- 1 This is a particularly curious matter if one is to consider how the short stories and non-fiction o (...)
1Having gained enormous popularity both as a best-selling author and in more conservative academic circles after the publication of his 1996 mammoth novel Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace has rapidly risen to the status of canonical writer. Following the wide acclaim received by his magnum opus, numerous works on his philosophical writings, essays and fiction have flooded into academia, instituting a body of scholarly research that has kept growing over the years. The discussion of his short stories, however, perhaps responding to the marginal status that the genre has long maintained, has been hardly comparable to that of his novels,1 even though the former offer some of the most remarkable instances of how the recurring themes of his literary production—mental health, addiction, boredom, empathy and solipsism, to name but a few—are constantly connected to that of intersubjectivity and made to illustrate the hesitant relationship that bonds us to our every other.
- 2 For a more thorough discussion on Brief Interviews as a short story cycle, see Holland 109.
2In the short story “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XXIV),” the face as frontier comes to the forefront as a boundary where the notions of self and other, as well as their potential exposure to damage, come to be most prolifically questioned. Through this brief piece, published as part of the short story cycle Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999),2 Wallace scrupulously questions what manner of perspectival self-consciousness arises when we become aware that the face, in all its irreducible vulnerability as a token of our humanity, may turn into the very source from which the most traumatic forms of violence are able to spring. Far from being isolated at the end of the collection, “Porousness (XXIV)” builds on the idea of a numbered series, most of which are utterly absent from Wallace’s literary production. In the case of the stories which are actually present and so labelled, both in Brief Interviews and elsewhere, a disruptive effort to rejoice in the fragmentariness and incompleteness of experience is made apparent through the inconsistent numeration at the end of each associated title. The “Porousness” tales thus invite a reading of other short stories as constituting the missing elements in the implied series, and in so doing, prompt conflicting interpretations on the nature of both the borders as presented and the porous quality that they are attributed.
3Brief Interviews, as does most of Wallace’s literary production, questions the possibility for empathy, presenting a vast array of unlikable characters and uncanny situations where the narcissism of one frequently eclipses the sheer prospect that the voice of all others may reach the reader, sentencing them to remain silent as the stories unfold. The dialogic dynamics established between self and other thus leave one perspective entirely out of the fiction, both in discourse and story. However, it is in these recurring, blaring absences, pervading the tales in the short story cycle from start to finish, that the gap between subjectivities, made evident through an ever-present ellipsis, is asserted as potentially bridgeable by the engaged reader. This lack is perhaps most evident in the title stories, where the interviewer’s voice is removed from the fiction in favor of those of the hideous men that populate the narrative. Their self-centeredness thus becomes both a thematic and a stylistic choice, leaving plenty of information gaps for the reader to fill in. Hence the demand exerted by the interviews—which provide a most detailed examination of the exercise of patriarchal violence in discourse, both superficially and symbolically—on this reader: that she elicits the true nature of the incomplete conversation; that she agrees to believe in its being conversational and to play with the lack at the conversation’s core, without ever being provided with the voice of the interviewer—the voice of woman, subjected, according to Adam Kelly, to a “double silencing” throughout the title stories, as “we [do] not hear from the only woman present” and “are told that anything a woman might contribute on this topic could not be taken at face value” (82-83).
4Far from merely excluding the voice of the other by erasure, Brief Interviews’ “consistent structural monovocality enacts exactly the interior solipsism and resulting communicative barriers that Wallace’s fiction as a whole aims to diagnose and overcome” (Holland 109), seeking to prompt a particular kind of response through which the reader may move past the limitations of Wallace’s self-imposed univocity. In so doing, the suspension of disbelief is made to depend on the reader’s willingness to reconstruct the presence of the other through her own projections, erecting a set of values for the silenced character and imagining a tonality to the missing questions. This exercise of reconstruction of the other is a recurring theme in the cycle, whose alternating long and short pieces seek to reconcile—as hinted at in the opening micro story, where “post-industrial subjects” are incapable of genuine connection as a consequence of their excruciating need to be liked by other people—the inherent pretentiousness and insufficiency of (post)modern language in its attempts to bring together the lived realities of subjects.
