres in the commitment to meta-metafiction and meta-ethics we can find operating there. However, this thesis is not intended to be a hagiography of Wallace, nor the outlining of a manifesto of post-postmodernism that sees Wallace's fiction as its enchiridion. This should be clear from the not-wholly-sympathetic terms in which I have defined post-postmodernism as a frame for understanding aspects of contemporary Western history.
154 Derrida, Jacques, The Politics of Friendship, trans. by George Collins (London, New York, NY: Verso, 1997), p. 68.
It is necessary here to make more explicit the ways in which the picture of Wallace's ethics of reading are marked by a coherence to the broader aspects of post-postmodernism that I have outlined. Throughout this chapter I have made clear that producing an ethical reading of metafiction – figuring metafiction as formally emblematic of the values of
postmodernism155 – produced something that is literally post-postmodern:
such a text reflects on and revises postmodernist forms, and in revising them, produces an intensified version of postmodernism that must be
considered post-postmodern. Nealon's definition helps us to understand this, and demonstrates that Wallace's writing stands in the same relation to
postmodernism that authors of postmodernist fiction (broadly defined) stand toward Modernists.156 But in coming to the conclusions I have about the specific project and intentions of The Pale King, it is necessary now to articulate why its ethics are the ethics of the post-postmodernism I describe, and the significance this has for Wallace as both author and critic of post-postmodernism.
I wish to end my reading of The Pale King by turning briefly to the character of Chris Fogle. If Lane Dean Jr, as I have analyzed his depiction in 'Good People', has the most ethical force in the novel, the transition we see Fogle undergoing in his central chapter of the novel represents a more broadly-drawn and politically-significant depiction of the 'ethical turn' in Wallace's fiction.
Fogle is described as archetypal of 'Generation Y':
155 Following Wallace's 'E Unibus Pluram', as cited in section 3.
I was by myself, wearing nylon warm-up pants and a black Pink Floyd tee shirt, trying to spin a soccer ball on my finger, and watching the CBS soap opera As the World Turns on the rooms little black-and-white Zenith - not Obetrolling or blowing off anything in particular but essentially still just being an unmotivated lump. (p. 221)
There are several things to note about this description. Firstly, it is at the beginning of a long, repetitive section of prose in which multiple aspects of the sentence are repeated. In particular, the title As the World Turns, with its inference of wasted time, becomes dramatically over-emphasized. The drawn-out process of the extension of Fogle's awareness partially mirrors the phenomenologically-inflected prose I noted earlier in this chapter, but it is also has a deliberate rhetorical and pedagogical effect on the reader: it literally slows down the reading process to refuse a passive engagement with the symbolic title. The reader thereby forced to repeat either Fogle's awareness of the title's significance, or become passive in their interpretation of the text, skipping past the accumulating meaning altogether. This is a formulation many of the text's driest sections repeat, although with the more abstract intention of testing and focusing readerly attention.157
Secondly, the description provides another example of Wallace's recycling of previous forms to be found in his writing. Most pertinently, it presents a recursive image. The ball that Fogle tries to spin reflects the smaller ball turning on the television screen, which in turn reflects the larger
156 '[…]post-postmodernism marks an intensification and mutation within postmodernism (which in its turn was of course a historical mutation and intensification of certain tendencies within modernism).' Nealon, p. viii.
157 See, for example, chapter 25, which consists almost entirely of various characters' names followed by '[…] turns a page'. The Pale King, p. 310-3.
spinning planet on which he sits. This image can be interpreted as Fogle's life stalling because of his obsession with fictional or image-based
representations of life, and thus his failing to acknowledge the larger structures of the world of which he should be a part. As it does with its ethics, The Pale King uses this image of recursion in a more direct way than Wallace's previous work, which Hayles correctly identified as crucially
important. Here, though, they require less interpretation to understand than the larger scale structures of previous work. The reference to Pink Floyd even connects the description to an image of recursion in popular culture:
the cover of the album Ummagumma.158
Thirdly, the description refers to the drug Obetrol. This is a drug prescribed for Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder-type conditions.
