Questions asked of a photograph of oneself as a 5-year-old: "I’m what you wanted me to be... You got me into this: now what do I do?"

A passage in David Lipsky's "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace." I found this so interesting but it is a little confusing. The book is based on a transcript of an interview with David Foster Wallace. The words are the voice of Lipsky, the interviewer. And the key quote, which is why I'm writing the post, comes from John Updike's memoirs ("Self-Consciousness") — and Updike is talking to a photograph of himself. Got that? So the "you" Lipsky is talking to is Wallace, but the "you" in the quote within the quote is the younger version of Updike to whom old man Updike is speaking:

This is just for color; so the fact that you’ve gotten the readership that you might have wanted in your midtwenties … quote from Self-Consciousness: photograph Updike sees of himself in his mother’s house, as a five-year-old boy, which now looks kind of sinister. "I’m what you wanted me to be,” you know what I mean? “You got me into this: now what do I do? I await his instructions.” I mean, in a sense, you fulfilled the ambitions that twenty-five-year-old had in terms of the kind of impact you wanted to make …

I didn't really mean to be so labyrinthine, but I'm fascinated by the idea of an old man confronted by a photograph of his younger self, seeing that boy as sinister, and sort of chewing him out and demanding to know what to do now.

I wonder what your comparable encounter with a photograph of your child-self would be like. Maybe Child You didn't get what he wanted and you have to say, tough luck, kid, you didn't get what you wanted. But then you'd have the advantage Updike didn't have. You wouldn't await further instruction from the sinister kid. He'd have no power over you. What does he know? He got it all wrong.

But that's just me trying to untangle what I encountered as labyrinthine but too good not to share. I can do better. I can get the Kindle of "Self-Consciousness" and try to find what Lipsky was quoting. Ah, Lipsky was paraphrasing! I bought the ebook and tried many searches. "Sinister" is certainly not Updike's word for his five-year-old self. Lipsky's version of the scene is all I can give you right now. That, and Wallace's response to the prompt:

You know, it may be that those ambitions are what get you to do the work, to get the exposure, to realize that the original ambitions were misguided. Right? So that it’s a weird paradoxical link. If you didn’t have the ambitions, you’d never find out that they were sort of deluded. But there is, you’re right, once you’ve decided those delusions are empty, you’ve got a big problem, because... you can’t kill off parts of yourself. You have to start building machinery that can incorporate that part.

I wish Wallace had done more with that wonderful prompt, but I don't think he liked Updike too much. Earlier in the Lipsky transcript, he'd said:

Because Updike, I think, has never had an unpublished thought. And that he’s got an ability to put it in very lapidary prose. But that Updike presents one with a compressed Internet problem, is there’s 80 percent absolute dreck, and 20 percent priceless stuff. And you just have to wade through so much purple gorgeous empty writing to get to anything that’s got any kind of heartbeat in it. Plus, I think he’s mentally ill.

Here's hoping this post — being on the internet — is no more than 80% absolute dreck.

ADDED: Imagine President Trump encountering this photograph:

What is his version of the Updike-like conversation? I’m what you wanted me to be. You got me into this: now what do I do? I await your instructions....

IN THE EMAIL: The author David Lipsky writes to say that I'm first person who's noticed that the Updike "quote" is just a paraphrase and to help me find the verbatim Updike quote (on page 238 of "Self-Consciousness"). Here:

I rub my face. My forehead, full of actinic damage from all those years of seeking the healing sun, hurts. My public, marketable self—the self put on display in interviews and slightly “off” caricatures in provincial book-review sections, the book-autographing, anxious-to-please me—feels like another skin and hurts also. I look over at my younger self on the wall: a photograph taken in Earl Snyder’s studio on Penn Street when I was five, wearing a kind of sailor collar, the edges blurred away—“vignetted”—in old-fashioned studio style, an image cherished by my mother, nicely framed the workmanlike way they do things in Reading, and always hanging here, in this spot, for me to admire and remember: little Johnny, his tentatively smiling mouth, his dark and ardent and hopeful eyes. For a second he looks evil. He has got me into this.

I like Updike's version and I like the extra spin Lipsky put on it. I also think it's very cool that Lipsky wrote to me, and his explanation of the confusion makes good sense: The book is a transcription of audio tapes, and the transcription included whatever mistakes DFW made (and was no longer in a position to correct), so it seemed "only fair" for Lipsky to refrain from correcting his own mistakes.