5The haunting presence of alterity in Brief Interviews is stylistically distinctive if compared to Wallace’s earlier writings, but it remains a thematic token of how his fiction “returns regularly to certain values: those of paying attention (to ourselves, to each other, to our surroundings), of exteriority in the face of an urge to retreat into solipsism, of shattering illusions of autonomy, of a desire to bridge the gap between self and other” (Jansen 56). This last desire, one of the most apparent in the highly ironic Brief Interviews, is carefully woven into all the aforementioned stories, being perhaps most present in “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XXIV)” as a double-edged preoccupation: bridging the gap between self and other, Wallace comes to evince, may also expose the self to violence and deception, rendering the subject’s self-image defenseless before potentially irrevocable forms of psychological damage.
6Following Paul Ricoeur’s twofold understanding of identity in Oneself as Another (1996), “Porousness (XXIV)” will be made to demonstrate how some of the subtlest forms of psychological damage pose a great danger to children’s healthy development, in particular at early ages, due to their capacity to alter their enduring sense of self. Consequentially, the illusion of identity unfurls as being not only necessary to the constitution of functional subjectivity, but as standing at the core of the subject’s capability to be hurt. As the tale turns the face—eulogized token of people’s humanity and the antechamber of ethics in Levinasian philosophy (1961)—into the very weapon through which the aggression is perpetrated, the face’s very call to good action as derived from the susceptibility of the other is interrogated. Drawing on Johan Galtung’s renowned taxonomy of violence (1969), it will be made apparent that in “Porousness (XXIV)” a child’s visage turns into a weapon with the ability to inflict psychological damage upon its victim and, through its ill-natured effect on the trusting other, can and does traumatically reduce his future potentialities to configure and imagine ways of being.
- 3 Originally published as “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XXI).”
- 4 Originally published as “Another Example of the Porousness of Various Borders (VI): Projected But N (...)
7Wallace’s “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XI),”3 “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (VI)”4 and “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XXIV)” draw on a leitmotif common to the three similarly named stories in Brief Interviews: self-awareness; and, more specifically, self-awareness as prompted by the other’s bedeviling perspective on the self. These three remarkably brief pieces are closely related to “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature”—originally entitled “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (VIII)” before being renamed after Richard Rorty’s famous book-length critique on modern analytic philosophy and republished in the later collection Oblivion (2004)—as well as to “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XII),” distributed in the US edition of Esquire in November 1998 and republished as part of Brief Interviews under the title “The Devil Is a Busy Man,” a heading shared with a later story in the book. The omnipresence of parental figures in the selected stories invites the interpretation that the porous borders to which their titles refer are not only the faces around which the tales often revolve, but those of mother and father figures, whose permeable attitudes and (in)actions are made to condition the development and worldview of the stories’ children.
8Before diving into “Porousness (XXIV),” some context pertaining to the other four “Porousness” stories and the web of interweaving patterns that they establish should be provided. Beyond having shared a nearly identical title at some moment in their publication histories, several underlying themes arise when considering the “Porous Borders” pieces as a set. These themes not only refer to the interpersonal relations that Wallace’s fiction so frequently forces to collapse by means of the many linguistic absences that punctuate it, but also to the ever-playful relationship between self and other, to the ways in which both expression and speech can be rendered dysfunctional by personal circumstance and to the potentially catastrophic consequences that these forms of dysfunctionality may carry with them. As Adam Kelly has convincingly suggested, these stories’ porous borders present a “challenge . . . to the transmission of ‘univocal information between two full-fledged subjects’” (87), and the characters in them often find themselves either unable to communicate or, on the contrary, forced into acknowledgement and empathy by some manner of successful, twisted communication whose effects on the self end up proving to be irreversibly detrimental.
