Anti-Climacus

The Pale King

In college I spent a lot of time talking to my friends over instant messenger. For people of my approximate age, this is reducible to "I went to college." It's probably only weird to people who are much older or much younger than I am. In the course of one of many lengthy conversations, one of my friends said to me:

I'm not surprised that college is hard. People had told me that. But I wasn't prepared for how boring it would be.

Which I found comic enough to drag out of the dialogue box as a text clipping, as I was in the habit of doing at the time, and has since remained the sort of thing I can remember at the appropriate moment.

There are two big, extended set-pieces in The Pale King, one at the beginning and one towards the end. It was towards the end of this second one that I grasped, I think, the point of the novel. The novel ostensibly follows a bunch of people who work for an IRS office, examining tax returns, in the mid-1980s, right as the Reagan administration is pushing through a major tax reform and sweeping change from those who consider tax work to be a public service and noble, and those who consider it to be a means of maximizing revenue collection. Thus far most reviews will take you. Some will note that the story is told mostly through an examination of the personal histories of the people who come to be working in the office at this time, a device whose purpose is not entirely clear. Also, nothing happens in the book; there's a note at the end that indicates 'nothing happening' may be intended, but like everything else, it remains unclear. (I was unsure of the importance and relationship of many of the important characters at the end of the book.)

But towards the end of this long setpiece I began to suspect that the use of the IRS was a red herring. I think the IRS is meant to stand in metaphorically or symbolically for adulthood. What does it mean to be an adult, in DFW's world? Boredom. It means permitting yourself to be bored, learning to like being bored, and ideally not seeing this as a cost to be borne but as something like a vocation. It means the boredom of constant responsibilities that won't go away; you either sink or swim.

I think it indisputably true that the adult world is essentially boring: your life consists of things like paying bills on time, going to work, balancing diet and exercise. It's true even at work, even at jobs that are supposedly creative or exciting. I have a friend who does cancer research, who will write four pages of notes to herself for all the stages of a 15-hour experiment, where each stage consists of things like "pipette one clear liquid into another, in precise amounts, 100 times." If she messes one of those stages up, it will jeopardize the entire experiment. Thus: incredibly boring, but demands constant and unflagging attention.

Or those of us who work in the humanities or humanities-adjacent disciplines: is there any fear more total than the possibility of missing an obvious interpretation of a text, or missing a part of a text in your interpretation? I work primarily on a book that's 1000 pages long. I have read it enough times to know the general orientation of arguments in the whole thing. There are chapters I know better than anyone else in the world knows those same chapters. And I still meticulously check my sources and arguments for fear of having missed something.

Beneath everything else in the text there is some real tragedy, in the way that 'David F Wallace' writes about his own composition of the book and refers to himself as a still-living person, and in the way that the characters get their moment of epiphany and then become anonymous, or reduced to a single exaggerated personality tic. But it gets better as the novel goes on, and leaves me wondering what the rest would've been like.