A Reader's Companion to INFINITE JEST
WILLIAM DowLING AND
ROBERT BELL
Copyright © 2005 by William Dowling and Robert Bell. ISBN:
Sortcover
1-4134-8446-8
This is the first edition submitted by these authors as copyright claimant. Q!Jotations from David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and the critical works listed in the notes are within the compass of Fair Use and do not reQuire permission. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical. including photocopying. recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner. This book was printed in the United States of America.
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Contents Preface
.........................................................................................................
9
Chapter One
Opening Episode .................................. ...................................... 13 ..
Chapter Two
Subsidized T ime ............................................................................ 19 Chapter Three
Scenes & Settings ......................................................................... 32 Chapter Four
Keys to Narrative Structure ......... ............. ...................... ....... 66 .
.
.
Chapter F ive
Compendium of Major Characters ........................................ 91 Chapter Six
The Plot of Infinite Jest: a Precis .......................................... 152 Chapter Seven
Key Themes & Narrative Techniques ............................... 2 09 Chapter Eight
Minor Characters & Real People ......................................... 2 31 Chapter Nine
Infinite Jest's Acronyms ........................................................... 2 94 Chapter Ten
Slang & Idioms ............................................. ...... ....................... 3 0 8 .
Afterword
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Acknowledgments Notes
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311 315 317
Dedication To Our Students
Preface One reviewer of Irifinite Jest gave up on the very first page. The book is too big to read in bed, she complained. You can't skim it. You look at the first page and you have no idea what it's going to be about. So she wrote a review that wasn't a review: a list of all the reasons why she hadn't been able to read the novel. We're here to tell you not to give up on the first page, or even after the opening episode. You have to say "episode" because, as you'll soon learn, Irifimte Jest doesn't have chapters. The book occasionally gives you a heading saying when the following episode or episodes took place - for instance, the opening episode bears a mysterious notation to the effect that it took place in the "Year of Glad," whatever that's supposed to mean - but then it jumps around: from location to location, from year to year and decade to decade, from narrative voice to narrative voice. All this is part of its meaning. Infim�e Jest is a story about the fragmented, alienated, lonely quality of life in the modern age - a world where it's possible to see everyone as an isolated consciousness locked away within the cage of the skull, communicating only with great difficulty with others. A world where a false sense of community - all we have left by way of meaningful relations with other people - is created by advertising slogans and brand names and "media reality," which are not a basis of any real or authentic co-existence with other people. Infim�e Jest is, as one ofits characters says later on in the story, a world where almost everyone's life is "a hell for one:· 9
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WILLIAM DOWLING AND ROB£RT BELL
In this situation, you'll see, the mind is likely to jump around a bit. So is a story about people whose lives are discontinuous with other people's lives. So is the reality of characters who seek desperate refuge from their solitude in drugs or alcohol or impersonal sex, which includes almost everyone in bifim�e Jest. That's why you shouldn't despair, as the reviewer did, at the impenetrability of the opening pages. As thousands of readers have found, lnfim�e Jest rewards those who stick with its densely-imagined world, a world with real human beings living in a society that mirrors our own, going through real and heart-wrenching experiences. It spans the social spectrum from the gutter life of drug addicts like Poor Tony Krause and Don Gately to the upscale world of middle-class specimens like Geoffrey Day and Ken Erdedy. In a way, Itifim�e Jest stands in the same relation to our world that the great Victorian novels - Dickens' Bleak House, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Trollope's The Way We Live Now - stood to theirs. The difference is that it mirrors a radically different social reality. Ifit's "difficult," that's only because modem life has become difficult, at least for anyone who aspires to genuine humanity in a world being drained of the human by the impersonal forces of an advertising and-marketing system that penetrates everyone's consciousness to one or another degree. !Jifim�e Jest is, in short, a little bit like the children's rhyme about Humpty Dumpty. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we find ourselves lying on the ground, broken into fragments, isolated and alienated and hearing our own voices echoing back to us from the void. But there's one difference. In the children's rhyme, all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Itifim�e Jest does want to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, and, if the response of thousands of passionately loyal readers is anything to go by, it succeeds in doing so for those who are willing to enter entirely into its world. Our Reader's Companion is meant to ease your entry into the teeming, complex, and sometimes confusing world of ltifim�e Jest. There are a lot of questions it won't try to answer - figuring out how Itifim�e Jest "works" is one of the great rewards of reading the book - but it will give you what might be called a road map through Wallace's intricate
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I
landscape of modern alienation, desperation, and, finally, hope and redemption. The sections immediately following this preface will help get you started, and then, as you read Infinite Jest, you can use our compendium ofcharacters and dictionary ofacronyms and special terms to clear up things that have left you scratching your head. Our goal is to bring you out on the other side of Wallace's vast narrative with a sense of having kept your bearings all the way through. Above all, we want to keep you from being one of those people who gives up on the first page, or who, having found bifim�e Jest too "difficult" for their taste, wrongly imagine that the problem is with the novel rather than with themselves.
II
Chapter One Opening Episode The opening episode of Irifim�e Jest is confusing not because it thrusts you right into the middle of a scene you've never encountered before - every novel does that - but because it gives you a world as seen by a narrator (Hal Incandenza) who's in the middle of a nervous breakdown. Or, since "nervous breakdown" seems to imply a pathology of some sort - the world is okay, it's the patient going through a psychotic episode who's the problem - we might say that the book opens with a narrator who's looking straight into the eyes of the terrifying possibility that the world may be psychotic. As we'll see, this is one of the central organizing principles of Infinite Jest. The notion of a "nervous breakdown" is in a way reassuring. If modern society is stable and coherent, and if someone we know starts living in a hallucinatory reality that is, as we say, "out of touch" with its norms, then we've got what amounts to a medical problem on our hands. Consultation with a psychiatrist, maybe a regular dose of Prozac or Zoloft, in extreme cases perhaps electroshock therapy, will bring the person back into touch with reality, and everything can go on from there. But there's an alternative possibility, and it's the one with which Infim�e Jest opens. It's the possibility that we live inside a social reality the world of SUV's and TV sitcoms and satellite pornography and endless bombardment by brand-name advertising - that is itself 13
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WilliAM DoWLING AND RoBERT Bm
psychotic, in which case getting "out oftouch" with one's reality wouldn't be insane at all. The narrator in the opening episode ofInfinite Jest is, as we've said, one Hal Incandenza. As the story progresses, we're going to find out a great deal about Hal - he's one of the three central characters in the novel - but at this point all we can take in is a few particulars about his personality and background. He's a top-ranked junior tennis player applying for admission to the University of Arizona on an athletic scholarship. He is intellectually brilliant - as a teenager he was writing essays on "Montague Grammar and the Semantics of Physical Modality" - but for some reason he has gotten such low scores on the SAT that the University of Arizona has serious questions about his academic ability. The three deans in the room keep hammering away at a single point: since a lot of talented athletes come to college with grades they didn't really earn, on the basis of papers written for them by other people and tests on which they cheated, how is the University of Arizona supposed to know that Hal's so-called "brilliance" isn't something rigged up by his sponsors at Enfield Tennis Academy, the combination private-school-plus-tennis-camp from which he will receive his degree? What if he gets to college and, as his extremely low SAT scores seem to indicate, won't be able to handle the work at the University ofArizona? So far, this is a scene that we might encounter in any novel: a young man being challenged about the authenticity of his academic record by a Dean of Admissions, a Dean of Academic Affairs, a Dean of Athletics. But as everyone who picks up Infinite Jest and opens it to the first page finds out, there is something weird going on here. The first weirdness is this: Hal doesn't talk. He can't talk. At the beginning of the scene, all the talking is done for him by one Charles Tavis, whom we later to find out to be his uncle and the head of the Enfield Tennis Academy where Hal got his training in both tennis and academic subjects. Also present in the room is Aubrey deLint, an ETA tennis coach who will later emerge as one of the feared disciplinarians of the institution. He says a few words, but it is the compulsive talker CT who does most of the talking, hilariously trying to cover up with manic chatter the fact that the three deans are facing an 1 8-year-old
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boy frozen into silence by some fearful and as-yet-unrevealed mental condition. Let's pause a second to notice something in the preceding paragraph. Did you note that "Enfield Tennis Academy" became "ETA'' as we were recounting what goes on in the room where Hal is being interviewed by the three deans? Or that "Charles Tavis" somehow became "CT" as we continued? This is something that goes on almost constantly in !tifinz'te Jest, and it's one of the reasons that superficial readers find the novel "confusing:' But in fact anyone who reads the story with anything like real attention soon realizes that the practice of reducing the names of person, institutions, and organizations to acronyms is a kind of survival tactic in a world where saying everything at full length every time would drive everyone crazy. But note that Infinite Jest isn't being intentionally confusing or obscurantist here. In ordinary life, we begin referring to organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous as "AA'' because it's a useful shorthand, one that saves us repeating the longer term every time we want to mention it We say NASA because saying "National Aeronautics and Space Administration" would soon drive us and our friends crazy. We talk about "MIT" rather than "the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology" because the full name is too much of a mouthful to keep repeating in an extended conversation. We refer to public figures as "FOR" or 'JFK" because they've become so well known that using their full names at every mention would be unnecessary and cumbersome. This is what is going on in the opening episode of Irifinite Jest, and will continue to go on as the story develops along a multitude of different narrative lines. There is, as they say, bad news and good news about the effect thus obtained. The bad news is this: Infinz'te Jest takes place in a world-of-the-near-future in which there are vast geopolitical changes on the North American continent, with a multitude of governmental organizations, secret terrorist groups, and social service departments corresponding to nothing in the world of contemporary American readers. So an acronym like ONANCAA - to choose just one from the opening episode - will mean nothing at all to you when you begin the story. Such acronyms are confusing, one of the reasons why readers
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easily frightened by "difficulty" in literary works give up on Itifinite Jest in the first few pages. Here's the good news. Just as the familiar acronyms of our own world - think of FDR, JFK, NASA, NCAA, IRS, FBI - make it easier for us to converse and think without a lot of needless repetition, the acronyms of !'!finite Jests world very soon become familiar and easy, a source not of confusion but of time-saving ease of reference. There's more. Just as 'JFK" and "FBI" give those who know what they mean a comfortable sense of inhabiting a shared social reality - imagine trying to explain to someone from Inner Mongolia what "NASA'' stands for! the acronyms of !'!finite Jest soon begin to lend a depth and solidity to the world of the narrative that draw us in and make us citizens of its imagined reality. The acronyms are one of the ways Irifinr�e Jest takes us out of our own world and into the world of Hal Incandenza and Don Gately and the others, where we soon learn to operate as comfortably as we do in our own world ofJFK and FBI and NASA. Now. There's something else confusing about the opening scene of Irifinr�e Jest. The big problem for the reader is that Hal is talking to us he's obviously an articulate young man, someone who's read a lot, who has a huge vocabulary, and who notices his surroundings in great and sometimes almost hallucinatory detail - and it takes a while to figure out that, for the three deans sitting at the table, he is an absolutely silent figure sitting there with a neutral, even "dead," expression on his face. (He's been coached in this by his uncle Charles Tavis and Aubrey deLint, who are aware that he's walking on a knife edge. He's very close to a complete nervous breakdown, and any tiny stimulus might set off a scene in which Hal's face breaks into an expression of pure torture and he begins making animal noises instead of speaking in language.) So part of the trick of reading the opening episode is to gradually let dawn on you not what you are hearing from Hal - we're inside his head, so to speak, where he remains perfectly articulate - but what the three University of Arizona deans sitting across the table from him are seeing: a totally silent young man with a weirdly strained expression on his face, who seems incapable of answering their questions.
A READER's CoMPANION TO INFINITE JEST
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Here we have the main point ofthe opening episode. bifinite Jest is a world where scores of characters exist "inside their heads," living out a private reality that has no point of contact with the world outside themselves. Again and again we'll be asked to imagine the world as it looks from inside the mind of a character who is slipping into psychosis, or drug-induced hallucinations, or terror brought on by a paralyzing anxiety, and then to imagine this same character as he would look to you or me if we just saw him as we were walking down the street. (Another point of Infinite Jest is that you and I, walking down the street in what we take to be an entirely "normal" reality, are in fact inhabiting a pretty phantasmagoric world ourselves. It's just that we haven't seen its weirdness yet. But we will by the time we finish the story.) The opening episode of !t!ftnite Jest is a short scene. What happens, briefly, is this. Hal's uncle, Charles Tavis, tries for as long as he can to cover up for Hal's pathological silence - his inability to answer even the simplest question or make the most ordinary remark without entering into a psychotic state where he falls to the floor, writhing, and makes animal sounds and screams. So long as Hal can just sit there and concentrate on keeping his facial expression "normal," he'll be all right. But this plan falls apart when the three deans, realizing that they're being kept from seeing something about Hal that they feel they need to know before he's admitted to the University of Arizona, ask CT and Aubrey deLint to leave the room. That's when Hal has his crackup, and it's with that crackup that the opening episode ends: Hal on the floor of a men's room, being physically restrained by the administrators who were freaked out by the contorted facial expressions and animal noises he began to make as soon as he tried to answer their questions. In Hal's head, there now occurs the memory of a similar episode that happened to him almost exactly a year ago, when he had to be carried off to the Emergency Room under physical restraint. Remembering that episode, his mind shifts to a hospital worker who came and looked down at him curiously and, having a moment to spare, asked him not what was wrong, but what his "story" was ("So yo then man what's your story?" [17]). With the hospital worker's question, Irifinite Jest as a narrative properly begins. The essential thing for you to realize as you now begin
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to read is that everything that happens in this vast sprawling novel you have almost a thousand pages to go when the hospital worker
asks Hal for his story - is in effect a single gigantic flashback. This is a principle familiar to you both from literature and film: a chance association carries the story back to some earlier episode that supplies background or explanation of what we've been seeing so far. The difference is that
Infinite Jest is, so to speak, all flashback, until the final pages when, in a different setting and in the mind of a different character, the story comes full circle and we end where we began. By the time that happens, though, every character in this teeming story will have undergone important changes, and we ourselves will have learned to see our own society in radically different terms. In that transformation lies Infinite Jests hope of redemption in a world in which we, like Hal in the opening episode, have been locked away within the private world of our isolated consciousness with no awareness that our isolation is tragic.
Chapter Two Subsidized Time The very first page of
Infim�e Jest bears the cryptic heading "Year
of Glad:' It's not clear what that's supposed to mean. Year in which everyone is glad? Year in which Hal, whose story we are about to begin, is glad? Or, given that Glad sandwich bags are a major consumer item in American supermarkets - and also, as we'll find out, are favored by drug addicts as a way of passing around substances like cocaine and marijuana and doses of prescription drugs like Demerol - could this somehow be a year in which the Glad brand name has assumed some sort of importance for everyone inside the novel? The last of these possibilities is the one that explains the heading. When we enter the world of
hifim�e Jest,
we are also entering the
world of something called Subsidized Time, in which major American corporations or brand names bid against each other for the right to have the entire society mention the name of their product every time they write something into their appointment calendar. The world of Subsidized Time is, in short, one in which consumerism has so thoroughly penetrated American consciousness that people wake up every morning into a social reality in which brand name advertising and the most ordinary facts of personal life - getting up, getting dressed, going out the door - are no longer separable. 19
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Readers who love
Infinite Jest and try
to explain to their friends
about Subsidized Time are likely to get some strange looks. Isn't there something awfully cartoonish about the idea of a society in which even the calendar carries the name of corporations and products? The answer is, yes and no. There is something cartoonish about the idea of having corporations bid against each other for the right to have the coming year called "The Year of the Whopper" or "Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland" or "Year of Glad," but the point of ltifinite Jest will be that most Americans are already living inside just such a social reality and haven't noticed it yet. A major theme of Itifinite Jest is that we've all been turned into cartoon characters, two-dimensional people, by a world in which people no longer have souls. They exist merely as bundles of consumer preferences, and one way
Itifim�e Jest shows this is by raising to the level of cartoon-reality
certain aspects of American social existence that we otherwise take for granted. The convention of Subsidized Time is one means of doing this. The way
Itifim�e Jest attempts to awaken the
consciousness of its
readers can be illustrated by a story that's sometimes told about an experiment involving frogs. Frogs are cold-blooded, meaning that their blood temperature at any given moment is the same as that of the surrounding - or
circumambient,
as we will hear Don Gately learn to
say - atmosphere. This is why lizards lie on rocks in the sun at the beginning of the day: they are waiting to absorb enough body heat to get on with the rest of the day. Here is the experiment with the frog. It turns out that if you boil a pot of water on the stove and then toss a frog into the pot, it will jump right back out again. Who wouldn't? But if you take the same frog and put him in a pot of cold water standing on top of the stove, then heat the water up a few degrees at a time, the frog finds the increased warmth relaxing and does not jump out. If you keep heating the water up a little bit at a time, even to the point where its temperature is close to the boiling point, the frog remains in the water. When you increase the temperature to boiling, the frog stays right there and boils to death. One of the major themes of
Itifim�e Jest is
that advertising and
consumerist ideology work just this way. There's never a big change, the kind of thing that makes you want to jump right out of the water.
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Instead, there's a slow creep that works unobtrusively in a million different areas of social life, so that nobody ever picks out any one thing as being a threat to what one character in !'!finite Jest calls the "interior worth" of human beings. Think about this: a hundred years ago, no one in American society would have thought of wearing clothing that carried brand names. Turning yourself into a billboard for a product would in that earlier period have been thought of as vulgar or dehumanizing. Move forward fifty years and we find that it has become routine to feature brand names and slogans and logos on articles of clothing - the LaCoste alligator, the Calvin Klein logo, tee shirts with Budweiser and Coke and Pepsi on them - and that fewer and fewer people see this as odd or repulsive. Fast forward to the year 2000, the end of the millennium and, in l'!ftnz�e Jest, the beginning of Subsidized Time, and we find not only a world saturated with advertising - caps and shoes and shirts and pants covered with names like Nike and GAP and Old Navy - but brand names and logos screaming at us from every conceivable angle of social reality: bus stops and train platforms and TV spots and pop ups on our computer screens and spam in our e-mail and late-afternoon telemarketers and even scenes in movies where corporations have paid to have their products "placed" in a prominent position in scenes featuring the leading characters. One answer to the charge that Subsidized Time in
Infinz�e Jest is
cartoonish, then, is that we're already living inside a cartoon - and exist, ourselves, as cartoon characters rather than three-dimensional human beings - and, like the frog in the bathtub, have been wholly unaware of what's going on. We're perilously close to boiling to death, in other words, and the point of certain motifs in I'!ftm�e Jest is to turn the heat up suddenly, in hopes of making us jump out of the water before it's too late. The way in which Subsidized Time is not cartoonish is that it is a carefully worked-out element in a phantasmagoric social reality in which everything really has become both two - dimensional and advertising saturated, so that the world Before Subsidization has become a receding memory. There may be an element of cartoonishness to the way all this happens, but, as with the frog in the bathtub, it's shown to have happened
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so gradually that the characters in the story aren't aware of what's been going on. The people who live in Subsidized Time are, in short, all of us as we might be imagined to exist in a social reality that keeps on developing just the way it has been developing for the last century, until it reaches its logical conclusion in a world totally saturated by consumer consc1ousness. As important, David Foster Wallace shows its cartoonish character by never reporting the crucial events in straightforward terms. For instance, the key figure in the inauguration of Subsidized Time isjohnny Gentle, a Las Vegas singer who unexpectedly gets elected president of the United States. Subsidized Time is his brilliant inspiration - or, at least, he is made to think it is his own inspiration by Rodney Tine, the sinister Chief of Staff who manipulates Gentle in matters of policy but our introduction to the election ofjohnny Gentle and Subsidized Time comes not through newspaper reportage or even TV or radio news but as a filmed puppet show put on at the Enfield Tennis Academy as part of its annual celebration oflnterdependence Day, one of the key events in the calendar of Subsidized Time. By the time we figure out where "Year of the Whopper" and "Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland" come from, in short, we're already gazing at their invention through layers of parody. The serious point of the joke, and of what we've been calling the cartoonish character of motifs like Subsidized Time, is that Americans have already been living in the midst of a parodic social reality for a long time, and haven't understood their own situation. Let's start with johnny Gentle, usually referred to in !tifim�e Jest as 'Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner," or "JGFC:' Gentle is a character familiar enough in American society dominated by media and entertainment: the sort of aging crooner - Frank Sinatra, Tony \Villiams, Perry Como - to whom one's parents listened, or, in the case of younger readers of
Infinz�e Jest,
to whom their grandparents listened. Such
crooners speak the endearing language of an older epoch in show business, as when they twirl their microphones or inform their audiences that they have "gorgeous souls," and they are today more likely to perform in Las Vegas night clubs or lounges than on TV. Johnny Gentle is a creature of this world, wholly unpuzzled when his fringe political party -
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CUSP, for "Clean U.S. Party" - pulls an upset victory that carries him into the White House, wholly clear about what he wants to achieve once he gets there. He is, we are told at a certain point, the first president of the United States to twirl his microphone by its cord when making his Inaugural Speech. Why isn't this cartoonish? Well, partly because
Infinite Jests
portrayal of johnny Gentle is dominated by memories of another U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, who ascended to the presidency from his
Bedtime.for Bonzo Gen eral Electn'c 17zeater. Infinite Jest isn't "anti-Reagan"
beginning as an actor in Hollywood B-movies like and host of TV's
in the way of the academic or intellectual liberals whose creed involves a real and reflexive hatred of Ronald Reagan and his presidency - Johnny Gentle is, in his own clueless way, an endearing character - but its point is a serious one: in a society where B-movie actors and TV hosts have already been elected to the American presidency, it is hardly cartoonish to imagine a scenario in which the same victory is won by an aging Las Vegas crooner. If it is, we are already living inside that cartoon. (When we get to ETA, the tennis academy attended by Hal Incandenza, we'll find out that one book everyone has read is Edwin Abbott's Flatland, a mathematician's attempt to imagine the world as it would exist in two dimensions, as it does for characters in a cartoon.) A second reason that johnny Gentle is hardly cartoonish - or that, being cartoonish, he is hardly an exaggeration of our own American society - is that he combines features of other notoriously shallow U.S. politicians in an age when politics has become almost entirely a matter of media manipulation of the electorate. Thus, for instance, Gentle will echo the line that brought down the presidency of the first George Bush ("No new taxes. I said no new taxes. Read my lips") in a scene where Gentle reminds his listeners that he's against changes in social policy: "I told them on Inauguration Day. I said look into my eyes: no new enhancements:' But, once again, this doesn't mean that Infinz'te Jest is in any superficially ideological way "against" George Bush or Republicans generally. The point, a much deeper one, is that we live in an age where electoral choices are made by an uninformed, distracted, and media-manipulated electorate, and where all politicians are likely to be a version of johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner.
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Despite his claim that his presidency will bring about no new enhancements, though, the Gentle administration does bring about major changes not simply in American politics, but in the relation of America to the rest of the world. Part of the fun of Infinite Jest lies in tracing the hilarious process through which the United States absorbs Mexico and Canada to become the Organization of North American Nations (ONAN), with the presidente of Mexico and the Prime Minister of Canada becoming simply members of the President's cabinet. We are not going to spoil the fun by tracing it in detail here. But certain elements of the change are necessary to understanding Subsidized Time, and those we will mention. To understand the reasons for Johnny Gentle's victory in the U.S. presidential election, you have to understand the dilemma into which
I'!ftm�e Jest sees America plunged at the turn of the millennium. The United States is the world's only remaining superpower, which leaves Americans for the first time in their history without an enemy. A dangerous situation, as Johnny Gentle recognizes, for when history was thoughtful enough to provide enemies - Germany in the first part of the twentieth century, Germany andJapan at its midpoint, the Soviet Union in the second half - the sense of mutual hostility was strong enough to give Americans a sense that they had something in common with each other. With the end of the Cold War, there exists nothing but a society filled with isolated or detached souls, trying to achieve meaning through consumer hedonism but failing to achieve any sense of community or spiritual coherence. The political genius ofjohnny Gentle lies in his sense that the new enemy in this situation need not be a foreign nation but simply dirt the viruses and other microbes of which so many Americans live in terror, or the dust and clutter of ordinary life, or, finally, the waste constantly generated by a consumer society in which everything comes wrapped in five layers of plastic backed by glossy cardboard, or plastic bottles and foil candy bar wrappers, or styrofoam peanuts and other packing materials. Johnny Gentle's solution is simple and elegant: CUSP, his Clean U.S. Party, proposes to empty out the thinly-populated region of the northeast United States that includes Maine, Vermont, northern New York and Massachusetts - this will become in I'!ftm�e Jest the area
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known, from its shape on the map, the great Concavity - and to make it a huge garbage dump for the rest of the nation. More about the Concavity in a moment, but let us pause a moment to say something about Johnny Gentle's mania for cleanliness, an unspoken obsession so obviously general among Americans of the millennium that he swept to victory over the two major parties that remained mired in an older politics of defense, social programs, and the like. In general terms, Gentle's mania is modeled on that of Howard Hughes, the eccentric billionaire whose absolute horror of microbes led him to live a secluded life carried out as far as possible in antiseptic conditions - telephones wiped down with disinfectants as soon as they had been used by anyone other than Hughes, surgical masks worn by anyone ushered into his presence, etc. Many of the details that go into
bifinde Jests
portrait of Gentle are drawn directly from stories told
about Hughes in the last years before his death. Yet the obsession with dirt is not peculiar either to Howard Hughes or Johnny Gentle, Irifinde Jest wants us to see. In a time when medical care has improved dramatically and longevity has increased amazingly, every middle-class American has become a version of Hughes and Johnny Gentle. Thus, for instance, the nation's endless fascination with HIV - called simply "the Virus" in lrifim�e Jest - and the books written about the Ebola virus and other terrifying infectious diseases supposedly lying in wait just beyond the borders of civilization, in Africa and elsewhere, and the disproportionate media attention given to outbreaks like Legionnaire's Disease and Lyme Disease, and a country where the dream of the middle class is to live in ceramic-tiled surroundings with an endless supply of hot soapy water to scrub away the germs. What Gentle and CUSP have seen, in short, is that microbes, invisible, malevolent, mysterious, lying in wait on every household surface, have become the Enemy, and the expulsion of physical filth or waste a national obsession powerful enough to carry Gentle and his party into the White House. As we've said, we'll leave it to you to trace out the exact stages through which the victory of Gentle and CUSP leads to what throughout
Infim�e Jest is called the Reconfiguration: the absorption of Mexico and Canada into the new Organization of North American Nations, with
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gigantic airborne waste disposal vehicles constantly passing overhead as huge catapults hurl ONANs waste into the great Concavity where northern New York and New England used to be. All that is necessary to understand Subsidized Time is that it is born as an immediate consequence of the Reconfiguration, and is carried out under the sign of what
Irifim�e Jest describes
as the new ONAN heraldic design, "a
snarling full-front eagle with a broom and a can of disinfectant in one claw and a Maple Leaf in the other and wearing a sombrero" (153). For whatjohnny Gentle and CUSP discover is that absorbing two previously independent countries, and then emptying out a large region of the northeast United States to use as a gigantic waste receptacle for the mega-nation thus created, costs a great deal of money. In the old United States in which Johnny Gentle was elected president, the problem of raising the money to create and fund the Concavity waste-disposal system would have been negligible. In a booming economy, where an endless cycle of consumption is driven by constant advertising, it's only necessary to pass taxes that will provide funding. But here CUSP faces a problem. Because of certain changes in the technology of entertainment broadcasting, there are no longer television revenues, or corporate revenues as those are sustained by TV advertising, to pay for expensive measures like Reconfiguration. For the world of Subsidized Time is also one in which broadcasting - now called "spontaneous dissemination" by those old-fashioned enough to subscribe - has largely been replaced by home-entertainment cartridges played over high-defmition teleputers (TPs). Worse, even spontaneously disseminated programs
can
be transferred to cartridges by software
that automatically removes commercial spots. Paradoxically, a society wholly given over to advertising and mindless consumption has produced technology that permits viewers to escape advertising altogether. The stroke of genius that leads johnny Gentle to invent Subsidized Time comes when he makes a presidential appearance - protected from germs by an "oxygenated Portabubble" - at a post-season bowl game played by two college football teams. Or rather, at the post-game dinner at a Chinese restaurant where the place mat reminds him of the ancient Chinese practice of naming years after various animals: the Year of the
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Tiger, the Year of the Rat, etc. For in attending the bowl game Gentle thought he would simply be making an appearance at a college football contest. He is going, his aides have told him, to something called the Forsythia Bowl. But when he actually arrives he discovers that what he has come to watch is only incidentally a college football game. It is an advertising vehicle for the corporate sponsors who use it to advertise their products: the Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox Kemper-Insurance-Forsythia Bowl. College football, in short, has become another element in American life wholly absorbed by the TV networks and "the ad rates their huge overheads' slavering maw demand" (4 1 1 ) . The epochal birth of Subsidized Time occurs at the moment when Johnny Gentle (Famous Crooner) realizes that the advertising-vehicle status of events like the Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox-Kemper-Insurance Forsythia Bowl can be combined with the Chinese custom of giving names like Year of the Rat to years on the calendar. Again, readers who find this cartoonish as a mode of parody should simply pause and turn their eyes away from
bifinite Jest to the society around them. As this
paragraph is being written, for instance, a quick glance at the TV schedule of college football games comes up with the following: the Tostitos Corn Chips Fiesta Bowl, the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, the SBC Communications Cotton Bowl, the FedEx Orange Bowl, the Nokia Sugar Bowl, the Mazda Tangerine Bowl, the Toyota Gator Bowl, and many more. In December and early January, in a nation that has been transformed, as
Irifinite Jest puts
it, into "an entertainment market
of sofas and eyes" (6 1 1 ) , millions of Americans will sit down to watch spectacles like the Tostitos Corn Chips Fiesta bowl without the slightest suspicion that there is anything weird about their doing so. If there is a mindless superficiality to the idea of Subsidized Time - and, without question, there is - neither the mindlessness nor the superficiality is coming from
Infinite Jest.
There you have,
in short, the explanation of those mysterious section headings Year of the Whopper, Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad - that on a first acquaintance make
Irifinite Jest so forbidding to new readers. Infinz'te Jest, we are given a chronology
At a point not very far into
of Subsidized Time, or, as the novel puts it, a "Chronology of
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WILLIAM DOWLING AND ROBERT BELL
Organization of North American Nations' Revenue -Enhancing Subsidized TimeTM":
(1) (2) (3 ) (4) (5) (6)
Year of the Whopper Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster Year of the Yushityou 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade for Infernatron/Interlace TP Systems for Home, Office, Or Mobile (sic)
(7) Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland
(8) Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (9) Year of Glad A couple of notes on how to imagine Subsidized Time as you're making your way through
Itifim�e Jest.
First, knowing that the year
2000 was the end of our present system - the years Before Subsidization, as Infim�e Jest will usually put it, as in "1960 BS" - you will feel a temptation to translate the years of Subsidized Time into their "normal" equivalents: the Year of the Whopper as 2001, for instance, and the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad as 2002, and so on. For a number of reasons, it's probably best to resist this temptation. The most important is that Subsidized Time doesn't just represent a new way of counting calendrical time, but a whole new way of dealing with social reality. Just as Americans today see nothing strange about sitting down on the sofa to watch something called the Tostitos Corn Chips Fiesta Bowl, the people in Infim�e Jest see nothing odd about dating things that happen to them in terms of the Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken. If you can manage to get yourself into the state of mind demanded by Subsidized Time - or to recognize that most of us are already in that state of mind without realizing it - you'll have no problem making sense of a lot of episodes that look strange from our BS perspective. Consider, for instance, one of the newspaper headlines in the ETA puppet show that traces the rise of johnny Gentle and the CUSP party, the Reconfiguration and the creation of the great Concavity for waste
A READER's CoMPANION ro INFINITE lEST
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disposal, and the birth of Subsidized Time as a way of paying for it all: "FREAK STATUE O F LI B E RTY A C C I D ENT KI LLS FED ENGINEER. - Header: BRAVE MAN ON CRANE CRUSHED BY 5 TON CAST IRON BURGER" (398) . I f we've absorbed the idea that Subsidized Time means that every new year in the calendar belongs to a major corporation or one of its products, we'll almost automatically make sense of this: the right to "own" a year of the U.S. calendar involves not only the publicity that comes from having everyone in American society plan their daily lives in the name of some brand or product, but to have the Statue ofLiberty brandish a symbol or logo of the product for that entire year: "NNYC's harbor's Liberty Island's gigantic Lady has the sun for a crown and holds what looks like a huge photo album under one iron arm, and the other arm holds aloft a product. The product is changed each lJan. by brave men with pitons and cranes" (367). The 5-ton cast iron burger that kills the Federal engineer, in short, is our assurance that this must be happening in the Year of the Whopper. And "NNYC" is "New New York City," the New York that has come into existence when the Reconfiguration removed a previously-existing upstate New York from the map forever, to create the great Concavity. Or, similarly, if we notice that the Year of the Yushityu 2007's signal product has an uncharacteristically long and cumbersome name "Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install Upgrade for Infematron/Interlace TP Systems for Home, Office, or Mobile (sic)" - we're likely to notice as well that, in an era of total technological transformation, this was an especially important year. For the "TP" system announced in the Yushityu corporate slogan is a "teleputer," a kind of composite television-computer device that has come to be universal in the era of Subsidized time. The "cartridges" that the Yushityu permits you to view contain everything from films to TV programs to aerobics shows to tennis-training tapes. In the world of bifinite Jest, such cartridges are omnipresent and universal. As we'll see below, the plot of Infim�e Jest turns on a cartridge it's called The Entertainment, or simply the Samizdat - made by an experimental film maker. It is, as one character puts it, "lethally
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W1u1AM DOWLING AND RoBERT Bm
entertaining." Anyone who watches The Entertainment is frozen into a posture of pure self-gratification, wanting nothing but to see it again and again, rejecting food and water and ignoring all attempts at conversation, until they finally waste away and have to be removed from the premises by those who have not yet been enslaved. In one episode in Irifim�e Jest, a viewer put into a room as an experimental subject is told that he must, as the price of each new viewing, cut off a thumb or finger with an orthopedic saw and pass it out under the door to those who operate a remote control. The price is not too much to pay: the bloody digits come out, one by one, and the subject gets his reruns ofThe Entertainment. We'll discuss the logic ofThe Entertainment, and the way it stands as a metaphor for the soullessness of a society driven by consumerism and self-gratification, below. At the outset, the point to keep in mind is that its logic is the logic of Subsidized Time, an era in world history not too remote from us, it sometimes seems - in which society as little more than "an entertainment market of sofas and eyes" has transformed actual human beings into empty parodies of themselves, and in which the power of advertising to saturate human consciousness has become total or complete. One other point needs to be made about Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, before we leave his invention of Subsidized Time. Almost in passing, it is mentioned early on in Infim�e Jest that Gentle's political opponents, among them Hal's mother Avril Incandenza, have gone to court to try to block the "Gentle administration's Title-11/G-public funded-library-phaseout-fat-trimming initiative" (288). This is the darker side of the world of Subsidized Time. It is not only that in the new "floating no-space world of personal spectation" (620) symbolized by Johnny Gentle there will be nothing more than the endless and empty self-gratification offered by TPs and cartridges, but that books and reading will be actively discouraged until the entire society has forgotten that there ever was such a thing as losing yourself in a book. This is why Irifim�e Jest, not only as a book but as one that refuses to yield up its riches to anyone who resists the pleasures of"difficult" reading, sets out to offer a single gigantic antidote - a kind of cure - to the mentality of those living in Subsidized Time.
A READER's CoMrANION TO INFINIT£ )EST
I
The most important year i n Subsidized Time is the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment - a kind of diaper for senior citizens or others unable to control their bladders - which is the year immediately preceding the Year of Glad. As you'll find once you've actually entered the world of Irifim�e Jest and begin to register events in terms of its time scheme, the Year of Glad is something we encounter only in the opening episode of the story. All the rest of the novel's action takes place in a time period between 1960 BS ("Before Subsidization," remember?) and the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. The question of what happened to the "missing year" is one of the keys to making sense of Irifim�e Jest as a narrative.
31
Chapter Three Scenes & Settings Scene
1: ETA
Although the interwoven stories of !tifin#e Jest carry us back and forth constantly between the various locales and time periods in which the story takes place - the problem of a "decomposed" narrative which, even as it mirrors the fragmentation of its world, makes the novel tough going for beginning readers - its central settings can be separated into four main locations: (1) the Enfield Tennis Academy, the home ofHal Incandenza and his family and friends, (2) Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery facility, the home of Don Gately and a large group of wildly dysfunctional recovering drug addicts, ex-criminals, and weirdos, (3) an outcropping in the mountains outside Tucson, Arizona, the scene of a long philosophical debate between Hugh Steeply and Remy Marathe, whom we shall meet in due time, and (4) metro Boston, including Cambridge, Allston, Watertown, Weston, and other suburban locations, home to broken-down street people, homosexual hustlers and pimps, whores and drug addicts, and - as one moves toward the suburbs proper - upscale professionals who live in large Victorian houses with gardens and well-kept lawns. We'll introduce you to each of these in turn, giving you enough sense of what goes on in each to make you feel at home when you turn the page and find that you've been suddenly transported from Enfield 32
A READER's CoMPANION TO INFINITE )EST
I
Tennis Academy to Prospect Street in Cambridge, but let's start with ETA, the tennis academy founded byJames 0. Incandenza, Hal's father, in the period immediately preceding his suicide on 1 April in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. The career of)ames 0. Incandenza - also known throughout !tifinite Jestas]OI, Himself, the Mad Stork, and the "Infinite Jester" - is outlined in our compendium of main characters, but a few facts are in order for the benefit of those who need to know as much about ETA as is necessary to negotiate the story. To save time and needless repetition, let us adopt the convention that Hal's father will be referred to from now on either by his full name or as JOI. One crucial fact aboutJOI is that he was once himself a top-flight tennis player. Though he was a thin, scraggly, bespectacled youngster growing up in California and Arizona, he was the son of a father who was himselfa talented tennis player before becoming a hopeless alcoholic. That father ends his life as an actor in minor TV commercials, including one period when he dresses up in a white wig and white costume to play the Man from Glad. The youngJOI turns out to have inherited his father's gift for high-level tennis. As a highly-ranked junior player who is also brilliant at mathematics and optical theory,JOI gets a scholarship to MIT. His first work after graduation is in military optics for the U.S. government. The second part of his career as a scientist is devoted to "annular fusion" (more about this below, in our section on Quebec Separatism) . He next enjoys enormous success as an optical inventor, with patent royalties yielding so much wealth that he never again has to work. (Those mirrors on your car that say "Objects Are Closer Than They Appear" are one of]OI's many inventions.) Having himselfbeen a star tennis player, his next project is to establish Enfield Tennis Academy, where junior players aiming at a career in professional tennis both acquire academic credits and undergo a ceaseless training regimen meant to develop their talent to the fullest. Finally he becomes an experimental film maker, both admired and reviled by academic critics who see his mode of"anticonfluential'' film making either as the wave of the future or as a superficial avant-gardism with nothing really new to offer. We'll talk about some ofthis below, but the connection that concerns us right now is with ETA as the creation of James 0. Incandenza, hearkening back to his own days as a top junior player and putting into
33
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WILLIAM DOWLING AND RoBERT BELL
practice various of his theories about how to survive in a culture that he himself increasingly experiences as a spiritual wasteland. As some of the ETA players come to understand, the academy is less about learning to serve and hit backhands and forehands than it is about tennis as a microcosm of life itself: finding peace in a kind of self-transcendence that comes from meeting one's own limitations and conquering or accepting them, and in an attitude that takes the game itself, and not the fame or wealth or empty success that comes from being in tennis magazines or Sports Illustrated, as the arena of one's self-development. One more preliminary fact aboutJOI, and then we will go on to ETA and its large cast of characters. Though the ETA ethos works for some of the younger players, it's not able to overcome JOI's own sense of despair or hopelessness about the bleakness ofthe modem world. Though he's managed to remain sober for about 90 days before he kills himself, his death when it comes is particularly gruesome: he drinks a great deal of a large bottle of Wild Turkey and then, having cleverly altered the device to bring about the result he wants, commits suicide by putting his head in a microwave oven. A parody, clearly, of the head-in-a-gas oven suicides favored by some twentieth-century poets and artists Sylvia Plath is mentioned, though under a garbled version ofher name, at one point in Infinite Jest - but also a parody with a serious point. In the world ofSubsidized Time, ofTP cartridges and other technological breakthroughs with their promise of endless self-gratification, death by-microwave is the obvious way to go about killing yoursel£ Any older-fashioned method would be untrue to the culture that has led you to your despair. The spirit ofJames 0. Incandenza haunts ETA like a ghost, the halls of the subdorms and the rooms of the Headmaster's House filled with his memories. In the very last pages of Irifinite Jest,JOI will in fact appear as a ghost to a character (Don Gately) lying in his hospital bed after being seriously wounded in a fight, but in the early sections of the story he serves much the same function as the ghost ofHamlet's father in Shakespeare's play: a vivid unseen presence whose personality and achievements haunt everyone left alive in the world of the work. The echoes of Hamlet that recur constantly in Irifim�e Jest have, most of them, directly to do with the "absent presence" ofJOI.
A READER's CoMPANION TO INFINITE lm
I
Enfield, where both ETA and the Ennet House drug recovery facility are located, is both a real and an imaginary location. It's a real location because there was once an Enfield, Massachusetts. It's imaginary because the real town of Enfield was flooded, along with much neighboring territory, to create the Quabbin Reservoir as a water supply for Boston and other areas in Massachusetts. In our own real world, the site of what was once Enfield lies today under 40 square miles of water. But Enfield is also a literary locale - Francis W. Underwood's Quabbin: the Story ifa New England TO'WTI (1893), set in a lightly-fictionalized Enfield, is one of the best portraits of 19th-century village life - and in taking it over and relocating it in the immediate vicinity ofCambridge and Boston Itifim�e Jest is not least presenting a contrast with the older organic society for which New England town life was well known. (An acknowledgment of this theme, and also a kind of joke on the disappearance of the real Enfield, occurs at the end of the novel when Hal Incandenza attends what he thought was a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Natick, Massachusetts, in a building belonging to "Quabbin Recovery Systems:') As of the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment - from here on YDAU: getting used to the acronym will help you adjust to Subsidized time in Itifim�e Jest - ETA has been in operation for eight subsidized and three unsubsidized years, meaning that it was founded by James 0. Incandenza in 1998. As the story develops, we gradually build up a picture of how the academy was constructed. In the first place, JOI bought a large unoccupied hilltop in Enfield, and paid to have it leveled by bulldozers and earth-moving machinery into a flat-topped terrain. The side of the hill on which ETA sits is dense with brambles and undergrowth. At its bottom on one side lies the Ennet House recovery facility, important to the story because the residents of Ennet House very often take jobs as housecleaning staff or maintenance workers at ETA. Though it is technically forbidden, most Ennet House residents who work at ETA during the day take a shortcut down the densely wooded hillside to the facility - the Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital Complex - to which Ennet House belongs. The path down the hillside represents, therefore, not just a physical but a narrative connection between Ennet House's world of pimps and prostitutes and addicts and
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WilliAM DOWLING AND RoBERT BEll
the upscale world of ETA's junior tennis players and their teachers. It connects two separate worlds inside the story. ETA itself contains two worlds: the hard-driving world ofjunior tennis players training to make the professional tour - always called "the Show" by the ETAs - and a secret world of moral and spiritual training meant to save those who can be saved from the commercialized reality of American society. In tennis terms, this is the People Magazine or Sports Illustrated reality in which tennis players become celebrities, are exploited by TV and the world of tabloid newspapers, and wind up being ruined by their success. A great many of the younger players have come to ETA with this empty idea of" success" in their heads, and one major point of ETA training is to give them, at the same a time as it is perfecting their game, an inoculation against the shallowness and self-destructive nature of American celebrity status. The idea ofprotecting talented young people against the emptiness of American "success" was, we learn, a major point of JOI's original plan in founding ETA, which thus becomes a kind of counter-force against the more famous tennis academies that work only to prepare their members for athletics success and celebrity. Two characters play a central role in what might be called the spiritual conditioning that goes on at ETA. The first is a German tennis coach named Gerhardt Schtitt, with whom is associated certain characteristics normally thought of as belonging to the "fascist" dimension of German national character. He wears jackboots, carries a pointer - the rumor among younger players is that it used to be a whip - and drives his ETA charges through a relentless series of drills and conditioning routines so severe that they are known among the students as "pukers." You'll find out more about Schtitt in his entry in our section on the minor characters in ltifinite Jest, but it's essential to an understanding of ETA that all is not as it seems with him. For it turns out that Schtitt's authoritarian characteristics are "fascist" only in light of an extreme American individualism - the ethic of self-gratification and anybody gets-to-do-anything-they-want that drives the larger society. Taken in their own terms, they add up to a code of spiritual discipline. Schtitt's real message, which he repeats endlessly to the ETA members who have ears to hear, is that the real victory you work for as a tennis player
A READER's CoMPANION TO INFINITE lEST
I
is not victory or "making the Show," but self-transcendence, a kind of mystical state in which you, your body, your mind, your racquet, and the ball all become part of an elaborate slow- motion ballet and the normal division between the internal selfand the external world dissolves in a graceful ritual of oneness. Beneath his authoritarian exterior, Schtitt is a mystic, and the meaning ofhis mysticism lies at the heart of !'!finite Jests picture of the hidden or secret purpose of ETA as an institution. Even more mystical is Lyle, a mysterious trainer who presides over the world of the weight room and dispenses Zen- like advice to ETA players who are going through one or another kind of spiritual crisis. As the story unfolds, it will tum out that Lyle began by performing a similar service for JOI when the founder ofETA was in one ofhis worst periods of self-loathing and despair, but through most of Infim�e Jest we see him simply as a well- muscled man who sits in yoga position on the towel dispenser in ETA's training room, his ostensible purpose being to guide the weight-lifting routines of the players, his real purpose being to provide what might be called spiritual conditioning. There is a weirdness about Lyle that we should mention immediately. He lives, as far as anyone can tell, by licking the sweat off the bodies of ETA players who come to him for advice. A crucial point, made adequately in Infim�e Jest and reinforced so persuasively that we soon come to accept Lyle just as his ETA "clients" do, is that there is nothing sexual about this strange practice. Lyle's perspiration- diet is in fact only a slightly surreal version of the abstemious diets traditionally adopted by holy men and fakirs - you might think ofjohn the Baptist, living in the desert on locusts and honey, or the macrobiotic brown-rice diet of "spiritually advanced" holy men in some Eastern traditions - with the additional point that Lyle is teaching his young charges something important by choosing as his own means of sustenance something regarded in their own society as useless or expendable or even slightly repulsive. The third "mystical" character at ETA is Hal Incandenza's younger brother Mario, a misshapen, half-crippled, genetic freak who is unable even to stand on his own two legs when he's come to a stop. (Mario uses a police-lock type device, like those leaning bars ofsteel that dwellers in city apartments use to keep burglars from knocking in their door, to
37
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WiLLIAM DOWLING AND RoBERT BEll
stand up when he's stationary.) Mario is Infinite Jests nearest approximation to what might be called a natural or instinctive holy man, someone who bears his own deformity so cheerfully and whose sympathies with the less fortunate are so spontaneous and pure that people take to him immediately, and many end up coming to him for spiritual clarity on problems brought about by their own egoism or selfishness. In the Headmaster's House at ETA lives Avril Incandenza, mother ofthe Incandenza boys - a French-Canadian linguist whomJOI married when she was studying at McGill University - and one of the major characters in I'!finz�e Jest. Called "the Moms" by her own children, Avril is a permanent mystery just because she is seen in radically different ways throughout the story, depending on whose point of view we are hearing at the time. To her middle son, Orin, whose repressed sexual attraction to his mother leads him to view her in much the same terms as Hamlet views his mother Gertrude in Shakespeare's play, Avril is a sexually promiscuous woman whose openly adulterous affairs drove their father to suicide. To Mario, she is just "the Moms," someone to consult when he's trying to figure out the meaning of various events taking place in his own family. To Hal, her youngest son, she is the admired teacher whom he wants to please by mastering linguistic theory and memorizing all 24 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary, as well as writing papers about things like Montague grammar. To the regular students at ETA, she is simply the Dean of Students, someone who over s e e s their studies and c o u n s e l s t h e m on various extracurricular matters. (The scene in which Avril attempts to find out whether any of the youngest girl players have been sexually molested by male staff members, they being so young that they have absolutely no concept of"sexual touching," is a moment ofself-contained hilarity in the larger story.) In the Headmaster's House as well lives Charles Tavis, or CT, Avril's adoptive or half-brother who has taken over direction of ETA after his brother-in-law committed suicide-by-microwave. We see the interior of the Headmaster's House only on the rare occasions that Hal or Mario, who otherwise live with the other ETA students in a subdorm room, go by themselves or with a chosen friend or two to have dinner with the
A READER's CoMPANION ro INANITE lEST
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family. Mario's own visits to the Headmaster's house occur only when he goes there to listen, on the large radio in the living room, to "Madame Psychosis," a radio personality whose show comes out of the MIT student radio station, with a signal too weak to reach any other receiver at ETA. As the downhill path through the woods to the Ennet House drug-and-alcohol recovery facility connects the worlds of the tennis camp above and the drug-addict world below, the Madame Psychosis show is the main link between ETA and the outside world of metro Boston. In addition to what Itifim�e Jest once calls the "paradoxical Schtitt/ Incandenza/Lyle school" at its hidden center, ETA contains a regular tennis academy at which male and female players of all ages and all levels of play pursue their dream of making the professional circuit. Tuition at ETA is, we learn at one point, $2 1,000 a year. ETA has an accredited capacity of 140 players. At the time of the story, there are 136, of whom 72 are female. There are 95 who pay full tuition, and 4 1 scholarship students. We meet a great number ofthese during the course of the story, and get to know the central characters very well. One of them is Hal Incandenza, the youngest son ofJOI and Avril Incandenza, whose nervous breakdown we witnessed in the opening pages of the novel. Another is Michael Pemulis, from a blue-collar Irish family in nearby Allston, and one of the most memorable characters in Infim�e Jests vast and sprawling story. As a tennis player, Pemulis has peaked. His importance in the story lies elsewhere. He is, first, something of a mathematical genius, which, given its founder's own genius in theoretical optics - reflected in the higher-math component ofthe ETA curriculum - gives him an academic edge and makes him a valuable resource for the other students. He is, second, a streetwise con-artist, the one character inside the walls ofETA who provides a real connection with the outer world of metro Boston. (Under the "Big Buddy" system used at ETA, Pemulis is supposed to provide orientation and guidance to a group of younger players. He spends most of his "Big Buddy" sessions, though, bilking them out of their spending allowances by cheating them in card games.) Then Pemulis is, third, the major source of drugs for the other older ETA players who indulge in mind-altering substances. His friend
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Hal Incandenza is chief among these. Hal's routine of disappearing into the tunnel complex beneath ETA to do "one-hitters" of high-resin Bob Hope marijuana has him, by the time we come into the story, on the very edge of marijuana addiction. His source for Bob Hope is Michael Pemulis. In addition, Pemulis himself takes various forms of amphetamines ("'drines") such as Tenuate, and other recreational drugs as occasion offers. He stores his immediate drug supply in a special yachting-cap-with-hidden-pockets that is part of his trademark costume, his longer-term drug supply in a special cache above a ceiling panel in ETA's suspended hallway ceiling. (The last we see of Pemulis is the episode where he climbs up on a chair only to discover that someone has located his drug cache and removed its contents.) And finally, Pemulis is someone who has come into possession of "DMZ," a psychedelic drug left over from the 1960s wave of experimentation with LS D and similar substances. There is an implication that DMZ was used in various secret CIA-directed drug trials before being outlawed entirely. The question of whether or not Pemulis and his ETA drug circle will finally dare to take the DMZ is one of the ongoing mysteries of plot during the period covered by Irifim�e Jest s story. The cast of ETA characters is very large, and we come to know many of them intimately. You will find our directory of minor characters helpful in keeping them straight as you read through the story. The central outline of events will always be clear to you, though, if you just keep in mind the schematic picture we've given you here: ETA as standing on a hill high above Ennet House out in Enfield, on the fringes of metro Boston, with the ghost ofits founderJOI haunting the premises in many ways - through most of the story, as a presence remembered by CT and Avril and the older players - and a small central group of members for whom drugs have become a release from the pressures both of high-level tennis training and the society outside the walls of their academy. At the hidden center of ETA's values are Schtitt and Lyle, living reminders of the principle of self-transcendence for which James 0. Incandenza founded the academy in the years before he committed suicide.
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Scene 2 : Ennet House The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery Center, located at the bottom of the hill on which ETA sits, is in many ways the most important setting in Infim�e Jest. This is because addiction - to drugs, to "spectation" or entertainment-watching, to anonymous or impersonal sex, to alcohol - is Infim�e Jests central metaphor for the hopelessness or despair of modern American life, the empty round of production and consumption that dominates existence in so-called developed societies in the early twenty-first century. In this sense, the group meetings of various 12-step groups, principally Alcoholics Anonymous but also such 12-step spinoff's as Narcotics Anonymous, Cocaine Anonymous, and Sex-and-Love Addicts Anonymous, belong to the Ennet House setting. For the wasted and washed-up Ennet House residents, there are numerous rules that govern behavior in the house. No drugs or alcohol at any time, obviously, but also chores to be performed by residents upon pain of expulsion, "humility" jobs that earn less than the minimum wage and keep them to a regular schedule of responsibilities, and, finally, attendance at a 12step group meeting every evening ofthe week. Some ofthe most heart wrenching scenes in bifim�e Jest involve attendance at these meetings, where both various Ennet House residents and we as readers hear the stories of people who have hit bottom in ways so degrading and emotionally devastating that one wonders how they have managed to go on living. Still, ifInfim�e Jest were nothing more than 12-step stories - women who became prostitutes because they were sexually molested by family members as little girls, upscale professionals who drift into drugs and degradation because their lives are utterly empty, nearly-suicidal depressives who can see no reason to stay alive - it would consist merely of the stuff of TV talk shows, where child molestation, drug abuse, sexual fetishism, prostitution, and similar topics exist mainly as a way of getting high Nielsen ratings in a society grown steadily more jaded about social deviance. Similarly, the 12-step stories that belong thematically to the Ennet House setting would be no more than another
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form of sensationalism in an America that has dissolved into psychobabble "therapies" and the degraded mythology of recovered memory syndrome. The reason that this never happens is that l'!ftm�e Jest is, so to speak, against all such forms of voyeuristic sensationalism, seeing them as more of a problem than the various forms of addiction and deviant behavior fed to the TV-watching public in our own society. I'!ftnz�e Jest is in this sense a "tough-minded" treatment of various forms of social deviance, but beneath its tough-mindedness lies a moral and psychological clarity that translates into the most genuine form of sympathy for those driven to despair by the emptiness of modem existence. One way of putting this would be to say that Ennet House is about the possibility ofrecovering a sense of divine or transcendental meaning in a world wholly given over to an empty materialism. But putting things that way is at the same time untrue to the depth and complexity of I'!ftm�e Jests take on the possibility of transcendence. Its real subject is not God or a sense of the divine, but the terminal impoverishments of life in a society where it is impossible to even think about transcendence without irony. Irony, by the same token, is meant to demonstrate that one is wholly aware that only fools or idiots or fanatics are able to take seriously the idea that there may be a God whose existence gives meaning or purpose to a world in which people either live as the robot citizens of a consumer culture - TV, brand names, products, status, self gratification - or wind up broken in mind and spirit. Every 12-step narrative that occurs in I'!ftm�e Jest, therefore - and there are so many that their cumulative force is almost unbearable emotionally - is backlighted by a counterpoint of scenes in which residents new to Ennet House have "seen through" the stupidity and hollowness and tedious cliches of organizations like AA, which try to reform members' lives with a tacky pseudo-religiosity that promises to rescue them from their present enslavement to what in Ennet House parlance is always known as the Substance, a category that includes alcohol and marijuana and narcotic painkillers like Demerol and Talwin and cocaine (ingested both nasally and by freebase), on up to the heroin classically injected by street hustlers and junkies.
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Closely related to the Substance is the Disease, which is whatever drives ordinary people to their attempt to escape ordinary social reality, offering at first a bliss never before known, but ending up as an internal demon that controls every aspect ofthe addict's life, until it has become a living hell. One of the great triumphs of Irifinite Jest is that it takes the notion of Disease already implicit in AA thought - addiction as a force or power outside one's own will, existing much as did the Devil in older theologies, possessed of endless cunning, endless patience, endless willingness to wait for one small slip of the will that will carry you back completely into its power - and bestows on it a reality so vivid and true that one comes to understand, even from the safety ofa reader's chair, the hopelessness of those who have found their way into this particular hell. Behind the Disease, in turn , lies the experience ofdespair that Irifimte Jest always implicitly pictures as the true horror of life in the modern age, the terrifYing glimpse of a universe that is utterly meaningless, a cold void in which the existence ofhuman consciousness is the outcome of nothing more than a chance concatenation of atoms and molecules, and in which quite literally nothing at all has meaning or value. The customary way of dealing with this plunge into meaninglessness is to talk about it as clinical depression, and in Irifimte Jest we meet a number of characters whose despair is treated in clinical terms. We find ourselves taking the side of the characters who realize just how pointless and stupid the clinical notion of depression is to someone who is suffering real sickness of the soul. Consider, for instance, the early episode in which Kate Gompert attempts to explain to a young and puzzled medical resident that she has not tried to commit suicide because she wanted to "hurt herself," or because of any anger or self-loathing, but simply because remaining alive has become literally intolerable. Have you ever been sick to your stomach, she asks the young M.D. He makes a gesture like, as the narrative says, Well sure. Kate: "Imagine you felt that way inside. All through you. Like every cell and every atom or brain-cell or whatever is so nauseous it wanted to throw up, but it couldn't, and you felt that way all the time, and you're sure, you're positive the feeling will never go away, you're going to spend the rest of your natural life feeling like this" (74) .
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Like several other characters in the story - the earliest we meet is a junior advertising executive named Ken Erdedy - Kate's release from this state is Bob Hope, the same high-resin marijuana to which Hal Incandenza finds himselfaddicted. The point ofall such scenes in 11ifinite Jest, though, is that addiction to a Substance is merely a late and almost incidental symptom of the deeper despair in which it began. The path in Irifim�e Jest lies from some personal hell through release or escape into use of a Substance back into, inevitably, a hell worse than before. The shape in which despair reveals itselfagain and again in Irifim�e Jest is that of a dark, billowing, shapeless horror that appears just beyond the limits of ordinary existence. Many pages after her confrontation with the well-meaning but obtuse young physician, Kate Gompert finds herselfin Ennet House, talking to another newly-arrived resident named Geoffrey Day. He tells her about his own childhood encounter with the Disease - this is long before the Substance addiction that eventually lands him in Ennet House - and she immediately recognizes it as identical to her own. It was, Geoffrey Day reports, a "shape, dark, and either billowing or flapping": "it was a bit like a sail, or a small part ofthe wing of something far too large to be seen in totality. It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space" (650). And, like Kate Gompert, confrontation with the horror leads him to thoughts of suicide: "I understood . . . why people killed themselves. Ifl had to go for any length of time with that feeling I'd surely kill myself" (651). Geoffrey Day is an unusually articulate spokesman for the horror that lies at the heart ofInfim�e Jests central metaphor of addiction - he is an academic, and arrives at Ennet House feeling superior to the whores and hustlers who make up the larger part of its population but the feeling he describes is common to every character in Irifim�e Jest who experiences it not as mere clinical depression but as deep existential despair: the sense that one's consciousness is surrounded by nothing more than cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space, and that the diversions and self-delusions through which people sustain what is normally called ordinary life are no more than the thin crust on which one walks over a seething cauldron of utter hopelessness. The possibility of redemption that Infim�e Jest holds out, mainly through
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the story of its protagonist and moral hero Don Gately, is the discovery through self-transcendence that there is, after all, no thin crust and no cauldron of despair, that both are fictions - terribly real, undeniable in their vividness - created out of the darkest tendencies within one's own soul. The lonely personal hell of Irifim�e Jest is the prison the self or ego becomes when you take it to be the only possible reality. The total psychic horror Geoffrey Day describes might seem, on the face ofit, excuse enough for anyone's choosing escape into Substance addiction. And, in fact, there is a kind ofinitial division of lrifim�e Jests world into two types or strata of people. One is the vast majority of ordinary citizens who live clockwork lives, carrying out their normal routines, coming home and watching television - or, in Subsidized Time, their TPs - living empty consumerist lives and dying unregarded. The other consists of those who, like Kate Gompert and Geoffrey Day, have at least looked into the abyss of meaninglessness and attempted to escape through addiction or compulsive sexual coupling or other forms of deviant behavior. Yet finally characters in this second category face a further choice, which is to kill themselves - as does JOI, the most important of the despairing characters in the story - or to remain addicted to the Substance that now controls their lives, or to somehow get past the addiction and discover a plane ofexistence on which, having conquered both despair and addiction, there is a hard-won peace with one's own soul. In the 12-step world of Ennet House, the symbols of this victory over the Disease are the so-called Crocodiles, a group oflongtime AA members who have, as the narrative sometimes puts it, geological amounts of sober time behind them, who have not been tempted to return to their Substance for decades, and who yet never miss a meeting or an opportunity to strengthen through their own example the resolve of some member who has just Come In. They are old men, normally with white crew cuts and substantial bellies. They wear suspenders, smoke constantly - it is rare to hear a Crocodile talk or laugh without a good deal of wheezing and coughing - and, as the narrative puts it, seem to "live in a totally different spiritual galaxy:• They are, on the face of it, cynical and profane, possessors of a kind of wisdom that cannot be talked about directly but has to be inferred by the way they react to
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the stories and posturings and pleas for help of newer AA members. They're called the Crocodiles because the basement in which their AA group meets has, on the wall in one corner, a large poster of crocodiles sunning themselves on a river bank, and this is the favored spot for these oldest AA members to sit together. Yet as the story proceeds, they take on some of the qualities of crocodiles, being tough-skinned, lazily sure of themselves, and finally so different from the newer AA members as to seem almost a different species. The role of the Crocodiles in the world ofEnnet House recovery is to show by their way ofbeing in the world that they've passed through every stage of doubt and revulsion that newcomers to AA feel: the embarrassment about the cliches that are urged on new members "One Day at a Time," "Surrender to Win," "Give It Away to Keep It" the talk about powerlessness over the Substance, the references to a Higher Power ("God as We Understand Him"), and, having passed through, have come out the other side. The quintessential Crocodile is Francis ("Ferocious Francis") Gehaney, Don Gately's AA sponsor. The newcomer's dilemma is that of Gately himself, red-faced and humiliated by the routine ofgetting down on his knees at night to pray to a Higher Power in which he doesn't believe. He's been told to ask for the strength to go another day without the Substance, which in his case is the synthetic narcotic Demerol and related drugs like Talwin. And Irifim�e Jests ultimate "truth" is the experience gone through by Gately at Ennet House and symbolized by the Crocodiles: you don't overcome despair or emerge from your own personal hell by reasoning or arguing or thinking or even giving any value to your own doubts and anxieties. You just Do It, and when you Do It your life changes in ways you had no right to expect. At the heart of !'!finite Jest s AA parable lies a truth that is existential rather than doctrinal, and essentially incommunicable. It is a truth that must be lived rather than preached, and beyond that cannot be expressed. Like ETA, Ennet House has a large cast of characters with whom you will become very well acquainted as the story progresses. We've given accounts of the most important of these in our compendium of characters. The important point about Ennet House is that it is one of the centers on which numerous narrative lines in the story converge.
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Ken Erdedy, whom we meet very early in the story as a young advertising executive undergoing a near nervous breakdown as he waits for a shipment of marijuana to arrive, will wind up as an Ennet House resident. So will Joelle van Dyne, whom we meet as "Madame Psychosis," the WYYY radio personality. Along with Hal Incandenza and Don Gately, she will emerge as one of the major protagonists of the larger story, and she will arrive at Ennet House in due time. Randy Lenz, a small time cocaine dealer who comes as close to being purely and irredeemably evil as anyone in Irifinite Jest, permits himself to be admitted to Ennet House not because he wants to beat his own cocaine addiction but because he needs to hide out both from the law and the Mob. (Not knowing that he is playing a part in a Federal Drug Administration sting operation, Lenz accepts a large shipment of cocaine from a suspiciously naive Brazilian dealer - really a Federal plant - and then, instead ofdelivering it to his customers, holes up in a hotel and consumes the entire shipment.) The apocalyptic scene in which Don Gately takes on three huge Canadian gangster-terrorists who are chasing Lenz is one of the climactic episodes in lrifinite Jest.
