The Figurant's Cry

The theory the novel keeps of itself

Late in the book, mute and gunshot and pinned to a hospital bed, Don Gately is visited by a wraith who will not stop talking, and one of the things the wraith wants to talk about is television. Not the lethal cartridge, but ordinary television: the barroom on a sitcom, and the people at the tables behind the stars. The wraith makes Gately remember the extras on his beloved Cheers!, "the nameless patrons always at tables, filling out the bar's crowd," whose mouths move but produce no sound, because "only the name-stars at the bar itself could audibilize" (scene 162, p. 834). They are, the wraith says, "human furniture, figurants" (scene 162, p. 834), a term he borrows from ballet: the dancers at the edge of the stage who fill the frame and are never meant to be watched. What the camera does to them, any eye does. They are the "surreally mute background presences whose presence really revealed that the camera, like any eye, has a perceptual corner" (scene 162, p. 834), a triage of who is important enough to be seen and heard against who is merely seen.

The wraith's grievance is that this is a kind of cruelty, and that it is total: "you can't appreciate the dramatic pathos of a figurant until you realize how completely trapped and encaged he is in his mute peripheral status" (scene 162, p. 835). He works the example to its dead end: if a Cheers! extra could not bear it any longer and stood up and started shouting for attention, the nearest name-star would simply bolt over and apply restraints or the Heimlich, taking the outburst for a man choking on a beer-nut, and the rest of the episode would be about the star's heroics. "No way for a figurant to win. No possible voice or focus for the encaged figurant" (scene 162, p. 835). Against that, the wraith sets the art he says he made when he was alive: entertainments in which "you could bloody well hear every single performer's voice, no matter how far out on the cinematographic or narrative periphery they were" (scene 162, p. 835). Not the fake overlapping chatter of an Altman, he insists, but "real life's real egalitarian babble of figurantless crowds" (scene 162, p. 836), a world in which every last body in the frame is "the central and articulate protagonist of his own entertainment" (scene 162, p. 836).

It is the closest the novel comes to describing its own design out loud. The wraith is complaining about the movies, but he has stated the governing law of the book that contains him: a novel that keeps insisting the person at the edge of the frame has a whole life, and keeps turning to prove it. The pathos he attaches to the figurant is not incidental to his own case, either. He confesses that he "personally spent the vast bulk of his own former animate life as pretty much a figurant" (scene 162, p. 835), furniture at the periphery of the eyes closest to him; and the wraith is himself, now, a being with no voice of its own, one who "had no out-loud voice of its own" and must borrow the brain-voice of the man in the bed to be heard at all (scene 162, p. 831). The theory of minor characters is delivered by a minor character who has died into total silence, to a man who cannot answer. It arrives with its stakes already paid.

The nurse who says Help

If the wraith states the theory, the practice has a face, and the face belongs to a woman the book never names and never lets us meet. In the Alzheimer's unit along the roadlet from Ennet House lives one "ancient retired Air Force nurse" who "does nothing but scream 'Help!' for hours at a time from a second-story window" (scene 054, p. 196). She is introduced as pure setting, a piece of local color, and the residents treat her as such: because their recovery program places so much weight on Asking For Help, someone hangs a stolen "HELP WANTED" sign beneath her window as a joke (scene 054, p. 196). Her one word is the program's central word, turned into a gag.

And then the book will not let her stay a gag. Her cry recurs, scattered and unresolved, at the edges of other people's scenes. It comes up the hill at dawn while the tennis players do their conditioning, "a repetitive scream for help come up from someplace downhill to the east, presumably Enfield Marine" (scene 094, p. 452), and nobody remarks on it. It reaches Mario Incandenza on one of his night walks — "A woman's voice, calling for help without any real urgency" from a darkened upper window (scene 117, p. 590), and Mario, who registers everything tender, walks on. And it sounds all through the one night the book brings the two buildings' worlds together, the gun-battle outside Ennet House, where the ruckus rouses "the old nurse in #4 who Asks For Help," her figure splayed against the glass, "yelling 'Eeeeeeeyelp!'" (scene 120, p. 609). She goes on crying through the whole fight, at the far margin of the frame while Gately is being shot: "The lady yells for Help" (scene 120, p. 613); and as it ends and Gately sits down bleeding in the street, "The lady at the high warped window shouts for Helphelphelphelphelp" (scene 120, p. 615).

The cruelty the wraith described is enacted on her exactly. She has a voice and no focus. And the book states the cost in a single sentence, buried mid-battle in Gately's head: it occurs to him "that the Help lady has cried Wolf for so many years that real shouts for real help are all going to be ignored" (scene 120, p. 610). That is the figurant's whole tragedy compressed to a line. A person reduced to one repeated word becomes, over time, unhearable; the very constancy that ought to be an emergency is what trains everyone to stop listening. She is, as one of the novel's most attentive readers puts it, encaged "not only in a hospital room, but within the structure of a narrative" (plank) — shut in by the story's own architecture, which can only ever hold her at the edge. The joke sign turns out to have read her correctly and backwards at once: HELP WANTED, for the one and the many both.

