Time of the Crystal, Time of Becoming: A Deleuzian Reading of David Foster Wallace’s “The Soul Is Not a Smithy” PDF Free Download
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NTU Studies in Language and Literature 29
Number 39 (June 2018), 29-51
DOI: 10.6153/NTUSLL.201806_(39).0002
Time of the Crystal, Time of Becoming:
A Deleuzian Reading of David Foster Wallace’s
“The Soul Is Not a Smithy”
Shu-yu Lee
Ph.D., Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
National Taiwan University
Abstract
“The Soul Is Not a Smithy,” one of the stories in David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion,
is a first-person narrative that opens with the promise to recount a classroom hostage
situation he went through as a nine-year-old child but immediately disintegrates into
multiple, seemingly irrelevant narrative threads. Upon its publication, the story baf-
fled many reviewers, who are left wondering “who is telling this story? Where are we?
What exactly is happening?” (Mason). Although recent criticism has suggested vari-
ous explanations for the obfuscating narration, a detailed analysis of the organization
of the story is still lacking. This essay aims to tease out the underlying structure of
Wallace’s short story from the perspective of Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “crystal-
line narration.” In this Deleuzian reading, “Smithy” expresses an anti-representational
aesthetics that, instead of representing the hostage crisis as a pre-exisitng, self-identical
referent independent of its representation, creates it as a virtual-actual becoming, an
ongoing process rather than a fully-formed object.
This essay will first present a brief introduction to the Deleuzian crystalline narra-
tion and two concepts that it presupposes: time as duration and the ontology of be-
coming. I will then discuss the cinematographicity of “Smithy,” which will provide a
mandate for interpreting Wallace’s short story from the perspective of film theory. The
bulk of the paper will be devoted to interpreting “Smithy” as a crystalline narration
and analyzing how its reconceptualization of time creates the hostage event as a be-
coming.
Keywords: David Foster Wallace, “The Soul Is Not a Smithy,” Oblivion, Gilles Deleuze,
Cinema 2: The Time-Image, crystalline narration, time
30 NTU Studies in Language and Literature
晶體時間、生成時間：
大衛•福斯特•華萊士〈靈魂不是個鐵工坊〉的
德勒茲式讀法
李書雨
國立臺灣大學外國語文學系博士
摘 要
大衛‧福斯特‧華萊士短篇小說集《遺忘》中的〈靈魂不是個鐵工坊〉第一
人稱敘述者開場便宣稱要陳述九歲時經歷的一場教室人質危機，但隨即故事便分
裂成多個、幾乎不相關的故事線。因此，〈靈魂〉在出版之初讓許多評論者極為
困惑，認為其並未遵守基本的敘事原則。晚近的研究雖然對華萊士刻意製造的混
亂提出解釋，但還未能細究這篇故事深層的組織架構。本文試圖從德勒茲「晶體
敘事」（crystalline narration）的觀點來分析〈靈魂〉的敘事結構，認為此小說並
非既存、自我同一的人質事件的再現，而是將人質事件創造為一不斷「生成」
（becoming）的過程。
本文首先說明德勒茲的晶體敘事理論，為其基礎的「綿延」（duration）時間
概念，以及「生成」的本體論，接著討論〈靈魂〉的電影影像性，為從德勒茲電
影理論角度來解讀華萊士的小說建立合理性。本文主要部分將探討〈靈魂〉如何
可說是一反再現的晶體敘事，以及此小說的時間觀如何促使人質事件的生成。
關鍵詞： 大衛‧福斯特‧華萊士、〈靈魂不是個鐵工坊〉、《遺忘》、德勒茲、《電
影2：時間－影像》、晶體敘事、時間
Time of the Crystal, Time of Becoming 31
Time of the Crystal, Time of Becoming:
A Deleuzian Reading of David Foster Wallace’s
“The Soul Is Not a Smithy”
Shu-yu Lee
“The Soul Is Not a Smithy,” the second story in David Foster Wallace’s
Oblivion, is a first-person narrative that opens with the unnamed narrator
claiming, “This is the story of how Frank Caldwell, Chris DeMatteis, Mandy
Blemm, and I became, in the city newspaper’s words, the 4 Unwitting Hos-
tages, and of how our strange and special alliance and the trauma surrounding
its origin bore on our subsequent lives and careers as adults later on” (67).1
The ensuing narrative fulfills its promise of recounting a classroom hostage
situation only tangentially, bifurcating into a plethora of narrative threads
seemingly irrelevant to the central event.
Upon its publication, the narrative style of “Smithy” and the story col-
lection Oblivion baffled many critics. In a review of the book, Wyatt Mason
remarks, “The typical mode of their narration is digressive” and “the defining
quality of these fictions is the degree to which they leave the reader unsure
about very basic narrative issues: who is telling this story? Where are we?
What exactly is happening?” Writer Chad Harbach describes the collection as
consisting of “distinct, asymptotic plot lines that . . . never quite converge.
There is a superabundance of data to be sifted through, all of it accurate but
much of it irrelevant or unmarked,” which gives the reader “the growing sus-
picion that one can never really know what happened.” James Wood express-
es a similar sentiment when he characterizes the stories in Oblivion as the
“shaggy-dog story” (29).
However, despite its apparent lack of organization, “Smithy” is not just a
willfully sloppy manuscript of randomly compiled fragments. There is, so to
speak, method in its madness. In a recent essay, Chloe Harrison argues that the
backgrounding of the proclaimed subject matter and the foregrounding of di-
gressive storylines is meant to provoke author-reader interaction where readers
1 Wallace wrote “The Soul Is Not a Smithy” in 1997 as part of the project that would later be
published in 2011 as the unfinished novel, The Pale King (Hering, “Too Much”). The novel’s
theme of paying attention and the motif of white-collar workplace boredom see seminal exploration
in the short story.
