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In order not to betray the fantasy’s First Premise through causing incongruities in the scientifically catalogued measurements of the Solar Day and the Synodic Period, the earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun must itself be halted by my supernatural hand’s gesture, an orbit whose plane…
But I’ll stop there. There are times when reading Wallace feels unbearable, and the weight of things stacked against the reader insurmountable: missing context, rhetorical complication, awful people, grotesque or absurd subject matter, language that is-at the same time!-childishly scatological and a
The apotheosis of this technique is “The Depressed Person.” It’s not that the depressed person is an unforgettable character. She’s banal, typical. It’s that when you’re reading “The Depressed Person” you’re forced to run her recursive thought processes through your own head, to pursue her self-serving self-hatreds through those endless footnotes, to speak with her that absurd therapy-speak, to live with her in the suffocating solipsism of her mind. Many readers will object to this. And there are other problems, besides: sometimes in the attempt to capture a brain from the inside, Wallace aims too low, and patronizes. Much of the therapy terminology in “The Depressed Person” amounts to cheap laughs, gotten too cheaply. (“I have a grossly sentimental affection for gags,” he admitted.) Support System, Blame Game, I
As a schoolgirl, the depressed person had never spoken of the incident of the boy’s telephone call and the mendacious pantomime with that particular roommate-a roommate with whom the depressed person hadn’t clicked or co
Two simple syntactic units (“The depressed person had never spoken of the incident of the boy’s telephone call” and “The boy was pathetically unaware of the incident”) have been inserted into a third (“The depressed person dreaded being like the boy”) to make a recursive sentence in which prepositional phrases lie inside one another like Russian dolls: The depressed person, who had never spoken of the incident of the boy’s phone call of which the boy was pathetically unaware, dreaded being like the boy. (And that’s not even including the further recursion of the roommate.) In the process, the embedded “incident” is rerun in its entirety, here, and elsewhere in “The Depressed Person,” as the poor girl reflects on her “dread” and thus sets the procedure off again, ru
There’s always been a strong and distinctive American distaste for frustration and suffering… It seems distinctly Western-industrial, anyway. In most other cultures, if you hurt, if you have a symptom that’s causing you to suffer, they view this as basically healthy and natural, a sign that your nervous system knows something’s wrong. For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire’s still going. But if you just look at the number of ways that we try like hell to alleviate mere symptoms in this country-from fast-fast-fast-relief antacids to the popularity of lighthearted musicals during the Depression-you can see an almost compulsive tendency to regard pain itself as the problem.
For the depressed person pain has certainly been fetishized, pathologized: she can’t feel simple sadness, only “agony”; she’s not merely depressed, she is “in terrible and unceasing emotional pain.” Meanwhile, another kind of pain-the kind one feels for other people in their suffering-is inaccessible to her. When one of her Support System becomes terminally ill, the only pain this causes her (i.e., the depressed person) is the realization that she doesn’t really care at all, which in turn sparks in her mind the dreaded possibility that she might in fact be “a solipsistic, self-consumed, endless emotional vacuum and sponge.” She is disgusted by herself, and the disgust causes her yet more pain and pica-gnawed [80] hands, and on it goes in its terrible cycle. The last lines of the story put the snake’s tongue in its own mouth: “How was she to decide and describe-even to herself, looking inward and facing herself-what all she’d so painfully learned said about her?”
[79] An argument recently challenged by the American professor of linguistics Dan Everett, whose paper “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã,” caused an almighty brouhaha among the sort of people who get all brouhaha-ed about linguistics. In the paper he claimed to have found a tribe in the rainforest of northwestern Brazil-the Pirahã-whose language does not use recursion and is, in fact, finite. The New Yorker had an interesting article about all this, “The Interpreter,” in the April 16, 2007 issue.
[80] From the OED: “Pica-A tendency or craving to eat substances other than normal food, occurring during childhood or pregnancy, or as a symptom of disease.” This is Wallace’s way of describing someone chewing her own fingernails.