Richard French, click
here to update your pages on AuthorsDen.
Blogs by Richard French
A Novel about Taxes & Bureaucrats? No Way!! 1/27/2017 4:36:53 PM
I'm about two-thirds the way through an unfinished novel called "The Pale King" by the American David Foster Wallace, who suffered from depression and died by his own hand in his mid-forties. An editor put his work on the novel together and broight it out.
Though I still have a ways to go before I finish this book, I've read enough already to compose a blogpost, for I came upon an idea that held my attention and got me thinking. When I began reading the novel, I was afraid I'd have the same difficulty I've had with post-modernist works, that it would turn out to be dry, claustrophobic, disdainful toward ordinary life, and painful to read.
Though I don't agree with comments that "The Pale King" is hilarious, Wallace had a sense of humor, and his novel is filled with a deft sense of irony. Moreover, Wallace imparted to his main characters openness, frankness, and a bemused humility that I find appealing.
The story concerns a young man who decides to apply for work at the American federal tax bureau, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). I'll come back to this point. Meanwhile, here are random notes I made while reading:
"The Pale King" abides in the present. For a long novel, it has no sense of the sweep of history. Instead, the world Wallace portrays seems to have been afflicted with electric shock therapy.
Most of the characters are harried and by necessity pressed into a confining environment. The novel stealthily calls attention to the so-called decline of the middle class. No one has the breathing room to appreciate the basic goodness of life.
The main character knows he is powerless but he keeps on going anyway. His gift for thoroughness seems like a refuge from the rest of life. Intelligent, sardonic, he can't see anything to satisfy human aspirations for fuilfillment, including his own.
Unlike the way novels usually proceed, this one has pages and pages of technical detail about the IRS and its environment, something like the essays on whaling in "Moby Dick". In this case, Wallace brings readers a deadpan rendering of bureaucratic minutiae. He becomes a spokesman for ordinary people who feel directionless and out of it.
This novel is a masterpiece of study and research. Wallace never worked for the IRS, but he talked to people who knew it well, read copiously on his subject, made scads of notes, and took courses in tax accounting.
Now, I've come to the point I want to make. Wallace's main character stumbles onto a lecture by a trainer who says that cultural heros nowadays aren't cowboys or super strong people but those who discipline themselves to endure tedium and repetition in the service of a larger cause -- in this case IRS employees who examine piles of tax returns so that the government receives the funds it needs to carry out its programs.
I'd never have thought of a notion like that on my own. It appears that other people have, however. I happened on an internet essay that has nothing to do with this novel about the situation in the United States today. I have no easy way to verify what I read, but the author said that universities now teach the surpassing value of government bureaucracies, for they bring order out of chaos.
Could it be that faculty in our universities teach that bureaucraccies like the one Wallace describes are not only beneficial but the best anyone can hope for in a topsy-turvy world? What about personal freedom and individual creativity and initiative? What about love for God and our fellow human beings?
I now have a new insight into Wallace's novel, though. He wrote with compassion for people caught by economoic neccesity and the power of propaganda in stifling environments. If he offers a remedy for their predicament before the end, I'll compose another blogpost.