32 NTU Studies in Language and Literature
have to actively decide to which narrative thread to direct their attention (66).
Marshall Boswell attributes the seeming lack of focus and structure of
“Smithy” to Wallace’s “imitative fallacy” (Boswell, “Monologue” 165). In an
attempt to depict the condition of consciousness of the information age, Wal-
lace bombards readers with a “whirlwind of useless, alienating, and unremit-
tingly boring data” instead of focusing on the hostage incident (165). Inter-
preting “Smithy” as a portrait of consciousness under traumatic circumstances,
Thomas Tracey argues that the digressions from the hostage narrative—chief
among which is a story the narrator imagines onto a mesh window, in the form
of a movie storyboard, during the classroom drama—represents a psychical
defense against the traumatic real-life situation (“Representations” 178).
While the purposefulness of the apparent chaos of “Smithy” has been
recognized by these recent critics, the rich aesthetic and ontological ideas that
inform the structure of the story has yet to be explicated through a detailed
analysis. In this essay, I will present a reading of “Smithy” from the perspec-
tive of Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “crystalline narration” to argue that
Wallace’s short story demonstrates an anti-representational aesthetics that,
instead of representing the hostage crisis as a pre-existing, self-identical ref-
erent independent of its representation, creates it as a virtual-actual becoming,
an ongoing process rather than a fully-formed object.
Reading Wallace through any philosophical framework inevitably brings
up the novelist’s own extensive engagement with philosophy in his upbringing,
formal education, and literary career. Son of philosophy professor James Don-
ald Wallace, Wallace majored in philosophy, as well as English, at Amherst
College. Later he enrolled briefly in a graduate program in philosophy at Har-
vard University. Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System, draws heavily
on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy. The title alludes to Aphorism 60 of
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, whereas the protagonist, Lenore
Stonecipher Beadsman, is intellectually preoccupied with Wittgenstein’s theory
of language as she searches for her missing great-grandmother, a former student
of the Austrian-British philosopher (Boswell, Understanding 23; O’Donnell 4).
Elsewhere Wallace makes explicit allusions to William James and
Richard Rorty, important figures of American pragmatism, the other of Wal-
lace’s major philosophical influences besides Wittgenstein (Tracey, “Forma-
tive” 158).2 In Infinite Jest, the tragicomic character Randy Lenz hides his
2 For the James’ influence on Wallace, see Evans. In an interview, Wallace praises James’s writings
for making him feel “intellectually, emotionally, spiritually . . . unalone” (“Salon” 62).
Time of the Crystal, Time of Becoming 33
emergency stash of cocaine in his hollowed-out copy of James’ Principles of
Psychology and The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion while applying—or
rather misapplying—James’ ideas of catharsis and resolution to his own vio-
lent stress relief routines (543-44). In Oblivion, the story collection that also
includes “Smithy,” Wallace names one story, “Philosophy and the Mirror of
Nature,” after Rorty’s 1979 book.
While giving Wittgenstein, James, and Rorty the prides of place, Wal-
lace namechecks other philosophers, often as a characterization tactic. For
instance, in the opening chapter of Infinite Jest, the protagonist Hal
Incandenza, in a college admission interview, mentions Kierkegaard, Camus,
Hobbes, Rousseau, and Hegel in rapid succession in an attempt to prove his
intellectual capabilities (12). Incidentally, Deleuze is also referenced in this
novel.3 Confessing under duress to the United States Office of Unspecified
Services about a lethally entertaining film, Molly Notkin, a “post-Marxist”
film studies PhD candidate, cites “M. Gilles Deleuze’s posthumous Incest and
the Life of Death in Capitalist Entertainment,” a fictional work that evidently
parodies Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia, to support her
opinion on the film (792).4 Having an unreliable character make the allusion,
which is, moreover, parodic in nature, Wallace is clearly using Deleuze not to
express his own philosophical affinity but to better characterize Notkin by
situating her within the French theory trend in the US academia of the early
1990s, when he was writing Infinite Jest. At any rate, as much as Deleuze’s
philosophy provides a valid perspective on Wallace’s fiction, I do not suggest
that Wallace was familiar with or drew inspiration from Deleuze’s philosophy.
This essay will first present a brief introduction to the Deleuzian crys-
talline narration and two concepts that it presupposes: time as duration and
the ontology of becoming. I will then discuss the cinematographicity of
“Smithy,” which will provide a mandate for interpreting Wallace’s short story
from the perspective of film theory.5 The bulk of the paper will be devoted to
interpreting “Smithy” as a crystalline narration and analyzing how its recon-
ceptualization of time creates the hostage event as a becoming.
3 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer of an earlier draft of the essay for suggesting a discussion
on Wallace’s allusion to Deleuze in Infinite Jest.
4 See Dini 28n13.
5 I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer of an earlier draft of the paper for pointing out the
importance of cinema to Wallace’s works, especially Infinite Jest, and for providing the helpful
suggestion that the paper includes a discussion on the pertinence of Deleuze’s film theory to
“Smithy.”
