The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

  Fully and exquisitely real for the boy in his eleventh year, however, remained those portions of his trunk he had not yet attempted: areas of his chest above the pectoralis minor and of his lower throat between clavicle and upper platysma, as well as the smooth and endless planes and tracts of his back (excluding lateral portions of the trapezius and rear deltoid, which he had achieved at eight and a half) extending upward from the buttocks.

  Four separate licensed, bonded physicians apparently testified that the Bavarian mystic Therese Neumann’s stigmata comprised corticate dermal structures that passed medially through both her hands. Therese Neumann’s additional capacity for inedia was attested in writing by four Franciscan nuns who attended her in rotating shifts from 1927 to 1962 and confirmed that Therese lived for almost thirty-five years without food or liquid of any kind; her one recorded bowel movement (12 March 1928) was determined by laboratory analysis to comprise only mucus and empyreumatic bile.

  A Bengali holy man known to followers as ‘Prahansatha the Second’ underwent periods of meditative chanting during which his eyes exited their sockets and ascended to float above his head, connected only by their dura mater cords, and thereupon underwent (i.e., the floating eyes did) rhythmically stylized rotary movements described by Western witnesses as evocative of dancing four-faced Shivas, of charmed snakes, of interwoven genetic helices, of the counterpointed figure-eight orbits of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies around each other at the perimeter of the Local Group, or of all four (supposedly) at once.

  Studies of human algesia have established that the musculoskeletal structures most sensitive to painful stimulation are: the periosteum and joint capsules. Tendons, ligaments, and subchondral bone are classified as significantly pain-sensitive, while muscle and cortical bone’s sensitivity has been established as moderate, and articular cartilage and fibrocartilage’s as mild.

  Pain is a wholly subjective experience and thus ‘inaccessible’ as a diagnostic object. Considerations of personality type also complicate the evaluation. As a general rule, however, the observed behavior of a patient in pain can provide a measure of (a) the pain’s intensity and (b) the patient’s ability to cope with it.

  Common fallacies about pain include:

  • People who are critically ill or gravely injured always experience intense pain.

  • The greater the pain, the greater the extent and severity of damage.

  • Severe chronic pain is symptomatic of incurable illness.

  In fact, patients who are critically ill or gravely injured do not necessarily experience intense pain. Nor is the observed intensity of pain directly proportional to the extent or severity of damage; the correlation depends also on whether the ‘pain pathways’ of the anterolateral spinothalamic system are intact and functioning within established norms. In addition, the personality of a neurotic patient may accentuate felt pain, and a stoic or resilient personality may diminish its perceived intensity.

  No one ever did ask him. His father believed only that he had an eccentric but very limber and flexible child, a child who’d taken Kathy Kessinger’s homilies about spinal hygiene to heart the way some children will take things to heart and now spent a lot of time flexing and limbering his body, which as the queer heartcraft of children went was preferable to many other slack or damaging fixations the father could think of. The father, an entrepreneur who sold motivational tapes through the mail, worked out of a home office but was frequently away for seminars and mysterious evening sales calls. The family’s home, which faced west, was tall and slender and contemporary; it resembled one half of a duplex town house from which the other half had been suddenly removed. It had olive-colored aluminum siding and was on a cul-de-sac at the northern end of which stood a side entrance to the county’s third-largest cemetery, whose name was woven in iron above the main gate but not above that side entrance. The word that the father thought of when he thought of the boy was: dutiful, which surprised the man, for it was a rather old-fashioned word and he had no idea where it came from when he thought of him in there, from outside the door.

