“The Soul is Not a Smithy,” like most of David Foster Wallace’s work, is initially a frustrating short story. Ostensibly, it is about four children who, in the midst of a civics teacher’s mental breakdown, remain seated instead of fleeing. At least, this is what the narrator claims the story is about—but a significant chunk of the pages are spent dealing with entirely fictitious storylines that the narrator imagines while sitting in class. Despite having been diagnosed with unsatisfactory listening skills, his desk is placed near the windows, which “led [his] attention not merely to wander idly, but to actively construct whole linear, discretely organized narrative fantasies.” As he faces studying the US Constitution, Wallace’s narrator doesn’t choose simply to ignore his schoolwork; rather, he pays attention to something else, daydreaming, which “often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class.”
There are two things at play here. First is the act of paying attention. Second is what you choose to pay attention to—what entertains you. These themes haunted Wallace, maintaining such a strong grip on his psyche that everything he wrote stems from trying to make sense of them. His magnum opus, Infinite Jest, is named after a film so completely entertaining that the viewer wastes away, their attention so utterly entranced that they neglect the basic necessities of their corporeal form, “eyes wobbling around like some drug-addicted newborn.” Actual descriptions of “the Entertainment” are sparse, but perhaps the most telling detail is that it is both technically gorgeous and structurally hollow. A veritable black hole: it consumes everything and produces nothing.
For Wallace, this sort of cataclysmically dangerous device was not merely a MacGuffin for him to write about Canadian terrorists in wheelchairs. The careening of mass media and twenty-first century society towards increasingly potent forms of entertainment deeply disturbed him. Over a five-day conversation author David Lipsky captures in his memoir, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace, a recurring topic is television, the most efficacious attention-hoarder of the time. The problem with television is that it feigns the creation of relationships without any of the attention and care actually necessary in day-to-day life. Wallace compared it to candy: temporarily gratifying but insufficient to nourish a human. He feared that, as technology gets better, it would become “more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen.” The prospect of existentially unsatisfying pleasure was terrifying. For Wallace, it was literally a matter of life and death.
That existential fear forms the basis of his posthumous novel, The Pale King, which presents the core themes of “The Soul Is Not A Smithy” in their full maturation. Wallace replaces his impressionable fourth-graders with anhedonic accountants; a classroom with a regional IRS office. The ability to divert one’s attention from an all-consuming, completely uninteresting concept is no longer a single class’s effort; it becomes the task of a lifetime, the dire back-and-forth that shapes the employees’ lives. Chris Fogle spends roughly one-fifth of the book’s length justifying why he became an accountant. Frederick Blumquist is so overworked and exhausted he dies at his desk—and stays there, surrounded by other (living) overworked and exhausted accountants, for four days. The one IRS official who actually enjoys planning and organization, Leonard Stecyk, is widely hated. Each and every one of these people are trying to distract themselves, desperately looking for something worth paying attention to, something to which they can devote their being.
The cruel irony of The Pale King is that none of these efforts coalesce into anything substantive; most characters are voyeuristically observed and discarded, the snapshots of their lives scrapped as soon as they are introduced. The harder they seek the reprieve of entertainment, the more crushingly empty they find themselves. Both Infinite Jest and The Pale King feature labyrinths of prose and a pious reverence towards human value. They differ in where these mechanisms end up. Infinite Jest ends hopefully: the battles of Hal Incandenza and Don Gately are demanding but conquerable, both ending up in medical care but holding on to what makes them human. The Pale King ends pessimistically: none of its characters realize the fruits of their labor. The only character’s fate we truly know is Blumquist’s, from an obituary. We don’t know if Fogle found his true vocation. We don’t know if Stecyk is truly fulfilled by filing taxes. They are stuck between deep chasms of task and distraction, attempted fulfilment and reprieve. Part of the reason all these fates are unfinished is because The Pale King is itself incomplete. Wallace’s fears, dreads, and terrors that laced his fiction clouded his life, manifesting in deep depressions and anxieties that he ultimately could not bear. At 46 years old, he hanged himself, his last “novel” a jumble of manuscripts, notebooks, and floppy disks. His driving question—the quest for something he could pay attention to and entertain himself with, meaningfuly—was one he could not answer.