34 NTU Studies in Language and Literature
Deleuze develops his concept of the “crystalline narration” in Cinema 2:
The Time-Image to characterize a new kind of cinema appearing after World
War II. Classical cinema is characterized by the organic regime of image,
which, following the Platonic aesthetic scheme of the model and the copy,
assumes there is an antecedent, self-same reality that it represents. Organic
narration proceeds in accordance with sensory-motor schemata, where char-
acters “act . . . according to how they perceive the situation. Actions are
linked to perceptions and perceptions develop into actions” (Deleuze, Negoti-
ations 51). The “characters react to situations or act in such a way as to dis-
close the situation” (Deleuze, Cinema 127). The organic regime “is a regime
of localizable relations, actual linkages, legal, causal and logical connections”
(126-27). In other words, the organic narrative is a linear chain of actions and
reactions, causes and effects (Rodowick 84). Fundamental to the organic re-
gime is the commonsense spatio-temporal structure. Irrational, non-causal
actions deviating from commonsense reality are rationalized as flashback,
dream, hallucination, or imagination—in a word, presented as less than “re-
al,” and thus reintegrated into causal continuity and temporal linearity. Main-
taining a chronological, self-identical reality, the organic regime is cinema as
representation.
The crystalline regime is anti-representational insofar as it is founded on
a non-chronological conception of time. In Cinema 2, Deleuze puts forward a
three-dimensional model of time that appropriates Henri Bergson’s “duration”
(la durée), where the relationship between the present and the past is not se-
quential but paradoxical. Every present moment, when it is still present, is
also already past. Were it not so, the present would never pass and the future
would never come. Every present instant is both in the now and in the imme-
diate past. As Deleuze argues, “since the past is constituted not after the pre-
sent that it was but at the same time, time has to split itself in two at each
moment as present and past” (81). Therefore, time moves in two directions,
forming “two dissymmetrical jets, one of which makes all the present pass on,
while the other preserves all the past” (81).
The past is never gone but is preserved in itself: “all of the past coexists
with the new present in relation to which it is now past” (Deleuze, Difference
81-82). This reserve of past in general or the pure past is like an inverted cone
the tip of which is in contact with a shifting “plane of matter” whence comes
each new present (O’Sullivan 46). All the strata in the conic pure past have
different degrees of expansion and contraction, which do not correspond to its
chronological distance to the present. Rather, “a greater contraction means a
Time of the Crystal, Time of Becoming 35
closer relation to a person’s behavioral involvement with the world” in the
present (May 50). Constituting the tip of the cone, “each present present is
only the entire past in its most contracted state” (Deleuze, Difference 82).
This conception of time as duration is clearly not duration as a stretch of
time in which something lasts. Time is not a quantitative homogeneity measur-
able in units defined by the orbits of celestial bodies or the movements of the
hands on a clock—that is, time as a form of space. Time as duration is a quali-
tative multiplicity, “the continuous and unbroken flow of change and newness,”
as the moving plane of materiality ceaselessly brings about the present while
reshuffling the contemporaneous, diffused layers of past (Mueller 28).
Time as duration has an important ontological implication: being is be-
coming. “Becoming is the operation of self-differentiation,” whereas “[d]uration
is the ‘field’ in which difference lives and plays itself out” (Grosz 4). In this
sense, one can even say that “[d]uration is . . . another name for becoming”
(4). Everything is self-differentiating, constantly bifurcating into the present
and the past, the actual and the virtual. “What is actual is always a present,”
whereas the virtual is “the past in itself” (Deleuze, Cinema 78; Deleuze,
Proust 58). The actual is the mode of present perceptions and the actions de-
manded by these perceptions. The virtual departs from present exigencies into
not only memories but also dreams, fantasies, or any other realm where ele-
ments from different and even conflicting pasts mingle and combine, free
from the dictates of the moment.
“Our actual existence, then, whilst it is unrolled in time, duplicates itself
along with a virtual existence, a mirror image. Every moment of our life pre-
sents the two aspects, it is actual and virtual, perception on the one side and
recollection on the other” (Bergson qtd. in Deleuze, Cinema 79). Here per-
ception and recollection is not only psychological but also ontological. The
virtual is a multiplicity of ideal tendencies that partially actualizes itself on
the plane of matter while, at the same time, being transformed to some extent
by the actual in a relationship of reciprocal generation. Nothing is ever static
and self-identical and everything is a virtual-actual compound that keeps be-
coming with the scission and doubling of time.
The aesthetic corollary of the ontology of becoming is the crystalline
regime. The crystal does not represent a preexisting reality but directly pre-
sents the workings of time, which founds becoming. “What constitutes the
crystal-image is the most fundamental operation of time,” its scission into the
chronological actual and the non-chronological virtual (Deleuze, Cinema 81).
“The present is the actual image, and its contemporaneous past is the virtual
36 NTU Studies in Language and Literature
image, the image in a mirror” (79; emphasis in original). Like the physical
crystal, the crystal image involves at least two distinct images reflecting each
other. The crystal illustrates the doubling split of the actual and its virtu-
al—the present and the maximally contracted region of the past—at the tip of
the inverted cone of time. As such, the crystal image is not a copy of an orig-
inal, completed object but its latest becoming. In the crystalline regime, the
“description stands for its object, replaces it, both creates and erases it. . . . It
is now the description itself which constitutes the sole decomposed and mul-
tiplied object” (126). As it reveals the continual bifurcation of time, the crys-
tal abolishes the representational object while creating the object anew as a
virtual-actual compound ceaselessly emerging in time.
Reading “Smithy” through the lens of the Deleuzian crystalline narra-
tion raises the question of whether film theory can be applied to literary texts,
as the formal difference between literature and cinema is unignorable. On the
other hand, literariness and cinematographicity are never mutually exclusive.
Moreover, since postmodernity, cinema has exerted a significant influence on
literature. As Brian McHale observes in Postmodernist Fiction, “movie met-
aphors substitute for the language of novelistic narration and description,”
“film vocabulary is used . . . as a mode of notation for textual strategies,” and
“extended cinematic trope has . . . been applied to the text itself” (129). More
recently, Mirko Lino also attributes a “cinematic figurative expressivity” to a
number of postmodern novelists that include Wallace (185).