  Doctor Kathy, who sometimes saw the boy for continuing prophylactic adjustments to his thoracic vertebrae, facets, and anterior rami, and was not a loon or a huckster in a shopping-center office but simply a DC who believed in the interpenetrating dance of spine, nervous system, spirit, and cosmos as totality—in the universe as an infinite system of neural connections that had evolved, at its highest point, an organism which could sustain consciousness of both itself and the universe at the same time, such that the human nervous system became the universe’s way of being aware of and thus ‘accessible [to]’ itself—Doctor Kathy believed the patient to be a very quiet, inner-directed boy who had responded to a traumatic T3 subluxation with a commitment to spinal hygiene and neurospiritual integrity that might well signal a calling to chiropractic as an eventual career. It was she who had given the boy his first, comparatively simple stretching manuals, as well as the copies of B. R. Faucet’s famous neuromuscular diagrams (©1961, Los Angeles College of Chiropractic) out of which the boy fashioned the freestanding four-sided cardboard chart that stood as if guarding his pillowless bed while he slept.

  The father’s belief in ATTITUDE as the overarching determinant of ALTITUDE had been unwavering since his own adolescence, during which awkward time he had discovered the works of Dale Carnegie and of the Willard and Marguerite Beecher Foundation, and had utilized these practical philosophies to bolster his own self-confidence and to improve his social standing—this standing, as well as all interpersonal exchanges and incidents which served as evidence thereof, was charted weekly and the charts and graphs displayed for ease of reference on the inside of his bedroom’s closet door. Even as a provisional and secretly tortured adult, the father still worked tirelessly to maintain and improve his attitude and so influence his own altitude in personal achievement. To the medicine cabinet’s mirror in the home’s bathroom, for instance, where he could not help but reread and internalize them as he tended to personal grooming, were taped inspirational maxims such as:

  ‘NO BIRD SOARS TOO HIGH, IF HE SOARS WITH HIS OWN WINGS—BLAKE’

  ‘IF WE ABDICATE OUR INITIATIVE, WE BECOME PASSIVE—RECEPTIVE VICTIMS OF ON-COMING CIRCUMSTANCES—BEECHER FOUNDATION’

  ‘DARE TO ACHIEVE!—NAPOLEON HILL’

  ‘THE COWARD FLEES EVEN WHEN NO MAN PURSUETH—BIBLE’

  ‘WHATEVER YOU CAN DO OR DREAM, YOU CAN BEGIN IT. BOLDNESS HAS GENIUS, POWER AND MAGIC IN IT. BEGIN IT NOW!—GOETHE’

  and so forth, dozens or at times even scores of inspirational quotes and reminders, carefully printed in block capitals on small, fortune cookie–sized slips of paper and taped to the mirror as written reminders of the father’s personal responsibility for whether he soared boldly, sometimes so many slips and pieces of tape that only a few slots of actual mirror were left above the bathroom’s sink, and the father had to almost contort himself even to see to shave.

  When the boy’s father thought of himself, on the other hand, the word that came unbidden first to mind was always: tortured. Much of this secret torture—whose causes he perceived as impossibly complex and protean and involving both normal male sexual drives and highly abnormal personal weakness and lack of backbone—was actually quite simple to diagnose. Wedded at twenty to a woman about whom he’d known just one salient thing, this father-to-be had almost immediately found marriage’s conjugal routines tedious and stifling; and the sense of monotony and sexual obligation (as opposed to sexual achievement) had caused in him a feeling that he felt must be almost like death. Even as a newlywed, he had begun to suffer from night terrors and to wake from nightmares of some terrible confinement feeling unable to move or breathe. These dreams did not exactly take any kind of psychiatric Einstein to interpret, the father knew, and after almost a year of inner struggle and complex self-analysis he had given in and begun seeing another woman, sexually. This woman, whom the father had met at a motivational seminar, was also ma
rried, and had a small child of her own, and they had agreed that this put some sensible limits and restrictions on the affair.

