Can You Procrastinate Yourself to Death?

More incisive critical minds than mine have written about David Foster Wallace's recently published unfinished novel, The Pale King. All I will do here is point out a few aspects of this unusual book on which Wallace worked for so many years, in order to encourage readers, and especially Wallace fans, not to miss it.

Little, Brown publisher Michael Pietsch edited the book and describes the huge challenge in his warmly written Editor's Note. We'll never know how much of The Pale King is autobiographical, but it seems much of the most personal parts are.

For example, Wallace masterfully describes the world of inner mirrors into which you fall when on certain mind-altering drugs. He (or his character) took Obetrol frequently as a teen. When I was 14 or so, I was prescribed Preludin, a stimulant drug used for weight loss back then (though photos from that era show me quite slim). My doctor, when I told him the Preludin made me want to do my school work," said, "Anything that helps you concentrate is good." Wallace seems to have encountered this attitude and also to have discovered its dark side.

ONLY FOCUS

Being able to concentrate despite boredom is a major theme of The Pale King. Most writers will smile at this description's aptness:

The way hard deskwork really goes is in jagged little fits and starts, brief intervals of concentration alternated with frequent trips to the men's room, the drinking fountain, the vending machine, constant visits to the pencil sharpener, phone calls you suddenly feel are imperative to make, rapt intervals of seeing what kinds of shapes you can bend a paperclip into, & c.

Wallace (or his character, or both) learned in college that "the problem with stillness and concentration was more or less universal and not some unique shortcoming." Nevertheless, the issue of being able to focus on his writing without his mind tormenting itself was a lifelong quandary for Wallace.

THE FLOW CONNECTION

I couldn't help but think of flow, and how it's been found that we can learn to find a measure of engagement in anything, and turn it into a flow activity. Wallace wrote about IRS workers managing such a trick:

The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.

The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable.

It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

Wallace, whose fiction and nonfiction is noted for its intense detail, has a character say: "I would say almost anything you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting." He was able to make the IRS setting a little bit interesting, but what's best about the novel is the sense of having a peek at Wallace's interior world.

THE LAST WORD?

The final words in this unfinished novel are from one of the many notes Wallace left behind:

Woman on assembly line counting number of visible loops of twine on outside of bale of twine. Counting, over and over. When the whistle blows, every other worker practically runs for the door. She stays briefly, immersed in her work. It's the ability to be immersed.

Up for an even more profound mental challenge? Check out Wallace's other recently published work, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will from Columbia University Press, which is his undergraduate thesis. The Introduction is illuminating (and necessary to those of us who aren't philosophers).

The essay tackles an aspect of determinism. Richard Taylor theorized something like "what will be" is "what will have been." That makes sense, sort of, but Wallace takes issue with the flawed logic of Taylor's argument to make a careful point about free will. It shows what a thinker Wallace was, and reminds us of our loss.

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• More info about Wallace's books.

• Five drafts of Chapter 9 are on a special website at the University of Texas's Ransom Center.

• You may want to see this interview with Karen Green, Wallace's wife.

• For more insight into Wallace, see my previous blog post.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Susan K. Perry, Ph.D.