Cinema and other audiovisual media have as much bearing on Wallace’s
style as on his subject matter. Wallace frequently depicts film and television
in his fictions, with examples ranging from commercials like the “spectacular
collective Reunion commercial” starring all the actors that have ever appeared
in a McDonald’s commercial in “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its
Way” to the cable reality channel specializing in “moments of human an-
guish” and pain in the story “The Suffering Channel,” also collected in
Oblivion (“Westward” 235; “Suffering” 291). Wallace’s most sustained en-
gagement with film and television takes place in his best-known work, Infi-
nite Jest, whose title comes from the eponymous underground film cartridge
so entertaining that its viewers are literally unable to stop watching until they
die in front of the screen. Unlike these portraits of cinematic/televisual prod-
ucts, however, “Smithy” seems unburdened with satire. How are we to make
sense of this discrepancy?
To begin with, there is a crucial difference between the imaginary
“filmic storyboards” in “Smithy” and the above-mentioned audiovisual prod-
Time of the Crystal, Time of Becoming 37
ucts (“Smithy” 71). Wallace places entertainment and art on the opposite ends
of a continuum. Entertainment, epitomized by the lethal film in Infinite Jest,
gives viewers passive pleasure. “Entertainment’s chief job is to make you so
riveted by it that you can’t tear your eyes away,” as he told fellow writer Da-
vid Lipsky (Lipsky 79). As Philip Sayers points out, Wallace’s comment co-
heres with Roland Barthes’s characterization of commercial movie spectation
as hypnosis: the audience are “riveted to the representation” (Barthes qtd. in
Sayers 108). In contrast to entertainment, “art requires you to work” (Lipsky
174).6 And work is exactly what the imaginary film storyboards demand of
the narrator of “Smithy.” “These imagined constructions,” he avers, “were
difficult and concentrated work; the truth is that they bore little resemblance
to what Mrs. Claymore, Mrs.Taylor, Miss Vlastos, or my parents called day-
dreaming” (77). Actively imagined, the film storyboards are works of art ra-
ther than hypnosis-inducing entertainment. Despite his seemingly negative
stance toward audiovisual media, the real concern for Wallace is not film or
television per se but media products that induce passivity.
On the other hand, Wallace does express a pessimistic attitude toward
television through the temporal setting of the story.7 While “Westward the
Course of Empire Takes Its Way” is set in the early 1980s, “The Suffering
Channel” in 2001, and Infinite Jest in the early 21st century, “Smithy” harks
back to 1960, at least in most of its narrative threads. Although television has
become prevalent by this time, the deregulation and subsequent explosion of
the cable industry in the 1970s has yet to take place to make television syn-
onymous with audiovisual culture. Throughout “Smithy,” the narrator repeat-
edly compares his imaginary stories to cartoons and movies but never men-
tions television. By situating the narrator’s active filmic experience in a media
environment devoid of television, Wallace seems to suggest that television
fails to offer the active spectatorship that film can elicit.
Of all Wallace’s fictions, “Smithy” lends itself particularly well to an
interpretation through film theory because of its strong cinematographicity.
Cinematic tropes pervade one of the major narrative threads of the short story:
the “narrative fantasy” the narrator composes as a fourth grader during the
class when the hostage situation takes place (“Smithy” 92). Seated next to one
6 For a discussion on Wallace’s ideas of art, entertainment, and visual media, see the chapter “Visuality”
in Hering, Fiction and Form.
7 I thank an anonymous reviewer of an earlier draft of the essay for pointing out the importance of
the temporal setting of “Smithy” and for suggesting that I include a discussion on Wallace’s
ambivalence toward cinema and television.
38 NTU Studies in Language and Literature
of the two large windows in the classroom, the narrator spends the class im-
agining stories onto the 84 square panels formed by the wire mesh guard
mounted on the window. The narrator’s description of his view looking out
the window is distinctively visual. The Fishinger Secondary ballfield, he said,
is “much foreshortened” and “occupying only three squares at the window’s
lower left” (71). He seems to be looking through a camera lens as he de-
scribes that “there were several exposed rocks in the soccer fields, of which at
least half or more could be brought into calibrated view from my seat,” as
“calibration” refers to the removal of angle and scale distortions of camera
lenses (71). In fact, the narrator goes so far as to say that his classroom fanta-
sy takes the form of “filmic storyboards” or “privately imagined films’ or
cartoons’ storyboards” (71). In this formal setting, the fantasy consists of a
“split narrative” that “extends like arms or the radial spikes one often sees
around a cartoon sun”—a description that evokes a cinematic split-screen
montage (79).
The narrator appears not so much a story-teller as a movie-viewer. For
instance, at one point in the storyline about Cuffie, a puppy tricked by two
adult feral dogs into running away from home and then forced to enter a
squalid industrial pipe, he says, “Cuffie and the hardbitten feral dogs were
presumably still traversing the lengthy industrial pipe . . . , as for several con-
secutive panels there are depictions of the cement exterior of the pipe but no
visible activity or anything exiting the pipe at either end,” as if he is describ-
ing a film footage (88). Moreover, instead of saying that Cuffie is frightened
and unhappy, the narrator describes what seems like a close-up of the puppy’s
face: “The dog’s illustrated facial expression said it all. It conveyed that
Cuffie was very frightened and unhappy” (83).
The episode about the maiming of Mr. Simmons, the father of the blind
little girl Ruth Simmons, Cuffie’s owner, is also rendered in cinematic idioms.
