Bureaucracy, Clerks and Spectral Realities in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King
Type
conference paper
Date Issued
2020-11-26
Author(s)
Abstract
David Foster Wallace’s novel The Pale King reflects on the working conditions, thoughts and emotions of clerks at the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS). In exploring tensions and ambivalences that seem to haunt the clerks, the bureaucratic institutions, if not life itself, Wallace employs supernatural phenomena to grasp the complexity of human experience (especially when doing boring, seemingly inhuman office work). Ghosts as chimeras inhabiting a middle-ground between life and death, past and present, are particularly apt to represent concepts that transcend an ontological is/is not dichotomy. Oxymoronic qualities of (bureaucratic) reality are shown to abound in the novel, are explored and become evident on different narrative levels. The paper demonstrates how the irreal real not only infiltrates and haunts but also enriches the clerk’s world, and thus potentially also that of the reader.
Language
English
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
HSG Profile Area
SHSS - Kulturen, Institutionen, Maerkte (KIM)
Event Title
Bureaucratic Poetics: Brian O’Nolan and the Irish Civil Service
Event Location
Virtual conference organized by University of Stockholm
Event Date
26.-27. November 2020
Subject(s)
Division(s)
Contact Email Address
sixta.quassdorf@unisg.ch
References
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Loevli, Elisabeth. M. “Faith in the Ghosts of Literature. Poetic Hauntology in Derrida, Blanchot and Morrisons’s Beloved.” Religions 4 (2013): 336-350.
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Riordan, Kevin. “Ghosts – in Theory – in Theater.” Intertexts 18.2 (2014): 165-180
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Wouters, Conley. “’What Am I, a Machine?’: Humans, Information, and Matters of Record in David Foster Wallace's The Pale King.” Studies in the Novel 44.4 (2012): 447-63.
Weber, Max (1925/1946): Essays in Sociology. Transl. Hans Heinrich Gerth and Bryan S. Turner. New York: Oxford University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. Marx’ Gespenster. Der Staat der Schuld, die Trauerarbeit und die neue Internationale. Frankfurt M.: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, 2004.
Clare, Ralph. “The Politics of Boredom and the Boredom of Politics in David Foster Wallace's The Pale King.” Studies in the Novel 44.4 (2012): 428–446.
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno. The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Transl. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007.
Loevli, Elisabeth. M. “Faith in the Ghosts of Literature. Poetic Hauntology in Derrida, Blanchot and Morrisons’s Beloved.” Religions 4 (2013): 336-350.
Peeren, Esther. The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Riordan, Kevin. “Ghosts – in Theory – in Theater.” Intertexts 18.2 (2014): 165-180
Wallace, David Foster. The Pale King. New York: Little, Brown and Co, 2011.
Wouters, Conley. “’What Am I, a Machine?’: Humans, Information, and Matters of Record in David Foster Wallace's The Pale King.” Studies in the Novel 44.4 (2012): 447-63.
Weber, Max (1925/1946): Essays in Sociology. Transl. Hans Heinrich Gerth and Bryan S. Turner. New York: Oxford University Press.
Eprints ID
261560