David Foster Wallace & the Christianity of Filling in Forms
Part 1

David Foster Wallace

3,999 words

Distracted from distraction by distraction.
—T.S. Eliot

Unfortunately, as things are, the festival’s sure to fail. But I have the power to save you guys. Through death I’ll release you from your earthly suffering.
—Unnamed female character from Chainsaw Man, Chapter 196

***

This is how it goes. David Foster Wallace’s story The Soul is Not a Smithy (2003) was originally published by AGNI, a paper named after the Vedic fire god, and involves a substitute teacher named Mr. Richard Johnson having a mental breakdown before a group of “4 Unwitting Hostages”, including the narrator. These hostages are a group of children alternately so distracted and bored by the immanent reality of what’s happening in the lesson for a plethora of reasons that they do not leave the classroom to save their souls.

Whilst it is later revealed Mr. Johnson might have had no intention of killing anyone in the class, the fact that the kids stolidly remain under the fluorescent lights of the room, gazing out of windows as the scene gets worse and worse, is exactly what enables authorities to take them into account as hostages and execute Mr. Johnson with a handgun once the incident is reported. The moral of the story is given to us by our narrator, who reflects—as a grown up looking back over his past—about how he never understood the agony of his father’s life in a dull, horrific bureaucratic job, until he got one himself. We are meant to understand that Mr. Johnson’s life, whatever it used to be, was destroyed by the same crushing boredom of bureaucracy as the narrator’s father’s life, and when Mr. Johnson writes “KILL THEM” over and over again on the blackboard in increasingly feral chalk, it’s not necessarily the kids he’s thinking about. It’s “THEM” –those people, whoever they are[1] who have effectively effaced his dreams as an educator, who have pulled his wings off, and have, in equal measure, dried out and ruined the enthusiasm of the students that could well have burned up brightly in different circumstances. For our author, David Foster Wallace, these people—“THEY”—don’t really exist, but Johnson is mad at them anyway. In Wallace’s world, what Johnson’s really dealing with is “the system”, which means he might as well be dealing with Biblical principalities, or the distorters of life and culture that some of the early Church fathers posit as Devils intending to corrupt the nexus of God’s plan. Johnson has been digested by these things, by their system, and that’s why he is filled with literally years of self-hatred, trauma, and misdirected rage.

In The Pale King (2011)—the posthumously published novel of which The Soul is Not a Smithy might originally have been intended as a part—Wallace describes Mr. Johnson’s caste of teachers thusly:

The young men were the worst, some actual martinets, depressed and bitter, because the idealism that had brought them to [education] was no match for the petrified bureaucracy of the Columbus School System or the listless passivity of children they’d dreamed of inspiring (read, indoctrinating) to a soft liberalism (peace was a big word with these men) that would replicate and flatter their own, children who were instead locked tight inside themselves and an institutional tedium they couldn’t name but had already lost their hearts to.

The reason I decided to sum up The Soul is Not a Smithy in my first paragraph rather than immediately quoting the narrator’s own moral explanation can be eked out from the paragraph above: Wallace writes really, really long sentences. Most of his stories, even novels, have quite simple premises. But his tendency as a writer is to become fixated on a specific subject to such a ludicrous and frequently boring extent that, both intentionally and accidentally, being bored with Wallace is sewn into the joy of reading Wallace.[2] Maybe this is where his interest in boredom and bliss as a pairing comes from more than anywhere else.

It’s a chicken-and-egg scenario, really. Which came first? Was it Wallace working out that he was very good at flipping between being boring and being very exciting as a writer that caused him to become interested in the ethics of excitement and boredom? Or was it the reverse? Did he intend to do studies of boredom and bliss from the beginning and then consciously incorporate boringness and blissfulness into his writing style? My answer has gradations. I think his novel Infinite Jest is a giant, brilliant, slightly silly experiment where he worked out that boring his audience and also causing them to be obsessed with the mystery of the narrative was something he could accomplish, but did not initially intend. Meanwhile, The Pale King, written after Wallace had worked out that he had this specific talent as a writer in Infinite Jest, was absolutely designed to develop the morality that he conjured up in his previous book to do with the necessity of dealing with being bored and keeping away from dangerous distractions.

The editor of The Pale King, Michael Pietsch, who was tasked with the extremely difficult challenge of organising and cutting the original copy’s thousands of associated pages of handwritten text before going through even more text on CD ROMS stuck in corners of the garage where Wallace hanged himself, on top of just normally editing the finished manuscript that Wallace prepared in his bathroom before completing the act, apparently found the following note that explains what DFW was going for in his last work.