9“Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XI),” the first of five in being published, although originally numbered differently (see footnote 3), offers a prominent example of the latter scenario. This short story introduces a first-person protagonist who becomes hypersensitive to his own sense of sight as a consequence of having dreamt about being blind. The pain derived from his newly developed hyper-awareness of his perceptive capacities, however, only comes about upon being forced into awareness by the other:
As in all those other dreams, I’m with somebody I know but don’t know how I know them, and now this person suddenly points out to me that I’m blind. . . . Or else it’s in the presence of this person that I suddenly realize I’m blind. (Wallace, Brief Interviews 29; emphasis added)
10The revelation causes the narrator to cry, even though he is told by this dreamt-of other that doing so “will hurt [his] eyes” (29). After waking up, he goes on with his day feeling terribly sad about this dream, unable to stop thinking about how his newly developed knowingness is “tiring as hell” (30), and he eventually decides to leave work early due to the insufferable empathy that the experience has incited in him. Once home, he goes back to bed, where he may dream of the possibility of his own blindness once more, and the story hence begins again.
11Perhaps the most remarkable image in the tale is that of the crying narrator, whose outburst initiates a cycle that causes self-awareness to grow progressively more acute: the more he cries, the more he becomes aware of his sense of sight; the more he becomes aware of such a sense, the more lurid his crying. This recurring urgency towards self-awareness and the inescapability of it will be one of the most poignant images pertaining to the self-other relationship as presented in these stories, reappearing in a different manner in “Porousness (XXIV),” and also clearly paralleling Wallace’s own recollection of his early panic attacks as described by his biographer, D. T. Max: “he saw that they [his panic attacks] quickly became endless loops, where he worried that people would notice he was panicking, and that in turn would make him panic more” (12). To these unending loops and their many intricacies Wallace’s fiction repeatedly returns, both in the “Porousness” stories and elsewhere—for instance with the paradoxical loop that leads Neal, the protagonist in “Good Old Neon” (2001), to think of himself as inherently fraudulent, or with David Cusk’s childhood story in The Pale King (2011), where we are presented with a similar cycle of anxiety, here triggered by the character’s inability to control his copious sweating. In evoking a numbered series of tales, the very titles of these stories seem to attest to the infinite nature of all such cycles, contributing to Wallace’s apology of the deliberately “unfinished,” as has been claimed to inhere to the whole of Brief Interviews (Morsia 81).
12“Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” published as part of Oblivion, is a first-person, introspective narrative featuring one of the most patent porous borders that take the form of faces in Wallace’s short fiction. In the tale, a surgery gone wrong leaves the narrator’s mother disfigured so that her visage appears to be that of somebody who is “insanely frightened at all times” (Wallace, Oblivion 182), a condition which she soon tries to remedy by getting more cosmetic surgery. This later operation, however, only manages to leave her worse off than she was at the outset. The focal moment of hyperrealist self-awareness as triggered by foreign input does not come about when she beholds the terrified expression of those around her as she is escorted by the protagonist to her attorney’s office (183), nor when the other passengers turn to look at the window before her in search of the source of her alarming expression (185), nor in the “worse-case scenario . . . occurring if one confronts some young duo of punks or hostile organisms in the opposing seat whose reaction to Mother might be an aggressive challenging stare” (189), but at a much earlier stage, when she sees herself reflected in a mirror after the first intervention, now turned into an other-to-be-assimilated. Here the reaction of the woman is unintelligible to her son’s outside perspective; he concludes that “one could at first not ascertain whether the face’s expression was a reaction to what she saw in the mirror or if it itself was what she saw and this was the stimulus causing the noises” (185). But then, in a sudden change of viewpoint, the mother’s own take on the matter momentarily bursts into the narrative by means of an omniscient, third-person voice, forcing the fiction’s very use of language to collapse as a way to reflect her uncertainty and her shattering sense of self:
Mother . . . could herself not ascertain at first if the look of insane terror was the response or the stimulus and if it was a response then a response to what in the mirror if the response itself was the expression. (185)
13This is the only instance where Mother’s identity—that of a woman ostracized from her community as a consequence of her disfigured face—is given any privileged form of attention. The son, however, on which the short story actually focuses, provides in his coldly reflective account of the events a manifest instance of empathy towards the seemingly alien, both by means of presenting himself as his mother’s protector and as a caretaker of spiders, to whose study he dedicates most of his time. Further, the narrator himself and his most peculiar use of language confer upon the tale a sense of uncanniness, as it repeatedly switches from recollections of the disastrous surgery to a returning past episode involving a nine-year-old who had fallen through the roof of the narrator’s garage, where he had been bitten to death by the latter’s collection of lethal arachnids—a boy towards whom the protagonist is incapable of articulating any form of empathy. It is through these recurring memories that he fails to escape the cage of consciousness which has been claimed to underlie Oblivion as a collection (Boswell, “Constant” 168), and which, one could go so far as to maintain, illuminates the entirety of Wallace’s work as a writer. Furthermore, it is the question of consciousness, ever-present in the selected stories, that speaks of Wallace’s narrative voices most appropriately, as it is an alteration of some sort in one’s ability for consciousness that often triggers Wallace’s dark epiphanies. In these moments, being hyperaware of the self’s position as part of the world menaces to erase the other entirely from one’s own perspective, regardless of that perspective having been erected as a response to the other, the very other who often appears as barely a trace in Wallace’s recherché language; regardless of that very other proving to be that which the self so ferociously and irremediably needs.
