Forms, Punch Cards and Letters

This essay looks at The Pale King's representation of three bureaucratic technologies—paper documents, punch cards and computers—and describes its intertextual relationships with John Barth's 1979 novel LETTERS and the films Blade Runner and The Terminator. The Pale King is “a portrait of a bureaucracy”, but it is also a novel which wrestles with the idea of self-reference. Its imitation of bureaucratic documents, by the use of cross-referencing, footnotes and the section symbol (§), means that its self-references constitute an unexpected kind of mimetic realism. Its representations of newer bureaucratic technologies—punch cards and computers—involve strategies for escaping narrative linearity borrowed from LETTERS: spatial organization of data, alphabetization and automation. The Pale King uses these bureaucratic textual strategies to explore the analogy between reflexivity in fiction and the Science Fiction trope of consciousness arising in artificial technologies, an analogy David Foster Wallace proposes in his 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery. References to Blade Runner and The Terminator are used to express an ambiguous, sceptical attitude not only toward the apparent emergence of artificial consciousness from recursive technological processes, but also toward human subjectivity

Aesthetics · Analogy · Art · Bureaucracy · Consciousness · Epistemology · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Reflexivity · Social science · Sociology · Subjectivity · Computer Science · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction · Law · Philosophy

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