Bliss, a second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies at the other side of crushing, crushing boredom.

Maybe this could almost serve as an explanation of The Soul is Not a Smithy as well, although it doesn’t quite fit that narrative. Whereas in The Pale King, Wallace is intentionally engaging with the history of the American Inland Revenue Service[3] and the zen states that tax examiners manage to enter in the style of Vajrayana Buddhist monks attempting to escape the cycle of birth and death by simply paying attention to their work and nothing else, Smithy is essentially concerned with the bare, horrifying fact of being bored—and that our lives in a modern bureaucratic state in essence have to be largely boring for anything to work, and that for anyone who got his hopes up during his adventurous youth, that is something directly and obviously nightmarish, a solution to which can only be presented afterwards. The raw fact itself cannot be denied.

The paragraph below from Smithy is one that I sent to my best friend who is, as my mother would describe him, part fairy art-man and part unemployable wastrel like me.[4] When he read it, he told me it represented living death. It is also Smithy’s essential moral core: you will be bored, and you will have to live with that, and that will be most of your life in all likelihood, and everything else is a distraction or a fantasy.[5] This is Smithy’s narrator talking about his father, who seems to have a very similar life to Mr. Johnson the crazy substitute, and, in truth, every other grown up in the West for at least the last one hundred years.

Looking back, I suspect that there was something of a cover-your-eyes and stop-your-ears quality to my lack of curiosity about just what my father had to do all day. I can remember certain exciting narrative tableaux based around the competitive, almost primitive connotations of the word breadwinner, which had been Mrs. Claymore’s blanket term for our fathers’ occupations. But I do not believe I knew or could even imagine, as a child, that for almost 30 years of 51 weeks a year my father sat all day at a metal desk in a silent, fluorescent lit room, reading forms and making calculations and filling out further forms on the results of those calculations, breaking only occasionally to answer his telephone or to meet with other insurance men in other bright, quiet rooms. With only a small and sunless north window that looked out on other small office windows in other tall grey buildings. The nightmares were vivid and powerful, but they were not the kind from which you wake up crying out and then have to try to explain to your mother when she comes what the dream was about so that she could reassure you that there was nothing like what you just dreamed in the real world. I knew that he liked to have music or a lively radio program on and audible all of the time at home, or to hear my brother practicing while he read the Dispatch before dinner, but I am certain I did not then connect this with the silence he sat in all day. I did not know that our mother’s making his lunch was one of the keystones of their marriage contract, or that in mild weather he took his lunch down in the elevator and ate it sitting on a backless stone bench that faced a small square of grass with two trees and an abstract public sculpture, or that on many mornings he steered by these 30 minutes outside the way mariners out of sight of land use stars.

We are supposed to take from this that—perhaps due to his marriage and children, perhaps even just due to his stable routine—the narrator’s father did not snap, but well could have, and that the number of men who are on the verge of losing it completely in the modern bureaucratic West is far higher than anyone supposes, that also, to drag the sentence on, we are truly surrounded by people with violent fantasies about their superiors, about their jobs, and that Mr. Johnson sounds like such an appropriately generic name for a mental case, because he is also an extremely generic mental case, who just so happened to lose sight of the stars. A question that immediately comes up for me when I read the extract above is: “So, why would you even bother doing all that work?” An easy answer would be that that’s just what a father does in order to keep his wife and children afloat, but suppose I don’t have a family to click into, and that, leaving aside the expectations of other people like, for instance, my parents, I sit down and actually consider what life like that would be like. What would have to be my reward to make me do that? Would I have to believe in or simply desperately stumble towards a God who, after my own “30 years of 51 weeks a year”, would wait for me with an enormous present at the end to make it all worthwhile?

In these terms, Wallace’s ambivalent spirituality is interesting, especially when it’s at its least ambivalent. Let’s go back to Patrick Arden’s article “David Foster Wallace warms up”, as per footnote #1. Apparently, “The 1991 edition of Contemporary Authors shows a 20-something Wallace, looking earnest, or at least clean shaven. Under “Religion,” it says “Catholic,” a surprising assertion considering that after “Politics” it lists the “Communist Party of the United States.”[6] Wallace apparently went through the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults, but “always flunk[ed] the period of inquiry”. In other words, Wallace had very strong, sympathetic Christian impulses, but he couldn’t commit—perhaps given the fact he was raised by parents who were “atheists of the 60s brand. You know, religion for them equals central suppression from authority.” But the impulses were there.

