Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest by Greg Carlisle

Author:Greg Carlisle [Carlisle, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780984779048
Publisher: Sideshow Media Group
Published: 2007-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

PLOT AND CHARACTER: Gately, Joelle, A.F.R.

THEME: Recur, Cycles, Waste, Fear/Obsess, Inf/Reg

The narrator of this section asks, “Has anybody mentioned Gately’s head is square?” which either implies that there are several narrators of Infinite Jest or that Wallace is making light of the frequency with which he mentions the size of Gately’s head. Motion in this section, including the dance of light on mirrors and glass, is significant; and Wallace leaves the narrative in motion at the end of the section with Lucien “soaring north.” Lucien, “who loves only to sweep and dance in a clean pane,” “bobs and sweeps, and bobbing shafts of mirror-light gleam and dance, backed by night, in the locked door’s pane.” Lucien sees “in the carefully placed display mirrors’ angles, spikes of light off rotary metal rotating” as the A.F.R. prepare for “encirclement” of the shop. “Gately’s never had sex sober yet, or danced, or held somebody’s hand except to say the Our Father in a big circle.” In Pat’s fast car, Gately raises a “tornado of waste” (other recurrences of waste imagery: the Irish are “puke-white”; the train has a “farty-sounding horn”; Lucien hears a nearby toilet flush; and Lucien’s sphincter fails him). Lucien’s “face’s transparent image fills the glass,” which is a figurative capture of the head by glass analogous to the literal capturing of Otis P. Lord’s head by monitor glass at the end of Ch. 22.1 and which also is resonant with the recurring image of a forehead against glass, like Tavis’s at the beginning of drills earlier in the chapter. The “disembodied smile” on the cartridge warns that the happy viewer’s head will be captured by what it sees on the screen. This figurative disembodiment leaves the viewer trapped in a cycle; whereas Lucien’s literal disembodiment, the shedding of “his body’s suit,” prompts a linear ascent: he is “soaring north.”

Lucien does not understand the A.F.R.’s French, just as Gately did not understand DuPlessis’s French and Pemulis did not understand Bertraund’s French. There is “a blue-black shadow” at sunset; Bertraund eats “oblong blue-veined patties of meat”; the DMZ was traded for “an antique blue lava-lamp”; the twilight is “blue-shadowed”; and Bertraund has a railroad spike in his “former blue right eye.” Fearful signs recur in association with the A.F.R.: their incessant squeaks; their being “like faceless rats, the devil’s own hamsters”; and their masks, especially the “yellow empty smiling chewing face” of the leader. A pan drops, and a mirror shatters (cf. Tavis on p. 193 and Melinda on p. 235). Lucien is caught in a web spun by his unraveling pants. Lucien cleaned the shop obsessively; it resembled “a junkyard for anal retentives.”

Usually, infant imagery is associated with regression or compulsion, but in this section it symbolizes Lucien’s (relative) innocence. Consider the narrator’s description of Lucien on p. 482: “He has that rare spinal appreciation for beauty in the ordinary that nature seems to bestow on those who have no native words for what they see.” Lucien heard squeaks “naïvely like the babe.

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