IJ study archive

Reading IJ: Structure and Symbolism (DFW Conference, ISU, 2019 — final panel)

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TL;DR

The closing panel of the 2019 ISU conference, two papers. The first — "Inside JOI's Head" — is the standout of the whole round-2 batch on the ending: it argues the Hal/Gately graveyard meeting is systematically undercut by the text and exists only where the reader constructs it, with JOI's head as a deliberately Schrödinger-indeterminate object. The second reads IJ's figurant voices against The Waste Land via Deleuze-Guattari's rhizome. Auto-captions; paraphrase only.

Key claims — paper 1, "Inside JOI's Head" (~min 2-25)

  • Two framing questions: why does Wallace undercut every detail of the graveyard meeting, and why do readers everywhere accept it as fact anyway? (~min 3).
  • The two attestations (Hal's p. 17 memory; Gately's p. 934 fever-dream) share only two constants — graveyard + a head to dig up; everything else is personalized to each dreamer (Hal gets masked John Wayne; Gately gets winged, underwearless Joelle). Both versions "float free" of the narrative (~min 8-13).
  • JOI's head is quantum-indeterminate: reported exploded by the microwave, yet intact enough to conceal continental-emergency-grade contents. Boswell's Understanding DFW summary juxtaposes both within a sentence without noticing; readers and critics have followed him in not trying to resolve it (~min 13-15).
  • New physical argument (~min 15-16): the grave sits essentially within the Concavity, subject to annular hyperfloration/decay cycles (the funeral itself twice delayed by them, per n. 160) — on the lecturer's reasoning, anything buried there is unlikely to have stayed intact. So both defining elements of the scene are compromised; any certainty about the meeting has to be supplied by the reader, since the text withholds it.
  • The lost year is the only place all plot lines (Hal, Gately, the Entertainment) converge — and they converge only in dream. Reads Wallace's "projected beyond the right frame" Live Online statement as instructions for exactly this reader-completion (~min 12-13).
  • Freud's primal scene (via Peter Brooks) as the structural analogue: a scene reconstructed after the fact to organize disparate symptoms, never separable from the patient who may have invented it — likewise the graveyard scene organizes the novel's plots toward a common endpoint while implicating the reader as "perhaps its only real participant" (~min 17-20).
  • The JOI's-head symbol read through the professional-conversationalist speech (the spiraling inventory ending at the entertainment cartridge "implanted in your very own towering father's anaplastic cerebrum", p. 31): the language of a solipsist whose inside and outside are "identical" — the head won't provide a stable foundation because it embodies self-enclosure breaching itself (the microwave as a literal forcing-open of the skull's sealed casing of bone) (~min 21-23).
  • Endpoint, in the lecturer's formulation: the vital thing was never what was inside the wise head but what we encountered on the journey to recover it — tied to the Everything and More epigraph, which he renders as the head mattering less than what the head is inside of (~min 24-25).

Key claims — paper 2, rhizomatic polyphony (~min 25-43)

  • IJ + The Waste Land as rhizomatic texts (Deleuze/Guattari): voices distributed non-hierarchically, no set entries/exits; Eliot's working title "He Do the Police in Different Voices" as the polyphony tell (~min 38).
  • Wallace's figurants (via the wraith's radical-realism speech to Gately) as the program: Mikey's five pages at p. 958 right when we crave resolution; yrstruly; the catatonic-sister and stillborn-infant AA stories — voices given through their own idiom rather than narrated over (~min 33-37).
  • Jameson's waning of affect; Baudrillard's America; E Unibus Pluram's title flipped (out of one, many voices) (~min 30-32).
  • Q&A (~min 43-53): the roving camera-eye (Wings of Desire pan; the Gately-drives-past-Antitoi-Entertainment perspective handoff) as cinematic structure; Eschaton as the book-within-the-book microcosm with explicit theatrical staging; "hysterical realism" question answered with Wallace's fractured-reality realism claim.

Themes

ghosts-wraiths, family-hamlet (the graveyard scene), annularity (Concavity decay cycles), communication-solipsism (JOI's head; figurants), maps-territory (reader completes the map).

Cross-references

Advances