The Work of Literature in the Age of the Office (Parts 1–4)

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TL;DR

A four-part serialization (March–April 2012, on the blog "What is literature?") of Christopher Schaberg's book chapter "The Work of Literature in the Age of the Office", reading The Pale King alongside two other office-space novels (Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End and Ed Park's Personal Days), Mad Men, and Melville's "Bartleby". This is non–Infinite Jest criticism: its subject is The Pale King and the literature of office work, and it advances no theory about Infinite Jest — it reads as context for Wallace's posthumous reception and the fate of the unfinished last novel. Its through-argument — that a Work about endless, un-finishable office work can itself never be complete, and that Wallace's death literally left "an unfinished Work that yet requires more work" — is a useful articulation of the Pale-King editorial and theoretical problem, tangent to but not about Infinite Jest.

Key claims

Part 1 (Mad Men): the ad-agency drama is really about the contemporary office and "job spill" (work leaking into leisure and vice versa) — "there is no life outside of advertising work. The work makes life worth living." Mad Men also carries "the persistent imperative for the characters to become literary"; Roger Sterling quips that "in every ad man there is an aspiring novelist." The chapter will read three office novels: Ferris, Park, and The Pale King.
Part 2 (Endless Work): Ferris's and Park's novels both stage a bind between "office work" (endless, boundless) and "the Work" (the finished novel, the oeuvre); each smuggles in a text-within-the-text (Ferris's Hank Neary inter-novel; Park's "Jilliad") to make the office "literary" — the finished novel becomes "the Work apart, utterly incongruous with the day-to-day grind of the office."
Part 3 (The Author is Dead; Office Work Remains): "David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel about office work self-consciously bores." Reading the "Wiggle Room" excerpt (Lane Dean Jr.) and D.T. Max's accompanying New Yorker profile, Schaberg hears Barthes: "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." With Wallace, "The author is dead; but office work remains" — the editors, journalists, and academics must do the office work of assembling the unfinished book. Foucault's "What is an Author?" frames the editorial problem of what counts as part of the "complete works".
Part 4 (Never Complete): via Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" ("I would prefer not to") and Žižek's reading of it, Schaberg argues The Pale King is a "Bartleby figure always asymptotically approaching death… because an incomplete novel can never end." Conclusion: "Wallace's unfinished Work will never have an adequate conclusion," which "most truthfully… reflects the basic condition of office work which is, in principle, never complete."

Themes

Boredom and attention (The Pale King's central subject); work and the "Work" (labor vs. the finished literary object); authorship and the posthumous/unfinished text (Barthes, Foucault, the editorial problem); office-space fiction as a genre. None of these are pursued through Infinite Jest.

Cross-references

Part of the 2012 Pale-King reception wave; a theory-of-the-unfinished companion to the archive's other posthumous-DFW pieces. Overlaps the boredom/attention material that the This-is-Water readings (e.g. letterstodfw-blanck-what-the-hell-is-water) route through The Pale King, but Schaberg's interest is formal and editorial, not ethical.
No Infinite Jest scene mappings — the essay quotes no IJ passage.

Notable passages

"there is no life outside of advertising work. The work makes life worth living." (Schaberg, on Mad Men)
"David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel about office work self-consciously bores." (Schaberg)
"The author is dead; but office work remains" (Schaberg, after Barthes)
"Wallace's unfinished Work will never have an adequate conclusion" (Schaberg)