  Within a short time, however, the father had begun to find this other woman kind of tedious and oppressive, as well. The fact that they lived separate lives and had little to talk about made the sex start to seem obligatory. It put too much weight on the physical sex, it seemed, and spoiled it. The father attempted to cool things off and to see the woman less, whereupon she in return also began to seem less interested and accessible than she had been. This was when the torture started. The father began to fear that the woman would break off the affair with him, either to resume monogamous sex with her husband or to take up with some other man. This fear, which was a completely secret and interior torture, caused him to pursue the woman all over again even as he came more and more to despise her. The father, in short, longed to detach from the woman, but he didn’t want the woman to be able to detach. He began to feel numb and even nauseous when he was with the other woman, but when he was away from her he felt tortured by thoughts of her with someone else. It seemed like an impossible situation, and the dreams of contorted suffocation came back more and more often. The only possible remedy that the father (whose son had just turned four) could see was not to detach from the woman he was having an affair with but to hang dutifully in there with the affair, but also to find and begin seeing a third woman, in secret and as it were ‘on the side,’ in order to feel—if only for a short time—the relief and excitement of an attachment freely chosen.

  Thus began the father’s true cycle of torture, in which the number of women with whom he was secretly involved and to whom he had sexual obligations steadily expanded, and in which not one of the women could be let go or given cause to detach and break it off, even as each became less and less a source of anything more than a sort of dutiful tedium of energy and time and the will to forge on in the face of despair.

  The boy’s mid- and upper back were the first areas of radical, perhaps even impossible unavailability to his own lips, presenting challenges to flexibility and discipline that occupied a vast percentage of his inner life in Grades 4 and 5. And beyond, of course, like the falls at a long river’s end, lay the unimaginable prospects of achieving the back of his neck, the eight centimeters just below the chin’s point, the galeae of his scalp’s back and crown, the forehead and zygomatic ridge, the ears, nose, eyes—as well as the paradoxical ding an sich of his lips themselves, accessing which appeared to be like asking a blade to cut itself. These sites occupied a near-mythic place in the overall project: The boy revered them in such a way as to place them almost beyond the range of conscious intent. This boy was not by nature a ‘worrier’ (unlike himself, his father thought), but the inaccessibility of these last sites seemed so immense that it was as if their cast shadow fell across all the slow progress up toward his clavicle in the front and lumbar curvature in the rear that occupied his eleventh year, darkening the whole endeavor, a tenebrous shadow the boy chose to see as lending the enterprise a somber dignity rather than futility or pathos.

  He did not yet know how, but he believed, as he approached pubescence, that his head would be his. He would find a way to access all of himself. He possessed nothing that anyone could ever call doubt, inside.

  Afterword

  This passage—which appeared posthumously in The New Yorker in 2011, with the title “Backbone,” and became Chapter 36 of The Pale King—was one that David Foster Wallace had been working on for some time. He’d read a version of it at the Lannan Foundation in December 2000, and before that, in April 1999, he’d sent me an earlier draft, for possible inclusion in the magazine’s first “20 Under 40” fiction issue. (Below the return address on the accompanying letter—“Fragmentco Unltd.”—he wrote, “Dear D.T., Pursuant to our phone conversation of last Fri., here is as much of the Fragment as I can render readable in time to have this to you by week’s end. In the wildly unlikely event that this Fragment does not meet your publication needs at this time, I would ask that you dispose of it thoroughly and irremediably—some combination of shredder and flame* is usually sufficient.… *[in that order…].” My apology, David, for whatever it’s worth, for not having followed your instructions.) In the end, we ran a more polished piece in the issue—a story from Wallace’s forthcoming “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.”

  When I read the story again in 2011—significantly changed and expanded since its 1999 iteration—I was both awed and sorrow-struck. With the unearned privilege of hindsight, I could see how intricately, consciously or not, Wallace had reshaped his own process as a writer into his six-year-old hero’s obsessive, torturous pursuit of perfection. The way that Wallace returned to this narrative, and others, again and again, removing, adding, adjusting, stretching, improving, had much in common with the way that the boy pursues his own dream, one that he knows, from the beginning, is quixotic and may even destroy him. The project begins as “child’s play” and develops into a life’s work, something that will require “maximum effort, discipline, and a commitment sustainable over periods of time that [the boy] could not then… imagine.” Wallace is, of course, aware of the narcissism of this ambition: what could be more narcissistic than kissing “every square inch” of one’s own body except perhaps exposing every square inch of oneself in writing? At the same time, the boy is a kind of saintly figure, his story repeatedly juxtaposed with those of holy men and women who have accomplished supernatural feats of physical endurance.