Scene 3 : the Arizona Outcropping The larger narrative of Infim�e Jest is punctuated by a recurring scene that takes place over one evening, night, and morning on a mountain outcropping overlooking Tucson, Arizona. The scene is essentially one long philosophical debate between Hugh Steeply, an agent of the Office of Unspecified Services - a sort of cross between the CIA and the FBI, instituted after Reconfiguration to deal with various Quebecois Separatist groups, and in particular the dreaded Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents [szc] , or AFR - and Remy Marathe, a member of the AFR who is either an AFR agent (that is, he's an AFR member who is pretending to have turned informer but is really working for the AFR) or a double agent (he's an informer who is pretending to be working for the AFR, planting misleading information they want passed to the American government, but actually is a real informer) , or a triple agent (he's an informer who's pretending to be a plant who's pretending to be real informer but
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who is really, underneath all the layers of duplicity, actually working for the AFR after all). We'll give you a complete account of Quebecois Separatism and the Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents ("Wheelchair Assassins") below, but the importance of the interludes on the Outcropping is that they contain a philosophical debate about the sources ofthe modem alienation explored in narrative terms elsewhere in Irifim�e Jest. They stand in relation to the main story something as the Chorus in Sophoclean or Aeschylean tragedy stands in relation to the main action of Greek drama, commenting, moralizing, warning, prophesying, and in general providing a "view from the outside" that is unattainable by any of the characters caught up in the events that make up the larger story. To say that scenes on the Outcropping are a philosophical debate may seem to suggest something dry or abstract, some kind of moralizing intrusion into the main action that could be skipped over and leave the narrative intact. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The scenes between Steeply and Marathe are in fact as dramatic as anything in Irifim�e Jest, filled with a kind of existential drama that totally belies the static nature oftheir interchange. The Outcropping sequence is a major subplot of the story, with its own drama and poignancy. When the scene dissolves to send Steeply and Marathe on their separate ways, echoes of their debate on the Outcropping will linger to provide depth and meaning to various episodes that would in themselves be nearly unintelligible. In the long and complicated conversation that takes place on the Outcropping, we come as close as we will get in Irifim�e Jest to an external perspective on the terminally deranged society in which the major events of the story take place. The meeting between Steeply and Marathe takes place in Arizona for two reasons. The first is that Arizona is one of the two points of dissemination for Interlace cartridges - the other is Boston - and is therefore one of the points from which Quebecois Separatists have already managed to infiltrate a few read-only cartridges of the Entertainment into the ONAN market. The second is that Orin Incandenza, the oldest son ofjames 0. Incandenza, the maker of the Entertainment, is now the star punter of the Phoenix Cardinals, a professional football team. Both Steeply's Office ofUnspecified Services
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(henceforth OUS) and Marathe's AFR reason that the way to the Master Cartridge from which a huge number of cartridges can be duplicated and released into the U.S. market is through Orin Incandenza, who might know what his father did with the Master before committing suicide. So the meeting on the Outcropping is ostensibly an exchange of information in which each side, the OUS and the AFR, hopes to learn what the other has so far found out. The drama of the Outcropping scenes has to do, first, with the comedy ofHugh Steeply's OUS-dictated disguise as a woman. Steeply, a substantial hulk of a man, is on the face of it the most unlikely woman imaginable, a sort oflinebacker-sized federal agent playing the role of a female interviewer for Moment magazine, a People-magazine-type publication devoted to profiles ofcelebrities. He wears a wig that never sits comfortably or convincingly on his head. He has had his facial hair removed by electrolysis, leaving behind a pinhole-like red rash over the lower part of his face. He wears false breasts - huge cone-like protuberances - that have been set askew by his climb up to the Outcropping and point in various unlikely directions. His shoes are delicate narrow-toed slippers held on by straps, which squeeze his large feet and cause him constant discomfort. He has undergone OUS training for various "female" gestures and postures, some of which he has mastered, others of which he forgets or performs so imperfectly that they seem like parodies of the behavior they are meant to imitate. He smokes a kind of Belgian cigarette called Flanderfume, on which he is constantly puffing during the entire scene, disposing of the still-lighted butts by tossing them down the mountainside and reaching into his purse for a fresh cigarette. Steeply's female disguise is so clumsy, in short, as to lend an almost surreal quality to his early exchanges with Marathe on the Outcropping. It's only much later that we learn that it has a serious purpose. As "Helen" Steeply, Moment magazine writer, he is in Arizona to interview Orin Incandenza, whom we know - and OUS knows - to be an inveterate womanizer, much more likely to talk freely if he thinks he might be able to seduce the woman sent out to write a piece on the star punter for the Phoenix Cardinals. There is a kind of poignancy to the ploy, in that Orin, somehow sensing that this women represents a totally
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new kind of challenge to his talents as a seducer, is in fact driven nearly crazy by his inability to get to first base with "Helen." He does end up revealing much more about himself, and the Incandenza family, than he would ever have otherwise let slip. Orin calls the women he seduces "Subjects." He regularly calls his younger brother Hal to describe his various seduction strategies in great and lascivious detail. In one of their conversations, Hal points out that Orin earlier described the Moment magazine interviewer as "obese," scarcely the sort ofwoman Orin usually considers as a potential Subject. It is then that we find out that the OUS disguise has worked its magic: "'I said she was a girl and a half in all directions. Which all of a sudden there was something that seemed cross-cultural about it: I had this sudden flash of understanding how cultures can regard largeness as erotic. More of someone to love. Not to mention queerly and oddly intense and alive and vibrant." The magic, of course, is that as a man "Helen" Steeply cannot respond to Orin's advances, putting him in the impossible position oftrying to seduce a woman who is not a woman. But all this is a comedy that works itself out much later in the story. In the beginning, on the Outcropping, it is the strangeness of Steeply's disguise, and his obvious discomfort in the role he has been assigned, that lends the scene its quality of strangeness. On the other side, Remy Marathe's physical condition provides a counterpart to this surreal quality. For as a member ofthe Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, Marathe is legless and wheelchair-bound. He arrives at the Outcropping before Steeply, and insists that Steeply leave before him when their conversation ends, so it is never clear how someone in a wheelchair has managed to get to this isolated mountainside location. His secrecy about how it was accomplished, and how he will manage to get down once Steeply has gone, is meant to preserve the AFR mystique ofinvincibility, a theme that will be pursued in detail in other episodes. The mountain nights being cold, Marathe sits with a blanket over his lap, holding the pebbled grip of a machine pistol hidden in his left hand. Though the leadership of the AFR has demanded for political reasons that all his meetings with Steeply be conducted in Quebecois French, the two of them converse mainly in what Marathe calls U.SA
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English, his own version o f which i s basically Quebecois translated in hilariously literal terms into English syntax. ("I have said to you all we know. Civilians as individual warnings to ONAN are not our desire. This is known by you:' [92)). We also hear Marathe's thoughts to himself in the same stilted French-English, lending a further surreal quality to the scene. During the course of the scenes taking place on the Outcropping, we learn a great deal about Remy Marathe. Like most members of the AFR, he has lost his legs in Lejeu du Prochain Train ("The Game ofthe Next Train"), a terrifying game in which young boys in rural Quebec test their courage by seeing who can wait the longest to leap across the tracks in front of an engine hurtling through the Canadian night. The winners, almost always, are those who wait so long that their legs are severed by the speeding wheels. His reason for dealing with the OUS is that he is contemplating defection to the United States to obtain medical care for his seriously ill wife Gertraud, whose life can be saved by a new medical technology available only in the U.S. Gertraud, lying near death at home in Quebec, is also the main hold his AFR superiors have over Marathe. Should they find out that he has betrayed them to the OUS, he knows, they will kill her without compunction. The subject of the meeting on the Outcropping is the lethally entertaining cartridge that OUS, Steeply's employer, calls the Samizdat, a word borrowed from the underground publications that circulated in Russia before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since we'll discuss the Entertainment in detail in another section, it's only necessary to mention at this point that the OUS, much perturbed by several episodes in which read-only copies of the Entertainment have reduced those who watched them to a vegetative state, is involved in a race against the AFR and other Quebecois Separatist groups to locate the Master from which those copies were made. Should the Quebecois obtain it before they do, they know, tens of thousands of Samizdat cartridges will be released to an unsuspecting U.S. public, turning America into a nation of drooling TP-watchers who sit staring at their screens until they waste away from thirst and self-imposed starvation. We've said that Steeply's conversation with Marathe is a philosophical debate, but it is not understood that way by either participant. Its nature
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as a debate emerges only slowly from genuine incomprehension on both sides. To Steeply, it is puzzling that a group like the AFR should want to attack the United States through an Entertainment that is, on the face of it, simply a means of limitless self-gratification. This would be understandable if, for instance, the object were to make the U.S. militarily helpless, so passive and powerless that it could not mount a defense against an invading enemy. In the world of ONAN and Subsidized Time, however, there are no such enemies. The Soviet Union has collapsed. Canada as a nation has been absorbed into the new Organization ofNorth American Nations. The AFR and other Quebecois splinter groups scarcely have the capacity to mount a military threat. It is not obvious how turning the U.S. into an immobilized population staring vacantly at their TP screens would serve the purpose ofbringing about an independent Quebec. On Marathe's side, the mystery is Steeply's inability to recognize that his fear ofthe Samizdat is really an anxiety about the moral flaccidity of modern American society. For a circulation of the Entertainment would not be an attack. Simply to make available a means of limitless self-gratification to a society already committed to endless self gratification is not to assault anyone, any more than leaving sleeping pills in a medicine cabinet would be to cause the suicide of someone who chose to take an overdose. The peculiar brilliance of ltifinite Jests theme ofthe Entertainment is that is about the possibility that a culture that lives for self-gratification alone does not need external enemies. It is already well along the way to spiritual suicide. The Samizdat is simply the means through which an American society already dying a lingering spiritual death would be able to administer to itself the coup de grace. The Quebecois theme in Itifim�e Jest, which contains a good bit of high comedy as well as moments of pure terror, puts into perspective a thousand details in the narrative that would otherwise seem random or unmotivated. At the center lies the notion of the Separatist cause itself, which has less to do with the issue of Quebecois autonomy than with the abstract value ofliving one's life for a cause, something higher than one's own self-interest. More peripherally, there are all the ways that Quebecois culture generally represents throughout Itifim�e Jest opposition to mindless consumerism, advertising, a reflexive emphasis on wealth
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or status, a technology made to serve microscopic niches of "convenience" for purposes ofendless marketing and consumption. We'll let one peculiarity stand for all the rest. It is a shared characteristic of the Quebecois characters in !'!finite Jest that they are made physically uncomfortable by fluorescent lighting, the cold, flickering, omnipresent symbol ofAmerican technology in both public and private spaces. It is due to Avril Incandenza's strong distaste for fluorescent lighting, for instance, that ETA has none in any of its rooms, the optical engineer JOI having designed an alternative system that serves the same purpose using incandescent light sources and mirrors. The Quebecois dislike of fluorescent lighting is, at bottom, a reaction to the coldness and irreality of American culture. The debate between Steeply and Marathe turns on two possible definitions of freedom. To Steeply, raised in a U.S. ethos of "choice" choice of products, choice of television programs or TP cartridges to watch, choice of other recreational activities - Marathe and the AFR seem like crazed fanatics whose opposition to U.S. culture has no real point. What he cannot grasp is that from Marathe's perspective the thing that Steeply calls "choice" is really a form ofenslavement Americans choose their automobiles or brands of cereal or TP cartridges, but the society in which they make those "choices" has, without their realizing it, already taken away the power to do anything but choose among a meaningless set of consumer alternatives. But to Steeply, consumer choice is the most visible example of a larger commitment to freedom itself: "This is what lets us steer free of oppression, and tyranny . . . . The United States: a community ofsacred individuals which reveres the sacredness of the individual choice. The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ratio of pleasure to pain; utterly sacrosanct. Defended with teeth and bared claws all through our history" (424). To which Marathe answers, drily, "Bien sur" (roughly: "Ah yes, certainly"). "Helen" Steeply's impassioned defense of American economic individualism is simplistic to the point of parody, the sort of thing one might hear at a meeting of small-town Elks or Rotarians. Yet that is precisely its point in Infinite Jest. It isn't sophisticated Austrian School defenses of free market individualism that have made America into a mindless, soulless consumer culture, but a vulgarized and simplified
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ethic of"choice," enormously powerful in its historical context, that has given us both America as a global power and as the land ofthe Whopper and WhataBurger and the Perdue Wonderchicken. To this ethic Remy Marathe counterposes an ethic ofsomething like transcendental loyalty: you are choosing only if you live for something important enough to die for: "Choose with care. You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice. You, M. Hugh Steeply: you would die without thinking for what?" !'!finite Jest is at its most daring in the debate between Steeply and Marathe. The portions of the story that take place at Ennet House or the 12-step meetings are filled with drama and interest of an obvious kind: lost souls who have undergone terrible mental suffering to bring them to the point where they are willing to surrender themselves to anything that promises them salvation. The Steeply-Marathe debate, on the other hand, is wholly abstract, a conflict of ideas or values that wholly lacks the sensationalism ofpersonal misery or sexual degradation or drug addiction heard in the meetings of the White Flag Group or the Better Late Than Never Group or the St. Columbkill Sunday Night Group. Yet the debate is a real drama in its own right, not least because we understand that the tales ofmisery and degradation that we encounter in the 12-step meetings have their source in the "sacredness ofindividual choice" that Steeply defends as the essence ofAmerican freedom. Irifim�e Jest as a novel takes no political sides - it is implicitly on the "side" of something that can only be loosely and unsatisfactorily described as self-transcendence - but without the political debate on the Arizona outcropping its stories of drug addiction and prostitution and child m o lestation would dwindle into little more than talk-show sensationalism, precisely the false and titillating "transgressiveness" that Irifim�e Jest sees as a major symptom of American cultural emptiness. The point that Marathe keeps making against Steeply, with great effectiveness, is that if the OUS takes its own ethic ofindividual choice seriously, there is nothing to be feared from the Entertainment. Nor is there any reason to consider the AFR's presumed role in circulating it an attack on the United States. If the Entertainment were universally available, Marathe asks, and if millions of Americans "chose" to watch
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it, thus giving themselves over to a speechless passivity in which they wanted to do nothing but watch the cartridge over and over again, would that not simply be the logical outcome of the sacredness of individual choice? "You people seem to want us dead," Steeply complains at one point. And Marathe's reply is chilling. You cannot kill what is already dead: "This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite ofyour people unable to choose appetites, this is the death . . . . The choice for death of the head by pleasure now exists, and your authorities know, or you would not now be trying to stop the pleasure" (3 19). Steeply's answer, which is an account ofexperiments carried out in Marathe's own Canada on laboratory rats, takes us to the heart of Irifinite Jests diagnosis ofAmerican self-gratification as a spiritual disease. The scientists who designed the experiments had located the rats' so called p-terminals - the beta-endorphins, L-Dopa, serotonin, "all the various neurotransmitters of pleasure" - and implanted electrodes in them, such that a rat who pressed a lever could experience, as Steeply later says, "'the neural distillate of, say, orgasm, religious enlightenment, ecstatic drugs . . . - the sum of all possible pleasures refined into pure current and deliverable at the flip of a hand-held lever, thousands of times an hour, at will'" (473). And what the scientists found is that pleasure, in such a case, literally meant death: '"the Canadians found that if they rigged an auto-stimulation lever, the rat would press the lever to stimulate his p-terminal over and over, thousands of times an hour, over and over, ignoring food and female rats in heat, completely fixated on the lever's stimulation, day and night, stopping only when the rat finally died of dehydration or simple fatigue"' (471). The Brandon experiments, Steeply points out, did not stop with rats. They were repeated on dogs, cats, monkeys, dolphins. In every case the animal chose death-by-pleasure over any other choice offered. And then the clincher: when the results of the experiment were made known to the public, and human volunteers asked for, there were lines literally around the block of the laboratory building ofyoung Canadian volunteers frantic to be the first in whom p-terminal-electrodes would be implanted. The decisive point, he thinks, is that these volunteers were young Canadians, not Americans. In other words, the same
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Canadian culture that produced Remy Marathe, who pretends to be so scathingly critical of an America given over to consumer hedonism, produced a limitless number of candidates who would have given anything to be the subjects of an experiment that would, as was by now fully understood, put them permanently into a vegetative state. So the argument is not really about America or Canada but about modernity itsel£ '"Surely,"' says Steeply to Marathe, "'you can see the implications for any industrialized, market-driven, high-discretionary-spending society"' (473) . The p-terminal experiment described by Steeply has implications he is wholly unable to gTasp. For the personal hell that drives characters like Don Gately andjoelle van Dyne and Kate Gompert andJOI himself to seek refuge in alcohol or free-base cocaine or Demerol or Talwin is simply an extreme version ofthe spiritual emptiness that haunts everyone in the society that Remy Marathe and his AFR compatriots despise. The effect of the Steeply-Marathe debate about "choice" is to take a dilemma that has historically been treated as marginal - the sadness of the addict's plight as the fate of a deviant few - and put it at the absolute center oflife in a TV-watching, producing-and-consuming, advertising saturated society. In a sense, the AA scenes in !'!finite Jest give us a gToup of people who are superior to their society because, in Substance addiction, they have confronted a hell that is otherwise repressed by everyone else in a society living by Steeply's doctrine of the sacredness ofindividual choice. IfEnnet House is a mirror held up to a consumerist society, the Steeply-Marathe debate about the Samizdat is what permits us to see the image revealed in that mirror. The physical setting of the interpolated Outcropping scenes is an important part of their meaning as well. At the beginning, with the sun going down behind them, Steeply and Marathe cast huge shadows from the mountainside down in the direction of Tucson, Arizona, a southwestern city that in its rawness and ugliness represents all that is rootless and sterile in American life. Directly beneath them are earth moving machines, evidence that this sterile human environment is still under ongoing construction. As we listen to the debate on the Outcropping, earlier and later scenes with Orin Incandenza, or earlier with JOI and his own alcoholic father, fill in the local detail. For Orin,
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living in the heat-blasted American southwest, scuttling from one air conditioned environment to the next, is a kind of punishment. The cockroaches that come up the bathroom drain, so resistant to man made poisons that no exterminator is able to do anything about them, are constant reminders of a desert landscape where human beings were never meant to dwell. A hallucinated scene at the end of Irifim�e Jest, in which Orin is trapped inside a gigantic plastic glass, just as he himself has earlier trapped the cockroaches and left them to asphyxiate, is a final image of this particular hell. As the sun goes down over the Rincon mountain range, however, another reality becomes visible. The stars shine with an unreal clarity. The mountains loom up as visible reminders of a primordial geologic time in which human beings, with their automobiles and cell phones and air-conditioned buildings, have arrived as transient latecomers. (Back at ETA, Lyle, the guru of the weight room, will frequently remind the confused youngsters who come to him for advice that "the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old" [3 8 9] ) . Far below the outcropping, a group of young people drinking and dancing around a campfire seem like members ofsome ancient or primitive tribe celebrating an immemorial ritual. This is the time during which the conversation between Steeply and Marathe takes its abstract or philosophical turn, as though in answer to the purely natural setting that has become their new surroundings. The night air is chill, and Steeply shivers in his dress. The end of the Outcropping sequence comes with the arrival of dawn, the sun coming up over the desert like a hostile or malevolent eye, as though to remind the two men that the alien setting in which their conversation had begun remains as inhospitable to their kind as before. ("The sun of A.M. had no radial knives of light. It appeared brutal and businesslike and harmful to look upon" [647] .) Only then do we fully realize that this debate-on-a-mountainside has been a single scene suspended in time, a still point to which the story returns again and again amidst the ceaseless comings and goings of the other characters. The sequence ends with Hugh Steeply's account ofhis own father, who had himself become obsessed with a television program (M*A*S*H) in the earlier days of broadcast television. The look in his eyes at the end, Steeply now remembers, oddly resembled that in the
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eyes of those who have recently become unwitting victims of the Entertainment. It is a look impossible to describe: "Trapped," as Steeply says, trying to pin down exactly what he means. Marathe tries to help : "Meaning between different cravings of great intensity, this." Steeply: "Not even cravings so much. Emptier than that. As if he were stuck wondering. As if there was something he'd forgotten." What has been forgotten, as subsequent events will make clear, is the possibility that, before this age of mindless self-gratification, life once had meaning.
Scene 4: Metro Boston The environment of metro Boston is heterogeneous in the extreme, embracing everything from the world of pimps and street hustlers to the ordinary citizens who live their lives in nearby suburbs to the academic or intellectual culture that flourishes around Harvard and MIT. Within the world of bifinite Jest, its invisible center is WYYY, the MIT student radio station from which a surreal personality named "Madame Psychosis" beams out her show every Monday through Friday at midnight, reading passages from chosen works in a strangely dead or hollow voice, with odd electronic music playing in the background. She is a mystery even to the student engineer responsible for technical arrangements. Her show, filled with silences and never lasting the same amount of time - it is billed as "Sixty Minutes More or Less" - has a large cult following in the Boston area. At the time it is first mentioned in I'!ftnr�e Jest, the show has been on the air for three years. It begins, always, with the same line: "And Lo, for the Earth was empty ofform, and void. And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep:' Her monologues, we are told, "seem both free-associative and intricately structured, not unlike nightmares:· Madame Psychosis is the disembodied voice of a nameless despair beamed out over the metro Boston area. One key to that setting is the breadth of her appeal, embracing the world of college students and junkies, solid citizens and hustlers, all ages and sexes. Her voice runs like a thread through the various levels of l'!ftnr�e Jests crowded world, picking out characters and highlighting personal situations, giving people
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who will never meet something important in common. In a late scene in hifint'te Jest, the admirable Don Gately of Ennet House, seriously wounded in an ugly brawl, will suddenly recognize the voice of the woman who leans over him to tend his wound as that of Madame Psychosis, lending him a moment of exaltation before he passes out from loss of blood. Early in the story, we see the damaged and indomitably cheerful Mario Incandenza making a nightly journey to the Headmaster's House at ETA, snuggling up to the large radio in the living room that is the only apparatus on the premises large enough to bring in station WYYY' s weak FM signal from across the river. The building from which WYYY broadcasts, the student union at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a similarly surreal image both of the Harvard-MIT academic world and the predicament of every character in bifint'te Jest who is locked within the world of his or her own mind. Designed by the avant-garde architect A.Y. Rickey - the same architect, significantly, who was hired byJOI to design the buildings at ETA - the MIT union is a large-scale model of the human brain, even to the point of duplicating the structures and textures of the cerebrum. Much of the dark comedy of the WYYY scenes comes from the incidental architectural description through which we realize with a shock that this or that detail belongs to what amounts to a gigantic anatomical model ofthe neurons and synapses that permit human beings to speak and think and solve mathematical theorems - the machinery of cognition that, even as we read any given sentence, is permitting us to dwell in the world of lnfim�e Jest itself. Our first clue to the identity of Madame Psychosis comes from the fact that not even the student engineer who oversees her broadcast has ever seen her face. She is veiled - she wears a veil over her features, and will do so throughout lnfim�e Jest - and broadcasts from behind a screen in the studio, as though to set up a double barrier between her and the prying eyes of the curious. From the segments of one broadcast recorded in Irifim�e Jest, we learn that she is a member of an organization known as the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed, all of whose members wear veils as a way, paradoxically, of proclaiming their own refusal to be pitied or despised for whatever physical disfigurement they have suffered.
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The genesis of the Madame Psychosis broadcasts is made clear to us in a later scene in Ennet House where a veiled member of the UHID is explaining that the real curse of being physically deformed is the reaction of other people: "'you're the object ofstares that the people try to conceal because they're ashamed of wanting to stare, and you want nothing more than to hide from the covert stares:" You pray, says this character, "for a power failure and for this kind of utter liberating equalizing darkness to descend so you can be reduced to nothing but a voice among other voices, invisible, equal, no different, hidden"' (534). For Madame Psychosis and her listeners, most ofwhom may be supposed to have stared into the void themselves, "Sixty Minutes More or Less" is that liberating equalizing darkness, a midnight world held together by her voice as a voice among other voices. The character speaking here is Joelle van Dyne, who in real life is the person who appears on radio as Madame Psychosis. We first meet her (as joelle van Dyne) at an academic party in East Cambridge. The party carries us into another of the separate but related worlds that make up metro Boston, the sphere of Harvard and MIT intellectuals, above-average minds and enormous egos, where the walls resound with au courant opinions and sonorous attempts to have the last word on whatever film or novel or piece of music is being discussed. Later in the story, we will be able to trace many of the myths that in the earlier part of I'!fim�e Jest have been given as facts - about JOI's film career, about his suicide, about his relation with Joelle, even about her disfigurement by acid - to the kind of academic gossip and speculation we first hear at this party. We will also discover that Molly Notkin, the Film-and-Film-Cartridge Studies Ph.D candidate who gives the party, is along with Orin Incandenza one ofthe novel's most radically unreliable narrators. But the importance of the earlier party scene is that Molly Notkin's apartment is where Joelle van Dyne has decided to commit suicide, by locking herselfin the bathroom and overdosing on freebase cocaine. We give the history ofJoelle van Dyne, from BU cheerleader to Madame Psychosis, in a separate section. The major point about her suicide attempt for a grasp of the metro Boston milieu is that it carries her to Ennet House, where she meets Don Gately, the burglar and
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Demerol addict brought to Ennet House by his own misadventures. After more than a year of sobriety Gately has become a live-in resident counselor. His personal history gives us another part of metro Boston's teeming world, the blue-collar class to which his alcoholic mother and abusive stepfather, a former military policeman, belong. The young Don Gately is huge, his head so large and square that he sometimes amuses his friends by shutting elevator doors on it. Being tremendously strong, he is a varsity football player on his school team until drugs and drinking with his gang make it impossible for him to keep up with any schoolwork at all. To support his drug habit, he hires out as a strong arm collector of gambling debts for a local bookmaker. Fortunately for Gately, who dislikes violence, his mere size is usually enough to convince those behind on their gambling debts to pay up. The story ofDon Gately's early days, when he and two buddies go full time into burglary and various forms of fraud, comes out only towards the very end of !tifinite Jest, when Gately is lying in a semi coma in the Trauma Wing of St. Elizabeth's hospital. Yet when we hear the story, we are able to make sense of a multitude of details earlier in the narrative, for Don Gately's burglar-and-con-artist world gives us, in effect, one entire level of metro Boston street society, a world ofmarginal souls still in a sense in touch with their roots in working class respectability. In the period just prior to his arrival at Ennet House, for instance, the scam most frequently practiced by Gately and his two friends is to rent luxury apartments under false pretenses - one, something of an intellectual before being kicked out of a local college, is a computer whiz, able to fake identification and credit ratings - and then gradually to sell off their furnishings to buy drugs with the proceeds. By the time the first month's rent is due and the phone and electricity are about to be cut off, the apartment is bare and the three move on, under a different set of identity papers, to an apartment in another luxury complex. The extended scene in which Gately and his fiiend Gene Fackelmann go on a protracted drug binge in one of these bare apartments, injecting huge amounts ofDilaudid and becoming so nearly comatose that they are unable to do anything but sit in puddles of their own urine and fecal waste, is a tour de force, a nightmare sequence for which !'!finite Jest is
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destined to be quoted in medicaljournals and seminars on the psychology of addiction. Yet its importance for a grasp of the larger metro Boston milieu is that even this scene of degradation is in a manner of speaking still in very remote touch with its origins in blue-collar values. The luxury apartment in which Gately and Fackelmann go on their binge itselfrepresents a certain kind of marginal respectability, if only because, when dealing with rental agents, their appearance and social manner had to be plausible enough to seem to support their forged identity papers. When Gately emerges from his stupor and enters Ennet House, it is as a representative of the large blue collar class that constitutes an important segment of the metro Boston population. One setting that most clearly represents this level of metro Boston society is the Allston ofETA's Michael Pemulis. Pemulis is, throughout the ETA section, the street-smart Allston kid whose tennis ability has landed him among the upscale specimens who dominate life at the tennis academy. Yet we see very little ofPemulis's Allston. On the one occasion when he does vanish into metro Boston to come back with the killer psychedelic DMZ, it is to go to Inman Square in Cambridge, where the Quebecois Antitoi brothers have an "entertainment" shop they sell mostly mirrors, lava lamps, and used Interlace cartridges that serves as a front for their sporadic anti-ONAN activities. It is Inman Square, and in particular Prospect Street, that gives us the most detailed image of metro Boston as the place where the world of blue collar types like Pemulis and Don Gately overlaps with the panhandlers, pimps, homosexual prostitutes, and heroin addicts who constitute the lowest rung of metro Boston society. Pemulis's own trip to Inman Square illustrates one aspect of its importance as a setting in !t!ftnite Jest, which is the protective coloration it provides for characters coming from the very top to the very bottom of the social scale. The common denominator is, of course, drugs, in search of which bankers and lawyers have to leave their upper-class surroundings and find their way to run-down neighborhoods filled with winos and addicts and cripples they are careful not to look at as they walk along the sidewalk. Like Ennet House, Inman Square is one of !'!finite Jests melting-pot settings, where the democracy of addiction, or even of recreational drug use, mixes together artists, academics,
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hard-partying working class males and their girlfriends, recently-arrived Portuguese and Latin American immigrants, homosexual prostitutes and junkies, and, not least, pockets of Quebecois emigres, most ofwhom are involved in one or another anti-ONAN organization. It is also the location of Bread & Circus, an upscale organic-foods market, and a similarly upscale pub, Ryle's jazz club. Nonetheless, the dominant note in Inman Square is set by working class culture, the sort of double-decker houses in which beer cans litter the front lawn and a chained dog yaps at passersby and, on summer weekends, there are loud parties with open windows and gigantic stereo speakers blasting rock music out into the street. The Inman Square setting is another ofItifim�e Jes!s triumphs oflocal portraiture, capturing as it does the mutual incomprehension of American social classes working class types looking upon horrendously loud rock music as a form of convivial sharing, for instance, while upper-class passersby wince and have to put their fingers in their ears - and the demotic mix of students, immigrants, and street people that gives everyone within its precincts an often welcome urban anonymity. In and out of the Inman Square area, in tum, drift those on the lowest level of metro Boston society, the pimps and whores and junkies who live their lives mainly on the streets, and for whom life is a hand to-mouth existence devoted entirely to getting enough money for the next day's fix. In purely geographical terms, theirs is a setting shared with the other characters in ltifim�e Jest, but to see metro Boston through their eyes - the eyes of people with names like Poor Tony and Lolasister and Susan T. Cheese - is to see the same urban landscape taking an altogether different shape, with interiors (houses, restaurants, shops) reduced to relative unimportance, the exterior world of street and parks and alleys and subway grates becoming a primary reality. So far as it has a physical embodiment, the world of Poor Tony Krause and his companions is identified with locations like the Brighton Projects, on the playground ofwhich unemployed African Americans called "Nigers" by the unnamed and semi-literate narrator of one early episode - hang out and smoke and drink and deal dope to those who are courageous or desperate enough to enter their violent neighborhood. Not far away is the Allston Spur trailer park, in one scene described as
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"apocalyptic," where a mysterious hare-lipped drug dealer keeps several large snakes as pets and deals high-resin marijuana to both blue collar and upscale customers. But the real world of the pimps and prostitutes and junkies who belong to this echelon of metro Boston society is the streets themselves, crowded with passersby whose purses may be snatched or wallets stolen, bounded by public buildings behind whose shrubs a person can shoot up and nod off, or in cold weather get a bit of warm air coming up from the subway through a nearby grate. In moral terms, the importance of the street denizens of metro Boston is that they live in a world in which there is no morality, in something very close to that state ofnature that the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes described as a war of all against all. Life in such a world, as Hobbes also famously said, is nasty, brutish, and short, and that is just the way it exists for the prostitutes and hustlers of metro Boston street culture. There is no moral code because, first, the need for self-gratification that drives such characters to drugs and prostitution has become, in its advanced stages, a rudimentary survival instinct that recognizes no obligation or responsibility higher than, as the unnamed narrator of the initial Poor Tony episode puts it, to "stay straight," which paradoxically means stoned on drugs and thus able to fend off the horror of narcotics withdrawal. A junkie, it is sometimes said, will kill his own mother for the money in her cookie jar. We have no doubt that Poor Tony, or companions like C and the addict-narrator of their misadventures, would do just that. The mecca for Poor Tony and his companions, when they have enough money to buy a serious amount of dope, is Hung Toys in Chinatown, where one Dr. Wo sells high-quality heroin from behind a brightly-colored curtain at the rear of the shop. For reasons that don't become evident until later - see our character sketch of Poor Tony Krause - Poor Tony refuses to go into the shop, waiting outside while his two companions go in to purchase dope for the three of them. They then take the subway to Copley Square, where their apparatus for cooking and shooting up the heroin is hidden behind a bush. A subway grate in front of the bush is their place for nodding off after they've shot up.
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On this occasion Poor Tony, usually frantic to get the dope into his veins as soon as possible, delays cooking up and tying off his arm. The . unnamed narrator, noticing his peculiar behavior, does likewise. So it is their companion C who discovers that Dr. Wo has sold them hotshots, lethal doses ofDrano with the blue glitter removed: "C started with the screaming in a loud hi pitch fashion instantly after he unties and boots and downhegoes flopping with his heels pouning on the metal of the blowergrate and hes' at his throat with his hands tearing at him self . . . and blood and bloody materil is coming out Cs' mouth and C's nose and . . . Cs' eyes get beesly and bulge and hes' cryng blood into the feathers in his mouth and trying to hold onto my glove" (134) . It is Poor Tony, of course, whose behavior instructs us in the brutal Hobbesian reality of the scene. He has, as it turns out, burned Dr. Wo in a previous dope deal, and he is fairly certain that Dr. Wo will retaliate this way. But with no sure way to tell whether or not Dr. Wo's dope is real high grade heroin or a lethal hotshot, there is only one way to know - to let one of his companions shoot up first and see what happens. Any number of characters in Infinite Jest must soon or later be understood as living in their own personal hell, but the street hustlers of metro Boston are in a special hell, a world stripped of everything but the need to stay alive and minister to their addiction. As a setting in Irifim�e Jest, metro Boston may be thought of as a series of overlays, like those transparent sheets in anatomy books that allow one to create a complete picture of the human body by adding various systems one at a time - first the skeleton, then organs, then the blood vessels, then the nervous system, and finally the musculature. To see Irifim�e Jests portrayal of metro Boston in these terms would be to start in the suburbs, peel away a layer to listen to the academic chatter and self-conscious wit ofMolly Notkin's party, then another to reveal the blue collar world of Inman Square and Prospect Street. At the very bottom, in a hell of drug addiction and randomly violent crime, is the metro Boston of the streets, with the sound of C screaming as he realizes that he has just cooked and shot up a hit of Drano.
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Chapter Four Keys to Narrative Structure The
Samizdat
The plot of !'!finite Jest turns, as we've seen, on the rumor of the Entertainment, a film cartridge so lethally entertaining that anyone who watches it becomes, like the rats in the laboratory experiment Hugh Steeply describes, a creature wanting more of the same. Our evidence that the Entertainment really does exist comes in an early episode in which a Near Eastern medical attache, normally employed as an attending specialist by a Saudi Arabian prince, comes home on a night when his wife has gone out with her woman friends. On a normal night, his wife would have the attache's dinner ready: "a spicy and 1 00% shari'a-halal dinner piping hot and arranged and steaming pleasantly," his bib ironed and laid out, the complexly-molded plastic tray that fits just underneath his chin ready to be fastened on, and the cartridges he will watch that evening already chosen and ready to be inserted into his expensive teleputer when he sits down in his chair. On this night, the attache has to get his own dinner, and then to choose the cartridges he will watch from the ones that have arrived in that day's mail. They are an unpromising lot: several medical-instruction cartridges in his speciality, an Arabic-language video edition of a men's magazine, a sort of Moslem Playboy in which all the models are completely robed and veiled, and a curious cartridge in a padded mailer 66
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that has no title or logo. It is a standard black entertainment cartridge, with one of those "vapid U.S.A-type circular smiling heads embossed upon it where the registration - and duration-codes are supposed to be" (36). In an evil hour, the medical attache inserts the cartridge, affixes his dinner tray under his chin, and settles down to watch the cartridge. When the medical attache doesn't turn up for work the next day, the Saudi Prince sends a messenger to see why he has failed to appear. The messenger does not return. Next, the Prince's own personal physician is dispatched, and does not return. Two security guards from the Saudi Embassy, wearing sidearms, are sent after him. By the time anyone figures out that it is dangerous to let anyone into the room where the medical attache sat down to watch the cartridge - as we get farther into bifinite Jest, we find that the only safe way ofhandling this situation is to turn off the power in the building - a small crowd has assembled, transfixed, in front of the attache's high-end TP: not simply his wife, who came back from her women's night out while the cartridge was running, but, in addition to those already mentioned, two Seventh Day Adventists who, thinking that their knock had not been heard, found the front door unlocked and entered the room to do a bit ofproselytizing. They are, to all intents and purposes, comatose: "all were watching the recursive loop the medical attache had rigged on the TP's viewer the night before, sitting and standing there very still and attentive, looking not one bit distressed or in any way displeased, even though the room smelled very bad indeed" (87). Whether or not the Entertainment actually exists is another of the central puzzles of bifim�e Jest. The early episode of the Near Eastern medical attache might seem proof positive that it exists, and yet there are problems about this particular character. For instance, he turns out to be both Arabic and Canadian - he was born in Canada to Arabic parents - and to have known Avril Incandenza when he was a medical resident at Brandeis University, where she once taught Linguistics. Our information that he was Avril's "dear and cherished friend," which in ltifim�e Jest is usually Orin's code for someone he thinks has been sleeping with his mother, comes ultimately from Orin himself. whose accounts ofeverything having to do with ETA and his family are radically unreliable. And then, in a nightmare sequence that comes to Don Gately
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when he is lying seriously wounded in the hospital at the end of
Infinite Jest, a figure very like this Near Eastern attache appears to urge Gately to take Demerol or Talwin for his pain, which, as Gately understands, would inevitably start him back down the path of Substance addiction. Irifinite Jest giveth and it taketh away, in short. There are insistent signs throughout the story that many scenes may belong to a single long hallucination only distantly related to a "real" reality as that seems to be visible beneath the fantasy of Subsidized Time andjohnny Gentle Famous Crooner and Quebecois Separatism. Ifthe Near Eastern medical attache belongs to this hallucinatory reality, then the Entertainment that reduces him and everyone sent to rescue him to a trance-like state is also a hallucination, and the OUS and Hugh Steeply, who are our other sources for information about similar scenes involving the Entertainment, belong to the same phantasmagoric reality. And yet there is never any question in Irifinite Jest that what the Entertainment or Samizdat stands for, the ultimate self-gratification in a society motivated entirely by a collective demand for self-gratification, is real, and every bit as threatening as it seems to be in the case of the medical attache and his fellow victims. The Entertainment, that is to say, stands at the summit of a pyramid of solitary enjoyments that have become the only point of existence in Irifimte Jests world of self-gratification. At the level of bodily pleasure, as we have seen in the cases of Ennet House and metro Boston, the possibility of purely solitary enjoyment is represented by narcotics addiction: the rush of pure bliss that comes from heroin or Demerol or freebase cocaine, which only later turns into the hell ofpersonal addiction. At the level of sexual pleasure, it is the anonymous or impersonal sex made available to compulsive philanderers like Orin Incandenza, whose gratification comes not from the sexual act itselfbut from his sense of having conquered the resistance of another person. Sex in this mode becomes, even though it physically involves two people, a form of masturbation, reminding us that the acronym ONAN, standing for the continental system set up by Johnny Gentle under Subsidized Time, is among other things a reference to the Biblical "sin ofOnan," long used as another term for masturbation.
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The common denominator of all these forms of self-gratification, as we have also seen, is the notion ofpure isolation that seals the pleasure seeker off in a private world of solitude or total estrangement from others. Whatjoelle van Dyne comes to realize about the freebase cocaine that comes close to killing her - that it was, as she puts it, "something that didn't know she was there and yet was all about making her feel good anyway" - is true about every form of solitary self-gratification in ltifim�e Jest. For all these, the Entertainment or Samizdat stands simply as the purest form, uncompromised by the physiological dependence of Substance addiction or the illusion of mutuality that permits Orin Incandenza to talk one Subject after another into his bed. For the only thing the Entertainment asks is that you turn on your TP and begin to watch, in which case you end up like one of the laboratory rats in the Brandon experiments, compulsively pressing the lever that delivers a jolt of pleasure to the p-terminals in your brain. The very notion ofthe Entertainment permits Itifinite Jest to imagine American society as what it once calls "a floating no-space world of personal spectation" (620), a nation ofsofas and eyeballs in which people go to work and come home and eat their dinners in front ofthe television set. The conceit of the Entertainment is, in this context, merely a slight exaggeration ofan America that already exists, not only as an advertising saturated nation of television watchers but a society in which television has actually created or constructed the consciousness of those who watch it. At a certain moment late in Itifim�e Jest, Orin Incandenza will go to the door to answer what he thinks is a survey about his own attitudes toward contemporary society. What, asks the interviewer, are the things he misses most. Network television, Orin answers: "Jeannie, Gilligan, Hawkeye." But isn't television really better now, in the age of cartridges and complete freedom of choice, than it was in the days when one had to watch whatever came on? No, answers Orin. What he misses is precisely the freedom from choice: "with television you were subjected to repetition" (600) . The relation between the Entertainment in ltifim�e Jest and network or cable television as it exists in our own world is made clearest in one of the conversations that takes place between Steeply and Marathe on the Outcropping. For it turns out that Steeply's own father, in the days
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of broadcast TV, had undergone an experience uncannily like those now reported in connection with the Entertainment, except that it stretched out over a longer period of time. The experience starts as a simple attachment to M*A*S*H, a television comedy set in a military hospital during the Korean conflict. Steeply's father schedules his week around the show, making sure to be home from work on Thursdays at 8:50 p.m. Then, as the years pass and the show continues to be popular, old episodes begin to be run in syndication, making it possible to watch earlier episodes while waiting for new ones to come on in the regular prime time slot. This is the point at which the attachment of Steeply, Sr. begins to sound something like the Entertainment. '"It progressed very slowly,"' Steeply tells Marathe. '"The gradual immersion. The withdrawal from life. I remember the guys from his bowling league calling, that he'd quit:" Then comes a time in which his father's absorption is total, "him all hunched in front of the set, barely even eating from his tray. And every night late at night, for the nightly hour, the old man too wide awake, and hunched over weirdly, head out, as if pulled toward the screen'" (640). Can this not be attributed, asks Marathe, to the undeniable appeal ofM*A*S*H as a program that entranced millions? Steeply thinks not: "'It was OK. But it was broadcast TV. Broad comedy and canned laughter"' (64 1). In the case ofSteeply's father, the power of the program to absorb lies in its status as an alternative reality. When VHS appears, he begins taping episodes and taking feverish notes, cross-indexing names and events. His family finds letters in the trash that have been written to a character in M*A*S*H, sent via military mail to Seoul, Korea. He loses the ability to talk about anything but M*A*S*H, developing what Steeply calls huge and complex theories about "'deeply hidden themes having to do with death and time, on the show. Like evidence of some sort of coded communication to certain viewers about an end to our familiar type ofworld-time and the advent of a whole different order of world time"' (644) . Steeply's father is, of course, correct. What he has glimpsed is the end of American society and the emergence of]ohnny Gentle, CUSP, ONAN, and Subsidized Time. His obsession with M*A*S*H, only a
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mild exaggeration ofthe attachment ofAmericans to their favorite weekly programs, as well as his gradual absorption into a TV-created reality, are only a slightly heightened version of the way American children today, who watch 20,000 hours of television during childhood and adolescence, perceive the world. It is only the mental or intellectual energy he invests in attempting to crack the code ofM*A*S*H - "'the final enclosing isolation of obsession,'" as Marathe sympathetically murmurs when listening to Steeply's account - that makes this a story about television rather than the Entertainment. The power of the Samizdat, as Steeply and OUS well understand, is that it produces the same isolation without the obsession, or any investment ofmental energy at all. Itifim�e Jest contains numerous scattered hints of what those who watch the Entertainment actually see. Aware that anyone who views the Samizdat is lost to further questioning, the OUS tries an experiment with a mentally retarded and sociopathic volunteer at Leavenworth, strapping him into a chair, equipping him with a headset to talk to those outside the room, and applying electrodes to jolt him back to awareness as he sinks under the spell of the Entertainment. They learn only that the Entertainment begins with a scene in which a woman enters the revolving door of a large public building, catches sight of someone she knows in the door's reflection, and turns her head so that her veil billows. After disclosing that much, the volunteer's mental and spiritual energies decline to a point where even strongjolts of electricity are unable to distract him from the Entertainment. When we have learned that the Entertainment or Samizdat is identical with the last unreleased cartridge made byJames 0. Incandenza before his suicide - its title, Infim�e Jest V or Itifim�e Jest VI, indicated that this was only the latest in a long series oftries to make this particular film - other sources of information open up. One of these is Joelle van Dyne, who played a major role inJOI's final project. She has never seen the completed film, but she remembers her own scenes in it, one of which has her entering the revolving door of a large public building, catching sight of another person who is, she reports, "epicene" or androgynous, neither male nor female (939) . We later infer that this character is played by one Stokely "Dark Star" McNair, a homosexual
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prostitute who has acted in other ofJOI's productions, among them
Accomplice (945). (We find out the meaning of the actor's nickname in yet another scene, where a boy undergoing homosexual rape has vaseline smeared around his anal orifice, his "rosebud, his dark star" [685]). Joelle van Dyne's account of !tifinite Jest V or VI includes another scene that, it is tempting to think, might account for the mesmerizing quality of the Entertainment. In this scene she is wearing a flowing white gown and leaning over to look into a baby carriage. The scene is shot from the point of view of the baby in the carriage, through a special lens with a ball-and-socket mount that makes it wobble, reproducing the visual field of a newborn infant, or what is called neonatal nystagmus. Her only line, repeated again and again, is a variation on a single apology: "'I'm so sorry. I'm so terribly sorry. I am so, so sorry. Please know how very, very, very sorry I am"' (939). (WhenJOI appears as a ghost to Don Gately, lying in a state of febrile hallucination in the hospital, he will explain that his last wish was to make a film so magically entertaining that it would allow him to communicate with his son, Hal, "'something so bloody compelling it would reverse thrust on a young self's fall into the womb of solipsism, anhedonia, death in life:" A way, he adds, "'to say I AM SO VERY, VERY SORRY and have it heard'" (839). There is every reason, it would seem, to suppose that something like the Entertainment really does exist in !tifinite Jest, and that everything connected with it in the plot - the attempt of OUS and the AFR and other Canadian groups to recover the Master cartridge from which multiple copies can be made, the whole elaborate fantasy of ONAN andjohnny Gentle and Subsidized Time - has a real existence inside its imaginary world. The problem with this is that so many of the details located at scattered intervals throughout the story can be traced to unreliable sources, as when Molly Notkin, the Film and Film-Cartridge Studies graduate student, talks knowledgeably about the rumor of" some angelic monster of audience-gratification" contrived by JOI before his death (79 1). Notkin herself, it should be said, doubts the existence of any such cartridge, based on her knowledge of the Auteur's other films. Yet so many details in her account are distortions of facts we know from elsewhere in Infinite Jest that the suspicion arises that the
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Entertainment, too, is nothing more than a monstrous urban legend, confected out ofFrench theory - Notkin is a student ofDeleuze's work and the sort of glib Cultural Studies chatter in which Notkin herself specializes. The issue of the Samizdat comes down, finally, to the question of where the missing Master cartridge might be found. Hints scattered throughout the story and endnotes to !Jifinite Jest point to the conclusion that james 0. Incandenza ordered the cartridges of all his unreleased productions to be buried with him. His casket, we know, was buried by his wife Avril in the Mondragon family plot area, which would mean that the Master cartridge is to be found, if the Entertainment really does exist, in the Cimetiere du St. Adelbert in l:Islet Province, Quebec (1030) . Whether or not this notion belongs to those portions of Infinite Jest that may be suspected to be a hallucinatory reality, it points to one of the most important cruxes - or, as Avril Incandenza, leader of the Militant Grammarians ofMassachusetts, would doubtless insist, cruces in the narrative: the problem ofa single mysterious episode that surfaces separately in the minds ofHal Incandenza and Don Gately, who have never met each other. In the opening sequence in which Hal Incandenza is being questioned by three University of Arizona deans about his possible admission on a tennis scholarship, we remember, the pressure of the interview sends him off into something like a psychotic seizure, during which his mind skips randomly from one fragmented thought to another. Nearly lost among the chaotic welter of details is a memory no first time reader of Irifim'te Jest is likely to pick up: "I think of John N.R. Wayne, . . . standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father's head" (17). Over 900 pages later, after numerous insistent hints that the Entertainment has been buried with JOI in his grave, a dream comes to Don Gately in his hospital room in the Trauma Wing of St. Elizabeth's: "He dreams he's with a very sad kid and they're in a graveyard digging some dead guy's head up and it's really important, like Continental-Emergency important" (934). The puzzle of the Entertainment, finally, is the puzzle of how Hal Incandenza and Don Gately, in an echo of the graveyard scene in Hamlet from which the title of Infim'te Jest is taken, can have somehow have tuned in to a
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shared dream that plays, as well, a m::tior role in the main plot of the novel.
Quebec Separatism To fully understand Quebecois Separatism in Irifinite Jest, you have to remember the scenario summarized above under "Subsidized Time:' Remember that the story takes place after Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, is elected president of the United States on the CUSP (Clean U.S. Party) ticket. At a time when America is drowning in its own waste, not simply excrement and pollution but the bottles and plastic and paper and styrofoam and other trash produced in a fast-food, throw away economy, Gentle understands that the solution to the problem is simply to take a relatively underpopulated part of the United States the area comprising northern New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, and all of Maine - and turn it into a vast dump. In one of the headlines in Mario Incandenza's Interdependence Day film, Gentle is reported to have promised a convention of Cub Scouts a "territorial U.S. clean enough to eat right off" of (398). The vast dump planned by Gentle and his advisers is known in the United States as the Concavity, from its shape on a map of North America. (To Canadians, part of whose country has been sacrificed in the Reconfiguration project, it is always the Convexity.) The portions of Irifimte Jest that take place in Massachusetts remind us constantly of the Reconfiguration, as huge ATHSCME fans blow pollution back away from the U.S. and towards the north, and huge Empire Waste Disposal (EWD) vehicles filled with garbage, their warning lights blinking in the night sky, are catapulted towards the Concavity. A gigantic Lucite wall separates the Concavity from the "New United States," which in tum is part of the new Organization ofAmerican Nations (ONAN) that has now absorbed what used to be Mexico and Canada into its governmental system. The explanation of Quebecois Separatism is debated throughout Irifimte Jest. For here, once again, the novel is making up a world out of materials that, with only slight exaggeration, really do exist in historical reality. In the 17th and early 18th centuries, Canada was a colony of
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France, inhabited by French settlers and traders. Only during the Seven Years' War in the middle of the 18th century did French Canada, or what is now the province of Quebec, become a minority culture surrounded on all sides by an Anglophone (English-speaking) majority. In the 1960s, the charismatic Rene Levesque founded the Parti Quebecois, whose program specifically demanded separation and complete political independence for Quebec. When French president Charles de Gaulle visited Montreal in 1967, he gave enormous impetus to the separatist movement when he cried "Vive le Quebec Libre" ("Long live free Quebec") to a cheering crowd in Montreal. The Parti Quebecois has been the major force in the province from that day to this. In bifim�e Jest, a significant question, much debated by characters in the story, is why in the age of Interdependence the Quebecois separatists have chosen to speak for all Canadians who resent the absorption of Canada into johnny Gentle's new Organization ofNorth American Nations. What does a movement that before Subsidized Time only wanted independence from Anglophone Canada mean, in short, by turning its terrorist activities towards a transcontinental system that could not grant them independence ifit wanted to? The answer, we are led to believe, has something to do with the Concavity. As the Canadian province that shares a long border with a huge continental garbage dump, the Quebecois have redirected their animosity from their old enemies to the new imperialism - or, as it is called throughout Infim�e Jest, experialism: the exporting of waste and sludge to areas that don't want it - represented by Johnny Gentle and ONAN. The glimpses of Quebecois Separatism that we get throughout Infim�e Jest are both hilarious and chilling. There is, for instance, the ploy of one Quebecois radical group that consists of trucking huge mirrors into the dangerous narrow mountain passes that run in a north south direction close to the Concavity. When ONAN government or military personnel travel these roads by night, they round a bend to see what looks like the headlights ofanother vehicle moving directly towards them on their own side of the road. When they swerve frantically to try to get out of its path, the oncoming vehicle does exactly the same. Finally, they veer frantically off the shoulderless highway to plunge to their death thousands of feet below, leaving yet another mysterious
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wreck for the ONAN police to try to figure out when daylight returns. Having accomplished their mission, the Quebecois insurgents then reload the mirror onto their truck and vanish northward into the darkness. The most terrifYing of the Quebecois terrorists, as we've seen, are the Assassins des Fauteuils Ro1lents, the group of wheelchair assassins to whom Remy Marathe belongs. As one of Infinite Jests longest endnotes explains in detail, this quasi-mythical group is made up of rural Quebecois youths who have survived the deadly Jeu du Prochain Train, for which the distant model is the sort of American teenage game of chicken portrayed in Rebel Wzthout a Cause and similar movies. In the Canadian version, it is a deadly serious ritual in which groups of six young Quebecois males line up at night along the rails when a high speed express is scheduled to come by. The game consists of waiting until the last possible moment to leap across the tracks in front of the speeding train. Those who survive on the competitive ladder are invariably those who, sooner or later,jump so late as to get only the upper portion of their body across the tracks while their legs are severed by the wheels of the train. The wheelchair assassins of AFR, deadly and menacing and implacable, are the most feared of the Quebecois groups who play a part in Infinzte Jests story, their presence felt even when their name is not specifically mentioned. Thus, for instance, the Prime Minister of Canada who is in office at the time of the Reconfiguration that creates ONAN and the great Concavity, despised by the Quebecois for having been cowardly enough to permit his nation to be absorbed into the larger and wealthier and more powerful United States, is assassinated with a railroad spike driven through his eye - the signature technique of the AFR when they wish to dispose of an enemy or a traitor. In the later scene in the Antitoi Entertainent [stc] shop in Inman Square, Lucien Antitoi will realize how deadly an enemy he is dealing with only when, his premises having been invaded by purposeful, swiftly-moving figures in wheelchairs, he goes into the back room to find his brother Bertraund dead with a railroad spike through his eye. AU this may be, as we have noted, simply part of a single sustained hallucination making up the main plot line of !tifinzte Jest. The endnote from which most of our information about the AFR comes is an involuted
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and wonderfully parodic mini-narrative in which an ETA tennis player is plagiarizing a research paper from a article written in an academic journal by one Geoffrey Day, a red-wine-and-Quaaludes addict whom we have already met as one of the residents of Ennet House. (The comedy of the scene lies in the way the ETAer, Jim Struck, tries to translate Day's congested academic jargon into prose that will, however, not give his plagiarism away by betraying more knowledge of Quebecois Separatism than Struck could possible have on his own.) The gist of Day's article is, when one has penetrated the fog of academic prose, that the AFR is recognized even among specialists as an organization that may be mythical rather than real, a kind of dark compensatory projection ofQuebecois resentment at the double domination ofQuebec by Anglophone Canada and the United States. The notion that the AFR's existence may be mythical is borne out by the various legends about the Concavity that weave their way through !'!finite Jest. For in its depopulated and uninhabitable state, the Concavity has become a imaginary landscape of monsters and genetic freaks. The process that explains this is "annulation" - the name implies a circular or ring-like cycle - a technology that uses the waste deposited in the Concavity for, as bifinite Jest once says, "a type of fusion that can produce waste that's fuel for a process whose waste is fuel for the fusion" (572). The detail in which the imagined process is worked out is one of the comic delights of Infim�e Jest - much of the curriculum at ETA is devoted to understanding the scientific basis of annular fusion and we will not try to summarize it. Our point here concerns the way the notion of annulation breeds rumors and myths in the world of Irifim�e Jest, which in turn bears in important ways on the theme of Quebecois Separatism. The Concavity as it has come to exist in Subsidized Time might be thought of as the hideously repressed unconscious of a consumerist society. The cyclical process that produces energy through annular fusion does so by alternating periods of sterility with extravagant growth, during which plants grow to gigantic size, vines and bushes provide a tangled and impenetrable undergrowth, and animals and humans become feral monsters. A recurrent legend about the eastern Concavity, for instance, features thundering herds of feral hamsters, the offspring
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of a pair of pets allowed to go free in the region at the very beginning of the period of annular fusion. There are stories about huge toddlers, inadvertently left behind as infants when the region was vacated and now roaming the landscape as giant diapered babies. There are reports of ordinary people who live the regions bordered by the Concavity being born without skulls or with misshapen limbs or with a single eye in the middle of their foreheads, an echo of myths of cultural and anatomical strangeness going back to Greek and Roman writers like Herodotus and the elder Pliny. The serious point about Queb ecois Separatism in this phantasmagoric context is that it is sustained throughout by the idea of Quebec as an isolated traditional or organic society in the midst of a globalized consumer culture. Beneath the dark comedy of the mirrors across-the-highway terrorism of one Quebecois group, or the more chilling picture of the AFR driving a railroad spike through the eye of a victim, there burns a real moral contempt for the selfishness and vapidity of contemporary American society. Thus it is that virtually every Quebecois character in Infinite Jest, as with Avril Incandenza or the tennis player John Wayne, will be suspected as Separatist sympathizers, if not active supporters of groups like the AFR. The core of truth is that all do share, simply by virtue of having been born into a traditional culture, a certain revulsion at an American society that exists not as a communal reality but, as is once said in bifim�e Jest, as "a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears" (83). As regards the plot of Infim�e Jest, the only scene that needs to be outlined is the one in which Don Gately and a friend, meaning only to carry out a residential burglary while those who live in the house are away for the weekend, inadvertently break into a house in which Guillaume DuPlessis, the most important leader of anti-ONAN activity in the United States, is in bed with a terrible cold. For though Gately dislikes violence - as Itifim�e Jest explains, most addicts who commit burglaries to support their habit are not interested in violence, as it distracts from the main business of getting enough money for their next fix he can scarcely leave the homeowner free to call the police as he and his companion are departing with their loot. So he ties DuPlessis to a chair, tapes his mouth shut with strapping tape, and departs, not realizing -
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that his mucus - clogged victim cannot breath through his nose. So it is that Guillaume DuPlessis expires, Don Gately inadvertently faces a murder charge, and the Quebecois Separatist subplot is set in motion. To spell out the plot in any greater detail would be to spoil !tifinr�e Jest for the reader, so we will say only that it involves a movement in what might be called diametrically opposite directions. For the Quebecois, certain that the death ofDuPlessis could scarcely have been accidental, interpret it as a clumsy attempt to cover up the assassination ofDuPlessis by the OUS. Knowing in tum that DuPlessis was among those in on the secret of the Entertainment, they assume that the OUS must at this point also be aware of their hopes oflocating the Master and releasing Samizdat cartridges into the American entertainment market. Here begins the subplot that will produce the conversations of Steeply and Marathe on the Outcropping, as well as the recurrent scenes of Quebecois terrorist activity that are woven into the main narrative fabric of Irifinr�e Jest. In another, more hopeful, direction, Gately's burglary and inadvertent killing ofM. DuPlessis will lead to a sequence in which he is at last freed of any danger of going to prison for manslaughter. For as Gately lies mute and helpless in his hospital bed at the end of the story, there sits outside his room an ominous figure in a hat whom he supposes, correctly, to be an Assistant District Attorney bent on revenge against Gately for an earlier and unspeakable humiliation. To say more than this would be unfair to both Infinr�e Jest and the reader. Let us say only that, while Quebec has not by the time Infinr�e Jest ends achieved its separation either from Canada or ONAN, Don Gately does achieve a liberation from his terrible guilt and worry about the death of M. DuPlessis.
Madame Psychosis Our fullest treatment of Madame Psychosis will be found in our compendium of major characters. Our object here is simply to trace the way the history ofjoelle van Dyne intersects with and carries forward the main plot of Irifinr�e Jest, highlighting a few thematic points that arise in connection with her role as the radio personality Madame
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Psychosis, as a member ofjames 0. Incandenza's film "stock company," and as a member ofUHID, the Union ofthe Hideously and Improbably Deformed. We meetjoelle van Dyne first as Madame Psychosis, and it is only as the story develops that we learn the background events that have brought her to the studios ofWYYY at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the radio personality responsible for "Sixty Minutes More or Less" each Monday through Friday at midnight The name "Madame Psychosis," we learn, originated in her role in severalJOI productions in which she played the figure of Death, presumably as a stage name that would protect her future career as a film-and-cartridge scholar under her own real name. "Madame Psychosis," we also learn, has come to be used by metro Boston drug addicts as the street name of a powerful psychedelic, probably by those who listen to her radio show. Before she was Madame Psychosis, Joelle van Dyne was a small town girl from Shiny Prize, Kentucky, whose accent she never entirely loses, and whose idiom still shows itself in her speech. Her father, to whom she always refers as her "own personal Daddy," is an industrial chemist to whom, as a little girl, she was extremely close. When she decides to attend Boston University as a Film-and-Film-Cartridge Studies major, it is partly because her memories of going to weekly movies with her own personal Daddy all during her girlhood are so idyllic. As an undergraduate, Joelle van Dyne first becomes the girlfriend of Orin Incandenza, also at that point a BU student. She subsequently becomes an actress in the films ofJOI, Orin's father. We will leave the story of her relationship with Orin for their respective entries in our compendium of characters, but it is necessary here to emphasize the one thing that most matters at the point she enters the story under her own name. She is not simply a beautiful young woman, but so perfect in her beauty that she virtually paralyzes males who attempt to approach her. At the time she meets Orin, she has never had a date, and even he, the arch-seducer, has never worked up courage to speak to her. It is only when she approaches him, asking him to autograph a football, that their relationship begins. The story of Joelle van Dyne's downhill path to addiction and attempted suicide is also one we will not summarize here in any detail.
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I n brief terms, she goes from being Orin's girlfriend t o an actress i n his father's productions - she and Orin break up because of his jealousy over her working for his father, in comparison to whom he feels overshadowed and inadequate - to a cocaine addict and radio personality to, after her failed suicide attempt, residency in Ennet House. The crucial point is that sometime during this period she acquires the veil worn by members of the UHID, bringing with it the supposition that she has been, as the title ofthe organization suggests, hideously and improbably deformed. Yet !Tifinite Jest gives only two accounts ofher disfigurement, one the claim by the vile and shifty cocaine dealer Randy Lenz that she has only a single eye in the middle ofher forehead - obviously a part of his manic coke-induced chatter about related matters like the Concavity and feral hamsters and infants born without skulls - and the other by Molly Notkin, whose story about a vial of acid thrown by Joelle's father is embedded in a narrative filled with errors and blatant fabrications. The reason that this matters to the plot is not simply that the question of what is hidden by Joelle van Dyne's veil constitutes another of the major puzzles of !Tifim�e Jest, but that its status as a puzzle is central to the meaning of the story. For there seem to be only two real possible answers. The first is that, as she once tells Don Gately, she donned the veil because she grew tired ofbeing so beautiful that she had become, in effect, a freak. lrifim�e Jest contains a number of scenes that have a bit offun with the more strident feminist claims about the "objectification" of women - specifically, the claim that men tend to look at women as objects or things, turning them into mere projections of male self gratification - but it is also a work that takes the idea seriously. At a parodic level, the theme gives us episodes like the one in which a Dworkinite group of feminists on motorcycles roars up to carry off a bunch of college basketball cheerleaders who had offered themselves as sexual objects to a largely male crowd. At a serious level, it gives the possibility thatjoelle van Dyne wears the veil not because she is literally deformed or disfigured but because she has, in a world ofmale voyeurism, come to regard her own perfect beauty as a deformation. The other possibility is that Joelle really has been disfigured by some accident or illness, though we have only highly speculative or unreliable accounts of what this might have been. (Molly Notkin's
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account, the most complete given in !tifinite Jest, bears every sign of having been made up to account for the veil, rather than the veil's having been donned to hide the disfigurement-by-acid Notkin describes.) This is what lends the infrequent hints about what lies under the veil an almost maddening quality, as though the readers of Infinite Jest had been drawn into the world of the story and given occasional teasing glimpses ofjoelle as she really looks when her face is not hidden. So, for instance, we are given the scene during the apocalyptic street brawl at Ennet House where Don Gately, badly wounded and bleeding profusely, looks up under the veil and sees thatjoelle's chin and mouth are perfectly regular. We are given the dream in which she looks at her own unveiled features in a metal mirror and sees only a face aged and worn by cocaine addiction. We are given the scene in which, after her suicide attempt, an Emergency Room physician sees her unveiled face and immediately calls the director of Ennet House to request that she be given special admittance. But whether he has been moved by her ethereal beauty or pities her for some hideous disfigurement we can only guess. The theme is important in !tifinite Jest because it is controlled by the description of one of James 0. Incandenza's films given in the endnotes. Entitled The Medusa and the Odalisque, this is an odd experimental production in which a Medusa, a creature out of Greek mythology so hideous that she turned men to stone, does battle with an Odalisque, which here means a woman so beautiful that she, too, has the power to tum men to stone. In the original Greek myth, a hero named Perseus defeats the Medusa by using a mirror that allows him to do battle with her without ever looking directly at her. In theJOI film, the Medusa and the Odalisque are shown in a battle carried out on a stage in front of spectators, where each carries a mirror-like shield that permits them to use Perseus's tactic against each other. As they fight, their shields are turned in various directions, neither managing to get in a good sword stroke at the other. But the spectators in the audience, who at different times catch a glimpse ofeither the Medusa or Odalisque in the shield of the other, are one by one turned to stone. hifim�e Jest also borrows from Greek mythology the story ofActeon, a Greek hunter turned into a stag by the transcendently beautiful goddess
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Artemis when he comes upon her taking a bath in a stream. Against the background of The Medusa and the Odalisque, the term "acteonizing" beauty as it is used in the story comes to mean the power of a beautiful woman to transform men to stone, an equal-and-opposite power, so to speak, to that attributed to the Medusa in the Perseus myth. In either case, it is the moral implications ofthe gaze that are brought into question by the puzzle ofjoelle van Dyne's veiled countenance. If, as she once claims, she has donned the veil because she is tired ofbeing so beautiful that men look upon her as a object, she would correspond to the Odalisque in JOI's production, and the problem would be one of extraordinary beauty as it acts as a stimulus to a fantasy of pure self gratification. If she really is deformed or disfigured, on the other hand, the problem would be one of denial, the revulsion of "normal" people as they are unable to look past physical appearances to the person underneath. In either case, the problem is one ofwhat the philosopher Stanley Cavell calls acknowledgment - the failure of all of us fully to acknowledge others as human beings - and the suggestion of Infim�e Jest is that the opposite cases are, at bottom, the same. The problem ot)oelle van Dyne's veil is especially pressing in Itifinite Jest because, just as the problem of the Entertainment seems about to solve itself - that is, the problem of whether or not any such "lethally entertaining" cartridge really exists or has ever existed, or whether it is a pure figment ofacademic speculation - the issue ofwhether orJoelle is beautiful or deformed turns out unexpectedly to explode whatever guesses one might have been making. For it is about halfway through Infim�e Jest that Joelle tells Don Gately that she has donned the veil because she is so beautiful: "'Don, I'm perfect. I'm so beautiful I drive anybody with a nervous system out oftheir fucking mind. Once they've seen me they can't think of anything else and don't want to look at anything else and stop carrying out normal responsibilities and believe that ifthey can only have me right there with them at all times everything will be all right'" (538) . AA, we are told early in Infim�e Jest, is an irony-free zone, and so by extension is Ennet House. For irony, as every addict sooner or later learns, feeds the Disease: it is a weapon of denial used by the Disease to perpetuate itself by letting the addict feel superior to others. Butjoelle
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when this conversation takes place is new to Ennet House, and as the story develops it will become more and more likely that she was being ironic when talking to Don Gately about her perfect, acteonizing beauty. There remains the possibility, of course, that she is as beautiful as ever, and that her saying so to Gately is just her way of fending off his questions about what she is hiding under the veil. (Questions he asks, it should be noted, not out of prurient curiosity, but because as her Ennet House counselor he is trying to get her to a stage of self-acceptance that would make any wearing of veils unnecessary.) As we learn much later in the story, the linejoelle feeds to Gately may not only be ironic, but may be a standard line she gives to anyone too insistent in their questions about why she is wearing a veil. And this is important because, as we also learn, the notion of a vision so perfect that it paralyzes the spectator - the root idea of the Entertainment, in short - is one thatJOI may well have picked up fromjoelle van Dyne: "'I used to go around saying the veil was to disguise lethal perfection, that I was too lethally beautiful for people to stand. It was a kind ofjoke I'd gotten from one ofhis entertainments, the Medusa-Odalisk thing . . . . So Jim took a failed piece and told me it was too perfect to release - it'd paralyze people'" (940) . Once more, Irifim�e Jest giveth and it taketh away. Yet beneath the alternative visions ofnarrative consistency, beneath the layers ofirony that must be peeled back to expose yet others, what survives is the notion of what Irifim�e Jest variously calls spectation or scopophilia as both a prison of solipsism and a failure to acknowledge others as human. This is the truth that lies beyond irony.
