Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,62

child, and they then began to sell or barter these interrogatory skills to ordinary villagers who wished to extract maximum value for their monthly question, which was the advent of what the narrative apparently terms the village’s consultant caste. For instance instead of asking the child something narrowly circumscribed such as, ‘Where in our village’s region of the rain forest should I look for a certain type of edible root?’ a professional consultant’s suggestion here might be that his client ask the child something more general along the lines for example of, ‘How can a man feed his family with less effort than we now expend?’ or, ‘How might we ensure a store of food that will last our family through periods when available resources are scarce?’ Whereas on the other hand, as the whole enterprise became more sophisticated and specialized, the consultant caste also discovered that maximizing the answer’s value sometimes entailed making a certain question more specific and practical, as in for instance instead of, ‘How can we increase our supply of firewood?’ a more efficacious question here might be, ‘How might a single man move a whole downed tree close to his home so as to have plentiful firewood?’ And evidently some of the village’s new consultant caste developed into rather ingenious interlocutors and managed to design questions of historic cultural importance and value such as, ‘When my neighbor borrows my spear, how can I make a record of the loan in order to prove that the spear is mine in case my neighbor suddenly turns round and claims that the spear is his and refuses to return it?’ or, ‘How might I divert water from one of the rain forest’s streams so that instead of my wife having to walk miles with a jar balanced on her head in order to haul water from the stream the stream might be made to as it were come to us?’ and so forth—here it was not clear whether my friend or his acquaintance were providing their own examples or whether these were actual examples enumerated during the dialogue he overheard on the United flight. He said that certain very general conclusions about the two passengers’ different ages and economic status could be deduced from their respective hair’s color and cut and their postures and the backs of their necks, but that that was all. That there was no reading material except the seat pocket’s customary in-flight catalogue and safety card, and the wing’s engine’s constant noise would have prevented him from sleeping even had he taken a pill, and that there was literally nothing for him to do but lean ever so subtly forward and try as unobtrusively as possible to make out what the darker-haired young passenger was relating to his less educated seatmate or companion, and to try to interpret it and fit it into some context that would as it were ground the narrative and render it more comme on dit illuminating or relevant to his own context. And that but at certain points it became unclear what was part of the cycle’s narrative Ding an sich and what were the passenger’s own editorial interpolations and commentary, such as the fact that it was evidently during the child’s decade-long occupancy of the special raised platform that the village’s culture evolved from hunting and gathering to a crude form of agriculture and husbandry, and discovered as well the principles of the wheel and rotary displacement, and fashioned their first fully enclosed dwellings of willow and yam-thatch, and developed an ideographic alphabet and primitive written grammar which allowed for more sophisticated divisions of labor and a crude economic system of trade in various goods and services; and in sum the entire village’s culture, technology, and standard of living undergo a metastatic evolution that would normally have taken thousands of years and countless paleolithic generations to attain. And, not surprisingly, these quantum leaps arouse a certain degree of fear and jealousy in many of the region’s other paleolithic villages, which are all still in the pantheo-shamanistic, hunting-and-gathering, hunch-round- the-fire-when-it’s-cold stage of cultural attainment, and the United flight’s narrative focuses particularly on the reaction of one large and formidable village, which is ruled by a single autocratic shaman in a kind of totalitarian theocracy, and which has also historically dominated this entire region of the rain forest and exacted tribute from all the other villages, this both because their warriors are so fierce and because their autocratic shaman is