I don’t know how Wallace comes up with some of this stuff.
The passage on pages 569-574 is really funny, but I’m wondering what the deeper significance to the rest of the novel is. This is the passage where Mike Pemulis comes across a blind-folded Idris Arslanian and the two start talking about how much of the NNE waste gets catapulted up to the Great Concavity to counteract some crazy growth that occurs as a result of a lack of pollution in the area. The lack of pollution was caused by an idea of JOI’s in which two highly toxic and radioactive particles combined to create some sort of stable, non-toxic compound.
But, in a classic DFW ironic twist, this lack of pollution in the area caused everything to grow so lush and rapidly that the area became what sounds like a sci-fi planet, with “rapacial feral hamsters and insects of Volkswagen size and infantile giganticism and the unmacheteable regions of forests” (573). So now the problem is that the area needs more radioactive and toxic stuff, and this is why garbage is catapulted up there.
We can never fully predict the consequences of our actions. This little anecdote highlights the fact that in our world, everything is dependent on something else. If one problem gets solved, another one crops up in its place. Everything is “annular” (possibly DFWs favorite word.)
I think this has a lot to do with the issue of second-order vanity and the ironic loop that we are all caught in. People try to hide their vanity, but instead of eradicating vanity all this does is make the problem worse. Similarly, now that irony has become such an integral part of our culture, we can sort of ignore all the different levels of irony that we deal with every day, but this does nothing to actually solve the problem. Eliminating pollution and waste creates a need for more waste.
And so this is my problem with Wallace’s proposed cure for cancer: giving the cancer cells cancer. Let’s believe for a second that it is possible to give cancer cells cancer by “getting force-fed micromassive quantities of overdone beef and diet soda, forced to chain-smoke microsized Marlboros near tiny little cellular phones” (572). Giving the cancer cells cancer may kill the cancer cells, but there are still tinier cancer cells within the cancer cells within the human body. Shouldn’t this be just another endless loop that humanity will probably be caught in forever? Or is Wallace attempting to provide an example here of how a cycle can end?
2 responses so far ↓
mr // 13 April 2009 at 10.32 am
I agree with you, this does seem to invite more of an endless cycle than a viable solution, unless DFW is implying that once the tiny cancer cells envelop the larger ones, the whole thing dies, leaving the human cancer free. That would involve treating the cancer as a separate living organism, not just rapidly dividing out-of-control cells.
Either way, Wallace may be trying to expose a cultural dynamic that only becomes apparent over time, which is the gradual acceptance of seemingly radical ideas. Much of what’s considered “fringe” migrates to the mainstream, it just takes time. As even “annular chemotherapy did start out kind of whacko” (572).
ag1646 // 14 April 2009 at 8.16 pm
When I read this post I thought of how Marshall Boswell in his “Understanding David Foster Wallace” claims that that DFW “ironizes irony.” In the same vein, Boswell says that DFW uses “self-reflexivity to point at self-reflexivity.” Do you think that it’s possible that this giving-cancer-cells-cancer is perhaps Wallace giving own style a little jab? As in, ironizing irony can help explode the original irony, but there danger is also the pitfall of a recursive loop, as mentioned in the post. And we all know how much Wallace struggles with self-recursive loops in his writing.