What the book does about it

The answer the novel gives to its own accusation is to keep stopping, at apparently random points in its sprawl, to hand a whole interior life to someone who would be an extra anywhere else. It does this most nakedly early, in the Wardine section, where a girl from the Brighton projects tells, in her own unmediated voice, of her half-sister being beaten with a hanger and stalked by her mother's man: "Wardine say her momma aint treat her right" (scene 008, p. 37). The prose does not translate her or step back to explain her; it simply gives her the microphone and lets her grammar be the whole reality for two pages. And what it reaches for, at the bottom of that horror, is not sociology but the thing a frightened child would actually want to know. Her back flayed and numb, Wardine asks the one question left: "Is she still pretty, she cry" (scene 008, p. 38). The section ends not on the violence but on the narrator's own small doomed future, stated flat: "And I am gone have a child" (scene 008, p. 38). Nobody in the book's foreground will ever learn Wardine's name.

The same move recurs wherever the novel bothers to look. The yrstruly monologue gives a full first-person world, phonetically spelled and unglossed, to a street addict scoring on Christmas Eve; and the book locates, inside that scrabbling voice, a genuine tenderness — Poor Tony's plea that the crew stay straight and "get Lolasister straight for XMas" (scene 040, p. 131) and lie up out of the struggle for a couple of days — a figurant's voice raised and not heard: C "is not 2Bdenied," and the crew heads down to Chinatown instead. These are not decorations. And the book quietly proves it by letting them carry forward: Clenette, the girl narrating the Wardine section, turns up years later as one of the bodies on the lawn during the Ennet House shooting, no longer a voice but a name in a crowd — "Clenette H. and Yolanda W. are now up and not at bay" (scene 120, p. 614). A reader who was paying attention in the first hundred pages knows she is not an extra. The novel has already audibilized her; it is only asking us to remember.

The quarrel over the bodies

Not every reader has been sure the design is humane. The first great study of Wallace described the novel's population, memorably and a little coldly, as "its cast of precocious teenagers and grotesque cripples" (boswell) — a phrase that has had a long life, and that a later critic singled out as a troubling and influential example of exactly the reflex the book is supposed to resist. Writing on Wallace and disability, Peter Sloane argues that Wallace is "not so much a writer of the grotesque as he is a humanist" (dfw-in-context), one who turns the damaged body into an occasion for sincere contact between people. But Sloane will not let even that off the hook: to make a suffering body the vehicle of someone else's moral growth is to risk using it as what he calls, borrowing from Mitchell and Snyder, an "opportunistic metaphorical device" (dfw-in-context). The figurant given a voice can still be a prop for the reader's edification.

The most patient version of the argument comes from Plank, who reads the nurse through Alex Woloch's account of how novels distribute their finite attention — the permanent unfairness by which a book with one center must push everyone else toward the wall. Plank is honest that this is not a problem any author escapes; a novelist "cannot really avoid fragmentation and is inevitably unfair to both minor and major characters" (plank), the way Hamlet is never quite fair to Claudius. Which means the book cannot, by itself, guarantee the humane result it gestures toward. Redistributing one's attention to the screaming nurse, Plank concedes, is finally "a reader's prerogative and perhaps also his or her ethical duty" (plank), never something the text can perform on the reader's behalf. The tradition he sets the book inside is old and demanding: Henry James's insistence that even the walk-on figures deserve consideration, "they too should have a 'case'" (plank); Zadie Smith's verdict that "Wallace's fiction cares what happens to the stupid, the coarse, and the blind" (plank). The book supplies the occasion. It cannot supply the attention.

The only audience she has

Which is where the figurant's cry finally lands, and why it is addressed, past everyone in the fiction, to us. Inside the story the nurse has no listener; her window looks out on a world that has trained itself not to hear her, and the one sentence that registers her — Gately's, mid-fight — registers only that she can no longer be registered. The wraith's dream of a "figurantless crowd," every member of it "the central and articulate protagonist of his own entertainment" (scene 162, p. 836), has no home on the actual pages of anyone's life; it can only be built by a reader who declines the camera's triage and turns, deliberately, to the edge of the frame. That is the peculiar transaction the book keeps setting up. It puts a whole person at the periphery, gives her one word, lets everyone around her stop hearing it, and then trusts that somewhere outside the fiction there is a single figure who will. The nurse screams Help for eleven hundred pages into a world that answers HELP WANTED. The only one positioned to answer her is the person holding the book.

Sources

The novel's own statement of the idea is the wraith's figurant monologue to Gately (scene 162), cited inline by page; the nurse's dispersed cry is gathered from her four appearances across the book (scenes 054, 094, 117, and the Ennet House shooting, 120), and the curated minor lives from the Wardine and yrstruly sections (scenes 008, 040). The critical quarrel is drawn from three studies the archive holds: Marshall Boswell's Understanding David Foster Wallace (the "grotesque cripples" phrase), Peter Sloane's chapter on Wallace and disability in David Foster Wallace in Context (the humanist-not-grotesque reading and its self-caveat), and Karl Plank's The Fact of the Cage, the fullest reading of the nurse and the one that routes her through Woloch's one-vs-many apparatus and the James/Smith line on minor lives. Plank gathers the nurse's cry into what he calls five dispersed appearances; tracing each to its page, they fall in four scenes across the book, the last of them the gun-battle, where she cries out again and again.