IJ study archive

Leaf by Leaf at the IDFWS Conference 2023 (Gettysburg College): Lyle, LaMont Chu, and the Fact of the Cage

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TL;DR

A tight 23-minute conference talk (International DFW Society, Gettysburg, June 2023): a close reading of the Lyle/LaMont Chu envy-of-fame exchange (pp. 387-389), arguing Lyle is a christological/Ecclesiastes figure and formalizing "Chu's conundrum." Personal frame: the reading dissolved the speaker's own twenty-year novelist ambition. The single most focused close reading in the round-2 essay batch. Auto-captions; paraphrase only.

Key claims

  • Lyle is not a disposable new-age-guru parody (~min 14-16) — print: "It’s like he’s working as hard as you. You both of you, briefly, feel unalone." (p. 388) parallels Wallace's writer-reader reciprocity; Lyle as the externalized embodiment of Ecclesiastes 3:11 (eternity placed within us, unknowable), positioned above (levitating) yet of us — print: "It’s like he’s you in the top of a clean pond." (p. 389).
  • The sweat works on three levels (~min 16-17): homeostasis (equilibrium); visible evidence of labor (Chu's burden); and waste/filth — Lyle as a christological figure who takes burden and filth in exchange for cleansing. Anchoring the serious in the silly as signature method.
  • "Chu's conundrum" (~min 17-20): Lyle's "You have been snared by the delusion that envy has a reciprocal." (p. 389) — formalized as wanting to experience the other experiencing you, the way you once experienced them; the aside that the envied M. Chang is "lately expired" (p. 388) signals the dead end (the hero literally cannot envy back), so the desire amends, in his formulation, to the way one once experienced another — achievable only in imagination or fiction; and the desire's intensity is inversely proportional to Chu's playing (fear of losing makes him lose).
  • The pivot (~min 20-21) — print, Lyle's counsel: "escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage" (p. 390) — paralleled with the wider fish parable (in IJ, then Kenyon); cites Carl A. Plank, The Fact of the Cage: Reading and Redemption in DFW's Infinite Jest; a fellow panelist's dictum, as relayed, that anything at all is abusable; the choice that forfeits all future choosing — Joelle's cocaine, Gompert's attempts, the attaché's play-button, Chu's hypothetical fame — as the addiction template.
  • Conclusion (~min 21-23): the feelings associated with envy may satisfy as fully as those of the envied state — so the dream's feelings may enrich more than its attainment would; right restrictions yield freedoms. Applied autobiographically: do I want to write novels, or to experience others experiencing me as I experienced writers? — envy's end as freedom's beginning, in his closing formula.

Themes

the-body-tennis (Lyle), entertainment-self (fame as Substance), addiction-recovery (choice-forfeiting choices), irony-sincerity (silly anchoring serious).

Cross-references