Chapter 5 of The Pale King, through the character of Leonard Stecyk, produces a discussion of the relationship between postmodernism and ethics through a metafictional form. The next chapter introduces a potential solution to the ethical and formal difficulties represented by Stecyk. Similarly, if Wallace's approach to the ethical nature of the act of writing was always informed by a compulsion to relativism, as demonstrated by some of the features of The Broom of the System, the sixth chapter of The Pale King opens a new possibility for the ethical relationship between author and reader to precede the inevitability of relativism.
Throughout this chapter I have argued that Wallace presents ethical dilemmas through a metafictional frame as a means of intensifying the impulses and assumptions of metafiction. The ethics of such writing tends towards the relativistic and solipsistic in the same way that Wallace claims postmodernism more broadly does.136 In Chapter 6 of The Pale King, placed in direct opposition to the individualized and isolated ethics of Leonard Stecyk, Wallace presents us with an outward-facing version of
self-reflexivity; an approach to metafiction that re-asserts the ethical relationship as potentially prior to a conception of the self. In doing so, he draws on the ideas of Lévinas, placing them as centrally in The Pale King as were Laing, Wittgenstein and Derrida's thought in The Broom of the System.137 This
136 See, for example, his description of the broader effects of postmodernism in 'E Unibus Pluram': 'U.S. pop culture is just like U.S. serious culture in that its central tension has always set the nobility of individualism against the warmth of communal belonging. […]
(Television commercials always make their appeals to individuals, not groups, a fact that seems curious in light of the unprecedented size of TV's Audience, until one hears gifted salesmen explain how people are always most vulnerable, hence frightened, hence persuadable, when they are approached solo.)' (pp. 54-5)
137 Van Ewijk also claims a potential influence of Lévinas' thought on Infinite Jest: Petrus van Ewijk, "'I' and the 'Other': The relevance of Wittgenstein, Buber and Levinas for an understanding of AA's Recovery Program in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest" English Text Construction 2.1 (2009), pp. 132–45
influence makes the final novel a much clearer attempt to produce an ethics of post-postmodernism distinct from the damaging implications of relativism.
The chapter introduces the character of Lane Dean Jr. As if to emphasis the ethical nature of its content, it was published in The New Yorker under the title 'Good People'.138 The style of this chapter is
characteristic of several of Wallace's later stories. The two closest relatives are 'Forever Overhead' collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and 'Incarnations of Burned Children' collected in Oblivion: Stories.139 The prose style found in those stories I will describe as 'phenomenologically-inflected', meaning that the direct and indirect experiences of the protagonist of each story is central to both the form and the content of the narrative. This style is the best fit for what has been called Wallace's 'metafiction of consciousness', and it fits with the concept of 'existential phenomenology' from Laing, cited above.140 There is a way in which it reflects the hyperconsciousness that Wallace noted in Fyodor Dostoevsky's writing.141 Equally, it can be
considered a metafictional re-imagining of a stream-of-consciousness style, but with significant differences in directness and self-awareness. Experience
138 Many of the pieces in The Pale King are likely to have stand-alone titles as they were drafted, as there are references to various examples in the Ransom Center Archive.
Therefore, even though it was posthumously published, it is probable that 'Good People' is Wallace's own title.
139 Compare the sentence quoted from page 36 of The Pale King, below, with this from 'Forever Overhead': The pool has a strong clear blue smell, though you know the smell is never as strong when you are actually in the blue water, as you are now, all swum out, resting back along the shallow end, the hip-high water lapping at where it's all changed'; or this, from 'Incarnations of Burned Children': 'The Daddy was around the side of the house hanging a door for the tenant when he heard the child's screams and the Mommy's voice gone high between them.' David Foster Wallace, 'Forever Overhead', in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (New York: Back Bay Books, 2007), p. 6; David Foster Wallace, 'Incarnations of Burned Children', in Oblivion: Stories (London: Abacus, 2004), p. 114.
140 Wallace's writing as a 'metafiction of consciousness' was elaborated in radio programme Endnotes: Endnotes, BBC Radio 4, 6 February 2011.