Eschaton In our experience, the one episode in lnfim�e Jest that tends to slow down even the most committed readers is the long ETA sequence devoted to Eschaton, an elaborate game of strategy played by junior players on the academy's central complex of tennis courts. Yet this is one of the most brilliant moments in Irifim�e Jests phantasmagoric story, and not much patience is needed to grasp the meaning both of its low comedy and its highly serious logical or philosophical point. When we have done so, we have another of those episodes in which Irifim�e Jest pulls
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away the veil of ordinary social appearances and shows us that it is, after all, our own world and its assumptions that are phantasmagoric. The name Eschaton comes from a Greek word (eschatos) meaning "last" or "final." The area of serious thought dealing with what are called "last things" - death, the notion of a Day of Doom or final judgment, the question of whether consciousness lives on after the death of the body - is called Eschatology, and, before the twentieth century, occupied a large part both of philosophy and theology. In the twentieth century, with the rise to dominance of a general agnosticism or atheism, traditional eschatological concerns tended to get displaced onto issues of political or national policy. In an age of superpowers armed with nuclear weapons in the period following World War II, of course, this was the Soviet Union and the United States, each with enough atomic missles aimed at each other to kill its adversary's population five or six times over: would humankind extinguish itself in a final Apocalypse of nuclear exchange? Would human beings become extinct not through changes in climate or the impact of a comet from outer space, but through the triumph of certain homicidal or suicidal tendencies within human nature? In bifim�e Jest, this world of imminent nuclear destruction is fast fading into memory. That is the whole point, both comic and serious, of the election ofJohnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, and the Reconfiguration, and the identification of dirt or waste as an "enemy," and the birth of ONAN as the world's sole remaining superpower. So far as the possibility of military conflict or even small-scale nuclear exchange exists, it is the business mainly of developing nations, terrorist groups, loose or realigned power blocs, and the shifting interests of former major powers. Played on tennis courts that have been laid out as a strategic map of the globe, Eschaton is orchestrated by a powerful computer program able to instantly compute the military and political consequences of any strategic option exercised by any of the competing groups. The only element of actual tennis that survives is that nuclear exchanges are implemented as tennis lobs, which, given the expertise even of the youngest players at ETA, means that most "missiles" may be counted upon to reach their targets. Eschaton is, first and last, a war game.
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Yet beneath the absurdity of the notion of a game of global strategy carried out on tennis courts, there is a seriousness of moral purpose in the Eschaton sequence that remains central to the larger narrative. The first lies in the notion of war games themselves. We are told in an endnote that Eschaton evolved from a preexisting computerized war game, and that serves as a reminder that war games very much like the proto-Eschaton have been used for years by strategic institutes and by our own Pentagon and its counterparts in all developed countries to map the consequences of nuclear conflict. Behind ltifim�e Jests portrayal ofEschaton lies the serious picture ofmen like the RAND Corporation's Herman Kahn, working out branching strategies and dispassionately recording on grids and graphs the results which in real life would be measured in millions ofbumt and screaming bodies. The innocence of the Eschaton players in Itifim�e Jest, which has mainly to do with the youth of the players and the passing of the Cold War, is mirrored in historical terms by the chilling picture of grown men who played a game of worlds with just the same purely "strategic" detachment from human pain and suffering. The parodic edge of Itifim�e Jests Eschaton sequence, then, cuts both ways. On the one hand, it locates us in a world of the future in which the terrible imminence ofnuclear holocaust has receded to become little more than a cultural memory, much as we in the modern age read stories about the tournaments ofmedieval knights, and as children might play games of mock-jousting after reading stories of King Arthur. On the other hand, it reminds us of a very recent world in which adults used game theory and systems analysis to calculate the slaughter of innocent millions with something like a child's sense ofunreality about what was really entailed. And finally, Eschaton as played in Itifim�e Jest reminds us that the game of nations goes on even amidst the unexpected twists and turns of history. This is the point ofits shifting alliances and power blocs, its terrorist groups and armed nationalist movements, reminding us that the specter of global self-destruction, given the right circumstances, could reappear at any time. We won't try to summarize the rules ofEschaton as played in this episode, but we do want to point out one feature of the game that becomes important to understanding Itifim�e Jest as a work. This is the
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convention, central to Eschaton, that various markers on the tennis courts represent actual regions, cities, concentrations ofmilitary forces, etc. Here's an example: "Folded gray-on-red ETA T-shirts are MAMAs Major Metro Areas. Towels stolen from selected motels on the junior tour stand for airfields, bridges, satellite-linked monitoring facilities, carrier groups, conventional power plants, important rail convergences. Red tennis shorts with gray trim are CONFORCONS Conventional Force Concentrations" (323). The missiles used by each ofthe combatant forces are outworn tennis balls too bald and bounceless to be of any use even in practice. The essence of the game is a poker-like bluff and response, with occasional attacks on enemy centers and diplomatic initiatives to create new alliances in the shifting strategic situation. The game normally ends with one major combatant going SACPOP (strikes against civilian populations), while another emerges with a favorable ratio of points for INDDIR (infliction of death, destruction, and incapacitation of response) . It is, partly, the sudden riot of acronyms that makes the Eschaton sequence hard going even for committed readers ofltifinite Jest. SPAS EX, SACPOP, INDDIR, SUFDDIR, AMNAT, SOVWAR, DEFCON, LIBSYR, INDPAK and similar acronyms pile up one after another, until even the relative penetrability of the individual abbreviations (AMNAT equals, for instance, "American Nations," INDPAK "India and Pakistan") stops being much help. Yet the serious point here is an important one. Anyone who has ever spent a few minutes reading military or strategic documents knows that this is how the people who spend their lives composing such reports really do think and write, and that this style of thinking carries with it a certain danger to humanity as a whole. If one of us picks up a sharp knife and threatens someone else, we are dealing with a situation as old as humanity itsel£ The blood and pain and terror, though they may not yet have happened, are real. But in a world of strategic acronyms where INDPAK might go SACPOP against SOVWAR, we are suddenly inside a reality where only bloodless abstractions are in any danger of coming into conflict, and abstractions do not scream with pain. Before the game of Eschaton in Itifinite Jest ends, however, there are real screams of pain, as a dispute about the rules leads to general
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mayhem on the courts and the younger players start attacking each other as real rather than game-theory opponents. This is a comic sequence too good to spoil by summary, and we will leave it to be enjoyed by first-time readers of 17ifim�e Jest. The sight of a computerized game of strategic warfare dissolving into a contest of bloody noses and angry welts among pre-adolescent tennis players is at once a triumph of slapstick comedy and a serious deflation of the "adult" pretensions of those who gather around map tables in the Pentagon and CIA. One important implication ofthe Eschaton sequence is the idea that all human warfare, even at its most terrible, involves a certain irreducible element of purely childish aggression. We are not used to thinking of the Adolf Hitler who reoccupied the Rhineland, annexed Austria, and invaded Poland and France as a child having a temper tantrum, but !nfim�e Jest permits us to see that, among other things, he was that as well. The one element of the Eschaton sequence that seems to us to need special emphasis is the dispute about the rules over which the melee among the younger players breaks out. For it concerns a serious logical or philosophical point, which is the gap that separates representation and reality in any symbolic system. The point at which the breakdown comes is so surrounded with violence that it's easy to miss, but it will be worth while to pause a moment and see what the stakes are for lnfim�e Jest as a literary work that must itself make important representational claims. The dispute breaks out when snow begins to fall on the court where Eschaton is played, leading one particularly dim team member to claim that this alters the strategic situation. The claim drives Michael Pemulis, who himselfwas a champion Eschaton player when he was in thejunior ranks, nearly berserk: '"Players aren't inside the goddamn game. Players are part of the apparatus of the game. They're part of the map. It's snowing on the players but not on the tem�ory"' (338) . This is at the same time an elementary and a profound point, having to do with the nature of representational systems. We can see what is driving Pemulis mad if we think of any simple situation involving a map. Suppose we are planning a trip from New Jersey to Virginia. We spread the map out, get the scale, and begin to measure the distance between Princeton and Charlottesville. While you are translating the
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inches on the ruler into miles, I go and get a cup of coffee, which I set down on the map right beside the section of the map we are concentrating on. And then, being an excitable type, I spill my coffee all over the section of the map that represents Virginia. Somebody who watched all this and thought that the actual population ofVirginia must right now be suffering from a huge inundation of hot coffee - "I spilled coffee on Virginia, so people in Virginia must be pretty wet" - would obviously be suffering from a deep confusion. This is Pemulis's point. At the same time, the nature of symbolic representation is not always so cut and dried. To make a political point, for instance, one might want to claim that the flag of the United States is, just like your shirt or my trousers, nothing more than a piece of cloth. If that's true, I can no more insult the United States by burning its flag than I can physically harm you by cutting up your shirt with a pair of scissors. It's true that you might be inconvenienced if I did this, but it would be pointless to pretend that I'd done the same sort of harm to you as I would if l'd stabbed you physically with the same pair of scissors. Yet those who want to claim that the U.S. flag is "more than" a symbol, that images like the Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima with the bodies of dead American soldiers lying about show that it has a meaning that goes beyond mere conventions of representation, also have a point. In such a situation, we encounter a problematic instance in which both sides have some claim to a measure of truth. It is true, surely, that cutting up a piece of cloth is not the same as harming another human being. But it is also true that, living in a culture, we live in and through symbols to a degree that it is mere sophistry to deny. The meaning of the Eschaton sequence in bifinz�e Jest has to do with the inescapable interpenetration of the real and the symbolic, or more properly with the sense in which it is sometimes nearly impossible to say where the one begins and the other leaves off. The basic point will remain that made by Michael Pemulis: the gap separating a simple hearing of the word "pain" and the experience of having someone stab you with a hatpin is, in the end, unbridgeable. There is always a naked or primary reality that cannot be actually reproduced in any system of representation. Yet the opposite point is also important: in reading a literary work like Infinz�e Jest we may enter into kinds of pain and
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suffering and, ultimately, enlightenment that our own experience would otherwise never have made available to us. When this occurs - when characters like Don Gately andjoelle van Dyne and Mario Incandenza become, so to speak, members of our circle of acquaintance - then we are entitled to say that certain modes of"merely" symbolic experience are every bit as immediate as our ordinary existence. Beneath the comedy and slapstick action of the Eschaton episode lies, in the end, a point about literary experience, and ultimately about Infinite Jest itself as a literary work.
Chapter Five Compendium of Major Characters Don Gately Infinite Jest has a number of major protagonists - Don Gately, Joelle van Dyne, Hal Incandenza - but by any conventional standard its hero is Don Gately, a burglar, ex-convict, recovering drug addict, and Ennet House counselor. For it is an age-old literary convention that the hero is someone who intervenes on behalf of the weak or helpless, as with the knight who rides forth to do battle with the dragon so that the villagers may be saved, or the epic hero who challenges an enemy to single combat so that his companions may be spared. There are elements of this epic or chivalric element in Don Gately's character from the very beginning ofIrifimte Jest. They emerge fully in the gripping episode where Gately comes forth from Ennet House to single-handedly take on three physically huge opponents, one of them armed with a pistol, a .44 Bulldog Special, and is seriously wounded while managing to neutralize or defeat all three. The problem for first-time readers of Infimte Jest is that Gately's personal history has to be understood backwards. We meet him for the first time as a figure in Ennet House who has been sober or substance free for over a year. He is then a central figure in all the Ennet House scenes, coming and going to 12-step meetings, overseeing and counseling new residents, providing a kind of calm center in the maelstrom of 91
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anxiety and erratic behavior that Ennet House's strung-out population unavoidably creates. Only much later, when Gately is lying gravely wounded in the Trauma Wing ofSt. Elizabeth's hospital, drifting in and out of a comatose state composed partly of involuntary memories, partly of outright delusions, do we learn certain final details about his earlier life. Itifinite Jest, we've said, is a story that is fragmented or decomposed in the way that entered modern literature with Joyce's Ulysses, imitating the rhythms ofindividual consciousness or perception rather than the straightforward episodic structure of more traditional narrative. That alone would be excuse enough for telling Gately's story backwards, for it is only when he is lying helpless in his hospital bed that his mind is freed to travel back to the scenes of his early youth - he has, before that, been far too occupied with maintaining his own sobriety and trying to help other people to spend much time thinking about his own past and in telling his story in the way it does Itifim�e Jest is being true to the inner flow of Gately's own conscious experience. Still, there is a much more important reason why we learn a great deal early in the story about Gately's present life as an Ennet House counselor, and only much later about his years as a high school student, football player, drug addict, burglar, and prison inmate. For the point of lnfim�e Jest s portrayal of Gately will be to reverse our normal understanding of heroism. The episode in which Gately takes on and defeats three huge Quebecois opponents is genuinely heroic, but by the end of Itifim�e Jest we will have come to see that Gately's real heroism has consisted all along in the self-conquest that permitted him to escape the terrifYing isolation ofhis addiction and enter into a human community. The street fight scene, when it occurs, will only be the outward confirmation of something we already know. The way we know it will be from having understood the most recent, rather than the earliest, scenes in Gately's personal history. That said, there is no reason why we may not reconstruct Gately's story for first-time readers of Itifim�e Jest, who will lose nothing by having some sense ofthe path that brought him to Ennet House. Gately was born into the lowest tier of the working class, that marginal world that exists a notch higher than welfare dependence and a notch lower
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than a more secure working-class world of regular or long-term employment, ownership of one's own property, and a certain degree offamily stability. His father, we are told, was an Estonian immigrant who broke Gately's mother's jaw in a domestic quarrel and left Boston while Gately was, in the story's phrase, still in his mother's stomach (446) . By the time he is old enough to remember much, Gately's mother has become an alcoholic living with a former Navy �1 P (military policeman) who regularly and methodically beats her, hitting her in an area between her chest and her groin - a skill he'd learned as a military policeman so that no tell-tale bruises will be evident the next day. The mother's MP lover is an important person in the young Don Gately's life, though we have to remember certain details to understand exactly how he influenced Gately, which is mainly by negative example. So, for instance, there is the fact that the MP is himself an alcoholic, who drinks himselfinto a stupor every night on Heineken beer, carefully logging each can he finishes into a small notebook, certain that his ability to keep accurate records ofhis consumption means that he cannot be a drunk. Or, in the same way, there will be the MP's weight-lifting. He is proud of his body, and proud of the shape he keeps it in. He teaches Gately - already huge as a youngster, and by the time we meet him a giant, 6' 10" and weighting 2 8 1 pounds - how to do work out with weights. Within a relatively short time Gately is lifting more than the MP. Only later does it occur to him to wonder why he never felt called upon to intervene when the MP was administering his nightly beating to Gately's alcoholic mother. Gately's descent into substance addiction begins when he's ten or eleven, watching his mother drink herself into a stupor in front of the television set, then himselffinishing off the nightly bottle ofStolichnaya vodka that she has left open beside her. When his mother begins to suffer physical deterioration from her drinking, the young Don Gately doesn't know enough medical terminology to understand her diagnosis (cirrhosis of the liver, a common and dangerous symptom of chronic alcoholism). He hears "cirrhosis" as the name of one of the knights of the Round Table with whose story he is distantly familiar, and becomes in his own fantasy Sir Osis: "he'd ride a mop-handle horse and brandish
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a trash-can lid and . . . tell the neighborhood kids he was Sir Osis of Thuliver, most fearsomely loyal and fierce of Arthur's vessels" (449) . Gately's response is in itself poignant enough - the acting-out of a young boy made to feel helpless by his mother's illness and dreaming of coming to her rescue like a knight of old - but it's even more poignant as an early glimpse of the core of Gately's moral character. For beneath his outward appearance - huge, strong, and menacing enough that he is able to support his drug habit by acting as a debt collector to the bookie Whitey Sorkin - Gately really is a kind of Arthurian knight, with a purely instinctive sense offairness or decency that never vanishes even when he has reached the nadir of his decline. As a child, he is the only kid in the neighborhood to show kindness to an old, half-crazed neighbor woman whom the others torment with mean practical jokes. As an adult drug addict and criminal, he is so unwilling to take sexual advantage of a perennially drunken girl (Pamela Hoffman-Jeep) that she dubs him her knight-errant - Gately hears this as "Knight Errand," as he had earlier heard "cirrhosis" as "Sir Osis" and "vassal" as "vessel" and falls in love with him. Throughout Infinite Jest, Don Gately never at some level ceases to be Sir Osis ofThuliver. We've seen in an earlier section the series of events that brings Gately finally to Ennet House, by which time we know or infer certain essential facts about him. The most important, perhaps, is that, for all his enormous size and great strength, he doesn't like violence. When he does lose control ofhimself, as when he is drunk and gets into a barroom brawl, he is a berserk giant. !tifim'te Jest in several places obliquely compares Gately to Hercules in Greek and Roman myth, an obvious reference to the superhuman strength of the ancient hero. But it is in his moments of irrational anger - the Heraclesforens of Euripides and Seneca, "Hercules in a towering rage" - that the resemblance is most marked. For in the morning, realizing dimly what havoc he has wrought, Don Gately is once again Sir Osis of Thuliver, sorry for what he has done, wishing that he had not been led to misuse his gigantic strength in a paroxysm of uncontrollable wrath. By the time we first meet Don Gately in !tifim'te Jest, he has already undergone tremendous changes. The berserk barroom brawler has disappeared. The junkie who went on an epic narcotics binge with his
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fiiend Gene Fackelman, working his way through a huge pile ofDialalud until he is unable to do anything but sit stupefied in a puddle ofhis own urine, has now been substance-free for over 400 days. Gately the ex burglar is tortured with remorse, having taped the mouth of a burglary victim shut and only later learned that the man suffocated because he couldn't breath through his nose. He is haunted by the fear that he may yet be brought to account for this burglary-plus-manslaughter. The way he had silenced the victim's alarm, with a straight-meter shunt learned from an older burglar during one of his spells in prison, is something of a Gately signature among metro Boston detectives. But for reasons at which he can only guess the investigation seems to have been permanently derailed. With Ennet House newcomers he is endlessly patient, remembering his own early days in treatment, remembering his detestation of AA slogans and platitudes, still radically uncertain about the existence of that being AA refers to as a Higher Power. (Gately has at this point, Irifim�e Jest tells us, "like nothing of a God concept" [ 467] .) All this stands as a background to the extraordinary episode in which Randy Lenz, an Ennet House resident and an irretrievably twisted soul, is followed home by three huge Quebecois rowdies whose dog he has killed when passing through the Inman Square area. (The sequence in which Lenz goes from torturing and killing cats to slitting the throats of dogs is one of the most chilling in Irifim�e Jest, a dark emblem of what lies at the other pole from Gately's own story of redemption.) When the three Quebecois in their Mercury Montego corner Lenz in a dead-end street outside Ennet House, two chasing him around a parked car, the third standing with a .44 caliber pistol held in both hands out in front of him, waiting for a clear shot, the residents shouting, screaming onlookers standing on both sides of the street, Don Gately will emerge from the front door to take control of the situation. In an earlier section in which he had been involved in physical violence, a bystander remarked admiringly that Gately looks as though he'd been born in a bar fight. That, externally, is the Don Gately we see, and the Quebecois toughs see, in this climactic sequence. The change in Gately, in other words, has been wholly internal, a measure of his inward transformation of character in the months he
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has been free of his addiction and doing his best to aid other battered souls in their struggle with their own demons. He moves into this brawl not as a Heraclesforens, but with an almost frightening clarity of mind, as though he's both entering the battle of his life and watching himself from some distant point of observation. He feels, we are told, almost jolly. In a momentary glimpse of what's passing through his mind, we discover the source of this clarity: "late in Gately's Substance and burglary careers, when he'd felt so low about himself, he'd had sick little fantasies of saving somebody from harm, some innocent party, and getting killed in the process and getting eulogized at great length in bold-faced Globe print" (6 1 1) . The fantasies were sick, of course, only because the Gately who had them was a different person, compensating for his own sense of worthlessness with impossible chivalric dreams. Now, as the fantasy becomes a reality in the bloody scene outside Ennet House, the theme begun long ago in Gately's error about "cirrhosis" culminates in a demonstration ofgenuine and incontestable chivalry. The apocalyptic knife-and-gun fight outside Ennet House, in which various other Ennet residents get involved and in which Gately himself is badly wounded, is in a certain sense the end of the Gately story as a major subplot of Irifinite Jest. We will spend a great deal of the rest of the story inside Gately's mind as he lies in his hospital bed in the Trauma Wing. Much that flows through his consciousness then will - even as it raises in acute terms how much of Irifinzte Jests own story is delusional or hallucinatory - bring together separate strands of the narrative, as though all the major themes ofthe story were converging in the fevered mind of Gately the immobilized giant. By the time readers have reached this point in Irifinzte Jest they will be in a position to draw their own conclusions about the layers of reality involved in Gately's passages in and out of dreaming consciousness, and especially the appearance of James 0. Incandenza, whom he has never before met, as a ghost or wraith whose literary antecedents trace back to Shakespeare's Hamlet. We will simply say that every reader who gets to the hospital scenes in Irifinzte Jest will be likely to agree on one thing, that the enormous body lying helpless in the hospital bed belongs not to the old or unregenerate Don Gately, but to Sir Osis, the most fearsomely loyal and fierce of Arthur's knights.
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Joelle
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We've covered a great deal of Joelle van Dyne's story in earlier sections. She is inseparable from her radio incarnation as Madame Psychosis, and therefore from the significance of metro Boston as one of !'!finite Jests main settings. Our account now will attempt only to fill in certain important details that had to be omitted in our earlier summary. !'!finite Jest gives us most of Joelle van Dyne's earlier story in a series of flashbacks, some involving other main characters like Orin lncandenza and JOI, some devoted to her alone. The essentials are these. Joelle enters !'!finite Jests world as a cheerleader at Boston University, to which she has come as a simple Southern girl from Shiny Prize, Kentucky. Her father is a low-Ph industrial chemist. (Low-Ph factor means highly acidic, which will become important in an episode in which joelle is supposed to have been facially disfigured when her father throws a flask of acid across the room.) He is also someone who, almost from the time his daughter is a little girl, forgets his wife in his adoration of her. There are reasons for the adoration.Joelle is not only, as we discover in l'!fimte Jest, an intelligent and perceptive young woman, but she is, all the time she is growing up, simply and superbly beautiful. (As a cheerleader at BU, she acquires the nickname PGOAT - the Prettiest Girl of All Time.) She is, like Yeats's Rose of the World or Homer's Helen of Troy, one of those incarnations of female beauty that has a power to drive men mad, or so to awe them that they withdraw from her as though she were a goddess. When she arrives at Boston University, Joelle is a virgin. She has never been out on a date. The only male who has been allowed inside the magic circle ofher enchantress-like beauty is her father, to whom she is especially close. Throughout Injimte Jest, she refers to him as her "own personal daddy," a term that gets taken over into the third-person narration. The implication is that, having known her from a baby, her father has been partly immunized to the otherwise paralyzing power of her beauty. The cheerleader role is an emblem of Joelle's simple or unsophisticated Kentucky upbringing. According to a certain stereotype, pretty Southern girls are expected to be cheerleaders - i.e., decorative
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objects at football games played by males - and Joelle van Dyne is a stunningly beautiful Southern girl, so she has been baton-twirling since an early age. We are expected to understand that Joelle's arrival at Boston University, at the heart of a sophisticated and urbane Boston Cambridge intellectual culture, was a bit of a shock. So it is that, seeking a bit of home comfort, she joins the BU cheerleading squad, which is where she meets Orin Incandenza. That story is given elsewhere in this section, so we will simply say that it's this series of accidents that leads to Joelle's encounter with Orin, and that emboldens him to speak to her while other males have been afraid. Within a few months ofhaving met Orin, Joelle is neither a virgin nor, any longer, a cheerleader. A short time thereafter, they have moved together to an off-campus apartment. A bit later, Orin takesJoelle home to Enfield to meetJames 0. Incandenza and Avril, his mother. Avril Mondragon lncandenza, we remember, is called the Moms by all members of her family. Relations between joelle van Dyne and the Moms are problematic from the very first. For one thing, the two women are extraordinarily alike in certain respects. The Moms is, for instance, a compulsive cleaner and tidier. She is, in fact, obsessive compulsive about everything from household dirt to English grammar, an agoraphobic ("fear of appearing in public") control freak who tries to manipulate her own children and everyone else. As we will see in subsquent episodes, Joelle is given to similarly frentic bursts of housecleaning, especially when, having entered the sophisticated world, she finds herself doing more and more cocaine. Her favorite cocaine high consists offreebasing, and then spending hours dusting, washing, vacuuming, polishing, and otherwise setting to rights every article in her surroundings. Avril is, likejoelle, a strikingly beautiful woman. And, to complicate matters in unpleasant ways, Avril was adored, in the grim and fateful way diagnosed by Freud as the Oedipus complex, by her son Orin Incandenza. The account we've just given may or may not be true, either in its substance or its details. The great problem with whole stretches of !tifin#e Jest is that Orin Incandenza is a pathological liar, and no part of its story touches him as immediately as thejoelle-Avril-Oedipus-complex subplot that runs as a main thread through the larger narrative. Worse,
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whole long "Orin sections" in the story and footnotes have been absorbed into the consciousness ofHal Incandenza, Orin's younger brother, whose point of view is at the center of the story as a whole. Thus, for instance, certain motifs that we begin by unhesitatingly attributing to Orin's dark Oedipal sexual attraction to his own mother - projections in which he imagines her as indulging in promiscuous sex with practically every male who comes into her vicinity, including her own hapless half-brother Charles Tavis - will by the end ofthe story have been absorbed into the consciousness ofHal himself, who will dream about his mother having sex with his ETA tennis rival john Wayne. At the outer limits of Hal's increasingly delusional mental peregrinations, we will be compelled to ask to what degree his brother Orin is, or has been throughout, little more than a figment of Hal's own diseased imagination. Nonetheless, let us follow Joelle's story as it seems to emerge from the time ofher entry into the somewhat surrealistic world oflncandenza family life. Orin takes her home, as we have said, to meet his family. Avril takes an instant dislike to her or is imagined as having taken an instant dislike to her by either Orin or Hal, who are prone to portray Joelle as the Oedipal rival of Avril with her own sons.JOI, as is by then his habit, is too far along in his nightly assault on a bottle of Wild Turkey to pay her much attention. The conversation is chilly. Avril, the obsessively perfect hostess, and joelle, the obsessively polite Southern belle, preserve all decencies of appearance. Dinner comes to an end. JOI has long since disappeared from the table - he goes away to refill the glass of bourbon that is his real dinner, and on one trip never returns - and the experiment of Orin's having taken his one true love home to meet his family is felt on all sides to have been a failure. At this point, a subordinate motifbecomes important. As it happens, Joelle van Dyne has been led to enroll at BU, rather than going to a Southern university, because ofits film studies program (in Subsidized Time, this is Film-and-Film-Cartridge Studies) . Her personal transit to the world of avant-garde film study has an unlikely beginning. As a little girl in Kentucky, her most prized times with her father were their regular weekend trip to the movies, where they'd sit down front, eat popcorn together, and watch the big screen. When she shows up at BU, Joelle knows in some sense that she loves film, but at that point is
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most fond of what an endnote in !'!finite Jest calls corporate films that is, Hollywood blockbusters, as they are more commonly called, where a lot of things are blown up. This is a taste that changes forever when she meets James 0. Incandenza, the leading figure in what has come to be known as "anticonfluential" filmmaking. An irony is that Orin Incandenza had introducedJoelle to his father in hopes thatJOI would use her, as a conventionally but transcendentally beautiful girl, in some of his upcoming productions. This would be a marked change from his father's usual casting procedure, which consists of rounding up marginal characters like Stokely "Dark Star" McNair, a homosexual prostitute, or irreducibly ordinary people with no acting experience, such as Phillip T. Smothergill in Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat and other films. Responding at first only to Joelle's conventional beauty,JOI shows no interest in casting her. Then he sees something else, and Joelle's drift from the orbit of Orin Incandenza, college student, football player, and son, to that of James Orin Incandenza, alcoholic, genius inventor, and experimental filmmaker, is underway. The path from the rural innocence to the suicidal despair of Joelle's Madame Psychosis radio personality lies through the films she makes with Orin's father: Low-Temperature Civics, 17ze Desire to Desire, 17ze Night Wears a Sombrero, a film adaptation of Peter Weiss's Marat/ Sade, and a long succession of uncompleted and/ or unreleased films entitled !'!finite Jest. Since /'!finite Jest- we are back to the novel now - tells each of its stories from multiple viewpoints, the story ofJoelle's relationship with James 0. Incandenza is extremely hard to untangle. But, as always in !'!finite Jest, the entanglements, too, have their point. Truth is not always a matter of cold empirical fact. Thus, for instance, we have strong intimations that Orin's breakup with Joelle van Dyne occurs because she is now sleeping with his father, which would make the story one of straightforward romantic or sexual jealousy. But then we learn from other sources that their relationship was never a sexual one, not least because JOI was by then so far advanced in his alcoholism as to be sexually incapable. So we're left with the implication that what alters Joelle van Dyne forever is her plunge into James 0. Incandenza's artistic world as a filmmaker, at the center of which echoes a long cry of
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despair about the bleak spiritual landscape of contemporary American society. In the same way,Joelle's appearance inJOI's films raises in urgent terms the question of whether or not the facial disfigurement that has led her to wear the veil of the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed is real. We talked in an earlier section about the scene in whichjoelle tells Don Gately that she wears the veil because she is not deformed, that she put it on because she eventually became revulsed by the way her flawless beauty made her a target of male "objectification," which here refers to what happens when a person is treated as a mere object. But then we heardjoelle describe that as a mere ploy she uses to fend off questions about what is hidden by the veil. Infim�e Jest keeps open the question of what "really" lies under the veil of Madame Psychosis for its own reasons, and it is the question, rather than answers proposed by this or that reader, that is central to the plot of the novel. That said, a few words of guidance may perhaps be given. The long filmography ofjames 0. Incandenza's works given in an endnote to Infinz�e Jest is one of the most important keys to the meaning of the story, a virtual instruction manual on how to separate reality from illusion (or delusion) in at least some cases. So, for instance, we will learn that one of JOI's films is Paluab/e Coupon Has Been Removed, summarized in the filmography as a story in which "a boy helps his alcoholic-delusional father and disassociated mother dismantle their bed to search for rodents, and later he intuits the future feasibility of D.T. cycle annular fusion" (991). As a first-time reader learns, this corresponds in the novel Infinz�e Jest to a memoir written byJOI himself and included as part of the story. Similarly, the film It Was a Great Marvel That He Was in the Father W#hout Knowing Him, "a father, suffering from the delusion that his etymologically precocious son is pretending to be mute, poses as a 'professional conversationalist' in order to draw the boy out" (993) , exactly corresponds to an early scene in Infinite Jest the novel. In addition, the question ofjoelle van Dyne's disfigurement is made intensely problematic by the fact thatJOI, before the plot of Infin#e Jest introduces him to Joelle, has already made a film starring a woman with a badly disfigured face. This is Blood Sister. One Tough Nun, so
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important that it is not only listed in the end-of-book filmography but described in detail as Hal Incandenza, slowly going out of his mind, watches it in a viewing room at ETA. One major character in Blood Sirteris a troubled adolescent with a "pink shiny bum-scarred face," the permanent result of an episode in which she was doing free-base cocaine and the ether exploded. The troubled adolescent, we are told by the filmography, was played not by "Madame Psychosis,"Joelle's invariable screen name when she appears inJOI's films, but by one Marla-Dean Chumm. So it is that we are given strong hints thatjoelle van Dyne's disfigurement, when we first meet her as Madame Psychosis, may be not literal but figurative, a scarring of the soul for which she has chosen to wear a facial disguise. In any case, the series of events that carries Joelle into her final stage of cocaine addiction, and from there to Ennet House, is clear enough. When James 0. Incandenza commits suicide by putting his head into a microwave oven, leaving behind an ample estate created by royalties from his earlier inventions, he leavesJoelle van Dyne an annuity that permits her to drop out of school and live independently on a generous annual income. It is enough not simply to support her, but to support a cocaine habit that was merely recreational in the days when she was living with Orin Incandenza, but which now, with Orin estranged andJOI in his grave, occupies more and more of her time. Her social life, such as it is, is spent in the company ofBoston-Cambridge writers and academics, most of them interested in film studies. From Monday to Friday, at station WYYY, she performs as Madame Psychosis on "Sixty Minutes More or Less:' The rest of the time she does cocaine, or renounces cocaine forever before going on another binge, or thinks about suicide. Joelle's attempted suicide at Molly Notkin's party is the episode that brings her into the web of relations that includes most of the other major characters in ltifinite Jes t She does overdose on freebase cocaine, but doesn't manage to kill hersel£ She is taken, unconscious, to the emergency room of a local hospital, where the head physician on duty, moved by what he sees when he lifts her veil and looks on her face, immediately uses personal connections to get Joelle placed at Ennet House when she has recovered from her overdose. (Even here there is .
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a radical ambiguity about what lies under the veil: is the ER physician moved byJoelle's transcendent physical beauty, or by pity for an extreme physical disfigurement? We are not told.) And so it comes about that Joelle van Dyne enters a community with which we have been intimately acquainted almost since the opening pages of !'![mite Jest, the counselors and residents of the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery center. The story ofjoelle van Dyne from this point on is, to an important degree, the story of her unlikely and moving relationship with Don Gately. She first encounters Gately as a counselor - the long interviews in whichjoelle, by now a sophisticated, ironic, and articulate academic, fences conversationally with the resolutely blue-collar Gately are wonderful tours de force - then, increasingly, sees him as a friend and fellow traveller not simply on the road to sobriety but to spiritual redemption. Finally, with the eruption of the apocalyptic knife-and-gun brawl in which Gately is seriously wounded, she begins to understand that she feels for him something very much like a romantic attraction. The scene in which the wounded Gately peers up beneathjoelle's veil just as he is passing out from loss of blood - the moment lasts no more than a sentence or two - is one of the most strangely moving in bifinite Jests altogether moving story. The final scenes involvingjoelle van Dyne may or may not be real. As Gately lies in his hospital bed, in terrible pain but refusing painkillers because he knows that they would start him off once again on the path to narcotics addition, unable to speak because the tube going down his throat makes it impossible for him to articulate, drifting in and out of a hallucinatory dream-state,Joelle comes to visit him. She speaks to him tenderly, tells him about doings at Ennet House, spends a long time showing him her album with childhood pictures of herself and her own personal daddy in their Kentucky surroundings, and leaves only when she suspects that her visit has begun to tire him. Or so it all seems to Don Gately, who, however, will later wake up, or dream that he has awakened, to ask himself whether Joelle's visit to his bedside may not have been nothing more than one of those oddly lucid apparitions that, like the wraith-figure of]ames 0. Incandenza, have visited him in his long night of personal suffering. Whether or not this is the case is something we leave for readers of our Companion to decide for themselves.
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Hal lncandenza One traditional kind of narrative is the coming of age story, or Bzldungsroman. The saga of Hal Incandenza in Infim�e Jest is an inverted Bzldungsroman - a story not of maturing, affirming his identity, and moving beyond the self into the world, but of unraveling, losing his way, and retreating deep inside himsel£ Hal was born in 1992. His childhood was spent in suburban, bucolic Weston, Mass., remembered in nostalgic detail, a childhood in some respects idyllic, when a gifted, beloved boy could explore freely his wide-ranging interests. He loses this paradise at age seven when his parents established the tennis academy. By age eleven, Hal also loses touch with his father. Sent to be interviewed by a "professional conversationalist," Hal characterizes himself as a "continentally ranked junior tennis player who can also recite great chunks of the dictionary, verbatim, at will, and tends to get beat up and wears a bow tie" (28). He says that his father is "having this hallucination that I never speak" (29). He calls his father "Himself.' The conversationalist, Hal soon realizes, is actually Himselfin disguise. Father and son remain conspicuously disconnected. A gifted, hard-working student, Hal is especially eager to please Avril Incandenza, his Moms. He shares her interests in culture and aesthetics, literature and linguistics. His seventh-grade essay on "the tangled fates of broadcast television and the American ad industry" (411) provides a cogent history of the Entertainment business in the Subsidized era. Another precocious essay for "Introduction to Entertainment Studies" compares two TV heroes, Captain Steve McGarett of "Hawaii Five-0," "homing in on the truth," and Captain Frank Furillo of "Hill Street Blues," "navigating cluttered fields . . . a post-modern hero, a virtuoso of triage and composure and administration" (141). Wise, or at least clever, beyond his years, Hal appears as the central focus of the narrator's loving solicitude, endowed with deep feelings and astute insights - a privileged character in a deplorable state. In that seventh-grade essay, Hal contends that the hero since the BS 1980s is trapped "in the reactive moral ambiguity of 'post-' and 'post-post' -
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modem culture," and that the next step in modem media will be "the catatonic hero" (142). In Hal, we get that hero. Hal Incandenza is as smart and chillingly inhuman as Hal the Computer in 2001. On April 1, Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar, Hal's life changes forever when the boy, age "thirteen going on really old"(248), comes home to find his father's dead body. Hal goes into traumatic shock, and is dispatched into "grief-therapy" with another therapist. It doesn't help. Hal manipulates language well enough to compel others and perhaps persuade himself that "he's in there, inside his own hull, as a human being" (694). His glibness often works: the Moms "believes she knows him inside and out as a human being" (694). But Hal, in therapy, realizes that he isn't "delivering the goods" to his psychologist, and despairs of satisfying the counselor and getting out of therapy. Hal's strategy for getting out of "grief counseling" is, characteristically, intellectual. Studying grief-therapy terms, "library derived," Hal teaches himself how to grieve; he performs brilliantly: "I was in The Zone, therapeutically speaking" (256). He gives the therapist a wholly new account of coming home to find his father's body, now with a macabre twist. W hen he entered the kitchen that fatal day, he tells the psychologist, starving after hours of arduous practice, he remembers thinking " That something smelled deli'dous!" For this innocent, outrageous reaction, he is now able to forgive himself, he triumphantly announces. He is pronounced cured. Still, though his "traumatic grief was professionally pronounced uncovered and countenanced and processed" (257), the past is not forgotten nor is Hal's trial concluded. As with his older brother Orin, Hal's painful psychological ordeal is temporarily masked by his athletic prowess. At sixteen Hal bursts forth as a tennis star, second only toJohn Wayne as ETA's most promising player, ranked #4 under eighteen in the U.S. and sixth-best on the continent. But at the same time, Hal has been becoming addicted to the high resin marijuana "Bob Hope." Daily descents into the ETA underground Pump Room become an elaborate ritual, a "subterranean covert drama" (52) Hal cherishes. Some days Hal can't wait for his pre supper "one hitter" in the Pump Room. He gets "secretly high so regularly these days this year that if by dinnertime he hasn't gotten high yet that day his mouth begins to fill with spit" (114).
106 1 WILLIAM DowtiNG AND RoBERT Bm Despite his drug problems, Hal remains a kind, sensitive young man. He likes being an ETA Big Buddy, mixing practical tennis advice with Life 101, and he generally provides sage counsel. He tells his Little Buddies that suffering and resentment build character and community, though he's not sentimental about it: "We're all on each other's food chain. All of us. It's an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual We're each deeply alone here. It's what we all have in common, this aloneness" (112). He knows that the bitching and moaning are "ritualistic" and therapeutic for them all; "the suffering unites us:' One must learn "the pragmatics of expressing fear," to "be 011 guard' (175). The Game "is about managed fear" (176). "Expect some rough dreams" (176). This fall, YDAU, Hal receives frequent late night phone calls from long incommunicado Orin, playing football in Phoenix. Orin's sexual escapades disgust Hal: he is a seventeen-year-old virgin, partly because of his disgust with his brother's predatory promiscuity. Orin thinks sex might awaken Hal's buried life, "so shut down talking to him is like throwing a stone in a pond" (1040). Orin comments, ''I'm surprised you were even there. In person. I was expecting the Disembodied Voice" (1009). The narrator confirms that "in fact" Hal is "far more robotic than john Wayne," and "has not had a bona fide intensity-of-interior life-type emotion since he was tiny" (694). Their conversations are also strained by Hal's smoldering resentment of the way Orin has cut off their mother. Orin's take is that Hal remains unhealthily obsessed with their mother's approval, and still lives for her applause. Hal's crisis crystallizes at the annual Eschaton tournament, when the elaborate war-game runs amok. Hal is paralyzed, unable to react when kids including his own Little Buddy are injured. Eerily detached, Hal "feels at his own face to see whether he is wincing" (342). In "guiltily sickening stomach-pit shock from the afternoon's Eschaton debacle and his failure to intervene" (410), Hal smokes Bob Hope four times that day. On November 10, Hal, Axhandle (see Minor Characters), and Pemulis are summoned to explain Sunday's "horrendous Eschaton fiasco" (510). Inside Tavis's office a surprise awaits them: a "scrubbed young button-nosed urologist in an ONANTA blazer" (527) collecting urine
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samples. The next day, to everyone's surprise, Hal is almost beaten by Ortho Stice in a meaningless exhibition match. Abruptly trying to go clean, Hal immediately feels the effects of withdrawal. On the court he is "strangely affectless, as if deep inside some well of his own private troubles" (637). His "face registered nothing" (680). DeLint tells Hal "You just never quite occurred out there, kid" (686), a formulation which chills Hal "to the root:' Thoroughly shaken, Hal tries to relax by watching aJOI film titled Wave Bye Bye to the Bureaucrat, about a minor executive who bangs into a little kid with "thick glasses and a bow-tie." Hal gets hung up trying to remember who played the little kid, which is probably important to him because he understands that the actor is an image of both himself and his father when they were small boys. The film is unusual for Himself in that it features a rare "clear internal-conflict moment," with a frankly "unhip earnestness" (689), that Hal finds secretly moving. A measure of his condition is that any genuine emotion must remain strictly "secret:' But he's not, we are given to hope, beyond repair. A cartridge Hal especially likes by Himself is "mostly about a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and miivete are mutually exclusive" (694). Hal "theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of really being human." It's such perceptions, again approaching the narrator's lucid and scathing comments on spectation, that show Hal in a positive light even during his long fall into desperation and despair. The only person Hal is able to communicate with is his brother and roommate Mario. He tells Mario about his marijuana addiction, which until now has been safely secret. Trapped by the ONANTA rep demanding a urine sample, he has been given a temporary reprieve by Mike Pemulis, who persuaded the guy "to give us thirty days" (772). That will get him through the big tournaments and give him a month to get clean. Still Hal feels a paralyzing anxiety that he won't be able to get or stay clean, that he will be exposed, humiliated, and disgraced. Frustrated by Mario's incomprehension, and finding his saintly brother simply too forgiving and understanding in this moment of personal crisis, Hal comes as close as he ever will to losing his temper. "You can get mad at somebody and it doesn't mean they'll go away,"
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he tells Mario impatiently. "Are you in there?" he asks (784). Both the remark and the question pertain all too obviously to his own sense of loss. In the midst of his withdrawal from addiction, Hal says he feels a "hole. It's going to be a huge hole, in a month. A way more than Hal sized hole" (785). On Thursday, November 12, Mike Pemulis tutors Hal for the forthcoming math SATs, and urges Hal to join him in a "meaningful transcendent DMZ-type" (1064) interlude before the WhataBurger Tournament in Tucson. Hal is wary and reluctant. Pemulis unhelpfully insists that addict is "just a word" (1066). At least Hal knows better. After a drug-free week, recognizing the severity of his addiction, plagued by nightmares and constant saliva, Hal drives to Natick, Massachusetts for a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. He finds the NA meeting in progress, with nine or ten adult middle-class males, and a round middle aged male up front holding a teddy bear, saying, "I'd like to suggest we men all hold our bears tight and let our Inner Infant nonjudgmentally listen to Kevin's Inner Infant expressing his grief and loss" (800). Hal wonders "what the etiquette is in NA about getting up and leaving right in the middle of somebody's Infantile revelation of need" (803). It's true that the scene is ridiculous and hilarious; it's equally important that Hal is prevented from moving out of his cage by his intellectual sophistication and ironic defenses. Expressing grief and loss is exactly what Hal could never do. On November 20 Hal wakes before dawn, again suffering symptoms of withdrawal. Reflecting his hopeless, strung-out state, the "whole scene had an indescribable pathos to it" (868). It's snowing heavily, windy and terribly cold. Hal hopes the big ETA exhibition, fundraiser, and party will be called off. He wonders whether his beloved Bob Hope had become "not just the high-point of the day but its actual meaning" (853). Hal's recorded message for his answering machine suggests an answer: "This is the disembodied voice of Hal Incandenza, whose body is not now able . . :' (854). Now Hal's body, stirring but stricken, reacts: he has a panic attack, like a bad trip: "just intense and vivid. It wasn't like being high, but it was still very: lucid:' It's notable that we are for the first time since the opening episode inside Hal's consciousness with him, or closer to him. Perhaps this -
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narrative segue indicates some movement on Hal's part, toward closer apprehension of his anguished feelings. Lying on the carpet ofViewing Room 5, Hal struggles for a semblance of control. He realizes that "if it came down to a choice between continuing to play competitive tennis and continuing to be able to get high, it would be a nearly impossible choice to make. The distant way in which this fact appalled me itself appalled me" (898). Hal thinks that it "seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end . . ..It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic" (900). He thinks about Hamlet again, wondering why the hero, "for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost" (900). (This isn't true of Shakespeare's play, but it is important that Hal believes it). Mike Pemulis, the Mephistopheles of self-medication, wants to discuss their DMZ weekend but Hal cuts him off; trying to purge his body within thirty days, "I do not need you launching temptation rhetoric my way" (908). It's a blizzard of historic proportions, as Hal watches T P and day-dreams. He contemplates feigning a fall, to "be the faultless victim of a freak accident . . . the object of compassionate sorrow rather than disappointed sorrow" (954-955). Our last image of Hal is of a young man forlornly watching entertainment and considering his family: his mother's aging, his father's counsel to Orin about how pornography misrepresents sex, intimacy that can be "profound and really quite moving:' Hal regrets that he never once had "a conversation nearly that open or intimate with Himself.' In comes John Wayne, who (Hal thinks) has in a sense replaced Himself; Hal believes that John Wayne had been "involved with the Moms sexually" since he arrived. With chilling detachment, Hal imagines his mother and her young lover having sex. If we're encouraged by the book's sustained regard to maintain faith in and hope for Hal, any optimism is based on slight signs and marginal movement. Hal considers the connection between the Moms's "passion for hiddenness and the fact that Himself had made so many films titled Cage" without connecting the Incandenza history of "hiddenness" to his own secret addiction. The Wraith visiting Gately confides that "his own personal youngest offspring, a son, the one most -
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like him" (837) seemed to become a figurant - increasingly "blank, inbent, silent, frightening, mute" (838), more and more of a "hidden boy." To this extent the story of Hal ends in stasis, another instance of the tragic family romance, the perilous effects of parents upon children, the terror of intimate relations, the pain offspring bring to their parents, and the cycle of despair. Hal is stuck in Analysis-Paralysis, defmed in AA parlance as addicts "also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking" (203). Yet it's also important to recall that the book ends by circling back to its beginning, making the entire narrative a larger example of the many cycles it contains. The opening episode, we remember, takes place one year after the last episodes recounted in the narrative. It's also crucial to see the importance, after we have ceased to follow Hal's story, of a scene in one of Don Gately's fevered dreams: "he's with a very sad kid and they're in a graveyard digging some dead guy's head up and it's really important, like Continental-Emergency important and the sad kid is trying to scream at Gately that the important thing was buried in the guy's head and to divert the Continental Emergency to start digging the guy's head up before it's too late, but the kid moves his mouth but nothing comes out . . . Too Late (934). Whatever this signifies about the connection between Don Gately and Hal - some meeting between them, perhaps in the hospital during the "missing year," or some mystical communion between their spirits Gately's vision conveys the centrality of Hal's consciousness in !'!finite Jest. a boy tortured by the gruesome death of his father, haunted by his father's spirit, isolated, fortified partly against his mother's needs, and unable to communicate - trapped inside himself, a reluctant actor, paralyzed. The rest is silence.
Avril lncandenza In the opening episode Hal recalls a childhood trauma: as a five year-old boy he once ate a patch of mold he found in the basement of their house. He brings some outside to show his mother, who is working in the garden. An obsessive-compulsive woman who has always herself refused to enter their damp, dank basement, she reacts hysterically:
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"God! Help! My son ate this! Help!" she yells repeatedly, running frantically around the square of string she is arranging for her garden. So the Avril Incandenza we first encounter is above all a mother, solicitous (first words: God help my son) but volatile. Though we don't yet realize it, Hal's memory of this episode is mediated (perhaps shaped, possibly contrived) by his older brother Orin, who remembers "noting how even in hysterical trauma her flight-lines were plumb, her foot prints Native-American straight, her turns, inside the ideogram of string, crisp and martial" (11). W ho is the Moms? She is a striking, majestic figure, "one of the few bona fide bombshell-type females in North American academia, the extremely tall and high-strung but also extremely pretty and gainly and teetotalling and classy Dr. Avril Mondragon:' Born in 1953 near Quebec, Canada, Avril is a brilliant student who becomes a prominent academic. She ascends to the Macdonald Chair in Prescriptive Usage at the Royal Victoria College of McGill University, where she becomes involved "however demonstrably nonviolent, with certain members of the Quebecois-Separatist Left while in graduate school" (64). The degree and duration of her political involvement is unclear; like many things concerning Avril, her politics are often mentioned but never specified. Avril marries the equally gifted james 0. Incandenza. They have three children. Their son Orin was begotten partly as a strategy to obtain Avril's Green Card to emigrate to the United States. She remains married to JOI for twenty-two years, continues her academic career, and helps him direct the Enfield Tennis Academy, until his suicide in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. In an intriguing, creepy reenactment of Hamlet, Avril's half-brother or adoptive brother, Charles Tavis, replaces JOI as director of ETA. At present, in the Y DAU, five years after her husband's death, Avril is 53 years old. She continues to do research, to assail sloppy grammar and ubiquitous misusage, and to play several key roles at ETA: Moms in residence, Dean of Students, teacher, adviser, mentor. Avril's conduct and qualities - as wife, mother, and person- are elusive, complicated issues. She seems to be three different people to her three sons. To her first child she is a clear case. Orin believes that "the Moms is unredeemably fucking bats" (1040), hyper-intellectual
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and manipulative, flagrantly promiscuous, the primary cause of her husband's despair and suicide, and a malevolent influence on her sons. It's ostensibly to save Hal from further damage that Orin, after years of silence, suddenly begins calling his brother. Orin worries that Hal is "still obsessed with her approval. He lives for applause from exactly two hands" (1040). Orin repeats the story of little Hal and the house mold as evidence of the Moms' craziness. Even more serious is Orin's testimony regarding Avril's marriage and sexual history. Orin characterizes Avril "as a kind of contortionist with other people's bodies, which Hal's never been able to forget" (285), and she is widely regarded as habitually promiscuous. Some of those aware of Quebecois separatism regard her as sexually accessible to virtually any Canadian male. Particularly disturbing are indications that Avril has an intimate relationship with john (N. R.) Wayne, a Canadian student at ETA. Hal believes that john Wayne has been "involved with the Moms sexually" since he arrived. In what is very likely an imagined or hallucinated scene, Michael Pemulis catches Avril and john Wayne in a compromising situation, and their "inappropriate" relationship is represented as an open secret at ETA. But Orin, as we come to recognize, is an unreliable narrator and a dubious witness, especially on the subject of his mother. Their relationship is charged with neurotic energies on both sides. It's telling, for instance, that the scene Pemulis is supposed to have walked in on depicts Avril in a cheerleader's outfit and john Wayne in a jockstrap and football helmet - as though they are staging the original meeting between Orin and Joelle. Whatever Avril is up to, it's inadequate to see her strictly through Orin's eyes, as simply "unredeemably fucking bats" (1040). At the very least, she is incredibly productive and effective "functions and then some" (1039), as even Orin acknowledges. Still, to Orin, with his idee fixe, Avril's productivity is merely evidence of her emotional disorder, compulsively "efficient and practical about her compulsion" (1040). Orin's conception of Avril as a wicked witch is partly corroborated but seriously qualified by other witnesses. Another major source is Joelle. At the first family dinner where Joelle is introduced into the Incandenza family, Joelle is given the howling fantods by the way
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everything inclines "toward Avril, very slightly and subtly, like heliotropes" (745).Joelle finds herself thinking that Avril is "very possibly Death incarnate" (790). But here too the observations are subjective. Joelle initially sees Avril through Orin's eyes. She never notices how much she and Avril have in common: both are beautiful and smart, obsessive-compulsive house-cleaners, intimately involved with the same men. Naturally Joelle regards Avril from the skewed perspective of a younger rival. She is, after all, living with Avril's son and deeply involved with Avril's husband.Joelle no doubt resents knowing that the Moms was the "light and pulse and the center that held tight" (737) and that Orin had regarded her (in happier days) as "his emotional sun" (738). Hal's attitude towards the Moms differs greatly from Orin's. Though obviously troubled by his mother, Hal is not obsessed like Orin, nor is he perturbed for the same reasons. He loves and admires the Moms, strives to win her approval, and resents Orin's emotional withdrawal from the family. Hal is particularly indignant about one particular example of Orin's gratuitous cruelty to Avril. After he breaks off communication with the family, she continues to write her wayward son. We read one of Avril's letters to Orin. It's affectionate, chatty, full offamily and ETA news, gossip, and accounts of her on-going efforts to correct misuses of language. She doesn't sound like a crazy person; she sounds like a Mom, type-A, wired and intellectual. In response she receives a form letter acknowledging receipt from one Jethro Bodine, ostensibly a mailroom clerk for the New Orleans Saints, for whom Orin is the star punter. This is Orin's idea of a joke: the name, taken from a character on "Beverly Hillbillies," glances at Pig Bodine in Pynchon's V. The only certain thing about Avril is that her experience of being JOI's wife was a long ordeal. He was a terrible drunk, another obsessive personality, fanatically dedicated to his art, and dangerously fascinated by Joelle. Though Orin knows, or believes he knows, thatjoelle and his father were never lovers, Avril "did not know they weren't lovers, although by the time of joelle's acquaintance with him jim wasn't in a position to be lovers with anybody, neurologically speaking" (999). To have one's husband splatter his brains over the inside of a microwave oven, leaving behind three sons, not to mention a school, qualifies as a grievous trauma and, one would think, grounds for sympathy.
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If Orin is adamantly hostile, a pure sympathy for Avril comes from her son Mario. He cares about her and worries about her. He keeps himself and Hal awake, wondering why "the Moms never cried when Himself passed away," even seemed to Mario "like she got happier." Mario, highly intuitive and deeply sensitive, suspects she's pretending, that "she's plenty sad, I bet" (42). Throughout the novel, Mario is a far more accurate guide to other people than Orin. It's not simply Mario's characteristic empathy and sympathy that provide compelling evidence of a very different and much more admirable Avril. We see it for ourselves. In one episode, Mario, toting his camera to make a documentary about ETA, visits the Moms working late in her office, where she is so often to be found. She asks if she is the "subject" of an interview and looks like "just looking at her kid gives her joy" (760). Always wary of being intrusive or smothering, she wants to be available always to her children; she prides herself on their open lines of communication, and being part of a family always there for each other. Her language may be corny and cliched, but it's hardly objectionable. Mario wants to know how to tell if someone is sad, and she guesses he's worrying about Hal's recently aggravated elusiveness. She defines kinds of sadness, and analyzes fears of becoming engulfed by feelings. "Certain types of persons are terrified even to poke a big toe into genuinely felt regret or sadness, or to get angry" (766). She points out that Mario, whom she addresses as "Love-o," being highly sensitive, is characteristically alert to other people's sadness. Other kinds of sadness are less evident. Sad people may be "Not quite there. Blank. Distant. Muted. Distant . . . . Deadened. Disconnected. Distant. Or they may drink alcohol or take other drugs" (767). Finally Avril wonders if perhaps Mario is speaking of his own sadness. "Though of course the sun would leave my sky ifl couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me you were sad" (768-769). The question is whether or not this is only a performance, a "sincere" form of self-delusion. At worst, Avril may be excessively abstract or academic, but she's not fatuous or irrelevant. She performs her role as a mother with care, dedication, and loving-kindness. Avril certainly does not appear to be the wicked witch of Orin's fairy tale. And we can't forget that she is working her way through a
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life full of sorrows and horrors. Setting aside the catastrophic loss of her husband and her responsibility for three young boys, one of them severely handicapped, even the more ordinary trials of motherhood have been painful. Orin has been a difficult child, as one episode illustrates. For instance, Avril is so attached to her dog S.Johnson that she can't bear the thought of leaving him alone even when he can't be allowed in the house. So, tying S.Johnson to the rear bumper of herVolvo, she rigs up a cell phone so that its ring will let him know that he hasn't been forgotten. When it rings, Orin picks up the phone phone and barks like a dog. Orin is also responsible for the death of S.Johnson. One day, in a frantic hurry to score drugs, Orin and his friend Marlon Bain snatch the family Volvo and speed down Commonwealth Avenue without remembering that the dog is leashed to the car. They're aware that spectators are trying to shout things at them from the sidewalks, but only when they stop do they realize that S. Johnson has been dragged to death, worn to a nubbin as he bounces along behind the Volvo. By the time they realize what they've done, S. Johnson has deteriorated from beloved pet to "let's call it attached material" (1049). When asked by his mother what happened, Orin delivers a transparent lie. She never probes further or accuses him of irresponsibility or dishonesty. Marlon Bain, a character who knew the Incandenza family in earlier days, makes a point of contesting Orin's image of Avril. The woman, admits Marlon, "is so multileveled and indictment-proof that it is difficult to feel comfortable with any sort of univocal accusation of anything" (1051). Her response to Orin's "entire grotesque fiction" about the death ofS.Johnson, reports Marlon, was to treat Orin with even more generous loving-kindness. So who knows: "Is it mind-bogglingly considerate and loving and supportive, or is there something . . . a-eepyabout it?" (1051). Is this "smothering proximity" or "unimpeachable warmth and love"? (1052). Marlon, for all his obvious self-involvement, here seems astute. Marlon provides one more tidbit: he recalls Orin's spot-on imitations of the Moms, "a person closing in, arms wide open, smiling" (1052), bearing more than passing resemblance to Orin the predator wooing his Subjects. Another expression of Avril's decency is her work at ETA as Dean of Academic Students and Dean of Females. Hal overhears her talking
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with the youngest girls at ETA about their privacy and boundary issues. W hat Hal thinks of as "diddle-prevention duty" (511) ira very amusing scene. It's also evidence that Avril does her job with energy, commitment, sensitivity, and tireless dedication. From what we see of her, she is an admirable teacher and administrator. Granted, it's more than passing strange that she is so single-mindedly devoted to ETA that she never leaves the grounds, and prefers to commute between her house and ETA below ground, in the labyrinthine tunnels that run beneath the tennis academy. Strange and sad, but not demonic or demented. Our comprehension and assessment of Avril Incandenza is, and must be, complex - and ultimately provisional. Our attitudes are after all based on the testimony of wildly disparate, competing points of view. And most important is what we do not get: privileged access to Avril's consciousness or sustained presentations of her voice. We know her almost entirely through the views of others. We rarely hear from Avril herself, except in brief moments - in the letter to Orin, in conversation with Mario, as a figure in Hal's memories. Like Caddy Compson in Faulkner's 17ze Sound and the Fury, Avril Incandenza is the composite construction of others, especially her family, who regard her with radically different, always powerful feelings. A vivid, compelling character, she remains mysterious, elusive, and evocative. In her antipathy for "hiddenness" she is herself veiled, distant, unreachable.
