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From capitalist to communist abstraction: The Pale King 's cultural fix

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 28; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0950236x.2014.965889

1470-1308

Stephen Shapiro,

Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

AbstractDavid Foster Wallace's The Pale King achieves a new novelistic form that narrates different capitalist temporalities simultaneously – in his case, the classic logistic of capitalism and its particular contemporary form in neoliberalism. A reading of his novel suggests a solution to the goal of cultural materialist theory. By rereading the second and third volumes of Marx's Capital, we can perceive the absence of a term – fixed labour-power – that ought to be present but is not. By providing this term, we can resolve incompletely theorised techniques from Russian Formalism and its later adaptation by Fredric Jameson. The Pale King thus creates a text that suggests what a Western communist or left front novel in the post-Cold War, post-9/11 period might look like.Keywords: David Foster WallaceKarl Marxcapitalismpostmodernismthe novelneoliberalism Notes1 David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (London: Penguin, 2011). For a useful discussion of literary postmodernism's fate, see the special issue 'After Postmodernism: Form and History in Contemporary American Fiction', ed. Andrew Hoberek, Twentieth Century Literature 53 (3), 2007. For commentary on David Foster Wallace and The Pale King, see: A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, eds. Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); David Foster Wallace and 'The Long Thing': New Essays on the Novels, ed. Marshall Boswell (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014); Paul Giles, 'All Swallowed Up: David Foster Wallace and American Literature' in Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou (ed.), The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), pp. 3–22; and two pieces by Adam Kelly, 'David Foster Wallace: the Death of the Author and the Birth of a Discipline' Irish Journal of American Studies, 2 (2010). Online: http://www.ijasonline.com/Adam-Kelly.html; and 'David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction' in David Hering (ed.), Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays (Austin, TX: SSMG Press, 2010), pp. 131–46.2 Karl Marx, Capital I (New York: Vintage, 1977), p. 786. See also: 'the repeated turnover of industrial capital expresses the periodicity and renewal of the entire reproduction process (including the process of consumption).' Karl Marx, Capital III (London: Penguin, 1981), p. 418. Just as the heavenly bodies always repeat a certain movement, once they have been flung into it, so also does social production, once it has been flung into this movement of alternate expansion and contraction. Effects become causes in their turn, and the various vicissitudes of the whole process, which always reproduces its own conditions, take on the form of periodicity.3 Marx, Capital I, pp. 198, 727.4 Alexis Tocqueville, Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, trans. Gerald E. Bevan (London: Penguin, 2003).5 David Foster Wallace, Oblivion (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2004).6 Synoptic accounts of neoliberalism include Gérard Duménil and Lévy Dominique, The Crisis of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London: Allen Lane, 2007); and Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London: Verso, 2013).7 David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 1.8 Tocqueville, Democracy, pp. 19–20.9 Tocqueville, Democracy, pp. 622–3.10 Tocqueville, Democracy, p. 623.11 Tocqueville, Democracy, p. 617.12 Tocqueville, Democracy, pp. 805–6.13 Wallace, Oblivion, p. 284.14 Wallace, Oblivion, pp. 103, 108.15 Wallace, Pale King, p. 19.16 Wallace, Pale King, p. 143.17 Wallace, Pale King, pp. 145–6.18 Wallace, Pale King, pp. 132–3.19 Wallace, Pale King, pp. 144, 148.20 Wallace, Pale King, p. 149.21 Wallace, Pale King, pp. 136, 139, 140.22 Wallace, Pale King, p. 143.23 Wallace, Pale King, p. 72.24 Wallace, Pale King, pp. 81fn, 85.25 Quoted from Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 9.26 Karl Marx, Capital II (London: Penguin, 1978), p. 110.27 Modified from Meghnad Dessai, Marxian Economics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), p. 33. The original chart reappears in David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (London: Verso, 1982), p. 70.28 Marx, Capital II, p. 183.29 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1973), pp. 454–5.30 Marx, Capital II, pp. 237–8.31 Harvey, Limits, pp. 431–8.32 Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: NLR Books, 1972).33 Marx says that the 'inner relation' of capital relations has the capitalist place the worker in a condition of 'indifference, externality, and alienation' in that the capitalist does not need to support a worker's human existence as a slave would require, removes the means of labor and access to raw materials and energy sources from the worker, and considers the commodity as the source of value. Most cultural materialist criticisms beyond 1900 see Marx's claim of 'indifference' to workers' lives as contradictory to the need to reestablish class relations over time. Marx, Capital III, p. 178.34 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 166fn, 167.35 V. N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (New York: Seminar Press, 1973), p. 19.36 Vološinov, Marxism, p. 23.37 Marx, Capital III, p. 596.38 Wallace, Pale King, p. 85.39 Wallace, Pale King, p. 87.40 Wallace, Pale King, p. 87.41 Wallace, Pale King, p. 235.42 Wallace, Pale King, p. 231.43 Wallace, Pale King, p. 233.44 Herman Melville, Pierre or the Ambiguities (New York: Penguin, 1996), pp. 214–5.45 Wallace, Pale King, p. 5.46 Wallace, Pale King, pp. 312–5.