Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace

Author:David Foster Wallace
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780965027434
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
Published: 1999-10-15T07:00:00+00:00

ADULT WORLD (II)

PART: 4

FORMAT: SCHEMA

TITLE: ONE FLESH

‘As blindingly sudden and dramatic as any question about any man’s sexual imagination is going to appear, it was not the question itself which caused Jeni Roberts’ epiphany and rapid maturation, but what she found herself gazing at as she asked it.’

—PT. 4 epigraph, in same stilted mode as ‘Adult World (I)’ [→ highlights format change from dramatic/stochastic to schematic/ordered]

1a. Question Jeni Roberts asks is whether Former Lover had indeed in their past relationship ever fantasized about other women during lovemaking w/ her.

1a(1) Inserted at beginning of question is participial phrase ‘After apologizing for how irrational and inappropriate it might sound after all this time…’

1b. At some point during J.’s question, J. follows F.L.’s gaze out fast-food window & sees husband’s special vanity license plate among vehicles in Adult World lot: → epiphany. Epiph unfolds more or less independently as facially asymmetric F.L. responds to J.’s question.

1c. Flat narr description of J.’s sudden pallor & inability to hold decaf steady as J. undergoes sddn blndng realization that hsbnd is a Secret Compulsive Masturbator & that insomnia/yen is cover for secret trips to Adult World to purchase/view/masturbate self raw to XXX films & images & that suspicions of hsbnd’s ambivalence about ‘sexlife together’ have in fact been prescient intuitions & that hsbnd has clearly been suffering from inner deficits/psychic pain of which J.’s own self-conscious anxieties have kept her from having any real idea [point of view (1c) all objective, exterior desc only].

2a. Meanwhile F.L. is answering J.’s orig question in vehement neg, tears appearing in eye: holy shit no, god, no, no, never, had loved her always, was never as fully ‘there’ as when he & J. were making love [if in J.’s p.o.v., insert ‘together’ after ‘love’].

2a(1) At emotional height of dialogue, tears streaming down 1⁄2 face, F.L. confesses/declares that he still loves J., has all this time, 5 yrs, in fact sometimes still thinks of J. while making love to his current fiancée, which causes him to feel guilty (i.e. ‘like I’m not really there’) drng sex w/ fiancée. [Direct transcription of F.L.’s whole answer/confession → emotional focus of scene is off J. while J. undergoes trauma of sddnly realizing hsbnd is Secret Compulsive Masturbator → avoids nasty problem of trying to convey epiphany in narr expo.]

2b. Coincidence [N.B.: too heavy?]: F.L. confesses that he also still sometimes secretly masturbates to memories of former lovemaking w/ J., sometimes to point of making himself raw/sore. [→ F.L.’s ‘confession’ here both reinforcing J.’s epiph w/r/t male fantasy & providing her w/ much-needed injection of sexual esteem (i.e. it ‘wasn’t her fault’). [N.B. re Theme: implicit sadness of F.L. making soul-rending confession of love while J. is 1⁄2-distracted by trauma of (1b)/(1c)’s epiph; i.e. = further networks of misconnection, emotional asymmetry.]]

2b(1) Tone of F.L.’s confession trmndsly moving & high-affect, & J. (even tho traumatized w/r/t (1b)/(1c)’s shattering epiphany) never for one nanosec doubts the truth of what F.L. says; feels she ‘really did know this man’ & c.

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