Wallace’s death is the denouement to a philosophical conundrum I sympathize with every step of the way, until the conclusion. There’s something beyond the base level of tragedy that feels deeply wrong about what Wallace did. His fixation on our dependence on entertainment, and his failure to gratify that fixation within himself, presents a problem for the average person. What are we to make of this? One option is to ignore Wallace’s concerns, to suppress one’s intellectual faculties in favor of empirical instinct. Happiness and intellect vying against each other isn’t a new idea—it basically kickstarted Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Why ask these questions at all? We could simply subsume ourselves in entertainment, creating a better Reel, a better drug. Wallace’s characters, however, illustrate the impossibility of that idea. No matter how much weed he smokes, Infinite Jest’s protagonist can’t shake the feeling that “he hasn’t had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny.” We cannot bury the pull of Wallace’s misgivings. We must address them, in a Goldilocks pairing of consumptive appetite and intellectual fulfillment.
What is striking about this understanding of Wallace’s evolving fictions is that everything he wrote, two decades later, is starting to ring true. Wallace feared the advancement of shallow and seductive entertainment, and it’s hard to argue against the realization of that fear in the present day. If television was candy, what do you even call an Instagram Reel? Crack cocaine? Can it be conceivably argued that the forms of content we have now are not the product of an even more ravenous, more unquenchable appetite to be entertained? Can you reasonably justify that the onslaught of information birthed into the world every single day is conducive to the ability to pay attention?
In his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, Wallace presented the beginnings of a solution. “This is Water” deals with the drudgery of adult life, the underlying discontent that fueled The Pale King. In order to escape the default cynicism ingrained into modern being, one must learn to pay attention and see something greater. If you do this, “If you really learn how to pay attention … It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars.” This earnestness and zeal for existence is not unique to Wallace’s speech. In his essay “E Unibus Pluram,” a referendum on television, he predicts the next writers will be “‘anti-rebels,’ born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values.” Wallace argues that we could eschew the cultural conditioning towards parasitic entertainment with an effort stemming from something genuine, something that could transcend the irony of the overeducated without dipping into hedonistic turmoil. We could have our entertainment and stay alive.
Wallace believed all this with a fiery conviction, and yet his later work demonstrates he could not conceive its feasibility. The Pale King catches glimpses of this hope—the unbridled happiness that Stecyk possesses in doing taxes, the cautious optimism of belief that overtakes Fogle—but the moments are few and far between, seeping like light through the floorboards to the dark cellar of repulsion and terror over what Wallace saw society becoming. Writer Georgia Halliday writes about Wallace’s inability to manifest his principles in her essay “A Genuine Cynic,” in which she diagnoses this failure as a result of his deep cynicism, his “ludicrously overeducated” mind betraying his wish for sincerity with irony. This problem haunted Wallace for his entire life. The solution that he fervently rallied behind was not enough for him to live it out himself, his art and life the ultimate tragedy. Is Wallace’s solution even possible? Was he just an out-of-touch idealist, his hyperactive mind constructing an Eden that is incompatible with the world we live in? Has the onslaught of entertainment eroded our ability to pay attention to anything meaningful?
Wallace’s misgivings were real spiritual conflicts that we, and future generations, will have to wrestle with. The technology will only get better; so must our mechanisms of resistance. The ability to pay attention will become more necessary. A lethal entertainment may never exist, but we’re getting closer, and the implications of the attention arms race will only become more dire. But the problem is not hopeless. There’s something that we can truly believe in and live out and manifest to deal with all this entertainment, something that he knew existed, something that lives in between the Epicurean and the intellectual, the slack-jawed mindlessness of consumption and the paralyzing fear of artistic production.
Let us cultivate the spirit that Wallace viewed as vital to a meaningful life: let us enjoy doing our taxes and remember to be human.
Image: George Bellows, Tennis Tournament, oil on canvas, 1920 (National Gallery of Art, DC).