Before reaching his arm into the Snow Boy snowplow to unclog the
snow-jammed machine, he forgets to disable the spark plugs first, as a
non-diegetic “arrow and dotted line at the intact spark plugs” in the panel
show (91). The moment the rotor blades become sufficiently cleared of snow,
the device suddenly springs back to life, cutting off Mr. Simmons’ arm in a
lurid panel showing “a horrifying full color spray of red snow and human
matter” (91). The descriptor “full color” would not adequately convey the
visual impact of the scene unless one places it in the context of cinema at the
time, the year 1960, when many movies were still in black and white and the
use of full colors was a prestigious feature. The narrator often seems to be
Time of the Crystal, Time of Becoming 39
describing his film-viewing experience, as when he says that “the whole
highspeed tableau is grainy and imperfectly seen because of all of the trees
and spiky undergrowth and the driving blizzard and huge drifts of wind driv-
en snow” (98). The moment his attention returns from the window pane to the
classroom “is somewhat like coming out of a movie theatre in the afternoon,
when the sunlight and sensory press of the street’s activity nearly stun you,”
an observation that further testifies to the filmic quality of the narrative fan-
tasy (101).
Cinematographicity also permeates the narrator’s account of the recur-
rent nightmares about “the reality of adult life” he had in childhood (103).
“The nightmares themselves always opened with a wide angle view of a
number of men at desks in rows in a large, brightly lit room or hall” (103). As
the nightmare proceeds, “the lens of perspective pulls suddenly back, and I
am one of them” (109). Like a zooming camera, “the dream’s perspective’s
view slowly moves further and further in until it is primarily me in view, in
closeup, with a handful of other desks’ men’s faces and upper bodies framing
me” (109). In all these descriptions, the visuality of the scenario is distinc-
tively cinematic.
The narrator not only recounts fantasies and dreams in cinematic terms
but also portrays scenes from real-life cinema. For two and a half pages, he
describes in great detail an episode from the 1973 movie The Exorcist (94-97).
This includes not only action sequences but also a horrifying flash frame of a
demonic face spliced into them—a cinematic image that continues to trauma-
tize the narrator in reality. With such prevalent cinematographicity and filmic
references, “Smithy” turns the page into a screen and renders the literary
cinematic.
Now that we have established the legitimacy of approaching “Smithy”
from a theoretical framework originally meant for film studies, we can ad-
dress the question of how Wallace’s short story is an anti-representational
crystalline narrative that creates the hostage crisis as a virtual-actual becom-
ing. First of all, “Smithy” presents a crystal of real-imaginary reciprocation.
The story opens with a three-page preamble detailing the layout of the class-
room where the hostage incident is to take place. The description of the back-
drop of the “real incident” then segues into an equally detailed one of the set-
ting of the “imagined constructions,” that is, the meshed window of the “nar-
rative fantasy” (84, 72, 92). At the sight of a big rottweiler mix and a smaller
brindle dog mating some distance away from the window, the then
nine-year-old narrator begins imagining a childlike tale about the puppy
40 NTU Studies in Language and Literature
Cuffie. Describing the scene where Cuffie is being coerced by the two thug-
gish feral dogs to walk along “the seedy east bank of the Scioto River, which
even in 1960 was already starting to smell bad above the Griggs Dam . . . ,
and which my father said he could remember being able to fish right out of
with a string and safety pin circa 1935,” the narrator makes the real and the
imaginary traverse each other in one sentence (82). Just as the small brindle
dog outside the window of the real classroom finds its imaginary reflection in
Cuffie, the river in the imaginary Cuffie’s story gets its real-life double in
Scioto River.
The real and the imaginary continue to resonate henceforth. After forc-
ing Cuffie to enter a foul-smelling cement pipe, the black feral dog walking
behind the puppy also leaps up into the pipe. Before he does, he casts “an
ominous look to either side” of him (84). The ominous atmosphere of the im-
aginary story is reflected by the turn of events at this moment in the class-
room reality, as Mr. Johnson, the substitute teacher of the Civics class, inex-
plicably inserts the word “KILL” into the text of the U.S. Constitution he is
copying onto the blackboard (84).
While the snowfall in the imaginary tale is “turning into a real snow-
storm,” Mr. Johnson begins to insert “KILL” and “KILL THEM” more fre-
quently between the words of the Constitution (84, 87, 87). Just when it
emerges that “something was now evidently wrong with Mr. Johnson’s face
and its expression,” things also begin going wrong in the storyboard: the
snowplow that Mr. Simmons was operating has stalled, which, as mentioned
before, will ultimately lead to the severing of Mr. Simmons’ arm (89).
So far the narrative has proceeded in two contemporaneous and mutu-
ally reflective series: the classroom events and the windowpane storyboard. In
the Deleuzian crystal, “the real and the imaginary, the physical and the men-
tal . . . continually followed each other, running behind each other and refer-
ring back to each other,” leading to the “coalescence of the actual image and
the virtual image” (Deleuze, Cinema 69). With a real and an imaginary story-
line closely reciprocating each other, “Smithy” is precisely such a narrative
crystal.
The crystalline narration of “Smithy” consists of more than two facets.
Nested in the narrator’s description of Mr. Simmons’ snowplow is another
real-imaginary crystal: “The Snow Boy was . . . little more than a modified
power lawnmower, which our neighbor Mr. Snead was proudly the first on
our street to get one of, and had turned it over for the neighborhood children’s
inspection after disabling the spark plugs” (Wallace, “Smithy” 89). Like the
Time of the Crystal, Time of Becoming 41
above-mentioned “Scioto River,” the “Snow Boy” is here presented in its dou-
bling crystal image astride the real and the imaginary. These single-sentence
crystals inside the larger crystal—composed of the spatio-temporal reality of
the hostage drama and the imaginary tale about Cuffie and the Simmons—turn
the narrative into a mise en abyme of real-imaginary, actual-virtual circuits.