  There’s a certain defensiveness in that first line: “Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals”—the insistence on “wholeness,” the emphatic string of synonyms. The boy—an asthmatic who has trouble breathing, who seems to have lost his mother (she doesn’t appear here; in the 1999 version, she died of “septic shock” after giving birth), who breaks his own back—is, arguably, not whole; marginalized, unloved, unkissed, he sets out to provide the missing kisses to himself. To do so, he must become someone else, or become two people: the kissed and the kisser, the child and his mother. “The difficulty increased with the abruptness of a coastal shelf,” Wallace writes, in an echo, perhaps, of Philip Larkin’s searing excoriation of parenthood “This Be the Verse”: “Man hands on misery to man. / It deepens like a coastal shelf. / Get out as early as you can, / And don’t have any kids yourself.”

  It’s possible that the father in the story—the apparent opposite of his son, a man with a “lack of backbone” who feels trapped with one woman, adds another to his life, feels trapped, adds another, and so on, in his own “true cycle of torture”—also has something to tell us about Wallace’s experience of writing The Pale King, an ever-expanding narrative with a multitude of beginnings and a multitude of characters, none of whom are ever entirely released from their service to the plot, though the nature of that service remains at times, perhaps purposefully, obscure.

  And yet what I remember most about this story is the sudden joyous upward flight of its ending: a ringing declaration of ambition, of confidence, of optimism. Coming as it does after the bleakness of the child’s fanatical isolation and of the father’s emotional despair, its note of triumph feels even more ascendant: “He would find a way to access all of himself. He possessed nothing that anyone could ever call doubt, inside.”

  —Deborah Treisman

  TEACHING MATERIALS

  Introduction

  Good teachers are those who so love their subjects that they try with all their might and main to help students love them, too, forever. David seldom met a word he didn’t enjoy playing with, making it jump through flaming hoops and perform feats of derring-do. (Or, as he might have said, daring-don’t). When he was about four years old, he loved the sounds of precocious, atrocious, and ferocious, and he used them often (although he hadn’t yet differentiated their definitions). When he was in high school, he would always ask, “Any thin, natal coverings?” when he came home. (He had discovered the word caul.) He was always eager to learn al
l he could about the language and how it works, and he was eager to share with his students, in a maximally palatable way, what he learned, knew, lived, and loved.

  David was always interested in how other teachers plied their craft, and, like an engaging, appreciative, bandanna-wearing magpie, he would pick up shiny ideas from all over. Because both David and I assigned lots of writing, we were fond of groaning about composition and decomposition, grading and degrading. My constant mantra in the classroom was that good writers strive for clarity, courtesy, and conciseness, with an emphasis on courtesy because it’s downright rude to expect a reader to wade through woolly constructions multiple times, trying to figure out what the writer is saying. I always read each student essay three times before I made a mark on the actual paper because first of all, I was eager to see how students responded to the assignment, then to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the effort, then to applaud the good stuff and make suggestions for revision of the less-good stuff. David adopted this practice and read each student piece three times, too, but he made marginal comments each time through, using different colored pens to differentiate. This Herculean time-and-labor-intensive practice blew his students’ socks off and bolstered their efforts. He often called me with questions, sometimes during his office hours, when he had dinged a student for some grammatical breach but couldn’t quite explain to the student exactly what made it a breach. His dad and I could hear the student chuckling in the background.

  Even a person who had never heard of David could infer his character and personality from the materials he wrote for his students. His syllabi and teaching materials offer insight into a thoughtful, caring, funny, generous teacher who never stopped being a student. He was the kind of teacher who probably felt a bit guilty about accepting a salary for doing something he so enjoyed. Perhaps some of the pedagogical practices found in David’s syllabi and handouts will be useful to teachers using The David Foster Wallace Reader in their classrooms.