Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,66

It is the progressively extreme changes in the advanced boy’s relation to as it were both Truth and Culture which constitute the exemplum’s catastasis or crisis or falling action or Third Act. At first, now, the child will sometimes answer a villager’s question just as before, but now will also append to this specific answer additional answers to certain other related or consequent questions which the child apparently believes his initial answer entails, as if he now understands his answers as part of a much larger network or system of questions and answers and further questions instead of being merely discrete self-contained units of information; and whenever the reawakened child breaks with previous convention and extemporizes on an answer’s ramifications it evidently sends both cultural and economic shock-waves through the village’s community, because the established custom and norm heretofore has of course been that the child on the dais answers only a question that he is explicitly asked, answering in an almost idiotic, cybernetically literal way, such that—as the pedantic younger man reminded his auditor he’d mentioned in passing during the protasis—such that an entire new caste of interrogatory consultants had come into being in the village’s economy, consultants whose marketable skill lay in structuring citizens’ questions in such a way as to avoid the so-called G.I.G.O. phenomenon to which questions presented to the child before the climactic trance were susceptible, in other words being paid or as it were compensated to ensure that the question posed was not for example something like, ‘Can you tell me where my eldest son’s lost blowgun might be found?’ to which the child would traditionally be wont to answer simply, ‘Yes,’ the boy intending this answer not to be sarcastic or unhelpful but simply True, operating out of an almost classically binary or comme on dit Boolean paradigm, a crude human computer, and as such susceptible to G.I.G.O., being still after all at heart a child no matter how exceptional or even omniscient, and then the unfortunate villager would have to wait an entire lunar cycle before he could re-pose his question in a more efficacious way, an interrogatory syndrome which the consultant caste had gotten more and more successful at preventing, at higher and higher rates of compensation; but now in the epi—pardon me in the catastasis now the powerful new consultant caste’s whole stock-in-trade becomes useless or unnecessary, because the child’s new incarnation appears now disposed not just to respond to villagers’ questions but to as it were read them, the questions, with ‘read’ evidently being either the passenger’s or my friend’s acquaintance’s term for interpreting, contextualizing, and/or anticipating the ramified implications of a given question, the metamorphosed post-trance child in other words now trying to involve his queued interlocutors in actual heuristic exchanges or dialogues, violating custom and upsetting the villagers and rendering the consultant caste’s rhetorical or as it were ‘computer programming’ skills otiose and sowing the seeds of political unrest and ill will simply by having apparently evolved—the exceptional child has—into a new, suppler, more humanistic and less mechanical kind of intelligence or wisdom, which itself is bad enough but then apparently in the next phase of the child’s heuristic evolution—as either he pubertally matures and develops or else the hemean shaman’s or maiden’s or wasp’s or tsetse fly’s spell takes further hold, depending on the epitatic variant—after a few more lunar cycles the child begins the even more troubling practice of responding to a villager’s question with questions of his own, questions which frequently seem to be irrelevant to the issue at hand and are often frankly disturbing, for example in one of what the fellow remembered as the numerous examples proffered on the United liner if the question was along the lines of, for instance, ‘My eldest daughter is willful and disobedient; should I follow our local shaman’s recommendation to have her clitoridectomy performed early in order to modify her attitude, or should I wait and allow the man she eventually marries to be the one to order the clitoridectomy as custom dictates?’ the answer would apparently be something quite off the point or even offensive such as, ‘Have you asked your daughter’s mother what she thinks?’ or, ‘What might one suppose to be the equivalent of a clitoridectomy for willful sons?’ or—in the case of the example he apparently heard the most clearly because the auditor either did not catch it or was unable to follow the point and asked the pedantic and analytical young