The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

  But there had been flashes of something else. Even in the early oeuvre, before Himself made the leap to narratively anticonfluential but unironic melodrama she helped prolong the arc of, where he dropped the technical fireworks and tried to make characters move, however inconclusively, and showed courage, abandoned everything he did well and willingly took the risk of appearing amateurish (which he had). But even in the early Work—flashes of something. Very hidden and quick. Almost furtive. She noticed them only when alone, watching, without Orin and his rheostat’s dimmer, the living room’s lights up high like she liked them, liked to see herself and everything else in the room with the viewer—Orin liked to sit in the dark and enter what he watched, his jaw slackening, a child raised on multichannel cable TV. But Joelle began—on repeated viewing whose original purpose was to study how the man had blocked out scenes, for an Advanced Storyboard course she went the extra click in—she began to see little flashes of something. The M v. O.’s three quick cuts to the sides of the gorgeous combatants’ faces, twisted past recognition with some kind of torment. Each cut to a flash of pained face had followed the crash of a petrified spectator toppling over in her chair. Three split-seconds, no more, of glimpses of facial pain. And not pain at wounds—they never touched each other, whirling with mirrors and blades; the defenses of both were impenetrable. More like as if what their beauty was doing to those drawn to watch it ate them alive, up there on stage, the flashes seemed to suggest. But just three flashes, each almost subliminally quick. Accidents? But not one shot or cut in the whole queer cold film was accidental—the thing was clearly s-boarded frame by frame. Must have taken hundreds of hours. Astounding technical anality. Joelle kept trying to Pause the cartridge on the flashes of facial torment, but these were the early days of InterLace cartridges, and the Pause still distorted the screen just enough to keep her from seeing what she wanted to study. Plus she got the creepy feeling the man had upped the film-speed in these few-frame human flashes, to thwart just such study. It was like he couldn’t help putting human flashes in, but he wanted to get them in as quickly and unstudyably as possible, as if they compromised him somehow.

  Orin Incandenza had been only the second boy ever to approach her in a male-female way.307 The first had been shiny-chinned and half blind on Everclear punch, an All-Kentucky lineman for the Shiny Prize Biting Shoats team back in Shiny Prize KY, at a cookout to which the Boosters had invited the Pep and Baton girls; and the lineman had looked like a little shy boy as he confessed, by way of apologizing for almost splashing her when he threw up, that she was just too Goddamn-all petrifyingly pretty to approach any other way but liquored up past all horror. The lineman’d confessed the whole team’s paralyzing horror of the prettiness of varsity Pep’s top twirler, Joelle. Orin confessed to his private name for her. The memory of that H.S. afternoon remained real strong. She could smell the mesquite smoke and the blue pines and the YardGuard spray, hear the squeals of the stock they butchered and cleaned in symbolic prep for the opener against the N. Paducah Technical H.S. Rivermen. She could still see the swooning lineman, wet-lipped and confessing, keeping himself upright against an immature blue pine until the blue pine’s trunk finally gave with a snap and crash.

  Until that cookout and confession she’d somehow thought it was her own personal Daddy, somehow, discouraging dates and male-female approaches. The whole thing had been queer, and lonely, until she’d been approached by Orin, who made no secret of the fact that he had balls of unrejectable steel where horrifyingly pretty girls were concerned.