James Orin lncandenza So dramatically does the spirit of]ames Orin Incandenza stalk the story that it is hard to refer to the prominent, deceased character in the past tense: he endures. He was born in 1950 in Phoenix, Arizona. His father was a talented junior tennis player and method actor whose careers fizzled owing to alcohol and instability. Young James is abundantly gifted. He wins a tennis scholarship to MIT, where he pursues mathematics and optical physics. He becomes the U. S. government's "top applied-geometrical-optics man," developing techniques that "made possible cold annular fusion" (63) and important optical products. He makes a lot of money and "a lasting contribution to the energy of waste" (572). He marries a brilliant woman, a "bona fide bombshell"
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Canadian academic with some nonviolent involvement with Quebecois separatists. After the birth of their first child Orin, JOI takes his wife back to America, where they have two more sons. In Boston,JOI founds the Enfield Tennis Academy but soon becomes restless. He liquidates his assets and cedes control of ETA to his wife and her half-brother, to devote himself to the "production of documentaries, technically recondite art films, and mordantly obscurer and obsessive dramatic cartridges" cherished by a small academic following for being "both surreally abstract and . . . melodramatic at the same time." Several of his films featurejoelle van Dyne, the girlfriend of his son Orin.JOI suffers from alcoholism, despite repeated efforts to detox and dry out. There are indications that his wife Avril is repeatedly unfaithful, and that this contributes to his despair.JOI commits suicide, at home, in a particularly gruesome fashion, on April Fool's Day, in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. He was fifty-four. His death is mourned by so-called "anticonfluential" filmmakers (65), and afficionados who regard his "apres-garde experimental-and conceptual-film work [as] too far either ahead of or behind its time" (64). One of his legacies is a film titled Irifinite Jest, an entertainment so lethal that viewers abandon everything to keep watching it. The master copy of this fatal entertainment is, as we have seen, urgently sought by numerous interested, powerful parties. Such are the basic facts available in this diffuse, "decomposed," remarkably detailed narrative. However intriguing, they neglect almost everything truly unusual about James 0. Incandenza. The very first reference toJOI is, as we've also seen, cryptic and evocative: Hal dreams or imagines that he and Don Gately are digging up his father's head. Bizarre as it seems, it is apt that our first view ofJOI is mediated by Hal and featuresJOI's disembodied head. For the unquiet spirit ofJOI never rests, visiting Don Gately and haunting Hal. Conspicuously absent,JOI, or the ghost of Himself, is oppressively present. Mysterious occurrences at ETA suggest his continuing presence. Our first direct view of]OI is in 1960 BS, in Tucson Arizona.JOI's father, Orin james Incandenza, is haranguing his ten-year old son jim. He's beginning to teach his son tennis and gets side-tracked on Marlon Brando, physical grace, attitude and respect, fear of spiders, love of
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cars, and especially his own frustrated greatness and his high hopes for his son. "I was near- great. You will be truly great" (158).Jim's father looks forward to the day he is beaten by his son, causing "an obliterated father's terrible joy." Meanwhile, far from obliterated, he is ominously present: "But I watch, very closely. Don't ever think I don't, son" (158). A phrase reiterated in the opening episode, that Hal in the W hataBurger Tournament has "justified his seed," seems in light of this rant by JOI's father ominously apt. In this novel, nearly every father and son relationship is pathological, with children being ignored or abused. JOI's father lacks fundamental paternal consideration for his child. His harps on his son's unusual height, "almost five-eleven, a possible pituitary freak," and "grotesque" appearance, "like some sort of mongoloid child:' Drinking heavily from a prized two-pint flask,J OI's father believes he is teaching his son the "gloriously painful" nature of life. His monologue reveals a deeply disturbed, aggressive bully, broken by his failure to fulfill his own father's standards: "He cast a long shadow, Jim" (164).Justifying one's seed in the Incandenza family is a doomed project, a cycle of despair. The burden of justifying one's seed is repeatedly dramatized. Once, competing in one of the only tennis matches his father ever came to watch,JOI's father heard the old man say that the son would Never Be Great Whether he tripped before, during, or after hearing this devastating remark is moot. He may have slipped on a black widow spider. The accident ruins his knees and endsJOI's father's career as a tennis player; "something poisonous or infected" (167) is being passed down to his own son twenty-seven years later, despite the differences Jim senior imagines between himself and the father he calls "Himself" (165). Progressively drunker,Jim senior pronounces the family fate: "Jim, I'm telling you you cannot imagine my absence" (168). Incandenza fathers haunt their sons: "Son, it was more than a father's voice, carrying . . . it's a seminal, religious day when you get to both hear and feel your destiny at the same moment,Jim" (169). His legacy- the "seed" imagery in "seminal" is obvious - has been a crippling burden, and partly responsible for leading the son, like the father, to seek refuge in drink. One day thirteen-year-old James comes home to find his father, an actor who plays the Man from Glad in television advertisements, dressed
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in his "vaguely medical uniform of all white" (494), trying to locate an annoying squeak in his bed. (Eventually we will learn to associate that squeak with danger, the ominous sounds made by the W heelchair Assassins, who conduct a terrifying campaign to locate JOI's last film). Father and son take apart the parents' bed, as the wife/mother remains ostentatiously mute, insulted by her annoying husband's complaints about dust under the bed. JOI's account of this experience, in an autobiographical essay titled "The Awakening of My Interest in Annular Systems," is included as an episode in Irifinite Jest. It is eerily disconnected- lucidly precise about innumerable details, and blankly unresponsive to the emotional reality of the situation. The dust and the tension in his parents' bedroom precipitate a spasm of coughing in the father. James Senior collapses and vomits, while the son contemplates the angle of the box spring and mattress. Mother reappears with a vacuum cleaner.JamesJr.retreats to his bedroom and jumps upon his bed. His swan dive onto the bed knocks over the lamp which breaks off the doorknob to the closet- all described in meticulous, scientific prose, with diagrams and analogues. The rolling doorknob, weirdly, miraculously reminds the boy "what it would look like for someone to try to turn somersaults with one hand nailed to the floor. This was how I first became interested in the possibilities of annulation" (503). Instead of tracing his burgeoning identity in and through a calling or a vocation that unifies and vitalizes aspects ofhimself, JOI's autobiographical narrative records an awakening associated with pain, anger, fear- good reasons to shut down the system. The boy's affectless demeanor towardhis father's callous unkindness resembles his own son Hal's willful isolation. Like his son Hai,JOI as a boy wears a bow-tie and glasses; like Hal, James has a father at once over-bearing and unavailable; like Hal, JOI is both physically and intellectually talented; both are addictive personalities in cages of the sel£ It's no coincidence that Hall calls his father "Himself.' When JOI appears as the Wraith to Don Gately in his hospital bed at the end of the story, he will confirm that "his son had become what he [the Wraith] had feared as a child he [the Wraith] was" (838). BecauseJOI is so deeply hidden, we "know" or regardJOI mainly through his work. We've discussed in earlier sections his groundbreaking
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work on "annular fusion," his productive research on optics, and his success at an entirely new career, as founding head of ETA, a tennis academy with genuinely philosophic, ethical, and educational purposes. JOI's· work as a film maker is substantial but less unequivocally significant. !'!finite Jest demands that we ponder deeply the nature of JOI's artistic achievement. He regards himself as a huge failure, and many critics deplore his work. JOI laments that critics "were complaining that even in his commercially entertaining stuff Incandenza's fatal Achilles heel was plot, that Incandenza's efforts had no sort of engaging plot, no movement that sucked you in and drew you along" (375). But JOI is clinically depressed, and like so many artists, preternaturally self-conscious and self-critical. Critics can be wrong. A creative genius may be a prophet without honor in his time and place. JOI's cinematic career is intrinsically controversial - polemical in intent and problematic in effect.JOI's most extreme experiment, which he calls his Found Drama project, could be seen as a silly scam, or simply crazy. One critic, for instance, characterizes his films as "the planet's most psychotic psyche working out its shit right there on the screen and asking you to pay to watch him" (1038). Yet JOI was prodigiously active and remarkably effective at producing his various idiosyncratic visions. Optics, the making and uses of lenses, are JOI's scientific forte, "what he had to bring to the whole enterprise" (939), and peculiar ways of seeing mark his cinema. Such multiplicity of perspectives, often strangely skewed or prismatic, are another indication that the whole book concerns ways of seeing; there is even a character
namedLenz. Provocatively, both JOI's elusive last film and the novel are titled
Infinite Jest, suggesting both trivial amusements and profound implications. As a rule of thumb, we begin to understand at a certain point that anything said about or found in JOI's films is potentially pertinent to the novel - its methods, aesthetic, narrative strategies. It's telling that the title is a phrase from Hamlet's address to the skull of Yorick, for the death's head haunts both Hamlet and lrifim'te Jest (book and film). The fatal Entertainment, starringJoelle van Dyne as "some kind of maternal instantiation of the archetypal figure Death" (788),
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naked, pregnant, and disfigured, confounds, in unsettling ways, memory and desire, mothers and murder. Among the many commentaries uponJOI's films is the thoughtful critique ofJoelle van Dyne.Joelle's "mental name for the man had been 'Infinite Jim'" (225), another link between the film and the novel, and bitterly ironic since JOI proves so very finite. She mourns him as "a great filmic mind and her true heart's friend" (225). At first, as a young student of film, she had considered JOI's work "technically gorgeous" but "oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic !C!Wardness - no narrative movement toward a real story; no emotional movement toward an audience" (740). The films seemed "cold," "hidden: no risk of empathy" (740). Gradually, on repeated viewings, she discovers other qualities, even in his early "narratively anticonfluential but unironic melodrama" (740). She finds signs of character movement, even courage, indications of pain, "human flashes:· It was, she thinks, as if Jim "couldn't help putting human flashes in, but he wanted to get them in as quickly and unstudyably as possible, as if they compromised him somehow" (741). Still, these moments "betrayed something more than cold hip technical abstraction" (742). She became sensitive to "what was absent:' Joelle recalls thatJOI was nearly unreachable emotionally, "missing," according to Orin, "the part of the human brain that allowed for being aware enough of other people to disapprove of them" (736-737).Jim was already making films but not yet notorious when Joelle met him. Orin's father "barely existed, parentally," and habitually wore an "opaque blank facial expression" ( 737). Joelle says, "When he talked about this thing as a quote perfect entertainment, terminally compelling- it was always ironic- he was having a sly little jab at me. I used to go around saying the veil was to disguise lethal perfection, that I was too lethally beautiful for people to stand. It was a kind of joke I'd gotten from one of his entertainments, the Medusa- Odalisk thing . ...So Jim took a failed piece and told me it was too perfect to release- it'd paralyze people. It was entirely clear that it was an ironic joke. To me" (940). Joelle's apparently sound perception is richly complex, merging many themes: entertainment, addiction, death, beauty, jest, irony, deformity, paralysis, secrecy, hiddenness, conveyed in language full of
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and about irony, humor, ardor, passionate self-definition. And - in the kind of shuttle we often see between self-assertion and self-mockery she recalls thatjim referred to The Work as "entertainments." He did so "ironically about half the time" (743). Such shifting, contrary observations typify the way Irifini'te Jest simultaneously gives and takes away, declares and ironizes, asserts and qualifies. To contemplate JOI's films is to confront the fundamental difficulty of knowing and the perennial problem of assessing. Another astute though hardly impartial viewer ofJOI's works is his son Hal. Hal watches Wave Bye Bye to the Bureaucrat, about a man who can't get to work on time, faces "'termination' as in ontological erasure" (687), and in a desperate last chance to get to work on time, collides with a small child at the train. The child (like little James and young Hal) has "thick glasses and a bow-tie." The film is unusual for Himself in that it features a rare "clear internal-conflict moment," with a frankly "unhip earnestness" (689). Though he pretends otherwise to Mario, Hal finds this secretly moving. Thus, sadly late,JOI fulfills his hope of reaching his son through his entertainments. Noting "the frequent presence of audiences inside Himselfs films," Hal considers Himselfs purpose as being to "strip away the pernicious illusion of realism and to remind the audience that they were in reality watching actors acting and not people behaving" (944), what he termed "illusory realism:' This later film, meant to be "self-consciously nonillusory and wildly entertaining" (945), is part of Himselfs "abandonment of anticonfluentialism" (944). It doesn't always work. Accomplice! depicts a depraved older man who solicits sex with a beautiful young boy. W hen the boy requires that the old sod wear a condom, the man goes berserk resenting the implication that he has AIDS. The crazy old guy enters the boy but with a concealed razor cuts the condom and the boy's anus. The camera shows "the eight-legged-vivid-contusion-blotch sign of Kaposi's Sarcoma" (946) on the HIV-positive boy and the film ends with several unbearable minutes of the boy screaming over and over, "Murderer! Murderer! Intended to be moving, the film isn't effective: "we end up feeling and thinking not about the characters but about the cartridge itself' (946). Hal wonders, "is Himself simply an amazingly shitty editor of his own stuff?"
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Like many of]OI's films,JOI's marriage, personal life, and especially his last few years, remain maddeningly opaque, a composite of speculations mainly by Hal, Orin, andJoelle.Joelle thinks the whole sad Incandenza family is "lousy with secrets," from "each other, themselves, itself.' There are surely a lot of things under the carpet and in the closets, and much more left unspoken.Joelle becomesJOI's muse, star actress, and intimate confidante, but was she JOI's lover as well as Orin's live-in girlfriend? Probably not. We're told thatjoelle was Orin's "only lover for twenty-six months and his father's optical beloved for twenty-one" (229). And in a characteristically layered yet precise footnote, the narrator assures us that "Orin Incandenza knew thatjoelle van Dyne and Dr. James 0. Incandenza weren't lovers; Mrs. Avril Incandenza did not know they weren't lovers, although by the time of Joelle's acquaintance with him jim wasn't in a position to be lovers with anybody, neurologically speaking" (999). Orin tells "Helen Steeply" that his father, "The Stork" (also called by Orin "The Sad Stork" and "The Mad Stork"), was a "full-blown demented alcoholic" who put his head in the microwave, "and I think just in terms of unpleasantness you'd have to be sort of insane to kill yourself in such a painful way" (1038). Orin thinks his suicide was precipitated by the mysterious app earance on theVolvo's fogged window of the name of Avril's lover (one of many). But Orin's testimony on the nature of the relationship among Avril,JOI, andjoelle, is highly inflected, flagrantly subjective, and maybe worse. Marlon Bain tells Helen to take Orin's reflections "in a fairly high-sodium way," for Orin "has come to regard the truth as constrocted instead of reported' (1048). But it was Hal, age "thirteen going on really old"(248), who was home to endure the worst. Hal says that "Himself allegedly used to see his father's ghost . . . but then again toward the end he used to see black-widow spiders in his hair, too, and claimed I wasn't speaking sometimes when I was sitting right there speaking to him" (870). Hal insists several times that Himselfs obsession with Hal's silence was JOI's delusion. It is of course Hal who finds his father's body that April Fool's Day; as Marathe might say, he is a Fool of Avril.JOI had made a head-size hole in the microwave and packed the extra space with wadded up aluminum foil. They had to reconstruct the scene because the area
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had been so thoroughly, gruesomely "deconstructed," to use "the one word [Himself ] hated" more than any other. The flagrantly unreliable Molly Notkin is another principal source for the last days ofJOI.Joelle persuadesJames to forsake alcohol, which he does for the ninety days preceding his suicide. Molly suspects that it was Avril who deposited the bottle of W ild Turkey at the suicide scene as an inept explanation, for alcohol "was keeping the man's tether ravelled" (791). Molly says thatJoelle was present neither at James's suicide nor at his funeral in Quebec, and that she was a beneficiary of his will. Joelle, with whomJOI was so intimate, can only explainJOI partially, and wonders about the fate of the final film: "If it got made and nobody's seen it, the Master, it's in there with him. Buried. That's just a guess" (940). Under questioning, Molly says that the Master copies of everything unreleased "were buried with him . . . . At least that was in his will" (940), but she doesn't know if Jim ever even got a "finished Master" of the Entertainment. "That's your story." So our story flaunts notable lacunae, gaps, and glitches, inviting and requiring speculation, theory, and projection. Perhaps we can never get to the essence of Irifimie Jest, the fatal Entertainment, nor to the realJames 0. Incandenza. Consider again Joelle's comment that JOI had a thing about "being criticized about entertainment v. nonentertainment and stasis. He used to refer to the Work itself as 'entertainments: He always meant it ironically" (940). Elsewhere, though, Joelle says that JOI meant it "ironically about half the time" (743). If no meaning stays put, no spirit rests easy or stays still. The last third of the novel is marked by dramatic appearances of a ghostly figure, who gradually materializes as a "very tall sunken-chested man in black-frame glasses" (829) identifying himself as a wraith, and a vibrant character in his own right. The Wraith looks and talks like James 0. Incandenza, Himself himsel£ Remarkably, Don Gately has never met or heard ofJOI, at least not to our knowledge. The Wraith is not, or not simply, a hallucination or apparition- not merely a creation of Don Gately's fevered mind. The Wraith insists Don mustn't get hung up on "dream-v.-real controversies" (830) and that he should take advantage of its presence (this from Himself, the conspicuously "absent presence"). The wraith does pirouettes, appears and disappears, and plants in Gately's
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brain weird words, "a sort of lexical rape . . . terms he doesn't know from shinola" (832-833). That the Wraith is independent of Don and somehow "real" is suggested by the fact that it speaks words Don doesn't recognize. W hat the Wraith says about entertainments bears upon JOI's entertainments and the book we are reading. The Wraith defines the people used as mere background on TV or films as "figurants." In his own work, "you could bloody well hear every single performer's voice, no matter how far out on the cinematographic or narrative periphery they were" (835). In his films, "it was real life's real egalitarian babble of figurantless crowds, of the animate world's real agora, the babble of crowds every member of which was the central and articulate protagonist of his own entertainment" (835-836). This aptly defines the decentered polyphony of l'!fini'te Jest, where the reader hears everybody's narratives, but may have trouble following "the really meaningful central narrative conversations" (836). The Wraith also elaborates that central theme, the fatal link between fathers and sons. The Wraith confides that "his own personal youngest offspring, a son, the one most like him" (837) seemed to become a figurant- increasingly "blank, inbent, silent, frightening, mute" (838), more and more of a "hidden boy." Toward the end, says the wraith, he feared his boy was experimenting with Substances, as he himself abused Wild Turkey. The Wraith implies that his films, the entertainments, were diversionary, a means by which he and the muted son could "simply converse' (838). The Wraith insists, plangently, that "the worst kind of gut-wrenching intergenerational interface is better than withdrawal or hiddenness on either side" (839). The cycle of sorrow involving fathers and sons continues. In bringing us back to our frrst awful and abiding vision of Hal, withdrawn, hidden, the narrative has brought us full circle. The enduring strangeness, spooky resonance, and unending echoes of the father's voice are crushing realizations of I'!ftnz�e Jest.
Orin lncandenza The story ofOn'n Incandenza i's a main arc i'n I'!ftnz�e Jest, rendered in intermittent episodes yet less radically decomposed than other narrative
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sequences. Orin emerges as a sharply delineated, charismatic figure vivid yet mysterious. In some ways Orin is easy to read, in others he remains unfathomable. He is another regular source and object of humor. He's also a highly objectionable character, given to wretched behavior and nefarious attitudes. And he is painfully wounded, as badly crippled as any maimed spirit in this book of lost souls. Orin is the first child of Avril and james Incandenza, born in 1983 BS in Canada. The family moves to the Boston area, where Orin is big brother to Mario and Hal. Glimpses of Orin as a child are disconcerting: he cheerfully tortures his impaired brother Mario, because he resents the attention showered on Mario by his solicitous family. As a teenager Orin seems reckless, self-centered, and especially duplicitous. Having caused a particularly nasty, fatal accident to his mother's beloved dog, we recall, Orin lies callously to evade responsibility. Like his father, Orin is an exceptional tennis player, and for a while tennis organizes and justifies his life. But he peaks at thirteen, evidently not gifted enough to pursue a professional career. The good academic training at ETA enables him to score well on standardized tests, especially for a nationally ranked athlete, so he is eagerly recruited by colleges. He chooses nearby Boston University, with a full athletic scholarship, including housing, and a "lucrative work-study job" turning on the sprinklers every morning at Nickerson Field, "sprinklers that were already on automatic timers" (286). At BU Orin burns out as a tennis player, becoming "an empty withered psychic husk, competitively" (288). The story takes a crucial turn when, one day, his gaze lights on a football cheerleader, a sophomore baton-twirler he nicknames the P GOAT for the Prettiest Girl Of All Time. She has red-gold hair and is "almost grotesquely lovely" (290), so gorgeous that boys are afraid to approach her. Her name is Joelle van Dyne. Hoping to get closer to her, Orin quits tennis and tries football. His tryout is a disaster. But then, as he leaves the football field a hapless failure, the team punter is accidentally flattened by an over-zealous punt-rusher. The ball bounces near Orin. One thing we have learned about Orin's tennis game is that he was brilliant at doing high, endlessly arcing lobs against his opponent. Now, imagining kicking a football as being something like a tennis lob, he
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kicks it back down to the other end of the field. Having lobbed thousands of tennis balls in similar situations, Orin almost instinctively kicks the football back to other end of the field. It is a magnificent kick, and we realize that Orin has just begun a new career of glorious, majestic punts, sailing unimaginably high and far. Having learned precision of placement from his tennis lobbing, he is especially good at nailing coffin-comer kicks. For Orin, the best part of being a football player will be that he literally cannot "hear himself think" on the field during a game; he is "out there transformed, his own self transcended" (295). He becomes a BMO C at BU. His football heroics attract national attention and make him a celebrity. Drafted by the New Orleans Saints, Orin becomes a star kicker in the NFL. While at BU, Infim�e Jest tells us, the "only really cardiac-grade romantic relationship of Orin's life took bilateral root at a distance, during games, without one exchanged personal phoneme, a love communicated . . . entirely through stylized repetitive motions - his functional [punting], hers celebratory [twirling]" (294). Orin andjoelle become lovers and move in together.Joelle now moves towards inclusion in the ETA family: majoring in Film/Cartridge theory and production at BU, she is a great admirer of JOI's entertainments.Orin introduces her to his father, who becomes smitten with her and gives her a major role in several films. Meanwhilejoelle, more interested in making her own productions, spends a great deal of time filming football games, her documentary cartridges "featuring pretty much [Orin] only" (297). These Orin later watches in private, rapt and aroused. "She gets his timing: a punt's timing is minutely precise, like a serve's; it's like a solo dance" (299). Still,Joelle is also appearing inJOI's films, and Orin suffers from jealousy, fearing that Joelle and his father have become lovers, and resenting, even if they are not lovers, their closeness. As the novel begins, Orin has been traded from New Orleans to the Phoenix Cardinals. His love affair withjoelle is long since over, and he has become a world-class philanderer. In October Y DAU, Orin is in his apartment in Phoenix, Arizona, after having spent another night with a random lover. He refers to the women he seduces as "Subjects," aptly conveying his clinical detachment. Orin's fame and prowess have
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brought little satisfaction or peace of mind. Relieved that the latest Subject has departed, he takes a scalding shower to discourage invasions from the "armored-vehicle type" roaches that give him "the howling fantods" (45). Plagued by drenching night-sweats, Orin leaves "fetal shaped fossilized image [s]" (43) on his sheets; every night brings dark and terrifYing "horror-show dreams" (47). He has terrifYing dreams about his mother's head, disconnected and "attached face-to-face to his own fine head" (46). Orin is also dreading an interview with "some profiler from Moment magazine:' It is the stressful thought of the upcoming interview that provokes him to call his brother Hal at ETA, thus reopening the "whole Pandora's box of worms" (49) that is the Incandenza family history. Though he has been out of touch with his family since the death of his father several years before, Orin now suddenly tries to reestablish contact of a sort with his brother Hal. It's largely through these late night calls that we come to know Orin. The ostensible purpose of the conversations is to instruct Hal in Orin's patented seduction tactics, all neatly labeled and utterly repugnant to Hal: "It's poignant somehow that you always use the word Subject when you mean the exact obverse" (1008). One of Orin's seduction strategies is particularly significant: he tells a Subject to tell him "what it is she wants him to be . . . and he'll be that person." W hat Marlon Bain terms Orin's "pose of poselessness" (1048) is also a narrative strategy in Irifim�e Jest. The tactic illustrates Orin's cleverness, flattering the woman with the implication that she is too sophisticated for standard procedure, pretending to cut through all the prevarications of courtship, flirtation, and accommodation, when of course all he offers is unadulterated prevarication. Yet the strategy of impersonating a truly urgent, desperate lover nonetheless reveals that Orin is urgent and desperate in ways he can't begin to understand or face. What Orin regards as the infinite jest of erotic play is the sadder, sorrier joke of bottomless vacuity, emptiness, loneliness. Constantly questing, Orin can never achieve emotional fulfillment. In in his futile cycle, to have or get is to lack and need. It's evident that Orin is as much a victim as agent of his fate. This modest perception brings us back to Orin's mother. He was inordinately
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attached to the Moms, in ways that have damaged him. Molly Notkin says that "the little rotter had enough malcathected issues with his mother to keep all of Vienna humming briskly for quite some time" (791). (Although radically unreliable, like Orin himself, Molly is not wholly imperceptive.) Angry that Orin has so cruelly cut off their mother, Hal can't believe Orin could be so heartless, as when he responds to the Mom's affectionate letters with a mock form letter from an invented mailroom clerk. Hal is also indignant that Orin targets as his objects of seduction the mothers of young children, and that he pretends, as a ploy, to be passionately devoted to his own (fictitious) wife. Now, Orin tells Hal that he has met "a possibly very special somebody" (137). He is genuinely smitten by the Momentprofiler Helen Steeply, the ostensible journalist who has been sent out to do a story on him. But he is also unexpectedly disconcerted by Helen, stymied in his flirtation and troubled by her pursuit of "family-linen inquiry" for the profile. She asks him provocative questions about his father's Entertainments and his mother's Canadian connections. Why, he wonders, would their father's name come up in connection with the odd word sami'zdat, which is not in his vocabularly. (For his benefit, Hal, by far the more literate ofthe two brothers, defines this as "politically underground or beyond-the-pale" material.) Orin, not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, fears he's over his head with this well-informed reporter. He asks Hal, as Helen Steeply has been asking him, about Canadian Separatism. Orin suspects he is being tested by Helen Steeply. It emerges that Orin is also agitated by the sudden swarm of anonymous men in wheelchairs suddenly visible everywhere in his vicinity. Orin has also called, it turns out, to warn Hal that the clever, imposing Helen Steeply is en route to ETA. What Orin does not realize, though we have been told, is that "Helen" is really a male agent for the Office of Unspecified Services, or OUS, seeking information about the Incandenza family that might lead them to JOI's final cartridge, the Entertainment. Interviewed by "Helen," Orin, ridiculously pursuing another Subject, becomes uncharacteristically candid and revealing. It's wildly comic that Orin should be attracted to a hulking male in drag (and not very convincing or attractive female garb at that). Undoubtedly, "Helen's" lack of receptivity to Orin's seductive moves is a major
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attraction. It's also comic justice that the heartless stud who seduces and abandons so many women be subjected to such humiliation. The one love he falls for is the one he can never have. But, marvelously, Orin Incandenza is taken out of his depression by the appearance of another "incredible specimen:' Every time he needs to fill his emptiness (his nickname is 0) he finds another Subject. Asjoelle once had, this likely Subject seeks his autograph on a Cardinal souvenir football for her child. She says she is a "Swiss hand model:' Quickly the attractive, obliging model and Orin the arch seducer find their way to a hotel room. After sex with a Subject, Orin Incandenza rarely experiences a "feeling of outright unalloyed sadness as such, afterward - just an abrupt loss of hope" (596). 0. enjoys conveying, or pretending to give, the "impression of care and sympathy" in this "post-seminal interval of clingy vulnerability on the Subject's part" (597); what he actually feels is "the sort of clinical contempt you feel for an insect" (598). This time, however, the post-seminal interval is interrupted by a knock on the door. The Swiss hand-model hides under the covers. Orin opens the door to find an amputee in a wheelchair who claims to be conducting a marketing survey. He asks what "lifestyle elements" Orin lacks or misses, an obliquely apt question for someone whose life so utterly lacks meaning. 0., seriously engaged by the question, thinks back nostalgically to the TV shows he watched while growing up, even those he and his friends mocked as junk, for he now realizes that they provided (the surveyor notes) "emotions of mastery and control and superiority. And pleasure." (600). Only later does it strike 0. as odd that the interviewer had a Swiss accent. Also that his Swiss Subject, supposedly hidden under the bedcovers while the interview was taking place, was so extraordinarily patient with the interruption. Our reservations about Orin are compounded not only by what we see and hear ourselves, and by Hal's outraged commentary, but by damning testimony from other sources. Helen Steeply, for instance, contacts Marlon Bain, Orin's fiiend and ETA tennis partner, who provides important insights into the dynamics of the Incandenza family. Marlon admits that his point of view is tainted: early drug experiences "left me with certain Disabilities" and "withdrawal" from both competitive tennis
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and "contemporary life as we know it" (1047). In addition, Marlon and Orin are "on the outs a bit at the moment." Still, Bain was one of the first matriculants at ETA, and had been an intimate friend of Orin from the time they were fifteen. Bain's recollections show Orin in an extremely unflattering light. Specifically, Bain teaches us to put no reliance whatever on Orin's testimony, especially as it concerns the relationship among Avril, her husband james and his protege joelle. Marlon sees Orin as a pathetically ineffective, pathlogical liar, a fabulist who can no longer tell the difference between what he makes up and what he swears to be the truth. Bain stresses that Orin is the "least open man I know" ( 1048) . But that doesn't mean that we're to disregard Orin as the source ofhis own elaborately "constructed" reality. No major character in Wallace's world is without complexity and interiority, nor denied some claim upon our sympathies. Orin is certainly not without afterthoughts, chastened feelings, and regrets. We've seen that he has some impulses towards decency. Orin worries, for instance, that his little brother Hal buries his feelings, and never has fun: ''I'm surprised you were even there. In person. I was expecting the Disembodied Voice" (1009). In one moving sequence, Orin recalls an encounter with Himself that took place when, as a teenager at ETA, Orin was caught watching a porn flick. His father's response is unexpected, especially considering that he is the Headmaster and that other students are involved. JOI tells Orin that he may watch the X-rated movie if he really wants to, and asks only that he keep it discreet, so that no young kids or parents get involved. Then Orin's father adds, quite gently, that he would personally prefer it if Orin didn't watch the film, but only because he suspects that pornography will give his son the wrong idea about sex. In an ideal world, Orin would wait "until he experienced for himselfwhat a profound and really quite moving thing sex could be, before he watched a film where sex was presented as nothing more than organs going in and out of other organs, emotionless, terribly lonely." The danger, in short, has nothing to do with a prudish attitude towards pornography, but lies instead in "an impoverished, lonely idea of sexuality" (956).JOI's impulse is generous, wise and remarkably prophetic, for Orin does become
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trapped in a cycle ofimpoverished, lonely, meaningless and mechanical sexuality. If such occasional glimpses of Orin arouse pity for a young man so removed from sources oflove, consolation, and purpose, our last view of him provokes the howling fantods. We first spied Orin in Arizona, terrified ofinsects, desperately fighting the huge cockroaches that emerge from the drain whenever he showers. He has called in pest control agencies, and they can do nothing to resolve the problem. So Orin resorts to the tactic of inverting a drinking glass over each roach, to asphyxiate rather than squash it. The plight of the cockroaches slowly dying under Orin's inverted tumblers is one of the novel's metaphors for damaged souls like Orin, reduced by their own worst instincts to less-than-human status - trapped inside their own selfishness, able to see another world through the glass, but unable to communicate with it, or, ultimately, to breath its air. In a last phantasmagoric scene, belonging less to the main narrative than to the hallucinatory reality that replaces it at the end of Irifinite Jest, Orin's fate is to be grilled and tortured by the pitiless Wheelchair Assassins. Orin, now himselfvery much the Subject, is being held prisoner by Quebecois operatives seeking his father's infamous film, demanding to know "Where Is The Master Buried?" (972). The adoring Swiss hand model, no longer posing as a doting Subject, turns out to be Mlle. Luria P, leading the team of Orin's torturers. In this last horrific vision we have of Orin, close to the end of lrifim�e Jest, he appears as someone himselftrapped inside a giant inverted drinking glass, slowly asphyxiating as his tormenters look on from outside. It is a Kafkaesque moment that brings into sharp, terrible focus all the scattered moments in Irifim�e Jest in which phobias about insects and rodents reveal themselves as fears about what is going on within the soul of the observer.
Mario lncandenza Mario Incandenza, born 1991 BS, is the second child of Avril and James, brother ofOrin and Hal, though "Mario doesn't seem to resemble much ofanyone they know" (101). He becomes a strange and marvelous character, and a surprisingly potent source of hope amid so much
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unrelenting pain. Utterly lovable and emotionally insightful, Mario is truly the heart of this long narrative. His mother doesn't even realize she is pregnant until Mario is born prematurely, "more or less scraped out . . . like the meat of an oyster" (3 12), an "incomplete gestation and arachnoidal birth" that leaves little Mario with "some lifelong character building physical challenges" and several odd features: a body insensible to pain, the "lurchy half-stumble of a vaudeville inebriate," an "involuntarily constant smile," uncannily reptilian/dinosaurian skin. In sixth grade he's the size of a toddler, and in YDAU at age 18, Mario is "somewhere between elf and jockey" (3 13) , with "hideously arachnodactylic fingers" (2 16). He's not so much retarded as "more like refracted, almost, ever so slightly epistemically bent" (3 14) . Even to move, Mario needs special equipment, including an apartment-door style police lock extending from a special vest. He is able to stay upright by leaning on this when he is standing still. Though Mario's life is in obvious ways terribly sad, his memories are mainly perceptions of pleasure. Mario has many resources, activities, and connections. His father made Mario an assistant in his film-making, which has kindled in his son a passion for pictures, images, and especially films. Best of all, his father willed him a tri-lensed camera with a special head-mount which "attenuates the sadness of his status," for with this apparatus Mario is able to lovingly create the ETA's annual fundraising documentaries, cartridges, videotapes of students' strokes and matches, as well as to create "more ambitious, arty-type things" (3 16). Severely handicapped as he is, Mario gets around and makes contact with an extraordinary number of different people. His family provides consoling love. WhenJOI was alive, Mario had a strong though mostly tacit bond with his father. The Moms calls him "Love-o," and dotes on him. Mario is also adored by Hal, who asked to room with his brother, "almost idealizes Mario, secretly" and "fears his opinion more than probably anybody except their Moms's" (3 16). Mario is only partially aware ofhis one imperfect relationship with another person, his mother's half-brother Charles Tavis. While he is an "object of some weird attracto-repulsive gestalt for Charles Tavis, Mario treats CT with the quiet deference he can feel his possible half-uncle wanting, and stays out of his way." There may or may not be more to
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this relationship than meets the eye. CT could be Mario's biological father: "it's not entirely impossible he may have fathered" Mario, says the deliberately noncommital narrator, as CT gazes, "not eager to wake it," tt'being the dismaying term CT uses for Mario, "and have to interface with it and have it look up at him with a terrible calm and accepting knowledge it's quite possible is nothing but Tavis's imagination" (45 1) . Mario remains blessedly unaware o f anything more ominous between CT and himself than a vaguely puzzling tension. Generally, Mario is wholly without the crippling self-consciousness of his brother Hal or the paralyzing fixations of his brother Orin. Physically unable to play tennis or any other sport, "so damaged he can't even grip a stick" (79) that is, a tennis racket - Mario is nevertheless an active, valued member of the community. He has "sat in on a back-row stool for every session of an ETA Entertainment Dept. offering ever since he was finally three years ago December asked to disenroll from the Wmter Hill Special School in Cambridge for cheerfully declining even to try to learn to really read" (188). It suits Mario, collecting "peripatetic footage" for his documentary on ETA, to roam around the school, encountering students and faculty, and registering their attitudes and reflections. Mario's film is the regular main attraction at ETA's Interdependence Day blowout gala banquet. For all his conceptual and perceptual limitations, Mario is able to forge enduring emotional relationships with several people, including the forbidding Gerhard Schtitt, Head Coach and Athletic Director, with whom he regularly takes long walks. Schtitt, near seventy, enjoys talking to the barely comprehending Mario, who in tum loves to listen to the old man lecture. Schtitt and Mario have a kind of "interpersonal connection" (80). Schtitt explains his philosophy of tennis, which is really a philosophy oflife and struggle, as Mario struggles to comprehend, meanwhile enjoying the old man's company. Things don't always fall off Mario like water from a duck's back. This fall, for instance, as his nineteenth birthday approaches on November 25, Mario finds himself suffering from insomnia. He mourns the loss ofMadame Psychosis, her unexplained disappearance from the midnight radio show he has followed so closely. Mario's thoughts about his feelings, often inchoate, are sometimes are as important as the feelings -
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themselves. Mario realizes, for instance, and regrets, that Hal can't respond when Mario brings up matters he himself regards as "real." He needs to touch and be touched by others. This explains, in particular, why Mario so often takes evening walks by Ennet House, where a lot of people are "damaged or askew and lean hard to one side or are twisted into themselves . . . and he can feel his heart going out into the world through them" (590), where "nobody notices anybody else or comments on a disability and the Headmistress" (he means Pat Montesian, the Ennet House head administrator, who was once nice to him) is "kind to the people and the people cry in front of each other" (59 1) . People respond t o Mario because h e i s s o innocent, ingenuous, kind, and compassionate. A "born listener" (80) , a charismatic listener, he is keenly attuned to the voices of others. Though Mario has a "neurological deficit whereby he can't feel physical pain very well" (589), he is inordinately sensitive to feelings and the pain of others. He thinks and worries about his mother's sadness and his brother Hal's isolation and he does so without passing judgment. He hears his mother's screaming "night terror," and he can usually tell if Hal is sad. Recently he can't "feel it," which worries him. "Mario loves Hal so much it makes his heart beat hard" (590). We are constantly made aware of Mario's heart, as when Hal helps Mario with his police lock's vest: "Mario's chest is so fragile-feeling that I could feel his heartbeat's tremble through the vest and sweatshirt" (942). Mario is an innocent, and the object of other people's needs, sometimes painfully, sometimes humorously, and, as so often in I'!fim�e Jest, usually both. One day Mario is accosted by Millicent Kent, an overgrown sixteen-year-old ETA student. To lure Mario into a search expedition, she tells him she's found a Husky-VI tripod abandoned in the woods. She becomes surprisingly intimate. Oblivious to her sexual designs, Mario just wants to see the tripod. He has no idea what to do when she suddenly begins undressing him. Fortunately, Millicent has difficulty with the extendable police lock Mario requires to remain upright and doesn't realize he is ridiculously ticklish. Mario's high-pitched laughter identifies his whereabouts to Hal, who rescues his clueless brother. Mario does feel yearnings, but his impulses are never sexual, self serving or aggressive. The "beaming and brady-kinetic boy gets to forge
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an interpersonal connection he knows only he can truly feel, here" (80). In his own, pure way, he loves Madame Psychosis, the host of the talk show he listens to religiously. Typically, Mario responds to her tone, her plangency, her abiding sadness. Mario feels sure she "cannot herself sense the compelling beauty and light she projects over the air, somehow" (190). He bets she would feel a lot better if she listened to her own show! Again Mario's sentiments are all pre- or beyond intellection, for Madame Psychosis is the voice of cool, self-reflective, ironic detachment, conveying that "there's an in-joke that you and she alone are in on" (191), even if Mario can't begin to get it. But essentially, Mario does get it: he perceives and treasures other elements in her tone, especially the nakedly pained, truly pathetic, stridently unironic aspects. He's fallen in love with Madame Psychosis "because he felt like he was listening to someone sad read out loud . . . stuff about heartbreak and people you loved dying and U.S. woe, stuff that was real" (592), stuff that embarrasses teenagers at ETA and gets greeted with mockery. He laments that "real stuffcan only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn't happy" (592) . There are also indications that Mario understands or conceptualizes more than he appears to. His hugely popular film of a puppet show is a vivid dramatization of recent history, and one of our primary and clearest sources ofthe remarkable, complicated history ofU.S. experialism and the reconfiguration ofNorth America. The film parodies President Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner's "Concavity Cabinet" meeting with the prime ministers of Mexico and Canada, demoted to Secretaries in the ONAN reconfiguration. In his film, Mario shows considerable talent as an artist, teacher, and satirist. Regularly we see Mario as the person reaching out to others. In this he is the opposite of Hal, inside his "womb of solipsism" (839). An emblematic illustration of Mario's solicitude is his instinctive response to the bitter alienation of the character Barry Loach. For reasons we will go into later, the despairing Barry stands at the Park Street, Boston MTA stop imploring passers-by not to give him money but to touch him, to make some minimal human contact with him. Nobody does, no human contact whatsoever. Barry is on the verge of"disappearing forever into the fringes and dregs of metro Boston street life" (970) , when
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someone appears, a fourteen-year-old with clawlike hands, who in his mindless and lovable way reaches out a hand to him. Mario saves Barry Loach and brings him to ETA. Of course, the person who makes contact with the wretched refuse of humanity is often left to clean up. It was Mario who got the crazed gun-wielding tennis player Eric Clipperton admitted to the ETA grounds to talk withJOI. Mario and Himself take Eric Clipperton to an unused top-floor room in Subdorm C of East House. Mario is recording the conversation when Clipperton pulls out his gun, "scrunches up his face and blows his legitimated brains out for real and all time, eradicates his map and then some" (433) . And it is Mario who diligently scours the room. If Mario is something of a saint or holy fool, his good intentions and kind efforts are sometimes unavailing. A case in point is Hal, who loves and admires his brother yet feels frustrated by Mario's misapprehensions, and puzzled by his stubborn innocence. Only with Mario is Hal candid. He tells Mario that he smokes powerful marijuana all the time in secret and hides it carefully, so that no one suspects. Now Hal is terrified. Hal confides his guilt and fears: that he won't be able to get entirely clean within the allotted month, that the Moment reporter will sniff the scandal, that the Moms will be dreadfully hurt and the school ruined, that he will be in "abrupt withdrawal" just when he's trying to compete on the court and take the SAT's. Hal also regrets lying to and evading Mario, who insists, "I wasn't hurt. I don't want you to be sad" (784). Still, Hal's frustration breaks through. Finding Mario's all-accepting sympathy more than he can bear, he winds up shouting at him that "You can get mad at somebody and it doesn't mean they'll go away." '1\re you i'n there?" he asks impatiently (784). Hal may be speaking to himself but he also underscores the limits ofMario's capacities. Hal is exasperated by Mario's perennially "Panglossian constitution:' How, he wonders, does Mario survive without knowing when he's being lied to, or something is being hidden? Mario is ultimately the clearest instance ofWallace's effort to move past our deplorable inability to understand that cynicism is only another form of naivete. Very often Wallace mocks what he cherishes. Only
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sometimes does he love what he laughs at. Mario is both immune to irony and devoid of it. In Mario, love is made invulnerable to irony without becoming sophisticated, hip, or any less intense; love is inoculated against corruption, against ironic dissolution. He is the least of our brethren, a simple, unsophisticated consciousness, and a generous, pure heart. Mario's heart is close to the center ofIrifinite Jests vast "retroironic" and deeply compelling story.
Charles Tavis Charles Tavis is an important but shadowy figure. There is an essential vagueness about him that belies his apparent candor and affability. The "unsettling thing" about him is that he is so open, but "less like a person than a sort of cross-section of a person" (5 17). Conceived in darkness, CT remains concealed in obscurity. Half brother (perhaps) or step-brother of Hal's mother, Avril Incandenza, he is known as CT or Uncle Charles. Hal thinks Charles Tavis is "probably not related to the Moms by actual blood" (900) , but we never know for sure. Apparently, after Avril's mother died, her father, a binge-drinker, went off and returned with a dwarfish woman named Elizabeth Tavis and her infant son Charles. That same Charles has now grown up to become the director ofthe Enfield Tennis Academy, with a lot of problems on his hands. We meet CT in the opening episode, where he does most of the talking, vainly trying to account for Hal's poor test scores and catatonic state to the Arizona deans. It's been a hard year, and not an easy life, for Charles Tavis. Born in 196 1 BS in Canada, trained as a civil engineer, he achieved some initial success. But then he designed the Toronto BlueJays' "novel and much ballyhooed SkyDome ballpark-and-hotel complex" (516) with a catastrophic architectural feature that led him to give up designing large scale athletic venues. CT comes to ETA in 1991, when his brother-in law JOI is increasingly preoccupied with filmmaking and drinking- or absent in various alcohol-rehabilitative facilities. The death ofJOI leaves CT with a very demanding job. But, he muses, "who better to assume the stress of filling in as anger-object than the dead man's thankless inglorious sedulous untiring 3-D bureaucratic assistant and replacement,
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whose own upstairs room was right next to the HmH's master bedroom and who might, by some grieving parties, be viewed as some kind of interloping usurper" (287). cr and Avril run the school with great energy and dedication, cr as head administrator, Avril as academic dean and teacher. Cf is a physically small man but with Avril makes up one halfof"pretty much the Dynamic Duo of compulsion" (5 19). He rises every morning at an ungodly hour, anticipating "permutations ofcomplications" (45 1), and works and worries until late at night. He runs a highly successful institution. The weirdest thing about cr is the nature of his relationship with Avril, which sometimes seems to have sexual or incestuous overtones. We don't know with any certainty CT's origins or genealogy. "The fact that Orin was our one and only source for data shrouded the whole thing," meaning Cf's connection to Avril, "in further ambiguity," Hal confesses. To Hal, the Moms and Uncle Charles "have never represented themselves as anything other than unrelated but extremely close" (901). More troubling is the possibility that Cf might be the biological father of Mario Incandenza, a speculation the text wants us to take seriously: "it's not entirely impossible he may have fathered" Mario, says the narrator, as cr gazes at the sleeping Mario, "not eager to wake it and have to interface with it and have it look up at him with a terrible calm and accepting knowledge it's quite possible is nothing but Tavis's imagination" (45 1). The question of Mario's paternity is disturbing; so is the clinical detachment ofCf, unwilling to "interface" with the relative he calls "it:' There's a patina ofnormality to the Incandena-Tavis family relations. Hal and Mario, who room at the school, eat at the Headmaster's House with the Moms and CT a couple of times a week. Of course nobody communicates much with Hal, so the distance between them wouldn't be noticeable. Though Mario is an "object of some weird attracto repulsive gestalt for Charles Tavis, Mario treats Cf with the quiet deference he can feel his possible half-uncle wanting, and stays out of his way," and of course doesn't articulate his anxieties about or to CT. The YDAU has been a particularly trying period for CT. The annual Eschaton game deteriorated into a brawl in which several kids were injured, some seriously - no incidental issue in a tennis academy. Evan
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Ingersoll is on crutches with a ruptured patellar tendon, and Penn has an even more serious femoral fracture. The culpable parties are the Big Buddies who organized the event, and failed to protect their little Buddies: Mike Pemulis, a bad apple and perennial trouble-maker, Axford, and Hal, who is guilty mostly by omission, neglecting to aid his young charge. In November, CT ordered the boys to his office to discuss Sunday's "horrendous Eschaton fiasco" (5 10). In the headmaster's office the boys are kertwanged by the presence of a "scrubbed young button nosed urologist in an ONANTA blazer" (5 27). He's there to test them for drug use. Through Pemulis's brilliant manipulations and denials, Hal, Axford, and Pemulis get a month's reprieve to get clean. But the Eschaton debacle and the drug difficulties have cast shadows, and meanwhile strange things have been happening at ETA, with inanimate objects moving into or out of places "in a steadily accelerating and troubling cycle" (632). Tensions are running high and the whole place seems charged. CT is sitting atop a powder keg.
Lyle An "oiled guru" named Lyle presides over the weight room at ETA. A beloved nut, this oddly compelling figure "lives offthe sweat of others. Literally." Kids who have worked up a sweat let him lick their arms and forehead - it "isn't like a faggy or sexual thing" - and listen to his little nuggets of "fitness-guru wisdom." The creepiness of Lyle's diet is meant to make us think, and, paradoxically, to heed his words, for he is an important spiritual counselor at ETA. Lyle was extremely helpful to Hal in the terrible days after his father's suicide, not because he could comfort or heal the wounded boy, but because he helped him navigate the hateful but mandatory process of "grief counseling." Hal hates the whole thing, but doesn't know how to escape the psychobabble sessions he's being made to attend. In exchange for some "gourmet sweat," it's Lyle who advises him to read textbooks used by psychologists, to learn how to grieve, to produce the prescribed language of suffering, to the therapist's satisfaction.
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Lyle's helpfulness to the Incandenzas has a history. He was originally brought to ETA byJOI, who regarded him as a confidante and thought he would be a fine teacher of youth. In one flashback, the blotto JOI laments to Lyle in the ETA sauna that critics "were complaining that even in his commercially entertaining stuff lncandenza's fatal Achilles heel was plot, that Incandenza's efforts had no sort of engaging plot, no movement that sucked you in and drew you along" (375). Though Lyle can't and won't drink with his friend, he is a faithful and sympathetic companion. So we get a scene in which JOI, "one of those profound personality-change drinkers" (379), drinks his Wild Turkey while Lyle, placidly sipping Diet Coke and licking bourbon-soaked sweat, reads to him the poetry of Blake in the voices of cartoon characters. To the younger generation, Lyle continues to provide consolation, perspective, and encouragement. He counsels Pemulis to imagine a key ring with a hundred keys and to try them all, to be willing to make mistakes. While Mario's film is being shown, Lyle in the weight room confers with another freaked-out ETA kid, Lamont Chu, only eleven and already frantic with how much he "wants the hype" offame, which Lyle patiently tries to show him only presents the empty illusion of "immense meaning."
Michael Pemulis Mike Pemulis is a seventeen-year-old student at ETA and a major drug abuser/dealer. He is a significant supporting character, Hal's best friend, his source of drugs, and a link between ETA and the Boston underworld. Though it is tempting to reduce Pemulis to a stereotype, the street-smart working class kid at an upscale school, testing the boundaries and causing troubles great and small, Pemulis emerges as a brash, gaudy, complex character. It's important to note that Pemulis is at ETA as a scholarship student from nearby Allston, from a working class family with troubles that dyifUnctt'onal doesn't begin to cover. Quite late in the novel we meet Michael's brother Matty, a 23-year-old male prostitute; almost casually we're told that "His Da'd begun fucking Matty up the ass when Matty was ten" (684). Eventually Da, afll icted with cirrhosis, choked to death
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on his own blood. Matty drinks to the memory of his blessed escape from Da. So it's small wonder that Matty's little brother Mike, a gifted math student, with the highest Stanford-Binet scores of any kid on academic probation ever at the Academy, harbors a deep dread of "academic or disciplinary expulsion and ejection, of having to schlepp back down Comm. Ave. into blue-collar Allston" (1035). Da may be gone but Allston will always be there. Pemulis's fear doesn't keep him from dangerous transgressions and rash impulses. A druggie, he favors 'drines, especially Tenuate, which he hoards in a secret stash above the false ceiling in a dorm hallway, and carries in a detachable lining ofhis jaunty, trademark yachting cap, ideal for hiding "portable quantities ofjust about anything." He is more than the ETA dealer: he is an apostle of drugs. We first spot him in a dorm room, educating younger ETA kids about his favorite subject, drug-induced "alterations in consciousness" (66), and scamming his Little Buddies with card tricks. Pemulis is a good tennis player, of course, but not talented enough to make it professionally. On the surface a very cool customer, his nerves betray him before every match, when he throws up. His standing is precarious, and when he does win a big match, by default, it is usually because he has managed to slip his opponent a disorienting drug. Pemulis is gifted at mathematics, though he gets some math wrong, according to one friend who is also mathematically talented. Clearly, Mike's real genius is for conning, persuading, talking, and hustling. One hilarious episode describes his elaborate, lucrative business peddling that most common of commodities, urine. Because about a fourth of these ranking players at ETA over the age of 15 could not pass a test for drugs, Michael Pemulis and Trevor Axford run a brisk business in "clean" urine procured from the youngest ETAers, who are so far entirely innocent about drugs. Mario films the spectacle in progress, featuring the intrepid Pemulis, who "also sells small-time drugs of distinguished potency at reasonable retail prices to a large pie-slice of the total junior tournament-circuit market" (154). Pemulis has a bond with Mario and is best friends with Hal. Pemulis is truly a "good friend and a bad-news enemy . . . a thoroughgoing chilled-revenge gourmet" (1025). On a typical day, Pemulis receives a
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call from Hal, asking him to "Please commit a crime," that is, deliver some drugs pronto. Thus does Pemulis, demonic drug dealer, imagining that this ploy will allow him to plead entrapment if caught, protect himself from the law. In the current fall semester, Pemulis and Hal are juniors at ETA. As we've stressed, Pemulis is not just savvy, but intellectually first-rate. He is our source for important background and understanding of political and scientific developments. He explains in detail to one younger student exactly how their school's founder, "the man himself," made a "lasting contribution to the energy of waste" (572) by developing special holographic conversions enabling the researchers to study in highly poisonous environments without getting poisoned themselves. Pemulis also explains the only "kertwang" in the solution of placing the natural fusion site in the Great Concavity is that the ecosystem is devoid of toxin and poison, or any inhibitors to organic growth. The former Northern New England is overrun with rapacious feral hamsters and insects ofVolkswagen size. Unfortunately this uninhibited ecosystem system needs to be bombarded with toxins to keep it from spreading and overrunning everything else. Hence the continuing, incessant catapulting of waste from the metro area due north into the eastern Concavity. The thing to keep in mind for the Energy course is "the cyclic effects of the waste-delivery and fusion," and the "concept of time in flux, conceptually" (573), an incredible "slowing down of time": the teacher's mnemonic rhyme is, "Wasteland to lush: time's in no rush" (573). Mter this lecture on temporal-flux stuff, the student needs to rush to the toilet, and Pemulis, entrepreneur extraordinaire, realizes he hasjust found a great source for his own little recycling business, providing clean urine for drug-addled tennis players. Pemulis's latest rave is the incredibly potent DMZ, its effects "almost ontological" (170). DMZ is also called Madame Psychosis, after the cult radio personality. But before Pemulis can explore this particular type of better living through chemistry, he gets blindsided by the administration for his role in the Eschaton debacle. As we've seen, the game produced several serious injuries, for which the Big Buddies are responsible. Now Pemulis has to pay the piper. On November 10, he, Hal, and Axford find themselves outside the head's office awaiting an interview
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1 WilliAM DOWLING AND RoBERT BELl with CT about their role in Sunday's "horrendous Eschaton fiasco" (510). They are all nervous, but they have planned defenses and strategies: Pemulis, the silver-tongued con artist, will do the talking, Hal will interject appropriately, and Axford will shut up. But in the office they are stunned by the presence of a drug tester who demands a urine sample. Only the remarkable poise and persuasiveness of Pemulis saves the boys' skins. He somehow persuades CT to give them a month to get clean before the major tournaments. Hal is awed by Mike's cool courage under extreme pressure. But Pemulis can't or won't get straight. Two days later he is tutoring Hal for the forthcoming math SATs, and trying to persuade Hal to join him in a "meaningful transcendent DMZ-type" (1064) adventure. Pemulis isn't sympathetic to Hal's reluctance and signals of distress: "I think your hinges are starting to squeak" (1064). Pemulis is intent on "a real cobweb-blaster with me and Axford after the Fundraiser," which he says "could help you get some serious perspective" (1065). Mike's conception of serious perspective is that some vital part of your perspective "would die without something to ingest" (1066). Addict, he tells Hal, is "just a word." It's hard not to see Pemulis as an utterly corrupt tempter and wholly self-serving low life. We get another look at the dark side of Mike Pemulis, as we learn that he and Hal escaped on-the-spot urine analysis "only because Pemulis implied to Mrs. Incandenza that he'd tell the !nester [Hal] about Avril having some sort of major-sport interlude with John Wayne" (1068) . There is some risk in naming John Wayne, who might already have detected the hand ofPemulis in a leaflet publicly posted and announcing "a joint John Wayne/Or. Avril Incendenza arithmetic presentation . . . on how 17 can actually go into 56 way more than 3.294 times" (1069) . As a rule of thumb, if something is amiss at ETA, it's his doing. It will later come as a surprise to us that Pemulis actually had nothing to do with the drugging of squeaky-clean John Wayne. No matter. His goose is cooked. The downslide begins at the moment Mike Pemulis in the locker room with Postal Weight (ETA student Possalthwaite) is told thatJohn Wayne is running amok. Pemulis expresses mock-relief that John Wayne is going to be OK. Then we
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jump without warning to a scene in the ETA administrative office: Pemulis is being questioned very intently by deLint, Nwangi, and Watson, who suspect that Pemulis knows something about why John Wayne, in the middle of an interview on the student radio station, went suddenly loony, "making public castigations ofhis various peers and instructors" (1074). John Wayne's characterization of his instructors are cited, to the horror of his interrogators and the delight of Pemulis, who cooly tells "Aubs" [Aubrey deLint) that he really must "interface" with Mrs. Inc about U.S.-Canadian relations. DeLint is not intimidated. He conveys Dean Incandenza's "very best regards and her wish that quote 'may the road rise up to meet you witherever your future travels lie' . . . I think that was it in a nutshell" (1075). Pemulis is summarily expelled, rather gleefully, by his put-upon teachers and administrators, exhorted to hit the road and find his way"whitherever." We last see him groping futilely for his drug stash in the ceiling, which has been ripped offby an unknown person. He then disappears onto the streets of Boston.
Randy Lenz Randy Lenz is an irredeemably nasty character residing in Ennet House. A two-bit organic-coke dealer, he's there not to free himself from addiction but to avoid the police. Not knowing that he is playing a part in a Federal Drug Administration sting operation, Lenz had accepted a large shipment of cocaine from a suspiciously naive Brazilian dealer - really a Federal plant - and then, instead of delivering it to his customers, holed up in a hotel and consumed the entire shipment. Both the FDA and his swindled customers are searching for him. Keeping a very low profile to avoid the law, he travels to the nightly required AA/NA meetings "in a disguise that makes him look like Cesar Romero after a terrible accident" (276). One identifYing feature is the tattoo on his right hip, memorializing a PAMELA Lenz can't remember. Everybody at Ennet House, even the endlessly forbearing Don Gately, hates Lenz; Gately tells the impatient residents that Lenz is there to teach them "valuable patience and tolerance" (539).
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Lenz gives us access to the manic rush of a cocaine high, and a portrait of a gratuitously cruel, barely human being. But he's human too, suffering "impotent rage and powerless fear" (54 1). His means of resolving these tensions take him "nightly through urban-animal territory" (540) on a bizarre mission: to lure and kill animals. The first time he crushed rats in a dumpster with a rock he "discovered what he liked to say at the moment of issue-resolution was: ' There:" (540-541). He graduates to stray cats, attracted with tuna fish and trapped in Hefty bags. Earlier he had set fire to live cats, but once he found himselfbeing terrifYingly pursued by a flaming, fierce cat. The episode with the burning cat leads Lenz to employ a knife on canines, attracted by dangled meat. Cutting the throats of dogs is an effective release for Powerless Rage issues. Lenz wonders how he will handle a new burden, the tendency of Bruce Green to tag along on Lenz's evening walks back to Ennet House. He likes Green, who hardly says anything and actually seems to listen, but Green's presence puts a crimp in Lenz's violent acting-out. On these expeditions, high on Bing (cocaine) and highly motivated, Lenz feels he really comes alive, and the prose crackles with energy. Walking back to Ennet House from an NA meeting with Bruce Green, the only person who will tolerate being around him, Lenz talks manically. Lenz tells Green "pretty much every experience and thought he's ever had" (557), "the plots of several books he's read, confabulating them" (557) , his discovery of his "own unusual life-force . . . that he was not somehow like the run of common men" (557), his physical powers, in vitro experiences, bizarre cult information, reports ofvirtual sex videos, suicidal Nuck cults ofguysjumping in front oftrains, feral beasts roaming the Concavity, crazed Rastas fanning north and "performing a cultish ritual referred to in oblique tones only as Propitiating The Irifant," etc. ad infinitum. By any standard, Randy Lenz is a nasty piece of work. Yet, like many characters in Irifim�e Jest, even the most despicable, Randy Lenz has a story that to some small extent accounts for his viciousness. He tells Bruce Green about his mother, so obscenely obese she got stuck in a child-sized desk when visiting his school on Parents Day. She gets stuck a second, more fateful time in another freakish accident. lrifim�e Jest is a veritable anthology of urban legends. Mrs. Lenz, in the tiny bathroom of a bus driving over a highway under construction,
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had been thrown helter-skelter like a pinball and lodged "freakishly enough" in the window of the bus toilet room. Fellow passengers were "unable to excretate [szc] her." Finally released, she sued successfully for trauma, public mortification, and second-degree frostbite, and received "a morbidly obese settlement" (576) . Retired, enjoying the sedentary, high-calorie life, she died suddenly. Typically, Lenz tells the story without pity or regret for anything other than the fact that his mother pissed away all the money she had won in the legal settlement. One night walking to Ennet House Lenz and Green get separated because Lenz wants to be alone to slit the throat of a new dog on his route. On a street of Canadian and Concavity-displaced families is a party, featuring loud Hawaiian music by the "hideously compelling Don Ho:• There Green, who had lost sight ofLenz, suddenly glimpses him skulking like a "vaudeville fiend up to no good at all" (584) , approaching the "Hawaiianized Nuck house" (586) where Lenz's poisoned meat attracts the big dog's attention. With a "wraithlike quality" (587) Lenz moves in, draws something glittering from his coat, straddles the dog, and slits its throat, commenting, "How dare you" to the dying dog, standing over the dog "like you stand over a punished child, at full height and radiating authority" (588). Then he vaults the fence and runs toward Enfield. The revelers, unmistakably Quebecois, stop partying, find the dead dog, and give chase. From behind a tree Green notices a figure in a wheelchair, and then a second wheelchaired figure. The Canadians can't catch Lenz. Green, fearing he will be seen as an accomplice, shrinks back out of sight. The outraged Canadian dog lovers track Lenz to Ennet House. They threaten the terrified Lenz with vengeance, as he futilely shouts defiance and asserts his innocence. Don Gately, in charge of Ennet House this night, feels responsible for Lenz's welfare, even though he can't abide Lenz and he recognizes that Lenz is stoned. Though he'd love to get Lenz expelled, he defends and protects Lenz, facing down an angry gunman. In the melee Gately is badly wounded. Lenz escapes unharmed. He is ejected from Ennet House and disappears. Thus Lenz leaves Gately fighting for his life and without corroborating evidence of self-defense, for nobody can locate the gun used to shoot Gately. We last see Lenz back on the Cambridge streets, snorting coke and stalking two little Chinese ladies he believes to be carrying their "earthly
148 1 WILLIAM DOWLING AND RoBERT BELL sum-total of personal wealth" (718) in garbage bags, as all Chinese ladies allegedly do. Randy is again high, both on cocaine and the hunt, avoiding the adversaries he imagines everywhere, "deeply disguised" in his trademark mustache and outrageous attire. He can now "openly hide" (717), being nothing more than an unremarkable member of the "itinerant mad of metro Boston" (718). His only real problem is that he's running out of coke. Otherwise, he feels in total control of the situation. He robs the two little old Chinese women, and absconds with his loot. He runs past Poor Tony Krause, who knocks over a waste barrel in his flight from Ruth van Cleve, and into the night.
Poor Tony Krause We meet poor Tony Krause early on in Infinite Jest, in an episode retold by an unnamed narrator who belongs to his "crew" - the loose collection of addicts and petty criminals who help each other roll drunks and foreign students for their money, or who provide distraction while their companions are shoplifting items from a pharmacy or a Harvard Square store. Poor Tony's crew in the initial episode consists of himself. a particularly violent junkie friend known as C, and the anonymous narrator, who refers to himself throughout as "yrstruly." (Later in the story Randy Lenz, the Ennet House cocaine addict and dealer, similarly refers to himself as "yrstruly" - he is the only other character in the book who does - but his diction in the episodes in which he talks, very often manically and at great length, suggest that he cannot be the narrator here.) Their lives in the Harvard Square area consist of a ceaseless quest to get enough money for that night's high, which by preference for these three consists of heroin. In an emergency, they can make do with synthetic painkillers or even cough syrup, but the goal is to stave off withdrawal long enough to get back to heroin as soon as they can afford it. Poor Tony is a homosexual prostitute, a role he plays with a certain degree of pathetic grace despite the wretchedness to which his addiction has reduced him. He wears a wig, a strapless cocktail dress, spike heels and a feather boa wrapped around his neck, and his walk and consciously
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"dramatic" flourishes of the boa are feminine. His transvestitism is, we find out later on in the story, useful for his preferred mode of theft, which is purse-snatching. Middle-class women who would be made wary by a male street hustler or strong arm type tend to ignore what they think is another female right behind them. On the night we meet Poor Tony, he and his crew wait outside a Cambridge pub for a mugging victim, eventually seeing their best possibility in a drunken older man in an expensive coat who is exiting the pub. He is a "patty" - a garbled version of "paddy," an older deprecatory term for Irishman - and, Poor Tony realizes, a previous client of his. He offers the old man a free blow job to entice him to a dark alley behind some of the omnipresent dumpsters that are everywhere in Johnny Gentle's "clean U.S.," and there the trio rolls him - "crew on" him, in Poor Tony's metro Boston lingo - and we find out just how violent Poor Tony's world is. They pound the old man's face bloody - "mess up his map," in the same lingo - to discourage him from reporting them to the police, and leave him lying in the snow under a dumpster. C wants to siphon off gasoline from a car parked out on Massachusetts Avenue to set their victim on fire, but the other two convince him that it is not worth the trouble. The question now is where they will get the heroin. Various options are discussed, but the final decision is to go down by MTA (the Boston subway system) to Chinatown, where one Dr. Wo sells high-quality heroin from behind a brightly-colored red curtain in a small shop. Poor Tony is violently opposed to this plan. As it will turn out, he has "burned" Dr. Wo in an earlier drug deal and knows that Wo is ruthless in exacting revenge. When the other two go into the shop to get the heroin, Poor Tony remains outside, shivering in his boa in a doorway down the street. When the three have returned to Copley Square to cook up and inject Dr. Wo's heroin, Poor Tony - as "yrstruly" instantly notices, deciding himselfto do likewise - uncharacteristically hangs back, waiting for C to use snowmelt to cook up his own dose of heroin, and then to tie offhis arm and inject it The reason for Poor Tony's hesitation becomes instantly and repulsively clear: he suspects that Dr. Wo, having identified C and "yrstruly" as members ofhis own crew, has sent them away with
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Hotshots: lethal doses ofDrano with the blue glitter picked out so as to look exactly like heroin. C dies a screaming, horrific death, his body twitching reflexively and blood pouring from his eyes and mouth. Poor Tony and "yrstruly" dispose of his body and flee the scene. In a later scene, Poor Tony is a central figure in one of the more surrealistic moments in Irifim�e Jest, when he snatches what he thinks is a purse in Harvard Square. As it happens, this "purse" is one of the prototype models of the newly-developed jarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart that permits patients - this one is a 46-year-old accountant with irreversible restinosis of the heart - to lead an ordinary life by carrying the device with them at all times. This patient is, as it happens, carrying herJarvik IX in a stylish Etienne Aigner handbag, just the sort ofupscale item that Poor Tony associates with affiuence. He snatches the woman's purse, she follows him for nearly four blocks shouting "Stop her! She stole my heart!" at passersby - including a couple of policemen who smile wearily at each other, sure that they're witnessing nothing more than an ordinary Cambridge lesbian romance-gone-wrong - and then she collapses dying on the sidewalk. The last major scene involving Poor Tony occurs when, having been cut off from his usual street companions by the Dr. Wo episode and the publicity surrounding his heart-snatching, he is forced to go into drug withdrawal in the men's room of the Armenian Foundation Library in central Watertown, drinking codeine cough syrup and, when that gives out, suffering from an endless nightmare of diarrhea and gushing bodily fluids, cowering behind the metal walls of his bathroom stall during the day when the library is in use, locked at night in the utter darkness of a windowless room when the library staff turns out the lights. When he finally decides to venture forth from his hiding place, he is dehydrated and weak, little more than a skeleton, his clothing fouled and his head covered with an improvised hood of scotch-taped bathroom towels. He manages to make it to a streetcar going in the direction of Central Square, and on the car he has a seizure. It's during Poor Tony's withdrawal, much of it told in flashback form, that we learn that Poor Tony came from an upper-middle-class family, his father an obstetrician in the same central Watertown to which PT retreats for his drug withdrawal. In the Jewish ritual that
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declares a child lost to the family "dead," his father had rent his garments in symbolic shiva when Poor Tony left home in the Year ofthe Whopper, by then, presumably, already addicted to drugs and active as a prostitute. In the whirl of thoughts going through Poor Tony's brain in the bathroom stall, we learn that he had attended his father's funeral in Mount Auburn cemetery, watching from a distance and hidden by dark glasses as the body was lowered into the grave. These are the memories going through Poor Tony's mind as, in the unreal brightly-lit interior of an MTA car moving towards Cambridge, he has a seizure. Lying on the floor, his body twitching and his heels drumming on the rubber carpet, he gives out inarticulate cries, attempts to keep from swallowing his tongue, and finally passes out. When Poor Tony wakes up, in the Emergency Room of Cambridge City Hospital, he is in the strangely elevated state of mind that sometimes follows such seizures, insisting that he is perfectly well and that he should be allowed to go his way. The hospital staff, not much liking his appearance and finding that he has no medical insurance, is happy to oblige. Thereafter, we catch glimpses of Poor Tony as he passes down Prospect Street in a later scene, snatches the purse ofKate Gompert, an Ennet House resident who happens to be in the vicinity, and finally heads for Antitoi Entertainent, which has been his goal all along, Bertraund Antitoi having once provided him with drugs when he was in need. The last we see of Poor Tony is when he is in a back room of the Antitoi shop, being used by the AFR as an experimental subject for testing the read-only copy of the Entertainment they have found in the shop. To discover whether or not the Entertainment has a declining curve of gratification, the AFR leader has arranged to have Poor Tony given one showing of the cartridge. For each successive showing, he is instructed to cut ofT a thumb or finger with an orthopedic saw provided by his captors, and to pass the amputated digit out under the door. Any lengthening of the period between amputations would mean that the Entertainment does not have an endless capacity to entertain, but that its fascination declines over time. The digit-amputation test, being purely statistical, will show whether or not this is the case.
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3-10. Hal Incandenza is being interviewed for a tennis scholarship to the University of Arizona. Hal's Uncle Charles is doing most of the talking on behalf of Hal who appears incapable ofspeaking for himsel£ The Dean of Admissions is concerned with the incongruity between Hal's grades at ETA and "verbal scores that are just quite a bit closer to zero than we're comfortable with" (6). Finally, Hal says, "I cannot make myself understood, now . . . . Call it something I ate" (10) . 10-17. Hal remembers early family life with his eldest brother Orin and their mother, whom they call "The Moms," at their home in Weston, Massachusetts before Hal's father founded ETA. Hal at age five ate a large patch of mold, which horrified his mother, an obsessive-compulsive woman who "refused ever even to go into the damp basement" ( 1 1) , and reacted hysterically. Hal desperately tries to explain himself to the University administrators, but his protests emerge as animal-like sounds and frightening gestures. Horrified, the deans think he is having a seizure. As Hal is taken to an Emergency Room, he recalls that he was taken to an ER almost exactly one year earlier. 17-27. Boston, the previous year, the "Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment," the present time for most of the action (henceforth, 152
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YDAU). Erdedy desperately awaits the arrival of a woman who is supposed to bring him marijuana. He plans to "simply smoke so much so fast that it would be so unpleasant and the memory ofit so repulsive that once he'd consumed it and gotten it out of his home and his life as quickly as possible he would never want to do it again" (22) , though he has "tried to stop smoking marijuana maybe 70 or 80 times before" ( 1 8) . 27-3 1. April 1, Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Hal, almost eleven years old, is being interviewed by a "professional conversationalist," actually Hal's father in disguise. 32-33. ETA dorm room, May 9, YDAU. Hal receives a phone call probably from his older brother Orin. Hal tells his brother and room mate Mario that the call was "No one you know, I don't think" (33) . 33-37. A suburban Boston home, April 1 , YDAU. A medical attache is part of a delegation of the Saudi Minister of Home Entertainment in Boston to "cut another mammoth deal with InterLace Te!Entertainment" (3 3) . The attache looks for an "entertainment cartridge" to play on his Teleputer or TP. The only entertainment cartridges he locates arrived in today's mail, including an unidentified standard black cartridge. It is postmarked Phoenix, A r i z o n a , a n d i n s t ea d of a return a d d r e s s h a s " HA P P Y ANNIVERSARY." A t 1 9 : 2 7 hours he settles i n t o watch it. 37-39. Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken. A black girl named Clenette narrates a painful monologue about her friend Wardine, whose mother has just beaten her with a hanger. Wardine is harassed and abused by her mother's "man" Roy Tony. Wardine's boyfriend Reginald wants to defend Wardine but Roy Tony is dangerous. Clenette fears that Roy Tony will kill Reginald and that Wardine will be beaten to death by her mother. Bruce Green, an eighth grader, fell in love with a "fatally pretty" classmate named Mildred Bonk. She becomes a tough kid by senior year, mother of a baby girl and living in a housetrailer with Bruce - near a drug dealer, Tommy Doocey.