The crystallization of the narrative intensifies from here, as the narrative
fantasy and the classroom events become increasingly violent synchronically.
By the time the narrative fantasy reaches the point when Mr. Simmons’ fore-
arm is chopped off by the Snow Boy machine, Mr. Johnson has written on the
chalkboard repetitions of “KILL THEM KILL THEM ALL,” with the pupils
whimpering in fear and consternation (91). As Mr. Johnson goes on to cover
the chalkboard with iterations of “KILL KILL KILL THEM ALL KILL THEM
DO IT NOW KILL THEM” in gradually larger letters, scaring the pupils into
crying, the events of the storyboard take an even darker turn (92). Ruth Sim-
mons is surrounded by her classmates ridiculing her for the crude statuette of
Cuffie she made; the exhaust pipe of Mrs. Simmons’ idling car gets blocked,
killing her with carbon monoxide poisoning; and Scraps, one of Cuffie’s bul-
lies, is being eaten alive by an army of mutant roaches (93-94). As the narra-
tor recalls, “I believe that the atmosphere of the classroom may have subcon-
sciously influenced the unhappy events of the period’s window’s mesh’s nar-
rative fantasy, which was now more like a nightmare” (92).
The image of Scraps’ violent death was so horrendous that the narrator
cuts off the storyboard abruptly, leaving the panel a “peripheral snapshot or
flash” (94). The imaginary peripheral snapshot prompts the narrator to dwell
on an equally traumatic real-life peripheral snapshot he would encounter later
as an adult: the flash of the demonic face of the character Father Karras in the
movie The Exorcist. The two nightmarish images make up another real-imaginary
circuit nested within the real/classroom-imaginary/storyboard narrative crystal.
The narrator continues with his storyboard. Mr. Simmons, blinded by
spurts of his own blood, stumbles headfirst into a pile of snowdrift. Mrs.
Simmons’ dead body is extracted from her car, which has been dug out of the
snow by two public workers. Unbeknownst to the workers, the narrator says,
is that the rear side of the house they are facing stands next to a clump of trees
abutting a group of knolls adjacent to the narrator’s school ballfield, “in
which even now the dominant rottweiler is again trying to mount the Sim-
mons’ lost dog, in the actual field through the classroom window” (99). In
one sentence, the imaginary house (near which lies Mrs. Simmon’s dead body)
steps out of the mirror into the narrator’s spatio-temporal reality, and yet this
42 NTU Studies in Language and Literature
reality (the mating of the rottweiler mix and the small brindle dog outside the
window) takes place in the imaginary Cuffie’s universe. Each of the real and
the imaginary—actual and virtual facets of the crystal—keeps “taking the
other’s role in a relation which we must describe as reciprocal presupposition,
or reversibility,” which joins the two sides paradoxically in an inexorable
fracture (Deleuze, Cinema 69).
When the narrator sees in his imaginary storyboard a close-up revealing
the statuette of Cuffie that Ruth made in class to be a half-human, half-beast
monster, Mr. Johnson standing in front of the blackboard in the real classroom
also assumes a monstrous appearance, looking “simultaneously electrocuted
and demonically possessed” (Wallace, “Smithy” 101). So far in the narrative,
the real and the imaginary have been “distinct and yet indiscernible” in their
incessant reversals into each other (Deleuze, Cinema 81). For instance, the
imaginary monster—the statuette of Cuffie—and the real monster—Mr.
Johnson—are not confused or identified with each other. However, the imag-
inary tale possesses such vividness and drama in its own right that readers
cannot dismiss the imaginary as less real while reading. In other words, the
imaginary is never assimilated into the real by making it reality at one remove.
In the crystalline narration, “the virtual ceases to be a derivative of the actual
and takes on a life of its own” (Buchanan 152). It is not a matter of subjective
illusion, of the narrator being unreliable, mistaking his imaginings for the
“real incident” (Wallace, “Smithy” 84). Rather, it is an “objective illusion,”
which “does not suppress the distinction between the two sides, but makes it
unattributable” (Deleuze, Cinema 69).
The story of Cuffie and the Simmons is the mirror image of the hostage
drama. Quintessential to the crystalline regime, the mirror image is liberated
from the margins and comes to trade places with the actual: “the mirror-image
is virtual in relation to the actual character that the mirror catches, but it is
actual in the mirror which now leaves the character with only a virtuality and
pushes him back out-of-field” (Deleuze, Cinema 70). The Simmons’ story,
though virtual in relation to the actual hostage incident, takes over the narra-
tive, relegating the actual to the periphery of “Smithy.” This parallels what
happens to the narrator when the classroom events are unfolding: The imagi-
nary storyboard so totally absorbs him that he is not even conscious of what is
going on in the classroom and therefore becomes a “hostage” unawares.
At the snap of the chalk in Mr. Johnson’s hand, the narrator’s attention
finally returns to the classroom to witness the screaming pupils’ panicked ex-
odus from the classroom, which turns into a bloody stampede as they block
Time of the Crystal, Time of Becoming 43
each other’s way to the only door of the classroom. The nightmarish class-
room situation is immediately followed and mirrored by the narrator’s recur-
rent nightmares about adult life the narrator has had since seven years old
(Wallace, “Smithy” 103). This nightmare, like the hostage crisis in the class-
room, also has an institutional setting, an office as big as a soccer field. Even
“[t]he desks were arranged in precise rows and columns like the desks of an R.