14“The Devil Is a Busy Man,” first published as “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XII),” features a capitalized “Daddy” presented in a similar fashion to the character of Mother in “Philosophy.” Once again, the narrative voice is that of a child, who explains how his father regularly puts notices up in the Trading Post paper in order that other people take the items he no longer needs. The observing narrator notices how the potential buyers behave capriciously whenever his father tries to give the items for free, their faces “all closed up like at cards and they’d walk around the thing and poke it with their toe and go Where’d you all get it at what’s the matter with it how come you want shed of it so bad” (Wallace, Brief Interviews 59), whereas asking an insignificant amount of money in exchange for the item would cause them to
scarce even look at the item and press on Daddy to take the 5 or $10 right away before any other folks could take it. . . . Their faces was different and their wife’s faces in the truck, fine and showing teeth and him with a [sic] arm around the Mrs. and a wave at Daddy as they back out. (59-60)
15This short story offers one of the many instances of Wallace’s ever-present preoccupation with consumerism and pretension in post-industrial society, a concern common to the great majority of his published works. The narrator’s focus on the faces of each potential purchaser and the language that they use, on the other hand, not only reinforces the apperception that both visage and language correspond to the porous borders to which the stories continually return, but also speaks of a certain directionality concerning these works’ take on familial relations. It is the children that appear in several of the stories, after all, who either manage to grasp something pertaining to the adult world’s mechanics as it is filtered through the pores of facial and linguistic expression, or suffer some form of psychological violence that goes unnoticed by the parents, or even, as is the case in “Porousness (VI),” damage that is directly prompted by the parents’ negligence.
16It is precisely in “Porousness (VI)” that we find the child’s perspective erased from the tale. This short story, just over a hundred words in length, solely provides an excerpt of the two parents’ discussion over an upcoming divorce. The lengthy subtitle to the ironically succinct story, initially reading “Projected But Not Improbable Transcript of Author’s Parents’ Marriage’s End, 1971” on the spine of Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and later becoming “Reconstructed Transcript of Mr. Walter D. (‘Walt’) DeLasandro Jr.’s Parents’ Marriage’s End, May 1956” in Brief Interviews, brings the missing child—first a fictionalized Wallace, then a boy named Walter—into the story, where the arguing parents fill in his absence by means of language as they flip a coin to see who will be taking care of the boy thence onwards. The appeal to the “projected” or “reconstructed” nature of the transcript, common to both versions of the story, points directly towards the possibility that the child himself, now an adult, is responsible for the writing of the fiction, an idea supported by the original title and which also implies that the recorded conversation is likely to have been overheard by the boy. Thus, the privacy granted by the frail border of an intimate conversation collapses yet again, and through its pores, the realization that neither parent wishes to stay with the child floods into the life of the latter. The effects of such a deluge remain one of Brief Interviews’ many silences, but it is safe to presume, provided the concern with self-awareness that the three “Porousness” stories explicitly presented as such in Brief Interviews share, that the aforementioned revelation triggered feelings of profound unwantedness in the boy, irremediably altering the course of his journey towards socialization and self-discovery.