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39-42. An ETA dorm room, YDAU. Mario is keeping Hal awake, wondering why "the Moms never cried when Himself passed away," even seemed to Mario "like she got happier." 42-49. Orin Incandenza's apartment in Phoenix, Arizona, October YDAU. Orin Incandenza, star punter for the Phoenix Cardinals, awakes after another night with a random lover - he refers to them as "Subjects." Plagued by drenching night -sweats, Orin leaves "fetal-shaped fossilized image[s]" (43) on his sheets; every night brings dark and terrifying "horror-show dreams" (4 7). Orin dreads an interview with "some profiler from Moment magazine," causing stress which provokes him to start calling his brother Hal at ETA, thus reopening "that whole Pandora's box of worms" (49). 49-55. ETA underground Pump Room, YDAU. Hal likes to get high on high resin marijuana called "Bob Hope:' Interpolation: the medical attache is ominously riveted to his mysterious entertainment. 55-60. Autumn, YDAU. Don Gately is a twenty-seven-year old narcotics addict and "a more or less professional burglar . . . distinguished by his ferocious and jolly elan" (55). Convicted by the North Shore Assistant DA, Gately on release plans revenge. He and an accomplice stage a burglary of the DA's home in Revere to look like an aborted operation. A month later Gately mails the DA's wife two Polaroid snapshots ofhimself and his partner Trent Kite in her bathroom - each criminal wearing a Halloween mask with his pants down and bent over, the handle of a homeowner's toothbrush "protruding from his bottom." The DA's wife now needs Valium "even just to floss" (59). Another burglary goes terribly awry when a supposedly empty house turns out to be occupied by a Quebecois Frenchman home sick in bed. He is Guillaume DuPlessis, "the right-hand man to probably the most infamous anti-O.N.A.N organizer north of the Great Concavity" (58) . The burgled homeowner DuPlessis i s suffering from a severely blocked nasal passage. Unable to make himself understood, bound and
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gagged, he can't breathe, and dies. Now the North Shore DA makes the recapture of Don Gately his mission in life. Gately is "in the sort of a hell of a deep-shit mess that can tum a man's life right around" (60). 60-63. ETA dorm room, November 3, YDAU. Jim Troeltsch, seventeen-year old student and tennis player, is sick and has terrifying dreams. 63-65. YDAU. A brief biography ofJames Orin Incandenza. 65-66. Denver Bronco's Mile-High Stadium, November 1, YDAU. Orin Incandenza resents being forced by the team management to do a PR exhibition and a personal interview in a ridiculous costume. 66-68. ETA dorm room, YDAU. Michael Pemulis tells younger ETA students about drug-induced "alterations in consciousness" (66). 68-85. YDAU. In the psychiatric ward of a Boston hospital, Kate Gompert is on Suicide Watch, supervised by a staffer twenty four hours a day. Twenty-one years old, this is her fourth hospitalization in three years, all for clinical depression. Kate describes her addiction to "Bob Hope," or marijuana, and struggles to explain her feelings: "Just get me out of this," she begs the doctor. The medical resident regards Kate with "a kind of bland compassion:' Kate wants shock treatment. Interpolation: The Saudi medical attache's wife returns home to find her husband blissed into a comatose state by the entertainment on their cartridge-viewer. Back at ETA, Gerhard Schtitt, Head Coach and Athletic Director, walks with Mario Incandenza to get some gourmet ice cream. The barely comprehending Mario, "so damaged he can't even grip" a tennis racket, loves to listen to the old man lecture. 85-87. A taxicab, early November YDAU. Tiny Ewell, an "elf-sized U. S. male" whose wife locked him outs heads for the Enfield Marine VA Hospital, a halfWay house. April 2, YDAU at the home of the Saudi medical attache. Several people from the Embassy seeking the missing
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attache and two Seventh Day Adventist pamphleteers plying their wares are transfixed by the TP viewer. All are "sitting and standing there very still and attentive, looking not one bit distressed or in any way displeased, even though the room smelled very bad indeed" (87) . 87-95. A mountain over the Sonora Desert outside Tucson, Arizona, April 30, YDAU. Remy Marathe sits alone on a ridge in his customized wheel chair and amuses himself with his shadow as the sun descends. Marathe awaits Hugh Steeply, a field-operative for the Office of Unspecified Services, or OUS. who arrives in disguise as a woman. Marathe is a member of the AFR, the notorious "Wheelchair Assassins," Quebec's "most dreaded and rapacious anti-O.NA.N. terrorist cell" (994) , headed by M. Fortier who believes that Marathe is "functioning as a kind of 'triple agent' or duplicitous 'double agent'" (995) . Marathe and Steeply discuss the dramatic effects of the "Entertainment" sent out of the blue to the Saudi attache. 95-105. Enfield Tennis Academy locker room, Tuesday, November 3, YDAU. At the end of a long day, the boys, many of them ranked continentally, are exhausted. In the locker room they shower, banter about classes, teachers, coaches, practice, and competition. The older boys are often Big Buddies to the younger. 105-109. The desert outside Tucson, YDAU. Marathe and Steeply discuss the nature of love (heroic, classical, real-life) and the "maybe even timeless love" of Rod Tine for Luria. Steeply says Tine, nicknamed "Rod the God," would die for her. Marathe, thinking of his "own betrayal of A.F.R.: for medical care for the conditions of his wife" (106) who is in fact dying, comments that "attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully" (107) . We learn that The Wheel-Chair Assassins have a "remote embryonic disseminatory Ops base down here in Southwest U.S.A" (109) . 109-12 1. ETA, November 3, YDAU. The ETA Big Buddies meet with their younger charges. Hal's group listens to Kent Blott, age ten,
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express his dread that all this suffering only leads to more dreadful suffering if and when he makes "the Show," big time tennis. Hal says their suffering and resentment build character and community. In other ETA rooms, other Big Buddies dispense advice and encouragement. John Wayne, the top player, is the most sought - after Big Buddy. But John Wayne is emphatically uncommunicative and Lamont Chu does most of the talking to the Little Buddies. Mike Pemulis, Ted Schacht, Troeltsch, Jim Struck, and Ortho Stice are also Big Buddying. 12 1-126. ETA grounds, mid-October YDAU. Mario and Hal are taking a stroll when Hal disappears to get high and Mario is accosted sexually by Millicent Kent, a huge sixteen-year-old student. Mario's high-pitched laughter identifies his whereabouts and Hal rescues his brother. Returning to school they see a mysteriously abandoned camera tripod. 126-127. Mountain ridge above Tucson, YDAU. Steeply and Marathe continue their conversation. The Wheelchair Assassins chose Boston as a center of operations because ofits closeness to the "Convexity" and to Quebec and because it is "the place of the supposed Entertainment's origin" (126). The FLQ seeks copies of the lethal Entertainment and Marathe wonders if there also exists an antidote or remedy made by the director "to counter the lethality" (126). 127-128. Lyle presides over the weight room at ETA. A beloved nut, this guru "lives off the sweat of others. Literally." 127-135. On the streets of Cambridge: a narrator called yrstruly and his pals Poor Tony and C roam the city in search of drugs, tricks, and victims. Yrstruly tells another terrible story about scoring some drugs from Dr. Wo and watching his friend C die of a lethal dose laced with Drano. They leave C's body in a "dumster:' The "crew," or gang, roll a pathetic old timer, steal his $400, and leave him freezing under a dumpster. 135-137. November 3, YDAU. ETA dorm room. Hal, high again, receives a phone call from brother Orin, sweltering in Phoenix. Orin
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says he has met "a possibly very special somebody" (137) and asks what Hal knows about Canadian Separatism. 137-138. The founding of the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House in the Year of the Whopper by a recovering drug addict known as the Guy Who Didn't Even Use His First Name. 138-140.June 26, YDAU. Correspondence from Dwayne R. Glynn, explaining a bizarre accident and making a claim to State Farm Insurance Company. 140-142. Hal's seventh grade ETA essay for "Introduction to Entertainment Studies," comparing two TV heroes. 142-144. A Moment magazine feature by "Helen" Steeply, the disguise of Steeply the OUS. operative, about a heinous crime in Cambridge Massachusetts; an artificial heart, an "extraordinary prosthesis portably installed in a stylish Etienne Aigner purse," keeping alive a 46-year-old woman, was stolen by "a transvestite purse snatcher, a drug addict with a criminal record all too well known to public officials, bizarrely outfitted in a strapless cocktail dress, spike heels, tattered feather boa, and auburn wig" (143), whom we recognize as Poor Tony Krause. The victim, giving chase and yelling "She stole my heart," died. 145-151. An expository essay on the demise of"video-telephoning" or "videophony"; why consumers reverted to "good old voice-only telephoning" (145). 15 1-156. ETA, October YDAU. "Four times per annum, in these chemically troubled times, the Organization ofNorth American Nations Tennis Association's Junior Division sends a young toxicologist . . . to collect urine samples from any student at an accredited tennis academy ranked higher than 41'64 continentally in his or her age-division" (151) . Because about a fourth o fthese ranking players at ETA over the age of 15 could not pass such a test, Michael Pemulis and Trevor Axford run a brisk business in "clean" urine.
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157-169. Tucson, Arizona, Winter 1960. Hal's grandfather, Orin James Incandenza, harangues his ten-year old son Jim. 169-171. Cambridge Massachusetts, November 4, YDAU. Michael Pemulis, "nobody's fool at all," rides the T under Cambridge into downtown Boston. Pemulis receives a call from Hal, asking him to "Please commit a crime," that is, deliver some drugs pronto. 172-176. Hal's narrative voice-over of a film titled "Tennis and the Feral Prodigy," directed, recorded, written and edited by Mario Incandenza. 176-181. Ennet Recovery House, Wed. 4 November YDAU Selected transcripts of comments made by unidentified patients at Ennet House to Pat Montesian, Executive Director. One patient stabbed a second with a fork, a second is in elaborate, pompous denial, a third asks for a special Program prayer "for when you want to hang yourself' (178), another insists something inhuman and ominous is in the toilet. We meet somebody who knows Clenette, and hear from Bruce Green, who describes life with Mildred Bonk and their daughter Harriet in that Allston trailer park with Doocey the hare-lipped drug dealer and proprietor of snakes. His childhood sweetheart Mildred has run off with some guy to New Jersey: "Who wouldn't have to get high just to stand it?" (180) . 181-193. MIT student radio station, October 22, YDAU. The student engineer sets up the sound for Madame Psychosis, a mysterious cult figure in an impenetrable veil. The show's faithful audience includes Mario Incandenza. Even when she has a guest, "she's mostly alone in there when she's on-air" (185) , delivering monologues "both free associative and intricately structured," often about film (including "anticonfluential cinema") and sports (especially football). On this evening, she reads a PR circular for the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed, or UHID, summoning "all ye hateful" (187) in an epic catalog ofthe diseased, deformed, and disgusting,
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who are all urged to "Come don the veil" (190). "Blessed are the poor in body" ( 1 87) . Among the victims she addresses are "the fatally pulchritudinous:' Though she has "an unironic but generally gloomy outlook on the universe in general," Mario feels sure she "cannot herself sense the compelling beauty and light she projects over the air, somehow" (190). He bets she would feel a lot better if she listened to her own show! Another feeling she somehow conveys is that "there's an in-joke that you and she alone are in on" (191) . Back at ETA, Hal and Mario eat at the Headmaster's House with the Moms and CT a couple of times a week. Sometimes they bring with them Canada's John ("No Relation") Wayne, "whom Mrs. I. likes and speaks to animatedly" (192). The brothers listen to Madame Psychosis. 193-198. Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, October YDAU. Here is a detailed building and ground plan of Ennet House, just down the hill from ETA, regarded by Don Gately as "the rich tennis school for blond gleaming tennis kids on what used to be the hilltop" (198), shaved and flattened to construct tennis courts which sent "avalanche-type debris rolling down and all over" Unit 41'7. 198-200. ETA Weight Room, November 6, YDAU. The boys lift weights, banter, and bitch. 200-2 1 1. Ennet House, November 6, YDAU. The narrator explains many interesting and surprising facts about addiction and life in a recovery facility and "Recoveryspeak." Many Ennet House residents have tattoos, a spectacular variety of weird, grotesque artistry and self abuse, defense, and assertion, all meticulously "charted and cross referenced" by Tiny Ewall. 2 1 1-2 19. Pemulis' room at ETA, November 6, YDAU, 2:30 P.M. Michael Pemulis has scored some incredibly potent hallucinogen called DMZ (also known as "Madame Psychosis") from a "duo of reputed former Canadian insurgents" (2 15) at a film emporium called Antitoi Entertainment in Inman Square, Cambridge.
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Now Pemulis meets with Hal and Trevor Axford to gloat and plan their big drug trip. They've got a baker's dozen of the DMZ tablets, enough to freak out everybody at the forthcoming WhataBurger tournament, and to get unprecedentedly high, but, unsure of the dosage and slightly wary of the danger, Pemulis must do some research. Since they'll need time to enjoy the high and to come down, their "window of opportunity looks to be 1 1/2 0-2 1" (2 17), the weekend right after the big fundraising exhibition against Quebec and the weekend right before Thanksgiving week and the WhataBurger Invitational in Arizona. Hal is slated to be seeded third or fourth in 18's Singles. But Hal is already half blissed at the prospect of hallucinogenic "luminescence," which Axford terms "Halation" (2 18). 2 19-240. Cambridge Massachusetts, December 7, YDAU. Joelle van Dyne, revealed to be the radio figure known as Madame Psychosis, is at a party at the apartment ofMolly Notkin.Joelle barely acknowledges anyone. She plans to carry out "that most self-involved of acts, self cancelling" [stc] , to lock herself in Molly's bathroom "and get so high that she's going to fall down and stop breathing and turn blue and die, clutching her heart" (222) . Interpolation on page 223 lists the chronology of ONAN "REVENUE-ENHANCING SUBSIDIZED TIME, BY YEAR." Joelle had a love affair with Orin. Through Orin she met his father, who used her as featured actor in several films. She mourns him as "a great filmic mind and her true heart's friend" (225). Joelle was Orin's "only lover for twenty-six months and his father's optical beloved for twenty-one" (229). Interpolation: A CV ofHelen P. Steeply (227).Joelle finds her way to the bathroom where she prepares to have "Too Much Fun" one last time. Preparing her freebase cocaine she thinks of Jim, his "allegedly fatally entertaining and scopophiliac thing Jim alleges he made out of her unveiled face" (230) which she had never seen. ("Scopophiliac" signifies "love of being seen or watched"). Fewer than ninety days later Jim killed himself putting his head in a microwave oven. Joelle thinks about the cocaine and her impending high. "The stuffhad not just been her en caging god but her lover, too, fiendish, angelic, ofrock" (235). "It
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was when her hands started to tremble during this part of the cooking procedure that she'd first known she liked this more than anyone can like anything and still live" (236). More even than how much she loved watching movies with "her own personal Daddy" (237) when she had felt so taken care o£ She slides down "uprightly fetal . . . deveiled, too pretty for words, maybe the Prettiest Girl Of All Time (Prettiest G.O.A.T.), knees to chest" (239), vomiting into oblivion. 240-242. A survey of Enfield from the ETA hilltop 242-258. Hal's dorm room at ETA, 5 November YDAU. Clipping his toenails, Hal receives another telephone call from Orin, who says he is being followed by burly guys in wheelchairs and is worried about his forthcoming interview with this Helen Steeply reporter for Moment magazine. The supposed reporter is a large, physically imposing but weirdly sexy creature. Why, Hal wants to know, does Orin suddenly, after all this time, want to talk about their family's grotesque history, especially the suicide of their father? 258-270. Port Washington Tennis Academy, November 6, YDAU. ETA comes to Port Washington Tennis Academy for their mammoth annual meet. john Wayne continues his spectacular ascent toward the top ranking in Boys Under 18 tennis. Despite his drug habit, seventeen year old Hal Incandenza has come out of nowhere to soar into the elite category. Mike Pemulis, for whom this match is an all-out must-win, is "deep into the little hell ofhis own nauseous pre-match nerves" (262). Schacht, coping with a shattered knee and Crohn's Disease, no longer dreams of the big Show yet plays effectively. Mario shoots footage for his "short and upbeat annual documentary" (265) . 270-2 8 1 . Daily life at Ennet House from Gately's perspective. Geoffrey Day resents the AA cliches; he's a "red-wine-and-Quaalude" white man who "taught something horseshit-sounding like social historicity or historical sociality" and describes Ennet House as "hilariously egregulous" (272).
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Gately's own counselor when he was an Ennet House resident is Eugenio Martinez, one of the volunteer alumni counselors, "a one-eared former boiler-room bunko man" who has been about ten years clean. Don Gately, now 2 9, has been completely Substance-free for 42 1 days. Gene calls the disease of addiction The Spider and talks about Feeding the Spider versus Starving the Spider. Burt F. Smith, forty-five but looks seventy, making "his like fiftieth stab at sobriety in AA," got mugged and "beaten half to death in Cambridge on Xmas Eve oflast year, and left there to like freeze there, in an alley, in a storm, and ended up losing his hands and feet" (275) . Emil Minty, "a hard-core smack-addict punk" has an orange mohawk and shaved skull. He's been on the streets since he was sixteen. There's the quiet kid, Bruce Green with the tattoo MILDRED BONK "who took their daughter and left him this summer" (276) . And Randy Lenz, "a small-time organic coke dealer" keeping a real low profile to avoid the law; he travels to the nightly required AA/NA meetings in a disguise. Charlotte Treat, a former prostitute with violently red hair, in her reformation has become prim as a librarian and a needlepointer. Besides daily troubles, "all jonesing and head-gaming and mokus and grieving and basically whacked out and producing nonstopping output 24-7365" (273) , there are nightly "freakshow dreams. Nightmares beyond the worst D.T.s you'd ever heard about" (280). 2 8 1-2 83. The bus ride home from Port Washington to Enfield is a long but victorious trip. John Wayne and Hal lost only five games between them in singles. Though Coyle and Troeltsch and Teddy Schacht lost, Troeltsch won in doubles and enjoys recapping the day's match highlights for his audience, "speaking earnestly into his fist" ; Pemulis won by default; he probably slipped his opponent a disorienting drug. In too much knee-pain to enjoy anything, Schacht gets injected with something that make his eyes "roll up in his head" (281). On an earlier trip, Keith Freer had been discovered by a prorector "more or less Xing poor Bernadette Longley under an Adidas blanket in the very back seat" (282) , and now a leaflet about that episode circulates
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throughout the bus and mortifies Bernadette. But Charles Tavis, head of the triumphant school, remains jubilant. 283-2 99. We learn about Orin's athletic career and Charles Tavis's move to ETA. 2 99-306. A dumpster and a library stall, November 14, YDAU. Poor Tony Krause is sinking lower than ever; "Who wouldn't wonder Why Me?" (300) . His heroin-connections have dried up and his contacts going down or disappearing. So in hiding Poor Tony begins to "Withdraw From Heroin," for the first time since he got strung out at seventeen and began to "rent out his charms" to feed his habit. On a crowded MTA train he has a seizure, as terrifying as it is painful, in which he again sees his father - and finally "his father's head exploded" (306) . 306-3 12. ETA, November 7, YDAU. Hal ices his bum ankle after an interrupted match with Hugh Pemberton, who was badly overmatched and then slightly injured. Everybody is anticipating tomorrow's Interdependence Day blowout gala, especially Mario who will record much ofit and show one of his films at the banquet; Hal listens to a message left by Orin, observing that all of Emily Dickinson's lines of poetry can be sung to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas." The phone rings again, and again it is Orin. Mike Pemulis arrives looking forward to a primo Dubois with Hal. With Orin's political questions unresolved, and in the middle of another reference to when Helen Steeply "raised this samizdat-word in connec'' - they are cut off, aptly, in the middle of the word connection. 3 12-3 17. A history and portrait of Mario. 3 17-3 2 1 : Above the Tucson desert, 30 ApriV1 May YDAU. Steeply and Marathe continue their long, strange discussion, now focusing more sharply on the mysterious cartridge "so entertaining and diverting it is lethal" (320).
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32 1-342. ETA, November 8, YDAU: Eschaton. Yearly, about a dozen kids between twelve and fifteen are fanatically devoted to a "homemade Academy game called Eschaton" (322), origins unknown, but basic structure coalesced by Michael Pemulis. This year's "gamemaster and statistician of record" is Otis P. Lord, while Pemulis, all-time ETA Eschaton master, has an "unofficial emeritus power of correction" (322). The game breaks down into "a degenerative chaos so complex in its disorder that it's hard to tell whether it seems choreographed or simply chaotically disordered" (34 1), and Ingersoll, who is Hal's least favorite Little Buddy, gets bombarded, once near the eye, Hal 'just about paralyzed with absorption" - he's been smoking pot again. What began as an intricate, elegant game ends in a free-for-all. Hal gazes and contemplates while Ingersoll lies without moving for several minutes. "Penn flails on his back . . . Possalthwaite, Ingersoll, and McKenna bleed," while Hal, eerily detached from the scene, "feels at his own face to see whether he is wincing" (342). 343-3 74. Same day, November 8, YDAU, Boston AA meeting. AA members make "Commitments" to visit and speak regularly at each other's group meeting. Every night in Boston there are Commitments. The White Flag Group ofEnfield, Massachusetts meets Sundays in the cafeteria of the Provident Nursing Home near ETA. Most of the stories are similar: "fun with the Substance, then very gradually less fun, then significantly less fun because of like blackouts you suddenly come out of on the highway going 145 kph with companions you do not know, nights you awake from in unfamiliar bedding next to somebody who doesn't even resemble any known sort of mammal . . . gradually less and less actual fun but with some physical need for the Substance now, instead of the former voluntary fun; then at some point suddenly just very little fun at all, combined with terrible daily hand-trembling need, then dread, anxiety, irrational phobias, dim siren-like memories of fun, trouble with assorted authorities, knee buckling headaches, mild seizures, and the litany of what Boston AA calls Losses" (345), then "unbelievable psychic pain, a kind of peritonitis
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of the soul" (346), and maybe the terrifYing recognition of the Face in the Floor, yourself in a cage. One reason Gately is so helpful to new members is that he resisted and resented the "happy horseshit" quality of the Program and still made the "shocking discovery that the thing does actually seem to work" (349), though nobody has ever been able to figure out why. No matter what you get up and say, you're supported and encouraged. Some people like the ancient Crocodiles have been attending for decades, still speaking in "hushed, 'Nam-like tones about Out There" (355). AA sees itself as a "benign anarchy, that any order to the thing is a function of Miracle" (356). AA meetings are "maximally unironic. An ironist in a Boston AA meeting is a witch in church. Irony-free zone" (369). Eugenio Martinez refers to The Spider, for the disease of addiction. Ennet House residents are on display here, nearly all the recovering addicts : Ken Erdedy, Kate Gompert, Tiny Ewell, Wade McDade, Chandler Foss, Jennifer Belbin, the Diehl kid, Doony Glynn, Morris Hanley, Alfonso Parias-Carbo, and Clenette Henderson, Bruce Green, Emil Minty, Burt F. Smith, Charlotte Treat, Randy Lenz, Geoffrey Day are all there. There is also "the brand-new girl" Joelle V, the upscale, ravishing young woman behind the impenetrable veil who got in without the usual application procedure. Interpolation (377) : the Statue ofLiberty is used as a marketing tool for whichever company has subsidized the year and displays a new product each January 1. About the only thing that is taboo or discouraged at AA is getting "prolix and involved," especially "trying to blame your Disease on some cause or other" (370) . Even the harrowing story of the sister of the vegetable-like, abused girl her family called "It" is discouraged from elaborating her excuses. 375-379. Aprii 30/May 1, YDAU. Steeply and Marathe continue their cat-and-mouse conversation. Marathe remains "unsure in this time of what exactly it was that Hugh Steeply ofU.S.O.U.S wished to learn from him, or verity, through Marathe's betrayal" (375) while Hugh, dressed as Helen, has been "assigned to cultivate some of the Entertainment's alleged filmmaker's relatives and inner circles."
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Footnote 145 is a "transcript-fragment" from the interview between Helen Steeply and Orin Incandenza on 3 November (1026). Here Orin alternates between an explanation of Himselfs "Found Drama" and flirtatious overtures to his interviewer. Orin says that The Stork, as he calls his father (alternatively, "The Sad Stork" and "The Mad Stork") was reacting against criticism of his "self-referencing unentertaining formalism and unrealistic abstraction" (1027) and invented Found Drama as revenge on the critics. Either epitomally conceptual or maliciously meaningless, Found Drama starts with Himself throwing a dart at a page from the phone book. Whatever happens to the name hit by the dart for the next ninety minutes is the Drama - no audience necessary. Back to that Boston AA meeting, to hear the horrible story of another newcomer, who freebased her way through pregnancy and labor, poisoning her baby, whose dreadful stillborn corpse she refused to acknowledge as dead even while she continued to solicit tricks and drugs. Finally this crazed, pathetic woman had to swallow the "responsible truth" so here she is without Cause or Excuse. Gately listens and remembers "all over again what a tragic adventure this is, that none of them signed up for" (379). 3 8 0-4 1 0 . ETA, November 8, YDAU. Mario's first finished entertainment is a film of a puppet show, hugely popular with ETA kids, and shown annually on Nov. 8, Continental Interdependence Day in the dining hall as part of a "gala but rather ironic annual celebration" (380) . Everyone wears costume hats (Hal is in a black preacher's hat), gets special desserts, and watches Mario's film, choreography and puppetry also by Mario. The film parodies President Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner's "Concavity Cabinet" meetingwith the Prime Ministers of Mexico and Canada demoted to Secretaries in the ONAN reconfiguration. This puppet-parody gives us our clearest view of what happened, as "Rod the God" proposes "an unprecedented intercontinental gift of certain newly expendable northeast American territories, in return for the .foute-de-mieux continuation of U.S. waste-displacement access to
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those territories" (403), a kind of"ecological gerrymandering" causing massive dislocation of "citizenry and portable capital" to create a "designated disposal area" (405). This is also known as "Experialist Domination" (406) or, more blandly, as "Experialism" or "Experialist Reconfiguration:' 410-418. Same day. Hal, having smoked marijuana four times today, isn't feeling well. 4 1 8-430. Above Tucson, April 30 I May 1, YDAU. The discussion between Marathe and Steeply becomes increasingly speculative, almost philosophical. There is also a lovely lyrical interlude in which Marathe remembers the Boston Public Garden pond being refilled for the ducks' return (427). We learn that Marathe's wife "had been in an irreversible coma for fourteen months" (4 18) and that Steeply is regarded as one of the Bureau's fmest field-operatives. Most important, the debate concerns the AFR plan to make available the lethal Entertainment and indicates that the OUS is working hard to prevent dissemination. 430-434. Back in the last pre-Subsidized year, Eric Clipperton was winning tournaments brandishing his Glock 9mm pistol, but understandably disregarded by USTA, so that "the very tactic that let him win in the first place kept the wins, and in a way Clipperton himself, from being treated as real" (43 1). But in the Year of the Whopper, a new systems analyst for North Amencan Junior Tennis naively ranks Clipperton 4H nationally. Suddenly Eric Clipperton appears at the front gates ofETA, where little Mario gets him admitted to the grounds. Clipperton wants a few private minutes with Incandenza Sr., so Mario, Himself and Eric retreat to an unused top-floor room in Subdorm C of East House. Mario od recording the conversation when Clipperton pulls out his gun, "scrunches up his face and blows his legitimated brains out for real and all time, eradicates his map and then some" (433) . 434-436. Don Gately "sunlights on the side," working the dawn shift as janitor at the Shattuck Shelter for Homeless Males in Jamaica Plain, where the inmates suffer "from every kind of physical and
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psychological and addictive and spiritual difficulty you could ever think of, specializing in ones that are repulsive" ( 434-43 5) , requiring extraordinary efforts by Gately to clean up every morning. Gately works diligently, regularly, and silently; he'll be "paying court-scheduled restitution well into his thirties if he stays straight" (436). 436-442. ETA. Is it possible that "the only jr. tennis players who can win their way to the top and stay there without going bats are the ones who are already bats, or else who seem to be just grim machines a laJohn Wayne?" (437-438). For this kind of pressure ETA relies on the bird-of-prey-faced Dr. Dolores Rusk, "regarded by the kids as whatever's just slightly worse than useless" (437). At least they can blow off steam and enjoy Mario's film, now winding down with Johnny Gentle's Concavity Cabinet discussing the "thoroughgoing logistical coup" (439) of Territorial Reconfiguration, dropping their jaws learning the cost (is there "even a name for a figure with this many zeroes?"), trying to avoid wht'nging (Canadian idiom: "Whinge. Complain. Petition for redress"), and seeking inspiration from Mr. P. Tom Veals who brings them to the very verge of the concept of the Subsidized Year, and Ms. Luria P - , a beauty "simply beyond pulchritudinous belief' (440) . 442-449. Brighton, Massachusetts, July, YDAU. It's a White Flag Group Commitment to a Braintree AA group called the Tough Shit But You Still Can't Drink Group, or TSBYSCD. Don Gately knows that AA encourages you to "make up your own understanding of God or a Higher Power or Whom-/Whatever," but he still feels he has "no access to the Big spiritual Picture" (443), that he feels Nothing. The mostly biker group of TSBYSCD applaud his candor. After some eight months clean at Ennet, Gately began to remember "things he wouldjust as soon not have" (446), especially his mother's alcoholism, drunken stupors, and abuse at the hands of her live-in lover, a former Navy MP. 449-450. ETA, Very Late October, YDAU. Hal has horrible nightmares about losing his teeth, and Mario mourns the absence of Madame Psychosis from WYYY radio at midnight.
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450-461. ETA, November 9, YDAU. It's a cold early morning after the Eschaton debacle and Interdependence evening festivities. Charles Tavis is up at his usual ungodly hour, anticipating "permutations of complications" (45 1). Dawn drills for the students are arduous, especially this morning. Kids are retching from too many sweets last night. Schtitt commands the kids, except for Penn, Postal Weight, and Otis P. Lord, casualties at yesterday's Eschaton and ominously missing this morning. When the boys complain about the cold, Schtitt delivers a diatribe about adjusting to conditions, a mix of humiliating abuse and exhortation: "Because, privileged gentlemen and boys I am saying, is always something that is too . you, if you stay the same, stay inside . . . This world inside is the same, always, if you stay there . . . Make this second world inside the world: here there are no conditions" (458-459) . All of which deLint summarizes as, "So put a lid on it about the fucking cold" (459). .
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46 1-469. Ennet House, same day. Don Gately cooks and shops for Ennet House, which means he gets to drive Pat Montesian's black 1964 Ford Aventura, where he enjoys "some of the profoundest spiritual feelings of his sobriety" (46 1). It's also dangerous because he has lost his license. Pat has been a rock for Gately. She'd go anywhere before any court to back him up. He remembers his initial interview with Pat. Pat's story is that she was in and out of rehabs in her twenties, divorced by her husband, and almost died from a stroke, unable to communicate for the first six months; she remains partly paralyzed and in a wheelchair. Still "sexually credible" and partly pretty in her late thirties, she advocates the AA method, and encourages Don fervidly: he was her "biggest favorite among the residents last year" (466). Don has reason to believe, for it works, despite all his mockery of the semi-religious stuff about praying AM and PM, "the limpest kind of dickless pap" (466). And on the anniversary of his first year sober, when the people he cooked for made him a frosted one-candle cake, big Don Gately cried.
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470-475. Over Tucson, Arizona, Pre-Dawn, May 1. YDAU. Hugh Steeply asks Remy Marathe if he ever heard about experiments by some leading Canadian neurologist, to avoid surgery for severe epileptics. In these experiments the neuroscientists found that certain parts of the lobes gave the brain intense feelings of pleasure; these ''p-terminals" released "Rivers ofReward," the "Department ofEuphoria, so to speak, within the human brain" (471). Some Brandon low-level worker broke security and leaked word, which inspired hordes of regular young Canadians to volunteer "for fatal addiction to the electrical pleasure:· 475-489. Don Gately loves to drive much too fast and recklessly, especially considering that he doesn't have a license, and that he's in metro Boston where everybody "drives exactly the same sociopathic way" (476). He's 29 and he's never "had sex sober yet" (478), and not at all in the last year since he's been clean: "the weird hopelessness at the heart oflust" (477) pains him. Gately drives by Antitoi Entertainent (sic). The Antitoi brothers, Lucien and Bertraund, are proprietors of a video and cartridge store which also offers assorted jokes, tricks, postcards and greeting cards. They also store weapons, watch films, and smoke dope. Though the Antitoi Brothers are affiliated with the Separatist/Anti-ONAN FLQ. "they are for the most part a not very terrifying insurgent cell . . . more or less loners, self-contained . . . eccentric and borderline-incompetent, protected gently by their late regional patron M. Guillaume DuPlessis" (480) . They also deal drugs, including the DMZ Pemulis recently scored. But their main business is used cartridges - including a batch "stamped also with a circle and arc that resembled a disembodied smile" (483). The squeak of the front door turns out to be something really ominous, the sound ofthe Wheelchair Assassins, the AFR, coming in the twilight. Before the hapless Lucien can make use of his Colt or warn his brother, the Assassins have struck. Lucien finds Bertraund with a railroad spike in his eye. Pitiless and relentless, the AFR demand from Lucien an entertainment item they have come here to acquire, and they require a "Copy-Capable item" (487). Lucien can't even understand their French
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to reply. They fan out, while their leader shoves a sharp broom handle down Lucien's throat, all the way to his inguinal canal and sigmoid, until it bursts through "at a police-lock's canted angle:' Lucien finally dies in agony but "free, catapulted home" (489). 489-491. Desert over Tucson, pre-Dawn, May 1, YDAU. Steeply and Marathe continue to speak quietly with long silent intervals upon the mountain. Steeply confirms that the AFR have a "Read-Only" copy (that can't be copied) of the Entertainment or samizdat. The Americans are frantically conducting tests for "possible non-lethal viewing" (490) . 49 1-503. Sepulveda CA, Winter 1963. An autobiographical essay byJames 0. Incandenza titled "The Awakening ofMy Interest in Annular Systems" describesJOI's strange father and eventually specifies "how I first became interested in the possibilities of annulation" (503) . 503-507. The night after the Interdependence Day picnic, Ennet House staffer Johnette Foltz takes Ken Erdedy and Kate Gompert to a Narcotics Anonymous discussion meeting for marijuana addicts. Ken Erdedy withdraws from the throng of addicts, a scene of "rampant, indiscriminate hugging" (504). A huge heavy Mro-American, Roy Tony, the ex-con who had sexually abused his girlfriend's daughter (37), offers Erdedy a hug which is awkwardly refused: a "blatant dis" despite Erdedy's frantic politeness. Roy Tony explodes and threatens Erdedy. Terrified into submission, it looks like "Erdedy was trying to climb" Roy Tony. 507-508. Steeply and Marathe discuss a guy named Hank Hoyne, some "idiot intern in Data Analysis" who yielded to temptation to watch the forbidden Entertainment and has been in "four-point restraints" ever since. 508-527. ETA. November 10, YDAU. Hal, Axhandle, and Pemulis await an interview with Charles Tavis about their role in Sunday's "horrendous Eschaton fiasco" (5 10). Sitting in the office with Lateral Alice Moore the receptionist and waiting to see the Headmaster, Hal overhears his mother Avril, Dean of Academic Students and Dean of
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Females, talking with the youngest girls at ETA about their privacy and boundary issues; Hal thinks of this as "diddle-prevention duty" (5 1 1) . Inside, they are kertwanged by the presence o f a "scrubbed young button-nosed urologist in an O.N.A.N.T.A. blazer" (527).
52 8-530. Arizona desert, pre-dawn and dawn, May 1, YDAU. Steeply and Marathe discuss Oriental and Greek myths ofwomen such as the Odalisk "too exotic and intriguing or seductive to resist," where the "pleasure's too intense. No mortal can stand it. Kills them" (528). "The A.F.R. believed Marathe functioned as a triple agent, pretending to betray his nation for his wife, memorizing every detail" of these meetings with Steeply. According to Steeply, his superiors at OUS "did not know that Fortier knew that Steeply knew he (Fortier) knew Marathe was here" (529), a fact Steeply held back from his superiors. "M. Fortier did not know Marathe had reached the internal choice that he loved [his poor wife] more than he loved the Separatist and anti-O.N.A.N. cause ofthe nation Quebec, making Marathe no better than M. Rodney 'the God' Tine," despised head ofOUS (529). 53 1-538. Ennet House 4:50 AM, November 1 1, YDAU. Don Gately is having a long heart-to-heart withJoelle van Dyne. He tells her a story of his stupid drunken youth, she tells him about the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed (UHID) whose members declare openly that they wish to hide from all sides. Her explanations of this urge to hide seem wordy and evasive to Gately, "like you don't want me to follow" (535). "I'm so beautiful," says Joelle behind her veil, "I drive anybody with a nervous system out of their fucking mind. Once they've seen me they can't think of anything else" (538). 538-548. Ennet House. Randy Lenz likes to walk alone to Ennet House after the nightly AA and NA meetings, so he can kill animals. He started with rats and worked up to cats and dogs. 548-550. Metro Boston, early November YDAU. Every morning Rodney Tine, Chief, U.S. Office of Unspecified Services measures his
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penis with a special metric ruler. His other principle concern is a film "with certain he's given to understand from briefings quote 'qualities' such that whoever saw it wanted nothing else ever in life but to see it again, and then again, and so on" (548). One report says the so-called "samizda!' or "allegedly enslaving Entertainment" begins with a "veiled woman going through a large building's revolving doors" (549). Sources indicate the routing hubs of disseminators to be metro Boston/New Bedford and the desert Southwest, with a possibility of Canadian involvement. 550-552. ETA, late PM, Monday November 9, YDAU. Pemulis overhears Ortho Stice resisting and mocking Dr. Dolores Rusk's analysis of his "counterphobia." He enters the well-lit office of the Dean of Academic Affairs, Dr. Avril Incandenza. There he sees John Wayne in a football helmet, shoulderpads, and jockstrap posing in the classic three point stance, and Dr. Incandenza dressed in a cheerleader's outfit doing splits on the rug. "I probably won't even waste everybody's time asking if l'm interrupting" (553), Pemulis says. 553-562. Ennet House, Wednesday November 1 1 , YDAU. Randy Lenz needs to go solo sometimes to locate and eliminate cats and dogs. Hal meanwhile lies in his bunk breathing deeply. 563-565. Ennet House, Wednesday November 1 1 , YDAU. Don Gately in his capacity as live-in staff, talks with residents ofEnnet House after the Brookline AA meeting. He speaks withjoelle van Dyne, with Foss about Geoffrey Day and Nell making fun of the new kid Tingley, McDade about hot water, and Yolanda's inappropriate choice ofRandy Lenz as a sponsor. 565-567. Same time, Phoenix, Arizona, a rented room. Orin has been stymied in his flirtation with Helen Steeply, pursuing "lines of family-linen inquiry" for the Moment magazine profile. Orin vacillates between intimate revelations about his family and resistance to intimate questions. But, marvelously, Orin encounters an "incredible specimen" seeking his autograph and some intimate attention in a hotel room.
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567-574. ETA, same time. Idris Aslanian is wearing a blindfold to explore the possibilities of orientation through sound on the tennis court and through the corridors of ETA. He bumps into Mike Pemulis. They d i s cuss Watson's Energy survey course, and Doucette's difficulties "grasping annulation, even superficially" (569) . Pemulis describes "the whole fusion/fission waste-annulation thing . . . as nothing but a huge right triangle" (570) , and gives a thumbnail lecture. 574-575. Same time, hotel lobby, Phoenix Arizona. Orin, leaving his tryst with the Swiss hand-model, is in his Excitement-Hope Acquisition-Contempt cycle of seduction, when he notices that the wheelchairs are back - and realizes that the handicapped guy has the same Swiss accent as his Subject the hand-model. 575-589. Same time, en route to Ennet House. Randy Lenz continues walking with and talking at Bruce Green. Lenz tells about his mother. Bruce Green has issues too, "so deeply repressed inside Green that whole strata and substrata of silence and mute dumb animal suffering will have to be strip-mined up and dealt with a Day at a Time in sobriety" (578) . In a practical joke which backfired, Bruce's mother suffered a fatal cardiac arrest, right before the horrified child's eyes. His father's sadistic delight in nasty jokes catches up with him after the Blammo Cigars he sent out grotesquely decapitated three Rotarians and 24 Shriners, for which crime he was convicted and given a Lethal Injection (58 1). Lenz and Green drift apart after Lenz stops to urinate in a dumpster. Green continues back to Ennet House through a street of Canadian and Concavity-displaced families where one house is holding a party. Green sees Lenz kill their dog, vault the fence and run toward Enfield. Unmistakably Canadian revelers stop partying, find the dead dog, and give chase. From behind a tree Green notices a figure in a wheelchair, and then a second wheelchaired figure. The Canadians can't catch Lenz and Green fears being seen as an accomplice.
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589-593. Same time, ETA. Mario lncandenza turns nineteen on November 25. He's suffering from insomnia as Madame Psychosis's hiatus from her midnight radio show enters its third week. 593-596. Ennet House, same time. Don Gately's evening duties "are divided pretty evenly between the picayune and the unpleasant" (593). There's a lot of head counting, meds dispensing, paperwork. He's got to check on the suicidal Kate G., clean up all manner of mess, calm hotheads. "The daily bullshit here is hip-deep and not so much annoying as soul-sucking" (594), but way more organized than his life would be Out There. 596-60 1. Same time in Phoenix, Arizona., hotel room. After sex with a Subject, Orin Incandenza rarely experiences a "feeling ofoutright unalloyed sadness as such, afterward - just an abrupt loss ofhope" (596). 0. enjoys giving the "impression of care and sympathy" in this "post seminal interval of clingy vulnerability on the Subject's part" (597), for whom 0. feels "the sort of clinical contempt you feel for an insect" (598). There is a knock on the door; the Swiss hand-model hides under the covers. It is a disabled man, totally legless, in a wheelchair who says he is conducting a survey. The survey, supposedly for consumer advocacy, asks what "lifestyle elements" you lack or miss. 0. remembers TV, even junk he mocked, providing (the surveyor notes) "emotions of mastery and control and superiority. And pleasure." (600) . Only later does it strike 0. as odd that the interviewer also had a Swiss accent, and that his Swiss Subject under the covers was so patient with the interruption. 601-619. Ennet House 1 1 :50 PM, same day. Among Gately's duties are enforcing curfews and supervising movement of residents' vehicles to the opposite side of the street every midnight. Gately can tell that Randy Lenz is high, with that "Nietzschean supercharged aura of a wired individual" (605), but he hasn't got time now to demand a urine test, though he'd love to get rid of Lenz. Doony R. Glynn is too sick to move his own Volkswagen bug, and Gately can't drive it because he hasn't got a license, so he goes back
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inside to ask Bruce Green to help. Trouble erupts on the street: a dark Montego arrives; it's full of angry Canadians threatening and chasing Randy Lenz. One of them has a gun. Gately gets "very cool and clear and his headache recedes and his breathing slows. It's not so much that things slow as break into frames" (608). Three Nucks chase Lenz around the parked car, Lenz shouting defiance and innocence, the gunman taking aim. Gately feels neither fear nor excitement; he remembers the Canadian he's inadvertently killed in the botched burglary. Gately now feels he has no choice not to fight. The Nucks are screaming that Lenz is a bastard who killed "somebody they call either Pepe or Bebe." Gately is aware of Joelle watching from the upstairs window. The violence begins with punches, a broken hand and arm . A knife slash cutting Gately's calf, and then a gunshot; Gately is shot in the shoulder, and escapes worse only because Bruce Green got the Nuck from behind. Badly wounded, Gately continues to fight. The third Nuck is down, and Clennete H. and Yolanda W. are now up and "not at bay" and getting "solid high-heel kicks into the Nuck's and sometimes hopefully Lenz's ribs, reciting 'Moth �cka' and landing a kick each time they get to fil' (614). Joelle climbs down to comfort Don and take charge ofthe chaotic situation; Gately doesn't want the cops called. He's on the verge of passing out from loss ofblood and shock, but not before he recognizes Joelle's voice: she is Madame Psychosis. "I knew I knew you," he says tojoelle. 620-626. Bostonians congregate to watch the cleaning ofthe Public Garden duck pond. In the Garden today sun-tanning and studying Metallurgy of Annular Isotopes is the WYYY student engineer who worked for Madame Psychosis until her sudden disappearance. Nobody in the Public Garden pays attention to a van opening a squeaky side door, until a "madly squeaking" wheelchair with a snowplow-like scoop type thing in front of it careens out and moves fast down the hill. It scoops up the engineer and carries him down toward and inside of an idling van at the bottom of the incline.
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627-638. ETA dining hall, 6 : 1 0 PM, November 1 1 , YDAU. Suppertime, the kids ravenous. The Momentsoft-profiler, Helen Steeply, is present but silent. Ortho spins yarns about his parents' passionate love lives. Hal was almost beaten by Ortho Stice this afternoon in a nonchallenge exhibition match; as of this day, Hal is trying to get clean. The kids have heard rumors of a showdown with Dr. Tavis and the urology guy from ONANTA. Strange things have been happening at ETA, inanimate objects moving into or out of places "in a steadily accelerating and troubling cycle" (632) . In come two victims of the disastrous Eschaton game. Evan Ingersoll is on crutches with a ruptured patellar tendon, and Penn has an even more serious femoral fracture. 638-648. Desert mountain over Tucson, May 1, YDAU. Steeply tells Marathe the sad, bizarre story of how his father, through his obsession with M*A *S*H, was "consumed with a sort of entertainment" (639) . Mr. Steeply, an apparently ordinary man living and working and supporting his family in Troy, N.Y., became fascinated with the TV show and watched it incessantly in syndicated reruns. Gradually he became obsessed and withd rew from l i fe . Steeply and h i s "Mummykins" were ignored entirely, their anguish unavailing. Mr. Steeply died, perhaps happy, of a heart attack, terribly, blissfully "Misplaced. Lost" (647). 648-65 1. Ennet House, 2 :45 AM, November 13, YDAU. Geoffrey Day, regarded so far as a merely obnoxious figure, tells Kate Gompert a terrifYing episode from when he was ten, playing violin and horrified by a sense inside him of something large, dark, and billowing, "It was as if l'd awakened it and now it was active" (650). 651-662. ETA, November 1 1, YDAU. We watch the match between Hal and Ortho Stice from the perspective of Helen Steeply and Aubrey deLint, who has been assigned the task of accompanying and restricting her. DeLint mainly confines his remarks to elements of strategy, and he steers her away from or ignores her inquiries the into personal lives of the players.
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The command decision is to keep her away from the kids altogether. DeLint characterizes Orin to Helen as "kind of a head-case" (66 1), then explains why ETA policy bars reporters from its students. Helen points out they might benefit from learning about the press and publicity: "But even you call it 'The Show: They'll be entertainers" (66 1). DeLint says reporters just chew the players up, that ETA is "a little slice of space and/or time that's been carved out to protect talented kids from exactly the kind of activities you guys come in here to do" (662) . 663-665. Helen Steeply and Marlon Bain, Orin's friend and partner at ETA, exchange letters; Bain answers inquiries for the Moment profile. Footnote 269 (1047-1052) gives Marlon Bain's long response. 666-673. ETA tunnels. The boys under fourteen love to play in the numerous tunnels underneath ETA, where all manner ofjunk is stored or abandoned. A bunch of them calling themselves the Tunnel Club are down there now, "punitively remanded" (666) to prepare for the installation of the Lung (for winter tennis upstairs) ; these were the boys who were involved in but not injured during the Eschaton game. But they love being underground, especially now, because ten-year-old Kent Blott said he spotted something - a rat or maybe a "Concavitated feral hamster." What they find is a vile-smelling, refrigerator-like appliance. 673-682. ETA, same time. During the match between Hal and Ortho Stice, Helen Steeply is in the stands sitting and watching with Aubrey deLint. They are joined in the stands by Thierry Poutrincourt, a female prorector from Canada. They discuss the effects of fame, of being a star, an itozle, on the successful young players. How the stars eventually awaken to the fact that "you are loved for winning only" (677) , that the pressures are terrible. "Attaining the goal," deLint explains, "does not complete or redeem you" (680), nor does the glitter ofcelebrity, the Syndrome ofthe Endless Party" (681). DeLint tells "Helen" that Hal has a complete game. His "face registered nothing" (680). "Helen" wants to get to Hal's father who "dabbled in filming" (68 1). Meanwhile deLint babbles on about John
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Wayne's "gestalt," how he is "pure force" (682) . Whereas Hal, though he "looks just as perfectly dead out there" is "more vulnerable in terms of, like, emotionally" (682). DeLint says that he and Schtitt think "it's a will issue" (682). 682-686. The Man O'War Grille on Prospect Street in Cambridge, November 14, YDAU. Matty Pemulis is a male prostitute; today he is twenty-three. "His Da'd begun fucking Matty up the ass when Matty was ten" (684). 686-689. ETA, November 1 1 , YDAU. Hal goes to Viewing Room 6, thoroughly depressed, to watch cartridges made by Himsel£ He turns off"Medusa v. Odalisqul' when the audience started "getting turned to stone" (687). He watches a film called Wave Bye Bye to the Bureaucrat. The film is unusual for Himself in that it features a rare "clear internal conflict moment," with a frankly "unhip earnestness" (689). Though he pretends otherwise to Mario, Hal finds this secretly moving. 689-692. November 14, YDAU, North Cambridge. Poor Tony Krause is going through a "post-seizure feeling of well-being" (689), notoriously "deceptive and transient." At Cambridge City Hospital he tells people he's fine, and when they discover that he's destitute with no Health Card, they suddenly defer to his "subjective diagnostic knowledge" ofhis own condition, and release him. He heads for Antitoi Entertainment, seeking some "pharmacological credit" (690) . Poor Tony is as usual cross-dressed in his flamboyant boa outfit. We also hear about Poor Tony's small role in an anti-ONAN action involving the Antitoi Brothers: Tony was one of several decoys (including Lolasister, Susan T. Cheese, Bridget Tenderhole, Equus Reese, and the late Stokely "Dark Star" McNair) at a press conference disruption, moving helter-skelter to confuse efforts to chase and capture the perpetrators. Poor Tony bumps into Mad Matty Pemulis, who is aghast at Tony's appearance. 692-698. Ennet House, same time. Kate Gompert cotinues to be extremely depressed. The narrator comes forth more openly than usual, telling us what "in fact" J. 0. Incandenza's condition was and was not,
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and that "in fact" Hal i s "far more robotic than john Wayne," and "has not had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny" (694). The narrator connects this state to the millennia! American premiwn on hip ennui. Kids especially study the arts "for clues on how to be cool" or "Unalone" (694) . "The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony," learning "a weary cynicism" (694). The cartridge that Hal likes by Himself is "mostly about a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and na"ivete are mutually exclusive" (694) . Hal "theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of really being human." He doesn't know yet that anhedonia is not even the worst type of depression, that there is a far worse form, "the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain" (695) that Kate Gompert simply thinks of as It. It, a "radical and thoroughgoing evil," billows. To Kate, It means an "almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent ofwhich means painful harm to the self' (696) . Kate remembers a psychotically depressed patient who tried everything for relief from regular attendance at Mass to obsessive distraction with Lionel trains, to no avail. His case gave Kate "the howling fantods," though he and his wife send Kate an annual Xmas card wishing her "all available joy" (698). 698-71 1. Ennet House, November 14, YDAU. Kate endures a walk to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting with a newcomer, Ruth van Cleeve, who has just been remanded to Ennet House for addiction and abandoning her new-born. Kate can't stand Ruth, who is tacky, "all about sexuality and sex" (699), "hideous, despair-producing, slutty, and yammering" (700). Their empty purses are eyed by Poor Tony Krause. Meanwhile, Jim Troeltsch practices broadcasting, Michael Pemulis removes a panel in his drop-ceiling for his stash of drugs, Lyle meditates, Coach Schtitt and Mario walk, Avril calls ajownalistic business in Tucson, and Hal, watching Blood Sister: One Tough Nun, isjoined by Bridget Boone and Fran Unwin. Hal, "isolating," doesn't want company, but two more girls, Bernadette Longley andjennie Bash, come in for the video.
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Hal is "there only in a very technical sense" (703), silently watching Blood Sister: One Tough Nun, thinking about his father's sleazy-looking shocksploitation film with its grotesquely exaggerated formulae, conceived as "metacinematic parodies on the genres" (703), a "supposedly ironic lampoon" (704), "aloof and over-clever, to Hal's way ofthinking." Hal wonders what Himself"might have been feeling" laboring over the film's "metasilliness:' More kids arrive, "consummate spectators." "What's intriguing but unknown to everyone" (706) in the ETA Viewing Room is the parallel between the film's theme of substituting one crutch for another with the addict's initial notion that he is being asked to forsake one substance for another, the AA "Attitude ofPlatitude." Joelle van Dyne feels this ironic detachment less and less as she attends a Cocaine Anonymous meeting.Joelle "chooses consciously to believe it isn't affected, the story's emotive drama" (710). Now is the first time she feels "sure she wants to keep straight no matter what it means facing" (710). She thinks about Don Gately, who is in the Trauma Wing of the hospital "in a truly bad way" trying not to take Demerol. Moved by Don's heroism, she has "even considered possibly showing somebody the face" (710) . 71 1-714. Hal continues t o watch Blood Sister: One Tough Nun, described by the narrator as "this narratively prolix and tangled stuff" (712). Hal suddenly remembers the kid actor whose name had earlier eluded him: Smothergill. 714-716: Kate Gompert and Ruth van Cleve, walking to their NA meeting, are robbed by Poor Tony Krause. A street bum is proud to repeat "I'm a witness!" Kate's head was badly banged on a light pole in the purse-snatching, but Ruth, screaming at the "mafun ho," gives chase to the crook, "just about the most unattractive woman Kate Gompert had ever seen" (715) . 716-719. 1 0 : 1 2 PM, November 14, YDAU. Randy Lenz, ejected from Ennet House, is back on the Cambridge streets, snorting coke and stalking two little Chinese ladies he believes are carrying their "earthly sum-total of personal wealth" (718) in garbage bags. Interpolation: the
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Wheelchair Assassins have two routes "leading with hope to the original auteurs cartridge of the Entertainment" (719) : "interview" the family and associates of the director, or locate and secure a master copy of their own. 719-720. November 14, YDAU. Poor Tony Krause is running as fast as he can from the women he has just robbed. Ruth van Cleve is not giving up the chase, and Tony can feel the "horrid Creature" (720) ominously close behind. Heading for the Antitois brothers' shop, he remembers his father, a obstetrician, coming home to Mt. Auburn street in Watertown. 72 1-723. The Wheelchair Assassins considered their best chance of locating "the real Entertainment" at the "hapless Antitois' establishment" (72 1). The AFR's (Wheelchair Assassins') USA cell-leader is Fortier, directing this painstaking search. One owner is "visually dysfunctional," with a spike through his eye, and both brothers are now stowed in construction plastic in the storage room. Volunteers from the AFR systematically view all the cartridges in search of a Master cartridge, copy-able. Unlike the FLQ. the AFR is unconcerned with blackmail or geography; "The A.F.R. were interested only in dealing the sort of testicular .frappe to the underbelly of U.S.A. self-interests that would render Canada itselfunwilling to face the U.SA. retaliation for this" (722) . Marathe believes that DuPlessis received his original copy of the fatal Entertainment from Orin Incandenza. 723-724.Joelle van Dyne has been worrying obsessively about her teeth, vulnerable to cocaine abuse. She dreams of Don Gately as a dentist "ministering to her teeth" ravaged by years of cocaine. In her dream she has countless rows of teeth all sharp and strong and unblackened. 724-72 8. Fortier and his AFR operatives secure a copy of the Entertainment, but not without losses. Young Desjardins and the older Joubet, taking turns reviewing the entire inventory of the shop, saw the fatal cartridge, and couldn't stop viewing it, not even forJoubet's insulin.
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But this is a Read-Only cartridge; they need "the original Master, the
auteut's own cartridge," duplicable. The losses were terrible to Fortier, but through the sacrifice of their comrades "the device for extending ONAN's self-destructing logic to its final conclusion lay within their arduous grasp" (725). Fortier has already suspended smveillance of their rivals the FLQ in Allston. An employee has been recruited at ETA to join the Canadian instructor and the student already working for AFR (this would be Thierry Poutrincourt and probably John Wayne). Trying to find the original cartridge, the attentions of FLQ are now focused onJoelle van Dyne, "the cartridge's performer" and ETA "the Academy of Tennis of the auteurs estate:· Back in the Southwest desert, "the redoubtable Mlle. Luria P - was winning necessary confidences with her usual alacrity" (726) . Luria is Orin's "Swiss hand-model:' The MIT radio station engineer, recently abducted and under threat, has been extremely forthcoming about the Madame Psychosis figure. The radio engineer had also been very useful in an experiment where each repeated viewing ofthe lethal cartridge requires the sacrifice of a finger, a test "to confirm with statistical assurance the Subject's desire for viewing and reviewing as incapable of satiation" (727) . 728-729. Randy Lenz, having robbed the two little old Chinese women, runs with his loot. He runs past Poor Tony Krause, who is himself fleeing from Ruth van Cleve. 729-735. Remy Marathe, wearing a cheesecloth veil over his face, is posing as a recovering addict to gain admission into Ennet House. Another crucial footnote (732, fu 304) takes us to a specific time and place: "2030h on 1 1 November Year of the D.A.U., 308 Subdorm B," James Struck's dorm room at ETA. James is reading and plagiarizing a scholarly article on the Wheelchair Assassins - written by one G.T. Day, whose "diarrheatic" pomposities are vivid and pertinent; the old blow-hard becomes one of our best sources concerning the mysterious AFR, "essentially cultists," now "one of the most feared cells in the annals of Canadian extremism" (1057) .
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Day's article corroborates the existence ofthe oversized feral infants running wild in the northern areas of New New England. The legless Quebecer Wheelchair Assassins place "large reflective devices across odd-numbered United States highways for the purpose of disorienting and endangering northbound Americans" (1056), disrupted pipelines in the "Eastern Reconfiguration's annular fusion grid," sabotaged Waste Displacement's "launch and reception facilities," and assassinated Canadian officials supporting the American-dominated ONAN. The Assassins strike without warning "excepting the ominous squeak of slow wheels," giving rise to the euphemism, "to hear the squeak." The "Cult of the Next Train," a version of "Chicken," is a rite and a ritual, in which young men test their fanatic courage by confronting speeding trains: hence the cult oflegless wheel chair assassins. Poor Struck, dedicated plagiarist, must translate the scholar's academic prose to "more basic studential prose" (1058), and labors especially when the author "just totally abandons a scholarly tone" (1059) and makes up "hallucination details." Marathe sees Pat Montesian as "a damaged woman," and doesn't understand why the residents urge him to "Pet the dogs!" No sign of Joelle van Dyne. Marathe is "mentally memorizing every detail of all things" (733). He also was "prepared to die violently at any time, which rendered him free to choose among emotions" (732). He is called for his application interview, and urged again to pet the dogs. 736-747. Joelle is upstairs in the 5-woman room she shares with Charlotte Treat, Kate Gompert, April Cortelyu. and AmyJohnson. She's cleaning fanatically, as she used to like doing when she was high, and thinking about two families, Orin's and her own. Avril Incandenza was vividly, ubiquitously present for all three boys. joelle's "own personal Daddy" was utterly different from both Himself and Orin: "He was real present at all times" (739). In her relationship with Orin she wasn't slow to protect herself, feeling "what alone was going to feel like, and . . . erecting fortifications real early into it" (739). In retrospect, Joelle thinks 0. was trying to get to his own father through Joelle, whom he put forth as an actress, when Joelle really wanted to make films hersel£ joelle's critique of "The Work" ofjames
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Incandenza is very thoughtful. Joelle also remembers Thanksgiving dinner at the Incandenza home, where Avril gave her the howling fantods probably because everything at the dinner table inclined "toward Avril, very slightly and subtly, like heliotropes" (745). Joelle and Himself discussed the film critic Bazin. Little Hal, in his bow-tie, showed off his precocity. The retarded brother Mario was the size ofa fire hydrant and drooled a lot. Despite Avril's elaborate attempt to welcome and includejoelle,Joelle distrusts and despises the Moms. On the way home, Orin asked her twice how she liked the Moms; that night was the first timejoelle "intentionally did lines of cocaine to keep from sleeping" (747). 74 7-751. Marathe, disguised and seeking admission to Ennet House, is interviewed by Pat Montesian. Marathe poses as a Swiss addict named Henri. While Pat examines his credentials he is memorizing everything he sees. He spots film cartridges with tiny round faces of embossed smiles on their brown cases. And Pat mentions the presence in Ennet House of another UHID member - Joelle, also veiled. He knows his AFR and Steeply's OUS will be back here looking for the Entertainment, and now he knows that the Entertainment's performer is here now, veiled like himsel£ 75 1-752.Joelle thinks the whole sad Incandenza family was "lousy with secrets," from "each other, themselves, itself.' 752-755. Marathe has a "confusion of choices:' He can accept Pat's offer ofimmediate admission into Ennet House; or "alert the A.F.R. at the shop that here," perhaps, are "real cartridges of the Entertainment, perhaps including a duplicatable Master"; or he could return to his comrades at the Antitoi shop and return later for the cartridges and the veiled girl; or he could bypass the AFR and inform Steeply and the Office of Unspecified Services, "placing bets on O.N.A.N. and against Fortier, casting his lots finally with one side only" (752), seeking refuge and medical care for his beloved wife Gertraude in the USA - instead of continuing to be a double or triple agent. "The variable of calculus was how long to remain and work for dissemination against when to jump to the safety ofAmerican welcome"
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(753) . Or maybe he should wait longer before reveal ing his "quadrupling" - he's not just a double or even a triple agent! - "for O.N.A.N." Or he could snap Pat's neck right now and summon Fortier and the AFR. Truly he is uncertain; surely he has lost the belly for this type ofwork. Whenjohnette interrupts Pat's conversation with him, he decides there are too many people around for the last option. 755-774. ETA, 9:00 PM, November 1, YDAU. Mario, collecting "peripatetic footage," is filming a documentary on this fall's ETA. He records kids in their dorm rooms and corridors, Schtitt asleep in his office, and he interviews Lamont Chu. Chu wants to know if Mario knows what happened to Hal - if he is being blamed and might be punished for his very minor role in the Eschaton debacle. Mario visits the Moms working late in her office. She asks if she is the "subject" of an interview and looks like "just looking at her kid gives her joy" (760) . 769-774. Mario is back in his bed in Hal's dorm room. Before dawn - "The sun won't be up for a while," Hal says - Mario is awake and wants to talk with his brother. Hal tells Mario a scary nightmare he's been having about losing his teeth and getting "bills for somebody else's teeth, not my teeth" (770). Hal tells Mario about being trapped by the ONANTA rep demanding a urine sample, and how Mike Pemulis "got the guy to give us thirty days" (772) before taking the sample. That will get them through the big tournaments and give them a month to get clean. 774-782. Remy Marathe and Kate Gompert are having Kahula and milk drinks at Ryle's Inman Square jazz club. He has just come to her assistance after she was mugged and injured by Poor Tony Krause. He tells her she reminds him ofhis wife Gertraude and, partially maintaining his mask, becomes remarkably forthright and open with "Katherine." He describes his youthful alienation and despair as a disabled youth, how "one feels grotesque to people" (776) , how he and his comrades resented their government's (supposedly the Swiss) capitulation to foreign usurpation and domination. Marathe's disclosures are part hokum, part candor: "I feel I am chained in a cage of the self, from the pain" (777) . Kate echoes what she
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heard described by Geoffrey Day (695) and identifies his despair as "the b illowing shaped black sailing wing" (777) . Kate utterly miscomprehends Marathe, and, expecting a romantic narrative, is appalled by the grotesque details ofhis beloved's condition. Onto his epiphanic release from the cage of self, she projects her own impenetrable egocentricity, ''And you think, Ohfock me, just great, another horrible thing I'm going to have stand here and witness and then go feel pain over" (778). Gertraude had been a young woman he banged into in his wheelchair, saving his life but dislodging her metal head-protector. This woman who saved Marathe "had no skull," nor muscles, nerves, and other vital parts. When he took her to the hospital, he adds in a miracle of understatement, "It was there I learned of the other troubles" (779). There are numerous antidotes to desire, such as "cerebro-and-spinal fluids" dribbling from Gertraude's "distending oral cavity" (779) .1t gradually dawns on Kate that this is not "a feel-better story at all:' Not even the wedding ceremony when Remy held "tenderly the hook of my wife" (780) appeals to Kate: "Hook? As in hand-hook?' Marathe tells her that Gertraude is in a "comatose and vegetating state for almost one year," and that her only hope is a particular kind of artificial heart. It is for her, he confesses and proclaims, that he betrays "friends and cell, the cause of my nation." Kate is incredulous. This isn't love, this is "low self-esteem and self abuse and Settling for Less" (78 1), and by the way, it isn't very flattering to be told that she reminds him of his wife with no skull and a hook hand. Marathe tries to explain the difference between chains of self and the chains of his own choice, and questions Kate's (American) belief that there is "no love without the pleasure . . . . This whole idea of the pleasure and good feelings being what to choose" (78 1). Marathe, perhaps frustrated by her obtuse egocentricity, offers to show her some real pleasure, "more good feeling and pleasure than ever before" (782) . He of course means the fatal Entertainment. 782-785. Mario and Hal continue their late night or early morning conversation. Hal is extremely candid and frustrated by his interlocutor's misapprehensions. Hal regrets lying and evading Mario, who insists, "I
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wasn't hurt. I don't want you to be sad" (784) . Another extended footnote, number 32 1 on page 785, takes us to a conversation between Hal and Mike Pemulis, in the ETA dorm at 7:30 PM on Thursday, November 12, YDAU. Mike is tutoring Hal for the forthcoming math SATs, and trying to persuade Hal to join him in a "meaningful transcendent DMZ-type" (1064) interlude before Tucson. Hal is wary and reluctant. 785-786. Ennet House, 8:30 AM, November 17, YDAU. Johnette Foltz is working the night shift in place of the injured Don Gately when a boy appears at the door requesting info about Substance Anonymous meetings. We recognize the kid as Hal. 787, footnote 324: 17 November, YDAU, in the ETA males' locker room. Todd ("Postal Weight") Possalthwaite is having a crisis of confidence and questioning the meaning of life. His Big Buddy Mike Pemulis, who genuinely likes the kid, tries to help and encourage him. Despite his devotion to drugs and wise-ass attitude, Pemulis can be a good friend and decent guy. He talks first with Keith Freer and jokes about "metaphysical angst at thirteen" (1067), while learning more about the sources of Postal Weight's distress. Like a lot of stress in this novel, it seems to have its origin in paternal expectation. Pemulis offers both sympathy - "if you can't trust the ostensively [sic] loving patriarchal bosom you can't trust anyone at all" - and clinical detachment: "Let me both validate and remind you that the kertwang you're reeling under is emotion-based and not fact-based" (1070) . Pemulis comes close to expressing the narrator's own perception that "They were the age staring down the barrel not ofls anything true but Am I true, of What am I, ofWhat is this thing, and it made them strange" (1071). Other ETA students burst in with news thatjohn Wayne "is insanely holding forth innermost thoughts for public ears" (1072). Pemulis proffers a last bit of cryptic, maybe salient advice for Postal Weight: "Never trust the father you can see" (1072) . 787-795. Molly Notkin,Joelle's fiiend, host ofthe party she attended, is being grilled by Rod Tine, Jr. and the Office ofUnspecified Services.