B. Hayes classroom” (103). In this austere room are more than 100 men in
suits and ties bent over their desks silently “immersed in rote work” (103,
108). Like the children in the classroom stampede, “the men in the room ap-
peared as both individuals and a great anonymous mass” (108). The waking
and the oneiric nightmares reflect each other in another crystal of the narrative.
The dreamt adult-life nightmare forms a crystal with not only the wak-
ing classroom nightmare but also with the narrator’s father’s real adult life. As
the narrator says, what “helped inform the nightmares” is the sight of his fa-
ther coming home from work (104). Descriptions of the nightmares and of the
father’s job as an actuary interpolate and reflect each other until they begin to
circle “around a point of indiscernibility,” exemplified by the following pas-
sage (Deleuze, Cinema 69):
for almost 30 years of 51 weeks a year my father sat all day at a
metal desk in a silent, fluorescent lit room, reading forms and
making calculations and filling out further forms on the results of
those calculations, breaking only occasionally to answer his tele-
phone or meet with other actuaries in other bright, quiet rooms.
With only a small and sunless north window that looked out on
other small office windows in other grey buildings. The night-
mares were vivid and powerful, but they were not the kind from
which you wake up crying out. (Wallace, “Smithy” 105)
Without transition, the narrator switches from the scenes of his father at work
to the nightmares of adults at work, leading to the conflation of the reality and
nightmare in the reader’s mind. Even before the switch, the “bright, quiet
rooms” of the narrator’s father’s workplace already seem indistinguishable
from the “brightly lit,” “utterly silent” room of the nightmare (105, 103, 103).
The real is thus absorbed into the oneiric, which also absorbs the waking,
forming a complex crystalline narrative.
The doubling scission of the virtual and the actual in “Smithy” is evi-
dent in the real-imaginary and the waking-oneiric narrative crystals. At the
44 NTU Studies in Language and Literature
same time, it also consists in the crystallization of the present and the past.
When he resumes depicting the hostage drama, the narrator notices on the
chalkboard “212 overstruck KILL THEM’s and fragmentary portions of same”
that Mr. Johnson has written (111). Soon his attention is drawn to the west
wall of the classroom. In a one-page-long sentence, the present and the past
come into resonation: “The classroom’s westernmost wall— . . . against
which just lately all of the terrified pupils had been clambering over one an-
other to flee the room as Richard Allen Johnson stood frozen and transport-
ed . . . —also featured . . . two more freestanding cabinets containing” various
equipment and props “all for use in the . . . Presidents’ Day presentation that
Mrs. Roseman organized and directed” one month before. The wall acts as a
vertex for the story to bifurcate into the mutually reflective present and past,
into the present hostage drama led by the substitute teacher Mr. Johnson and
the past Presidents’ Day drama presentation overseen by the regular teacher,
Mrs. Roseman (112). In the process, the civics classroom takes on the dual
temporalities of the present and the past as well as the contemporaneous on-
tological modes of the virtual and the actual.
Embedded near the end of the one-sentence present-past crystal is an-
other real-imaginary crystal. Playing the part of lightning alongside Yolanda
Maldonado to “Philip Finkelpearl as Benjamin Franklin” flying a kite in a
thunderstorm in the Presidents’ Day performance is Ruth Simmons, one of the
narrator’s classmates. The reader cannot help but recall her homonym, the
blind little girl who is Cuffie’s owner in the windowpane fantasy. Here Ruth
Simmons becomes the nucleus of a quadruple-faceted narrative crystal, where
the mirroring of the present and the past is doubled in the reflection between
the real and the imaginary. “When virtual images proliferate like this, all to-
gether they absorb the entire actuality of the character, at the same time as the
character is no more than one virtuality among others” (Deleuze, Cinema 70).
There is no finding the original, actual Ruth Simmons, as the character frag-
ments into a virtual multiplicity.
Taken together, the imaginary narrative of the Simmons’ story, the
dream narrative of the adult life nightmare, and the recollection narrative of
the Presidents’ Day presentation inundate the real incident of the hostage cri-
sis. Crucially, the imaginary, the oneiric, and the recollective are not present-
ed as deficient in truth or deviant from the real or the present. Reading the
story as a whole, the reader has the impression that it is the hostage crisis that
is a fantasy against the Simmons’ story, a dream as opposed to the nightmar-
ish adult life, and a recollection at the time of the Presidents’ Day presentation.
Time of the Crystal, Time of Becoming 45
“Smithy” is thus a polygonal crystalline narrative with multiple reflecting
planes. The hostage crisis loses its privileged position of transcendence and
identity as it dissolves into a web of complexly connected virtual and actual
elements—a virtual-actual becoming. As the hostage incident ceases to be the
transcendent, self-same model at the center of the Platonic representational
scheme, “Smithy” can no longer be considered a mere copy of the original.
The short story represents nothing but is its own model. In this sense, Wal-
lace’s fiction creates the hostage incident—not just the event taking place in
the narrator’s classroom on March 14, 1960, but the entire virtual-actual net-
work of reality, imagination, dreams, and recollections surrounding it.
As discussed before, an anti-representational aesthetic is founded on the
non-chronological conception of time as duration. “Smithy” expresses time as
duration not only through crystalline narration but also by structuring a textu-
al “depth of field” (Deleuze, Cinema 106). Instead of progressing linearly, the
short story alternates between short, one-paragraph capitalized sections and
longer, typographically regular texts. For instance, the story opens with a cap-
italized paragraph on one Terence Valen: “TERENCE VELAN WOULD
LATER BE DECORATED IN COMBAT IN THE WAR IN INDOCHINA”
(Wallace, “Smithy” 67). The relevance of the information remains obscure
until two pages later, in the following mixed-case section, when the narrator
mentions Terence Valen among the classmates so traumatized by the class-
room incident that they soon transfer out of the elementary school. Similarly,
the all-capital paragraph about the demise of the DeMatteis family’s newspa-
per delivery business and its influence on Chris DeMatteis’ adult career pre-
cedes by half a page the narrator’s recollection, in the sentence-case section
that follows it, of Chris asleep in class as a consequence of helping his family
with newspaper delivery operations (85-86).
