David Wallace - Infinite jest

— That it did not strike her, Molly Notkin, as improbable that the special limited-edition turkey-shaped gift bottle of Wild Turkey Blended Whiskey-brand distilled spirits with the cerise velveteen gift-ribbon around its neck with the bow tucked under its wattles on the kitchen counter next to the microwave oven before which the Auteur’s body had been found so ghastlyly inclined had been placed there by the spouse’s widow-to-be — who may well have been enraged by the fact that the Auteur had never been willing to give up spirits quote ‘for her’ but had apparently been willing to give them up quote ‘for’ Madame Psychosis and her nude appearance in his final opus.

— That the by all reports exceptionally attractive Madame Psychosis had suffered an irreparable facial trauma on the same Thanksgiving Day that her mother had killed herself with a kitchen-appliance, leaving her (Madame Psychosis) hideously and improbably deformed, and that her membership in the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed’s 13-Step self-help organization was no kind of metaphor or ruse.

— That the intolerable stresses leading to the Auteur’s self-erasure had probably way less to do with film or digital art — this Auteur’s anti-confluential approach to the medium having always struck Molly Notkin as being rather aloof and cerebrally technical, to say nothing of naively post-Marxist in its self-congratulatory combination of anamorphic fragmentation and anti-Picaresque [331]narrative stasis — or with having allegedly spawned some angelic monster of audience-gratification — anyone with a nervous system who watched much of his oeuvre could see that fun or entertainment was pretty low on the late filmmaker’s list of priorities — but rather much more likely to do with the fact that his widow-to-be was engaging in sexual enmeshments with just about everything with a Y-chromo-some, and had been for what sounded like many years, including possibly with the Auteur’s son and Madame’s craven lover, as a child, seeing as it sounded like the little rotter had enough malcathected issues with his mother to keep all of Vienna humming briskly for quite some time.

— That thus — with the Promethean-guilt angle on the Auteur’s suicide cast into serious doubt — there was little question in A.B.D.-Dr. Notkin’s mind that the entire perfect-entertainment-as-Lzež>esíoíí myth surrounding the purportedly lethal final cartridge was nothing more than a classic illustration of the antinomically schizoid function of the post-industrial capitalist mechanism, whose logic presented commodity as the escape-from-anxieties-of-mortality-which-escape-is-itself-psychologically-fatal, as detailed in perspicuous detail in M. Gilles Deleuze’s posthumous Incest and the Life of Death in Capitalist Entertainment, which she’d be happy to lend the figures standing up somewhere above the lamp’s white fire, one of them tapping something irritatingly against the lamp’s conic metal shade, if they’d promise to return it and not mark it up.

— That — in response to respectful but pointed requests to keep the responses on some sort of factual track and spare them all the eggheaded abstractions — Madame Psychosis’s deforming trauma, in its combination of coincidence and malefic intention, had been like something right out of the Auteur’s most ghastly and unresolvable proto-incestuous disaster films, e.g. The Night Wears a Sombrero, Dial C for Concupiscence, and The Unfortunate Case of Me. That Madame Psychosis, an only child, had been extremely and heart-warmingly close to her father, a low-pH chemist for a Kentucky reagent outfit, who’d apparently had an extremely close only-child and watching-movies-together-based relationship with his own mother and seemed to reenact the closeness with Madame Psychosis, taking her to movies on a near-daily basis, in Kentucky, and driving her all over the mid-South for various junior baton-twirling competitions while his wife, Madame Psychosis’s mother, a devoutly religious but wounded and neurasthenic woman with a fear of public spaces, stayed home on the family farm, canning preserves and seeing to the administration of the farm, etc. But that things had gotten first strange and then creepy as Madame Psychosis entered puberty, apparently; specifically the low-pH father had gotten creepy, seeming to behave as if Madame Psychosis were getting younger instead of older: taking her to increasingly child-rated films at the local Cineplex, refusing to acknowledge issues of menses or breasts, strongly discouraging dating, etc. Apparently issues were complicated by the fact that Madame Psychosis emerged from puberty as an almost freakishly beautiful young woman, especially in a part of the United States where poor nutrition and indifference to dentition and hygiene made physical beauty an extremely rare and sort of discomfiting condition, one in no way shared by Madame Psychosis’s toothless and fireplug-shaped mother, who said not a word as Madame Psychosis’s father interdicted everything from brassieres to Pap smears, addressing the nubile Madame Psychosis in progressively puerile baby-talk and continuing to use her childhood diminutive like Pookie or Putti as he attempted to dissuade her from accepting a scholarship to a Boston University whose Film and Film-Cartridge Studies Program was, he apparently maintained, full of quote Nasty Pootem Wooky Barn-Bams, unquote, whatever family-code pejorative this signified.