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Molly obligingly provides lots ofinformation aboutJoelle - but we must remember it is Molly's perspective, and includes speculation and inference, not always verifiable truth. We get one of the most detailed descriptions of the notorious Entertainment titled Irifim�e Jest (V or VI), starringJoelle van Dyne as "some kind of maternal instantiation of the archetypal figure Death" (788), naked, pregnant, and disfigured. Joelle never saw the lethal film. Molly also has many critical insights into the film and the Auteur's oeuvre, but the OUS tells her to "spare them all the eggheaded abstractions" (792). Molly says thatJoelle was present neither at James's suicide nor at his funeral, though she was a beneficiary ofhis will. The Auteur's funeral took place in Quebec, though Molly doubts that Avril Incandenza has any association with insurgency groups.Joelle persuadedJames to forsake alcohol, which he did for many months until his suicide. Molly suspects that it was Avril who deposited the bottle ofWild Turkey at the suicide scene as a comment upon Joelle's role, though Joelle didn't need any more encouragement to feel guilty about James's suicide, for it was evidently alcohol that "was keeping the man's tether ravelled" (79 1). Molly says thatJoelle's mother committed suicide on Thanksgiving day the year before James Incandenza killed himself, each in a ghastly way. Joelle was sexually connected only to Orin, not to James, and that Orin, "the little rotter had enough malcathected issues with his mother to keep all of Vienna humming briskly for quite some time" (79 1). Molly also says that the "exceptionally attractive Madame Psychosis suffered an irreparable facial trauma on the same Thanksgiving Day that her mother killed herself" (79 1), leaving her Hideously and Improbably Deformed. Then living with Orin in Boston, she had come home to Kentucky for the holiday, where her father's adoration and infantilization of her, always strange, got really creepy. Speaking the Unspeakable about Daddy's obsession with his daughter causedJoelle's Daddy to confess his "doomed love for the little girl he'd escorted to the movies" (793) and couldn't bear to lose to maturity and another man. "The denial-system's pressure blew" (794) and Joelle's mother freaked out and said that she and her husband hadn't been intimate sinceJoelle first menstruated, that she knew something weird was going
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on, and that she (the mother) had been molested all through childhood. Now she sees that she has married the same kind of monster her father had been.Joelle's mother flees to the basement where her father has his laboratory, full of acids for his research. She grabs a beaker, takes aim at joelle's Daddy, and hurls acid at him. He ducks, so does Orin, and Joelle receives a "direct facial hit, resulting in the traumatic deformity" (795). Nobody pressed charges. Joelle's mother killed herself in characteristically grotesque fashion, putting one arm at a time down the garbage disposal. Pemulis remains "brass-mask-faced" as he gets the boot. His mock ingenuous question, "And this affects the WhataBurger, my chances?" provokes uproarious laughter from Nwangi, deLint, and Watson, and Pemulis find "their good humor almost infectious" (1076) . Pemulis has located his pilfered Tenuates in jim Troeltsch's possession, and shuddered to contemplate the effect of the drug on the virgin-pure John Wayne. Ironically, then, this "Wayne-dosing had been a total accident and in no way Pemulis's deal" (1073). 795-808. Hal is driving to Natick, Massachusetts for a Narcotics Anonymous meeting listed in the Metro-Boston Recovery Options booklet he was given at Ennet House. Hal has been drug free since last week, when he got flagged and abruptly Abandoned All Hope, but he's plagued by nightmares, saliva, and terrible symptoms of withdrawal. So, feeling pathetic and absurd, he's come to check out this NA meeting at a place in Natick called Quabbin Recovery Systems. "The whole place is so quiet Hal can hear the squeak ofblood in his head" (798). He finds the meeting, listed for 7:30, already in progress, with nine or ten adult middle-class males, and a round middle-aged guy up front holding a teddy bear, saying, "I'd like to suggest we men all hold our bears tight and let our Inner Infant nonjudgmentally listen to Kevin's Inner Infant expressing his grief and loss" (800) . Hal identifies himself as "Mike." Now Hal sees that all the men are holding teddy bears, as is the "Buddha-as-California-surfer-dude" with the "blandly kind didactic" (804) voice who is running the meeting. Various guys express their love, support, and non-judgmental empathy for Kevin, and Hal begins to
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worry that this NA meeting is some sort of "cosmetic-psychology encounter thing" (80 1). Kevin starts talking about his II's abandonment and deep-deprivation issues. Meanwhile music is playing "going absolutely nowhere, like Philip Glass on Quaaludes" (802). Hal wonders "what the etiquette is in NA about getting up and leaving right in the middle of somebody's Infantile revelation of need" (803). Then Kevin tells about being left alone when his parents were killed by a falling radio traffic helicopter - and Hal recognizes the speaker as Kevin Bain, the brother ofMarlon Bain, Orin's "doubles and chemical mischief partner" at ETA. Hal is terrified Kevin will recognize him. He suddenly realizes that this is no NA meeting but one ofthose "men's-issues-Men's-Movement type Meetings." It turns out that the list of meetings Hal picked up is nearly two years out-dated. There are several things he'd like to tell Kevin, such as that being held and loved by your parents "didn't automatically seem like it rendered you emotionally whole or Substance free" (805). Hal isn't much moved by Harv, the blond and Buddhaesque group leader, now "waggling the bear's arms back and forth and making his voice high and cartoon-characterish" and urging Kevin to ask his bear to ask someone in the group for a hug. Kevin selects a guy named Jim who doesn't respond to Kevin's overture. Hal is listing in alphabetical order all the places on earth he would rather be right now, including tumbling over American Falls in "a rusty old noxious-waste-displacement drum" (806). The group begins to chant "Meet Those Needs" like a football crowd chanting "Block That Kick!" Under Harv's prodding, Kevin realizes he is supposed to actively go over to Jim and ask to be held. To the chants of the group, Kevin crawls like a baby on all fours, awkwardly holding his teddy bear, seeking to satisfY those Needs. 809-827. Don Gately lies in pain in St. Elizabeth's Hospital's Trauma Wing, recovering from the gunshot wound to his shoulder and trying valiantly not to take medication, especially Demerol, to which he was addicted. Gately's wound was caused by the bullet passing through and missing bone but doing great and various damage to soft tissue. He's developed a massive infection, and
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writhes in fever-dreams. "He didn't know what would happen, but he didn't think he could stand it" (8 17) . Going in and out of consciousness, haunted by repetitious dreams, he cannot speak, which provides a welcome opportunity to several of his visitors, who turn out to have long uninterrupted narratives to share. The first visitor is Tiny Ewell, newly shaven, who tells the tale ofhis experience as a third-grader in Watertown, where he fell in with a bunch of tough Irish kids and formed the Money-Stealers' Club. Tiny was the brains and mouthpiece of the gang which collected money for the spurious Project Hope Youth Hockey fund. Tiny opened a savings account but was embezzling the money from his club: "the power had roused something dark in my personality, and the adrenaline drove it forward" (812). The tough boys eventually wanted their shares for Xmas gifts, but Tiny had embezzled more than he could make good. Facing exposure and a beating, Tiny stole his father's union slush fund money. He got pummeled anyway. Other visitors arrive: Joelle van Dyne, unless it was a nurse or a phantom, running a cold washcloth over his face; Pat Montesian tenderly consoling him and bursting into tears. Gately is dying to know "the legal fallout of the other night's thug-fracas" (8 18) . Did anybody get killed? But he cannot speak. He is visited by the catatonic Mrs. Lopate in a wheelchair and at some point for sure byJoelle van Dyne. "The whole right side ofhimself hurt so bad each breath was like a hard decision. He wanted to cry like a small child" (8 18) . Another visitor i s Calvin Thrust, Ennet House alum and senior counselor, four years sober, with a pretty complete and panoramic view of what happened after Gately blacked out from shock. We learn that Bruce Green threatened Randy Lenz and scared him into leaving, which wasn't such a good idea considering Gately might need Lenz as a witness. After the fracas subsided and Gately passed out from loss ofblood, there was much debate about what to do with Don, "because it was well known that he was on Probie against a real serious bit, and with all due trust and respect to Don it wasn't clear at that point from the
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scattered damaged Canadian forms still in different prone positions out in the street who'd done what to who in defense of whatever or not" (820). Somehow they had gotten the heavy and heavily bleeding Don into Thrust's beloved Corvette, never mind the blood on the upholstery. Gately is furiously, frantically trying to learn whether anybody got killed and whether a certain North Shore Assistant DA has turned up. The veiled girl, Thrust reports, wanted to go with Don; the missing girl Amy J. finally showed up "alljonesy and hungover" and got sacked. Lots of small details get mixed in with major issues, such as, what happened to the gun? Thrust starts wondering if Don will keep his arm or try one of those miraculous new prostheses they've developed. Gately is trying to figure out what day it is and how long it's been since he was shot, while Thrust runs through recent histories of nearly everyone at Ennet House. Gately finds Thrust "insufferable and wishes he'd just fucking go already" (826), but then Thrust mentions that almost everybody has filed depositions with the Boston Finest and these "rather weirder Federal guys with goofy-looking archaic crew cuts" (826) who must have come investigating because ofthe "like inter-O.NA.N. element of the Nucks" (826) . But the biggest problem is the missing alleged Item (gun) that makes the difference, Thrust opines, "between a seiiorio of ironshod self-defense and one ofjust maybe a huge fucking beef' (827) . Gately desperately tries to ask if he killed anybody but all that emerges are little kittenish sounds. Apparently one Nuck did expire, the one stomped by Clenette and Yolanda, who shrewdly left her high heel right there in the guy's eyeball. Thrust urges Gately to ransack his memory for "where and with who he last saw the alleged gun" (827) . 827-845. Geoffrey Day visits Don Gately in the hospital, to share his intimate stuff with the mute and effectively paralyzed Don whose "right side hurts so bad he can barely hear" (828). Don has feverish dreams of a tiny acne-scarred Oriental woman, and flickering appearances of a ghostish figure, who gradually materializes as a "very tall sunken-chested man in black-frame glasses" (829) who identifies himself or itself as a wraith.
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The Wraith looks and talks like James 0. Incandenza, Himself himsel£ The Wraith uses words Don doesn't recognize, yet insists Don mustn't get hung up on "dream-v.-real controversies" (830) and that he should take advantage of its presence. Unable to speak, Don can barely make sounds, and wonders about the Wraith speaking, as it were, in Don's own voice. He worries that the Wraith is going to unload on him like all his other visitors, who regard him as an "empty confessional booth" (83 1). The Wraith does pirouettes, appears and disappears, and plants in Gately's brain weird words, "a sort oflexical rape . . . terms he doesn't know from shinola" (832-833) : ANNULATE, SCOPOPHILIA are words the reader will recognize. Another odd insertion is POOR YORICK. The Wraith could be: "a sort of epiphanyish visitation," his Disease addiction he calls the Sergeant at Arms; a message from a Higher Power; a lonely ghost. The Wraith defines the people used as mere background on TV or films as "figurants:· In his own work, "you could bloody well hear every single performer's voice, no matter how far out on the cinematographic or narrative periphery they were" (835). In his films, "it was real life's real egalitarian babble of figurantless crowds, of the animate world's real agora, the babble ofcrowds every member ofwhich was the central and articulate protagonist of his own entertainment" (835-836) . The Wraith confides that "his own personal youngest offspring, a son, the one most like him" (837) seemed to become a figurant increasingly "blank, inbent, silent, frightening, mute" (838), more and more of a "hidden boy:· Toward the end, says the Wraith, he feared his boy was experimenting with Substances, which he himself abused, his favorite being Wild Turkey. This gets Gately's attention. The Wraith implies that his films, the entertainments, were diversionary, or means by which he and the mute son could "simply converse' (838). The Wraith bears down heavily on the paternity theme, insisting that "the worst kind of gut-wrenching intergenerational interface is better than withdrawal or hiddenness on either side" (839). Gately grew up without a father; instead there was a nasty former Navy MP who (literally) tore the wings of flies and who regularly beat
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Gately's mother while little Bimmie regarded his mother's plight as "in some strangely emphatic way not his business" (84 1). Three old White Flagger pals come to cheer him up - only to reveal that someone sounding ominously like his old enemy the Assistant DA has been sitting outside in the hall. 845-846. November 19, YDAU. Marathe and Fortier proceed with plans to locate the Master Entertainment, by "acquiring" members of the Auteur's immediate family. Newly "acquired" experimental subjects to test the deadliness of the cartridges include figures we recognize as Lenz and Poor Tony. Marathe had selected a ruthless young operative named Balbalis, who still has his legs, albeit paralyzed and stickishly withered, to abduct a bus full of tennis players; there will be casualties. Balbalis doesn't mind. 846-85 1 . Don Gately continues to have wild and feverish dreams. In one dreamjoelle van Dyne promises him "near-terminal pleasures," only to unveil and reveal the head ofWinston Churchill, complete with jowls and cigar. Don drifts into an extended memory of the strange old lady who lived near him, Mrs. Waite. Something was wrong with her; mothers ordered their kids to keep their distance; the kids said she was a witch. Still little Don found himself over there in her kitchen a few times when things got particularly unpleasant at home. Though Mrs. Waite had no money at all, she told Don she was saving her cigarette fund for something special. This turns out to be a cake she bakes for Don's birthday. The cake gets tossed in the garbage by an overcautious mother. Don "promoted" some cigarettes for Mrs. Waite, and left them for her, but he never heard from her again. "Everybody had their own private troubles," his mother had explained to him, when Mrs. Waite was discovered to have hanged hersel£ Now for some reason dreams ofjoelle take place in Mrs. Waite's kitchen, and in one disturbing dream, Mrs. Waite, who is Joelle, is Death. "As in the figure of Death, Death incarnate" (850) . Death says that Moms are obsessively loving, with a tinge of selfishness about their mother-love: "they're trying to make amends for a murder neither of
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you quite remember, except maybe in dreams" (850). As Gately heeds Death's explanations, he understands more and more - and becomes sadder and sadder. 851-854. ETA, 5 :00 AM , November 20, YDAU. Hal also wakes from nightmares and finds it snowing heavily; it could be "cancellation weather" (852). He's hoping the big ETA exhibition, fundraiser, and party is called off. They usually invite some foreign team they are bound to beat; this year's victims are from Quebec, the Canadian Jr. Davis and Jr. Wightman Cup teams. The desolate weather matches Hal's dreary, strung out mood. He wonders whether his beloved Bob Hope had become "not just the high-point of the day but its actual meaning" (853). 854-856. Trauma Wing. Joelle, "the apparently real nondream" person, is visiting Don Gately. Though he was never a big devotee of Madame Psychosis, Gately feels a rush, "as if the fact that she's a public personage makes him feel somehow physically actuated, like more th� feeling" (855).Joelle for her part thinks Don "has no idea how heroic or even romantic he looks . . . wounded in service to somebody who did not deserve service, half out ofhis tree from pain and refusing narcotics" (855). She tells him about her struggles to stay clean and with the program, and how she, like Don, has begun to take seriously what had first seemed to be the "trite cliches" of the program. Gately remains mute. Only then does he discover that he has all along had a tube down his throat, preventing him from speaking. Joelle says that formerly, trying to stop, she became frightened by the number of days without free-basing, as if she were Evel Knievel hoping to vault an increasingly large number of cars; now she feels she can do this. Gately thinks about the injunction to live in the present, one day, one hour at a time; how as an addict he could not deal with that and now he can endure it.Joelle has brought a photo album and shows Don pictures ofher own personal Daddy and scenes of her childhood. Overcome by Joelle, Gately in his mind has wooed, won, married, had children, and is living a ripe old age with grandchildren on his lap.
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864-876. ETA, 4:56 AM , November 18, YDAU. Hal wakes before dawn, as he has for the last ten days, feeling terrible from withdrawal. "The whole scene had an indescribable pathos to it" (868). It's snowing heavily, windy and terribly cold. He discovers Ortho Stice sitting in a chair apparently gazing fixedly out a window: his forehead is stuck, frozen to the glass window. They discuss if and whether the exhibition match might be rescheduled or played indoors somewhere else. Ortho is afraid to pull his frozen stuck forehead away from the glass. Hal stands there "horrified, admiring The Darkness's ballsy calm" (870). Ortho asks Hal if he believes in supernatural occurrences. Hal says that "Himself allegedly used to see his father's ghost . . . but then again toward the end he used to see black-widow spiders in his hair, too, and claimed I wasn't speaking sometimes when I was sitting right there speaking to him" (870) . Hal tries to pull Ortho's face from the window, but it is painful and unsuccessful. Troeltsch appears, emerging, inexplicably, from Axford's single room, and immediately begins his newscaster routine. They decide to seek help from the custodians, Kenkle and Brandt. The custodians bring hot water to the window, and Hal hears the scream of Ortho's painful release. Hal tries to make out his own facial expression in another window: "I looked sketchy and faint to myself, tentative and ghostly against all that blazing white" (876) . 876-883. State House Annex, Boston, November 20, YDAU. A meeting, presented as drama (characters and dialogue only), recalling Mario's puppet film. The purpose ofthe meeting is to review and approve a "dissemination" or advertisement discouraging kids from watching dangerous cartridges like the lethal Entertainment. Present and participating are : Rodney Ti ne Sr., Chief of Unspecified Services and White House Adviser on Interdependent Relati o n s ; Maureen H o o l ey, Vice-President fo r C h i l d r e n ' s Entertainment, InterLace Te!Entertainment, Inc. ; Carl E . ("Buster") Yee, Director of Marketing and Product-Perception, Glad Flaccid Receptacle Corporati o n ; Rodney Ti ne Jr., D eputy Regional
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Coordinator, U.S. Office ofUnspecified Services; P. Tom Veals, Viney and Veals Advertising, Unltd. Complaining about the cold, the snow, various winter ailments and technical difficulties, the group reviews the various ad proposals, Frankie the Hankie, hated by kids, associated with snot and boogers, and the new hope, Fully Functional Phil, a prancing ass, "a blur of kid-type activity" (880) with a loud and clear message: "not every entertainment cartridge out there is necessarily a good old safe pre-approved InterLace TeleEntertainment product" (880) , so, kids, be sure to "accept no Spontaneous Dissemination and play no post-delivered entertainment without checking with an authority figure" (882). And if you find your parents zombied on a weird new cartridge, don't look at it. No-ho-ho ho-ruzy! 882-896. Gately lies thinking aboutjoelle, "the fantasies of romance and rescue, and the consequent shame" (883) . "She hadn't just come to tell her troubles to someone that couldn't make humanjudgment-noises" (884). He wonders where those strange ghostwords - words he doesn't even recognize - came from. His Crocodilian sponsor Ferocious Francis visits, mocking Gately's "Captain Courageous" act against the six armed "Hawaiians:· Gately is still desperately trying to find out if he killed anyone, and who the hell is that sitting out in the hall? A doctor, Pakistani or Indian, arrives to describe the severe nature of Gately's wound, and to say that "the laws of trauma dictate that the pain will intensifY as the healing begins to commence" (887). He strongly urges medication, as mute Gately lies hoping Ferocious Francis "will step in and set this ad-man for the Disease," Demerol, "straight once and for all" (886). The doctor is oblivious to Gately's efforts to resist lapsing back into addiction, to putting himself back in the cage: "Surrender your courageous fear of dependence and let us do our profession, young sir" (888). With his one good arm Gately grabs the Pakistani doctor by the balls and squeezes until he screams like a woman. Or is this a dream, like Gately's memories of"good old Demerol . . . clamoring to be Entertained" (890) ? He struggles to "Let Them Go, the
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thoughts . .. do not Entertain them" (890) . Gately remembers friends he lost to drugs. Now more visitors: McDade and Diehl come to cheer him up with a Get Well card but also have "disparaging news" that the Item, the .44 caliber pistol, is still missing, probably snatched by Lenz, the scum bag Don rescued. Ejected from Ennet House, Lenz has been spotted Out There, officially relapsed. Gately endures: "it's a bit hard to see why a quote Loving God would have him go through the sausage-grinder of getting straight just to lie here in total discomfort and have to say no to medically advised Substances and get ready to go to jail just because Pat M. doesn't have the brass to make these selfish bottom-feeding dipshits stand up and do the right thing for once" (894). And now it's time for a much-too-attractive nurse to readjust his catheter. 896-902. ETA. Hal's narrative voice again. After Ortho's "defenestration," Hal continues to feel awful and listens to Tosca; he has a spell or panic attack, with a bad trip element: just intense and vivid. It wasn't like being high, but it was still very: lucid:' John Wayne had had a violent reaction to a decongestant and behaved weirdly in public; the Moms herself had stayed with John Wayne late into the night at the hospital. Hal thinks that it "seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end . . . . It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic" (900). He thinks about Hamlet again, wondering why the hero, "for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost" (900) . Hal speculates about his mother and Uncle Charles, "probably not related to the Moms by actual blood." All this seems lucid enough to someone in a panic attack lying on the floor. "I felt denser now; I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal" (902). 902-906. Don Gately lies thinking about his adolescence as the Big Indestructible Moron whose size, strength, and massive head made him a young football star. He wasn't a bully but he wasn't a student either; he always ran with a bad crowd and got into oral narcotics early; the
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combination ofbeer and Quaaludes would bring on "The Attack of the Killer Sidewalks:' This didn't dissuade him. One pal named Trent Kite was brainy enough to synthesize Quaaludes in the kitchen ofany vacationing parents' house. For a while Don took Substances only at night and never before games, but the temptation ofnarcotics and the difficulty of school work - English was his Water Lou - did him in or brought him down. "Gately's sixteenth year is still mostly a gray blank" (906) . In a feeble attempt to return to school and football, he couldn't even read the Classic comic book ofthe famous novel, Ethan From. 906-9 1 1. Hal's perspective again. He's been dozing and wakes hungry. "I hadn't been hungry in over a week" of detox; "I could remember when I was always hungry, constantly hungry" (907). His best friend Mike Pemulis shows up and wants to talk. Freer interrupts them to say that there is a "human strip of forehead-flesh upstairs on the hall window" (909). Hal urges Pemulis to fetch the entertainment, Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms . . . which Hal cues to its final five minutes for a particularly significant scene, but he thinks about Himselfs funeral, and how a gull shat on CT and when he opened his mouth a large fly flew inside. The scene Hal wants to review features an actor named Paul Anthony Heaven, the kind of nonprofessional Himself favored, who was especially effective at conveying a "deadening institutional presence" (9 10). 9 1 1-916. Gately lies in the Trauma Ward, "in terrific infected pain, trying to Abide between cravings for relief by remembering" (9 15) . Having dropped out o f high school, h e became a full-time drug addict and part-time burglar. A local crook named Whitey Sorkin hires Gately and Gene Fackleman, another very large young man who craves drugs, to work as his "operatives" in the business ofgambling and debt-collection. They were Whitey's Twin Towers, occasionally using muscle and force, but nothing really nasty.
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Gately was not a naturally cruel guy, though he did find that once he got started "it was like something ferocious and uncontrolled on a slope inside the big kid got dislodged and started to roll on its own" (9 14). They were joined by another strung-out guy, Nucci. Their real profession was doing addictive drugs. Getting high, Gately would feel like a baby in a crib under a sky "that bulged and receded like a big gray lung" (9 15). One day he was watching a BU football game on TV when the announcer made a big deal about this kid just two years younger than Don - a local punter who was a walk-on and "an inspirational story:' Don found himself crying like a baby. Interpolation: Michael Pemulis, opening his stash in the ceiling at ETA, discovers that panels of the suspended ceiling where he hides his dope have "somehow fallen out" (916). 9 16-934. Gately is still trying to Abide, remembering, "trapped inside his huge chattering head" (922). Don's partner and pal Fackelmann had been ripping off their boss Whitey Sorkin in little ways for some time, while they had also been doing serious full-time burglary. Whitey hired a punk named Bobby C who liked to hurt people. After Fackelmann died, Gately found money stolen from Whitey which he returned "Let him know somebody cared" (9 18) . The Nurse Cathy o r Kathy i s way too attractive; Don i s "forced to confront the fact that he's never once been with a really healthy girl, and not with even so much as a girl of any kind in sobriety" (9 19). Weirdly invaded by more ghostwords, big words planted by the Wraith and incomprehensible to Don, he rides through the "circumambient sexual tension" and feels sick with longing and self-pity, while a young doctor shows off for the "horrifYingly attractive" nurse. When they leave Don alone, it's even worse, the twilight afternoon time which always brought on his worst dread; probably it dates back to being alone as a toddler in his crib below "Herman the Ceiling that Breathed" (923). Pain has left him completely "alone, worse off than a toddler," where he "suddenly confronts deep-focus memories" (923) . Don was "disastrously involved" with Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, an upscale "not very healthy and pale and incredibly passive Danvers girl"
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who was "pretty definitely an alcoholic" (924). She would pass out and have to be taken home unconscious. Pamela called Gately "her 'Night-Errand and fell passively in love with his refusal to Take Advantage" (924) , or rape her after she had passed out. Pamela, however, was so out of it that "any sort of sex any time at all with her would have been classified as Taking Advantage" (924) . Don's partner Fackelmann came to grief through a bet which went awry and gave the Fax a chance to pocket $125,000 which a Yuppie named Eighties Bill had paid Fackelmann to be delivered to Whitey Sorkin. Owing to confusion between the bettor and Sorkin's administrator Gwendine O'Shay about which way Eighties Bill had bet on a Yale basketball game, Fackelmann was paid money he (and Whitey Sorkin) thought they owed Eighties Bill, so Fackelmann unexpectedly finds himself holding $250,000. With this kind of serious money, not very much smarts, and a craving for Dilaudid, Fackelmann yields to temptation, and gets immediately high on dope provided by Dr. Wo, the opiate-dealer in Chinatown. Fackelmann hasn't thought this scam through very carefully. He's forgotten that Eighties Bill is the son of Sixties Bob, a crony of W hitey Sorkin who is bound to get wind of the bet and mention it to his pal, which will inevitably cook Fax's goose. To which he is oblivious, having consumed "staggering quantities of Dilaudid, trying to mentally blot out the reality of the fact that he was going to get demapped if he didn't take some kind of decisive remedial action at once" (932). Gately's way ofexpressing loyalty had been to get high along with Fax. Lying in his hospital bed, he now realizes "that a drug addict was at root a craven and pathetic creature: a thing that basically hides" (932). Gately dreams: "he's with a very sad kid and they're in a graveyard digging some dead guy's head up and it's really important, like Continental-Emergency important and the sad kid is trying to scream at Gately that the important thing was buried in the guy's head and to divert the Continental Emergency to start digging the guy's head up before it's too late, but the kid moves his mouth but nothing comes out Too Late' (934). .
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934-938. In Gately's memory, he and Fackelmann are totally stoned, making their way through a mountain ofDilaudid, eating M&Ms, pissing their pants and the floor. Their pal Kite, knowing that Fackelmann is about to be eliminated, takes his gear and clears out. All Fackelmann can do is get higher and repeat his stock line, "That's a goddamn lie" (935). Don's girlfriend Pamela leans on the buzzer and isn't admitted. The phone rings but isn't answered. For the whacked-out Don, getting up is like reaching for the bars ofhis playpen. He wobbles like a toddler and the floor rushes up to him. 938-94 1 . Joelle van Dyne is being interviewed, by unidentified interrogators. The subject, ofcourse, is the Entertainment in which she was featured. One scene's point of view was "from the crib" (939). She says that lenses, handmade, were jim's forte, "what he had to bring to the whole enterprise" (939). This lens was supposed to "reproduce an infantile visual field." Under questioning, she says that the Masters of everything unreleased "were buried with him . . . At least that was in his will" (940), but she doesn't know ifJim ever even got a "finished Masters" of the Entertainment. "That's yourstory," Joelle adds. "Ifit got made and nobody's seen it, the Master, it's in there with him. Buried. That's just a guess" (940). 941-958. Hal narrates again, on the morning of the blizzard. Ortho needed a whole roll of tissue to stick to his bleeding face. Mario and two kids are watching Accomplice!, Himselfs film. Hal helps Mario with his police lock's vest: "Mario's chest is so fragile-feeling that I could feel his heartbeat's tremble through the vest and sweatshirt" (942) . Another weird telekinetic development: Ortho's bed is up near the ceiling ofthe room. Hal learns that Troeltsch switched room assignments with Trevor Axford. Hal senses glimmers of another panic-attack. Stice thinks the flying bed is a signal that "he's been chosen or selected to get haunted or possessed by some kind ofbeneficiary or guardian ghost" (943). Hal thinks about Himselfs project to "strip away the pernicious illusion of realism and to remind the audience that they were in reality
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watching actors acting and not people behaving" (944), whatJOI termed "illusory realism:' This later film, meant to be "self-consciously nonillusory and wildly entertaining" (945) is part of Himselfs "abandonment of anticonfluentialism" (944) . Hal thinks back to a turgid essay on Himself, as unreadable as the film appears unwatchable, which asks, "why so much aesthetically ambitious film was so boring and why so much shitty reductive commercial entertainment was so much fun" (947) . It's a blizzard of historic proportions. The kids watch TP news about the storm, as Hal watches and day-dreams. In 1998, the last huge snow storm, ETA had just opened, and Himselfwas beginning his obsession with film. He'd always been interested in optics: "From military optics to annular optics to entrepreneurial optics to tennis-pedagogy to film" (949). Hal remarks that "I too had moved serially between obsessions, as a child" (950). Before the family lived at ETA they lived in Weston, Massachusetts, which Hal remembers in fond detail, like "tableaux. They seemed more like snapshots than films" (950) . He pictures his father, "this silent figure . . . impossible to reconcile with the sensibility of something like Accomplice!' (95 1). Other ghosts flit in and out of Hal's memories. He recalls his paternal grandmother, described by Orin as looking like "an embalmed poodle" (953), eventually wheelchair bound, living out her life in a Boston brownstone. Now he remarks signs of aging in the Moms, her "gradual withdrawal and reluctance to leave the grounds" (954). Hal doesn't want to consider very long how this makes him feel inside; "the brutal questions are the ones thatforce you to lie" (954) . He realizes he's glad it's snowing so hard, that he would prefer not to play. He contemplates feigning a fall, to "be the faultless victim of a freak accident . . . the object of compassionate sorrow rather than disappointed sorrow" (954-955). John Wayne appears. He and Hal "never had much to say to one another" (956). NowJohn Wayne has in a sense replaced Himself; "he and the Moms were tight" (957) . Hal thinks ofOrin's assurance that Himself was faithful to the Moms to the end, that his attachment toJoelle was not sexual. But Hal thinks that John Wayne had been "involved with the Moms sexually" since he arrived.
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958. Joelle goes "home" after her interrogation about the Entertainment with the Wheelchair Assassins. Parked outside Ennet House in the snow storm is a Sheriff's car. 958-960. Another AA meeting with an addict named Mikey giving testimony. Denied access except with permission to his child, under a restraining order, Mikey has anger issues, "a spring-loaded temper," as well as alcohol problems. 960-964. Ennet House, Pat M's office. Don Gately's nemesis the Assistant District Attorney for Suffolk County comes to see Pat Montesian, who is "cool steel when it came to protecting the residents and House:' The DA tells her about his wife Tooty's breakdown and his own "enmeshment" with her condition since Gately sent them the Polaroids of the tooth-brushes planted in the burglars' rectums. The DA acknowledges he has harbored a resentment, has hated Gately, and has become obsessed with sending Gately to prison. But he's come to realize that revenge won't help Tooty's condition and that he has to let it go. "It's so damnably i'roni'c. The man's going to two-step out of at the very least a probation-violation and prosecution on all his old highly convictable charges because I have to pitch the case, for the sake of my own recovery" (962-963). Indeed, the DA, who is now in a recovery program, is supposed to "make amends" to Gately, but he just can't bring himself to ask forgiveness; Tooty is still scraping her tongue until it bleeds. 964-971 . MIT indoor tennis courts. November 20, YDAU. ETA was able to find an indoor venue for its big exhibition match and gala fund-raiser. Just about everybody is on hand, with a few exceptions: Michael Pemulis, expelled, is "whitherever," and Poutrincourt hasn't shown either (there are indications that she is an undercover agent for the Wheelchair Assassins). There were rumors that the Quebecois tennis players were arriving - in wheelchairs! Kids who ran to confirm the report didn't return. The ETA players are getting their knees and ankles taped by Barry Loach.
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There is another digression, telling the story of the ETA trainer Barry Loach: how he was under the thumb of a powerful Catholic mother who expected one of her sons to become a priest and was disappointed by all of Barry's older brothers. The last best hope of the Loach family before Barry's fate was sealed was a brother who did have a call and entered ajesuit seminary. But he experienced a "kind of degenerative Lou Gehrig's Disease of the spirit" (968) which left little Barry the task of"trying to talk the brother down from the misanthropic spiritual ledge he was on" (968) . To disprove his brother's despairing misanthropy, Barry agrees to conduct a moral experiment: in the disgusting guise of a homeless, louse-ridden derelict, Barry stands at the Park Street T-stop on the Boston Common, imploring passersby not for money but "just to touch him" (969). Nobody does, but guilty people force money on him, as other street people start to imitate Barry, begging people, "Touch me, please, please, someone!" (970). No human contact whatsoever; Barry himself is on the verge of "disappearing forever into the fringes and dregs of metro Boston street life" (970), when someone appears, a fourteen-year-old with clawlike hands, who in his clueless and lovable way extends his hand to Barry Loach. Meeting Mario saved Barry Loach and brought him to ETA. 971-972. Orin is being grilled or worse by Wheelchair Assassins in Tucson. The adoring Swiss hand-model is part of the team of interviewers, no longer a doting Subject. Orin is being interrogated by nasty customers who keep asking him "Where Is The Master Buried?" (972). Mlle. Luria P - , a.k.a. the Swiss hand model, is part of the torture team. 972-981. Gately continues to recover and remember, realizing that "it was impossible to imagine a world without himself in it" (973). He relives the terrible final scene with his drug-addled friend Fax. How his girl-friend Pamela found them hinging on Dilaudid, recklessly stoned and pissing on the floor; how Whitey Sorkin's henchmen Bobby C and gang arrived, as did two Canadian small time thugs named DesMonts
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and Pointgrave, and some Oriental tough guys with guns. They have been sent to deal with Fackelmann's treachery. To prevent Don from intervening, they shoot him with "pharm grade Sunshine," a powerful narcotic which sends Gately into a drug induced stupor as the bad guys sew Fackelmann's eyelids to the skin above his eyebrows. Gately's legs are "opting out," as the floors attack. Pointgrave takes the TP viewer off the wall and inserts a cartridge, "one about ultra-violence and sadism" (98 1). When Gately recovered from his stupor in that earlier episdoe, he now remembers, "he was fl a t on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out" (98 1).
Chapter Seven Key Themes & Narrative TechniQues nlVhat
am
I?" (1071): The Problem of Personal
Identity We've seen that in the opening episode Hal Incandenza, utterly lost, makes a puzzling reference to Don Gately. For the ensuing 972 pages, they never meet, nor does either think at all about the other. Then, late in the novel, Gately describes a dream about a kid, evidently Hal, at his father's grave, screaming about a cartridge buried with his father. Now there may well be a logical explanation for this gap that is a connection, or connection that is a gap. But this crux suggests, above all, the problem of personal identity in I'!fim�e Jest. Most of us believe or want to believe that personal identity, at least our own, is reliable, dependable, and fundamental. Somewhere, somehow, beyond our frame ofreference, the psyches of Don Gately and Hal Incandenza intersect or overlap. At such moments, I'!fim�e Jest suggests that identity is more porous, fluid, and elusive than we might suspect or customarily believe. The vexed problem of personal identity is dramatized in many forms throughout I'!fim�e Jest. There is the familiar crisis ofadolescent identity facing ETA students "staring down the barrel not of Is anything true but of Am I true, of What am I, of What is this thing, and it made them strange" (1071). Hal and Pemulis, and many other characters, take mind-bending, 209
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consciousness-altering drugs - terms suggesting, perhaps too optimistically, the liquidity of identity. Addicts at Ennet House try desperately to locate and reassert some sort of self separate from the Substance, the spider, the poison. Hugh Steeply, master of disguise, is in drag and becomes "Helen Steeply." His interlocutor Marathe is a double agent who is actually a triple agent, or regarded as such, or pretending to be, or . . . . Marathe's articulation of selfhood is a bailli ng question: "have I merely pretended to pretend to pretend to betray?" (94). Where if anywhere is the there there? While Infinite Jest conducts a rigorous, comic, outrageous interrogation of personal identity, it affirms - surprisingly - some basic elements or attributes of identity. It is significant that there is an answer to Marathe's seemingly unanswerable question, "have I merely pretended to pretend," etc. Indeed, this insistence upon or hope for meaningful selfhood is one important way in which David Foster Wallace differs from and corrects his post-modernist predecessors,John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. In !tifim�e Jest there indeed appears to be, provisionally and potentially, a there there, some enduring tendencies or qualities we are tempted to consider the bedrock self, or at least the inchoate stuff of personal identity. Two instances of this substantially enduring self are Don Gately and Mario Incandenza. The spirit ofDon Gately is capable ofgreat change yet heroic endurance; as he modestly puts it, he abides. The heart of Mario Incandenza moves outward and assimilates others, yet always remains simple and steadfast. We do not doubt the essential nature or persistent identity of Gately or Mario. In maintaining some beliefin selfhood, especially the persistence of memory and the possibility of willed, earned identity, Wallace distinguishes himselffrom postmodern repudiation ofthe sel£ Wallace's receptivity to traditional notions ofthe self indicates some affinities with Williamjames, whose books surface in Infim�e Jest, on the significance and possibility of personal identity (as well as on the viability of occult and supernatural "experience") . One commentator on Itifim�e Jest, underscoring Wallace's philosophical interests, distinguishes between "a modernist poetics preoccupied with epistemological concerns (problems of knowing) " and "postmodernist practice dominated by ontological concerns (questions ofbeing)." 1
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It seems naive to suggest that modernists like Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, Joyce, Faulkner, or Ellison were not seriously concerned with questions of being. But in considering Infinite Jest, the terms Modernist and Postmodernist remain useful. The same critic is surely right to say that Wallace breaks with postmodernism and recalls Joyce's Ulysses. In its explorations of questions of being, Irifim�eJest does not merely recycle infinite ironies, nor always defer meanings, nor produce endless futility.
"Yo,
man,
what's your story?" (17) Polyphony &
Narrative Voice One way Irifim�eJestsimultaneously interrogates and affirms identity is through the technique ofpolyphony. Originally a musical term, adapted by literary critics, polyphony signifies the use of more than one voice, the juxtaposition of multiple perspectives. Irifim�eJesttakes polyphony to glorious extremes; nearly everybody has a story and gets to tell it. In the first 95 pages of Irifim�e Jest, the narrative homes in upon thirteen distinct characters: Hal, Ken Erdedy, the Medical Attache, Clenette, Bruce Green. Orin, Don Gately,Jim Troeltsch, Kate Gombert, Schtitt, Tiny Elwell, Marathe and Steeply. In separate episodes each speaks at length. Such fragmentation of perspective challenges the unity and consistency of nmTatt"ve "identity"; sometimes it is hard to tell who is speaking; and it is impossible to say which of the many competing narrators will tum out to be especially important or central. Foregrounded characters may tum out to be relatively minor or tangential. For example, the second episode, pages 17-27, is narrated by Ken Erdedy, a relatively upscale, educated ad-man addicted to marijuana, who commands center stage almost as long as Hal in his opening episode; but Erdedy disappears for several hundred pages and reappears only briefly; similarly, an abused black girl named Clenette tells a harrowing story, then she too moves to the margins, relegated to a cameo role. Nearly everyone in Irifim�e Jest matters, and deserves a voice; inconsequential characters come forth from the shadows and speak out, not always affirming their agency but vibrantly, compellingly narrating their own dramas. Irifim�e Jest, "listening to different mingling voices" (23 1), values polyphony, highlights various, disparate perspectives, and creates a majestic medley.
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Borrowing a term from astronomy, probably via Joyce, Wallace speaks of "parallaxing" (556) , emphasizing that what you see depends very much on where you stand. Who is the Moms? It depends which son you ask. The polyphonic medley of voices, a form of parallax, underscores the "apparent displacement of an observed object due to a change in the position [or identity] ofthe observer." A related narrative technique, common to Wallace and Joyce, is the incessant oscillation between positions inside and outside of a character's consciousness; this movement emphasizes both the connection and the distance between perception and reality, the perpetual tension between what a character perceives "in here" and what is "out there." This basic philosophical issue - how does what's outside get inside one's consciousness - animates Wallace's narrative strategies. An example ofWallace's oscillating narrative perspective, shuttling in and out of a character's consciousness, is this passage about Don Gately's fatal burglary of the DuPlessis home: "The thing started out looking like tit on a tray, burglary-wise. A beautiful neo-Georgian home in a wildly upscale part of Brookline was set nicely back from an unlit pseudo-rural road, had a chintzy SentryCo alarm system that fed, idiotically enough, on a whole separate 330 v AC 90 Hz cable with its own meter . . . and had, at its rear, flimsily tasteful French doors surrounded by dense and thorn-free deciduous shrubbery," (56) etc. Gately's voice is evident in the breezy slang and professional knowledge of electronic security; we also hear a second voice, outside and beyond Gately's ken, a TO'W11 and Country or Architect's Digest style, noticing "tasteful French doors," Georgian style, and "deciduous shrubbery:' The simultaneous presence of two disparate, competing registers suggests an in-and-out movement typical of Infim�e Jest. The Inside/Outside dichotomy is a narrative strategy, a pattern of imagery, and a thematic concern in lnfim�e Jest. Even the title includes reiterations of"in": INfiNite. The second paragraph of the novel begins with Hal's forlorn declaration, "I am in here" (3), and he repeats the words "in" and "inside" several times in the opening episode. The whole book ends with Don Gately lying on a beach, the tide "way out" (98 1) . From first to last Infim�e Jest explores meanings o f inside and outside. Marathe tells Kate Gompert, "I feel I am chained in a cage of the self,
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from the pain" (777) .JOI, transforming pain to art , makes several films titled Cage. The novel like the films dramatizes hiddenness, modes of secrecy. Hal is a "hidden boy" (838), needing the secrecy of addiction as much as the drug. Talking to his brother Mario, Hal is really addressing himself when he asks "Are you in there?" (784). Avril pretends to hate secrecy, but keeps family skeletons hidden. So much in this story is illuminated, placed, defined, scrutinized and seen fully, yet so much is hidden, subterranean, kept secret. We often find ourselves, or lose ourselves, moving through dark streets and dark tunnels, an underworld. The students at ETA explore and inhabit the catacomb like subterranean tunnels. Gately realizes "that a drug addict was at root a craven and pathetic creature: a thing that basically hides" (93 2) . Joelle wears a veil. The Wraith says that "the worst kind of gut-wrenching intergenerational interface is better than withdrawal or hiddenness on either side" (839) . But and lonely as scary as it is Inside, it's dangerous Out There.
Encyclopedist and Lexicographer The narrator of !tifinite Jest is a kind of editor or an arranger. The Arranger's interests range widely, displaying an eager catholicity, delivering an amazing variety of knowledge. He draws on culture high and low, from canonical authors to TV personalities, the Oxford English Dictionary to the Physician 's Desk Riference, tennis tactics to terrorist politics. There is specialized computer technology, science and math, history and politics, philology and etymology, presented with unflagging gusto. We are given savage parodies of scholarly articles that nonetheless lovingly create the tone of much real academic writing. There are numerous kinds of documentation: the insertion ofletters, high school papers, correspondence, transcripts, journal entries. The Arranger's encyclopedic inclusiveness features abundant pop-cultural references, especially to TV, advertising, movies, the culture of celebrity and pop iconography. Inftm�e Jest resembles, and very nearly contains, a dictionary. "Word inflation" (100) is the term the ETA boys coin to characterize a prominent project of the text, multiplying ways of seeing and saying things. It's
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not just that this book has a lot of words, or that Hal Incandenza has memorized the OJiford English Dictionary, but that language is one of the main subjects as well as material of the novel. An obsession with getting the right word - "That's the right word for it" (73) - is not limited to Avril or Hal. Wallace resembles Joyce and Nabokov, and even Shakespeare, in his proliferation of words and in his sheer intoxication with language. Words seem to be used freely, almost recklessly, one might suspect wastefully, except that so often words are preserved, reiterated, redeemed. "There was every different kind of style" (980, including medical, anatomical, and pharmaceutical terminology, tennis lingo, adolescent slang, street argot (especially criminal), "Recoveryspeak" (202), French-Canadian idioms, etc. Gately coins a term, "ghostwords" (884) for another kind of language - the strange, unfamiliar words used by a wraith visiting him in the hospital, words like embrasure or circumambience or some other "invasive-wraith ghostword" (922) . Gately becomes a source of verbal fecundity in Irifinite Jest, an agent of language endowed with a remarkable vocabulary, contributing to the wonderfully mysterious ways that words, phrases, idioms appear, and proliferate. Words in !tifinite Jest have independent life. Words take wing, like dandelion seeds, disperse and blossom. Some slang or idiosyncratic words, such as map or click or kertwang, become common property. Wallace deploys "conjunctive key terms" (1055), the phrase for an internet search. As a rule you can't go wrong, and will often go blissfully right, focusing on Wallace's extraordinary uses of language, the range and power of his verbal resources - the range and vitality and complexity of vocabulary, from street argot to OED esoterica, vulgar slang to elegant ghostwords. Irifinite Jest, encyclopedic, masterfully erudite, also indicates inability or unwillingness to contain and control such massive, nearly "infinite," amounts ofmaterial. The discourse is frequently "excessive," often spilling over. (Excess is a theme and a problem in the story as well) . Sentences are so packed, weighted, and long that reading them is like drinking from a fire hose. The sentence partially quoted above, about Gately's burglary, is typical, running more than seven lines of text. Another sentence, dramatizing Lucien Antitoi's death, runs more than half a page. A reader might feel overwhelmed by information about tennis,
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drugs, etc. There are many long digressions. Extremely detailed evocations of a game called Eschaton try the reader's patience in the manner ofthe learned, whimsical disquisitions on whaling in Moby Dick.
"Self-conscious footnote" (946) A hundred pages of even smaller-fonted footnotes suggest how much material overflows the boundaries. Like hypertext, as Sven Bikerts notes, the book is "webbed, branched, rife with linkage,"2 reflecting a world inundated with information and images. In Wallace's gloriously excessive discourse, even the footnotes have footnotes! The footnotes themselves are highly varied, fromjokes and simple definitions to crucial information and compelling speculation about major figures. We skip them at our peril; they often are highly pertinent. Sometimes there are debates or quarrels the narrator seems to be conducting with his characters, or with himself. He may correct a character or specifY that he is speaking for his character: "None ofthese are Don Gately's terms" (1026), or "The speaker doesn't actually use" (1026) these precise terms. Another footnote, making another turn of the narr ative screw, informs us that the narrator is "Pemulis here, dictating to Inc" (1023), as Pemulis refers to Hal. Such coy, canny narrative gestures underscore the apparently infinite supplementarity of Wallace's project. Confessing that he is unable to abide by normal rules of discourse, he adds a footnote indicating that he has "overshot the place to mention" or "overshot the spot to include" (1022) some nevertheless telling detail or point. While some footnotes assert the narrator's scope and capacity, others are humorously debunking, as when a complex chemical formula is identified as "pimple cream" (1062). If some footnotes reveal crucial information or interpretive possibilities, others seem to produce or recycle random or gratuitous data. The reader, though subject to an overwhelming excess, must be wary, or remain vigilant, lest he miss a nugget or a clue. TheJOI "filmography" buries crucial information amid reams of data. Sometimes the narrator, in those endless footnotes, will coolly undermine the testimony he has just presented, as when he says "This
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may be a lie" (1044) . So let the reader beware: not only are there theories and counter-theories, speculations and contrary speculations, but the status of testimony is always in doubt. Everyone's reliability is suspect. The novel is demanding (in part) because there is no single omniscient perspective, no certain truths (despite all the connections) connected systematically and illuminated lucidly. Plots provoke counter plots, theories precipitate counter-theories, "even antitheories positing error, mistaken identity, sick hoax" (92) . So we must be on our toes, watching for hints and staying prepared for reversals. For example, Orin Incandenza, being interviewed for a magazine profile, refers the reporter to his oldest and best friend, Marlon Bain - who stresses that Orin's attitudes, especially on intimate family matters, are heavily biased and profoundly untrustworthy. Besides, Orin regards the truth as "constructed rather than reported" ( 1 0 4 8) , and he is particularly unreliable about people he knows best, like his mother. Our principle source for Joelle's history, Molly Notkin, is also conspicuously unreliable.
Halations Founded on a solid base of verisimilitude, Infinite Jest contains a strong supernatural element which only gradually reveals itself and remains deeply mysterious. Our first intimations of something beyond "the real" empirical world are scientific terms the boys employ preparing for a test on History ofEntertainment; they define the term halation as "a halo-shaped exposure pattern around light sources," that "most angelic of distortions" (97). It's apt that the term halation is a pun on the hero's name, and such distortions or appearances are indicated often enough to suggest metaphoric possibilities, as when we first meet Marathe alone above the desert, "amusing himself with his shadow. As the lowering light from behind came at an angle more and more acute, Goethe's well-known 'Brockengespens! phenomenon enlarged and distended his seated shadow far out overland" (88). A footnote adds that this is a "ghostly light - and monster-shadow phenomenon particular to certain mountains," and that Gespenstmeans specter or wraith" (994). Halations, ghostly visitations, supernatural phenomena, and a prominent wraith
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appear throughout ltifinite Jest. Hal is haunted by the ghost of his father, and strange occurrences at ETA suggest his continuing presence. Don Gately is visited by a wraith, the spirit of a man he never met, James 0. Incandenza. There are other mysterious links between states ofconsciousness that elude rational explanation. We've noted the puzzling link between Hal and Don Gately. Such "halations" and mysterious connections abound. The story is also haunted, maybe literally, by ghosts. The unquiet spirit ofJames Orin Incandenza stalks the story, weirdly visiting Don Gately, and hovering over Hal's dreams and waking hours. Conspicuously absent, Himself, or the ghost ofHimself, is dramatically present. Figuratively, Itifinite Jest conjures the spirits of Wallace's literary masters hovering over his project. He has many "fathers" - Joyce and Nabokov, Pynchon and Barth - in the tradition of the novel. Himself, JOI, may represent James JOice, whose Ulysses is a book of "many happy returns" for all manner of dead authors and departed souls. One might also regard Wallace as the adoring, defiant love-child ofThomas Pynchon, with the gleeful complexity, mind-boggling conspiracies, interwoven plots, built-in theories, often paranoid (''I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?") . And of course, in a book whose title alludes to Hamlet, we can't overlook the pervasive spirit ofShakespeare. Himselfs films are produced by Poor Yorick Productions Ltd. The hero named Hal is addressed as "Prince Hal" by the school custodian. The story parodically recreates Hamlet's situation : the despairing son mourning his cuckolded, deceased father, and resenting his usurping uncle and unfaithful mother.
''All
over the
map
in terms of key" (109)
A question asked about literary discourse by such older critics as Wayne Booth - what is the author's tone and implied attitude toward his subject? - is intricately vexed in ltifinite Jest. sometimes hard to ascertain, often shifting, occasionally impossible to pin down, and always fun to debate. Wallace specializes in complex, equivocal tones, and pulls our sympathies helter-skelter. Meaning is rarely single or clear, but ·�ways rather Two, one upside down in a convex lens" (280). Similarly the style
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veers from low to high, from street slang, argot, and vulgarity to lyric, heroic, and epic language. The tone of I'!fim�e Jest is a rich, sometimes disorienting mix of high and low, sublime and ridiculous, grotesque and pathetic. I'!fim�e Jest is also a text full ofequivocation and the proliferation ofattitudes, possibilities rather than probabilities. Wallacejuxtaposes high and low, or jocose and earnest A typical example: Schtitt concludes an utterly earnest, long-winded exhortation to the tennis players to transcend the conditions, to sustain a coherent, stable inner self- to which deLint adds tersely, "So cut the shit about the fucking cold weather:' The tone might shift in the other direction, from parodic to serious. An NA meeting is described as an "Irony free zone" (369). This means primarily that participants can say anything except when it denigrates the struggles of their peers, but it also alerts us to a marvelous shift in our own perceptions and evaluations, from ironic amusement and polite disdain for the cheesy cliches and rigid authoritarianism of the recovery movement - to grudging respect and eventually awe for the efficacy of the program. And this is not the only "Irony free zone" in I'!fim�e Jest. Whole characters may be immune to irony, and devoid of it: Mario Incandenza, the least of our brethren, a simple, unsophisticated consciousness, and a lovable, generous, pure heart.
"Unhip earnestness" (689) The narrator's phrase may be taken as a way to define the compelling quality ofhuman suffering in this story - so much loneliness, yearning, grieving. Wallace presents this spectacle not as a freak show but as a drama of aspiring souls, not always left to suffer alone. When Barry Loach, overwhelmed by inhumanity, stands at the Park Street subway station imploring commuters to "Touch me!" most pass by embarrassed or appalled; but Mario stops and reaches out. Infinite Jest makes an implicit critique of contemporary culture, and perhaps of postmodem fiction, for its clinical detachment, its hip premium on cool, where kids especially study the arts "for clues on how to be cool" or "Unalone" (694) . "The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony" (694), learning"a weary cynicism:'James Incandenza moved
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from metacinematic parodies and "supposedly ironic lampoons" to frankly sentimental narratives, sometimes mere glimpses, but as joelle recognizes, these "moments betrayed something more than cold hip technical abstraction" (742). There is, increasingly and powerfully, genuine pathos in the world of Irifinite Jest. Wallace depicts a world bursting with sin and sorrow, and regards it with a range of tones, but with abiding compassion, charity, and magnanimity. Wallace hearkens back to a traditional element in the novel, what he terms "hyperrealism" or "Expressionism," in his allegiance to character, a wish to "treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction." This hyperrealistic point-of view moves beyond or eschews "self-consciousness and hip fatigue" (81). Feelings might be explored, articulated, and "deployed in an old fashioned pre-postmodern way, i.e., nakedly, sincerely, without postmodemism's abstraction or irony" (198). This powerful tendency makes Irifim�e Jestdeeply moving; as we've seen, even minor and dreadful characters get their moment in the spotlight. Central figures like Mario and Don Gately are regarded with enormous respect and no small measure of affection, their struggles taken seriously, their aspirations treated tenderly, their virtues admired frankly. There is a sort of naked sincerity in their characters that deserves the "reverence and conviction" the novel conveys and inspires in its readers.
"Home Epic" George Eliot's term characterizes the tum Middlemarch gives to the traditional epic impulse. In fact the epic has always been centrally about home, from the destruction of home in the Iliad and the hero's Odyssey homeward, to Aeneas's quest to find and found a new home. It is not only in the great novels that, as Peter Brooks has written, "We are thus always trying to work back through time to that transcendent home, knowing, of course, that we cannot." 3 Home is a vibrant topos in Irifim�e Jest. "Homing in is the essence of what the classic hero of modem action does" (14 1), observed the precocious Hal in a school paper. Hal is flooded with memories of happier home life in Weston; Gately is haunted by his terrible home life,
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in that house with the gaping hole in the roo£ Wallace depicts homes in remarkable detail, room by room, corridor by corridor at ETA. More important than the precise sketches of houses is the sense that home is indeed where the heart is, that characters like Mario, Gately, Hal, and so many others are trying to work back through time to that transcendent home, knowing, of course that they cannot. Elsewhere Wallace has characterized "the central Kafka joke - that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey towards home is in fact our home:'4
"Self-Reflexive" (946) Infinite Jest tends to comment aptly and frequently on its own procedure or status. One result is to keep us on our toes, alert for hints that Wallace is telling us something he wants us to know or consider about his book generally. Typically, Wallace alerts us to the problem and winks rather than providing simple solutions. He refers tellingly to "Retroirony" which maddeningly implies just the kind of contraries he loves to exploit. Wallace's self-reflexivity has a game-like aspect and can be fun; it may also be frustrating, like seeking the needle-in-the haystack. For example, Wallace titles his novel after the last "Entertainment" made by James Incandenza. So it makes sense to heed connections between JOI's films and Wallace's novel. In fact, whenever anyone begins talking about Himselfs films, we should prick up our ears, for we're likely to find salient comments on Infim�e Jest the novel. "Salient" doesn't necessarily mean direct and specific; it might be an ironic take on the book. For instance,Joelle van Dyne recalls her early resistance to James's "Work," which as a grad student studying film she found "technically gorgeous . . . but oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic towardness - no narrative movement toward a real story; no emotional movement toward an audience" (740) . Her reflections bear upon the "narratively anticonfluential" (74 1) tendencies in the novel; whether we agree that there is no real story, no emotional movement toward an audience, her thoughts suggest a possible response to Infim�e Jest, no matter how misguided it may turn out in the end to be.
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Anticonfluence bifim'te Jest's own coinage explains much of the difficulty of this strange and wonderful book: its disruptions ofnarrative "flow," confusing jumps, fits and starts, flashbacks and leaps forward, multiplicity ofvenues, perspectives, characters, and plots; it is a "decomposed" narrative that must be reassembled in the reader's mind. Another term for this is Centnfogati'on or decentering energies. ("My readers have had some theory," Wallace has said. ) Key elements ofcontemporary cultural theory are evident in Infim'te Jest. its radical and disorienting tonal shifts, a comedy of the grotesque that appalls some readers and shocks others. Its cartoon quality, its hyperbolic excess in telling stories of gruesome pain. Its disjunctive leaps from prismatically unreliable points ofview to the master narrator's master/mega/global perspective. Yet we must bear in mind that james 0. Incandenza abandoned anticonfluentialism. So too David Foster Wallace moves beyond "anticonfluentialism" in
bifim'te Jest.
"Reflective vs. Reflexive Systems" (64) Typically, a jest - here, donnish wit - implies serious concerns of the novel. James lncandenza met Avril Mondragon at an academic conference on "Reflective vs. Reflexive Systems," which provides a rather neat way to think of competing tendencies in Infinite Jest. "Reflective" suggests the classic conception of art and of language, to reflect reality like a mirror; Wallace's allegiance to reflective art is evident in his precise elaborations of places, neighborhoods in Boston, Cambridge, Allston, and Weston, for instance. A world is created, as in Dickens's Bleak House or Eliot's Middlemarch or Joyce's Ulysses, delineated in remarkable detail, the stuff of felt life, the sounds, and smells, taste and touch of reality. Alongside, and in some ways competing with this reflective tendency or value is "Reflexivity," revealing, even flaunting the artificiality or made-up nature of art. Both strands are prominent in Don Quixote, and each might be said to achieve its culmination in Ulysses. Post-modern fiction beginning with Beckett and Nabokov and continuing through
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Gaddis, Pynchon, Rushdie, and DeLillo stresses the reflexivity of discourse, sometimes at the expense of its reflective qualities. You can't have two people fall harmlessly out of an airplane in The Satanic Verses without losing something.5 Often compared to Pynchon, Wallace differs in his balance between these two aspects of fiction. Like J a m e s I n ca n d e n z a ' s fil m s after he r e p u d i ated " a n t i confluentialism," Infinite Jest strives for a "technical feck and for a pathos that was somehow both surreally abstract and CNS-rendingly melodramatic at the same time" (64) .
"Circular Routine" (53) Marathe confuses the words "recycling" and "recircling" (643), underscoring the "circular routine" of the narrative, with its loops, digressions, links and intersections, and circular form. The narrative oscillates, moves back and forth in time and space. Memories recur and are recycled in a kind of narrative "recircling" (643) . The lethal Entertainment plays endlessly in a "recursive loop" (87). There is an up/down cycle, literally from the underworld ofdark streets and tunnels to the daylight realm of hospitals, institutions, schools, and courts. Stephen Burn has noted a central example of circular routine, tracing the "circulation" of the notorious film: Incandenz_DePiessis_Gately & Kite_Sixties Bob_Antitoi Brothers_AFR and back, terribly, to the lncandenzas, "a true circle:'6 Among the things cycled are waste - detritus, throwaways, garbage. The primary application of annular fusion is that garbage is recycled as energy for consumption which of course leads to more waste, recycled, etc., ad infinitum. We see upon completing Infinite Jest the need to begin again, perceiving the narrative as a form of annular fusion, a series of concentric rings, intersecting, linked, proliferating. That Figure 8 on its side that Orin idly traces on the naked thighs of his Subjects is the emblem of infinity, a sign of the narrator and a road map for the reader. Plots intersect, what goes around comes around; words are never wasted but redeemed by the discourse, recycled as "ghostwords:'
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Reading the Smiley Face The key to understanding Infinite Jest is the same as for any other literary work: a close attention to detail, and especially those details that look like they're going to take on symbolic value as elements of what literary scholars call the thematic structure of the work. In Infim'te Jest, though, the "anticonfluential" structure of the narrative makes this kind of close reading both more necessary and more difficult. A central thematic element might show up in a scene taking place at ETA, and then, several hundred pages later, in another at Ennet House, and then pop up unexpectedly in a dream or a memory in the mind of a character. As important, many repeated motifs in Infim'te Jest do not bear this kind of symbolic value - they simply belong to the level of naturalistic detail in the story - so the problem of close reading is always closely related to the way the narrative emphasizes one or another element as central to its thematic structure. Our Reader's Companion is not intended to tell anyone how to read lnfim'te Jest. It's only meant, as we have tried to emphasize, to help readers navigate their own way through Wallace's vast and sprawling story while arriving at their own sense ofits larger meaning. Our point in this section is only to show what sort of attention to thematic detail is likely to make the novel more rewarding to you as you follow the fortunes of Hal Incandenza and Don Gately and joelle van Dyne and the others. You can regard what follows as a very elementary instruction manual in the sort of close reading Infim'te Jest seems to repay, from the viewpoint of more experienced readers who have had a chance to think about its meaning through multiple readings and from a number of different angles. The "symbol" we've chosen for the exercise is the smiley face: that round yellow circle with two dots for eyes and a smiling mouth. The smily face is an especially good example of how symbolic meaning works in Infim'te Jest, not least because it shows how the novel exposes the degree to which a certain cultural symbolism is already omnipresent in the American culture it portrays. This is an important point. Many students, especially, have picked up the idea that "symbolism" in literature
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is a matter of references to arcane symbolic systems - Freud's phallic symbols, Jung's mandala- or remote areas of knowledge that are the special province ofliterary scholars. A teacher ofjamesjoyce's Ulysses, for instance, will point out to a class that the episodes taking place in Dublin during the course of the single day covered by the narrative have parallels in Homer's Odyssey, and that the correspondence of modem events to the epic or mythic events always there in the immediate background is an important part of Ulysses' meaning. To understand how symbolism works in !'!finite Jest, consider the smiley face. An anthropologist of contemporary society might be able to tell us where this smiling and vacuous figure came from, but for most of us it is just something that we recognized at some point was everywhere, on greeting cards and store products and lapel buttons and business logos. Those ofus old enough to remember will also have a vague sense that the smiley face entered the cultural stream at about the same time as Americans started saying "Have a nice day" instead of"Thank you" or "Goodbye" or "We'll be seeing you later" at the end of social transactions. The smiley face is already a symbol of something, obviously, though it would be hard to say exactly what: happiness? pleasure? product satisfaction? a determination to have a nice day? The smiley face enters !'!finite Jest, in short, as an already-constituted symbol of something about American society. What it comes to mean, as the story develops in various unexpected directions, will depend on the chain of associations that it comes to take on in different circumstances. Let's start with an episode that occurs in the opening pages: Hal Incandenza's memory ofeating some basement fungus when he was four years old and his family living in the Boston suburb of Weston. The weirdness of the scene depends on the fact that, as we almost immediately understand, Hal's mother Avril is obsessive compulsive about germ-free cleanliness, tidiness, order. When the toddler Hal comes up from the basement of their Weston House, dressed in "some sort of fuzzy red Pooh-wear" and carrying a patch of mold "horrific," as his brother Orin remembers it, "darkly green, glossy, vaguely hirsute, speckled with parasitic fungal points of yellow, orange, red" Avril is roto-tilling their back yard for her annual garden. Hal, crying,
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holds out the mold in a kind of salute motion and says "I ate this:' Avril goes into hysterics: "' God! she calls out. 'Help! My son ate this!'" (11). There are no smiley-faces in the scene, and, as Hal will later disclose, he has no memory of the episode. It assumes its place as one of the things he "remembers" by having had it described in vivid terms by his older brother Orin, many ofwhose own memories will tum out to have been complete fabrications of non-existent events. In one of the long endnotes that play so important a role in Infinite Jest, though, we get Orin's own version of the same episode. This time, there is a smiley face: "'In the middle of this tilling here comes my little brother Hallie, maybe like four at the time and wearing some kind offuzzy red pajamas and a tiny little down coat, and slippers that had those awful Nice-Day smile-faces on both toes . . . . The thing covering his palm and hanging over the sides of the palm is rhombusoid patch of fungus. Big old patch ofhouse-mold"' (1042). Yet even at this point, the smiley-face is simply another detail in the scene. Except for its associations with Orin's own slippery unreliability as a narrator, and the hideous patch of mold carried by Hal in both versions of the story, it scarcely seems to point to anything very ominous. A bit further along in Irifimte Jest, though, we come to the episode where the Near Eastern medical attache has come home early and is choosing the cartridges he will watch while eating dinner from the tray fastened underneath his chin. Since his wife has not had a chance to go to the cartridge-rental outlet from which their entertainment is usually rented, he is reduced to looking through those that have arrived in that day's mail. He looks curiously at a padded mailer with a crudely-drawn smiling face on it and a postmark saying that it has been sent from Arizona. The cartridge inside, as we recall, has another smiley-face, "another of these vapid U.S.A.-type circular smiling heads," embossed on it where the registration code is supposed to be. As the story continues, we will encounter more of these cartridges with smiley-face decals affixed to them, or an embossed smiley-face logo in place of the usual numerical codes. The next significant appearance of the smiley-face, apart from these cartridges, occurs in a dream that comes to Don Gately when he has just come back to Ennet House from one of his AA meetings. The
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context demands close attention. The specific thing that is bothering Gately at this point in the story is that AA instructs its members to get down on their knees and pray for the strength to remain free of their addiction for just one more day, whether or not they believe in God, or even any version of the Higher Power that AA in its latitudinarian formulation tells its members is to be the focus of their petitions. (This is AA's Higher Power as, famously, "God as we understand him:') Gately's problem is that he has no concept, however rudimentary, of anything like a Higher Power, and he finds getting down on his knees to pray to something he doesn't in the least believe in humiliating. Gately makes his distaste for the praying-to-a-Higher-Power routine obvious in a later scene when it is his tum to speak at an AA meeting and he decides, expecting probably to be expelled for his forthrightness, that he simply hates getting down on his knees: "at this point the God understanding stuff kind of makes him want to puke, from fear. Something you can't see or hear or touch or smell: OK. All right. But something you can't even .foe!? Because that's what he feels when he tries to understand something to really sincerely pray to. Nothingness." He imagines his own prayers, Gately tells members of this particular AA audience (the Tough Shit But You Still Can't Drink group, mostly made up of bikers and biker chicks), "going out and out, with nothing to stop them, going, going, radiating out into like space and outliving him and still going and never hitting Anything out there, much less Something with an ear" (444). This is Gately's experience, in short, of the universe as described by the great 17th-century French writer Pascal: "Le szlence eteme/ de ces espaces infinis m 'dfraie' 'The eternal silence of those infinite spaces makes me afraid'. Part of the reassurance Gately gets from speaking about his doubts comes from the unexpected response ofhis audience. Far from expelling him from the group, they are delighted with the point he has reached on his passage to sobriety: "'The tough chain-smoking TSBYSCD Group all stands and applauds and the men give two-finger whistles, and people come up at the raille-break to pump his big hand and even sometimes try to hug on him." The point is clear enough: most of those in the room have been in just the place Gately describes, and they recognize it instantly as a necessary stage in the longer battle against addiction.