  But it wasn’t even the subjective identification she felt, watching, she felt, somehow, for the flashes and seeming non-seqs that betrayed something more than cold hip technical abstraction. Like e.g. the 240-second motionless low-angle shot of Gianlorenzo Bernini’s ‘Ecstasy of St. Teresa,’ which—yes—ground Pre-Nuptial…’s dramatic movement to an annoying halt and added nothing that a 15-or 30-second still shot wouldn’t have added just as well; but on the fifth or sixth reviewing Joelle started to see the four-minute motionless shot as important for what was absent: the whole film was from the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman’s POV,308 and the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman—or rather his head—was on-screen every moment, even when split-screened against the titanic celestial marathon seven-card-stud-with-Tarot-cards game—his rolling eyes and temples’ dents and rosary of upper-lip sweat was imposed nonstop on the screen and viewer… except for the four narrative minutes the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman stood in the Vittorio’s Bernini room, and the climactic statue filled the screen and pressed against all four edges. The statue, the sensuous presence of the thing, let the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman escape himself, his tiresome ubiquitous involuted head, she saw, was the thing. The four-minute still shot maybe wasn’t just a heavy-art gesture or audience-hostile herring. Freedom from one’s own head, one’s inescapable P.O.V.—Joelle started to see here, oblique to the point of being hidden, an emotional thrust, since the mediated transcendence of self was just what the apparently decadent statue of the orgasmic nun claimed for itself as subject. Here then, after studious (and admittedly kind of boring) review, was an unironic, almost moral thesis to the campy abstract mordant cartridge: the film’s climactic statue’s stasis presented the theoretical subject as the emotional effect—self-forgetting as the Grail—and—in a covert gesture almost moralistic, Joelle thought as she glanced at the room-lit screen, very high, mouth writhing as she cleaned—presented the self-forgetting of alcohol as inferior to that of religion/art (since the consumption of bourbon made the salesman’s head progressively swell, horrendously, until by the film’s end its dimensions exceeded the frame, and he had a nasty and humiliating time squeezing it through the front door of the Vittorio).

  It didn’t much matter once she’d met the whole family anyhow, though. The Work and reviewings were just an inkling—usually felt on the small manageable bits of coke that helped her see deeper, harder, and so maybe not even objectively accessible in the Work itself—a lower-belly intuition that the punter’s hurt take on his father was limited and arrested and maybe unreal.

  With Joelle makeupless and stone-sober and hair up in a sloppy knot, the introductory supper with Orin and Himself at Legal Seafood up in Brookline309 betrayed nothing much at all, save that the director seemed more than able to resist ‘using’ Joelle in any capacity—she saw the tall man slump and cringe when Orin told him the P.G.O.A.T. majored in F&C310—Jim’d told her later she’d seemed too conventionally, commercially pretty to consider using in any of that period’s Work, part of whose theoretical project was to militate against received U.S. commercial-prettiness-conventions—and that Orin was so tense in ‘Himself’ ’s presence that there wasn’t room for any other real emotion at the table, Orin gradually beginning to fill up silences with more and faster nonstop blather until both Joelle and Jim were embarrassed at the fact that the punter hadn’t touched his steamed grouper or given anyone else space for a word of reply.

  Jim later told Joelle that he simply didn’t know how to speak with either of his undamaged sons without their mother’s presence and mediation. Orin could not be made to shut up, and Hal was so completely shut down in Jim’s presence that the silences were excruciating. Jim said he suspected he and Mario were so easy with each other only because the boy had been too damaged and arrested even to speak to until he was six, so that both he and Jim had got a chance to become comfortable in mutual silence, though Mario did have an interest in lenses and film that had nothing to do with fathers or needs to please, so that the interest was something truly to share, the two of them; and even when Mario was allowed to work crew on some of Jim’s later Work it was without any of the sort of pressures to interact or bond via film that there’d been with Orin and Hal and tennis, at which Jim (Orin informed her) had been a late-blooming junior but a top collegian.

  Jim referred to the Work’s various films as ‘entertainments.’ He did this ironically about half the time.

  In the ca
b (that Jim had hailed for them), on the way back home from Legal Seafood, Orin had beaten his fine forehead against the plastic partition and wept that he couldn’t seem to communicate with Himself without his mother’s presence and mediation. It wasn’t clear how the Moms mediated or facilitated communication between different family-members, he said. But she did. He didn’t have one fucking clue how Himself felt about his abandoning a decade’s tennis for punting, Orin wept. Or about Orin’s being truly great at it, at something, finally. Was he proud, or jealously threatened, or judgmental that Orin had quit tennis, or what?

  The 5-Woman’s room’s mattresses were too skinny for their frames, and the rims of the frames between the slats were appallingly clotted with dust, with female hair entwined and involved in the dust, so that it took one Kleenex just to wet the stuff down, several dry ones to wipe the muck out. Charlotte Treat had been too sick to shower for days, and her frame and slats were hard to be near.

