the birth of the idea to make himself a character writing a fake memoir

September 10, 2014 5:03 PM

The Pale King drafts: The David Foster Wallace archive at the Harry Ransom Center UT has made some documents from The Pale King accessible online, including a few pages of his workbook, handwritten drafts, and typed edits.

David Foster Wallace’s archive resides at the Harry Ransom Center. In partnership with Little, Brown and Company and prior to the publication of Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King, the Ransom Center offered a preview of materials from the archive related to the novel, which was published by Little, Brown and Company on April 15, 2011. Displayed here are a series of drafts of the "Author's Foreword," which eventually became chapter nine of the book. Wallace’s longtime editor, Michael Pietsch, discusses these pages and the publication of the novel in the "Editor's Note" below.

posted by Fizz (21 comments total)

I was lucky enough to get to spend about four hours at the Ransom Center looking at stuff from the archive. Amazing, amazing, amazing.
posted by escabeche at 5:12 PM on September 10, 2014 [4 favorites]

David Foster Wallace is one of those authors where I've read more ABOUT David Foster Wallace than I have BY David Foster Wallace.

I just wish I had more time to read David Foster Wallace.
posted by Fizz at 5:12 PM on September 10, 2014

Fizz, I would say if you like to read, you should just give it a go. I held off on reading Inifinte Jest and in the end I am so glad I did.

If you read a lot of contemporary fiction, you've likely read a lot of work that is influenced by DFW, sometimes heavily so.

I've never read the Pale King, would love to hear what others here thought.
posted by cell divide at 5:16 PM on September 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

I don't have the book in front of me, but I'm pretty sure that editor's note is almost entirely lifted verbatim from the editor's note to the published edition?

It's the "Reading this material in the months after returning, I found an astonishingly full novel..." that tipped me off, since I remember at the time, after finishing reading what was published, how untrue that claim felt.

But neat to see these pages, however few they've released so far. Thanks!
posted by nobody at 5:18 PM on September 10, 2014

I've never read the Pale King, would love to hear what others here thought.

I loved what was there, but -- at least in what was edited together for publication -- it felt to me like so many threads were introduced or teased that were then barely explored. Unless DFW was specifically playing with that sort of form (and I'm not sure I'd buy that he was, though I'd love to hear someone else's take on it), I suspect that what we got represents at most the first third of what the final work would have been.
posted by nobody at 5:21 PM on September 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

David Foster Wallace is one of those authors where I've read more ABOUT David Foster Wallace than I have BY David Foster Wallace.

Honestly he didn't really write a huge amount of stuff. It's easy to plow through everything he published in a summer or so.
posted by dilaudid at 5:37 PM on September 10, 2014

It's the "Reading this material in the months after returning, I found an astonishingly full novel..." that tipped me off, since I remember at the time, after finishing reading what was published, how untrue that claim felt.

Ha, yeah its bullshit. On the back of my edition: "DFW's most complete and satisfying work of fiction..." - Andrew Ervin, Philadelphia Inquirer

i mean give me a break Andy, did you read this or any of his work???
posted by stinkfoot at 5:41 PM on September 10, 2014 [2 favorites]

I've never read the Pale King, would love to hear what others here thought.

I've read it a couple times and love it, but comparing it to IJ you can imagine where he might have taken it if he had the time. I enjoy it with the pain that I feel looking at pictures of my beautiful and unpredictable high school girlfriend. What could have been, what could have been....

I loved what was there, but -- at least in what was edited together for publication -- it felt to me like so many threads were introduced or teased that were then barely explored. Unless DFW was specifically playing with that sort of form (and I'm not sure I'd buy that he was, though I'd love to hear someone else's take on it), I suspect that what we got represents at most the first third of what the final work would have been.

I agree with you to a certain extent- yeah he would have probably built some things out more but the suggestion of certain threads is enough in IJ to really get the points accross. I guess they're just more fully suggested(?).
posted by stinkfoot at 5:47 PM on September 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm pretty psyched to be headed for Austin for work next month. I'm hoping to make it to the Ransom center to see some of this stuff.
posted by nevercalm at 5:52 PM on September 10, 2014

I may be missing something but the interface for looking at this stuff is horrible.
posted by beagle at 6:00 PM on September 10, 2014

I may be missing something but the interface for looking at this stuff is horrible.

Archivist here. CONTENTdm has never been a very user-friendly or aesthetically-pleasing platform. Unfortunate, since it's very widely used by archives and libraries.
posted by mostly vowels at 6:08 PM on September 10, 2014

Ooh, I love a good notebook. They should just publish the notebooks, like they did with Cobain's.
posted by turbid dahlia at 6:32 PM on September 10, 2014

I've never read the Pale King, would love to hear what others here thought.