17In Oneself as Another (1992), Paul Ricoeur distinguishes two major meanings of identity, tracing them back to the Latin roots ipse and idem. In his account, idem identity (mêmeté) is characterized by the prevalence of sameness in time, thence constituting the ‘I,’ whereas ipse identity (ipséité), freed from such a requirement, constitutes the mutable category ‘Self.’ This dualistic outlook on identity sets sameness in direct opposition to selfhood, the two being indispensable approaches to any consideration on identity that wishes to escape the many aporias that contemporary studies on the matter recurrently encounter. A given human subject’s identity must, it follows, be understood in a two-fold manner. On the one hand, Ricoeur attests to a part of each person’s subjectivity which remains unchanged throughout our lives, much as we may age—it is thus that one identifies oneself as being in an old picture, for instance; as being the same person as that one. On the other hand, he points to the identitarian elements attached to each human subject that remain mutable as one ventures through existence—these being those to which we refer when we speak of selfhood. Ricoeur’s schematic distinction, however, is blurred under specific circumstances, and the relationship between identity-as-sameness and identity-as-selfhood becomes a troubling one in response, vulnerable to forms of tension that spring directly from the subject’s own understanding of her or his identity as linguistically inscribed in these two categories.
18“Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XXIV),” the short story closing Brief Interviews, illustrates these very tensions. The tale follows the monologic reflections of its protagonist, a boy potentially suffering from some form of gelotophobia (i.e. fear of being laughed at), as his mother gives him a haircut in the kitchen and he is face-to-face with his twin brother, subjected to his constant mockery and unable to move. The boy stares at his sibling’s inescapable face throughout—a face which “less mimed than lampooned my own [the protagonist’s], made instantly distended and obscene whatever position my own face’s pieces assumed” (Wallace, Brief Interviews 273)—and progressively grows more anxious as his brother’s gestures become unconventional and scornful. The visual mockery of the sibling ridicules the protagonist’s facial expressions by misrepresenting them to absurdity, making them appear impudently inappropriate. Taking his twin brother to be an identical copy of himself, the narrator sees in the face before him “the burlesque of a wet hysteria” (273) which he interprets to be his own. Self-awareness here becomes the source of the self’s corruption; a self which will be thenceforth wholly reconsidered, haunted by the realization of its horror as revealed by the other. Thus “[t]he maddening self-consciousness and hyperarticulacy that sometimes seem like mere tics of Wallace’s prose become . . . the absolutely faithful reflection of a consciousness that knows itself too well, and is disgusted by what it knows” (Kirsch 205). This uncanny reappropriation of the Greek aphorism “know thyself” not only speaks of Wallace’s mannerisms as a writer, but also of his treatment of the recurring themes in his fiction. “Porousness (XXIV)” is a perfect instance of this, as it presents a protagonist who, over the course of a few lines, develops a new sense of self-consciousness by means of experiencing the other before him, and finds in that very other a source of insurmountable self-hatred.
19The dialogic nature of fiction which Bakhtin so poignantly diagnosed as supporting our every distinction between self and other in literature (352) and which Wallace’s own thought echoed by firmly maintaining throughout his career that “writing is an act of communication between one human being and another” (Supposedly 144), is in this short story cycle assaulted by means of an explicit lack in language. This absence is most evident in the title stories, where the interviews are conducted without a transcription of the interviewer’s perspective, but does not escape “Porousness (XXIV),” where any insight on the brother’s motives is left out of the fiction. Here the other is merely a face in which the most loathsome version of the protagonist’s self is inscribed by means of a contracted understanding of “copying”: “for we called it that” (Wallace, Brief Interviews 272). Insofar as the two boys agreed to understand “copying” as such, the specular nature of the face beheld is also instituted, linguistically, as part of the story: because the brother is taken to be the same as, or, identical to, the narrator, the latter’s defective reflection as provided by the other’s face becomes a source of violence from which he must escape. Hence the reason why he desperately “attempts by expression alone to make Mum look up from me [the protagonist] and see him” (273), obsessed as he is “with escaping solipsistic loneliness by communicating with another consciousness” (Natalini 44) but failing to do so and, in not succeeding, falling prey to the trap of the presented self’s inexorable horror.