Greg Johnson’s Novel Takes: Essays on Literature, available for order here.

Relevant to our discussion about what makes a life of effectively torturing yourself by sitting in a boring office for most of it at all worthwhile, young Wallace is quoted in the Arden article making a point that is pretty much the prototype for the one I made two paragraphs ago.

America is one big experiment in what happens when you’re a wealthy privileged culture that’s pretty much lost religion or spirituality as a real informing presence. It’s still a verbal presence— it’s part of the etiquette that our leaders use, but it’s not inside us anymore, which in one way makes us very liberal and moderate and we’re not fanatics and we don’t tend to go around blowing things up.[7] But on the other hand, it’s very difficult to think that the point of life is to double your salary so that you can go to the mall more often. Even when you’re making fun and sneering at it, there’s a real dark emptiness about it.

Yes, there is. So what exactly is the satisfying “bliss” that you, Wallace, later argue is accessible “at the other side of crushing, crushing boredom”? Also: why is “bliss” worth attaining if you aren’t really willing to entertain that there’s any reward for all this office space misery after death? Or is death actually part of the reward because you don’t have to go to work anymore? Why not just become a heroin addict? To be candid, this whole dilemma reminds me of this particular anecdote that Dmitri comes up with—and has reported back to him by a phantom—in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880). A man must wander through the dark for a number of miles so long that it turns into a number of years so great it might as well almost be an eternity. At the end of the dark and the cold is something. Imagine that next to this something is a magic telephone that enables him to call back to the beginning of the infinite cave that we’re situated outside of, and that there’s time dilatation à la the Hyperbolic Time Chamber in Dragonball Z (1996-2003), so it can be a trillion years in there, and five seconds out here. We get a call from him at the end of his journey after he’s wandered all those trillions of miles in the dark and found something. And he tells us that not only is this something he discovers worth the journey, but he would make that journey a thousand million more times through the dark because of just how worth-it that something, that Paradise actually is. It’s a study of the infinity of quality that Heaven would have to possess to make certain miserable aspects of your average historical human life worthwhile.

The difference is in Wallace’s case he gives us the journey through darkness, but he is utterly unable to give us the light on the other side.

Why must we suffer? Because that’s what you must do. That is greatness.

In The Pale King (again), this is the message that the IRS employee “irrelevant”[8] Chris Fogle takes from being your standard political science student at DePaul University and accidentally, life-changingly, walking into the wrong lecture—the lecture that he ends up in concerns accounting—and finding himself listening to “an hortation” on the reality of adult life from a man he would not otherwise have ever heard. For this lecturer, and eventually for Chris Fogle, working a boring job isn’t just “greatness”— it’s the living reality of the heroic ideal.[9]

He paused again and smiled in a way that was not one bit self-mocking. “True heroism is you, alone, in designated work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world. Just you and the job, at your desk. You and the return, you and the cash-flow data, you and the inventory protocol, you and the depreciation schedules, you and the numbers…Learn it now, or later—the world has time. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui—these are the true hero’s enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.”

For they are real—and Satan, and God, and perhaps all angels and saints besides the most immanent, physical, painful manifestation of such in ordinary kind, sacrificial people, are not. In these terms, Wallace’s theology, outside of the Buddhistic joy of mastering the utterly boring majority of life to just manage your own pain, is decisively negative. There is suffering and there is gratuitous, pernicious evil. But there is not glory from an audience, or from a choir of divinities, or any confirmation of an afterlife. There remains an ethical code that has crystallised in the West now that Christianity has started to recede from the world, and we still have its values, and we still have the guilt of Original Sin that motivates us—and Wallace—to put up with a dull, bureaucratic life, and to endorse the values of a sincere “humanism”[10] even if a sociopathic, Hobbesian Paganism would better suit the accomplishment of our interests.

As a result, when Wallace is presenting life advice before a bunch of students at Kenyon College over the course of a speech that unfortunately has tens of millions of views in several different versions on YouTube, he cannot help but assume that the human default is something terrible. In the This is Water speech, Wallace cannot but perceive the human moral norm as abysmal. Harping on atheism as something that doesn’t exist in the modern world, Wallace asserts that “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual- type thing to worship…is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth.” The really important thing however is that these self-serving quasi-demoniac forms of aggrandisement—like worship of body, worship of beauty, of money—are not exceptions. They are not tendencies that Wallace identifies in just some of us. “They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about how you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.”

