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The Boneless Christ

essay

The prayer that works without belief

The novel's most direct religious claim is made by a man who believes nothing. Four months into Ennet House, the agonizing desire to ingest synthetic narcotics is mysteriously removed from Don Gately, and it is removed because he did the one thing the old-timers told him to do: get down on his knees twice a day and "ask God As He Understood Him to remove the agonizing desire" (scene 095, p. 466). He does it without a shred of belief. He has no God- or J.C.-background; "the knee-stuff seemed like the limpest kind of dickless pap" (scene 095, p. 466), and "he felt like a true hypocrite just going through the knee-motions" (scene 095, p. 466). The staff's answer to the hypocrisy is the whole scandal in miniature: it does not matter, at this point, what he thinks or believes or even says. "All that mattered was what he did." (scene 095, p. 466). Do the right things long enough and the belief will come along behind the action, never in front of it: "If he did the right things, and kept doing them for long enough, what Gately thought and believed would magically change." (scene 095, p. 466).

So Gately prays to a ceiling. "Thinking of it as talking to the ceiling was somehow preferable to imagining talking to Nothing." (scene 095, p. 467); he "beseeched the ceiling and thanked the ceiling" (scene 095, p. 467), and he "treated prayer like setting an oven-temp according to a box's direction" (scene 095, p. 467). And the Desire lifts anyway. "He was, in a way, Free." (scene 095, p. 468) — out, for the first time, "of this kind of mental cage since he was maybe ten" (scene 095, p. 468). He cannot account for it, and the not-accounting drives him bats: "How could some kind of Higher Power he didn't even believe in magically let him out of the cage" (scene 095, p. 468) when the whole transaction was fraudulent from his side? The White Flag old-timers do not resolve the puzzle; they dissolve it. Ferocious Francis suggests that "anything minor-league enough for Don Gately to understand probably wasn't going to be major-league enough to save Gately's addled ass" (scene 095, p. 468). Understanding was never on the table. Only doing.

This is the novel's theology in a sentence: a grace that arrives through practice and is indifferent to belief. The house's own creed, buried in the long litany of things a person picks up around Ennet House, states it flat. "That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels" (scene 056, p. 205). That God "speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God" (scene 056, p. 205). And — the line that turns the entire system agnostic — that "God might regard the issue of whether you believe there's a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list" (scene 056, p. 205). Belief is beside the point. What saves is what you do, in a room, with other people, whether or not anyone is listening.

Gately as the boneless Christ

The fullest theological reading of Gately in print (Plank) takes this prayer-without-belief and reads the whole back half of the novel as a Passion. Its Christ is a paradox: a figure "at once in need of help and yet capable of providing it" (Plank). Gately, shot defending the Ennet House residents and then intubated and mute in a trauma bed, is exactly that doubled figure — the man who took the bullet is now the one who cannot lift a hand, and yet the sickest people in the book keep coming to his bedside to unburden themselves. The novel supplies the emblem itself: mute and inert, Gately becomes "Don G. as huge empty confessional booth" (scene 162, p. 831), a wooden ear that can neither absolve nor interrupt, while one visitor after another — Ewell, Day, the wraith — tells him their worst things. The device, on this reading, lets Wallace advance a real theological claim: that the same condition that encages human beings also offers them the power to "modify or even arrest its alienation" (Plank).

Around the confessor the book arranges the other stations. Joelle at the bedside is cast as Veronica, the woman who wipes the suffering face, and the novel keeps her there literally: she is the figure whose "veil was running a cold washcloth over his face" (scene 161, p. 817), the one "mopping the massive unconscious forehead of" the man in the trauma wing (scene 139, p. 707). The deposition the narration files from her side is a sentence of pure witness — what is admirable is that Gately has no idea how heroic he looks, "wounded in service to somebody who did not deserve service, half out of his tree from pain and refusing narcotics" (scene 166, p. 855). Wounded in service to the undeserving is the whole shape of the thing. Even the recognition at the shooting is scored to it: when Gately finally places the veiled woman bearing down on his wound as the midnight radio voice he has loved for years, she answers with the first words of her show's mock-Genesis, "And Lo" (scene 120, p. 619) — the annunciation handed across a soaked robe.

The reading does not flinch from its own limits, and neither will this essay. Plank is candid that the boneless Christ fails: Gately's "most overt act of heroism is the most disappointing" (Plank), because the man he takes the bullet for lives on to no good end, and measured against any full transformation of the world the sacrifice changes nothing. The redemption is provisional, and the typology is connotative, not literal: "Gately is not Christ in disguise, but fully Don Gately" (Plank) — the Big Indestructible Moron, not a god slumming. What the device buys is a single formal insight, dramatized in Gately's fever-dream of a haloed dentist in whose forehead-mirror Joelle at last sees her own face: "The savior from solipsism is the one in whose face you see your own" (Nathan Little, via Plank). The savior is not the one who fixes you; it is the one in whose face your own is given back.

The rival frames

Gately-as-Christ is the boldest of the theological readings, but it is not the only one, and the record holds three more that fit the same text at different angles. The first runs the novel through Paul Tillich: sin as estrangement from the ground of being, salvation as an existential process rather than an afterlife transaction, the whole vast cast a symbolic window onto that estrangement — with Gately the contemporary symbol of salvation precisely because he gets on his knees and surrenders while believing nothing, the act of the whole person standing in for any intellectual assent, his bottom read as the dark night where grace strikes, alongside Tillich's sermon that one is accepted just as one is (the Tillich reading, paraphrased from audio). On this frame the banal platitudes that work are Tillich's own move: God is being-itself and the rest is symbol, so a religion of doing rather than believing is not a defect but the design.