20The cyclic nature of self-awareness as previously introduced in “Porousness (XI)” becomes in both stories a source of agony for the characters, as they experience their inability to detain the unrestrainable flow of damaging input originating in the other. In “Porousness (XXIV),” moreover, Wallace explicitly points at the source of the traumatic experience; he writes: “I saw in his twin face . . . the gross and pitiless sameness, the distortion in which there is, tiny, at the center, something cruelly true about the we who leer and woggle at stick necks and concave skulls, goggling eyes that swell to the edges” (Wallace, Brief Interviews 273). It is sameness, and not otherness nor selfhood, that is responsible for the pain of the subject; unsolicited, artificial sameness turned into a form of (identitarian) aggression as it is being forced upon another in the form of compulsory misrecognition. The illusion of sameness as provided by the other’s expression thus becomes a form of enforcedly visible, direct, psychological violence, as would be inscribed in Johan Galtung’s renowned typology (169). The face of the other, which Emmanuel Levinas understood as a token of their humanity, and thus as one which “does not negate the same, does not do violence to it” (203; emphasis added) turns Wallace into both attacker and weapon; into the irreducible proof that the other is as vulnerable to the self as the self is to him and the means by which one is able to assault the other.
- 5 By using “proper identifications” in this context, I intend to refer exclusively to those whose eff (...)
21The nature of such an assault is nonetheless a matter demanding further discussion: Galtung’s renowned definition of violence posits it as a form of influence by which human beings’ “somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations” (168). The imperfect mirroring of the facial expressions of the story’s main character, it follows, unfolds as a violent act insofar as there exists a manifest difference between the perfected, non-limiting understanding of the protagonist’s self (the potential)—to which he could have arrived at through “proper” identifications and projections5—and the impeding consequences of the performed parody of his twin brother (the actual), by reason of which he incurs in self-negation: because he wishes not to exist as that which is presented before him, he ends up “giving up the ghost completely for a blank slack gagged mask’s mindless stare—unseen and -seeing—into a mirror [he] could not know or feel [him]self without” (Wallace, Brief Interviews 273). Understood as a form of psychological violence, the twin brother’s mimicry qualifies as “brainwashing . . . that serve[s] to decrease mental potentialities” (Galtung 169). Further, the overpowering authority of his distortedly mirrored self, once it has been naturalized as the protagonist’s true sense of being, is emphasized by means of the very last sentence: “No not ever again” (Wallace, Brief Interviews 273), through which he negates the very possibility that he may undo the psychological damage resulting from the traumatic experience; that he may unsee his face in his twin brother’s; that he may appeal to his mutable ipse identity, following Ricoeur (2, 116), to grow out of the unsolicited, imposed image of himself with which his brother has irremediably presented him.
22This very last sentence serves yet another purpose, its multifaceted nature being common to that of most closing remarks in Brief Interviews, for it functions as though it were a commissive speech act in the form of “keeping one’s word,” a phrase employed by Ricoeur as an example of how the subject may attempt to “stand as a challenge to time, as a denial of change” (124), pugnaciously trying to transform her or his ipse identity into idem identity. To this struggle responds the narrator’s use of language, as he speaks of the brother’s mockery as “copying” (Wallace, Brief Interviews 272), a term which, by definition, refers to a process by which sameness is replicated ad infinitum. Thus, as the subject claims that he will resist the passing of time and the changes that it may naturally trigger in his “self,” he establishes a form of compromise to the tormenting bias that has been imposed on his sense of identity by means of a face. In registering the experience as a traumatic one, then, the self is turned inwardly and crystallizes into the illusion of a “same” whose potential alteration in the future will be conditioned by a series of obstacles springing directly from the moment of painful self-awareness which the subject has derived from (mis)identification with the parodying other.