In which case (again) why pay attention to the Christianity of filling in forms? Sure, worshipping the body, or worshipping youth, or worshipping consumerism equates to little more than “[t]he freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.” But what is the real meaning behind the empty drudgery of a desk job—aside from the alluded to “bliss” of getting really good at it, of presumably having a family to take care of, and building a society in which your descendants have a future, especially when—at least now—Indians are taking those accounting jobs and hiring themselves, and your country apparently isn’t your country anymore, and your own government would rather poison your homeland and grind up even the possibility of any future children—as well as release some actual children today into streets filled with knives and guns and dangerous foreigners that liberal men like David Foster Wallace want you to “care about” using your rigorous humanities type education?

Notes

[1] Maybe “psychotic corporate higher ups (!!)”, or “bureaucratic sovereigns (!!!)” are euphemisms that Wallace would have accepted—in Infinite Jest (1996), the minor oligarchic villain Rodney Tine is definitely one of these.

[2] On this note, there’s an extremely funny joke mentioned at the beginning of Patrick Arden’s article “David Foster Wallace warms up”: “I am tired of David Foster Wallace,” said a letter to the editor of Harper’s last November. The single-sentence missive was reinforced by five footnotes, which went on to detail the disgruntled reader’s obsessions with such personal problems as insomnia, grammar, and an identifying scar on his right index finger, caused by a broken drinking glass.”*

*In case my reader doesn’t get this joke, having read insufficient (or perhaps rightly little) Wallace—his novel Infinite Jest is 1079 pages long, written in small font, and has 388 footnotes written in even smaller font commenting on itself and the events of the story. In some cases (though the novel is so long I can’t pinpoint which) there are very short sentences with, one would expect, short footnotes attached that actually turn out to be several thousand words long on such disparate and hard-to-digest subjects as the theoretical mathematics of a tennis game and Indo-European linguistics at a PhD level. The Youtuber TheBookChemist has speculated that since Infinite Jest is partly about tennis, the reading experience of constantly having to go from the main text to the footnotes and back and forth again might have been an intentional way that DFW came up with of embedding tennis in the novel i.e. you’re essentially watching a tennis ball move from one side of a metaphysical “pitch” to another, and the action of going to the footnotes and back is the equivalent of the ball passing over one side of the net to another and back, complete with imaginary rackets whacking it each time. But whilst interesting, this fails to capture the experience of getting sucked down the abyss that some of the nastiest little footnotes open beneath you, which is much more akin to the experience of getting confronted by the footnote that you’re reading right now than landing on some metaphorical tennis pitch in the astral plane.

[3] Which, it turns out, is actually quite interesting but because of its armour of bureaucratic language very few people have ever seen fit to write about, let alone write about it as much as our author. In one section, Wallace talks about the restructuring of the IRS that took place during the Reagan era to massively increase its efficiency to seize assets from Americans on behalf of the state that could no longer be won through direct and ordinary taxation due to the low tax rhetoric that that President rode into office on. How come this isn’t more widely known? See page 85 of The Pale King: “The real reason why US citizens were/are not aware of these conflicts, changes, and stakes is that the whole subject of tax policy and administration is dull. Massively, spectacularly dull. ¶ It is impossible to overstate the importance of this feature. Consider, from the Service’s perspective, the advantages of the dull, the arcane, the mind-numbingly complex. The IRS was one of the very first government agencies to learn that such qualities help insulate them against public protest and political opposition, and that abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy. For the great disadvantage of secrecy is that it’s interesting.”

[4] This is a state he is—to my embarrassment—escaping faster than me due to Swiss military service. At my time of writing this, he’s learning how to fire a machine gun, which for some reason in my head connects with him developing the potential to get a job.

[5] To his credit, another guy I know told me he found it strangely comforting, but make up your own mind.

[6] Not surprising at all given the number of Communist-Catholics yours truly has been associated with—and the probable post-Vatican II infiltration by a significant enough number of the same ilk for Pope Francis I to condemn J.D. Vance for a moderate policy of deportation, and advocate mass immigration as a literal technique for spreading the Catholic faith; compare with the entire subgenre of Soviet-era pro-“African Liberation” posters and their strangely Christian undertone, leaving aside all the punily portrayed and in real life murdered white people.

[7] Read: B.S.

[8] His nickname because he has a tendency to be so long-winded that no one pays attention to him.

[9] Whether or not Wallace thinks this is anyone’s guess, although this speech sounds enough like his at least semi-serious This is Water (2005) commencement speech for yours truly to assume that he was trying to convince himself in it that accounting was a place for the expression of an heroic ideal, even if he did not think, deep down, it actually was.

[10] Read: Post-Christianity.