David Wallace - Infinite jest
The Personal Is the Political Is the Psychopathological: The Politics of
Contemporary Psychopathological Double-Binds
Midterm Examination
Ms. THODE November 7, Yr. of D.A.U.
KEEP YOUR ANSWERS BRIEF AND GENDER NEUTRAL
ITEM
(la) You are an individual who, is pathologically kleptomaniacal. As a kleptomaniac, you are pathologically driven to steal, steal, steal. You must steal.
(Ib) But, you are also an individual who, is pathologically agoraphobic. As an agoraphobic, you cannot so much as step off your front step of the porch of your home, without undergoing palpitations, drenching sweats, and feelings of impending doom. As an agoraphobic, you are driven to pathologically stay home and not leave. You cannot leave home.
(Ic) But, from (la) you are pathologically driven to go out and steal, steal, steal. But, from (Ib) you are pathologically driven to not ever leave home. You live alone.
Meaning, there is no one else in your home to steal from. Meaning, you must go out, into the marketplace to satisfy your overwhelming compulsion to steal, steal, steal. But, such is your fear of the marketplace that you cannot under any circumstances, leave home. Whether your problem is true personal psychopathology, or merely marginalization by a political definition of’psychopathology,’ nevertheless, it is a Double-Bind.
(Id) Thus, respond to the question of, what do you do?
Schacht was just looping the d in mail fraud when Jim Troeltsch’s pseudo-radio program, backed by its eustacian-crumpling operatic soundtrack, came over 112 West House’s E.T.A.-intercom speaker up over the classroom clock. When no away-tournaments or meets were going on, WETA student-run ‘radio’ got to ‘broadcast’ E.T.A.-related news, sports and community affairs for ten or so minutes over the closed-circuit intercom every Tuesday and Saturday during the last P.M. class period, like 1435-I445h. Troeltsch, who’s dreamed of a tennis-broadcast career ever since it became clear (very early) that he would be in no way Show-bound — the Troeltsch who spends every last fin his folks send him on his staggering InterLace/SPN-pro-match-cartridge library, and spends almost every free second calling pro action with his room’s TP’s viewer’s volume down;[106] the kind of pathetic Troeltsch who shamelessly kiss-asses the InterLace/SPN sportscasters whenever he’s on the scene of an I/SPN-recorded jr. event,[107] pestering the sportscasters and offering to get them doughnuts and joe, etc.; the Troeltsch who already owns a whole rack of generic blue blazers and practices combing his hair so that it has that glassy toupee-like look of a real sportscaster — Troeltsch’s been doing the sports portion of WETA’s weekly broadcast ever since Schacht’s old man died of ulcerative colitis and Ted came up to join his old childhood doubles partner at the Academy in the fall of the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, which had been four months after the late E.T.A. Headmaster’s felo de se, when the flags were still at half-mast and everybody’s bicep was banded in black cotton, which the mesomorphic Schacht got excused from because of biceps-size; Troeltsch’d already been doing WETA sports when he came, and he’s been undislodgeable from the post ever since.
The sports portion of WETA’s broadcast is mostly just reporting the outcomes and scores of whatever competitive events the E.T.A. squads have been in since the last broadcast.[108] Troeltsch, who approaches his twice-a-week duties with all possible verve, will say he feels like the hardest thing about his intercom-broadcasts is keeping things from getting repetitive as he goes through long lists of who beat whom and by how much. His quest for synonyms for beat and got beat by is never-ending and serious and a continual source of irritation to his friends. Mary Esther’s exams were notorious no-brainers and automatic A’s if you were careful with your third-person pronouns, and even while he listened closely enough to Troeltsch to be able to supply the audience-feedback that tonight’s dinner-table would be inescapable without, Schacht was already on the test’s third item, which concerned exhibitionism among the pathologically shy. 11/7’s broadcast results were from E.T.A.’s 71–37 rout of Port Washington’s A and B teams at the Port Washington annual thing.
‘John Wayne at A-l 18’s beat Port Washington’s Bob Francis of Great Neck, New New York, 6–0, 6–2,’ Troeltsch says, ‘while A-2 Singles’ Hal Incandenza defeated Craig Burda of Vivian Park, Utah, 6–2, 6–1; and while A-3 K. D. Coyle went down in a hard-fought loss to Port Wash’s Shelby van der Merwe of Hempstead, Long Island 6–3, 5–7, 7–5, A-4 Trevor “The Axhandle” Axford crushed P.W.’s Tapio Martti out of Sonora, Mexico, 7–5, 6–2.’