141 Wallace described Notes from Underground's protagonist as having a 'self-diagnosed
“disease” – a blend of grandiosity and self-contempt, of rage and cowardice, of ideological fervor and a conscious inability to act on his convictions: his whole paradoxical and self-negating character – [which] makes him a universal figure in whom we can all see parts of ourselves […]'. In his notes towards the article, he described this as 'hyperconsciousness'.
The 'self-negating' quality he describes coheres with my description of Wallace's writing;
intensifying this to the level found in The Pale King's sixth chapter and elsewhere mark such sections as Wallace's most ambitious literary legacy in some respects. 'Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky', p. 256; Wallace collection in the Harry Ransom Center, Box 4, File 12.
is not reflected directly in the prose of these stories; rather, experience presents itself as an unconscious filter on the prose itself, so that the data we are given is a second-order reflection of the direct or indirect experience of the protagonist.
To make my description of phenomenologically-inflected writing clearer, here is a short example from the opening of the Dean chapter: 'They sat up on the table's top portion and had their shoes on the bench part that people sat on and picnicked in carefree times.' (p. 36) Dean and his
girlfriend's physical aspect is set up not as if externally-described but as internally-experienced, and inflected with, one assumes, Dean's own understanding of the significance of their position: the 'carefree times' his location suggests is recalled because of its contrast with his present emotional state. This is what I mean by phenomenological: the prose here places experience as an essential filter to the descriptive content.
In a way, this form is a development of the kinds of prose I described in Chapter Two, where contradictions within sentences produced indirect information about character. It also reflects my discussion of Vigorous's narratives in The Broom of the System, where the essential meaning of the narratives is determined by the character-based implications of their
secondary allegorical implications. These phenomenologically-inflected passages present the selection and reproduction of any information as the means by which character is produced, so that each word has an ironic inference about the protagonist of the section. It is its neutrality – the assumption that irony is always encoded in discourse and so now exists without comment – that marks such late writing differently. The presentations of Lenore or Vigorous that I have described, for example, uses such irony negatively, while here the irony produces much greater sympathy with the protagonist. It also mirrors aspects of post-postmodernism: it intensifies metafiction's ironic distancing, it presents irony as a completely totalized system and, in producing a conception of character through the attention to
the external, it evokes a hollow-centre, in which identity is externalized to the interpretation of anything but the direct-self.
As the chapter progresses, Dean is shown to be a reflection of the protagonist of The Broom of the System. The phenomenologically-inflected prose of the chapter reveals how reliant Dean's own character is on the relationships of power that have coalesced around him. For example, in thinking about his girlfriend, his thoughts reflect his mother's: 'His mother had put it that she knew what it was she wanted, which was nursing and not an easy program at Peoria College, and plus she worked hostessing at the Embers and had bought her own car.' (p. 38, emphasis retained)The prose style employed here contradicts the values of the Stecyk chapter, by placing lived understanding at its centre. As with Lenore Beadsman, Dean is
revealed to be something of an empty vessel, upon which his community's ideas are loaded. He seems to have no opinion of his girlfriend of his own.
However, in the chapter's conclusion, it is revealed that this hollowness does not necessarily lead to the solipsistic conclusions that The Broom of the System seemed to draw, that a finding a place within a language community does not necessarily destroy the possibility of self-expression and
understanding.
This section is directly ethical in its content. Its formal qualities, in opposition to the Stecyk chapter that precedes it, emphasize the fact that ethical decisions are both personal and made within communities as an essential pre-requisite. This section concerns Dean and his girlfriend coming to a decision about her pregnancy, deciding whether or not she should have an abortion. Dean's consideration of this question is demonstrated to be an oblique process, rather than one with a pre-existing inevitable conclusion.
Dean is presented as being capable of failure through misrecognition, not of conclusions, but of explanations. This is brought out in the following section:
He hated himself for sitting so frozen. […] He knew it was wrong, he knew something was required of him and knew it was not this terrible frozen care and caution, but he pretended to himself he did not know what it was that was required. […] He pretended that not saying aloud what he knew to be right and true was for her sake, was for the sake of her needs and feelings. (p. 38)
Dean's 'pretending to himself' is an attempt to impose a Stecyk-style logic on the dilemma he is facing, using a self-motivated justification to excuse his own lack of action as a form of consideration for the other.