  At Joelle’s first interface with the whole sad family unit—Thanksgiving, Headmaster’s House, E.T.A., straight up Comm. Ave. in Enfield—Orin’s Moms Mrs. Incandenza (‘Please do call me Avril, Joelle’) had been gracious and warm and attentive without obtruding, and worked unobtrusively hard to put everyone at ease and to facilitate communication, and to make Joelle feel like a welcomed and esteemed part of the family gathering—and something about the woman made every follicle on Joelle’s body pucker and distend. It wasn’t that Avril Incandenza was one of the tallest women Joelle had ever seen, and definitely the tallest pretty older woman with immaculate posture (Dr. Incandenza slumped something awful) she’d ever met. It wasn’t that her syntax was so artless and fluid and imposing. Nor the near-sterile cleanliness of the home’s downstairs (the bathroom’s toilet seemed not only scrubbed but waxed to a high shine). And it wasn’t that Avril’s graciousness was in any conventional way fake. It took a long time for Joelle even to start to put a finger on what gave her the howling fantods about Orin’s mother. The dinner itself—no turkey; some politico-familial in-joke about no turkey on Thanksgiving—was delicious without being grandiose. They didn’t even sit down to eat until 2300h. Avril drank champagne out of a little fluted glass whose level somehow never went down. Dr. Incandenza (no invitation to call him Jim, she noticed) drank at a tri-faceted tumbler of something that made the air above it shimmer slightly. Avril put everyone at ease. Orin did credible impressions of famous figures. He and little Hal made dry fun of Avril’s Canadian pronunciation of certain diphthongs. Avril and Dr. Incandenza took turns cutting up Mario’s salmon. Joelle had a weird half-vision of Avril hiking her knife up hilt-first and plunging it into Joelle’s breast. Hal Incandenza and two other lopsidedly muscular boys from the tennis school ate like refugees and were regarded with gentle amusement. Avril dabbed her mouth in a patrician way after every bite. Joelle wore girl-clothes, her dress’s neckline very high. Hal and Orin looked vaguely alike. Avril directed every fourth comment to Joelle, to include her. Orin’s brother Mario was stunted and complexly deformed. There was a spotless doggie-dish under the table, but no dog, and no mention was ever made of a dog. Joelle noticed Avril also directed every fourth comment to Orin, Hal, and Mario, like a cycle of even inclusion. There was New York white and Albertan champagne. Dr. Incandenza drank his drink instead of wine, and got up several times to freshen his drink in the kitchen. A massive hanging garden behind Avril’s and Hal’s captains’ chairs cut complex shadows into the UV light that made the table’s candles’ glow a weird bright blue. The director was so tall he seemed to rise forever, when he rose with his tumbler. Joelle had the queerest indefensible feeling that Avril wished her ill; she kept feeling different areas of hair stand up. Everybody Please-and-Thank-You’d in a way that was sheer Yankee WASP. After his second trip to the kitchen, Dr. Incandenza molded his twice-baked potatoes into an intricate futuristic cityscape and suddenly started to discourse animatedly on the 1946 breakup of Hollywood’s monolithic Studio system and the subsequent rise of the Method actors Brando, Dean, Clift et al., arguing for a causal connection. His voice was mid-range and mild and devoid of accent. Orin’s Moms had to be over two meters tall, way taller than Joelle’s own personal Daddy. Joelle could somehow tell Avril was the sort of female who’d been ungainly as a girl and then blossomed and but who’d only become really beautiful later in life, like thirty-five. She’d decided Dr. Incandenza looked like an ecologically poisoned crane, she told him later. Mrs. Incandenza put everyone at ease. Joelle imagined her with a conductor’s baton. She never did tell Jim that Orin called him The Mad or Sad Stork. The whole Thanksgiving table inclined very subtly toward Avril, very slightly and subtly, like heliotropes. Joelle found herself doing it too, the inclining. Dr. Incandenza kept shading his eyes from the UV plant-light in a gesture that resembled a salute. Avril referred to her plants as her Green Babies. At some point out of nowhere, little Hal Incandenza, maybe ten, announced that the basic unit of luminous intensity is the Candela, which he defined for no one in particular as the luminous intensity of 1/600,000 of a square meter of a cavity at the freezing-temperature of platinum. All the table’s males wore coats and ties. The larger of Hal’s two tennis partners passed out dental stimulators, and no one made fun of him. Mario’s grin seemed both obscene and sincere. Hal, whom Joelle wasn’t crazy about, kept asking wasn’t anybody going to ask him the freezing-temperature of platinum. Joelle and Dr. Incandenza found themselves in a small