And so on. By the time it’s down to Boys A-i4’s, Troeltsch’s delivery gets terser even as his attempts at verbiform variety tend to have gotten more lurid, e.g.: ‘LaMont Chu disembowelled Charles Pospisilova 6–3, 6–2; Jeff Penn was on Nate Millis-Johnson like a duck on a Junebug 6–4, 6–7, 6–0; Peter Beak spread Ville Dillard on a cracker like some sort of hors d’oeuvre and bit down 6–4, 7–6, while 14’s A-4 Idris Arslanian ground his heel into the neck of David Wiere 6–1, 6–4 and P.W.’s 5-man R. Greg Chubb had to be just about carried off over somebody’s shoulder after Todd Possalthwaite moonballed him into a narcoleptic coma 4–6, 6–4, 7–5.’
Some of Corbett Thorp’s class on geometric distortions a lot of kids find hard; likewise deLint’s class, for the software-inept. And though Tex Watson’s overall handle on Cold-Containment DT-annulation is shaky, his lay-physics survey of combustion and annulation has some sort of academic validity to it, especially because he some terms gets Pemulis to guest-lecture when he and Pemulis are in a period of detente. But the only really challenging prorected class ever for Hal Incandenza is turning out to be Mile. Thierry Poutrincourt’s ‘Separatism and Return: Québecois History from Frontenac Through the Age of Interdependence,’ which to be candid Hal’d never heard much positive about and had always deflected his Moms’s suggestions that he might profitably take until finally this term’s schedule-juggling got dicey, and which (the class) he finds difficult and annoying but surprisingly less and less dull as the semester wears on, and is actually developing something of a layman’s savvy for Canadianism and O.N.A.N.ite politics, topics he’d previously found for some reason not only dull but queerly distasteful. The rub of this particular class’s difficulty is that Pou-trincourt teaches only in Québecois French, which Hal can get by in because of his youthful tour through Orin’s real-French Pléiade Classics but has never all that much liked, particularly sound-wise, Québecois being a gur-gly, glottal language that seems to require a perpetually sour facial expression to pronounce. Hal sees no way of Orin’s knowing he was taking Poutrincourt’s ‘Separatism and Return’ when he called to ask for help with Separatism, which Orin’s asking for help from him with anything was strange enough in itself.
‘Bernadette Longley reluctantly bowed to P.W.’s Jessica Pearlberg at 18 A-l Singles 6–4,4-6, 6–2, though A-2 Diane Prins hopped up and down on the thorax of Port’s Marilyn Ng-A-Thiep 7–6, 6–1, and Bridget Boone drove a hot thin spike into the right eye of Aimee Middleton-Law 6–3, 6–3’; and so on, in classroom after classroom, while instructors grade quizzes or read or tap a decreasingly patient foot, every Tues./Sat., while Schacht sketches prenatal dentition-charts in his exam’s margins w/ a concentrated look, not wanting to embarrass Thode by handing the no-brainer exam in too soon.
Most of the early-Quebec stuff about Cartier and Roberval and Cap Rouge and Champlain and flocks of Ursuline nuns with frozen wimples covered up to like U.N. Day Hal’d found mostly dry and repetitive, the wig-and-jerkin gentlemanly warfare stilted and absurd, like slow-motion slapstick, though everyone’d been sort of queasily intrigued by the way the English Commander Amherst had handled the Hurons by dispensing free blankets and buckskin that had been carefully coated with smallpox variola.
‘14’s A-3 Felicity Zweig went absolutely SACPOP on P.W.’s Kiki Pfefferblit 7–6, 6–1, while Gretchen Holt made PW’s Tammi Taylor-Bing sorry her parents were ever even in the same room together 6–0, 6–3. At 5, Ann Kittenplan grimaced and flexed her way to a 7–5, 2–6, 6–3 win over Paisley Steinkamp, right next to where Jolene Criess at 6 was doing to P.W.’s Mona Ghent what a quality boot can do to a toadstool, 2 and 2.’
Saluki-faced Thierry Poutrincourt leans back in her chair and closes her eyes and presses her palms hard against her temples and stays like that all the way through every WETA broadcast, which always interrupts her last-period lecture and puts this section slightly and maddeningly behind Separation & Return’s other section, resulting in two required lesson-preps instead of one. The sour Saskatchewanese kid next to Hal has been making impressive schematic drawings of automatic weaponry in his notebook all semester. The kid’s assigned ROM-diskettes are always visible in his book-bag still in their wrapper, yet the Skatch kid always finishes quizzes in like five minutes. It had taken up to the week before Halloween to get through with the B.S. ‘67 Levesque-Parti-and-Bloc Québecois[109] and early Fronte de la Liberation Nationale stuff and up to the present Interdependent era. Poutrincourt’s lecture-voice has gotten quieter and quieter as history’s approached its contemporary limit; and Hal, finding the stuff rather more high-concept and less dull than he’d expected — seeing himself as at his innermost core apolitical — nevertheless found the Québecois-Separatism mentality almost impossibly convolved and confused and impervious to U.S.
parsing,[110] plus was both com- and repelled by the fact that the contemporary-anti-O.N.A.N.-insurgence stuff provoked in him a queasy feeling, not the glittery disorientation of nightmares or on-court panic but a soggier, more furtively nauseous kind of sense, as if someone had been reading mail of Hal’s that he thought he’d thrown away.