— That — to cut to a chase which the interviewers’ hands-on-hip attitudes and replacement of the lamp’s bulb with a much higher wattage signified they’d very much like to see cut to — as is often the case, it wasn’t until Madame Psychosis got to college and gradually acquired some psychic distance and matter for emotional comparison that she even began to see how creepy her reagent-Daddy’s regression had been, and not until a certain major-sport-star son’s autograph on a punctured football inspired more e-mailed suspicion and sarcasm than gratitude from home in KY that she began even to suspect that her lack of social life throughout puberty might have had as much to do with her Daddy’s intrusive discouragement as with her actaeonizing pubescent charms. That — pausing briefly to spell actaeonizing — the shit had hit the intergenerational psychic fan when Madame Psychosis brought the Auteur’s little rotter of a son home to the KY spread for the third time, for Thanksgiving in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, and witnessing her Daddy’s infantilizing conduct of her and her mother’s wordless compulsive canning and cooking, not to mention the terrific tension that resulted when Madame Psychosis attempted to move some of the stuffed animals out of her room to make room for the Auteur’s son, in short experiencing her home and Daddy through the comparative filter of enmeshment with the Auteur’s son brought Madame Psychosis to the crisis that precipitates Speaking the Unspeakable; and that it had been at Thanksgiving Dinner, at midday on 24 November Y.T.M.P., when the low-pH Daddy began not only cutting up Madame Psychosis’s plate’s turkey for her but mashing it into puree between the tines of his fork, all under the raised comparative eyebrows of the Auteur’s son, that Madame Psychosis finally aired the unspoken question of why, with her now of legal age and living with a male and retired from childhood’s twirling and carving out an adult career on one and potentially two sides of the film-camera, did her own personal Daddy seem to feel she needed help to chew? Molly Notkin’s secondhand take on the emotional eruptions that ensued is not detailed, but she feels she can state w/ confidence that it’s plausibly a case of any kind of system that’s been under enormous silent pressure for some time, that when the system finally blows the accreted pressure’s such that it’s almost always a full-scale eruption. The low-pH Daddy’s enormous stress had apparently erupted, right there at the table, with his grown daughter’s white meat between his tines, in the confession that he’d been secretly, silently in love with Madame Psychosis from way, way back; that the love had been the real thing, pure, unspoken, genuflectory, timeless, impossible; that he never touched her, wouldn’t, nor ogle, less out of a horror of being the sort of mid-South father who touched and ogled than out of the purity of his doomed love for the little girl he’d escorted to the movies as proudly as any beau, daily; that the repression and disguisability of his pure love hadn’t been all that hard when Madame Psychosis had been juvenile and sexless, but that at the onset of puberty and nubility the pressure’d become so great that he could compensate only by regressing the child mentally to an age of incontinence and pre-mashed meat, and that his awareness of how creepy his denial of her maturation must have seemed — even though neither the daughter nor mother, even now wordlessly chewing a candied yam, had remarked on it, the denial and creepiness, although the man’s beloved pointers were given to whimper and scratch at the door when the denial had gotten especially creepy (animals being way more sensitive than humans to emotional anomalies, in Molly Notkin’s experience) — had raised his internal limbic system’s pressure to near intolerable foot-kilo levels, and that he’d been hanging on for dear life for the past nigh on now a decade, but that now that he’d had to actually stand witness to the removal of Pooky and Urgle-Bear et al. from her ballerina-wallpapered room to make space for a nonrelated mature male whose physical vigor through the peephole the Daddy’d exerted every gram of trembling will he’d possessed trying not to drill the hole in the bathroom wall just above the mirror over the sink whose pipes made the wall behind the headboard of Madame Psychosis’s room’s bed sing and clunk, and through which, late at night — claiming to Mother a case of skitters from all the holiday nibbles — hunched atop the sink, every night since Madame Psychosis and the Auteur’s son had first arrived to sleep together in the unstuffed-animaled bed of a childhood through which he’d been all but tortured by the purity of his impossible love for the —