There is a consistency between the philosophy of Lévinas and this section of The Pale King. The single most important of Lévinas's concepts for this connection is the idea that the ethical pre-exists the ontological: he states that 'Ontology is not accomplished in the triumph of human beings over their condition, but in the very tension where this condition is
assumed'.142 So, our relationship to the eternal and indefinable other exists prior to our conception of our selves or the world.
There are two reasons why this idea resonates within Wallace's work.
Firstly, Samuel Moyn points out that Lévinas built this conception as a response to the solipsistic conclusions drawn by Martin Heidegger, a near
142 Emmanuel Lévinas, 'Is Ontology Fundamental? (1951)', in Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. by Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 3.
contemporary.143 While both developed a philosophy from the principles of phenomenology, Heidegger's conclusions led to an isolating sense of self and a relativistic and apolitical ethics that Lévinas was compelled to oppose.
Moyn describes this as Lévinas's desire to 'transcend loneliness' – a desire that echoes Wallace's own words on the importance of fiction.144 The attraction Wallace felt to the purportedly similar project undertaken by
Wittgenstein,145 and the constant struggle with both solipsism and relativism found throughout his writing, make Wallace's work a close parallel to
Lévinas's project.
Secondly, Richard A. Cohen describes how, in Lévinas's philosophy, ethics necessarily pre-exists concepts, because the latter can be used to rationalize bad as well as good behaviour. It is not knowledge that leads to 'good' decision-making, but an acceptance of the unknowable.146 This echoes the way Alcoholics Anonymous is described in Infinite Jest, where any attempt to understand the method through which it operates, or to intellectualize its process, is considered both taboo and an inherent undermining of the process, described as 'Analysis-Paralysis'.147 It is considered centrally important not to consider, or know, how AA works. I discuss some of the implications of this for an author whose writing seems to desire the ability to explain everything in Chapters Four and Six, but already we can see the self-recognition of this trait in my reading of Stecyk. Through Stecyk, Wallace presents a figure who tries to operate ethically by following
143 Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Lévinas Between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 111-2.
144 Expressed most directly in 'David Foster Wallace im Interview (2003)'.
145 See McCaffery, p. 144.
146 Richard A. Cohen, Face to Face with Lévinas, ed. by Richard A. Cohen (Albany, N.Y:
State University of New York Press, 1986), p. 5.
a set of rules that logically interconnect with each other instead of
approaching each decision with a sense of its unknowability. Stecyk is a depiction of the absolute rationalization of behaviour, with his ethics involving the ontological sphere of total logic and knowledge.
Following an understanding of why Wallace's writing might come to echo or reflect on Lévinas's philosophy, it should be noted that these concepts also produce a response to the ideas of postmodernism that Wallace's work constantly brought into question. Most pertinently, this philosophy presents an opportunity to move beyond McHale's definition of postmodernist literature as asking 'ontological questions' as the logical deduction from the epistemological questions presented by Modernist literature.148
Accepting that there could or should be a precursor to the ontological level of existence, and that this level is founded absolutely on the presence of the 'other', and of the ethical concerns that seem so valueless to
postmodernism, is a significant simultaneous extension and undermining of postmodernist thought. Similarly, while Lévinas's philosophy does not necessarily produce a re-integration of a sense of unified selfhood, and is thereby not contradictory of many of the principles of postmodernity, it provides a sense in which the disunity of self is irrelevant in the face of an
147 A significant concept discussed further in Chapter Six. Infinite Jest, p. 1002n90.
148 'Intractable epistemological uncertainty becomes at a certain point ontological plurality or instability: push epistemological questions far enough and they “tip-over” into ontological questions. By the same token, push ontological questions far enough and they tip-over into epistemological questions – the sequence is not linear and unidirectional, but bidirectional and reversible'. McHale, p. 11.
