IJ study archive

Greg Carlisle on the MC Lars Podcast (Episode 32)

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TL;DR

Recorded April 2019 (episode dated Mon 8 April, on Lars's UK tour): 93 minutes of Carlisle talking IJ off the cuff, twelve years after Elegant Complexity. The most candid statement we have of his personal positions on the open cruxes — he walks the whole Entertainment chronology aloud, names where he thinks the gaps are unfillable by design, and states his Hal verdict plainly. Since the archive's Elegant Complexity digest is complete, most value here is in tone and emphasis: which of his book's hedges he'll commit to when talking, and which he won't. Auto-captions, heavy name-mangling ("infinite Jess," "ail" = Avril, "Tom Kite" = Trent Kite); paraphrase only.

Key claims

  • Method (~min 11-13): he segmented the novel as a theater director breaks a play into Stanislavskian beats — Hamlet is ~80 beats for him; every small section, on his method, had to be there for a reason, each unit related to the whole's theme. First read 2000-Jan 2001; wrote EC 2003-2007 while workshopping answers on the Wallace-l listserv (credits George Carr among the astute readers; cut-and-paste answers from the manuscript became a habit).
  • His core interpretation (~min 25-29): choose action over stasis — "it is better to abide moment-to-moment than to succumb to the passivity of paralyzed stasis" (quoting his own Elegant Complexity). Gately kneeling without belief, E.T.A. repetition (Hal's body still plays in YG when his speech fails), Beckett's "I can't go on, I'll go on," and Erdedy frozen between phone and doorbell as the emblematic image. Also the inverse image-set: motion that goes nowhere (hamster wheel) — sometimes the analogy works, sometimes it's an image of the unhelpful kind, and choosing is the point.
  • Sierpinski holes are load-bearing (~min 30-32): five years of writing EC taught him "it's not supposed to come together" — every iteration of the gasket adds detail and holes; the book is engineered so you always feel one reread away from solving it (he still half-expects, knowingly, to read online some day that somebody solved it).
  • Sequel thought-experiment (~min 33-36): an IJ continuation would have to be a theme sequel, not a plot sequel — his model is Lynch/Frost's Twin Peaks: The Return: broaden, give one small answer (e.g. the head-in-casket), keep the essence missing.
  • The Entertainment walkthrough (~min 37-62), his commitments and refusals:
    • The wraith tells Gately the film was made for Hal, to bring him "out of himself" — but the professional-conversationalist scene already inverts Year of Glad (Hal talking, JOI unable to hear), so JOI's premise is itself suspect; and the film infantilizes, a strange tool for drawing a son out (~min 37, 70).
    • Copies: "somehow copies got made" — he flags his own Disney-Leith-as-cinematographer speculation as "wildly off" the text; the master is "copy-capable" (copies can't be copied); JOI's unexplained pre-death surgery leaves open master-implanted-in-head vs. buried-in-casket; he refuses to adjudicate (~min 44-53).
    • Dissemination: he thinks Avril is the likeliest sender of the April-YDAU attaché cartridge, not Orin — the attaché was her ex-lover, the package said "Happy Anniversary," and 1 April is the anniversary of JOI's death; Orin, to him, simply doesn't seem checked-in enough to scheme (~min 53-56). But —
    • The Gertrude rule (~min 47-48): as with Gertrude's complicity in Hamlet, Avril's involvement is constructed to be undecidable — every incriminating fact (Duquette/DuPlessis county ties, Luria, the affairs) is offset by an exculpating one (she drove JOI to detox days before his death). The facts never line up; you can never be sure beyond a reasonable doubt — and that's deliberate.
    • The AFR path (~min 56-58): DuPlessis's stolen cartridges → Kite ("Tom Kite" per ASR) → Sixties Bob → the Antitois — and the AFR don't have a usable copy until Nov YDAU, so the April attaché release can't be theirs.
    • Aftermath (~min 60-62): the "Continental Emergency" and YG-as-last-subsidized-year hints mean something happened in the lost year — he suspects AFR dissemination — but he "hesitates to speculate."
  • Hal verdict (~min 64-68): his self-described "unexciting theory" — Hal neither watched the film nor took the DMZ; marijuana withdrawal drives the retreat into the head — Hal's crutch for face-to-face communication is gone. He rates the dosed-toothbrush possibility real but low (NASA glass unattended; DMZ missing from the ceiling tile; only four people knew), and near-rules-out Hal-watched-it (labeled/unlabeled cartridge tracking; and had Hal actually seen the film, he would presumably be glued to it yet). Mold and cereal-steroids noted as further unresolved clues.
  • Wardine / AAVE (~min 79-81): "an attempt at something positive" grounded in empathy — but in his judgment a white writer ventriloquizing Black speech can never land as empathetic for the reader; it cannot be seen that way — and Wallace could have foreseen that in 1996 and gone another way.
  • Misc: Gately's shooting framed as unrelated-to-the-film Canadian muscle (he calls the Nucks a rival organization, rendered "the fq" — i.e. he reads them as an F.L.Q.-like outfit; the text leaves them vaguer); Steven Moore's first-draft notes now in My Back Pages and tracked at the Howling Fantods (~min 20); Boswell cited for Wallace-as-product-of-his-time; Oblivion praised as the late peak; Pale King diagnosed as a containment/ circumlocution problem (~min 84-87); he invites reader email at his Morehead State address.

Themes

entertainment-self (the full samizdat chronology); family-hamlet (Gertrude rule for Avril); addiction-recovery (action over stasis; Gately's knees); communication-solipsism (Hal's withdrawal verdict); annularity (gasket holes, hamster wheels).

Cross-references

Advances