Mr. Squishy: the first of maybe a series of thoughts on the short stories in DFW’s Oblivion

“Mr. Squishy”

(These are more just some thoughts I’ve had about the story, half of it is talking out of my ass and shouldn’t be taken too seriously.)

The first story in Oblivion is a near perfect example of why some people really really dislike DFW, he bombards the reader with so many details that it is possible to be put off by the sheer amount of information he gives the reader. One could easily argue that there is too much, there are too many details about market research given, there are too many unnecessary details given about the person leading the focus group and the argument could be made that he’s just showing off: as if he is saying look at all the things that I know and I’m going to tell you them all like a precious child you want to smack. For roughly the first half of the story he does bombard the reader with almost too much information and the moments when humor and humanity show through are dulled by the onslaught of minutiae.

An often seen quote of David Foster Wallace is, “I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.” In the case of this story I believe that part of the structure is the bombarding the reader with somewhere less than 499,975 bits of discrete information but still piling it up and surrounding the ’25 bites’ that are important. For a story that is mostly about marketing, the selling of products via a stream of information to potential consumers there is a good reason to put the reader in the position he or she lives in daily of being forced to find the important pieces from the sea of superfluous. I don’t really believe this totally though, I believe that DFW isn’t just creating a story that is a narrative version of white noise and saying, hey find the pattern in here, I think it’s all very controlled; he is the marketing and ad man choosing carefully what is presented to us. He’s just not making it that easy for us. He’s making us surrender the role of passive consumer, and not just take the ironic role of a public that is aware of what the role of marketing and is supposedly more savvy about it, but wants the reader to be an active part of the story. This is all a re-hash of what I’ve written about Infinite Jest, but I like repeating myself.

The easiest way of looking at this story is to see it as a hip kind of fuck you, snigger snigger to corporate America and the marketing companies do for products. This is a common enough theme in many of DFW’s works but I think it’s just window dressing, it’s a level of distraction just like it is in reality. I think one needs to look past the critique of consumer products and DFW’s treatment of characters in the focus group and outside among the spectators watching the strange man climbing up the building seem to be pointing to the idea that just knowing what is going on and feeling detached from being part of the herd isn’t enough. Actively focusing on marketing even in a removed manner is still being focused on that world and you are still being taken in by the amount of psychic garbage that waves it’s hands around for our attention.

Instead the real meat to this story is loneliness and alienation. The story is depressing, for all of the humor in it at the center of the story is a lonely man who thought he was going to make a difference and now finds himself staring in the mirror each morning and seeing he looks more and more like Mr. Squishy, a friendly looking blob that is used as a mascot on snack-foods. But it’s not a story about him being a failure but rather being totally unexceptional, even in ever thinking that he could be exceptional, that he could make a difference and that his life would amount to being more than having a career he doesn’t find much satisfaction in. Schmidt can’t even feel exceptional in his failure because his is the story of everyone. A telling line in the story is when Schmidt is described as being afraid of the way he walks makes him stand out from everyone else, and he feels embarrassed by this fact, but in reality there is nothing distinctive in the way he walks and he actually walks in a way that is a hundred percent normal. Our perceptions of ourselves and the way others see us are incongruous and in way we are trapped in and by ourselves. Repeatedly in the story the theme of being watched by others who we can’t see comes up. From the double-blind manner research is done, the windows of The Gap that allow the people in the store to see the crowd outside on the street without being observed themselves, the way the ∆Y organization spies on it’s own employees, the hidden camera and moles in the focus group room itself; the references to situations like this steadily increase as the story goes on until by the end every relationship in the story is predicated on some form of being watched without the other person knowing and some form of deception. There no real human relations in the story everything is trickery on some level or another and many of the deceptions are being done with a nudge and nod to the other person letting them know that deception is all around them but between you and me there is honesty.

There is no human warmth in the story and that is kind of fitting in a story that bombards the reader with way too many details about statistical analysis, a type of mathematics that can reduce people not to individuals but into figures to be exploited and used.

Along with the theme of being watched by others who we can’t see, being subjected to the tyranny of the others gaze in existential speak, there is the violence that has an undercurrent in the story. It’s interesting the way that DFW first gives the idea of poisoning the snack cakes as some kind of revenge fantasy that probably passes through most peoples mind at some point when they work at a job they find unrewarding (well maybe not poisoning but doing something that would damage the company) to casually moving from a description of Schmidt’s condo to the details of the chemistry lab he has set up in a spare bedroom where he has been synthesizing a chemical that could be used to contaminate the snack product he is doing focus group research for. And of course there is the unknown violence that could be committed by the man climbing up the outside of the building who during one of his breaks straps an M-16 onto his back and continues his climb. Violence shakes people from the everyday hum-drum and it threatens to occur by ineffectual people who find no other way to get themselves really seen (on their own terms) than by doing something overly dramatic.

And what about the guy climbing the building? Why is he in the story? What is his purpose? He is the big question mark in the whole story. He is the ‘what happened to Hal’ kind of point, and why in the middle of one of Schmidt’s paragraphs is there a footnote told from the climbers perspective, and why is that the only perspective that is given in the first person? He’s a surreal aside to the story but by giving him that brief moment where he becomes the first person narrator it makes his relationship to the story seem more important that the ambiguousness suggests. A second reading of the story with some of these questions in mind will probably be necessary at some point.