conversation about Bazin, a film-theorist Himself detested, making a tormented face at the name. Joelle intrigued the optical scientist and director by explaining Bazin’s disparagement of self-conscious directorial expression as historically connected to the neo-Thomist Realism of the ‘Personalistes,’ an aesthetic school of great influence over French Catholic intellectuals circa 1930–1940—many of Bazin’s teachers had been eminent Personalistes. Avril encouraged Joelle to describe rural Kentucky. Orin did a long impression of late pop-astronomer Carl Sagan expressing televisual awe at the cosmos’ scale. ‘Billions and billions,’ he said. One of the tennis friends burped just awfully, and no one reacted to the sound in any way. Orin said ‘Billions and billions and billions’ in the voice of Sagan. Avril and Hal had a brief good-natured argument about whether the term circa could modify an interval or only a specific year. Then Hal asked for several examples of something called Haplology. Joelle kept fighting urges to slap the sleek little show-offy kid upside the head so hard his bow-tie would spin. ‘The universe:’—Orin continued long after the wit had worn thin—‘cold, immense, incredibly universal.’ The subjects of tennis, baton-twirling, and punting never came up: organized sports were never once mentioned. Joelle noticed that nobody seemed to look directly at Dr. Incandenza except her. A curious flabby white mammarial dome covered part of the Academy’s grounds outside the dining room’s window. Mario plunged his special fork into Dr. Incandenza’s potato-cityscape, to general applause and certain grating puns on the term deconstruction from the insufferable Hal kid. Everyone’s teeth were dazzling in the candlelight and UV. Hal wiped Mario’s snout, which seemed to run continuously. Avril invited Joelle by all means to make a Thanksgiving call home to her family in rural Kentucky if she wished. Orin said the Moms was herself originally from rural Québec. Joelle was on her seventh glass of wine. Orin’s fingering his half-Windsor kept looking more and more like a signal to somebody. Avril urged Dr. Incandenza to find a way to include Joelle in a production, since she was both a film student and a now a heartily welcome honorary addition to the family. Mario, reaching for the salad, fell out of his chair, and was helped up by one of the tennis players amid much hilarity. Mario’s deformities seemed wide-ranging and hard to name. Joelle decided he looked like a cross between a puppet and one of the big-headed carnivores from Spielberg’s old special-effects orgies about reptiles. Hal and Avril hashed out whether misspoke was a bona fide word. Dr. Incandenza’s tall narrow head kept inclining toward his plate and then slowly rising back up in a way that was either meditative or tipsy. Deformed Mario�
�s broad smile was so constant you could have hung things from the corners of it. In a fake Southern-belle accent that was clearly no jab at Joelle, more like a Scarlett O’Hara accent, Avril said she did declare that Albertan champagne always gave her ‘the vapors.’ Joelle noticed that pretty much everybody at the table was smiling, broadly and constantly, eyes shiny in the plants’ odd light. She was doing it herself, too, she noticed; her cheek muscles were starting to ache. Hal’s larger friend kept pausing to use his dental stimulator. Nobody else was using their dental stimulator, but everyone held one politely, as if getting ready to use it. Hal and the two friends made odd spasmic one-handed squeezing motions, periodically. No one seemed to notice. Not once in Orin’s presence did anyone mention the word tennis. He had been up half the previous night vomiting with anxiety. Now he challenged Hal to name the freezing-point of platinum. Joelle couldn’t for the life of her remember either of the names of poor old Spielberg’s old computer-enhanced celluloid dinosaur things, though her own Daddy’d personally taken her to each one. At some point Orin’s father got up to go freshen his drink and never returned.

  Just before dessert—which was on fire—Orin’s Moms had asked whether they could perhaps all join hands secularly for a moment and simply be grateful for all being together. She made a special point of asking Joelle to include her hands in the hand-holding. Joelle held Orin’s hand and Hal’s smaller friend’s hand, which was so callused up it felt like some sort of rind. Dessert was Cherries Jubilee with gourmet New Brunswick ice cream. Dr. Incandenza’s absence from the table went unmentioned, almost unnoticed, it seemed. Both Hal and his nonstimulating friend pleaded for Kahlua, and Mario flapped pathetically at the tabletop in imitation. Avril made a show of gazing at Orin in mock-horror as he produced a cigar and clipper. There was also a blancmange. The coffee was decaf with chickory. When Joelle looked over again, Orin had put his cigar away without lighting it.