I found sections of the prose superior to IJ (the sheer pain of Chapter 5 as a prime example) but the work as a whole less satisfying due to its unfinished nature. Taken as a collection of short stories (the intricacies are less visibly threaded) I'd put it on the same level, but people seem to insist on comparing the as if they were to be the same kind of beast. Putting that much time into something (and witnessing the difference between Broom of the System and IJ) I can't imagine that would've been the final case.
posted by solarion at 6:43 PM on September 10, 2014 [2 favorites]

It's hard to say how much of the novel we actually have, given that Wallace was trying for a series of events that seem like they'll lead to a plot but never do, etc. But at the same time the stuff that we do have is so gradual and scattered that it feels like it's maybe only the first quarter of the novel, which would mean that most likely a ton of it would have been edited down. It's definitely an interesting read, but I think I'm a lot more likely to return to Infinite Jest or Brief Interviews a lot more frequently than The Pale King.
posted by shakespeherian at 6:51 PM on September 10, 2014 [2 favorites]

I'm permanently about halfway through this, every time it gets back in my bag it gets bounded by other things. What I've read I liked, though there is a particularly, deliberately boring chapter in there that took me some work to get through.

I consider his biography (Every Love Story is a Ghost Story) to be a nice companion.

He had 3 somewhat distinct kinds of writing: tomes, short stories, and non fiction magazine articles. The pale king is an unfinished tome.

If you are putting off Infinite Jest (I read it not knowing who he or it was, fwiw), you might try something more digestible, like The Girl With Curious hair.

Or check out his commencement speech, "This is Water" on YouTube.
posted by lkc at 7:02 PM on September 10, 2014

I've read IJ. I can see that there is Something To Get, and I clearly don't get it.
posted by quillbreaker at 7:16 PM on September 10, 2014

There was one chapter that really resonated and stuck with me, the rest had flashes of brilliance.

That one chapter was towards the end, there were a group of co-workers at a pub having beers after work. Eventually everyone wanders off to the bathroom, playing pool etc. leaving the super introverted nerd guy and the resident hot office girl. They start off awkwardly conversing and it slowly gets deeper and deeper and more intimate and they start to levitate out of the booth. It was amazing to read and was obviously one of the few (close to) finished chapters.
posted by mannequito at 7:39 PM on September 10, 2014 [2 favorites]

I've read IJ. I can see that there is Something To Get, and I clearly don't get it.

Bingo. You got it.
posted by Ndwright at 7:54 PM on September 10, 2014 [3 favorites]

I was thrilled by The Pale King.

I read it knowing it was an 'unfinished' work put together by his editor posthumously. DFW used to call it 'The Long Thing' in chats with his editor.

But I also read it with the understanding that his editor pulling the threads, such as they are, together, was similar (as I recall it) to his agent pulling the manuscript of Infinite Jest away from DFW (who without such authority could not have let it go) and actually publishing it.

But the unfinished nature of it, perhaps, is his greatest measure of self expression: all his works exist in that strange hyper detailed world of his where even with all the detail, you feel he still wanted to say more: the endless tangents and digressions, the footnotes, the footnotes to the footnotes.

Everything about DFW was 'unfinished' including the way he died. So much left to do but he just couldnt do it.

I read that sense of perpetual 'unfinishedness' into all his works, and the Pale King in particular, and it is magnifcent and harrowing and dreadfully, dreadfully sad because of it.

But thrilling, nonetheless.
posted by Plutocratte at 9:38 PM on September 10, 2014 [2 favorites]

While the particular platform the HRC is using to house digitised copies of this material is less than ideal, it's understandable why they're making more of the collection available online. I remember hearing a conference paper recently about the DFW papers and the challenges involved in their preservation from an archivist's perspective. They get a lot of use, and the bulk of their requesters treat them as objects of fan devotion, not materials for academic study. The HRC has become a site of pilgrimage. Fans want to be with the items; to be able to hold and touch them. In the case of DFW's personal books, at least, many of which are cheap paperback editions, this kind of heavy, tactile usage is already starting to noticeably degrade the collections. It's a fine line for an archivist to tread.
posted by Sonny Jim at 12:52 AM on September 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

"I read that sense of perpetual 'unfinishedness' into all his works, and the Pale King in particular, and it is magnifcent and harrowing and dreadfully, dreadfully sad because of it."

Well said Plutocratte!
posted by stinkfoot at 11:18 AM on September 11, 2014