New Deals

This chapter demonstrates the deep importance of Wallace’s collegiate study of U.S. economic policy, especially in the Great Depression, to his early short stories. What if, I ask, we locate Wallace’s “origins” not in the post-World War II moment or 1960s ironic postmodernism, but instead in the crash of 1929, a less predictable moment of cultural crisis in which he took a quieter but subsuming interest? Key elements that emerge in this chapter are the U.S. Treasury (surreally portrayed as the issuer of a post-gold-standard currency – and post-metaphysical meaning – in the uncollected gem “Crash of 69”) and, in “Westward,” the governmental remedies of social insurance and economic reconstruction in the New Deal. While attending more briefly to other stories in Girl With Curious Hair, this chapter also provides sustained readings of Dust-Bowl metaphysics in “John Billy” and Johnson’s Great Society in “Lyndon.”

A Living Transaction

WHEN DAVID Foster Wallace committed suicide on September 12, 2008, amid the tragedy one of the most surprising details to emerge was news of the project he had left unfinished: a novel on the unlikely subject of the Internal Revenue Service. Mentioning in its opening pages book-keeping’s “double-entry method” (...

E Pluribus Unum

Where Infinite Jest had allowed Wallace to go continually inside the calculating minds of addicts and consumers to find evidence of diminishing returns and enslavement, he turned to taxes in order to place in the background of his next novel innumerable arcane terms of valuation, transaction, and reconciling, the million acts of book-balancing that go on constantly at the IRS. Oblivion’s wariness about the saving power of work receives new accents in this examination of ascetics, and by elaborating anew my central terms of work, value, and political rhetoric, I add nuance to readings that have already characterized the novel as a history of the rise of neoliberalism. In more specific terms, the chapter takes up three main threads: first, a re-energized role for ritual, a trope taken from DeLillo, as Wallace depicts his priestly accountants at sacred work. Second, a re-reading of forms of paper value in a neoliberal society, centered on contracts (a concern I unpack in previous chapters as well) and the values inscribed on currency, here elaborated in the novel’s many scenes that encode a Freudian intermingling of money and waste. Third, Wallace’s final rendition of axiology in passages about human attention’s comparative valuing of details, as explored through competing models of relevance and what the author-persona calls “the exact size and shape of every blade of grass in my front lawn” – one last image of the ground fiction forms.

Dei Gratia

Wallace’s masterpiece is an encyclopedia of transactions, values, and methods of valuation, documenting its subtle engagements with the economically topical (NAFTA’s neoliberal definition of “free trade,” for instance) and the culturally embedded (ongoing perversions of the Protestant work ethic, which this chapter links to Wallace’s readings of Pynchon and Gaddis). Wallace leads us to see viewers of the title Entertainment – and their more thoroughly examined analogues, drug and alcohol addicts – as economic agents seeking a return of value that has been utterly compromised, resulting in conditions of slavery that Wallace interprets, as he did in Broom and “Westward,” through Hegel’s “Lordship and Bondage.” With these terms in place, I revisit AA scenes that have driven interpretations focused on sincerity and irony and show these moments’ structuring term to be value. Often noted for his generative exceptionality in Wallace’s cast of characters, Don Gately comes to his distinctiveness, I argue, through a relationship to work and to the uncannily rewritten coinage in which he receives “payment.” Building on Wallace’s annotations of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift as well as a cut passage on pennies’ “weird inverse value” that I draw from the Infinite Jest manuscripts, I link Gately’s initials to the abbreviation for Dei Gratia – “By the Grace of God” – found on British coins, thus recalibrating readings of the novel’s religiosity and Wallace’s relationship to contingent structures.

His Capital Flush

This chapter treats Oblivion as a transitional work and Wallace’s most despairing book – despairing because it is the first fiction collection written entirely after Infinite Jest’s success, but also because he largely abandons certain features of “payoff” for a reader’s “work” that have dictated his maneuvers from Broom forward. I show Wallace fine-tuning this new aesthetic in a reading of moral, aesthetic, and informational values in the important late essay “Deciderization.” In addition to finding new dimensions in his representation of coins and social values, particularly in “Mister Squishy” and “The Soul is Not a Smithy,” this chapter connects Wallace’s new skepticism about work to his increasingly intricate readings of social institutions within a neoliberal universe: I extend chapter 2’s reading of the New Deal into the twenty-first century by revealing Wallace’s critiques of the health insurance industry in “Smithy,” “Oblivion,” and, in a brief flash-forward appropriate to the porous borders between late Wallace works, The Pale King. The chapter concludes with an extended reading of the workless and weightless of “The Suffering Channel.”

Other Math

In Brief Interviews, Wallace’s most mathematically driven work of fiction, the central lesson is how to value the other in such a way that she is not killed off – not mown down by being remade as a number in the punning meaning behind the Wallace story that gives this chapter its title, “Other Math.” I place this crucial dynamic of combining selves in the context of the many systems of human and economic valuation – from coins, gifts, and contracts to viewing a spouse as “my other half” – that knit together a collection too often read as a disparate assortment of stories. In Brief Interviews Wallace makes his fullest use of paratextual features of story-numbering, series, and page numbers to arrange for the reader an encounter with the stochastic mathematics that drives “Adult World,” which I regard as a take-down of Plato, a watershed in Wallace’s history of unbridled markets and neoliberalism, and the collection’s centerpiece (over the many who have focused on “Octet”). As in chapter 2, a crisis in the value of currency fires Wallace’s imagination, here in a response to the so-called Asian Flu of the late 1990s. Interweaving a genealogy of Wallace’s probability-driven formal experimentation with a history of stochastic math’s importance to modern finance, I describe the dialectic of computerized complexity and balance-scale simplicity that underlies this book’s moral vision.

In Line for the Cash Register with Wallace

“THERE YOU are at the market while your items are being tallied” (PK 343). To conclude, I leave Wallace there, where he has in a certain sense been his entire career, waiting for value to resolve itself into something other than the price tag on a commodity. His work is often quite Beckettian, but there is no blasted landscape, no Godot—one waits instead for reconciliation at the cash register. From the voice of Mindy saying “Total: seventeen-fifty” (...

Come to Work

The Broom of the System offers a covert dialogue with Reagan’s consolidation of the neoliberal agenda around a revived version of the Protestant call to work in the 1980s, driven by fears of the effects of a service economy. I unpack this novel’s preoccupation with work, other (less reliable) forms of creating and accruing value, and connected issues of language use: my foci include the leisure-based national literature represented by Rick Vigorous, the ersatz topoi of Protestantism and self-reliance embodied by Governor Zusatz and Reverend Sykes, and the countering force of Lenore Beadsman, importantly named (in what I show to be Wallace’s continual play with initials) for the pound, unit of weight, currency, and work. Lenore is associated with value, clarity, ground, the balance scale of justice, and, in a key early image of contingency in art, the miraculous value of lottery tickets.