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Though he is simply puzzled at the time, we're able to tell that Gately will derive immense comfort from various repetitions of this scene: "It seems like every time he forgets himself and publicizes how he's fucking up in sobriety Boston ANs fall all over themselves to tell him how good it was to hear him and for God's sake Keep Coming, for them if not for himself, whatever the fuck that means" (444). Still, what plays an ever more powerful role in persuading Gately to go to his knees and pray to a Higher Power that he doesn't believe to exist is the dream that comes to him one night early in his stay at Ennet House. In his dream Gately finds himselfin a low-rent church basement kneeling on a polyester cushion, surrounded by others doing the same. There is, Gately realizes, "no tier-boss or sergeant-at-arms-type figure around coercing them into kneeling," and he wonders what it is that's keeping them on their knees. And then a lady over to Gately's left stands up, as though to stretch, "and the minute she stood up she was all of a sudden yanked backward with terrible force and sucked out through one of the clear glass walls of the basement . . . and she was gone" (358). Then Gately notices that several of the other cushions in the room are vacant as well, and in search ofan explanation he looks up and finds the answer. Above the heads ofthe kneeling assembly, Gately sees, in his dream, a long hooked stick, something like a shepherd's crook, something like those hooked sticks that are used to yank vaudeville players off the stage when their act is going badly. The stick rotates slowly, purposefully, passing over the heads of the kneeling figures, waiting for someone to leave their kneeling posture so that they, too, can be jerked out of the building by the slow silent stick. Then Gately raises his eyes still more and sees the figure who throughout the rest of !tifinite Jest will reappear in his mind as the Sergeant at Arms, a cool, snappily dressed, authoritative figure that radiates good cheer and abundant charm and limitless patience as he trolls for more prey. His eyes are just visible, Gately sees, "from behind a mask that was simply the plain yellow smiley-face circle that accompanied invitations to have a nice day" (359). With the mask worn by the Sergeant of Arms in Gately's dream, the smiley-face has obviously begun to take on sinister associations, a symbolic value having something to do with a lurking evil that lies
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behind the banal surface of "Have a Nice Day" American cheerfulness or friendliness. In the case of the Near Eastern medical attache, it is already abundantly clear that this is the danger of a self-gratification so limitless that it almost literally kills the spirit, turning the viewer into a mere husk of a human being. In Gately's dream, however, it becomes the face of the Disease, the sudden unexpected focus of that rush of pleasure that allows ajames 0. Incandenza orJoelle van Dyne or Gately himself to escape from the personal hell of an isolated consciousness into a warm bath of pure, if temporary, self-gratification. The symbolic equivalence of drugs as they exist for the addict and such ordinary American activities as television-watching is established, in short, through the shared symbolism of the smiley face. In Gately's dream, the smiley face of the grim Sergeant at Arms who sits with endless patience above the kneeling figures on their cushions is also, and very obviously, the face of Death. In immediate terms, this is the death of the terminal alcoholic or addict through misadventure or suicide or mere physical collapse, as with JOI's microwave auto-de-fe or C's agonizing death when he injects the Drano he thinks is heroin, or the death from HIV suffered by Stokely "Dark Star" McNair before the story ofInfinite Jest has begun. The symbolic equivalence established between drug addiction and television watching, though, tells us that another sort of Death lurks behind the vacant grin of the American have-a-nice-day smiley face. It is the mental or spiritual death, as it may be a collective spiritual suicide, suffered by those whose minds are slowly dying within them as they come home from work to watch Sex and the City or Survivor or Amencan Idol The really horrific dimension ofthis slow death-by-television becomes clear in a third episode featuring the smiley face, this one the assault on Antitoi Entertainment by a squad sent out by the AFR to find the Master cartridge that will allow the Quebecois terrorists to duplicate thousands of copies ofthe Entertainment. For all its hallucinatory quality, the attack on the Antitoi brothers' shop is one of the most chilling in Iifim�e Jest. It begins when Lucien Antitoi, looking at the mirrors hung around the perimeter ofthe shop, sees a silent crowd ofmen in wheelchairs gathered just outside its door: the assassins ofthe most fearsome Quebecois terrorist group, no more merciful with other Quebecois than they are with the
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ONAN politicians or sympathizers who are their usual targets. Lucien, a simple fellow, hears what he thinks is the squeak ofthe shop's door in the wind, and then realizes that it is the squeak of the wheelchairs as they enter and take over the front of the shop. By the time Lucien is permitted to go into the back room of the shop, his brother Bertraund is already lying dead, his body slumped over the table where he had been eating a bowl of pea soup, a railroad spike driven through his right eye. It is then that Lucien sees the leader of the AFR hit squad. The faces ofthe others are covered with decorated ski-masks (fleur de lis with sword stem, symbol ofQuebecois insurgence), but one, clearly the AFR leader, has a quite different appearance. He is dressed "in an unpretentious sportcoat and tie" - the others wear the lumberjack-plaid flannel shirts that are the usual uniform of Quebecois operatives - "and the worst mask of all, a plain yellow polyresin circle with an obscenely simple smiley-face in thin black lines" (486). At this point, the smiley face becomes the demonic visage of the Samizdat itself. that spiritual-death-by-entertainment that sits invisibly above the head ofevery American for whom existence has become nothing more than (to use bifim�e Jests formulation once again) "a floating no-space world of personal spectation." The investment of symbolic meaning through which the smiley face becomes one of the major emblems of spiritual impoverishment or death in Irifim�e Jest is typical of the way the narrative as a whole works. There is normally, in the first instance, a reality so obviously fantastic or surreal that the reader is inclined to associate it with the phantasmagoric quality of a postmodern masterpiece like Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. But then Wallace's chosen mode of "apres-garde" fiction - a kind ofwriting that vaults back over the crazed, fragmented, disconnected narratives of postmodernism to recover the roots of storytelling in traditional narrative - will always manage to suggest or demonstrate that the surrealism of its world is not a matter of literary artifice, but of a certain hallucinatory quality that belongs to life in a postindustrial or consumerist society, that societede consummation written about by French cultural theorists as it looks from the inside, and in particular as it is inhabited by millions who have no idea that they are living inside a hallucination.
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The surreal elements in Irifim�e Jest amount in the end, one might say, to a kind of relentless moral or spiritual realism, what happens when inner experience is stripped ofits external preoccupations and left to gaze at itselfin the mirror. Thus it is, for instance, that Don Gately's dream in Irifim�e Jest has much more in common with works like the Pardoner's Tale in Chaucer or the medieval morality play Everyman than with anything written by Pynchon or Bartheleme or DeLillo. And thus it is that Irifim�e Jest, without ever becoming in the least moralistic, becomes a work of unmistakable moral purpose, speaking as urgently to its time as Dickens' Dombey and Son or Our Mutual Fn"end did to its Victorian readers. Its aim is nothing less than to shock a culture of empty or shallow self-gratification into an awareness ofwhat it is doing to itself and the world simply by existing in the way it does. Its theme is not the banality of evil but the evil of banality. Some anthropologist of the future, perhaps, will be able to measure the impact of Irifim�e Jest on its culture by recalling the precise moment at which the smiley face began to vanish from American life, or at which Americans began to respond to "Have a nice day" not with a vacant smile but a shudder.
Chapter E ight Minor Characters & Real Peop l e E. A. Abbott: (1836-1926) 281. Author of Flatland (1884), a work popular at ETA. Flatland is a fantastic, two-dimensional world. Shoshana Abram: 756. Girl at Enfield Tennis Academy; rooms with Carol Spodek. Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno: (1903-1969) 450. German philosopher, member of the so-called Frankfurt School. Spiro Agnew: (1918-1996) 280. Vice-President under Richard Nixon, 1969- 1973 . Alan Aida: (1936-) 647. Actor who played Captain "Hawkeye" Pierce on the 1970s TV show M*A*S*H. Alfonso: 178. Drug addict at Ennet House. Woody Allen: (1935-) 944. Film director and actor, comedian. Robert Altman: (1925-) 835. American film director.
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Lord Jeffrey Amherst: (1717- 1797) 3 10. Eighteenth-century British general who recovered Newfoundland from the French after the surrender of Montreal. Brad Anderson: Kate Gompert's one and only sexual partner; told her she was a "lousy lay" (782). Bertraund and Lucien Antitoi: 2 15. Brothers who run "Antitoi Entertainent" ("Whether English misspelling or Quebecois solecism, sic") (1034) in Inman Square Cambridge; Canadians of "the Quebec subgenus, sinister and duplicitous but . . . rather hapless political insurgents," doing "work ofaffiliation with the Separatist/Anti-O.NA.N. F.L.Q." (480). They are "for the most part a not very terrifying insurgent cell," protected by "their late regional patron M. Guillaume DuPlessis" (480), and "spurned by F.L.Q. after DuPlessis's assassination and also ridiculed by the more malignant anti-O.N.A.N. cells" (480) . The Antitoi brothers also sell drugs to Poor Tony Krause and Michael Pemulis. Both Lucien and brother Bertraund are burly, with Bertraund "the brains of the outfit, pretty much by default" (480) . They meet grisly ends at the hands of the brutal Wheelchair Assassins. Michelangelo Antonioni: (19 12-) 185. Italian film director. Taffy Appel: 990. Stage name of actress in Incandenza's pornography parody Mo"bi'us Stnps. Eve Arden: (1912-1990) 774. American comedian and radio personality. Jimmy Arias: (1964-) 676. American tennis player. Idris Arslanian: 98. Pakistani student at ETA known as "Id." Id conducts a blindfolded experiment and gets a tutorial on annular fusion from Mike Pemulis (567-574). Hal is his Big Buddy. Antonio Artaud: (1896-1948) 993. French experimental director, known especially for the so-called Theatre of Cruelty.
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King Arthur: 449. 6'h century legendary King of Britain, central figure in legends of the Round Table. Tracy Austin: (1962-) 675. American tennis prodigy. Frankie Avalon: (1940-) 168. American singer and movie star. Trevor Axford: 50. Student at ETA, partner with Pemulis in clean urine business. Has "a total of only three-and-a-half digits on his right hand" (332). A "true red-headed person, with copper-colored hair and that moist white freckle-chocked skin" (5 12). He's a junior from Connecticut "and under enormous family pressure to continue the male Axford tradition ofattending Yale" even though he is academically really marginal (512). Has a lesion-type brain injury causing food to taste horrible to him, "the way vomit smells" (628). Beth B: 985. Featured in an anticonfluential film article. Louise B: Legendary member ofWhite Flag Group of AA, "who tried to take a map-eliminating dive off the old Hancock Building" (348), was miraculously saved, and became rabidly Christian. Francis Bacon: (1909-1992) 199. English artist, known for his pain contorted portraits of"screaming Popes" and similar subjects. Kevin Bain: 800. Older brother of Marlon, whose story Hal hears, to his acute embarrassment, at a Men's Meeting into which he inadvertently stumbles (795-808). Marlon Bain: 46. "Orin's old E.T.A. doubles and chemical-mischief partner," from Dedham Massachusetts" (803). Marlon played roles in films ofJames Incandenza, "ubiquitous . . . in Himselfs work" (687); always wet, "the single sweatiest human being" (1039). Always doing his best to stay clean, he "shared extensively with Lyle" (386). Interviewed by Helen Steeply for Moment profile (663665). While Orin says that he and Marlon have "been close all our lives"
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(1039), Marlon casts doubt on Orin's "constructed" (1048) family history. Marlon regards himself as afflicted with "certain Disabilities" from early hallucinogen ingestion, leading to withdrawal from "contemporary life as we know it" (1047). His sister was one of Orin's Subjects. Balbalis: 726. A young operative for the Wheelchair Assassins (AFR) working for Fortier. Still has both legs, "albeit paralyzed and stickishly withered" (845); plans a deadly scheme to abduct and kill ETA kids (846). Amiri Baraka:
(1934-) 186. American poet, originally published under the name LeroiJones. Deprived ofhis position as Poet Laureate ofNew Jersey for anti-semitic poems offensive to many readers. Jennie Bash: 114. Student at ETA, linked to Michael Pemulis. Crosby Baum: 229. Guest at Molly Notkin's party. Andre
Bazin: (1918-1958) 747. French film critic and theorist, founder of Les Cahiers du Ci'nema, formative influence on the young James 0. Incandenza, as well as onJoelle van Dyne.
Peter Beak: 97. Twelve-year-old student at ETA; Hal is his Big Buddy. Schtitt chastises him for moral weakness, "always the weeping to home on the telephone" (460) . Beatles: 978. British band who transformed rock music between the early 1960s and their valedictory album Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts
Club Band. Beausoleil: 726. Colleague of Marathe. Boris Becker: (1967-) 675. German tennis player. P. Beesley: Author of "somewhat frumpy and dated BS-era Revival of
the Humam�i'es i'n Amencan Education" (997).
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Jennifer Belbin: 207. Resident ofEnnet House whose tattoos look like flies on her face. In trouble for passing bad checks, she is indicted but gets to complete her residency before her case goes to trial (824). Jack Benny: (1894-1974). American comedian, TV and radio personality. Bernard: Very temporary resident ofEnnet House who insists on being called "Plasmatron-7" (358) . Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini: (1598-1680). Renaissance sculptor, famous especially for St. Theresa i'n Ecstacy (235), which is invoked at crucial moments throughout Infim�e Jest. Johann Bernoulli: (1667-1748) 502. Swiss mathematician. Bill: 3. Dean of Athletics, University of Arizona; interviews Hal. Billingsley: 405 . The Secretary of State in Johnny Gentle's "Concavity Cabinet," spoofed in Mario's puppet show/film. Bimmy, or Bim: 448. Don Gately's childhood nickname, from an acronym for "Big Indestructible Moron." Herbert G. Birch: 987. Actor in Incandenza films. Thomas M. Blatto: Office of Unspecified Services, "director of lnput/ Output testing" (490) working on possible "non lethal viewing" of the notorious Entertainment. Harold Bloom: (1930-) 1077. American critic and professor whose bombastic style is parodied in an academic paper included in Infim�e
Jest. Kent Blott: 97 . Ten-year old student at ETA, one ofHal's "little brothers:• Kent reports to his wide-eyed group of younger ETA friends that he
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has spotted something - a rat or maybe a "Concavitated feral hamster" in the tunnels under ETA. Robert Bly: (1926-) 806. American writer, mid-twentieth century; active in the "men's movement" in the mid-twentieth century, origin of the touchy-feely style of "encounter group" that so embarrasses Hal in
Irifinite Jest. Jethro Bodine: 1007. Supposedly a mail room clerk for New Orleans Saints, made up by Orin Incandenza to discourage letters from the Moms (10 14) . The name is taken from a character on "Beverly Hillbillies," and glances at Pig Bodine in Pynchon's V. Nick Bollettieri: (193 1-) 79. World-famous tennis coach whose tennis academy for young players was a prototype for ETA. Mildred Bonk: A "fatally pretty" high school girl (38) who grows up to be a tough kid and lives with Bruce Green in Allston. Harriet Bonk-Green: 39. The child ofMildred Bonk and Bruce Green. Bridget C. Boone: 50. A student at ETA, "Preludin-happy" (983), "a lazy student but very bright girl." Bjorn Borg: (1956-) 675. Swedish tennis player, known for his "ping pong" style of groundstrokes. Hieronymus Bosch: (c1450-1516) 999. Early modem Flemish painter, especially of The Garden ofEarthly Delights. James Boswell: (1740-1795). Scottish biographer of the great eighteenth century writer Samuel Johnson. Hal calls Helen Steeply Orin's "Boswell in an E cup" (10 12) . Mr. Bouncety-Bounce: 520. The "mentally-ill kiddie show host Gately's always loved" (922) ; character o n a daily dissemination or teleentertainment who appears in an old doth-and-safety-pin diaper
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and paunch and rubber infant-head mask; "not a soothing or pleasant figure at all" (648) . Bouvier: 23 1. Director discussed in a conversation at Molly Notkin's party. Bouchards,Jr. and Sr.: Prominent figures in Separatist movement who "heard the squeak" (1057) and were killed by Wheelchair Assassins. Stan Brakhage: (1933-). Film-maker associated with "disassociative formalism" (996). Vic Braden: (1929-) 1032. Pro tennis coach. Marlon Brando: (1924-2004) 157. American actor, famous for his "method" performances on stage and in film. Otto Brandt: 32. Custodial worker at ETA. Brandt's IQ is submoronic to moronic; he's "bald and somehow at once overweight and wiry" (873) and rooms with Kenkle, his work-mate. Bertolt Brecht: (1898-1956) 944. German playwright, Marxist, known for Mother Courage, The Threepenny Opera, and other "radical" works. Robert Bresson: (c. 1907-1999) 185. French film director. The date given for his birth may be a later fabrication: he may have been born as early as 190 1. James Broughton: (1913-1999) 185. "Comic-Surrealist . . . avant-gardist" (1072) film maker. M. Broullime: 127. One ofMarathe's comrades-on-wheels in the AFR or Wheelchair Assassins. Uncle Bud: 22 1. Joelle's own personal uncle. Bulat: 447. First-name ofDon Gately's long-absent Estonian father.
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Luis Buiiuel: (1900-1983) 185. Spanish film maker. John Bunyan: (1628-1688) 322. Seventeenth-century English Puritan writer, author of the enormously influential Ptlgnm s Progress. Craig Burda: 309. Student at Port Washington Tennis Academy. Major Bums: 642. Character on television show M*A*S*H. William Burroughs: (1914-1997) 2 12. American writer, homosexual, heroin addict, author of Naked Lunch. Robert Burton: (1577-1640) 695 . Seventeenth-century English author of the great Anatomy q{Melancholy, which in its "anticonfluential" form anticipated Tristram Shandy in the eighteenth century,Joyce's Ulysses in the early twentieth, and Irifim�e Jest in our own day. George Bush: (1924-) 63. 41" American President, from 1989-1993. F.:X. ('Follow That Ambulance')
Byrne: "Brighton's infamous, rapacious
personal-injury ].D:' (512) Bobby C: 128. Petty criminal and druggie who overdoses on Dr. Wo's really bad junk; "bad news new guy Sorkin had befriended and put to work," a punk-type kid who "liked to hurt people" (9 17) . John Cage: (19 12-1992) American experimental composer, many of whose works represent a musical equivalent to JOI's experiments in film technique. James Cameron: (1954-) 48. American film director. Albert Camus: (19 13-1960) 12. French existentialist author, whose La Peste is a parable of modern despair. Georg Cantor: (1845-19 18) 82. German mathematician, inventor of set theory, and "more or less founder of transfinite mathematics" (994).
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Cantrell: 432. Prorector at ETA when Clipperton suddenly arrives. Truman Capote: (1924-1984) 344. American novelist Jennifer Capriati: (1976-) 676. American tennis player. Jimmy Carter: (1924-) 1037. 39'h American President, from 1977-198 1. Sir Georges Etienne Cartier: (18 14-1873) 3 10. Canadian statesman and leader. Gary Carty: 891. Old pal ofDon Gately on the North Shore. Pat Cash: (1965-) 676. Australian tennis player. William Casey: (1913-1987) 473. Former head of CIA, from 1981-1987. Cathy or Kathy: 920. The "horrifYingly attractive" nurse tending Gately in the Trauma Ward. Dick Cavett: (1936-) 344. American film actor, comedian, and talk show host. Briefly successful as the "intellectual" alternative to Johnny Carson's moronic Tonight Show. Samuel de Champlain: (1567-1635) 310. French explorer and Canadian colonist. Lake Champlain is named for him. Michael Chang: (1972-) 388. American tennis pro. Charlie Chaplin: (1889-1977) 231. Film maker, actor, star of a series of classic silent films, as well as The Great Dictator in the sound era. Charest: Another prominent figure in Separatist movement who "heard the squeak" (1057) and was killed by Wheelchair Assassins. Ibn-Said Chawaf: 254. Actor in Incandenza films and teacher at ETA.
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Mo Cheery: 643. Owner of Cheery Oil, Troy New York, where Hugh Steeply's father worked. Susan T. Cheese: 130. Buys beer for Poor Tony, C, and yrstruly. Chemically Over-Garrulous Headliner: Supposedly responsible for the manically verbose headlines in Mario's film about Experialism (398ff), "Fired Even from Subheader Dept. for Exceeding Verbal Parameters" (400). Jean Chretien: Canadian Prime Minister. Daphne Christianson: 38. A more likely name than Mildred Bonk for the beautiful 8th grader that Bruce Green fell in love with. LaMont Chu: 112. A student at ETA whose Big Buddy is John Wayne. Confesses to Lyle how much he "wants the hype" (388) offame in the Show. He leads the Tunnel Club expedition in search of the feral hamster supposedly sighted under the ETA complex. Greg Chubb: 309. Student at Port Washington Tennis Academy. Chuck or Chick: 533 . Gets shot in a bar (53 1-533). Marla-Dean Chumm: An actress in several Incandenza films, including The ONANtiad (989) and Blood Sister (990). Sir Winston Churchill : (1874-1965) 226. Prime minister of Great Britain during World War II, indomitable opponent ofHitler's Germany, winner of a Nobel Prize for his historical writing. Cisne: 2 64 . ETA student. Claprood: The "pre-O.N.A.N.ite Governor" (576) ofMassachusetts. Mrs. Clarke: 112. Head cook at ETA.
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Clayt: A "sad old ex-QB" (65) for the Phoenix Cardinals. Montgomery Oift: (1920-1966) 745. American Broadway and film actor. Hillary Rodham Clinton: (1947-) 382. Former first lady, accused a "vast right wing conspiracy" ofhaving invented the story ofher husband's Oval Office liason with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, later ran for political office. Eric Clipperton: 407. Sixteen-year-old tournament tennis player who brandishes an immaculately maintained Glock 17 semiautomatic and makes "clear his intention to blow his own brains out publicly, right there on the court, ifhe should lose, ever, even once" (408). Boys who draw Eric in tournaments are known as "the Clipperton Brigade:' His "only even remote friend on the jr. tour is eight-year-old Mario Incandenza" (4 10) whose little film is "the only available footage of the late Eric Clipperton" (4 10). Lori Clow: 1035. ETA student who plays microtennis with Freer. Comstock: 233. Author of scholarly article about james Incandenza (985). April Cortelyu: 206. "Spectrally thin" (601) resident of Ennet House. Kyle Dempsy Coyle: 50. Student at ETA. Roommate of Ortho Stice and friend of Mario. Comes from Tucson, Arizona. Jiminy Cricket: 1065. Pinocchio's mentor and conscience in the Walt Disney film version. Jolene Criess: 310. Girl at ETA. Crocodiles: 354. The old timers or "galoots" in White Flag Group, "decades sober" who still attend Enfield, Massachusetts AA meetings. Burrill B. Crohn: (1884-1983) 995. Doctor and expert on intestinal
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disorders; Crohn's disease, a chronic and debilitating inflammation of the bowel, is named after him. Bing Crosby: (1903-1977) 994. American crooner and movie star. In
Irifim�e Jest, his name is used as a slang term for cocaine. Zoltan Csikszentmihalyi: 965. A spectacularly-named "marginal Slavic" (1070) sixteen-year-old kid at ETA. George Cukor: (1899-1983) 2 19 . American film director. Salvador Dali: (1904-1989) 185. Spanish artist, Surrealist, self-promoter. Ram Das: (1534-1581) 213. A Sihk guru. Bunny Day: Stage name for actress in a "pornography-parody" called
Mobus Stnps (990) made by Incandenza. Geoffrey T. Day: 203 . Resident of Ennet House, a highly-educated, arrogant blow-hard. He's a "red-wine-and-Quaalude" white man who "taught something horseshit-sounding like social historicity or historical sociality" in Medford, "manned the helm" ofa Scholarly Quarterly (272). Probably the speaker of the monologues on pages 177 and 18 1. Day, usually regarded as a merely obnoxious figure, tells Kate Gompert a terrifying episode from when he was ten, playing violin and horrified by a sense inside him of something large, dark, and billowing, "It was as ifl'd awakened it and now it was active . . . . There is no way it could feel worse" (650-65 1). Day is prone to thinking how working class guys tend to give nicknames to their penises. Day is also the author of a bombastic but very pertinent scholarly essay about the Wheelchair Assassins, plagiarized by Jim Struck for an ETA course (1055-1062). Day visits Don Gately in the hospital, to share his intimate thoughts with the mute and effectively paralyzed Don. James Dean: (193 1-1955) 745. American actor and icon, famous for his role in Rebel Wt�hout A Cause.
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Michael DeBakey: (1908-) 33. Pioneer heart surgeon who invented many surgical instruments and was the developer of the Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals (MASH) concept for the military. Aubrey F. deLint: 3. Head prorector at ETA, always carrying clipboard and statistics sheet; an alumnus ofUniversity ofArizona. Sits with "Helen Steeply" at ETA exhibition match and keeps reporter away from Hal. Gilles Deleuze: (1925-1995) 792. French philosopher and social theorist, author of the Antz�Oedipe, a reinterpretation of schizophrenia as a condition produced by contemporary society. Lady Delphina: 13l. Joelle's source of cocaine in Upper Brighton. Robert DeNiro: ( 1943-) 944. American film star, best known for
Raging Bull. Brian DePalma: (1940-) 185. American film director. Maya Deren: (1917-196 1) 185. American author and experimental filmmaker. An old artish director, really "ne pas a Ia mode" anymore (1027) . Dick Desai: Works i n "Data Production" (49 1) for the Office of Unspecified Services. Desjardins: 725. Young member of the Wheelchair Assassins who dies watching the Entertainment with his associatejoubet. DesMonts: One of the "Canadian Harvard Square small-time thug types Gately knew slightly" (975), hangs out with Pointgrave. Miss Diagnosis: 450. Lame substitute for Madame Psychosis on WYYY midnight radio. Vivienne Dick: 985. Featured in an anticonfluential film article.
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Emily Dickinson: (1830-1886). "As in the Belle of Amherst Emily Dickinson, the canonical agoraphobic poet" (1005) . Gavin Diehl: 178. Young resident ofEnnet House who was in jail with Gately. Mrs. Diggs: 76. Works for Kate Gompert's family as house cleaner. Ville Dillard: 309. Student at Port Washington Tennis Academy. Dingley: 564. See Tingly. Franklin W. Dixon: 812. Collective pen name of a group of writers called the Stratemeyer Syndicate who wrote the Hardy Boys' adventure stories; Tiny Ewell's pseudonym for a bank account. Donnay: 757. Tennis racket manufacturers. Tommy Doocey: 'The infamous harelipped pot and sundries dealer" (39) who lives in a trailer park with his snakes in Allston, Massachusetts. (179). Anton Doucette: A clinically depressed ETA student, who dreads the nickname "Booger," which highlights "the big round dark raised mole on his upper-upper lip, just under his left nostril" (390) ; seeks help from Lyle. Donni: 523 . A staff member at ETA who wins a qualifying match at Hartford. Doris: Slang term for drugs, "synthetic dickies, psychs, and phenyls" (994). Fred I. Dretske : (1932-) 70. Philosopher, author of textbook on psychological disorders cited by Kate Gompert's physician. William E. B. DuBois: (1868-1963) 75. African-American writer and leader. "DuBois" is slang for marijuana, pot, cannabis, etc.
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Maura Duffy : 973. Schoolgirl Don Gately knew as a boy. Michael Dukakis: (1933-) 576. Governor ofMassachusetts 1975-1979 and 1983-1991, Democratic candidate for President in 1988. Rik Dunkel: 381. Prorector at ETA. Guillaume DuPlessis: 30. Assistant coordinator of the pan-Canadian Resistance, regarded as a genius by Marathe. He "once studied beneath radical Edmonton Jesuits" (420). He meets a grotesque death at the inadvertent hand ofDon Gately. Albert Diirer: (1471-1528) 323. German Renaissance painter, pioneer of perspective in painting and engraving. E. Duquette: 233. Film teacher and critic at MIT; author of articles about anticonfluential film (985, 993). Lucille Duquette: 795. Supposedly the real name ofJoelle van Dyne, daughter of Earl or AI Duquette. Dymphna/Dempster: 17. Blind kid, age nine, scheduled to enter ETA. Is "Dymphna" his name or only Arslanian's botched version (567) ? Dymphna is Hal's scheduled semifinal opponent in the WhataBurger Southwest Junior Invitational tournament, or at least Hal thinks so. Dymphna is identified as nine years of age (5 18, 567), but as "sixteen" on p. 17. Tommy E: A big "green-card Irishman" (35 1) who speaks at AA meeting about the joy of producing his first-in-a long-time solid bowel movement. Tina Echt: 381. Youngest kid at ETA, whose interview sends her into tears. "Just seven but a true cannibal off the backhand side" (5 1 1). Nelson Eddy: (1901-1967) . American movie star in 1930s; sings atop a mountain in a Canadian Mounties costume (10 11) .
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Egede or Egette: Dead-eyed nurse with German accent who provided Gately with Demerol and sex and said she "couldn't come close to coming unless he burned her with a cigarette" (891). Sergei Eisenstein: (1898-1948) 232. Russian film director and pioneer of "film syntax:' Elder or Elders, or perhaps Olders: leading Canadian neurologist conducted experiments at the Brandon psychiatric center in the BS 1970s to avoid surgery for severe epileptics; in these experiments the neuroscientists found that certain parts ofthe lobes gave the brain intense feelings of pleasure; these "p-terminals" released "Rivers of Reward," the "Department ofEuphoria, so to speak, within the human brain" (471). El Greco: (1541-16 14) 334. Greek/Spanish mannerist painter, famous for his phantasmagoric religious paintings. Bret Easton Ellis: (1964-). Talentless American novelist, gained brief notoriety for Amencan Psycho; called "ghastly" (19 1) . Ursula Emrich-Levine: 1026. Author ofunappreciative scholarly article on james Incadenza's oeuvre. Engineer for WYYY: 183. Worked for Madame Psychosis on her weekly show until she disappeared; is mysteriously abducted from Boston Common by Wheelchair Assassins (623-626). Columbus Epps: 38. Brother of Delores Epps. Delores Epps: 37. Sister ofColumbus and jump-roping friend ofClenette Henderson. Ken Erdedy: 17. He frantically, desperately awaits marijuana more-or less promised to him by a casual acquaintance (17-27), then later reappears (209) at the drug facility Ennet House where Erdedy is regarded by Don Gately as "a yuppie, an account executive at Viney and Veals
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Advertising downtown" (360), about Gately's age (28) , "softly good looking in that soft mannequinish way Harvard and Tufts schoolboys have . . . so smooth and groomed all the time even in jeans and a plain cotton sweater" (360) . Erdedy is also seen attending a Narcotics Anonymous Beginners' Discussion Meeting (503). Maurits Comelis (MC) Escher: (1898-1972) Graphic artist and creator of visual riddles; as in "Escherian signs" (1034) . Esconja: 652. Tennis player. Euclid: (c.325 BC-c265 BC) 81. Greek mathematician, inventor ofgeometry. Chris Evert: (1954-) 675. American tennis player. Eldred K. "Tiny" Ewell Jr.: 85. Elf-sized lawyer with the hypertensive flush and little white beard who moves from detox at St. Mel's Hospital to the Enfield Marine VA Hospital Complex and halfWay house. He tells Don Gately his story (809-8 14). Eugene ("Fax") Fackelmann: 6 14. Don Gately's old druggie pal on the North Shore, "a towering . . . prematurely potbellied, oddly priapistic, and congenitally high-strung Dilaudid addict" (9 12), one of Sorkin's Twin Towers who tries to rip offWhitey Sorkin in an insane scam. Robert F: 444 . Biker who attends Braintree AA meeting; calls himself "BOB DEATH" (445) . Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Feaster: 698. Suffering from depression, Ernest is in the same hospital as Kate Gompert, who comes to know him and his wife. Federico Fellini: (1920-1993) 185. Italian film director. Fenton: 47. Subject in a Canadian documentary about schizophrenia, disseminated by InterLace.
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Fentress: 25 4. Teacher at ETA. Filbert: 1006. The Moms addresses her son Orin with this nickname. A footnote to the footnote addresses the reader: "Don't ask" (102 1) . Thomas M. Flatto: 490. Director of"Input/Output" ofthe Entertainment; connected with a lab (646). Dwight Flechette: 949. One of the first students at ETA, there during the 1998 blizzard. Walt Flechette: Dwight's "gray-toothed" (46) brother, also a former ETA student. Flottman: 254. ETA teacher. Johnette Marie Foltz: 208. Current female live-in staffer, working with Don Gately, at Ennet House. Johnette answers the door when Hal comes for information about 12-step programs (786). Gerald R. Ford: (1913-) 63. Thirty-eighth American President, 19741977. Assumed office when Richard Nixon resigned due to mounting national anger over Watergate scandal. M. Fortier: 89 . Marathe's superior, head of the AFR, Les Assassins des Fauteur7s Rollents or Wheelchair Assassins, Quebec's "most dreaded and rapacious anti-O.N.A.N. terrorist cell" (994) . Chandler Foss: Resident of Ennet House, notable for having tried to efface a tattoo inscribed MARY by adding BLESSED VIRGIN with a razor blade, "with predictably ghastly results" (207) . Bob Fosse: (1927-1987) 990. American choreographer and director of film and theatre, including All That Jazz, an autobiographical movie. Jean Baptistejoseph Fourier: (1768-1830) 1072. French mathematician, best known for "Fourier transforms."
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Hollis Frampton: (1936-1984) Film maker of"audience-specific events" (988) , parodied in Incandenza's The Joke. Bob Francis: 309. Student at Port Washington Tennis Academy. Frankie the Hankie : 878 . Rejected cartoon advertising figure for projected anti-Entertainment advertising campaign; tested badly with sub-teens in market survey. Yves Francoeur: Actor in Incandenza film (992). Keith (''The Viking") Freer: 50. An older student at ETA, hostile to Pemulis. "'The Viking' moniker is his own invention, and nobody else uses it" (998), except the narrator, who does so ironically. Works out with Komspan (198) . Gottlob Frege: (1848-1925) 1072. German mathematician, logician, and philosopher. Major influence on Bertraund Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Louis
de Buade Frontenac: (1620-1698) 310. French governor of New France before the loss of Canada to Great Britain in the Seven Years' War.
Squyre Frydell: Actor in Incandenza film The ONANtiad (989) . Judith Fukuoka-Heam: 986. Actress who appears in several Incandenza films and narrates two films. Frank Furillo: 140. Police captain on "Hill Street Blues," a television show; subject of Hal's 7'h grade essay on heroes ofTV cop shows. Dennis Gabor. Hal says he could "very well have been the Antichrist" (12). Mahatma Gandhi: (1869-1948) 357. Indian political and spiritual leader who taught and practiced nonviolent resistance to British colonial rule. Garfield: 880. The Cat, a cartoon figure in a widely-syndicated newspaper series in the late twentieth century BS.
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Dr. Garton: 74. Kate Gompert's physician. Bill Gates: ( 1955-) 415. Chairman and chiefsoftware architect ofMicrosoft. A Harvard dropout who made billions of dollars by buying the rights to the DOS operating system at a crucial moment in software design. Don Gately: 17. Twenty-seven-year old narcotics addict and "a more or less professional burglar . . . distinguished by his ferocious and jolly elan" (55) who struggles to stay clean and works very hard at Ennet house. See Gately's entry in the Compendium of Major Characters. Paul Gauguin: (1848-1903) 460. French painter, known for his luscious paintings of native beauties in the Pacific islands. Carl Friedrich Gauss: (1777-1855) 1072. German mathematician, physicist, and astronomer. Francis ("Ferocious Francis") Gehaney: 273. Old-timer at Ennet House and Gately's sponsor in AA; member of the so-called Crocodiles, a group of old recovered alcoholics. Has a white crew cut and skallycap and a huge red nose and "the very clear bright eye-whites that went along with the extremely low resting pulse-rate of a guy with geologic amounts of sober AA time" (468). Lou Gehrig: (1903-194 1) 968. Hall of Fame baseball player, died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, now called Lou Gehrig's Disease. Member of the famous "Murderer's Row," which included teammate Babe Ruth, in the Yankees' batting order. Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner: 65. "Nejoyner, lounge singer turned teenybopper throb turned B-movie mainstay . . . founding standardbearer of the seminal new 'Clean U.S. Party' . . . suddenly swept to quadrennial victory in an angry reactionary voter-spasm . . . . the first U.S. President ever to swing his microphone around by the cord during his inauguration speech [which] heralded the advent of a Tighter, Tidier Nation" (381-382).
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Mona Ghent: 310. Student at Port Washington Tennis Academy. Ginger: 77. Kate Gompert's cat. Philip Glass: (193 7-) 802. American composer of minimalist music and opera. Jackie Gleason: (19 16-1987) 1070. American comedian and TV star, known for his role in the television series The Honeymooners. Dwayne R. Glynn: Suffers a freak accident and makes claim to insurance company (139-140) . Resides in Ennet House; known as "Doony Glynn" (206), "still woozy and infirm from some horrendous Workers Comp. scam gone awry last year, and is constantly sickly" (469), "so cross-eyed he could stand in the middle of the week and see both Sundays" (543) . Gloeckner: 1070. Male student at ETA whose locker is next to Hal's. Jacques Godbout: (1933-) French director of"neoconceptual structuralist films" (988), parodied by Incandenza Rube Goldberg: (1883-1970) 788. American cartoonist and sculptor, deviser of hilariously complex machines designed to perform absurdly simple tasks. Katherine Ann ("Kate") Gompert: 68. Strung-out, suicidal patient, twenty-one years old, addicted to marijuana and seeking either electric shock therapy or release through suicide. As we meet her, she is in the hospital for the fourth time in three years. She has made two previous suicide attempts. She enters Ennet House, and lives upstairs in a 5woman room withjoelle van Dyne, Charlotte Treat, April Cortelyu, and Amy Johnson. When Geoffrey Day tells Kate how he first discovered terror and despair, Kate comments with sympathy, "And there was this idea underneath that you'd brought it on, that you'd wakened it up" (650).
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She continues to be extremely depressed. Kate and the narrator consider types and effects of depression, beginning with a low grade form, anhedonia - a kind of"emotional novocaine" (692), in which one can "navigate, but has no location," and becomes "Unable To IdentifY" (693). "The true predator, the Great White Shark of pain" (695), Kate Gompert simply thinks of as It. Kate Gompert and Ruth van Cleve, walking to their NA meeting, are robbed by Poor Tony Krause, an "apparition" in his boa and red leather coat, "just about the most unattractive woman Kate Gompert had ever seen" (715). Kate's head is badly banged on a light pole in the purse-snatching. Later Remy Marathe and Kate Gompert have Kahlua and milk drinks at Ryle's Inman Square jazz club. He has just come to her assistance after she was mugged and injured. He tells her she reminds him of his wife Gertraude. Kate, expecting a romantic narrative, is appalled by the grotesque details ofhis beloved's condition. It gradually dawns on Kate that this is not "a feel-better story at all' It doesn't fit her preconception of love and marriage, that release from being "alrme and in heU' she's experienced. Marathe, perhaps frustrated by her obtuse egocentricity, offers to show her some real pleasure, "more good feeling and pleasure than ever before" (782). She of course thinks he means sex. He of course means that he will show her the lethal Entertainment. Their last exchange summarizes the unbreachable distance between them. Ivan Goncharov: (18 12-1891) 282. Nineteenth-century Russian writer, author of Oblomov. Josh Gopnik: 119. Student at ETA. Steffi Graf: (1969-) 675. German tennis player. Grateful Dead: 904. Legendary American rock band, carried on a tribal ritual of peripatetic concerts long after the 1 960s were over, followed all over the country by fanatical fans known as "Dead heads."
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Bruce Green: 39. Adored Mildred Bonk from first glimpse in eighth grade and grew up to cohabit with her in an Allston trailer. Later comes to live in Ennet House and is the only person willing to listen to the noxious Randy Lenz. Bruce Green, Sr.: Bruce's father, has some responsibility for perpetrating a joke gone very sour (see below under Mrs. Green). A former aerobics instructor whose leg grew grotesquely large, he became a joke salesman and aficionado. A second prank gone wrong, involving Blammo Cigars and the "grisly forensic fragments" ofseveral victims, led to his conviction and execution by Lethal Injection (579-581) . George Green: (1793-184 1) 1072. Nineteenth century English physicist and self-taught mathematician. Mrs. Green: Bruce's mother, who died suddenly of cardiac arrest when opening a joke Xmas present (578-580) given to her by her husband. John Robert Gregg: (1867-1948) 659. Stenographer who invented the Gregg shorthand system. D. W. Griffith: (1875-1948) 986. Pioneering American film maker, invented "cross-cutting" - shifting back and forth between two simultaneous events in a narrative to heighten suspense - admired by Incandenza; Himselfs film Dark Logics is a tribute to Griffith. Nell Gunther: 208. Resident of Ennet House who has "a glass eye which she amuses herself by usually wearing so the pupil and iris face in and the dead white and tiny manufacturer's specifications on the back of the eye face out" (362-363) . Somewhat short-tempered, she at one point stabs Morris Hanley with a fork. The Guy Who Didn't Even Use His First Name: 137. An ex-convict who founded Ennet House; the point lies in its reference to Bill W., the actual founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.
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Margaret Hamilton: (1902-1985) 19 1. American actress who played The Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard q{Oz. Alexander Hammid: 185. Czech film-maker, second husband of Maya Deren. Morris Hanley: 205. Resident ofEnnet House who loves special tollhouse cookies and is stabbed with a fork by Nell Gunther; monologue on pages 177-178. He donates his brownies to Gately in the hospital (855). Dave ("Fall Down Very") Harde: ETA's "well-loved old janitor laid off from Boston College for contracting narcolepsy" (152) . Neil Hartigan: 454. Tall , laconic prorector at ETA, favors a traditional Tahitian shirt and Gauguin-motif sweater (460) ; loses patience (1072). Harv: 802. The leader or facilitator ofthe repulsively touchy-feely Men's Meeting into which Hal stumbles by mistake. Paul Harvey: (1918-) 271. Radio personality and newscaster. Rita Hayworth: (19 18-1987) 209. American movie star. Hazel: 834. Heroine of a 1950s TV sitcom, played the wise housekeeper of a middle-class family. Pam Heath: 392. Teacher at ETA, actress in several Incandenza films (987) . Paul Anthony Heaven: 9 10. Actor in several Incandenza films. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: (1770-183 1) 12. German philosopher, originator of German Idealist philosophy, whose major claim is that human consciousness and the external world are simply different aspects of a single total reality.
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Martin Heidegger: (1899-1976) 233. German philosopher, brought about a revolution in modern philosophy by starting his inquiries not from the isolated consciousness of the individual but from Dasein, the "situatedness" of every consciousness in a world already existing. Werner Heisenberg: (1901-1976) 831. Nobel Laureate in physics, best known for the "Heisenberg principle" in quantum physics, which states that the behavior of physical reality at the subatomic level is altered by the act of observing it. Clenette Henderson : Black girl who narrates a very painful monologue about sexual abuse in her housing project (37) and, seeking sanctuary, ends up at Ennet House (363; 527) ; does custodial work at nearby ETA. Herman the Ceiling That Breathed: 447. Don Gately's childhood designation for a hole in the roof of his bedroom inadequately covered with plastic blowing in the breeze. Charlton Heston: (1924-) 205. Actor and former President ofthe National Rifle Association. David Hilbert: (1862-1943) 1072. Mathematician, best known for "Hilbertian n-dimensional space." Himself: 16. James Orin Incandenza. John Hinton: English professor and author of a book Hal read (253), probably Dying, published in 1967. Kenijuru Hirota: Choreographer for Incandenza film, ' 77ze Medusa v.
the Odalisque' (988). Adolf Hitler: (1889-1945) 777. German dictator, author ofMet'n Kampf, architect of the National Socialist takeover of Germany after the fall of
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the Weimar Republic. Concluded a mutual non-aggression treaty with Josef Stalin, the Soviet dictator, in 1938, then invaded Poland in 1939, bringing about the international crisis marking the formal beginning of World War II. Don Ho: 583. "Hideously compelling" (586) Hawaiiian musician, with the quality (Green thinks) of a type of ointment; heard on album entitled
Don Ho: From Hawmi· With All My Love. Thomas Hobbes: (1588-1679) 12. English philosopher of a gloomy cast, author of The Leviathan. Best known for his description of the State of Nature as a "war of all against all," in which the life of human beings is "nasty, brutish, and short:' The Leviathan outlines a political theory of the social contract in which each individual gives up part of his or her autonomy to a central authority so that a peaceful and productive society becomes possible. Pamela Hoffman:Jeep: 465. Don Gately's girlfriend, "upscale but directionless and not very healthy and pale and incredibly passive Danvers girl that worked in Purchasing for a hospital-supply co. in Swampscott and was pretty definitely an alcoholic" (924). Gretchen Holt: 310. A "bespectacled" (1035) student at ETA. Maureen Hooley: Vice-President for Children's Entertainment, InterLace Te!Entertainment, Inc.; attends meeting in Boston (876-882). Bob Hope: (1903-2004 ) 51. American comedian/movie/TV star. His name is used as "Metro Boston subdialectical argot" (994) for cannabis, pot, grass, high-grade high-resin marijuana. Name lends itself to expressing "Giving Up Hope" or "Abandoning All Hope." Harry Hopman: (1906-1985) 82. Australian tennis coach inducted into the International Tennis Hall ofFame in 1978; ran a tennis program in Florida where Schtitt taught before coming to ETA (307) .
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Horace: The name of Stice's dad's dog back home in Kansas that was poisoned by coyote bait; Stice names his anger "Horace" after the dog (551). Max Horkheimer. (1895-1973) 450. German philosopher and sociologist, colleague of Adorno in the Frankfurt School of social theory. Harry Houdini: (1874-1926). Escape-artist and showman; Charles Tavis, ETA's director, is characterized as "a Houdini with the manacles offact" (1046) . Mr. Howell: 169. The marooned millionaire o n the TV show "Gilligan's Island:' Henri ("Hank") F. Hoyne: An "idiot intern in Data Analysis" who yielded to temptation to watch the forbidden Entertainment and has been in "four-point restraints" ever since. "Nourishment through a tube. No desire or even basic survival-type will for anything other than more viewing" (507). Now "an empty shell" (508) . His wife, effectively a widow, is named Miriam. Wayne Huizenga: (1937-) 415. Former CEO ofBlockbuster Entertainment Telma Hurley: Acted in Incandenza's Blood Sister. One Tough Nun (990). Iaccarino: 23 1. Guest at Notkin's party; a Charlie Chaplin archivist. Taka limura: (1937-) 986. Japanese filmmaker parodied by Himself in Dark Logics. Avril Mondragon lncandenza: 10. Wife ofJOI, mother of Orin, Hal, and Mario. See Compendium of Major Characters. Hal Incandenza: 3. One ofthe novel's most important characters. Second son of James and April Incandenza. See Compendium of Major Characters.
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James Orin lncandenza: Hal's father, Avril's husband, tennis player, scientist, founder of ETA, film-maker. Committed suicide. See Compendium ofMajor Characters. Mario lncandenza: 32. The middle child, brother of Orin and Hal, though "Mario doesn't seem to resemble much of anyone they know" (101) . See Compendium of Major Characters. Mario lncandenza, Sr.: "Dr. james Incandenza's father's father," (3 13) and Mario's namesake. Orin james lncandenza, Sr: Father ofjames the suicidal film-maker and founder ofETA, grandfather of Orin, Hal, and Mario. In a harrowing monologue (157-169) delivered to his ten-year-old son james, he reveals himselfas a psychological tyrant, an alcoholic, and an abusive, fiightening figure. Orin lncandenza: 10. Hal's older brother, the eldest child ofjames and Avril Incandenza, a former tennis player turned football punter, now a star for the Phoenix Cardinals and a world-class philanderer. See Compendium ofMajor Characters. Evan Ingersoll: 97. Eleven-year-old eyebrowless student at ETA. His Big Buddy Axford despises him, so Ingersoll is "traded" for Possalthwaite to Hal. Seriously injured in Eschaton game. It: The invertebrate sister, pathetically nameless, whose father regularly rapes her while she haplessly wears a tacky mask ofRaquel Welch (370-373) . The girl is called "It" because she's regarded as barely human. Its Sister: Tells the terrible story of It and her own woes at the AA meeting, with altogether too much whining and not enough sense of responsibility for her own subsequent behavior (370-373) . Burl lves: (1909-1995) 86. American folksinger and celebrity.
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JackJ: 844. Visits Gately in hospital. AndreaJaeger: (1965-) 675. American tennis player. MickJagger: (1943-) 1037. Rock icon, lead singer of the Rolling Stones. William James: (1842-1910) 543. Leading American philosopher psychologist-public intellectual and Harvard professor in late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Author of 17ze Pnnciples ifPsychology and 17ze Vaneties ifReligrous Expenence, published in a book that Lenz finds in the Ennet House library and cuts up to conceal his drugs. Lenz repeatedly garbles the title ofJames's book (1037, etc) . Jay: Minor figure in Johnny Gentle's administration, head of a staff to "forestall anything like ostensible refugeeism" from the area reconstituted as the Concavity (404) ; works with Marty. Jim: 806. Guy at the Men's Meeting whose hug Kevin Bain's Inner Infant seeks. Amy Johnson: Lives at Ennet House; "the new-today girl" at ETA "shaking like an aspen" (475) ; misses curfew (539) . Ken N.Johnson: The "hairy-shouldered" actor (957) who played roles in Incandenza's films. S. Johnson: 771. "Very much Mrs. Incandenza's dog," whose name honors the eighteenth-century English writer Samuel Johnson, author of the great Di'chonary if the English Language; S. Johnson (the dog) suffers a grisly fate behind the family Volvo driven by an obliviously impaired Orin (1049). Joubet: Red-bearded member of the AFR "who loved to pop wheelies" (725) ; dies viewing the Entertainment. Pauline Kael: (1919-2001) 185. Tendentious but influential American film critic, columnist for 17ze New lOrker.
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Fmnz Kafka: (1883-1924) 254. German novelist whose surreal stories in one ofwhich, for instance, a man awakens to find himself tmnsfonned into an insect - are alluded to in several episodes of Itifim�e Jest. Petropolis Kahn: 17. A strong tennis player at ETA, sixteen-years-old, a.k.a 'W.M: for "Wooly Mammoth" because he's so hairy (456). He rooms with Graham Rader. Immanuel Kant: (1724-1804) 82. German philosopher and founder of critical philosophy. His Prolegomenon to all Future Metaphysics laid to rest the "ontological proof" of God's existence devised by St. Anselm of Canterbury and developed by later medieval philosophers. Itifim�e Jest s implicit assumption that the existence of God reveals itself in experience rather than being demonstrable through logical or rational argument is "critical" in the Kantian sense. Robert Kastenbaum: 253. Published Encyclopedia qfDeath with wife Beatrice. Rutherford Keck: 229. Guest at Molly Notkin's party. Friedrich August Kekule: (1829-1896) 5. German organic chemist. Jack Kemp: ( 1935-) 177. Fonner NFL football player and vice-presidential candidate, elected president of the United States in Itifim�e Jest. John F. Kennedy: (1917-1963) 147. 35th American President, from 19611963 ; assassinated. S0ren Kierkegaard : (1813-1855) 12. Danish philosopher and theologian, parodied in a film by lncandenza. Klaus Kinski: (1926-1991) 234. German film actor. E.J. Kenkle: 32. Custodial worker at ETA; also appeared in Incandenza film. Kenkle is an African-American with dredlocks and a doctorate in
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physics; he was court-martialed out of the Office of Naval Research and is now menially employed at ETA. Discourses nonstop to his roommate and work-partner Brandt. Millicent Kent: ·� sixteen-year-old out of Montclair NJ, 4 H Singles on the Girls 16's-A squad and two hundred kilos if she was a kilo" (121) ; tries to seduce the hapless Mario on the grounds ofETA. Referred to as "The U.S.S. Millicent Kent," in ironic homage to her size. Trent ("Quo Vadis") Kite: 6 14. Gately's "old and once-gifted friend from his Beverly MA childhood" (984), later his unidentified partner in crime. Smart enough to synthesize Quaaludes in the kitchen of any vacationing parents' house. Scam artist partner of Fackelmann, accompanies Gately in the disastrous break-in at Brookline home ofG. DuPlessis, "which Kite ended up regretting exponentially more than Gately did, once the A.F.R. got through with him" (1077). Ann Kittenplan: 3 10. Student at ETA, loves Eschaton; "butch and suspiciously muscular" (330), only twelve and a half years old but built "like a Belorussian shot-putter" (330) with more of a mustache than Hal at seventeen. Maury Klamkin: 9. One-time tennis coach at University of Arizona. Eve! Knievel: (1938-) 859. Motorcycle-jumper stunt artist who affected tight Elvis-type leather pants. Tawni Kondo: 35. Does an "immensely popular exercise program spontaneously disseminated daily in all three O.N.A.N. time zones at 0700 h . , " combining aerobics, calisthenics , and "cosmetic psychology" (620) . Eliot Komspan: Fifteen-year-old student at ETA who lifts weights with Keith Freer (198), and has a heavy cold at the MIT exhibition (965), "cretinous and cruel'' (1070) , though unfairly suspected of torturing stray cats (see Lenz) .
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jerzy Kosinski: (1933-1991). Novelist who committed suicide; parodied by Himself (987) . Poor Tony Krause: 128. Cambridge gay prostitute in flamboyant drag and in search of drugs. See Compendium of Major Characters. Aaron Krickstein: (1967-) 676. American tennis player. David Krone: 754 . A resident at Ennet house who scuttles like a crab (786), and is tormented by Wade and Emil; "a junior executive guy at ATHSCME Air Displacement, an upscale guy with a picket house and kids and a worried wife with tall hair" (824). Glenn Kubitz: 352. Known as Glenn K; a Gothic-Satanic White-Flagger at Boston AA nobody much likes; visits Gately in hospital. Elisabeth Kiibler-Ross: (1926-) 253. Therapist and author of On Death
and Dying. Akira Kurosawa: (1910-1998) 232. Japanese film director, arguably the greatest film auteurofthe mid-twentieth century. John L: 345. Speaks at AA meeting, very effectively and at length. Noreen Lace-Forche: the "USC-educated video-rental mogulette" (4 15) who in BS 1990s brought Phoenix's Intermission Video to rival Blockbuster in gross receipts. Foreseeing "broadcast apocalypse," Lace Forche founded InterLace TelEntertainment. The rest is history; or, that's Entertainment, a "whole new millennia! era . . . Total freedom, privacy, choice" (620) . Mrs. Lamb: 575. Parents' day visitor at school. Fritz Lang: (1 890-1976) 48. German director of movies such as
Metropolis, Fury, Rancho Noton'ous.
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Pierre Simon Laplace: (1749-1827) 1072. French mathematician and astronomer. Timothy Leary: (1920-1996) 170. American teacher and LSD-advocate, became a 1960s "New Age" guru in later decades. Jean-Pierre Uaud: (1944-) 234. French actor who plays Antoine Doinel in Truffaut films. Suzanne Lenglen: (1899-1938) 675. French tennis player. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: (1646-1716) 1072. German mathematician and philosopher, important predecessor ofKant in German philosophy. His optimistic theory ofpossible worlds is parodied by Voltaire in Candide. Disney R. Leith: 51. "Teaches ETA's History ofEntertainment I and II as well as certain high-level esoteric Optics things" (96). Nickname: The D.IS r_, 1/"r. "D'lZ ) . "
Ivan Lend!: (1960-) 259. Czech tennis star. Lenny: A long time AA member who "liked to wear Hanes" (973) ; part of a group known as the Crocodiles. Randy Lenz: Obnoxious resident of Ennet House. See Compendium of Major Characters. Mrs. Lenz: Randy's "morbidly obese" Mom, who gets stuck twice, once in a kid-size desk at Parents' Night, and once in the window of a tiny toilet on a bus. Her story is told on pages 575-577. Mrs. Leroux: 575. A mother attending Parents' Night with Mrs. Lenz. Guillaume de VHopital: (1661-1704) 1072. French mathematician,wrote the first book on differential calculus, developed VHopital's Rule.
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Rush Limbaugh: (195 1-) 177. American radio personality, popular advocate of Neoconservative doctrines, in the latter part of his career went deaf as the result of abuse of prescription painkillers; in the novel, elected president of U.S.; known as Rush L. (382) . Robert Lingley: 99 1. A teacher at ETA who appeared in Incandenza film (17ze) Desire to Desire. Larry Linville: (1939-2000). Actor who played Major Franklin Bums on M*A*S*H, object of Hugh Steeply's father's obsessions, though Steeply gets his name wrong. "I remember, too well . . . the actor Maury Linville" (643). Barry Loach: 198. Trainer at ETA, who loves Mario for helping him get his job. His mother desperately wanted a priest in the family, and one by one her sons disappointed her; Barry barely escaped her influence. Conducts a telling experiment to measure the basic decency of humanity with his brother at the Park Station T-stop on the Boston Common (969-970) . Therese Loach: Sister ofBarry Loach, not interested in being a Carmelite nun (967). Stavros Lobokulas: Gately's partner/boss at his janitorial job; female footwear fetishist; about forty or fifty, "a troubling guy with a long cigarette filter and an enormous collection of women's-shoes catalogues" (434) to feed his dream of opening an upscale women's shoe store where the women "have good feet and can afford to take care of their feet" (436). Lolasister: 130. Hangs out with Poor Tony, C, and yrstruly. Bernadette Longley: 50. Student at ETA who was caught "Xing" Keith Freer in the back seat of a bus. Mrs. Lopate: 753. Catatonic old lady in a wheel chair Gately sees touching the trees and who visits Gately in the hospital (8 18).
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Otis P. Lord: 117. Student at ETA whose Big Buddy is Michael Pemulis. This year's Eschaton "gamemaster and statistician of record" (322). His indecision at a crucial point in the proceedings leads to total disaster, and he is himself seriously hurt in the debacle. Lyle: A forty-year-old "oiled guru" in the ETA weight room. See Compendium ofMajor Characters. David Lynch: (1946-) 944. American film director. Gene M.: See Eugenio Martinez. Mackey: 1035. Male student at ETA. Fred MacMurray: (1908-1991) 805. American actor who played widower Steven Douglas on the television show "My Three Sons," a 1950s sitcom today taken as epitomizing the social conformity and false domesticity ofpost-WWII America. Dusan Makavajev: (1932-) 233. Yugoslavian film director. His name is spelled incorrectly in Infinite Jest. Bernard Makulic: Little kid at ETA, "constitutionally delicate and not long for E.T.A." (634). John Malone: (1941-). CEO ofTCI cable network. One of the triumvirate ofTumer, Malone, and a shadowy Albertan figure who coalesced "100plus regional and national cable networks into the . . . fractious but potent Trade Association" (4 11). Michael Mann: (1943-) 987. American director parodied by Incandenza. Gertraude Marathe: Wife ofRemy; "skull-deprived and heart-defective" (529) ; in Quebec but urgently needs expensive medical treatment only available in the U.S.
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Remy Marathe: 88. Member of the AFR, "functioning as a kind of 'triple agent' or duplicitous 'double agent'" (995) . See Compendium of Major Characters. Eugenio "Gene" Martinez: 177. Don Gately's individual counselor and predecessor at Ennet House; calls addiction "the Spider." Tappi o Martti: 309. Student at Port Washington Tennis Academy. Marty : 403. Secretary of Transportation i n Johnny Gentle's administration, head of a staff to "forestall anything like ostensible refugeeism" (404) ; works with jay. Johnny Mathis: (1935-) 102. 1950s American pop singer. Everard Maynall : 988. Actor in Incandenza's Cage Ill Linda McCartney: (1942-1978) 978. Wife of Beatles singer and songwriter Paul McCartney, sang backup on records. Paul McCartney: (1942-) 978. Former Beatie, Wings composer and singer. Wade McDade: 178. An elaborately tattooed, disruptive patient at Ennet House; "a young hard-core flask-alkie from Ashland KY" (469) . John McEnroe: (1959-) 652. Temperamental tennis player who won 77 singles titles and was ranked No. 1 from 1981 to 1984. Famous for temper tantrums and bad sportsmanship. Steve McGarrett: 140. Police chief on the television show "Hawaii Five-0"; subject of Hal's 7th grade essay. Fibber McGee: Radio character of 1940s who always opened an over stuffed closet despite Molly's warning; as in "McGee-like chaos of closet" (1055) .
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McGruff: 880. Cartoon figure, the anti-crime dog. Kieran McKenna: 115. A student at ETA whose Big Buddy is John Wayne; plays Eschaton and is pummeled by Ann Kittenplan. Kyle McLachlin: (1959-) 944. Actor, especially in Twi'n Peaks and Blue Velvet. Another misspelling: McLachlin in the novel, MacLachlan in reality. Stokely "Dark Star" McNair: 129. HIV-positive druggie who dies in a Fenway hospice; appeared in Incandenza film Accompli'ce! (992). Andrei Medvedev: (1974-) 675. Ukrainian tennis player. Georges Melies: (1861-1938) . French film-maker (2 19). Melinda: Girl at Molly Notkin's party with "absolutely fetching tits" (233). Menelaus: 105. From Greek mythology, Helen's husband before she ran off with the Trojan Paris, thus beginning the war recounted in Homer's Ili'ad Ethel Merman: (1909-1984) 2 14. American actress; boisterous, "belting out" singing of"There's No Business Like Show Business" (1063). Oscar Michaux: (1884-195 1) 232. Ifthe reference is to Oscar Micheaux, he was the first African American to produce a feature-length film. If not, see our Invitatio ad lectores at end of volume. Aimee Middleton-Law: 310. Student at Port Washington Tennis Academy. Mikey: 958. Addict with a "spring-loaded temper" (960) , and alcohol problems who speaks at an AA meeting. Michael Milken: (1946-) 926.Junk bond trader convicted on securities fraud and insider trading charges and imprisoned in 1989.
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W[illiam] Miller: 581. Captain in the War of 1812 who converted to Christianity in 18 16, deduced from his study ofScripture that the end of the world was coming, and brought about a mass religious hysteria in mid-nineteenth century America by proclaiming that the Apocalypse would take place in 1844. He is the author of tracts handed out by Bruce Green's aunt. Nate Millis:Johnson: 309. Student at Port Washington Tennis Academy. Theodore Millon: (192 8-) 473. Founding Editor of the Journal qf Personality Disorders and author of the Millon Clinical Inventories. Emil Minty: 178. Another disruptive patient at Ennet House, "a hard-core smack-addict punk" with an orange mohawk and shaved skull, who's been on the streets since he was sixteen. Tattooed DORIS on his left breast and FUCK NIGERS on his left biceps, discreetly covered (207). Poor Tony is scared to death Emil has him "marked for de-mapping as a consequence ofthat horrid thing with Wo and Bobby C last winter" (300). Joni Mitchell; (1943-) 966. American folksinger. Mohammed: (c.570-632) 108. Prophet of Allah, founder of lslam. "Eighties Bill" Monroe: 926. Yalie, impeccably groomed guy, Wall Street yuppie, old-fashioned corporate takeover type, one of the bettors who place their wagers with Sorkin. Dr. Robert ("Sixties' Bob") Monroe: 927. Septuagenarian, Nehru-jacket wearing, one ofTimothy Leary's original circle of acid-droppers, Grateful Dead fanatic; father ofEighties Bill. Patricia Montesian: 176 . Executive Director, Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House; "both pretty and not . . . maybe in her late thirties . . . very long pretty red hair, and a sexually credible body" (465). In and out of detox in her twenties, then a stroke victim, she can't read her own handwriting. She is fond of Don.