23In this manner, Wallace appears to be indirectly attacking the notoriously positive meaning that the face has in Levinasian philosophy, where it acquires religious significance. The ethical relation underlying the face-to-face encounter, by which the face of the other, in all its vulnerable, infinite givenness, is presented before the self, is in this short story corrupted by the identification of an eerie same in the very other whose gaze the self meets. As though he were a funhouse mirror, the protagonist’s twin brother mimics the former’s every action to farcicality, triggering an experience where sameness and selfhood are blurred into an insolvable indeterminacy into which the main character inscribes his identity. Trapped in a vicious circle of misidentifications, he becomes more agitated as his brother parodies his facial expressions, and his brother’s ill-natured mimicry becomes more exaggerated in response, instituting a never-ending cycle through which the “seen” is incessantly ingrained on the protagonist’s identity. The original responsibility for the other, which Levinas claims precedes ontology and which emerges from the face as an irreducible moment of infinity—as “a source from which all meaning appears” (299)—makes of the brother’s mimicry the unethical act by default. By perverting his own face to exert preposterous violence upon the other, the most unavoidable claim behind Levinasian ethics is twice corrupted: mainly by twisting the face’s very nature so that it will take advantage of its freedom to lie, a freedom which “already presuppose[s its] absolute authenticity” (202) far beyond the categories of deceit and veracity, but also by using that very authenticity to attack the other; to violate the appeal to one’s humanity that his face’s immeasurability as a gate to infinity necessarily conveys. The mocking brother thus resists the expression of the protagonist, whose helplessness defies his very ability for power—“mon pouvoir de pouvoir” (Levinas 198)—and, knowing “how I [the protagonist] hated it” (Wallace, Brief Interviews 273), chooses to violently exert his power over the other, the face considered.
24This sense of absolute authenticity in which the face is imbued turns it into the most apparent means by which to inflict psychological violence on others. Since, following Levinas, it appeals to our humanity and is taken to be irreducibly authentic as a consequence, what is deceitfully presented to us by means of facial expression is granted a privileged, influential position as self-given-to-us, and is thus favored over all other visual input that may move inwardly into the subject and affect the self’s very articulation. As Mary K. Holland convincingly suggests of the entire short story cycle, “Porousness (XXIV)” “enact[s] the estrangement of the self and suggest[s] that only in placing discrete selves in conjunction, connection, and proximity to each other can anything meaningful and beyond the self arise” (111). It is the dialogic relation that the self establishes with the other that makes it possible for each of their hermetic positions to become identitarian—hence the relational nature that identity maintains throughout Wallace’s fiction, greatly reminiscent of Bakhtinian thought and echoing his ultimate contentions that “‘self’ is dialogic,” and that, as a consequence, “[t]he event of existence has the nature of dialogue” (Holquist 19-27).
25This dialogical other, however, much as it unfolds as the source of transcendental meaning, also ceases to be an other upon being interpreted to convey the infinity contained by the face of the self rather than his own; a hideous face speaking of an infinity beyond all humanity by virtue of which both self and other are eventually denied their status as ontological categories. By commodifying the other as a doppelgänger of the self, phagocytizing him and assimilating the tormenting image that he provides into the subject’s very identity, the narrator of this short story, as happens repeatedly through Brief Interviews in particular and Wallace’s fictional oeuvre in general, escapes into solipsism: the other thence becomes not an-other but a mere image of my-self. His narratological escape into solipsism triggers the cyclical nature of the pain: because the narrator conceives his twin brother to be but a reflection of his own being, he cannot but infinitely replicate the exaggerated image before him, acting himself as another mirror—a “mirror I [the protagonist] could not know or feel myself without” (Wallace, Brief Interviews 273). The Nietzschean hall of mirrors thus folds in on itself, and identity is confined within its glassy walls. Encaged in such a manner, identity as selfhood is eradicated in favor of identity as sameness; or, rather, in favor of the idea of identity as sameness conceived by the protagonist, one which he will cyclically perpetrate by means of confirming his worst assumptions about who he believes to be in the face mirroring his own, reflecting himself as image thereafter.
