Hughlings Himwich

Comments on David Foster Wallace's INFINITE JEST: journal 2 - 5: the cage

2.  The uncertain chronology of IF as well as the interruption of the footnotes serve to divert the reader from the emotional impact of the text.  DWF has said that he put the footnotes in to break the linearity of the text, but the text itself is nonlinear. The novel unfolds in what I would call the no-time of the imagination -- scene after scene like annular waves repeat the a vision of a cage whose escape turns out to be the bars of the cage. It is of interest that in this imaginative time the novel begins in November and ends with Gately somehow tossed out upon a beach with the tide way out.  The imaginative time, not the linear time, is that of Melville's Moby Dick ("November in my soul" to "the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago").  Like MD, IF is also an epic that examines the nature of necessity and the American psyche.  (There are also many allusions to whales in IF.)  As the white whale represented the play of necessity in our lives just so Entertainment becomes the engine of fate in IF. Instead of the handbook of whaling that we get in MD we find in IF a a handbook on drugs.

3. Diversion from the emotional power of IF is a constant temptation for readers as they search out hints, loose ends and chronological conundra -- just so the allusions in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land function to lure the reader away from the deep personal despair of its author.  DWF Himself knows this waste land.

 4.  DWF haunts the pages of IF.  It is not for nothing that Jim Incandenza is called Himself or that Gately's first two initials are DW.  Of course, one can see DWF as alive in all his characters, but Jim Incandenza and Gately announce themselves more directly.  These two characters meet in the visitation of the wraith to Gately in the hospital.  The wraith is at once Himself (now manifestly DWF)  and the brain voice of Gately. The occurrence of paranormal events (a bed on the ceiling, the haunting of rooms at ETA, etc.) speaks to the author's visitations in lives of his own characters.  Note that Himself's films are short on narrative but rich in optics.  The same could be said of IF. One can easily understand that DWF wants ,as HImself does, simply to entertain, yet the entertainment creates its own fatal necessity. 

 5. Joelle wears her veil because, as she says, she is fatally beautiful.  Before the acid, her beauty was apotropaic but not fatal.  She appears unveiled in the last film of HImself in which the viewer catches a wobbling glimpse of her face, her voice repeating for twenty minutes "I am sorry" in various formulations. She is the Medusa.  The film turns out to be lethal.  One imagines the viewer caught between her beauty and disfiguration as the wobbling lense causes him to focus and refocus on her face over and over while all the while listening to her insistent apology. Her face in the film is a moving image of the novel itself both as to its theme and its effect upon the reader.  

 

Comments on David Foster Wallace's INFINITE JEST: journal 1

1. The mold Hal ingests as a child lies dormant within him and seems to become active as a result of his experimentation with various drugs.  As Hal begins his decline that will result in his behavior becoming first subnormal then subhuman then subanimal, mold-like, with waggles and sounds unseen, unheard before within the human community, a metamorphosis not unlike that of Gregor Samsa -- as Hal begins his decline, the most immediate effect is that the mold's hold on him acts as a kind of truth-serum, e.g. Hal to himself and in his verbal expression to others is very worried about the Darkness's loss of part of his face but to others Hal's own face presents an incongruous hilarity.  Hal's facial expression of pleasure as opposed to his verbal worry and concern stems from fact that the Darkness is an aspiring rival of his on the tennis court. As the mold becomes active, Hal becomes more and more simply an organic life-form, imposing on Hal and on us the realization that this is what we actually are: mold-like. The mold -- itself a source of DMZ --works on Hal through its organic, chemical interaction with its human host, enabled (how else!) by their organic kinship. So it is as well with all addictive drugs which our neurology selects first on the basis of pleasure but then locks in as a need even though the pleasure no longer obtains.  Thus it is that our organic being triumphs over the lies we tell ourselves.  As Madame Psychosis might say: I am sorry, so sorry, so so very sorry, so terribly . . . . 

For David Foster Wallace

You saw ugliness within

and without 

but found beauty

in the curve

of your line

in that space

that words make.

It was another sort

of prayer and another

sort of grace. 

A Creepy Long Sentence from David Foster Wallace's "Mr. Squishy"

What makes this long sentence so creepy is that by the time we arrive at its end Schmidt has unwittingly revealed himself to be the kind of creepy guy he ostensibly disavows. I have highlighted some of the structural elements.

Schmidt had had several years of psychotherapy and was not without some perspective on himself, and he knew THAT a certain percentage of his reaction to the way these older men coolly inspected their cuticles or pinched at the crease in the trouser of the topmost leg as they sat back on the coccyx joggling the foot of their crossed leg was just his insecurity, THAT he felt somewhat sullied and implicated by the whole enterprise of contemporary marketing and THAT this sometimes MANIFESTED VIA PROJECTION as the feeling that people he was trying to talk as candidly as possible to always believed he was making a sales pitch or trying to manipulate them in some way, as if merely being employed, however ephemerally, in the great grinding US marketing machine HAD SOMEHOW COLORED HIS WHOLE BEING and that something essentially shifty or pleading in his expression now always seemed inherently false or manipulative and turned people off, and not just in his career – which was not his whole existence, unlike so many at Team Δy, or even that terribly important to him; he had a vivid and complex inner life, and introspected a great deal – but in his personal affairs as well, AND THAT somewhere along the line his professional marketing skills HAD METASTASIZED THROUGH HIS WHOLE CHARACTER so that he was now the sort of man who, if he were to screw up his courage and ask a female colleague out for drinks and over drinks open his heart to her and reveal that he respected her enormously, that his feelings for her involved elements of both professional and highly personal regard, and that he spent a great deal more time thinking about her than she probably had any idea he did, and that if there were anything at all he could ever do to make her life happier or easier or more satisfying or fulfilling he hoped she’d just say the word, for that is all she would have to do, say the word or snap her thick fingers or even just look at him in a meaningful way, and he’d be there, instantly and with no reservations at all, he would nevertheless in all probability be viewed as probably just wanting to sleep with her or fondle or harass her, or as having some creepy obsession with her, or as maybe even having a small creepy secretive shrine to her in one corner of the unused second bedroom of his condominium, consisting of personal items fished out of her cubicle’s wastebasket or the occasional dry witty little notes she passed him during especially deadly or absurd Team Δy staff meetings, or that his home Apple PowerBook’s screensaver was an Adobe-brand 1440-dpi blowup of a digital snapshot of the two of them with his arm over her shoulder and just part of the arm and shoulder of another Team Δy Field-worker with his arm over her shoulder from the other side at a Fourth of July picnic that A.C. Romney-Jaswat & Assoc. had thrown for its research subcontractors at Navy Pier two years past, Darlene holding her cup and smiling in such a way as to show almost as much upper gum as teeth, the ale’s cup’s red digitally enhanced to match her lipstick and the small scarlet rainbow she often wore just right of center as a sort of personal signature or statement. (Oblivion, “Mister Squishy,’ 25-26)