The proud and haughty Québecois had been harassing and even terrorizing the rest of Canada over the Separation issue for time out of mind. It was the establishment of O.N.A.N. and the gerrymandering of the Great Convexity (Poutrincourt’s Canadian, recall) that turned the malevolent attention of Quebec’s worst post-F.L.N. insurgents south of the border. Ontario and New Brunswick took the continental Anschluss and territorial Reconfiguration like good sports. Certain far-right fringes in Alberta weren’t too pleased, but not much pleases an Albertan far-rightist anyway. It was, finally, only the proud and haughty Québecois who whinged,[111] and the insurgent cells of Quebec who completely lost their political shit.
Quebec’s anti-O.N.A.N. and thus — U.S. Séparatisteurs, the different terrorist cells formed when Ottawa had been the foe, proved to be not a very nice bunch at all. The earliest unignorable strikes involved a then-unknown terrorist cell[112] that apparently snuck down from the E.W.D.-blighted Pa-pineau region at night and dragged huge standing mirrors across U.S. Interstate 87 at selected dangerous narrow winding Adirondack passes south of the border and its Lucite walls. Naively empiricist north-bound U.S. motorists — a good many of them military and O.N.A.N.ite personnel, this close to the Concavity — would see impending headlights and believe some like suicidal idiot or Canadian had transversed the median and was coming right for them. They’d flash their high beams, but to all appearances the impending idiot would just flash his high beams right back. The U.S. motorists — usually not to be fucked with in their vehicles, historically, it was well known — would brazen it out as long as anyone right-minded possibly could, but right before apparent impact with the impending lights they’d always veer wildly and leave shoulderless 1-87 and put their arm over their head in that screaming pre-crash way and go ass-over-teakettle into an Adirondack chasm with a many-petaled bloom of Hi-Test flame, and the then-unknown Québecois terrorist cell would remove the huge mirror and truck off back up north via checkpointless back roads back into the blighted bowels of southern Quebec until next time. There were fatalities this way well into the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad before anyone had any idea they were diabolic-cell-related. For over twenty months the scores of burnt-out hulls piling up in Adirondack chasms were regarded as either suicides or inexplicable doze-behind-the-wheel-type single-car accidents by NNY State Troopers who had to detach their chinstraps to scratch under their big brown hats over the mysterious sleepiness that seemed to afflict Adirondack motorists at what looked to be high-adrenaline mountaintop passes. Chief of the new United States Office of Unspecified Services Rodney Tine pressed, to his later embarrassment, for a series of anti-driving-when-drowsy Public Service spots to be InterLace-disseminated in upstate New New York. It was an actual U.S. would-be suicide, a late-stage Valium-addicted Amway distributor from Schenectady who was at the end of her benzodioxane-rope and all over the road anyway, and who by historical accounts saw the sudden impending headlights in her northbound lane as Grace and shut her eyes and floored it right for them, the lights, never once veering, spraying glass and micronized silver over all four lanes, this unwitting civilian who ‘SMASHED THE ILLUSION,’ ‘MADE THE BREAKTHROUGH’ (media headlines), and brought to light the first tangible evidence of an anti-O.N.A.N. ill will way worse than anything aroused by plain old historical Separatism, up in Quebec.
The first birth of the Incandenzas’ second son was a surprise. The tall and eye-poppingly curvaceous Avril Incandenza did not show, bled like clockwork; no hemorrhoids or gland-static; no pica; affect and appetite normal; she threw up some mornings but who didn’t in those days?
It was on a metal-lit November evening in the seventh month of a hidden pregnancy that she stopped, Avril, on her husband’s long arm as they ascended the maple staircase of the Back Bay brownstone they were soon to leave, stopped, turned partly toward him, ashen, and opened her mouth in a mute way that was itself eloquent.
Her husband looked down at her, paling: ‘What is it?’
‘It’s pain.’
It was pain. Broken water had made several steps below them gleam. She seemed to James Incandenza to sort of turn in toward herself, hold herself low, curl and sink to a stairstep she barely made the edge of, hunched, her forehead against her shapely knees. Incandenza saw the whole slow thing in a light like he was Vermeer: she sank steadily from his side and he bent to hers and she then tried to rise.
‘Wait wait wait wait. Wait.’
‘It’s pain.’
A bit ragged from an afternoon of Wild Turkey and low-temperature holography, James had thought Avril was dying right before his eyes. His own father had dropped dead on a set of stairs. Luckily Avril’s half-brother Charles Tavis was upstairs, using the portable StairMaster he’d brought with him for an extended and emotional-battery-recharging visit the preceding spring, after the horrible snafu with the video-scoreboard at Toronto’s Skydome; and he heard the commotion and scuttled out and down and promptly took charge.