Mentioning it here suggests another echo of Infinite Jest and its pharmacological vocabulary, and The Pale King's own exploration of heightened attention. It also, in conjunction with its explication earlier in the chapter and the reference to Pink Floyd here, produces a reading of Fogle as an example of Nealon's post-postmodernist 'prosumer'. The effect of Obetrolling is to allow a 'doubling': being able to both 'listen to Floyd' and 'not only hear the music and each note and bar and key change' but also 'know, with the same kind of awareness and discrimination, that I was doing this, meaning really listening'.159 (p. 183.) The drug produces a state of
heightened 'self-awareness' rather than 'self-consciousness'. (p. 181) This description has echoes of metafiction, although in its awareness of the act of
158 Pink Floyd, Ummagumma (Harvest, SHDW 1/2, 1969).
159 'Doubling' is a significant concept for Wallace's writing that I will be discussing at length in Chapter Four.
consumption rather than production – placing a awareness over self-consciousness – the drug replicates Wallace's meta-metafiction as it places interpretation at its centre.
The description of Fogle locating his identity within the act of interpretation of particular music echoes Nealon's 'prosumer' (who is described as consuming older rock music, much as Fogle is), in that he 'produces him- or herself through consumption' of a cultural product with which he identifies (rather than producing an identity out of which he or she can produce identifications with certain consumer products). (p. 64) Indeed, Obetrol has the effect of intensifying this sense of identification, of being aware of its process, thereby conforming exactly to the logic of post-postmodernism.
This is all to say that Fogle is potentially a central figure of post-postmodernism and of Wallace's fiction, echoing features from throughout Nealon's text, The Pale King, and Wallace's other fictions, as well as essential features of the generation he describes. In addition to this, one should note that Fogle is orphaned in this chapter, a fact that echoes
Wallace's claim that post-postmodernists have been 'orphaned' by the logic of their postmodernist forebears. (McCaffery, p. 150) Fogle's apparent ethical awakening also comes as a response to a 'hortation', a synecdochic version of Wallace's favoured rhetorical device. (p. 229) The whole chapter is thus an extended metafictional parable of post-postmodernist ethics.
The problems for an ethical system after postmodernism are related to the image of the hollow centre. Post-postmodern figures must produce an ethics that is non-arbitrary, and non-relativistic, as this is the 'correction'
postmodernism seems to require. Meta-ethics also requires the formulation of ethics to be presented as a choice, following the skeptical nature of postmodernist knowledge, and replicating the importance of 'difference' to post-postmodernism. So, in analyzing Fogle's ethical awakening, we need to see how it is instigated (whether or not this is 'meta-ethically'), whether it denies or overlaps with the construction of identity as 'hollow-centred', and how closely it mirrors the ethical engagement Dean represents.
Viewing the 'substitute' lecturer whose hortation 'changes' Fogle as a metafictional author-figure requires us to consider whether the value system he explicitly constructs matches that of the novel as a whole, and then whether his position is an appropriate one for the ethical system the novel creates. There are three things to note about the description of the
substitute. Firstly, his effect on Fogle, which echoes the effects of Obetrol:
'[…] however alert and aware I felt, I was probably more aware of the effects the lecture seemed to be having on me than of the lecture itself, […] and yet was almost impossible to look away from or not feel stirred by.' Secondly, the substitute's delivery, which reflects 'people who know that what they are saying is too valuable in its own right to cheapen with concerns about delivery or 'connecting', and 'had a kind of zealous integrity that manifested not as style but as the lack of it'. Thirdly, the appropriate response to the lecture, which is somewhat different from Fogle's: 'the class's students all took notes, which in accounting classes means that one has to internalize and write […] while at the same time still listening intently enough to the next point to be able to write it down next'. (p. 219, emphasis retained)
Between these three sections, we have some evidence for the
substitute's lecture as descriptive of the novel's intent. The lecture bypasses the information-gathering part of Fogle's mind, to have an impact beyond details, and affect his sense of identity prior to any concept of learning. The delivery of the lecture strengthens my claim, made in section 4, that The Pale King represents Wallace's rejection of elements of a style that aims to 'connect'. Taken together, the 'phenomenologically-inflected' style I found Wallace developing in section 6, and the sorts of attention-concentrating passages I noted above produce this implication.
