Something To Do With Paying Attention is the title editors gave to this novella after they pulled it from the wreckage of David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published (but unfinished) novel, The Pale King. It stands alone and apparently even David Foster Wallace considered that it might do well on its own. The narrator is a self-described nihilist or, more colloquially, a wastoid, an undergraduate from the Chicago suburbs in the ‘70s who drifts in and out of programs, never quite completing anything before he loses interest and moves on. He exasperates his buttoned-down conservative father. As for his mother, she has too many of her own issues to offer more than a cursory defence of her son every time the father “squeezes his shoes” for being a slacker. The parents are divorced and the mother is in a lesbian relationship with a woman named Joyce which only adds to the narrator’s malaise.
During the height of the pre-Christmas shopping rush, something traumatic happens that, one would hope, shakes the boy out of his wastoid stupor. But no, he relates the event with an affectless detachment that inevitably suggests David Foster Wallace’s own legendary struggles with depression. While Christmas shopping with his father, they rush to jump onto a subway train and the father gets his arm stuck in the door. The train pulls out of the station, dragging the father with it. He dies somewhere in the tunnel. I seem to recall that the Incandenza father in Infinite Jest meets a similarly bizarre end, committing suicide by rigging a microwave oven so that it still operates when he shoves his head inside. Evidently, fathers don’t fare well in DFW fiction.
The narrator takes special care to describe his roommate’s girlfriend. She is a born again Christian and shares the precise moment of her conversion. As we would expect of a nihilist wastoid, his immediate response is to ridicule the girl, especially her belief that when the pastor at the church where her conversion happened made a general call to the audience, he was speaking directly to her. The narrator offers a cynical analysis of the conversion. The girl was suggestible. She was keyed to hear precisely the words the pastor spoke. As for the pastor, he was a con man who knew that a few suggestible people were sitting in his audience and would respond to precisely those words. However, as the narrator proceeds with his account, he talks himself into a more empathetic view of the girl. In a way, his affectless detachment allows him to treat her fairly. He wonders, then, why not believe the pastor was speaking directly to her? And what’s wrong with that? He recognizes that he can’t possibly understand what she was thinking and feeling at the moment of her conversion.
The encounter with the born again Christian prepares us for the narrator’s unique personal conversion experience. The narrator is on his way to the final Political Theory class of the term, a prep session for the exam, when he takes a wrong turn and ends up in an identical looking classroom on advanced tax law taught by an impressive Jesuit who is absolutely dispassionate and free from judgement both as regards his students and his subject matter. Here, David Foster Wallace treads a fine line between parody and stony-faced hyper-realism. The narrator finds himself drawn into the thought world of tax law and (dare we say it?) develops a passion for its dispassionate application. In true DFW style, we glimpse its complexities through extended passages of technical jargon-filled material that mirror the Jesuit’s impressive manner.
Nihilism
The novella’s 3rd paragraph opens with: “I think the truth is that I was the worst kind of nihilist—the kind who isn’t even aware he’s a nihilist.” In the 4th paragraph, he applies his own language to describe the state of his soul: “wastoid.” In other recent reviews, I’ve made much of the term nihilism. I use the term in reference to one side of a tension between those on the one hand who adhere to thought/belief systems grounded in an idea of ultimate meaning and those on the other who regard ultimacy as an illusion and prefer to focus on the challenge of living well. This dyad reflects the tension between true believers (in this scheme, “true believers” includes atheists, astrologers, spiritual but not religious types, and members of QAnon) and those who simply don’t care.
This novella documents the journey of one man from a state of nihilism to a system that grounds him in a sense of meaning. It’s a journey that follows the template of a religious conversion. But instead of a commitment to God and the Bible, the narrator steps into a recruitment office and commits himself to the IRS and the Uniform Tax Code. From a nihilist perspective, one commitment is as good as the other because both are grounded on the same false assumption. By ceasing to be a man who does his “most important thinking in incidental, accidental, almost daydreamy ways”, he casts off his old ways and dedicates himself to the discipline of a rule-bound life. It’s almost as if he’s entering a religious order, and it’s no accident then that the inspirational figure in this conversion happens to be a Jesuit.
Emptiness
The novella exhibits a preoccupation with absence and negative space. After his father has died, the narrator performs an inventory of the man’s clothing, and we have this oblique reference to his death: “The clothes closet contained his best and third-best topcoats, also from Jack Fagman, with the empty wooden hanger still between them.” Evidently, the narrator’s father was wearing his second-best topcoat when he got his arm stuck in the subway train door. The most important part of this passage is what goes unsaid.
Or consider the novella’s opening sentence: “I’m not sure I even know what to say.” Variations of this statement recur throughout. “I don’t know how to describe him, although he made an immediate impression.” “It’s hard to describe although I remember the awareness of it very clearly.” “He made a gesture I can’t describe…” “…there was no way to adequately describe for him…” “I’m not putting this well.” On and on. It goes without saying, that the narrator’s failure to express himself is not a personal failure but arises because of an emptiness at the heart of all human interactions, like the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, or an ineffable silence at the core of all language. This silence is second cousin to our nihilistic impulses because it stands as an insuperable barrier on our journey to an articulation of ultimate meaning. As the narrator discovers with the roommate’s born again Christian girlfriend, there are things about our interior lives that are impossible to articulate and so remain forever hidden.
The narrator tries to make the same empathic leap with his father. Death, of course, is the most inarticulate of inarticulate states, and the father’s death only compounds his silence in life. To understand his father, the narrator resorts to baseless projections. For example, in wondering why his father never offered advice: “If you begin to get the idea that other people can actually live by the clear, simple principles of good advice, it can make you feel even worse about your own inabilities. It can cause self-pity, which I think my father recognized as the great enemy of life and contributor to nihilism.” So, yes, according to the narrator, his father’s failure to talk to him was in fact a kindness. The irony of this passage is that the novella entirely concerns itself with the narrator’s tumble into the comfortable world of “clear, simple principles” that he supposes his father was trying to protect him from.
Numbers
One way around nihilism and emptiness is through the clarity of numbers and the dispassionate application of mathematical formulae. Early on, the narrator tells us that when he was in elementary school, he went through a two year phase of reading troubles. Instead of reading a text, he counted the words. This quirk appeared to be involuntary and it sometimes intrudes into the text’s present time. He writes: “For instance, I’ve said 2,752 words right now since I started. Meaning 2,752 words as of just before I said, ‘I’ve said,’ versus 2,754 if you count ‘I’ve said’—which I do, still. I count numbers as one word no matter how large a given number is.” His attraction to taxation seems a natural extension of this habit. David Foster Wallace exhibited a similar attraction, devoting an entire book to the history, philosophy, and mathematical challenges posed by the idea of infinity.
The problem with resorting to numbers as an antidote to the indeterminacy of language is that numbers have their own pitfalls. At one extreme is the concept of infinity which mocks any hope of ultimacy. At the other extreme is the concept of zero, which simply returns us to nihilism and an emptiness at the heart of all our plays for meaning.
The paradox in all of this is that, in spite of language’s limitations, David Foster Wallace managed to write what I take to be one of the 21st century’s minor masterpieces. Yes, there is an ineffable hollow at its centre, as there is in all writing, yet through some autocatalytic miracle—I’m not expressing myself as well as I’d like here—it pulls itself up by the bootstraps and offers us a brilliant something where there was nothing before.