IJ study archive

David Foster Wallace's Tax Classes

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TL;DR

An April 2012 New Yorker Page-Turner essay by Seth Colter Walls reading the longest of the four "previously unpublished scenes" appended to the Pale King paperback — a fourteen-page lunch-table scene in which an examiner named Hovatter plots to watch every second of a month of television — against Wallace's own accounting-class notebooks in the Harry Ransom Center, which Walls consulted after the 2012 Austin DFW Symposium. It is the best short piece of genetic criticism on The Pale King: it shows the novel's themes of boredom, attention, and unwitnessed heroism forming in Wallace's marginal jottings ("ACCOUNTANTS ARE COWBOYS OF INFORMATION", "PASSIVE a big word for IRS"), and it surfaces a MacArthur-fellowship self-note ("I am a MacArthur Fellow. Boy am I scared. I feel like throwing up… I don't feel like a Genius") that echoes, nearly word for word, the anxiety Wallace pencilled into the Infinite Jest manuscript margins. Its object is The Pale King, not Infinite Jest: it advances no theory about the earlier novel, but its portrait of Wallace's private anxiety sits directly beside the autobiographical questions readers bring to Infinite Jest.

Key claims

  • The new scene: four "previously unpublished scenes" accompany the Pale King paperback; three are pleasant but inessential, while the last literary "bonus track," at fourteen pages, is a keeper — “the longest new piece of unpublished Wallace fiction to emerge since "The Pale King" itself”. In it Claude Sylvanshine observes low-level rote examiners at lunch; the examiner Hovatter is practicing "ascetic frugality" so he can take a year off to watch "every last second of television broadcast in the month of May 1986."
  • The scene's argument: the logistical spiral of recording a month of TV ("How many VCRs will be required?") dramatizes Wallace's ideas about mindfulness, spectatorship, and choice. A lunch interlocutor delivers the thematic line: "It's not choice if it drowns you in choices so you can't meaningfully choose because there's too many options to choose from," adding "This may be the last time a lone man can absorb it all." The "type of thing" verbal tic marks another speaker as Ken "Type of Thing" Hindle.
  • The David Wallace frame: Walls ties the scene to the novel's fictional narrator, "named, in a po-mo fillip, David Wallace", who in Chapter 9 observes how tax-reform controversies hide in plain sight behind an insurmountable data-dump; the "notes and asides" pages say this fictional Wallace eventually "disappears--becomes creature of the system" (the double hyphen is the article's own), and Footnote 19 places him in a pod with the "type of thing" character.
  • The archival notebooks: Wallace attended tax courses as research for The Pale King; those notes are in his HRC archive. Walls quotes the jottings: "ACCOUNTING STUDENTS ARE INCREDIBLY ORGANIZED NOTE-TAKERS" — a line that "found its way into" the novel; on the same page, "God please help me--Pain, captain" (the double hyphen throughout is the article's rendering); from a class Wallace labelled a "Scam-Fest," the phrase "PASSIVE a big word for IRS"; and, filling the bottom of a page, "ACCOUNTANTS ARE COWBOYS OF INFORMATION" — the seed of the Pale King substitute-teacher's claim that accountants "are today's cowboys."
  • The MacArthur self-note: down the left margin of a page about tax-deferred exchanges, Wallace wrote: "I am a MacArthur Fellow. Boy am I scared. I feel like throwing up. Why? String-free award--nothing but an avowal of their belief that I am a 'Genius.' I don't feel like a Genius." (Nearby: "Need I pay FICA on grants, fellowships?" and, again, "God help me.") Walls reads the tax classes as a self-humbling project — Wallace correcting "the public's accounting of any heroic valor flowing from genius that seeks an audience."
  • The Schopenhauer intertext: filed with the notes is a two-page printout of Schopenhauer's "On the Vanity of Existence," a paragraph marked by Wallace's pen — life as "a task: the task of maintaining itself", after which boredom "hovers over every secure life like a bird of prey." Walls reads the anonymous heroism of the lone IRS agent as Wallace's proposed antidote to that vanity.
  • The Pale King aria: Walls quotes the substitute teacher's peroration — "The less conventionally heroic or exciting or adverting or even interesting or engaging a labor appears to be, the greater its potential as an arena for actual heroism, and therefore as a denomination of joy unequaled by any you men can yet imagine."
  • Provenance note: the essay reproduces two notebook pages, credited to the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust, images courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center.

Themes

Boredom, attention, and the heroism of tedious labor (the Pale King core); the metafictional author-surrogate ("David Wallace" inside the novel); genius, vanity, and the burden of reputation; and genetic criticism — reading the published fiction back through the archival research notes that generated it.

Cross-references

  • culturemap-pitchel-hrc-dfw-series-2011 — the same MacArthur-fellowship anxiety appears there in the Infinite Jest draft margins ("I am a MacArthur fellow, I feel like I could throw up") and here in the Pale King tax notebooks; the two HRC reports independently surface the same self-note, one novel apart. That series also describes the reading-room and the Austin scholarly scene this essay's symposium visit belongs to.
  • mcnally-making-of-ij-nadell-pietsch — Michael Pietsch, whose editing of Infinite Jest that note recounts, also edited the posthumous Pale King whose paperback scene this essay reads (the CultureMap note records that edit); the same editorial hand spans both books, though this essay itself never names him.

Notable passages

  • Lunch-table interlocutor (Pale King paperback scene): "It's not choice if it drowns you in choices so you can't meaningfully choose because there's too many options to choose from".
  • Wallace's tax notebook: "I am a MacArthur Fellow. Boy am I scared. I feel like throwing up… I don't feel like a Genius."
  • Wallace's tax notebook: "ACCOUNTANTS ARE COWBOYS OF INFORMATION."
  • Wallace's tax notebook: "God please help me--Pain, captain."
  • The Pale King substitute teacher: "The less conventionally heroic or exciting or adverting or even interesting or engaging a labor appears to be, the greater its potential as an arena for actual heroism".