Taken together, though, these brief analyses do not produce a response to postmodernist ethics that in Henricksen's terms produces an 'ethics of criticism without seeing the literary work as an ethical and therefore intentional act'. (p. 490) Indeed, the substitute is described as a 'substitute father' to Fogle, one who 'calls him to account'. (p. 176) There are direct expressions of Wallace's ethics in the expansion of the characters of The Broom of the System and their relationship to the ideas of R.D. Laing; the
hortation of This Is Water, whose concern for attention and the other mirrors some of the things I described in section 6;160 and as Aubry has suggested, in the structures of AA as presented in Infinite Jest, to which I will return in Chapter Six. The substitute's lecture conforms to the structures of each of these, presenting Fogle with an ethical system from a position of
authoritative and responsible objectivity in a persuasive manner. However, this presents a Wallace-ian paradox: it places the authorly function ahead of the readerly, and fails to re-inscribe difference. It responds to the 'relativism'
160 For another explication of the ethical system espoused in This Is Water, see Turnbull.
of endless choice by presenting an essentialist version of ethics that does not acknowledge difference, merely maintains the illusion of it.
The 'call to account' it places on Fogle is to join a network dedicated to controlling the operation of money within the economy. Ultimately, the substitute's ethics is one of subsuming difference to the global economic flows of data, presented as a resistance to it. This echoes Nealon's claim that in post-postmodernism 'resistance to the global flow of fleeting images […] can be found only in the intensive authenticity of your own private
experience' which are determined by your subsequent consumerist choices.
Similarly, Fogle is called to escape the Generation Y, prosumer, identity he constructs by following the ethical arm of the exact same system, the arm that balances and allows consumption to continue unabated: the varnish on this is not its consumerist 'connecting' to his individuality of the speech, but the anti-branding aesthetic that allows the system of which he is a part to exist in the first place, and to which, in his rejection, he must affix himself.
Fogle's choice does not confer him with any more of a sense of an authentic self. Just as Stecyk is described as shunned by the 'marginal and infirm' (p. 35), so Fogle is denigrated as 'Irrelevant Chris Fogle' by his co-workers, acting in the same service, but without the righteous lack of irony he brings to the job. Wallace's notes state that he 'ends up in the IRS as the insufferable do-gooder that Stecyk was as a child'. (p. 541) In this final position, the ethics Wallace attempts to describe directly end up producing an unsuccessful post-postmodernist, rigorously irrelevant to those around him, and simply another part of the larger post-postmodernist system. His
attempt to produce a system of meaning beyond post-postmodernism is inevitably an intensification of the post-postmodernism he observes.
Finally, we might compare Fogle and Dean, whose Lévinasian ethics are much more sophisticated in their drawing. However, Dean's later
appearances in the text, such as in chapter 33, seem little more hopeful than Fogle's. There Dean contemplates suicide very directly, 'imagining different places to jump off', in an echo of 'Good Old Neon'. Acting ethically, for the other, as Dean does in chapter 6, seems no guarantee of happiness or reward. Rather, the 'rote tasks just tricky enough to make him think' that place him within an awareness of the passing of time that Fogle's attention seems to validate, become for Dean a 'hell'. (p. 379)
Each of the ethical figures of The Pale King ends up unable to understand the communities of which they are part. However, they are part of the politics Derrida derived from the ethical system Lévinas drew up:
Critchley describes this as 'every day, there is a responsibility to invent democracy', and this is what Wallace's characters do. (p. 240) Another thinker of the post-postmodern, Žižek has described doing this as the only logical response to the conditions of post-postmodernism.161 The Pale King definitively maintains the struggles and paradoxes of the ethical we find throughout Wallace's writing. Finally, rather than any grander positive ethical project, this is how we should understand post-postmodernist ethics: they
161 Butler and Stephens summarize Žižek's thought in a way that reflects this maintaining of a thinking space of paradoxes and questions: 'True thinking is based not on something outside the world, producing a split between the ought and the is, but only on the world itself, producing a split between the is and the is. It is a split that is the very time and place of thought itself.' Rex Butler, and Scott Stephens, 'Editor's introduction: Slavoj Žižek's 'third way', in The Universal Exception: Selected Writings, Volume Two, ed. by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London, New York, NY: Continuum, 2006), p. 9, emphasis retained.
are a reminder that retaining the desire to find an ethics is itself an ethical decision. This coheres with the totalized logic of capitalist choice, the intensification, and the hollow-centre of self that I have described; yet it remains a validation of Wallace's work as a central post-postmodernist critic of these conditions.