Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,65

wholly oracular—and that, ironically, it will be the very questions the child is asked by the increasingly modernized and sophisticated villagers that will facilitate the wunderkind’s further development into something so supernaturally advanced that it will ultimately prove the upstart village’s very undoing, and so the shaman tells his upper-caste subjects not to worry because before too long the puericratic villagers will all be back hunting and gathering and worshipping Yam Gods and soiling their loincloths with fear at the sight of an etiolated regiment and coming across with their annual tribute of yams and hides to the hegemonic ———— village just as they always have, and so on and so forth; and sure enough in this moodier and somewhat more contemporary third version of the epitasis—in which narratively the malevolent shaman is reduced from a peripeteiac antagonist to a mere vehicle for exposition or foreshadowing, this rather anticipating the function which oracles, sorcerers, Attic choruses, Gaelic coronach, Senecan dumbshows, Plautian prologues, and chatty Victorian narrators perform in various later cycles’ exempla—but nevertheless in the variant’s next scene sure enough, at the precise sidereal moment of the paleolithic equivalent of its eleventh birthday, the child on the central dais spontaneously goes into the same ptotic autisto-mystical withdrawal as in the more structurally conventional variants—although according to the highly analytical younger man on the flight there exist here as well certain even less conventional sub-versions of the third main variant in which there is no mention of any regionally dominant village or shaman or cranial obeah, but rather here it is purportedly the young and extraordinarily comely daughter of an upper-caste villager, who had just died after a lengthy death-pallet scene, who—‘who’ here meaning the nubile daughter—leans in and whispers the mysterious coup de vieux-type question in the child’s ear; or in another marginal sub-version a mysterious white wasp or possibly trypanosomic bloodsucking fly of genus Glossina flies through the village straight to the center’s raised dais or platform and stings the child on the forehead in the precise spot corresponding to the ajna or sixth Hindic chakra, with the child immediately thereupon falling into the ptotic and compiling-esque trance—but the crux nevertheless is that in all the myriad variants and sub-versions of the rising action the child’s trance and its essential characteristics are the same, and it is at the point of the child’s psychic withdrawal that all three major competing editions of the epitasis apparently converge again and conclude the as it were Second Act of the exemplum; and what then transpires throughout the catastasis and various relief scenes and faux-reversals and dal segni and scènes à faire all the way to the narrative’s final catastrophe remains the same in all the putative variants and versions, such that the mythopoeic narrative’s very structure itself moves from initial unity to epitatic trinity to reconciliation and unity again in the falling action—this observation evidently also inserted by the jetliner’s somewhat pedantic young narrator, in or on the back of whose scalp as time passed my friend’s acquaintance said he began to think he could discern an unusual patch of gray or prematurely white hair that was of markedly different texture than the surrounding scalp’s hair and seemed if gazed at long enough to comprise some sort of strange intaglial glyph or design, though he was quick to admit that the same phenomenon can occur with clouds or configurations of shadows if one looks intently enough for long periods, and on the United flight there was simply very little else to look at—along, of course, with all the iconic resonance that an apparently One-into-Three-into-One dramatic structure will possess for the Western analytical mind. Nevertheless, when the child comes out of the catatonic trance or chrysalis stage, or resurfaces from meditating on the implications of whatever it was that the hegemonic shaman or nubile mourner had whispered, or recovers from the first wash of pubescent testosterone, or whatever precisely it was that was going on on the wickerwork dais while the boy sat motionless and incommunicado for several lunar cycles—afterward it’s immediately clear that the child has undergone some significant developmental changes, because when he finally does come out of it and opens his eyes and responds to stimuli and resumes answering the cyclic queue of villagers’ questions, evidently he’s now answering in a very different way indeed, and his relationship to the questions and to the villagers and to the village’s developing culture as a whole now comprises a wholly different gestalt.