the grief-therapy: textbook breakdown into genuine affect
By the end I swear his side of the desk was half a meter off the floor, at my grief-therapist-textbook breakdown into genuine affect and trauma and guilt and textbook earsplitting grief, then absolution.
Context
The paradox named in a single phrase: a "textbook breakdown into genuine affect." The breakdown is textbook — prepared, cued, plagiarized from the grief-pro literature — and the affect it breaks into is genuine, and Wallace refuses to let the reader separate them. Hal "passes" grief the way one passes an exam, and yet real trauma and guilt come out in the passing. This is the whole irony-sincerity engine running at once: the performance is not the opposite of the feeling, it is the only door the feeling can come through. He grieves by faking grief, and the faking is what makes the grief possible, and neither cancels the other.