The second frame is Kierkegaardian. Read through den Dulk's existentialism, the self is a gift and a task — you inherit the self behind you and are charged with shaping the one ahead — and irony is the avoidance of choice that empties the self out, while boredom is the ethical call the ironist most fears. The addicts' this-is-beneath-my-intelligence recoil from AA's boring simplicity is the aesthetic response; Gately's dogged, repetitive recovery work is the construction of a coherent self, sincerity practiced as a discipline of relating to others rather than a confession of some inner essence (the den Dulk reading, paraphrased from audio; carried further in his conference keynote, paraphrased from captions, where a marginal note in Wallace's own hand glosses a Dostoevsky heroine as the reader's salvation — a figure the addict, and the hideous man, can only counterfeit).

The third frame is a dispute, and the essay leaves it one. Reading the same material, Dreyfus and Kelly cast Wallace as a Nietzschean for whom the sacred is "something we impose upon experience; there is nothing given about it at all" (Dreyfus and Kelly, via Plank) — redemption without grace, meaning manufactured by the lonely will. Plank rejects it: the novel's people are not autonomous wills but agents and vehicles of something abundant and given, and in any case "even godless redemption gets one out of the arena" (Plank), which is what the sufferer actually needs. He will grant the weaker case — that these characters may be "divine surrogates who act in the absence of God" (Plank) — but argues the book makes the God-question moot from the bottom of the cage, where what matters is that a hand reaches down at all. Whether the redemption is grace-given or self-imposed is exactly the question the novel keeps open. Both readings fit the knees on the floor, and neither closes.

Betty Crocker directions

What all four frames are circling is the novel's odd insistence that grace comes in the imperative mood — as a set of directions to be followed, not a truth to be grasped. The image the book gives it is a cake. Gately's counselor tells him to "think of Boston AA as a box of Betty Crocker Cake Mix" (scene 095, p. 467), with directions on the side any eight-year-old could read. "It didn't matter one fuckola whether Gately like believed a cake would result" (scene 095, p. 467); it did not matter whether he grasped the baking-chemistry of how one would; all he had to do was "just follow the directions on the side of the fucking box" (scene 095, p. 467), and "if he just followed the motherfucking directions" (scene 095, p. 467) — getting help from more experienced bakers when he got confused — then "a cake would result" (scene 095, p. 467). The mechanism is deliberately, almost insultingly literal: recovery as recipe, salvation as instructions followed on a faith you do not have. This is where the recovery material and the theology fuse, and the essay takes only the theological half; the pedagogy of the clichés — why the banal works, the grammar of the rooms — belongs to the rooms themselves (addiction and recovery carries it). What the theology keeps is the scandal of the form: a grace you can receive by rote, your belief lagging years behind your knees, or never catching up at all. The directions do not require you to believe in cake.

The line itself: he carries, and he is carried

The title comes from the oldest voice in the book. In a Tucson garage in 1960, James Incandenza's father — himself a ruined near-great, drunk on a hot court decades before — tells the ten-year-old Jim how, the one time his own cold father came to watch him play, he fell. He went down on his wrecked knees on the sandpaper court, "forced into what was an exact parody of an imitation of contemplative prayer" (scene 049, p. 168), sliding toward the net "in the attitude of a mortified monk in total prayer" (scene 049, p. 168), and "ended in a posture of supplication on my knees' disclosed bones" (scene 049, p. 169). He calls it the day he "felt the religion of the physical" (scene 049, p. 169) — the body as the only church there is — and he closes the monologue on the image the novel would take its darkest sacrament from: how "the drunk and the maimed both are dragged forward out of the arena like a boneless Christ, one man under each arm, feet dragging, eyes on the aether" (scene 049, p. 169).

It is a christology, and it is an inheritance. The grandfather bequeaths it downward — three generations of Incandenza men who go down on their knees not in prayer but in ruin, whose bodies do the supplicating their belief never will. The fullest reading in print (Plank) widens the image until it covers the entire cast: the drunk and the maimed who are finally everyone in the novel are all, in the end, the boneless Christs. Everyone in the book is sooner or later hauled out of the arena feet-first. But the novel gives the figure one variation it never gives the grandfather, and it is the variation this whole essay has been circling. The grandfather is only carried. Gately is both. He is the one who interposes his body between the guns and the residents, who does the carrying and takes the wound meant for someone else, and then he is the one dragged inside — boneless, feet dragging, laid in a bed he cannot rise from. The christology the grandfather hands down is passive: the drunk hauled home under the arms of others, eyes on the aether, a Christ who only receives. Gately inverts it into something the old man could not imagine on his sliding knees — a boneless Christ who, before he is carried, carries. And he does it exactly as he prayed: without belief, on his knees for reasons he cannot explain, doing the thing whether or not it works, whether or not anyone is listening. Plank ends his book by borrowing Wallace's own benediction and turning it on the whole ruined cast: "You boneless Christs, I wish you this, way more than luck." (Plank). It is the right blessing for a religion of the physical: not faith, not understanding, only the wish that the doing be enough.

Sources

This essay is anchored throughout in the novel's own pages, cited inline by scene and page: the prayer scene and its Betty Crocker analogy (scene 095), the Ennet House litany (scene 056), the confessional booth (scene 162), the bedside vigil (scenes 139, 161, 166), the shooting and the recognition (scene 120), and the grandfather's garage monologue (scene 049). Its critical lanes:

The recovery pedagogy the Betty Crocker directions belong to — why the clichés work, the grammar of the rooms — is addiction and recovery; the bedside vigil and the Veronica material read as a love plot are Joelle and Gately. The novel's own words on the hospital are gathered on the addiction and recovery quotation page.

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