Wallace and I

Cognition, Consciousness, and Dualism in David Foster Wallace’s Fiction

Jamie Redgate

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429594663
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Though David Foster Wallace is well known for declaring that "Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being," what he actually meant by the term "human being" has been quite forgotten. It is a truism in Wallace studies that Wallace was a posthumanist writer, and too theoretically sophisticated to write about characters as having some kind of essential interior self or soul. Though the contemporary, posthuman model of the embodied brain is central to Wallace's work, so is his critique of that model: the soul is as vital a part of Wallace's fiction as the bodies in which his souls are housed. Drawing on Wallace's reading in the science and philosophy of mind, this book gives a rigorous account of Wallace's dualism, and of his humanistic engagement with key postmodern concerns: authorship; the self and interiority; madness and mind doctors; and free will. If Wallace's fiction is about what it is to be a human being, this book is about the human 'I' at the heart of Wallace's work.

1 “It’s much more boneheaded and practical than that”

Authorship and the Body

This page was once plant material, crushed and sluiced and pressed through a machine in a warehouse, the process overseen by a man plagued with a skin infection. . . . Naturally the pages, which told the story of an uneventful journey, became infected with his particulate matter.

—Amelia Gray, “Viscera” (Gutshot 143–44)

The Death of David Foster Wallace

Over the course of David Foster Wallace’s life our model of the mind was dramatically redrawn. We now understand that our consciousness, which seems to us to play such a central role in our lives, is in fact a very small, and not particularly powerful, part of the whole mind-body system. The “mind is what the brain does” (Pinker, How the Mind Works 21), and what the brain does is look after the body. Most of the mind’s activity, therefore, is regulatory and unconscious, outside of our awareness and out of our control. This marks a stark departure from earlier accounts of the human mind in the twentieth century, where the brain was thought to be “essentially the same thing as a general-purpose ‘universal computer’ that just happened to be connected to a body” (Ramachandran 143). To try and draw a line between brain and body, or to go even further and separate mind from matter altogether, is to neglect the fundamentally interdependent relationship between the two. By the end of the twentieth century, in popular accounts such as Antonio Damasio’s Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994), the mind is understood to be “embodied, in the full sense of the term, not just embrained” (118).

As David Hillman and Ulrika Maude explain, however, in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature (2015), the “body has always been a contested site” (1) and “approaches to the body . . . tend to display an eclectic theoretical pluralism” (2). For Arthur Kroker, for instance, “Nothing is as imaginary as the material body. Circulating, fluid, borderless, with no certain boundaries or predetermined history”: we should not think of ourselves as “inhabit[ing] . . . a solitary body of flesh and bone but [as] the intersection of a multiplicity of bodies, with life itself as a fluid intersection of humans and plants and animals and minerals” (3; 15). For Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, our “bodies were never in the womb. Bodies are determined and operated by systems whose reproduction is . . . asexual: capitalism, culture, professions, and institutions” (17). We have to be careful about our terms, then. While I do not wish to be reductive, Wallace was reading and engaging with a very specific, scientific model of the body, brain, and mind throughout his work, and when I use these terms I am referring to the evolved human organism that came out of a womb and is made of skin and bone and synapse. Though I will address Wallace’s engagement with this kind of literary theory, my use of a biological model of the material body in this chapter will set the precedent for this book as a whole.

The complicated workings of the embrained, embodied mind are front and centre in Wallace’s final, unfinished novel, The Pale King. Ostensibly “more like a memoir than any kind of made-up story” (69), The Pale King is apparently based on Wallace’s own experiences in the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) Midwest Regional Examination Centre in Peoria, Illinois, and Wallace himself appears both as a character within a body within the novel, who observes and interacts with the other characters, and as the memoirist in the metafictive ‘Author Here’ chapters: “Author here. Meaning the real author, the living human holding the pencil. . . . All of this is true. This book is really true” (68–69). Though the book is not really true—Wallace did not work at the IRS—the narrative conceit that The Pale King is a factual account signals Wallace’s intention to explore what it might entail if one were to be wholly factual, to actually write a narrative that accurately represents the experience of living inside a human body. In one memoirist footnote, Wallace explains that

I’m not going to be one of those memoirists who pretends to remember every last fact and thing in photorealist detail. The human mind doesn’t work that way, and everyone knows it; it’s an insulting bit of artifice in a genre that purports to be 100 percent ‘realistic.’ (259)

Wallace makes a distinction between reality and “artifice,” between the reality of “living human” beings—like the author “holding the pencil”—who are constrained by their own physical limitations, and the artifice of a mind that can see and access everything, a mind that would have to be detached from its bodily constraints in order to do so. Wallace rejects this fantasy of the bodiless mind and the limitless narrator, and suggests that doing so is a necessary step in writing a narrative that represents how the mind really does work.¹

As Chris Fogle, one of The Pale King’s better-read characters (who knows about theories of the mind, about “type A personalit[ies]” and the “dominant superego” [176]), explains:

For myself, I tend to do my most important thinking in incidental, accidental, almost daydreamy ways. . . . I think this experience . . . is common, if perhaps not universal, although it’s not something that you can ever really talk to anyone else about because it ends up being so abstract and hard to explain. (192–93)

The problem for Wallace is that Fogle’s (and our) primarily unconscious, subliminal experience, is “hard to explain” and dramatise because it frustrates both our common-sense conception of ourselves and the fundamental artifice that underlies what Wallace calls “capital-R Realism” (Conversations 129): the idea that fiction can be narrated by a single, unified, reliable consciousness.² So when Wallace claims that The Pale King “is really true” (69), though on one level he’s playfully pointing to the statement’s untruth, he is at the same time setting up The Pale King as a self-conscious interrogation of exactly what having a mind really entails. How does one write about consciousness, authorship, and the world, when the “epoch of the I”—of the reliable observer—“is drawing to a close” (Nørretranders ix)? This problem is keenly felt by Wallace because authors themselves, as he knew only too well, have bodies too.

The “Author Here” sections of The Pale King have received a lot of critical attention, perhaps because one of the key areas of interest in Wallace studies has been Wallace’s metafiction, and the “Author Here” sections bookend a line of Wallace’s metafictive stories: “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way,” “Octet,” and “Good Old Neon.” Yet despite a considerable volume of work on Wallace the writer, Wallace’s consistent descriptions of the author’s body, and of the embodied relationship between author and their work, has been largely undiscussed. Because the Wallace character in The Pale King “disappears,” as Wallace put it in one of his notes, to become a “creature of the system” (548), critics such as Mark McGurl, Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Mike Miley, Stephen Taylor Marsh, and Toon Staes do not comment on the author’s body but have instead interpreted the novel as enacting, in different ways, what Barthes famously called “the death of the Author” (Image 148).

The critical consensus is that Wallace appears in the novel only to die and leave his work in the hands of the reader and the reading public (a move that has been “profoundly ironized,” as McGurl writes, by Wallace’s actual death [48]). For McGurl, the author-character’s “disappearing from the novel is tantamount to disappearing into the system it represents,” which in Wallace’s case is “the contemporary institution of literature” itself (48). Mike Miley has argued that the disappearance of the author-character in The Pale King is a way for ‘David Wallace’ to try and kill ‘David Foster Wallace,’ the “persona” which, with his rising fame, had overshadowed the real man (202). Like McGurl, Miley argues that Wallace can never really kill the version of himself that is “a creature of the literary system” (203). Jeffrey R. Di Leo—for whom a theoretical “resurrection of the author is simply not acceptable” (123)—claims that Wallace never wanted The Pale King published, and that his intentions and presence as an author have been manufactured by his publishers for cynical reasons: “Funny how the sovereignty of the dead conveniently emerges when there is an opportunity for corporate profit” (132). Like Miley, Di Leo says that the persona of ‘David Foster Wallace’ is the only one the reader can ever know. Stephen Taylor Marsh and Toon Staes trace a similar line, making a distinction between the fleshy David Wallace, who is necessarily absent from the text, and the paper David Foster Wallace, to whom we have access. For Marsh, “Wallace, the physical one, cannot be found in” The Pale King (115), just as we should not try to find “the flesh-and-blood” author in Wallace’s other works: “Wallace’s background . . . does not alter the underlying creative labor or final artistic drive of the novel, arising out of the implied author David Foster Wallace” (117, my emphasis). Staes uses the same language as Marsh in his essay on The Pale King, arguing that “Readers construct an image of the author while they read that in all likelihood differs widely from the flesh-and-blood person” (“Work in Process” 81, my emphasis).

Each of these critics explicitly rehearses the same Barthesian paradigm about the death of the author and the birth of the reader (McGurl 48; Di Leo 124; Miley 196; Marsh 122; Staes, “Work in Process” 81). Though the death of the author is, unfortunately, a fact for Wallace studies following Wallace’s death, and while I share the view of these critics that we should not chase crude biographical readings of Wallace’s work, what I will argue in this chapter is that we are wrong to ignore the flesh-and-blood author completely. When Wallace writes about the act of writing he describes, very specifically, an embodied self, an authorial consciousness that writes from inside a body and brain. As Wallace puts it in one interview: talking about the work after the fact is “very different than what it’s like to actually do things” (Conversations 135). “[S]itting in a bright, quiet room in front of the paper it’s much more, uhhh does this make me want to throw up? . . . It’s much more boneheaded and practical than” the “critical discourse” that happens in interviews after-the-fact (135). However we want to frame the work, it emerges in the first place from inside a bone head.

