Author Here: The Legal Fiction of David Foster Wallace'sThe Pale King

5. Sincerity and Truth

“…After initially appraising a more traditional set of corpora, these social, structural inequalities remain manifest: only 15% of authors algorithmically selected for inclusion were women while a mere 5% were non-white. 21 To this end, the authors then conducted a second analysis with additional corpora contributed by some members of the editorial board of the journal MELUS (Multi Ethnic Literature of the United States), members of the Postcolonial Studies Association, and the editorial board of the Feminist Press (although this revised model still yielded only 10% non-white and 17% female). 22 For the purposes of the current discussion of contemporary fiction, however, what is perhaps most relevant are the principles of value selection that pervade Algee-Hewitt and McGurl's corpora.…”

“…After all, as the text notes with supreme irony, there is a belief in Serge's lifetime regarding war that "the more we can chatter with one another, the less likely that sort of thing [war] becomes". 21 C certainly wades deeply in the tradition of postmodern irony. 22 Like Remainder, though, C is also a novel that focuses upon a literary history through knowingly futile generic re-performances of paradigms such as experimental modernism.…”

“…20 Likewise, Peter Boxall notes that "Bolaño's fictions contain a kind of darkened image of a common world that is the closest the novel today can approach to imagining democracy", thereby situating 2666 within an ethical framework of globalisation that teaches us of the ills that it darkly reflects. 21 Daniela Omlor writes that "the murders of women recounted in the fourth part underpin all other narrative threads", thus interweaving the novel's teaching with its ethical premise. 22 For Fermín A. Rodríguez, "that the figure of exclusion in these novels has the face of a woman, that the biological body of the population is the body of young female workers, and that violence as 18 Bolaño, 2666, p. 372.…”

“…Sincerity, on the other hand, is seen in antiquity as a "moral excellence" deriving from Book Four of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics wherein a person is deemed sincere if he or she will "avoid falsehood as something base". 21 Sincerity is, in the interpretation that I will advance here, a type of honesty that is not merely concerned with accuracy in one's statements to others but is rather based upon checking future actions against previous speech and behaviour. 22 Although this differs somewhat from Trilling's definition of sincerity as "a congruence between avowal and actual feeling", this is unavoidable: the only way in which "actual feeling" can be seen is through action that is verified in a social situation.…”

“…This is presumably because, in addition to her non-exceptional post-accident visual appearance, he has pre-decided upon the theoretical content of his work and will shape reality to fit his textual ideal; exactly the same project undertaken by PersonalSpaces who wish to reduce reality to a sampled cross-section of the population. 21 In this light, Look at Me shows two pathological sides to academia: an isolated, nihilistic stagnation from Moose (connected perhaps to apocalypse and terror), who feels powerless to communicate his paralysing horror at post-industrial virtualisation and who feels joy only in the face of his 'disease' spreading, and an unreflexive participation with/complicity in an acceleration of this phenomenon from Phillipe.…”