IJ study archive

An autonomous internal appetite that strains toward its own self-annihilating fulfilment — an early working of the…

echoes

From: Order and Flux in Northampton

  • Early text: Dingle's love is a "small homunculoid presence inside Barry Dingle, a doll-sized self all its own" that "wants in some ultimate sense to be Barry Dingle"; being "a human love," it is possessed of a self-defeating drive — "Dingle's immoderate love's life strains ever forward toward the death that love's life loves." [c17-dfw1/dfw2]
  • IJ echo: The novel's figuration of appetite as an autonomous, host-consuming agent — Kate Gompert's "It," which "billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself" the self it inhabits (scene 135, pp. 692-698); and the addiction/"Disease" discourse of the recovery thread (White Flag / Ennet House, scene 074, pp. 343-367).
  • Weight: prefiguration