All of Wallace’s fiction, from his first published story “The Planet Trillaphon As it Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing” (1984) to The Pale King, is animated by the problematic relationship between conscious mind and boneheaded body, and his essays and reflections on authorship are no different. As Seán Burke puts it in Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern (1995), “Authorship, like cosmology, remains a source of fascination for believers and non-believers alike since the issues which it raises reflect any given society’s sense of being in the world” (xv). Wallace’s understanding of the nature of authorship comes from the same place as his understanding of human beings more generally. Once we recognise how central a role the sciences of the brain and embodied mind play in the work that Wallace has produced, then we can understand how central a role embodiment plays, for Wallace, in the process of production itself. Where Wallace studies have until now tread familiar ground regarding the death of the author, I suggest that Wallace’s model of the embodied author is best understood as part of a society-wide shift in what Burke calls our “sense of being in the world,” a shift that challenges Barthes in particular, and postmodern theories of authorship and selfhood more broadly.³

While some critics have discussed the significance of the body in Wallace’s work, only Jeffrey Severs and Stephen J. Burn have (briefly) discussed the connection in Wallace’s writing between the body and the authorial self. Severs, drawing on Wallace’s biography, persuasively argues that the John Keats poem about “This living hand, now warm and capable” (qtd. in Severs 20) was Wallace’s “standard for a text’s ability to offer an embodied relationship to the reader” (20), though this is a small point in Severs’s larger argument that the authorial hand is markedly different from the “‘Invisible Hand’ of self-correcting capitalist markets” (20). Burn is the only critic to emphasise the centrality of the material brain in Wallace’s work, and argued in “‘A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness’: Closing Time in The Pale King” (2012) that, in the light of Wallace’s own reading in contemporary neuroscience, the novel can be read as a “dissociative projection of the mind that dramatizes the unconscious, rather than the conscious” (386). Neither critic dwells on the role of Wallace’s own body and brain in the writing process. In this chapter I want to build upon Burn’s work on the neuroscientific sources for The Pale King, and explore the undiscussed but significant connection between the body and authorship for Wallace both in that novel and throughout his work.⁴ To understand Wallace’s role as a bodied author-character in The Pale King, we first have to understand how Wallace engaged with models of the mind throughout his career.

The Mind behind Wallace’s Work

The contemporary model of the embrained mind governs all of Wallace’s writing. This is the case even at the level of setting: each of Wallace’s three novels is literally set inside the human head. In The Broom of the System, first of all, most of the action takes place in “East Corinth, Ohio,” which has the “luxuriant and not unpopular shape” of the “profile of Jayne Mansfield” (45). Wallace explains that if one looks down onto the town from “Shaker Heights,” one sees “a nimbus of winding road-networks,” “a sinuous . . . curve of . . . highway,” and “a huge, swollen development of factories” (45). Like the underlying veins and musculature of a human face, the complicated road “networks,” “sinuous” (we might also read: sinew-ous) highways, and swollen developments are all very bodied descriptions of the constituent bits and pieces that go together to make up the whole town. Just as our individual cells and neurons have no knowledge of the larger system in which they play a part, the constituents of the town—the roads and residents that make it up—are “unaware of the shape of their town” (46) from the inside. Though from the outside one sees the shape of the head, it is the sum of its parts, as the human head is the sum of its internal workings.

As Wallace writes later in the novel, the “head” is

positively dominated and defined by the shape of the skull underneath. The skin stretched tight over that skull. A skull that seems to me perhaps to threaten to burst through and end the whole charade. Yecch. (300)

The human face is mere “charade,” another artifice. The reality that we try to avoid seeing is that we are all boneheaded biology underneath. For Wallace to set the action of his first novel inside an enormous human head emphasises both how central boneheadedness is to his aesthetic, and the extent to which the contemporary model of the embodied mind is, at the end of the twentieth century, in the zeitgeist: the idea that the mind is skull-bound is literally what Wallace’s characters live inside. As Wallace would later write, as the epigraph to Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞ (2003), “It is not what’s inside your head, it’s what your head’s inside” (ix). Just as Wallace’s head was inside an intellectual climate where it was understood that the mind is embodied, so too are the characters and settings inside Wallace’s head necessarily shaped by what Wallace’s head was inside: it’s bone heads all the way down.⁵

Though Wallace hints at something more ethereal inside East Corinth’s head with the word “nimbus,” which can mean a “halo” (Oxford English Dictionary, OED), we can also read the description of a “nimbus of winding road-networks” as one that roots that nimbus to the ground. The interconnecting highways do not make a single circle—a “halo”—but instead wind together to make up a kind of cloud, a complex weather system comprising discrete, interflowing parts. This mind/weather metaphor is one that Wallace picks up again and again throughout his writing. In “Little Expressionless Animals” Wallace sets the scene with the “gray clouds” that look brainlike, “bulbous and wrinkled and shiny. The sky looks cerebral” (Girl 3). We see it again in Wallace’s essay, “Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away from it All,” in which he charts his cognitive experience—given his “basic neurological makeup” (Supposedly 132)—of the Illinois State F...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: “[An] alarmed call to arms”: Cognitive Science, the Humanities, and the End of Postmodernism
• 1 It’s much more boneheaded and practical than that”: Authorship and the Body
• 2 He’s a ghost haunting his own body”: Cartesian Dualism in Wallace’s Ghost Stories
• 3 The heat just past the glass doors”: Therapy, Madness, and Metaphor
• 4 “(At Least) Three Cheers for Cause and Effect”: Free Will, Addiction, and the Self
• Works Cited
• Index