Th e bodies in the bubble: David Foster Wallace’s Th e Pale King

While predominantly concerned with the transformation of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) during the 1980s, David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011) represents signal contradictions in the nature of money, from 1971 (when Richard Nixon ended the convertibility of the dollar into gold) to the events of the 2008 financial crisis (when derivative trading dominated global financial markets). As unstable admixtures of abstraction and concreteness, Wallace’s fictional IRS workers embody the changing nature of these contradictions and the uneasy convergence between corporate and corporeal persons caught within the particular processes of abstraction associated with financialisation.