Lyle
Here’s how this blog is going to work. Even though I’m the type of person who doesn’t mind having a movie ending “spoiled”, I’m going to try to keep spoilers out of here. I’ll be using white font for anything that has spoiler potential, and of course with Infinite Jest, there is a lot of potential spoilage, so if you want to read this blog you’ll have to select it with your cursor a chunk at a time. I’ll be authorizing only a handful of people to post comments here, so if you’re not one of them and you want to add your two cents or reach me, just go to the GoodReads page for Infinite Jest and join the discussion there. Okay, first up is Lyle. He’s not a critical character plot-wise, as far as I know. But there is something about him which no one seems to notice. Here is an excerpt from a rambling email I sent to one of the people who’ll be commenting:
…I asked my friend who’d read the book twice, who considers IJ his #1 favorite book of all time, who is the smartest person I know, and he had never picked up on it, and I find zero mention of it online, and it occurred to me as soon as JOI’s wraith was revealed, and then it was completely verified later in a hospital scene, and if you picked up on it then you and I might be the only two IJ readers in the world, lol, not quite (well, maybe) but still it seems the majority of readers never picked up on it — which would be astonishing since to me it is so freaking daylight obvious. Ok, promise again you’ll seal your lips until the blog starts (or if I procrastinate, until 9/14 at the latest, then you’re free to blab/borrow)…Lyle is a wraith. Did you pick that up? Ponder it. He sits atop a fucking towel dispenser lol. Google images of locker room towel dispensers. Such a feat is only pulled off by JOI on the heart monitor, later on. He lives off fucking human sweat. Sweat, lol!!! (It’s a sign of how much weirdness there is in IJ overall that readers don’t really get hung up on Lyle’s sweat-licking.) He never ever moves (remember how wraiths materialize?). His rarer-than-rare journey across campus the night of Clip’s death was a sensation for the students…but they are never depicted as actually seeing him take that trip. The students never realize he is a wraith, because he is continuously materialized from sitting so utterly still and peaceful. Most important of all: JOI escorts Lyle to see Gately, for some of Gately’s sweat (Gately gets cat-tongue-licked, it’s there, trust me — which by itself necessarily means that Lyle is a wraith, when you think about it, regardless of whether it’s JOI or Lyle doing the licking). JOI and Lyle were life buddies and now they are wraith buddies (JOI may have even know Lyle-as-a-wraith while he [JOI] was alive, and if so it’d open up a can of worms about whether his knowledge of impending wraithhood affected his film career, among many other things). And now, to bring it full circle narrator-wise, do you remember the odd 1st person insertion after the reader is introduced to Lyle, the thing about (and I’m sorry I don’t have my book with me, or else I’d quote this passage with a page number, my copy is absolutely fucking littered with cross-referenced marginalia like yours probably and I’d find it quickly) “I would like to be like Lyle” or “I wish I could be like Lyle” or “I think it would be great to be like Lyle”. Why in the fuck would Hal say that, right? It’s JOI, expressing his admiration as a fellow wraith for how well Lyle materializes because of how utterly at peace Lyle’s soul is. Or…actually, in your Hal scenario, a Hal looking-back with the lens of knowing there are wraiths and Lyle’s one might say the same thing. But anyway, Lyle is a wraith. Absolutely, 100%, without-a-trace-of-a-doubt. If you hadn’t picked up on that, aren’t you shocked you didn’t? If you did pick up on it, aren’t you shocked there are people who still haven’t?
…LMAO, and if it turns out there are already 12 lengthy thesises about Lyle-as-a-wraith, then how much of a jackass do I look like right now, ahahahahahaha.
Testing, 1, 2, 3, 5, 109…
Paul
August 27, 2008 at 7:20 am
You son of a bitch Wallace. You’d better not have read this blog.
May you haunt the world. May you rest in peace.
May NO ONE ELSE follow your lead. Well, when it comes to what you did.
FUCK. FUCK. FUCK. FUCK. You fucking IDIOT. Hang THIS, you fucking prophet.
IF (BIG if) you’re still around, I’m betting you know what to do now. Help us.
Quisenberry's Flaw
September 14, 2008 at 5:42 am
RIP DFW. I thought I was the only person on the planet who thought Lyle was a wraith. I was too shy to ask him when he signed my copy of Oblivion in 2004. Now it is a permanently unresolvable point of debate.
Ken Flagg
September 15, 2008 at 1:43 am
I never thought it meant he was a wraith. I thought it meant that he was doing transcendental meditation. That’s as plausible as his being a wraith. As for his Clipperton ordeal, students take photos of him crossing the grounds, so they certainly saw him. If Lyle was a wraith, there’s no way he could there just as Clipperton demapped himself. He’d have weeks to get there. Plus Lyle wasn’t by himself, he was walking with Lateral Alice.
Terry
October 23, 2008 at 5:35 am
Good god, how much evidence do Jesse and I need to present? Again, first off, look up towel dispensers in a google search. Here, to help you, a link to such a search: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=towel%20dispenser&safe=active&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi So, ummm…Okay? Are we done speculating? Lyle IS a wraith. The Clipperton incident and his walking there and being photographed are certainly exceptional for a wraith. But he IS a wraith. Okay Terry? Nothing else is plausible. DFW wrote him as a wraith. It’s that obvious. Look again.
reachandpull
November 14, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Wallace was a big believer in the “intentional fallacy” so your whole approach to the book–that it’s to be “figured out”–seems wrongheaded to me, even putting aside the fact that your conclusion doesn’t change when the evidence does (i.e., your misreading the Clipperton section).
Terry
November 15, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Sorry, but I don’t give a rat’s ass what literary theory Wallace was a believer in, I only care about what is presented plain-as-day in the book. You were right to correct me about the kids photographing Lyle. But you are wrong to assume that your one correction negates my observation (not a theory, an OBSERVATION) that Lyle is (IS) a wraith. Again, please help yourself to a google search of towel dispensers. There are certainly some physical anomalies I can’t figure out in IJ, first and foremost the state of Marathe’s wife’s head. But it seems (on memory, I can’t even find my copy now) that every other thing in the book that contradicts the physical laws of our universe is the result of wraithhood. Lucien Antitoi’s flying call-to-arms. The curious tennis ball from the Hal-Ortho match. The ghostly re-arrangements at ETA. Just about every single thing concerning JOI’s wraith. (Remember him? The ghost that materializes by being still?) The real clincher regarding Lyle-is-a-wraith for me, is the cat lick. Perhaps you missed it, or don’t remember? The hospitalized Gately gets sweat licked off him like a cat. This is an either/or situation regarding who-is-doing-the-licking, either side of which confirms that Lyle is a wraith. If it is JOI doing the licking, then sweat-licking is something wraiths do. If it is Lyle, then sure you might think a merely TM-guru Lyle could be in the room for some reason, but tell me: WHAT reason. Why the hell would Lyle from ETA’s locker room be in immobilized Don Gately’s hospital room, licking Gately’s sweat? Lyle IS a wraith. A superior wraith, one who appears (pun intended) to be extraordinarily at peace, and is perhaps able then to perform extraordinary feats for a wraith when he so wills it, like walking across the ETA campus on the extraordinary night of Clipperton’s suicide. Perhaps the students, when they developed their film, captured nothing. Or perhaps they caught a ghost on film. People claim to have done that kind of thing all the time.
reachandpull
November 19, 2008 at 6:09 pm