Chapter 31 - “I Could, If You’d Let Me, Talk and Talk”

Summary

Wallace’s interest in the metanarrative systems that guide and govern human behavior persisted throughout his career, from urban geography, pharmacology and language through entertainment, taxation and alienation. One such system is that of citizenship, which arguably grows in significance the later we look in Wallace’s writing, reaching its zenith in The Pale King. This chapter outlines the configuration and operation of citizenship throughout Wallace’s work, situating it against a critical backdrop of studies of American space and citizenship more generally and working in dialogue with the accompanying chapters on ecologies, geographies and politics. A decisively American writer, Wallace’s writing deploys a complex set of images associated with citizenship and civic duty. Examining the shifting, almost hallucinatory qualities of nation space at play in Wallace’s late capitalist cultural imaginary, this chapter argues that Wallace’s image of citizenship emerges from a concept of community – individually and locally constructed by means of engagement with civic systems – rather than nationalist or historicist in nature.