The Myth of Morality

In 2005, novelist David Foster Wallace was invited to give a commencement speech to the graduates of Kenyon College. Captivating, inquisitive, and in no way didactic, Wallace unveiled to them the oncoming drudgery of adult life and all its routines—certainly nothing an ambitious twenty-two year old wants to hear. But Wallace offered an alternative to mental and emotional atrophy. The liberal arts degree, he said, not only teaches us how to think but encourages to “exercise some control over how and what we think.” We have the ability to experience the hellish monotony of daily life as “not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars.” “Please,” he added, “don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice.” In truth the most startling thing about Wallace’s lecture was its lack of lecturing, even when pleading for us to be compassionate. We believed that Wallace couldn’t lecture or moralize. He was a novelist, after all, and isn’t it the novelist’s task to show us the world as it is rather than the world as it should be?

The Pale King—Wallace’s unfinished posthumous novel published by Little, Brown last month—has gone on to receive what to any living author would be nerve-damaging attention, and the consensus is unanimous. The novel, says Laura Miller of Salon, “seems intended to plumb the meaning of boredom, a phenomenon usually defined by its meaninglessness.” In The New York Review of Books, Jonathan Raban informs us that Wallace’s “unresolved ambition to find meaning in ordinary, adult lives, to explore boredom and frustration as a necessary and interesting human condition, has great vitality in these pages.” Hopelessly scarce are the reviews that don’t mention the pervasive and almost prayer-like presence of boredom and routine. In the book—itself an undeniable extension of the philosophy unpacked in his Kenyon speech—Wallace’s characters become so entrenched in the tedium of their jobs at the IRS Regional Examination Center that their experiences border on revelation. Lane Dean Jr., at his Tingle table in an enormous room full of other examiners, becomes so bored that for the first time in his life he contemplates suicide, after which he begins to feel the presence of “phantoms”: “hallucinations that can afflict rote examiners at a certain threshold of concentrated boredom.” Dean’s particular phantom launches into an etymological discussion of the word “boredom,” concluding with a quote from Kierkegaard: “Strange that boredom, in itself so staid and solid, should have such power to set in motion.” Here boredom is a transformative process—a moment of awareness. Here our lives are enriched by a strange suffering and self-sacrifice. Coupled with the commencement speech, even the most brilliant of novelists in Wallace’s position would find himself powerless to wash the philosophy from his hands.

Everyone agrees that The Pale King enshrines boredom. What has been glossed over, however, is how fiercely and unrepentantly American these pages are. Yes, the book expounds upon the marvels of boredom and the “heroic” nature of doing a quiet but necessary task without audience or recognition, but juxtaposed are endless descriptions of bureaucracies, American culture at its most dysfunctional, and even extended Platonian dialogues about the decline of American society, complete with terms that never fail to surface in today’s news: “liberal individualism,” “corporations,” “conservatives,” “founding fathers,” “consumer capitalism,” etc. “Americans are crazy,” one character remarks to another: “We infantilize ourselves. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens—parts of something larger to which we have profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights but not our responsibilities.” The selfishness described here again harkens back to Wallace’s speech, in which he revealed that our “natural, hardwired default setting” is to be “deeply and literally self-centered.” This is of course explored much further in The Pale King. Framed within the tax metaphor (and it is a rich, wonderful metaphor), the examiner Chris Fogle reminds us of “basic economic law”: “In taxation, the result is that the taxpayer will always do whatever the law allows him to do in order to minimize his taxes. This is simple human nature.” Elsewhere, recruit David Cusk is concentrating all his energy on trying to prevent an attack of “shattering public sweats.” Ultimately, Cusk realizes that “the hot spotlight he felt on him did not exist,” after which he feels “solid and confident.” Again that strange morality, as though there’s a lesson to be learned or some improvement to be made, trading a solipsistic view for an awareness beyond oneself.

Much has been said about the morality of novels. Lovers of literature, we recoil at the agonizing simplicity of the word: morality. There’s nothing complex about it—nothing nuanced or emblematic of every human heart’s dichotomies. Morals are dangerously equated with messages, and as Nadine Gordimer reminded us in a November interview with The Guardian, “If you are writing with a direct cause in mind, you are writing propaganda. It’s fatal for a fiction writer.” Wallace, Raban states in his review, “loved ambiguity and teasing irony, but when it came to morals he had a deep fundamentalist streak in his makeup, a disconcertingly innocent thirst for the ‘capital-T Truth.’” Since his death in 2008 Wallace has become one of America’s most beloved and respected contemporary authors. The number of books, articles, and even websites dedicated to “Wallace studies” grows tirelessly larger every day. His popularity is beyond doubt and so too is the importance that readers place on his work. Yet there’s something resonant in Raban’s statement that Wallace is some kind of moral fundamentalist. The thematic undercurrents of The Pale King are so simplistic that it’s almost wholesome—and why does this terrify those of us who pride ourselves on “getting” great works of literature? It’s almost as if we renounced morals long ago as something both utopian and fantastic in the way of fairytales.

Considering our nation’s love for Wallace there is an important question that we must ask ourselves: What does it mean for us to have an affinity for a moral novelist? Do the people of the United States have some lesson to be learned from his fiction? Are we, even in our rebellious godless and let’s say nihilistic adolescence as a culture, still yearning for meaning in our lives? Do we, as the unnamed character in The Pale King states, have “profound responsibilities?” In the first of the Federalist Papers (mentioned multiple times in this novel), Alexander Hamilton informs us of our moment to decide “whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice.” In Wallace’s view, that reflection and choice was the key to living a successful life not only on a personal level but a societal level, insisting that choosing to consider the lives of others—the world beyond oneself—would lead us all to live more compassionate lives. The same character goes on to say that “We abdicate our civic responsibilities to the government and expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality.” If The Pale King, alongside the Kenyon speech, was Wallace’s plea to take that morality back from the automated bureaucracy that governs us, how can our most passionate and high-minded readers stay so hopelessly in love with his work, no matter how repellant the term “moral novelist” sounds to us? In its abstract idea there’s nothing literary about asking people to be selfless, but Wallace has made it literary. Is that what it ultimately took—for it to be literary? Do we as complex and even jaded readers need to encounter our moral lessons in something overwhelming like Wallace’s fiction? Did it really take a byzantine, monolithic, and even maximalist novel for us to think about what it means to have empathy for one another? On the precipice of our nation’s financial bankruptcy, do we need characters like Chris Fogle to instill in us a hunger for faith in altruism—for a choice to think beyond the self and perhaps stop doing everything we can to minimize our individual tax contributions? Amongst all this dispassion and almost crippling apathy, is it possible for us to choose to think about how legislation affects the other Americans around us? Was Wallace foolishly optimistic or exceptionally humanistic? Are morals still a myth?

Wallace, to the chagrin of his admirers, is not here to defend any vicious accusations of morality, nor answer any philosophical questions. All we have left is his work, the value of which depends entirely on how we choose to view it.