Since all-capital texts create the sense of loudness and impact, their
placement between the normal, sentence-case texts makes them appear closer
to the reader, as if lifted from the page in relief. The textual surface therefore
acquires a depth comparable to the cinematic depth of field. The all-capital
paragraph and its contiguous sentence-case sections make up the foreground
and the background of a single image. Positioned anachronistically before the
present of the narrative, the majuscule paragraphs about the characters’ future
developments have the effect of temporal destabilization unachievable by the
much better known of Wallace’s narrative techniques: the use of notes.8 Had
8 For discussions on Wallace’s use of notes, see Letzler, Tresco, Nadel, and Staes.
46 NTU Studies in Language and Literature
these paragraphs been footnotes or endnotes, they would have been relegated
to a lesser narrative order and no more able to disrupt the chronological pro-
gression of the narrative than the common literary devices of flashback and
flashforward.
The juxtaposition of two temporal planes, one in a majuscule paragraph
and the other in its accompanying sentence-case passage generates the tem-
poral depth overlapping the textual depth. Between the temporal plane of the
foregrounded all-capital paragraph and that of the backgrounded sen-
tence-case section, the characters of Terence Valen and Chris DeMatteis act as
transversal connectors setting discrete pasts into resonance. This creates the
“depth of field” proper, which consists in “crossing all planes, making ele-
ments from each interact with the rest, and in particular having the back-
ground in direct contact with the foreground” (Deleuze, Cinema 107). As
“images in depth express regions of past,” in the depth of field, the “depth is
of time and no longer of space” (106, 108). Depth of field intimates to readers
the all-inclusive “coexistence of all the sheets of past” in the pure past, invit-
ing them to leap between regions of the past, as the narrative does, and thus
experience time as duration (99).
Reading “Smithy” with the concept of time as duration in mind, one
would find that the apparent discursiveness of the story does not signify a
lack of logic but illustrates the logic of recollection. The trajectory spanning
seemingly unrelated narrative threads follows the movement pattern of re-
membering. This is particularly true of the part of the story from Scraps being
eaten alive to the adult-life nightmare (Wallace, “Smithy” 94-110). The hor-
rifying image of Scraps’ violent death shocks the narrator onto a trajectory
across the textual and temporal depths of field. He travels from the fear he
experiences while watching the movie The Exorcist with his girlfriend to the
fear that drives the police to open fire on Mr. Johnson (a majuscule paragraph)
(99), the pupils’ fear-stricken stampede, the fear that paralyzes Frank Cald-
well and prevents him from escaping (a majuscule paragraph) (103), and the
fearful nightmare about adult life. Deviating from sensory-motor schemata,
the amorphous trajectory does nothing to further the plot. What it achieves is
tracing the narrator’s remembrance of fear in the depths of time as duration.
As Deleuze argues, “Just as we perceive things in the place where they
are, and have to place ourselves among things in order to perceive them, we
go to look for recollection in the place where it is, we have to place ourselves
with a leap into the past in general, into these purely virtual images which
have been constantly preserved through time” (Cinema 80). Recollection in-
Time of the Crystal, Time of Becoming 47
volves a free fall into the depths of the pure past. As Jonna Bornemark notes,
recollection “is not a jump into a certain past time, but into the possibility to
move in time” (71). One plunges into the pure past and lets the mobility of
the chronologically undivided continuum carry one from one region to anoth-
er. Recollection thus follows an aleatory trajectory through temporal strata
with different levels of contraction. Showing time as duration, “Smithy” has
its narrator leap between “sheets of past” in his recollection of fear, instead of
reaffirming the spatio-temporal continuity that characterizes traditional, or-
ganic narratives (Deleuze, Cinema 99).
The foregoing discussion provides an explanation for the initial critics’
bafflement regarding “Smithy.” Their inability to summarize the story or fig-
ure out “[w]hat exactly is happening?” shows that the story is not an organic,
representational narrative in accordance with sensory-motor schemata and
chronological time (Mason). The essay also presents a close analysis of the
organization of the story to show how it is structured in the manner of the
Deleuzian crystalline regime. Through crystalline narration and textual depth
of field, “Smithy” reconceptualizes time as the non-chronological duration,
expressing an anti-representational aesthetic based on the ontology of virtu-
al-actual becoming, which follows from the proposition of time as duration.
If the title of the story plays with Stephen Dedalus’ metaphor, in A Por-
trait of the Artist as a Young Man, of the soul as a smithy, then Wallace is
suggesting that the artist is not like a blacksmith actively forging a represen-
tational object the audience can easily recognize and use.9 Rather, the artist is
“a seer, a becomer,” whose vision of the world as virtual and actual at the
same time is meant to allow things to become, to self-differentiate in time in
continual emergence (Deleuze and Guattari 171). By drawing readers into a
crystalline hall of mirrors, Wallace invites them to detach themselves from the
actual realm of clock time, common sense, and sensory-motor situations—all
of which fix them in a static universe of representational identities—and be-
come open to the virtual and, thus, the immanent creativity of the world.
9 “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in
the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (Joyce 213).
48 NTU Studies in Language and Literature
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[Received 14 February 2017;
accepted 18 May 2018]