26The solipsistic assimilation of the other as mirror also introduces a potentially narcissistic component into the narrative, already present in several other stories, most notably in the long-titled “On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand, the Acclaimed New Young Off-Broadway Playwright’s Father Begs a Boon.” In this short story, a dying father occupies the central position throughout, speaking to his son—of whom we know only what is stated in the title—of “the father’s needs, the father’s pain, the father’s words” (Holland 115) and the father’s feelings of profound disgust towards him, born with the baby himself, which the father wrongly and egotistically justifies by means of criticizing the needy nature of the child and his solipsistic “sense of utter entitlement” (Wallace, Brief Interviews 222), thus exposing “his own relentless infantile need and solipsism” (Holland 115). In “Porousness (XIV),” on the other hand, the protagonist comes to reduce the nature of his brother as unintelligibly other to a comprehensible but false re-presentation of what he looks like from an outside perspective, a re-presentation which the narrator takes to traumatically speak of who he is in a narcissistic turn into himself. With both parents unable to come to his aid and his brother’s mimicry being inescapable throughout the story, the narrator’s solipsistic retreat acquires a formally narcissistic undertone as the tale unfolds: only the protagonist’s consciousness can be attested to be present, the brother’s face having become a facsimile of his own and his voice having been obliterated from the narrative. The narrator’s account of the events will only find dialogical relief if interpreted as a desperate call for help directed to the reader; a reader who will herself be doomed to fail in her every attempt to neutralize the damage that the narrator’s self will inevitably encounter by the end of the story.
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27In his 1991 article “The Self in Literature,” Irving Howe maintained that, under certain circumstances, the self has the potential to “falsify itself through parody, becoming a masquerade of faked inspirations, hasty signals of untested intuitions” (59). Through Wallace’s porous borders, and in the last of the selected stories most manifestly, there is evidence of the role that the other as self-configuring entity might play in activating and forcing the parodic miswriting of the self. Upon the appearance of such patterns of misidentification and contemptuous self-concealment, sameness—the immutable sense of self by which one inscribes one’s identity as stable unit into timely existence—may be transformed into the means by which a ferocious outburst of assumed similarity originating beyond the subject comes to attack the subject’s understanding of itself from within. The pain experienced by the protagonist of “Porousness (XXIV)” originates from the intersection between his blind belief that his gestures truly resemble the unsocialized, exaggerated versions of them as provided by the copying visage of the other, and the realization that he may never gain knowledge of himself-as-perceived but through reflection and representation. The question underlying the entirety of the story, “Is this what others see when they look at me?” becomes for the narrator a source of insurmountable anxiety. By taking his brother to be a mirror of himself, he interprets his face’s noxious mockery as speaking of his “true identity”—the unchanging fantasy of an ever-expanding, inalterable sameness—and thus provides an affirmative answer (“yes, that which is presented before me is what others see when they look at me”) to the quandary which, as he maintains in the fiction, will forever accompany him in the form of trauma.
28Something beyond the face itself springs from the knowledge that the face is copying one’s own. This something manifests itself in the form of psychological violence, seemingly exerted upon the self in a narcissistic manner by means of a retreat into solipsism. As often in Wallace’s fiction, his carefully weaved effort to dissect the intricate patterns of consciousness remains in “Porousness (XXIV)” a most disquieting reminder that, much as we need the Levinasian other to become ethical beings, in our advent as such the anti-ethics of the face also springs into possibility for both our phenomenologically exposed selves as well as this of every other surrounding us. It is in knowing it to be so that the unsettling horror of the fiction trespasses the porous frontier of the text and manages to potentially change readers. Diving into Wallace’s work, we are frequently disturbed by the realization that fiction can be a cage: that literature may imprison us within itself and force us to look inwardly in search of those things which we least wish to face; in search of the other-image that traps us. For, as Zadie Smith brilliantly puts it, “[t]he difference is awareness (and this is always the difference in Wallace)” (233).