IJ study archive

DFW reads from The Pale King and Incarnations of Burned Children (December 2000)

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TL;DR

The reading half of the December 2000 Lannan Foundation evening whose conversation half is the Powers/O'Brien Q&A. A decade before The Pale King was published, DFW reads what he frames as four fragments — two of them pieces of one larger fragment, and one that he says he has been told is too disturbing for reading aloud — early Pale King material plus "Incarnations of Burned Children." Canonical texts: The Pale King and Oblivion (EPUBs in [local source]).

What's read / asides

  • Opening fragment is the boy whose goal is "to press his lips to every square inch of his own body" — published later as Pale King sec. 36 (and excerpted as "Backbone" in the New Yorker): "the difficulty increased with the abruptness of a coastal shelf. The boy came to understand that unimaginable challenges lay ahead of him. He was six."
  • Closes with "Incarnations of Burned Children" (the "too disturbing" one), read complete to the final lines ("the child had learned to leave himself... lived its life untenanted, a thing among things, its self's soul so much vapor aloft").
  • Self-deprecating stagecraft asides: praises the previous reader, catalogs his own nerves, the look-up-and-lose-your-place problem, "I also have saliva issues."

Why it matters here

Earliest public evidence in this collection of the post-IJ long project: the discipline/attention obsession (a boy devoting himself to an absurd contortion goal) already in Pale King form in 2000 — corroborating the composition timeline in The Unfinished. "Incarnations" is his most concentrated treatment of dissociation-from-pain, the mechanism Ennet House residents narrate at length.

Cross-references

  • Powers/O'Brien Q&A: same evening.
  • The Unfinished: Pale King chronology.
  • The Pale King and Oblivion (EPUBs in [local source]): canonical texts.
  • IJ connections: monastic bodily devotion (ETA's regimens, Schtitt's discipline-as-transcendence); leaving-the-body under unbearable pain (Gately's ward chapters; the trauma narratives of Ennet House).