IJ study archive

Order and Flux in Northampton

source

TL;DR

An uncollected Wallace short story (Conjunctions 17, Fall 1991; never in any book), written during the Infinite Jest years and set in Northampton, Massachusetts. It follows Barry Dingle, cross-eyed manager of a health-food store, whose hopeless love for Myrnaloy Trask, the woman who runs the copy-shop bulletin board next door, has hardened into an autonomous "homunculoid" presence inside him that campaigns, through his ingrown toenails, to take over his life. The story is a comic set-piece, but its machinery — an internal appetite that strains toward its own self-annihilating fulfilment, a jeremiad on entropic stasis as the end of the world, an optics of doubleness and distance — is recognizably the workshop in which several of Infinite Jest's preoccupations were being tooled.

Key claims

  • The situation. Barry Dingle, cross-eyed manager of The Whole Thing Health Food Emporium on Northampton's Great Awakening Avenue, is in helpless, unrequited love with Myrnaloy Trask, "regent" of the community bulletin board at Collective Copy next door; she barely knows he exists and has eyes only for the perpetual-graduate-student Don Megala. The love was born at a fixed moment (4:30 p.m., 15 June 1981) when Dingle glimpsed her reflected in the smoke-dark window of a halted bus.
  • The homunculoid love. Dingle's love is figured as a literal internal agent — a "doll-sized self" with "silent speech" and "undisguised ambitions to independent action" — that wants, ultimately, to become Dingle, and has launched a campaign to remake him. It even speaks to him in dialogue, casting itself as a chivalric knight and Dingle as its dragon.
  • Coercion by ingrown toenail. To force the passive Dingle into romantic action, the love relocates from his heart to an "annex" in his ingrown toenails, applying carefully gauged pain. The store declines; the chain's Scientologist owner visits; Dingle resolves at last to pursue Trask "by fair means or otherwise."
  • The Northampton interludes. Two mock-scholarly digressions frame the town: a history footnoting the 1711-1717 jeremiads of "dentist/theologian Solomon Stoddard," who foretold the world's end as an entropic stasis harbinged by poor nutrition, dental decay, the increasing infertility of modern woman, and "the rise of the novel"; and a note on Lord Jeffrey Amherst clearing the Pioneer Valley by distributing smallpox-infected blankets.
  • A partial text. The story as preserved in the Conjunctions online archive is a two-part excerpt of a longer whole: both archived pages end by pointing the reader to further sections that did not survive online.

Theories & evidence

Wallace's own fiction advances no theory about Infinite Jest; what follows records continuities of preoccupation between this 1991 story and the novel.

CONNECTION: An autonomous internal appetite that strains toward its own self-annihilating fulfilment — an early working of the addiction/appetite structure Infinite Jest builds on

  • Crux: none
  • 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
  • Notes: The precise continuity is structural: a force living inside the protagonist, with its own will, whose fulfilment would be the protagonist's dissolution. In 1991 the force is comic (love as a toenail-torturing homunculus); in Infinite Jest it is addiction and depression, but the anatomy — an internal agent that consumes its host — is the same. No specific novel crux is scoped; recorded as a shared-preoccupation continuity.

CONNECTION: Entropic stasis as the end of the world — the Solomon Stoddard jeremiad prefigures Infinite Jest's terminal-stasis dread

  • Crux: none
  • Early text: Stoddard's jeremiad foretells "the world's cold and imminent end," "characterizing that end as a kind of grim entropic stasis" harbinged by, among other portents, poor nutrition and dental decay, the increasing infertility of modern woman, "the rise of the novel; the Great Awakening itself"; and the plot delivers Dingle himself toward "breakdown and tilted stasis," since "Love has turned the order of Barry Dingle's life into flux". [c17-dfw1/dfw2]
  • IJ echo: The novel's image of terminal, self-consuming stasis — the viewer of the Entertainment reduced to inert, fatal bliss (the medical attaché settling in before the unlabeled cartridge, scene 007, pp. 33-37; the viewers reported out of commission altogether, scene 029, pp. 87-92) — and its broader dread of a culture entertaining itself into paralysis.
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation
  • Notes: "Order and Flux" is the story's own title and thesis; the Stoddard digression makes the entropy explicit and even names "the rise of the novel" as a symptom of cultural decline — the same self-implicating gesture Infinite Jest makes about entertainment. The continuity is thematic, not plot-scoped.

Themes

Entropy and stasis (the title, the Stoddard jeremiad, Dingle's slide toward "tilted stasis"); addiction and appetite (the homunculoid love as a proto-addiction, an internal compulsion that coerces its host); optics and the unattainable (Dingle's cross-eyed glasses force a permanent choice "between doubleness and distance," so the beloved is only ever doubled or distant, never "real" — an early sounding of Infinite Jest's desire-through-the-lens and map-versus-territory motifs); western-Massachusetts geography (Northampton, Amherst, the Pioneer Valley — the terrain around Wallace's own Amherst College, and the region whose drowned town of Enfield he would later reuse for Infinite Jest's Enfield).

Cross-references

  • broom-of-the-system and girl-with-curious-hair — the surrounding early-Wallace corpus; "Order and Flux" is contemporaneous with the run-up to Infinite Jest and shares their preoccupations (communication, appetite, manufactured landscape).
  • bdcwire-dfw-boston — for the geography link: the drowned western-Massachusetts town near Amherst (Enfield, flooded for the Quabbin Reservoir) whose name Wallace, by his own 1996 account, transplanted onto Infinite Jest's Enfield.
  • In the novel: scene 135 ("It" as an internal devouring agent, pp. 692-698); scene 074 (White Flag / the "Disease," pp. 343-367); scenes 007 and 029 (the Entertainment's viewer reduced to fatal stasis, pp. 33-37, 87-92).

Notable passages

  • Dingle's love as an internal agent: "Suspend and believe that the consuming, passionate love of Myrnaloy Trask has in fact become defined and centered as a small homunculoid presence inside Barry Dingle, a doll-sized self all its own"
  • The self-annihilating drive: "Dingle's immoderate love's life strains ever forward toward the death that love's life loves."
  • The Stoddard jeremiad: the reverend "foretold the world's cold and imminent end," "characterizing that end as a kind of grim entropic stasis" already harbinged by poor nutrition, infertility, and the rise of the novel.
  • The colonial clearing of the Pioneer Valley: Lord Jeffrey Amherst won his victory "by providing its tribes with free blankets, each carefully preinfected with smallpox."