other whose demands are absolute and infinite.149 These demands overwhelm the need for a sense of wholeness, as there is a constant necessity, which pre-exists all knowledge of a sense of self, to 'abdicate a position of centrality, in favor of the vulnerable other'.150 The concerns of postmodernism are therefore made irrelevant, replaced by a sense of, in Derrida's term, 'unconditional hospitality'.151
To return to the novel then, we can analyze the climax of the sixth chapter using Lévinas's principles, as well as a metafictional understanding of how literary forms overlap with their expression of an author's thoughts and a history of that form. As this chapter has demonstrated, the
deceptiveness of all fictional forms overlaps with its ethical concerns in every case. In the last extract from The Pale King, Dean was presented as
'pretending to himself' that his behaviour was correct or 'good'. This echoes the post-facto justification of an act that is produced if the ontological is thought to precede the ethical. But in moving beyond his pretending after this point, Dean begins to take responsibility for his duty to the other.
It is through the literary trope of epiphany that Dean's passivity is broken and he comes to a decision to act. This echoes the structure of many
149 Lévinas's definition of ethical subjectivity could be summarized in the following
description: 'Subjectivity, prior to or beyond the free and the nonfree, obliged with regard to the neighbor, is the breaking point where essence is exceeded by the Infinite. It is the point of rupture but also of connection; the glow of the trace is enigmatic, equivocal. It is so in still another sense, which distinguishes it from the appearing of phenomena. It cannot serve as the point of departure for a demonstration, which inexorably would bring it into immanence and essence. The trace is sketched out and effaced in the face of equivocation of a saying.
In this way it modulates the modality of the Transcendent. The infinite then cannot be tracked down like game by a hunter. The trace left by the Infinite is not the residue of a presence; its very glow is ambiguous. Otherwise its positivity would not preserve the infinity of the infinite any more than negativity would.', 'Essence and Disinterestedness (1974)', pp.
118-9.
150 Face to Face, p. 27.
of Wallace's ethically-themed fictions, particularly in the collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Dean's epiphany is produced as a movement toward the other, understanding of his responsibilities towards her over himself or his understanding of the world. Indeed, it is in coming to an understanding of her specific conception of their situation that Dean feels compelled to act.
It will be a terrible, make-or-break gamble born out of the desperation in Sheri Fisher's soul, the knowledge that she can neither do this thing today nor carry a child alone and shame her family. Her values block the way either way, Lane can see, and she has no other options or choice, [...] She is gambling that he is good. There on the table, neither frozen nor yet moving, Lane Dean Jr. sees all this, and is moved with pity and with also something more, something without any name he knows, that is given to him to feel in the form of a question that never once in all the long week's thinking and division had even so much as occurred – why is he so sure he doesn't love her? Why is one kind of love any different? What if he has no earthly idea what love is? (pp. 42-3)
Dean's decision isn't based on his own self-understanding, as he cannot answer the questions about love for himself. Nor is it based on abstract notions of what he 'should' do in a hypothetical situation; never does he consider what the best course of action would be, or what would reflect best on himself. His ethical behaviour is predicated entirely on the particular and unknowable other he is facing, and any other consequences are ignored.
151 Simon Critchley, Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Lévinas and Contemporary French Thought (London: Verso, 1999), p. 274.
Cohen describes the four elements of Lévinas's ethics to be '1) the alterity of the other person and 2) the passivity of the self, and their
"relations": 3) the other's command and 4) my responsibility to respond.'152 These all find correspondence in Lévinas's claim that 'ontological difference' '[…] signifies my responsibility for the other […] an ethical meaning of the relation to the other, answering, in the form of responsibility before the face, to the invisible that requires me; answering to a demand that puts me in question and comes to me from I know not where, nor when, nor why.'153 We
"relations": 3) the other's command and 4) my responsibility to respond.'152 These all find correspondence in Lévinas's claim that 'ontological difference' '[…] signifies my responsibility for the other […] an ethical meaning of the relation to the other, answering, in the form of responsibility before the face, to the invisible that requires me; answering to a demand that puts me in question and comes to me from I know not where, nor when, nor why.'153 We