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Lateral Alice Moore: 99. Works in the office at as Receptionist and Secretary at ETA. So called because ofher physical condition, caused in the crash when she had been "a helicopter pilot and airborne traffic reporter for a major Boston radio station" (5 10). She has a "chronic oxygen debt and a neurological condition whereby she was able to move only from side to side" (5 10) .
"Mummykins" or "The Mumminsky": Hugh Steeply's terms or nicknames for his mother (639-647). M. P.: 840. For "Military Police," the only ID for the Navy veteran who lived with and badly abused Gately's mother.
Brian Mulroney: (1939-) 1058. Canadian prime minister from 1984 to 1993. Edvard Munch: (1863-1944) 1016. Norwegian painter, did 17ze Scream.
Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau: (1888-193 1) 2 19. German film director, noted for breakthrough lighting techniques and deep-focus camera work. Dicky N: 445. A Crocodile, or long-time AA member. Maureen N: 826. Charlotte Treat's counselor at Ennet House. Tamara N: 445. Attends AA meeting in Braintree. Carry Nation: (1846-19 1 1) 926. Aggressive prohibitionist and member ofthe Women's Christian Temperance Union. Led political raiding parties that broke up men's saloons with axes.
Didi Neaves: 208. Resident of Ennet House. Elizabeth Harper Neeld: 253. Author of self-help books on grief and loss.
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Ng: 593. Father and son who own a grocery store; visited by Mario, they give him yellow tea when it's cold out. Marilyn Ng-A-Thiep: 310. Student at Port Washington Tennis Academy. Neil: "Over in Spin" (404) in johnny Gentle's administration, as parodied in Mario's film. John Newcombe: (1944-) 1034. Australian tennis star. Nickerson: Orin's "strabismic," or cross-eyed, and "faggy-sweatered but basically decent" (29 1) friend at BU. Nimitz: 448. Little Don Gately's kitten. Richard M. Nixon: 147. (1913-1994). Thirty-seventh American President, from 1969 to 1974. Nom: 834. Gately's Boston-accented version ofNorm, the character on the television show "Cheers" with whom he identifies. Molly Cantrell Notkin: 2 19. Friend ofjoelle van Dyne, a Ph.D student at MIT, wears a Karl Marx costume and holds a party at her Boston apartment wherejoelle overdoses on freebase cocaine. Comes to WYYY, still bearded as Karl Marx, to pick up old tapes for Madame Psychosis (625). Molly Notkin is the source for a large amount of information (and considerable speculation) aboutjoelle van Dyne's history, family life, and relationship with Orin and james Incandenza (787-795). Vinnie Nucci: 886. Don Gately's friend, "good old Nooch," who favored Dilaudid, got skinnier and skinner, and wasted away. Tony Nwangi: 98. "Hatchet-faced Kenyan" (998) prorector and teacher at ETA, who has got the "Pemulis/Troeltsch/Schacht suite under extremely beady scrutiny at all times" (998).
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Bud 0: 844. Hangs out with Glenn K and JackJ; visits Gately in hospital. Urquhart Ogliviejr.: 51. Prorector and teacher at ETA, popular teacher of Intro to Entertainment Studies, for which seventh-grader Hal Incandenza wrote about TV advertising's demise; UO Jr. also acted in Incandenza fi l ms. Oreida: 8 19. See lnvitatio ad lectores at end of volume. George Orwell: (1903-1950). English author, wrote numerous novels and the famous essay "Politics and the English Language" in 1946 (288) . Yasujiro Ozu: (1903-1963) 185. Japanese film director and writer. Gwendine O'Shay: Chief administrative aide to Whitey Sorkin on the North Shore; "Green Cardless former I.R.A. moll" with a "seedy sort of distracted-grandmotherly air" (927) ; her mistake about the results of the Yale-Brown basketball game inspires Fackelmann's fatal misstep. Sir Osis of Thuliver: 449. A role played by little Don Gately, who doesn't understand the term used by the physician who diagnoses his mother's cirrhosis of the liver. R. Ossowiecke: 726. An AFR or Wheelchair Assassins operative with decent English skills working with Fortier in Cambridge. Georg Wilhelm Pabst: (1885-1967) 220. German film director. Paliacci: 1037. See Invitatio ad lectores at end of volume. Pangloss: 772. Character in Voltaire's Candide, believed that this is the "best of all possible worlds:' Alfonso Parias-Carbo: 8 19 . Cuban addict, lives in Ennet House without understanding much English.
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Parizeau: 1014. Moderate Separatisteur from Quebec. Annie Parrot: 279. Assistant Manager of Ennet House. Giuseppe Peano: 1072. Italian mathematician. Jessica Pearlberg: 310. Student at Port Washington Tennis Academy. Heath Pearson: 687. Former student at ETA; appears at fund raiser in red vest, bellboy's cap and furry tail (853) ; founder of the sub-14's' Tunnel Club (899). Ieoh Ming (IM.) Pei: (1917-) 184. Chinese-American architect, designer of the infamous "coconut creme pei pyramid" in the Louvre courtyard, Paris. Sam Peckinpah: (1925-1984) 185. American film director parodied by James Incandenza. Famous for films featuring long sequences of gratuitous violence. Inexplicably adored by New Yomerfilm critic Pauline Kael. Hugh Pemberton: A younger kid and C-squadder at ETA, hit in the eye playing net during match with Hal, begins "wandering the service box in wobbled circles" (1004) . "Da" Pemulis: 683. Repulsive, horrifying, unspeakably disgusting and abusive father of Matty and Michael. Matty Pemulis: Older brother of Michael, whose story of sexual abuse by his "Da" is told in chilling detail on pages 682-686. Michael Mathew Pemulis: 49. Student at ETA and a major drug abuser/ dealer. See Compendium of Major Characters. Clifford Pendleton: Doctor who takes care ofDon Gately in the Trauma Wing; characterized as a "post-traumatic maroon" [i.e., "moron"] (921) by Dr. Pressburger.
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JeffreyJoseph Penn: 309 . A student at ETA who wins his match at Port Washington and plays Eschaton; "a high-ranked thirteen-year-old but not exactly the brightest log on the Yuletide fire" (327). Fractures his femur at Eschaton; his Big Buddy is Trevor Axford. Miles H. Penn: J. j:s brother, now twenty-one, former ETA student, tormenter ofPemulis (called Pemulis "Penisless" when young Mike had just arrived at ETA), now "flailing away on the grim Third World Satellite pro tour, playing for travel expenses in bleak dysenteric locales" (333). William Penn: (1644-1718) 2 16. Quaker founder of Pennsylvania. Luria Perec: Stenographer of Rodney Tine, a woman from Quebec who doubles as the stenographer (and lover) ofM. DuPlessis, assistant coordinator of the pan-Canadian Resistance. A.k.a Luria P . "the infamous and enigmatic Quebecois fatale" (4 1 1) . She is the "malevolent but allegedly irresistible amanuensis-cum-operative" (30) ofM. DuPlessis. A.k.a. "The Subject" to Orin. -
Ross Perot: (1930-) 382. Rich Texan who ran for President. Sidney Peterson: (1905-2 000) 185. Film director, especially of The Cage (986, 1077) and Potted Psalms (1072) . Timmy "Sleepy T.P?' Peterson: 115. Student at ETA whose Big Buddy is john Wayne. Plays Eschaton. Pettijohn: 254. ETA teacher. Kiki
Pfefferblit: 3 10. Student at Port Washington Tennis Academy.
Phelps and Phelps: Authors of The Cults ofthe Unwavenitg (1058). R. Bill ("Touchy") Phiely: A California Coach whose "hair-raising diary and collection oftelephotos and tiny panties" were discovered after his disappearance with a thirteen-year-old companion, which "created a climate of concern" among tennis parents (5 10-511) .
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Fully Functional Phil: 879. A prancing cartoon ass in an ad created by the good folks at Viney and Veals for the campaign against the dangerous Entertainment; "He's a blur ofkid-type activity" (880) with a trademark expression, "No-ho-ho-ho-way" (882). Pablo Picasso: (1881-1973) 798. Spanish artist, founder of Cubism, member of Communist Party, notorious womanizer. Steven Pinker: (1954-) 987. MIT linguist-philosopher, popularized reductionist theories of mind in several late-twentieth century books. Sylvia Plate: 593. Gately's misnomer for Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), American poet famous for having successfully committed suicide after several unsuccessful attempts. Edgar Allan Poe: (1809-1849) 1010. American poet and short story writer. Pokie: 737. Joelle van Dyne's family nickname. Pointgrave: "One of the Canadian Harvard Square small-time thug types Don Gately knew slightly" (975) ; hangs out with Desmonts; part of Bobby C's gang, present and nasty in the final scene (980). Polep: 17. ETA tennis player who plays Stice in the semifinals of the WhataBurger Southwest Junior Invitational tournament in the spring of the Year of Glad. Charles Pospisilova: 309. Student at Port Washington Tennis Academy. Posner: Film critic who teaches at Brandeis (1027) ; co-author of article on Anticonfluentialism (985). Todd ("Postal-Weight") Possalthwaite: 98. A student at ETA whose Big Buddy is Michael Pemulis. His "whole infuriating tennis-game consists of nothing but kick serves and topspin lobs" (330) and he has been the Eschaton Most Valuable Lobber for two years in a row.
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Thierry T. Poutrincourt: 309. A Canadian woman who teaches history at ETA whose "thick rimless specs were like a scary nun's. She looked more male than anything" (675). She sits with deLint and "Helen" Steeply during the match between Hal and Ortho Stice, and figures out that "Steeply is neither a civilian soft-profiler nor even a female" (1052), probably because she herself is a secret agent. Is mysteriously AWOL from the exhibition match with the Canadians at MIT (965), suggesting that she has been all along an undercover operative for the insurgents. Michael Powell: (1905-1990). British director of Peeping Tom (502). Dr. Pressburger: 920. Physician tending Don Gately in the Trauma Wing of the hospital. Jane Anne Prickett: 188. Acted in Incandenza's film adaptation ofMarat/ Sade (993) ; possibly same person as or sister of Miriam. Miriam Prickett: 229. Worked for James Incandenza on his films. Diane Prins: 3 10. Student at ETA who wins at Port Washington. "Madame Psychosis": The "darkly revered" (182) hostess of a midnight show on MIT's semi-underground radio station WYYY, the mysterious lady wears a net and welcomes the grotesque in her nightly presentations. "Mostly she solos" (185). See entry for Joelle van Dyne in Compendium of Major Characters. Tito Puente: (1923-2000) 22. Drummer and Latin music composer whose records Ken Erdedy likes. Prince Q-: 33. Saudi Minister ofHome Entertainment; the medical attache who succumbs to the Entertainment is his personal physician. Quik Kid: Young tennis player from Fresno, California, who wins a major tournament, is lionized, and celebrates with Quik laced with sodium cyanide (436-437), 1eading to the deaths of his family.
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Sven R: 1033. Member of the Crocodiles AA group. Graham Rader: 96. A younger student at ETA, nicknamed "Yardguard." Terrence Rafferty: 1038. New J-Orker film critic. Raggedy Andy: 460. One of a pair of popular cloth dolls, fashioned after characters in a children's story. SallyJesse Raphael: (1943-) 372. Host of a daytime television talk show. Randi: 20. Drug counselor who treated Ken Erdedy. Ross Reat: 46. Orin's old friend at ETA; appeared in an autobiographical film directed by JOI titled Widower. "A good kid, one of lncandenza's fair-haired boys, not too bright" (409) , "ubiquitous . . . in Himselfs work" (687) who had the misfortune to play Eric Clipperton when he first threatened to kill himself if he lost the match. "And Ross Reat was never quite exactly the same ever again after that" (409). Hugh G. Rection: A very old joke name given to an actor in an Incandenza film, Miibus Stnps (990) . Guglielmo Redondo: 759. A Catholic student at ETA, rooms with Esteban Reynes. Mr. Reehegan: Next-door neighbor of the Incandenza family in Weston, whom Orin suspiciously describes as "so-called 'friends'" with his mother ( 1044). Equus Reese: Provides forged prescriptions to Poor Tony Krause. Matty Pemulis thinks about him ( 68 3) . Called "Eckwus"; a friend of Kely Vinoy (129). Reginald: 37. Wardine's boyfriend. C. N. Reilly: Narrated documentary Annular Fusi'on Is Our Fn'end (986).
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Bernhard Reimann: (1826-1866) 1072. German mathematician. Remillard: Prominent figure in Separatist movement who "heard the squeak" (1057) and was killed by Wheelchair Assassins. Remington: 23 1 . Actor in a conversation at Molly's party. Ren and Stimpy: 834. Cartoon characters in 1990s. Revere ADA: 55. The Assistant District Attorney in Revere, Massachusetts who prosecuted Don Gately. Gately did something not very nice with the DA and his wife's toothbrushes, resulting in one permanently traumatized DA's wife and one implacable DA devoted to recapturing Gately. Esteban Reynes: 759. Male student at ETA, rooms with Redondo. Soma Richardson-Levy-O'Byme-Chawaf: 154. Teaches "Literature of Discipline" at ETA and acted in Incandenza films (188) ; known as Soma R.-L.-0. Chawa£ A.Y. ("V.F.") Rickey: Architect-designer of MIT's Union (186) ; "V. F:' stands for "vector field:' ETA's "original architect, Avril's old and very dear friend, the topology world's closed-curve-mapping- Ubennensch" (983). Cited by Pemulis in litany of revered mathematicians (1072). Lum Riney: Mr. van Dyne's business partner, inhaled fumes, "got strange" (862), never really recovered. Sieur de Roberval: (c. 1500-1560) 310. French explorer and colonizer in Canada who made the first (and unsuccessful) French attempt to establish a permanent colony in America. Norman Rockwell: (1894-1978) 271. American artist, famous for his Saturday Evening Post covers featuring scenes from rural America and celebration of older American values.
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Fred Rogers: (1928-2003) 357. Children's television personality, noted for his low-key, I'm-okay-you're-okay approach to dealing with a television audience composed largely of preschoolers. Cesar Romero: (1907-1994) 276. Latino actor whom Randy Lenz resembles when he is in disguise. Romney : 990. Author of critical article about james 0. Incandenza's unoriginality. Franklin Delano Roosevelt: (1882-1945) 440. 32 nd American President, from 1933-1945. Ken Rosewall : (1934-) 675. Australian tennis player, noted for the machine-like inerrancy ofhis ground strokes. Jean:Jacques Rousseau: (1712-1778) 12. Swiss-French writer, author of The Corifessi'ons. His Contra! Soda! is sometimes credited as one of the ideological wellsprings of the French Revolution. Dolores Rusk: 50. Ph.D, with doctorates in "both Gender and Deviance" (1 039), psychological counselor at ETA, "regarded by the kids as whatever's just slightly worse than useless" (437) ; Pemulis has it in for her. Tommy S: 364. Lives at Ennet House. Carl Sagan: (1934-1996) 745. Cornell astronomer whose television series popularized modem cosmological theory in the later twentieth century. Diane Saltoone: 990. Actress in Incandenza films. Sarge: Ferocious Francis's "nearly dead" (860) sponsor. Naoko Sawamatsu: (1973-) 675.Japanese tennis player. Dean Sawyer: 7. Dean ofAdmission, University of Arizona, interviews Hal.
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Ted Schacht: 31. A student and Big Buddy at ETA. "One of the very few genuinely stocky players at E.T.A. and one ofthe even fewer ranked junior players around without an apparent ego" (2 16) . Plays doubles with Troeltsch. Tight with Lyle in the weight room and with Mario. Has about "eight amber bottles of various medicines for his Crohn's Disease" (633). Schnede: Another prominent figure in Separatist movement who "heard the squeak" (1057) and was killed by Wheelchair Assassins. Schneewind: 900. Co-wrote Dictionary ofEnvironmental Sciences. Gerhard Schtitt: 52. Head Coach and Athletic Director at ETA. Nearly seventy, an old-school German disciplinarian with blue eyes and white hair, in his jackboots and claret-colored silk, preaches a mystical philosophy or aesthetic of competitive tennis. Schtitt's philosophy of tennis sometimes sounds like an aesthetic of !tifinite Jest. He loves the aspect of tennis that is " not-order, limit, the places where things broke down, fragmented into beauty" (8 1). He approaches competition "more like a pure mathematician than a technician" (8 1 ) , holding that "beauty and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to pattern" (82). Tennis, this "diagnate infinity ofinfinities of choice and execution" is ultimately "mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained," a game about "these boundaries of self' (82). You "disappear inside the game." Tennis to Schtitt is "like chess on the run, beautiful and infinitely dense" (83) . "The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself . . . you compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution" (84). Schtitt makes a serious critique of contemporary culture, "hilarious and frightening at the same time" (82) and provides a frame of reference or "values" to "anchor nicely the soul and course of a life" (82). Schtitt invites whingers, whiners, and complainers to "maybe meditate on some of the other ways to succeed besides votaried self transcendence and gut-sucking-in and hard daily slogging toward a
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distant goal you can then maybe, if you get there, live with" (434) . When the boys complain about the cold, Schtitt delivers a diatribe about adjusting to conditions, a mix ofhumiliating abuse and exhortation: "Because, privileged gentlemen and boys I am saying, is always something that is too . . . you, if you stay the same, stay inside . . . This world inside is the same, always, if you stay there . . . . Make this second world inside the world: here there are no conditions" (458-459). Schtitt befriends and discourses to Mario Incandenza, though "a sizable contingent ofE.T.A.s view Schtitt as bats and essentially a figurehead" (1000).
Schwulst: A screenwriter and "poseur" (835). Martin Scorcese: (1942-) 393. American film director; worked with Robert DeNiro (944). Jerry Seinfeld: ( 1954-) 834. American comedian and television personality. Selwyn: 745. A crazy inmate at Ennet House who tells Marathe that most of the other people there are mechanical (733). Sergeant at Arms: "The distinguished-looking shepherd guy" (359) who appears to Gately in a dream as the real force keeping recovering addicts in the AA program. He is, allegorically speaking, the figure whose shepherd's crook snatches addicts out of their recovery when they lose faith in the process that is making their recovery possible. Shantell: 37. Lives with Wardine. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw: (1837-1863) 223. Scion of a prominent Boston Abolitionist family, led the first Black regiment into battle in the Civil War, died a heroic death in battle, and is commemorated by St. Gaudens' statue on Boston Common. Tall Paul Shaw: 50. Student at ETA; always bounces the ball exactly eight times before service.
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John Sherman: (1823-1900) 411. American senator, credited with the passage of the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act. William Tecumseh Sherman: (1820-1891) 925. Civil war general for the North, conducted the brilliant campaign of swift-moving offensives and devastation of the Confederate homeland that led to Union victory. Shulgin: Director of"poststructuralist antidocumentaries" (988) parodied by Incandenza. Sidney or Stanley: The fat old "Secyotty" [Massachusetts dialect for "security"] guard at Enfield Marine complex; an ex-ballplayer gone to seed (6 19). Waclaw Sierpinski: (1882-1969) 213. Mathematician, with Banat and others, a major figure in the brilliant inter-war period ofpoJish mathematics. Simone: 519. Struck's pet tarantula; her escape got him booted out of Palmer Academy. Vigdis Simpson: Associated with anticonfluential movement in film (985). Erika Siress: 5 14. Young girl at ETA. Sitney: 900. Co-wrote Dictionary ofEnvi'rrmmental Sciences. Skull : The street-name of an otherwise unnamed addict at Ennet House whose body is festooned with amazing tattoos, including an imperfectly rendered line from the modernist poet ee cummings: "HOW DO YOU
LIK YOUR BLUEYED BOY NOWMR DETH/?'(208) . Slobodan: 525. A satellite tour tennis pro visiting ETA; a "barrel-chested Latvian" (1036). Burt F. Smith: 274. Lives at Ennet house after being mugged, knocked out, left for dead, and suffering the loss of both hands and feet.
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Stan Smith: (1946-) 110. American tennis star, on film ETA students watch. Tall, blonde, noted for his perfect form in the pre-Bjom Borg days of country-club tennis. Phillip T. Smothergill: "That insufferable child actor" who used to contort his face at Mario, who would just laugh "which sent Smothergill into tantrums" (229) . Hal can't remember his name, then suddenly does, on page 714. E. and K. Snow: Associated with James Incandenza and anticonfluentialism (985). Whitey Sorkin: A bookmaker on the North Shore (131), owned "several titty clubs down on Route 1 in Saugus ;" hires Don Gately and Fackelmann as the Twin Towers whom he sends to visit customers who haven't paid up on their bets; "victim" of an insane scam. Dr. Giinther Sperber: Co-author of critical article on Incandenza's lack of cinematic originality (990) , and editor of essays on discovering "Annular Systems" (1034) . The Spider: 274. Eugenio M:s term for his Disease, addiction. Steven Spielberg: (1947-) 746. American director, for commercial films about extraterrestrials and dinosaurs before breaking through to cinematic distinction with Saving Pnvate Ryan. Carol Spodek: 198. A "steroidic Girls' 16" student at ETA; rooms with Shoshana Abrams. Danielle Steenbok: 208. "Leggy," good-looking former resident of Ennet House with hideous eye-liner-like tattoos who is now a part-time counselor and the favorite candidate ofthe heterosexual males to succeed Johnette Foltz. Kate Gompert's counselor at Ennet House. Paisley Steinkamp: 310. Student at Port Washington Tennis Academy.
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Rod Stewart: (1945-) 44. British rock and roller. Helen P. Steeply: 142. "Putative Moment Magazi'ne soft-profile-writer" (1026) . Disguise of Hugh Steeply. Hugh H. Steeply: 88. A field-operative for United States Office Unspecified Services, or OUS. See Compendium of Major Characters. Mr. Steeply: Hugh Steeply's father, worked for a home-heating oil distributorship, Cheery Oil, in Troy, NY. A fanatic and ultimately obsessed and finally frankly bonkers fan of the TV show M*A*S*H. (639-646) . Ortho Stice: 17. An older student, age sixteen with a crew-cut, and Big Buddy at ETA. Pals with Hal, rooms with Coyle. "When he played any sort of match he wore all black, and at ETA and on the tour was known as The Darkness" (520). Almost beats Hal in a non-challenge exhibition. Tells stories about his parents, "The Bride" and Mr. Stice, passionate lovers and quarrelers (628-629). Ortho resembles "a poorly spliced photo," with a beautiful sports body and a ravaged Winston Churchill face (636). Surely "Show-bound after graduation" (638) . Stockhausen: A C team player and student a t ETA who pretends to sing opera (281) . Donnie Stott: 121. Coach at ETA. Betty Stove: (1945-) 123. A tennis pro from the Netherlands. James Albert Lockley StruckJr.: 49. Student at ETA from Orinda CA; a Big Buddy, revered by his charges, who likes to tell the story of the Clipperton tragedy. Subject: 43. A woman targeted for sexual seduction by Orin Incandenza. Joan Sutherland: (1926-) Australian opera singer, legendary for her performance in Luda, provides WETA its theme song (1069).
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Chip Sweeny: 460. Student at ETA. Algernon Swinburne: (1837-1909) 1047. Victorian poet, known for his spectacular control of poetic rhythm and meter, regarded as "decadent" for his focus on pagan sensuality. Swiss Subject: A "putatively Swiss hand-model," the "incredible specimen" with "professional lovely hands" who accosts Orin at the airport and, utterly unbidden, becomes his sexual partner. Later revealed to be the notorious Luria P - in disguise. Syrian Satellite Pro: 2 16. Visits ETA for training. Audem Tallat-Kelpsa: 118. A student at ETA whose Big Buddy isJim Struck. Quentin Tarantino: ( 1963-) 185. American film director ofPulp Fiction, etc. Andrei Tarkovsky: (1932-1986) Russian film director. Tassigny: The young member ofthe Wheelchair Assassins who doesn't die watching the Entertainment with his associate Desjardins because he had to leave to change his colostomy bag (725). Charles Tavis: 3. Cf, Hal's Uncle Charles, director of the Enfield Tennis Academy, halfbrother (perhaps) or step-brother ofHal's mother, Avril Incandenza. See Compendium of Major Characters. Elizabeth Tavis: The dwarf or very short woman brought home by Avril's father as a bride after the death of his previous wife, Avril's mother. Brought to the union an infant son, Charles Tavis (901) . Tammi Taylor-Bing: 310. Student at Port Washington Tennis Academy. Bridget Tenderhole: A prostitute who cops for Poor Tony until she is "shipped by her pimp to Brockton under maddeningly vague circumstances" (300).
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Tete-Beche: 993. Canadian film archivist. (It is perhaps worth noting that tete-beche is a term for when two connected postage stamps are printed and one is upside down.) Thevet: A teacher or text-book author Hal encounters at ETA. Mary Esther Thode: 80. A prorector at ETA, regarded as a "perennially batsoid" teacher but a proficient coach ofthe Girls' 16's. Invokes "Camilla, goddess of speed and light step" (965) - a reference both to Latin poetry and Alexander Pope's Essay on Cn'ti'cism - for her players. Ruth Thode: Mary Esther's sister, an insufferable early student at ETA who rats out the boys for watching a porn flick (955). Corbett Thorp: 188. Prorector at ETA who teaches "Deviant Geometries" (306) and whose "sobriquet among the less kind kids is 'Th-th-th-th'" (1032) for his stutter. He is an MIT alum and former 4H Singles player who arranges for ETA to use the MIT indoor tennis courts on the day of the snow storm. Hester Thrale: 180. Lives at Ennet House yet drives an Alfa Romeo. Calvin Thrust: Ennet House alumnus and senior counselor, "four years sober and a former NYC porn actor who'd gone through the House himself" (195), who visits Don Gately in the hospital and tells him what happened after he passed out from loss ofblood in the fracas with the Canadians (819-827) . Francis Thynne: (c1545-1608) 797. Wrote Anonymall Chroni'cals. Bill Tilden: (1893-1953) 171. Tennis great. Rodney Tine: 92. Chief of the new United States Office ofUnspecified Services and White House Adviser on Interdependent Relations; nicknamed "Rod the God." Disastrously intimate with the infamous Luria P - . Interviews Molly Notkin aboutjoelle (787-795). According
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to one theory, Tine is "the real dark force behind Reconfiguration," manipulatingjohnny Gentle, Famous Crooner and hapless President (1030).
Rodney Tine, Jr.: 876. Deputy Regional Coordinator, U.S. Office of Unspecified Services. Rod the God's not so smart son. Tingly: 208. The new, terrified kid at Ennet House who is usually, literally, in the closet. Called Dingley, the "skittery kid" (564) by mistake. Billy Tolan: 987. Actor in JOI film. Count Leo Tolstoy: (1828-1910) 95. Russian novelist, author of War and Peace, Anna Kareni'na, and other notable precursors of Itifinite Jest. Roy Tony: 37. Ex-con and addict living in the Brighton projects; sexually abuses his girlfriend's daughter. Tooty: 961. The traumatized wife of the Assistant DA who, having seen a Polaroid shot of Gately with her toothbrush up his rectum and then realizing that she had brushed her teeth with that same toothbrush later than night - falls apart psychologically. The Assistant DA spends the rest of Itifinite Jest attempting to find Gately in order to avenge his wife. Tosca:
4 1. Puccini opera Hal likes "for its free-floating misery" (896).
Toucan Sam: 880. Cartoon character. Philip Traub: 119. Student at ETA whose Big Buddy is Jim Struck. Charlotte Treat: 207. A scarred and tattooed resident ofEnnet House who spends most of her time doing needlepoint; a former prostitute with violently red hair who in her reformation has become prim as a librarian.
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Sir Herbert Tree: (1853-1917). English actor-manager with "hoary dramaturgy" (185). Gilbert Treffert: 675. Canadian tennis pro, considered one of the greats. Jim Troeltsch: 50. Seventeen-year-old student and tennis player at ETA. Most often seen in Infinite Jest impersonating a TV announcer, talking pompously into his closed hand. Knowing that he will never make the pro circuit, his ambition is to become an actual announcer after graduation from ETA. Plays doubles with Schacht. Pierre Elliott Trudeau: (1919-2000) 282. Prime Minister of Canada from 1968 to 1984. Mao Tse-Tung: (1893-1967) 620. Leading figure in China's Communist Party, unleashed the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, eventually responsible for the deaths of some 20 million Chinese as a result of the famine caused by his "Great Leap Forward." ]. M. W. Turner: (1775-185 1) 922. English painter, originated the hazy coloristic style later associated with European hnpressionism, given heroic status by the great art critic and social commentator John Ruskin in
Modem Painters. Stansfield Turner: (1923-) 473. Head of the CIA under President Carter from 1977-1981. Ted Turner: (1938-) 4 11. American mogul, owned TBS TV network, created CNN. Known, along with late-twentieth-century figures as Donald Trump, for the vulgarity of a personal style of tasteless but highly conspicuous consumption. Uncle T. S.: 738. Joelle's own personal uncle. Frannie Unwin: 50. A student/player at ETA, one ofthe top girl players; watches One Tough Nun with Hal and Bridget Boone (70 1).
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John Updike: (1932-) 987. American writer, began with short stories in 17ze New lfJr.W; broke through as a novelist with 17ze Centaur and Rabbit Run, subsequently regarded as the "Balzac of suburban sex" for his novels about adultery in later twentieth century America. Pir Valayat: (1916-) Advocate of "North American sufism" (34). Prince Valiant: 277. Hero of a 1950s comic strip with a distinctive put a-bowl-on-his-head-and-cut-evenly-all-around-the-rim haircut said to be duplicated by Don Gately. Van Buskirk: 48 1. Canadian glass-blower. Ruth van Cleeve: 595. Many kilos underweight, with big hair and brass colored lipstick; a new resident remanded to Ennet House when she abandoned a newborn baby who was addicted in the womb to substances Ruth abused (698-699) . Kate Gompert regards Ruth as "hideous, despair-producing, slutty, and yammering" (700). Colin van der Hingle: "South Mrican doubles specialist" (1030). Dennis van der Meer: A major pro tennis coach and "theory guru" (82) who started Van der Meer Tennis University. Shelby van der Merwe: 309. Student at Port Washington Tennis Academy. Mies van der Rohe: (1886-1969) 19 1. Architect. Vandervoort: 1035. An older boy at ETA. Joelle van Dyne: 2 19. The young woman behind the veil of Madame Psychosis; the PGOAT, the Prettiest Girl Of All Time. Once Orin's girlfriend, and an actress and intimate confidant of his father the film maker. See Compendium of Major Characters. Joe Lon van Dyne: Joelle s own personal Daddy (295) . '
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Duncan van Slack: ETA student (1029) ; cries when Wayne annihilates him (10 10) . Brian van Vleck: 460 . Left-handed tennis player and student at ETA. Caryn and Sharon Vaught: Seventeen, "O.N.A.N. top-ranked junior women's doubles team, unbeaten in three years, uncanny in their cooperation on the court" (2 17-2 18), roommates at ETA. The secret of their success is that they are Siamese twins. They get "counted as one entry in Room Draw" (2 14) . Veach: 259. A kid nominally ranked # 1 male singles under eighteen, avoids any match with john Wayne. P. Tom Veals: 4 15. Head of Viney & Veals Advertising, Unltd., whose campaign transformed InterLace into the entertainment powerhouse. Jan Vermeer: (1632-1675) 312. Greatest Dutch painter ofthe seventeenth century, whose small surviving corpus includes such masterpieces as The Little Street and the View ofDe!ft. Virgilio: 757. Boy at ETA, rooms with Beak and Whale. Viney and Veals: 4 12 . V&V, the fabulously successful advertising agency which created the "fatally powerful" Nunhagen Aspirin ads, the "fatally potent" LipoVac spots, and a series of advertisements for NoCoat tongue scrapers which "just clearly crossed some kind of psychoanalytic line" (4 13). Veals is P. Tom Veals, "drinking himself toward pancreatitis," apparently not much enjoying his success as the manager ofJohnny Gentle's PR campaign. Viney is his "remorse-tortured partner" who committed suicide by leaping off the Tobin Bridge (4 15-16) . V&V is the agency where Ken Erdedy sometimes works. Kely Vinoy: 129. A Cambridge hooker. Vogelsong: Guest at Molly Notkin's party, "ofEmerson College" (23 1) .
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Pamela-Sue Voorheis: Actress in Incandenza's Immanent Domain (987) . Vodriard: Director of"neoconceptual structuralist films" (988) parodied by Incandenza in Very Small Flames. Bill W.: 833. Founder ofAlcoholics Anonymous; Bill Wilson (1895-1971). Stephan Wagenknecht: 457. ETA student. Richard Wagner: (18 13-1883) 755. German opera composer, famous especially for his Ring Cycle, drawing on early Germanic heroic legend; c£ "Wagnerish" (1042). Mrs. Waite: Old lady regarded as a witch by Don Gately's neighborhood
pals. Bakes Don a birthday cake (847-850).
Wardine: 37. Beleaguered black girl. Ward andjune: Pet hamsters, named after the parents on the TV sitcom "Leave It to Beaver," who were released into the area that became the Concavity and spawned a race offeral hamsters (93). Ward and Wally: 931. Father/son combo on TV sitcom "Leave It To Beaver� Jean-Antoine Watteau: (1684-172 1) 68. French Rococo painter. Tex Watson: 98. A prorector at ETA who teaches a "laughable" course "From Scarcity to Plenty . . ."; "pattern-balding at twenty-seven" (453) ; "Texas Watson does not overwhelm with brightness, it is true" (569), notes Idris Arslanian. Cosgrove Watt: 16. An actor in several Incandenza films. "One ofthe very few professional actors Himselfever used . . . but he wasn't very good . . . . His widest commercial exposure was as the Dancing Gland in a series of spots for a chain ofEast Coast endocrinology clinics" (944).
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Alan Watts: (19 15-1973) 170. Author ofbooks on Zen Buddhism. Jeff Wax: 457. ETA student. Wayne: Young man from Kentucky who speaks at an AA meeting and has a horrible facial scar he calls "The Flaw" (856-857). Bernard Wayne: The only asbestos miner's son who didn't jump in "le Jeu de Prochain Train's extensive oral history" ( 1060) ; may be related to John N.R. Wayne, who is from "Montcerf, Quebec - an asbestos-mining town" (259). John ("N. R:') Wayne: The nickname stands for "no relation" to the movie star known as The Duke. Thisjohn Wayne, a Canadian, is "without question the best male player to appear at Enfield Academy in several years" (260) ; "the thing about Wayne is he's all business" (262), a grim machine, "pure force" (682), a "formidable predator" with "affectless reserve" (1069) . Laconic, virtually mute, John Wayne is the most sought-after Big Buddy. But Lamont Chu does most of the talking to Wayne's Little Buddies. Hal knows that Wayne and "the Moms were tight" (957) and thinks that he had been "involved with the Moms sexually" since he arrived at ETA. Their relationship is gossip at ETA, as in a public poster announcing "a joint john Wayne/Or. Avril Incendenza arithemetic presentation . . . on how 17 can actually go into 56 way more than 3.294 times" (1069). Somebody slips Wayne some drugs, sending his untainted system into an uproar: he begins ranting wildly during an interview on the student radio station. This is covered up as a violent reaction to a decongestant; Avril stays with him late into the night at the hospital. An intriguing mystery about john Wayne is the possibility that he is working for the AFR; he is probably the son of Bernard Wayne (see previous entry) and there is an indication that the AFR has a student agent at ETA. Raquel Welch: (1940-) 371. American actress.
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William F. Weld: (1945-) 8 15. Governor of Massachusetts from 1991 to 1997. Orson Welles: ( 1 9 1 5-1985) 583. American filmmaker and actor, produced the controversial radio play The War of the Worlds in 1938. Cz"tzen Kane, his first movie, was a landmark in American cinema. Carl Whale: 119. Age thirteen, violently cross-eyed student at ETA; nicknamed "Mobes" for "Moby." Rooms with Beak and Virgilio. KiJk White: 4. Coach ofUniversity ofArizona tennis team, interviews Hal. Walt Whitman: (1819-1892) 254. American poet, best known for his "democratic epic" Leaves ofGrass. Wonnie Wichardson: Salesman, former USMC flier (181, 295) ; so called by the host of a WYYY radio show that airs just before Sixty Minutes More or Less, who has a weawy bad lisp. David Wiere: 309. Student at Port Washington Tennis Academy. Mats Wilander: (1964-) 675. Tennis pro. George Will: (194 1-) 796. Syndicated columnist, conservative, friend of Nancy Reagan. William: 37. Lives with Wardine. Venus Williams: (1980-) 17. American tennis pro, championship player. Dick Willis: "On the 110 night-shift"; comes up with a phrase to describe the eyes of the victims of the Entertainment: "Empty of intent" (508) . Yolanda Willis: Lives in Ennet House. Naively chooses Randy Lenz as a sponsor (565) .
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Amy Wingo: 1035 . ETA student.
Henry Winkler: ( 1945-) . Character in American television sitcom
Happy Days. Dr. Wo: 131. A treacherous, "rapacious but discreet opiate dealer" (93 1) in Chinatown; proprietor of Hung Toy's Cold Tea Emporium. Woititz: Director of"poststructuralist antidocumentaries" (988) parodied by Incandenza in Homo Duplex. The Wraith: Appears to Don Gately in the hospital as the spirit of James 0. Incandenza (827-840) . John Wyclif: (c. 1328- 1384) 253. English religious reformer. William Wyler: (1902-1981). American director, Mrs. Minniver, 17ze Best lears if'OurLives, etc., parodied by Incandenza in Low-Temperature Civics (991) . Carl E. Yee: 876. Known as "Buster"; Director of Marketing and Product-Perception, Glad Flaccid Receptacle Corporation. Yevtushenko: (1933-) 68. Unlikely, given the context, to be the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933-) . See Invitatio ad lectores at end of volume. yrstruly: narrates a really nasty story (128-135) ; druggie friend ofPoor Tony, Bobby C.
Dr. E. Zegarelli: 27. Local dentist for ETA students and Enfield residents. He has dark-green eyes and famously bad breath (526). Spelled Zeggarelli on p. 762. Felicity Zweig: 3 10. A student at ETA.
Cha pter N ine Infinite Jesfs Acronyms Note: in the interests of consistency, the Reader's Companion has removed periods from all acronyms - e.g., "F.B.I." is given as "FBI" - except in the case ofU.S. as a stand-alone acronym for "United States." Periods are retained in quotations from Infinite Jest itsel£ 2R: Second-year medical resident (92 1) 3S: Single-Serving Size (425) AA: Alcoholics Anonymous (137) AAA : Highest level of minor league baseball (523) AAOAA: Anti-Anti-ONAN Activities Agency (549) AB: Artium Baccalaureus (Latin: Bachelor ofArts) university degree (227) ABD: All-But-Dissertation (227) - i.e., a doctoral student who has only the dissertation to complete before receiving the Ph.D. AC: Air conditioner (42) ACDC: American Council ofDisseminators of Cable (4 12) ACOA: Abused Children ofAlcoholics (1050) ACOG: Abused Children of Gamblers (1050) ACONA: Abused Children ofNarcotics Addicts (1050) ADA: Assistant District Attorney (55) ADD: Attention Deficit Disorder (905) A/DF: Ace to double fault ratio (656) AEC: Atomic Energy Commission (65) 294
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AFL: Armenian Foundation Library (303) AFR: Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollent: the Wheelchair Assassins (89) a.k.a.: Also known as (456) ALGOL: Algorithmic Language (491), but "what the hell 'ALGOI..; is is anybody's guess" (1036) AM: Morning (81) AMF: Aluminum Head Masters (263) AP: Advanced Placement (284) ARPA-Net: Advanced Research Projects Agency, precursor to the internet developed in 1968 (65) ASA: Amateur Sports Association (285) ASAP: As soon as possible (65) ATE: Enfield Tennis Academy, read in reverse order byJohnette Foltz (786) ATF: Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms ATHSCME: Air displacement system manufacturers (51). See /nvitatz'o ad lectores at end of volume. ATP: Association ofTennis Professionals (1 1 1) AWOL: Absent Without Leave (2 14) BA: Bachelor of Arts degree (5 16) BAMES: Bishop Anthony McDierdama Elementary School (575) BB: Big Buddy (1 19) BBQ: Barbeque (904) BBSB: Brighton Best Savings Bank (542) BC: Boston College (582) B&C: Bread and Circus, upscale grocery store (479) BCDC: Brandeis Child Development Center (3 14) B&E: Breaking and Entering (435) B&H: Benson and Hedges, cigarette manufacturers (760) BHA: Boston Housing Authority (709) BIM: Big Indestructible Moron, nickname given to Don Gately (449) BL: Barry Loach (970) BLTN: Better Late Than Never, an AA group (209) BMS: Beverly Middle School (904) BMW: Bavarian Motor Works (404) BP: Blood pressure (70) BPD: Boston Police Department (25 1)
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BPL: Boston Public Library (663) BS: Before Subsidization (81) BS: Blood Sister (71 1) BS:OTN: Blood Sister. One Tough Nun (1053) B S S : Bureau des Services sans Specificite, French for Office of Unspecified Services (89) BSHS: Beverly-Salem High School BTL (297) : See Invitatio ad lectores at end of volume. BU: Boston University (2 16) BUM: Clothing brand (856) B&W: Brigham and Women's Hospital (1026) BYP: Brookline Young People (546) C: Cold (554) C: Circa, i.e., approximately (62 1) C: Centigrade (623) CA: Cocaine Anonymous (20 1) CBC: Canadian Broadcasting Company (4 7) CBC/PATHE: Canadian Broadcasting Company/ Pathe production (36) CBS: College of Basic Studies at Boston University (85 1) CC: reservoir (796) . See lnvitatio ad lectores at end of volume. CD: Compact disk (978) CDC: Center for Disease Control (549) CD-ROM: Compact Disk-Read Only Memory (69) CEO: ChiefExecutive Officer (929) CFD: Cambridge Fire Department (186) CFDC: Caffeine Free Diet Coke (390) CIA: Central Intelligence Agency (2 12) CITGO: Oil company with a prominent sign in Boston (476) C-IV: Class (or schedule) 4 drug in the Controlled Substances Act classification system (2 10) CNS: Central Nervous System (64) CO: Carbon Monoxide (69) C02 : Carbon Dioxide (599) COGH: Chemically Over-Garrulous Headliner (400) CPA: Certified Public Accountant (257) CPCP: Calgarian Pro-Canadian Phalanx (489)
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CPR: Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (437) CPS: Centralized Processing Service ( 1 17) CPU: Central Processing Unit (629) CQBC: Canadian radio station (480) CSAC: Certified Substance Abuse Counselor (176) CT: Charles Tavis (3) CT: Calvin Thrust (208) CUS P: Clean United States Party, sweeps to victory with Johnny Gentle (2 83) CVS: (476) drugstore chain C/W: Country Western (628) CYD (139) : see lnvitatio ad lectores at end of volume. D: Defense (902) DARH: Drug and Alcohol Recovery House (53 1) D&C: Dilatation and Curettage (378) D&D: Drunk and Disorderly (462) DOD, or 3-D: Dizzy Dick Disorder (1078), or Post Coital Vestibulitis (928). DDS: Doctor of Dental Surgery (509) DEA: Drug Enforcement Agency (276) DEC: Digital Equipment Corporation (202) DEFCON: Defensive (Readiness) Condition (325) DG: Don Gately DOB: Date ofBirth (699) DOE: Department ofEducation (393) DOM: a stimulant (170) DMA: a hallucinogen (170) DMV: Department ofMotor Vehicles (274) DMT: a hallucinogen (170) DMZ: a powerful hallucinogen (170) DP: Debilitatingly phobic (997) DSAS: Department of Substance Abuse Services (462) DSS: Digital Satellite Service (4 17) DSS: Department ofSocial Services (699) DT: delirium tremens (85) DT: deuterium tritum, cycles thatjames Incandenza writes about (569, 1029) D UI: Driving under the influence (462)
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DVI: See In vitatio ad lectores at end of volume. EB: Eighties Bill (928) ECf: Electro-Convulsive Therapy (74) EDC: See Invitatio ad lectores at end of volume. EdD: Doctor of Education (898) EEC: European Economic Community (385) EEG: Electroencephalogram (722) ELD: Extra-Linear-Dynamics (994) EM: Enfield Marine (590) EM: electromagnetic (184) EMIT: Enzyme Multiple Immunoassay Test, the most popular urine screen for drugs (539) EMPHH: Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital (194) ENT: Ear, Nose and Throat (33) EPA: Environmental Protection Agency (399) ER: Emergency room (16) ESCHATON (322) AMNAT: American Nation CONFORCONS: Conventional-Force Concentrations ESACHAX.DIR: Eschaton-Axiom Directory INDDIR: Infliction of Death, Destruction, and Incapacitation of Response INDPAK: India/Pakistan IRLYBSYR: Iraq/Lybia/Syria LYBSYR: Lybia/Syria MAMA: Major Metro Area MILABBREV: Military Abbreviations MIRV: Multiple Independent ReentryVehicles REDCHI: Red China SACPOP: Strikes Against Civilian Populations SOUTHAF: South Africa SOV\VAR: Soviet/Warsaw Pact SPAS EX: Spasm Exchange SSTRAC: Sites of Strategic Command SUFDDIR: Suffering Death, Destruction, and Incapacitation of Response TRIGSIT: Triggering Situation
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ESL: English as a Second Language (749) EST: Eastern Standard Time (542) ETA: Enfield Tennis Academy (4) ETS: Educational Testing Service (1076) EV Theorem: Extreme Value Theorem (1023) EWD: Empire Waste Displacement (25) FAA: Federal Aviation Administration (866) F&C: Film/Cartridge Studies (743) FOR: Franklin Delano Roosevelt (49) FDV: Dave "Fall Down Very" Harde (284) FFG: Ferocious Francis Gehaney (360) FF&C: Federated Funnel and Cone Corporation (928) FHR: Full House Restriction (1045) FLN: Fronte de Ia Liberation Nationale FLQ: Fronte de Ia Liberation de Ia Quebec (see page 995) (126) FM: Frequency Modulation (183) FOPPP: Female Objectification Prevention and Protest Phalanx (929) FPR: Flaccid Plastic Receptacle (494) FRG-era: Federal Republic of Germany (79) GBF: Model of machine pistol (599) GC/MS; or G/M: Gas Chromatography/Mass Spectometry scan (152) GED: General Equivalency Diploma (575) GE/RCA: General Electric/Radio Corporation ofAmerica (382) GFR: Glad Flaccid Receptacle Company (999) GI: Government Issue (as in GIJoe) (209) GLAD FPR: Glad Flaccid Plastic Receptacle Co. G&M: Grammar and Meaning (1014) GNP: Gross National Product (323) GPA: Grade Point Average (155) GQ: Gentleman's Quarterly, men's magazine (822) GSL: Graduate Student Loan (185) GT Day: Geoffrey T. Day (1056) GTE: General Telephone & Electronics Corp (417) HBT: Heterojunction-bipolar-transistor; a type of alarm (56) HD: High Definition (290) HDTV: High Definition Television (417) HDTP: High Definition TelePuter (834)
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HDV: High Defmition Viewer (9 15) HEW: Department ofHealth, Education and Welfare (404) HIV: Human Immunodeficiency Virus (826) HmH: "ETA moniker for Headmaster's House" (189) HPS: Helen P. Steeply (227) HQ: Headquarters (182) HS: High School (74 1) HUD: Department ofHousing and Urban Development (442) IBEW: International Brotherhood ofEiectrical Workers (813) IBPWDW: International Brotherhood of Pier, Wharf, and Dock Workers (300) ICBM: Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (936) ICU: Intensive Care Unit (70) ID: Identify ( 1 1) ID-Day: Interdependence Day (1 13) II: Inner Infant (80 1) ILT: InterLace Te!Entertainment (103 1) IL/IN: InterLace/Infernatron (1037) I/0: Input/Output (490) IQ: Intelligence Quotient (203) IRA: Irish Republican Army (927) IRS: Internal Revenue Service (803) 1/SPN: InterLace Sports Programming Network, the post-BS version of ESPN (388) IV: Intravenous (73) IWD: Interdependence Waste Displacement (22 1) JBL: James Bullough Lansing, audio speaker manufacturer (583) JC:Jesus Christ (467) JD: Juris Doctor, an attorney (5 12) JDC: Junior Davis Cup (965) JFK: John F. Kennedy (440) JG:Johnny Gentle (40 1) JGFC:Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner (439) JJ: Prime Minister of Canada (385) llJC: Prime Minister of Canada (385) JOI: James Orin Incandenza, Himself (164)
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JvD: Joelle van Dyne (6 13) KB: Kent Blott (1 1 1) KB: Keith Freer (1 14) KG: Kilograms (227) K-L-RMKI: Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox-Kemper-Insurance (296) KM: Karl Marx (227) LA: Los Angeles (903) LAS (188) : See Invitatio ad lectores at end of volume. LB: Little Buddy (98) LD: Lady Delphina (225) LMP: Latrodectus Mactans Productions (1028) LSD: "acid," a powerful hallucinogen (170) L-TC: Low-Temperature Civics (706) LTI: Long-Term Institution (906) M: Meters (227) MA: Master of Arts (996) MAOI: Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitor, a class of antidepressants (70) M*A *S*H: Mobile Ambulatory Service Hospital, the TV series (639) MBA: Master ofBusiness Administration (5 16) MBRO: Metro-Boston Recovery Options (795) MCI: Massachusetts Correctional Institution (355) MD: Medicinae Doctor, a physician (16) M DA: Methylenedioxyamphetamine, a hallucinogen similar to "Ecstasy" (170) MDC: Middlesex District Commission MDC: Massachusetts Department ofCorrections (137) MDMA: a hallucinogen, known as "Ecstasy"(170) MDR: Mass Department ofRevenue MF: Millennia! Fizzy, a soft drink (480) M-F: Monday to Friday (191) MGM: Militant Grammarians ofMassachusetts (288) MIA-D'Orval: Montreal International Airport-D'Orval (853) MiG: Mikoyan-Gurevich, Russian engineers/developers of the MiG fighter jet (326) MIT: Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology (82) MJA: Master ofJournalistic Arts (227)
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MK-Ultra: Code for CIA project (472) MLB: Major League Baseball (4 14) MMP: Michael M. Pemulis (5 13) MMPI: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (4 72) MO: Modus Operandi (59) MP: Madame Psychosis (192) MP: Military Police (276) MPS: Medical Pressure Systems (608) MS: Master ofScience (437) MS: Mother Superior (71 1) MS: Multiple Sclerosis (906) MST: Mountain Standard Time (655) MSW: Master of Social Work (372) MVL: Most Valuable Lobber (330) NA: Narcotics Anonymous (20 1) NA: North America (440) NAAUP (9) : See lnvitatio ad lectores at end of volume. NaCN: Sodium Cyanide (437) NAITA: North American Free Trade Alliance (104 1) NAJT: North American junior Tennis (43 1) NASA: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (198) NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organization NB: Nota Bene (Latin: "note well") (207) NCA: New California (548) NCAA: National Collegiate Athletic Association (916) NC-FPF: National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation (977) NE: New England (289) NFL: National Football League (14) NL ofH: National League of Hockey (640) NNE: New New England (266) NNY: New New York (93) NNYC: New New York City (3 15) NO: New Orleans (45) NOW: National Organization for Women (929) NPR: National Public Radio (796) NRA: National Rifle Association
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NSA: National Security Agency (474) 0.: Orin Incandenza (1010) 02 : Oxygen (599) OB/GYN: Obstetrician-Gynecologist (901) OCD: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (203) 00 : Overdose (70) OED: Oxford English Dictionary (17) OH: Alcohol (904) OINS: "Trilateral North American immigration bureaucracy" (748) OJ: Orangejuice (57) OMM: Optimistically Misrepresentational Masking (149) ONAN: Organization ofNorth American Nations (36) ONANCAA: Organization of North American Nations Collegiate Athletics Association (1 1 1) ONAND EA : Organization of North American Nations Drug Enforcement Agency (984) ONANFL: Organization ofNorth American Nations Football League (5 17) ONANMA: Organization of North American Nations Medical Association (36) ONANTA : Organization of North American Nations Tennis Association ( 1 5 1) ONR: Office ofNaval Research (63) OPL: Otis P. Lord (965) arc: Over the counter, non-prescription medication (60) OUS: Office ofUnspecified Services (90) PA: Public Address, amplification system (343) PAC: Pacific Athletic Conference (285) PAC: Political Action Committee (4 13) PB: Peanut Butter (710) PBS: Public Broadcasting Service (4 1 1) PC: Personal Computer (325) PO: Police Department PO: Public Defender (55) PE: Physical Education (184) PET: Positron-Emission Topography, cutting edge technology (48)
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PGOAT: Prettiest Girl ofAll Tune (Orin's term forJoelle van Dyne) (239) PhD: Philosophiae Doctor, doctor of philosophy (43 7) PHH: Public Health Hospital (447) PHJ: Pamela Hoffman-Jeep (924) PIT: Une Personne de !1mportance Tem'ble, French for VIP (59) Pj's: Pajamas ( 1 1) PM: Mtemoon/Evening (79) PM: Patricia Montesian (178) PM: Prime Minister (384) PMA: A hallucinogen (996) PMUK: Prime Minister United Kingdom (226) PO: Post Office PO: Probation Officer (462) PO: Philharmonic Orchestra (967) POV: Point ofView (308) POW: Prisoner ofWar (628) PQ: Party Quebecois (1020) PR: Public Relations (48) PR: Pump Room (52) PT: Physical Therapist (297) PT: Poor Tony (Krause) (133) PTA: Parent-Teacher Association (393) PW: Port Washington (2 17) PWTA: Port Washington Tennis Academy PYEU: Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited (993) Q&A: Question and Answer (17) QB: Quarterback (65) QRS: Quabbin Recovery Systems (796) QV: quod vide, Latin, "which see" (5 15) RA: Resident Assistant (98) RASU: Reinforced Aluminum Spectation Unit (653) RAM: Random Access Memory (322) RC: Roman Catholic (274) RCA: Radio Corporation of America (192) RCC: Roman Catholic Church (24 1) RCMP: Royal Canadian Mounted Police (64)
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REM: Rapid Eye Movement (4 13) REM: a rock band (997) RICO: Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act (9) RHIP "Rank Hath Its Privileges" (627) RIJID: brand of male hairspray (554) RISC: Reduced Instruction Set Computer (60) ROM: Read Only Memory (12) ROTC: Reserve Officer Training Corps (284) RPM: Revolutions per minute (725) RN: Registered Nurse (817) RSVP: n!pondez sil votJS plait, French - "the favor of a reply is requested" (517) RT: Rodney Tine (439) SAC: Strategic Air Command (63) SAS: Substance Abuse Services (138) SAT: Scholastic Aptitude Test (171) SATR: Saturday SFPD: San Francisco Police Department (549) SJ: S. Johnson, the Moms' dog (770) SJOG: Saintjohn's of God (33 1) SOP: Standard Operating Procedure (185) SS: Social Security (892) SSRI: Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor, an antidepressant such as Prozac (1053) ST: Special Teams (295) STC: Susan T. Cheese (69 1) STP: a stimulant (170) STP: Sleepy Timmy Peterson (670) SUND: Sunday SUNY: State University ofNew York (293) S&W: Smith and Wesson, gun manufacturers (977) T: Transit System in Boston (77) TA: (232) See lnvitatio ad lectores at end of volume. TBS: Turner Broadcasting System (4 1 1) TCBY: The Continent's Best Yogurt (703) TCI: Telecommunications Interface (4 1 1)
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THC: the primary active chemical in marijuana (706) TP: Teleputer, displays "cartridges" of films, entertainments, etc. (19) TL(126) : See lnvitatio ad lectores at end of volume. TMA: a hallucinogen (170) TNT: Trinitrotoluene, dynamite (25 1) T&Q: Trivium and Quadrivium, the foundation of ETA's academic program (188) TSBYSCD: Tough Shit But You Still Can't Drink Group (443) TT: Transmittable Tableau (149) TUL: The Unexamined Life, a nightclub (58 1) TV: television (435) UC: University of California (436) UGC: Utter Global Crisis (337) UHF: Ultra High Frequency (96) UHID: Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed (187) UN: United Nations (407) UNH: University of New Hampshire (298) UNLV: University of Nevada at Las Vegas (393) UPS: United Parcel Service (86 1) USBSS: United States Bureau des Services sans Specificite, French for Office of Unspecified Services (723) USC: University of Southern California (168) USDD: United States Department of Defense (65) USMC: United States Marine Corps (295) USN: United States Navy (209) USO: United Service Organizations (404) USOUS: United States Office ofUnspecified Services (144) USSMK: "United States Ship" Millicent Kent, a large girl (122) USTA: United States Tennis Association (64) UV: Ultra-violet (80) UWSA: United We Stand America (the political party of presidential candidate Ross Perot) (382) VA: Department ofVeterans Affairs (87) VAPS: Vector/Angle/Pace/Spin (265) VC: Vice-Chair (400) VCR: Video Cassette Recorder (4 1 1)
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VD: victory by default (28 1) VF: Vector Field (185) VIP: Very Important Person (59) VFW: Veterans of Foreign Wars (58 1) VLR: Visiting Locker Room (928) VPD: Video-Physiognomic Dysphora (147) VR: Viewing Room (687) V&V: Viney and Veals Advertising Agency (4 12) VW: Volkswagen (579) WASP: White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (479) WATS: Wide Area Telecommunications Service (2 13) WC: Wightman Cup (965) WDV: Waste Displacement Vehicle (6 15) WETA: ETA's radio station (308) WM: "Wooly Mammoth," Petropolis Kahn (456) WOOS: a radio station (589) WPM: Words per minute (927) WTA: Women's Tennis Association (636) WYYY : MIT radio station (170) X: Ecstasy (53) X: verb, to have sex with (555) XL: Extra long (590) XXL: Extra extra long (8 16) YCA (577) : See Invitatio ad lectores at end of volume. YDAU: Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (33) YDPAH: Year ofDairy Products from the American Heartland (191) YET: You're Eligible Too, AAjargon (750)
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Chapter Ten S l ang & I d ioms Annular fusion: a technology that uses the waste deposited i n the Concavity for "a type of fusion that can produce waste that's fuel for a process whose waste is fuel for the fusion" (572) . The word annular implies a circular or ring-like cycle. Bit: a jail sentence Bob Hope: marijuana Boosting: stealing Brody, "did a Brody": committed suicide BS: Before Subsidization, when corporations began to purchase rights to a calendar year. Click: a kilometer on the odometer (military slang) . Concavity I Convexity: the territory formerly known as northern New England, forcibly imposed on Canada in the Reconfiguration and now a vast dump for US waste. The "Concavity in our map" is "a new Convexity in theirs" (1018) . Crew: gang. Verb - "crewed o n him" (130) - means t o violently assault a victim. Crocodiles: old bunch of AA guys Demapped: wiped out, killed; literally, "to have one's face eliminated" Doubling: acting as a double agent 'Drines: "organic methoxies" (994) , with cocaine called "Bing Crosby:' 308
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Eat cheese: to be a cheese-eater (rat) ; to squeal, report to the authorities Ephebe: an initiate, usually young; an apprentice in some art. Ethel: code for incredibly potent DMZ Experialism: the opposite of "imperialism," the new manifest destiny, by which the U.S. forced Canada to take northern New England states, for use as vast waste deposit sites (1013). Fantods: "fear, confusion, standing hair" (420). A severe version is the "howling fantods." Felo de se: Latin for "suicide," used to describe the final performance ofjames Orin Incandenza. Feral Infants: gargantuan toddlers running amok in the former New England territories. Finest: as in The Finest, or Boston's Finest, the police. Hope: for "Bob Hope," marijuana. Gasper: cigarette, slang from P.G. Wodehouse novels. Interface: talk with, see face to face. Item: gun 'Jim": "It's a Boston-colored thing on Commitments to make all speech a protracted apostrophe to some absent Jim'" (1054). Jones, jonesing: suffering symptoms of withdrawal. Kertwanged: zapped, fooled, surprised, faked out. Limp: lame, weak, flaccid. Many Wonders: Incandenza family term for left-overs. Map: face. Material: one's drugs Mokus (273) : See Invitatio ad lectores at end of volume. Nucks: for "Canucks," French-Canadians 'objay darts': unfeeling reference to the chronic catatonics at Enfield; from the French, oo/'ect d'arl. Pillow-biter, pillow-eater: homosexual (British). Pisser: Boston street-term for "really quite wonderful" (204) Promote: steal. Prorector: a tennis coach and teacher at Enfield Tennis Academy. Psy-Ops: "the truly and malignantly crazy [capacity or genius] for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military service this is called Psy-Ops" (104 1) .
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Reconfiguration: the rearranged territorial boundaries of Canada and the USA involving convexity and concavity (see "Experialism") . Regs: regulations Rickyticki: to scurry away. Ride: athletic scholarship Samizdat: signifiesJOI's last film, the lethal Entertainment. Scopophilia: love ofbeing seen or love of being watched. Scopophobia: "fear ofbeing seen" The Show: the professional tennis tour, "travel and cash prizes and endorsements and appearance fees, match-highlights in video mags, action photos in glossy print-mags" (1 1 1). Skeet: a drug Spectate; spectation: watching, viewing; academic jargon for seeing films. Spider: avaricious addiction Squeak, as in "to hear the squeak": meaning to realize the fatal presence of the Wheelchair Assassins with no good at all in mind with regard to the person who has heard the sound. Stash: drug supply, usually hidden Strung: addicted Subject: Orin's term for the temporary object of his affections. Substance: drug Tatt: a tattoo Technical interviews: AFR euphemism for interrogation under torture with threat of termination with extreme prejudice. Unit: penis. Vig: bookmaker's commission on an illegal bet. Whinge, whinging: originally British, "Incandenza family term" from "east Canadian idiom for vigorous high-pitched complaining, almost like whining except with a semantic tinge of legitimacy to the complaint" (1022).
Afterword l nvi tatio ad l ectores Every great novel is complex in its own way. That is why Pnde and Pre;itdice and Middlemarch and WarandPeace have each played a separate and distinct role in the experience of generations of readers. Yet certain novels present a special challenge, for even as they are creating a world, they constantly make us aware that they are doing so. By drawing attention to their own paradoxes and narrative dislocations, novels like Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Joyce's Ulysses and Nabokov's Pale Fire have seemed to audiences accustomed to a more traditional realism to assume a self-consciously enigmatic air, as though they were gigantic puzzles intended to be solved only by a special class of already initiated or, at least, relentlessly determined readers. In the years directly after their publication, as the reception of Ulysses and Pale Fire in the twentieth century reminds us, this was indeed the way these novels tended to be read, their formidable "difficulty" seeming to divide readers into esoteric and exoteric groups. Only later did it become evident that the object was never to shut readers out of the innermost secrets of such works. It was, on the contrary, to summon into being an ever-expanding community of readers who, drawn irresistibly into a fictional world by its puzzles and paradoxes, have come to rediscover the essential mystery of literary experience. "We are absurdly accustomed," says Kinbote, the mad commentator of Nabokov's Pale Fire, 311
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to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions ofthought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of routine acceptance, we undo the work of ages, the history of the gradual elaboration ofpoetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable (so I used to tell my students/
Heidegger's celebrated remark that "language is the house ofBeing" reminds us that the regions in which human beings have always sought for meaning - myth, religion, philosophy, great works of literature are regions not ofthe external cosmos but of a collective and mysterious human consciousness. In the blind whirl of matter that modem physics tells us is the ultimate reality of the universe - the world of atoms and molecules and dwarf stars and dying galaxies - there are no stories, and therefore, strictly speaking, nothing we should want to call meaning. With its gaps and puzzles and dislocations, Nabokov's Pale Fire or Wallace's lnfim�e Jest undoes our routine acceptance of the miracle of its being readable. Such novels remind us that stories not only dwell within the sphere of human consciousness, but that every story is at some level about the puzzle of a human consciousness existing uneasily in a physical world wholly oblivious to its existence. In composing our Reader's Companion to !'!finite Jest, we have been constantly aware of questions we've left unanswered and puzzles we've left unresolved. Many of these questions concern small details. By indicating these puzzlements in the text and directing our readers' attention to this Afterword, we mean to encourage correspondence with readers of l'!fim�e Jest who have understood details that resisted our own efforts at elucidation, or who have isolated problems that we've failed to recognize as such. As with Ulysses or Pale Fire or any challenging work, it's going to take the efforts of a substantial number of devoted readers before I'!fim�e Jest is able to summon to itself a
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wider community able to move comfortably in its teeming and complex world. The time taken by any single reader to penetrate a work of real depth, declares Proust, is "a symbol one might say, of the years, the centuries even, that must elapse before the public can begin to cherish a masterpiece that is really new:•s We will be updating our Reader's Companion as it goes through successive editions. If you've spotted errors in our commentary, or solved any of the puzzles that have left us in a quandary - e.g., what ATHSCME translates into as an acronym for the giant air displacement fans used by Empire Waste Disposal - or have convincing and detailed solutions to major problems in narrative structure - e.g., how Don Gately and Hal Incandenza know about each other's existence when, to all appearances, they have no mutual acquaintances and have never met - we invite you to communicate them to us. We will, of course, acknowledge by name the contributions ofeveryone who sends us material incorporated into subsequent editions. Since only one of us is on e-mail, we ask readers to contact us through the regular U. S. mail. Queries and comments on Chapters 14, on the character sketches of Don Gately and Joelle van Dyne in Chapter 5, and "Reading the Smiley Face" in Chapter 7 may be sent to William C. Dowling, Department of English Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. Queries and comments on other sections of the Reader's Companr'on may be sent to Robert H. Bell, Department of English, Williams College, Williamstown, MA 01267. We look forward to hearing from our readers.
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Ackn ow l edgments Robert Bell I am grateful to Williams College for generous support. Particular thanks to Dean ofFacultyTom Kohut and President Morton 0. Shapiro for their encouragement. I am especially grateful to my former student, friend, and collaborator Heather Pierce. Her work on this project was considerable: she conducted research, tracked hundreds of characters, wrote biographical sketches for historical figures, edited, and contributed crucially to the making of this book.
William C. Dowling I'd like to thank my student Benjamin Remsen, whose Henry Rutgers thesis on David Foster Wallace and the problem ofsolipsism in postmodem fiction got me thinking seriously about Ir!finite Jest. Conversation with members of the Thursday Club - in particular, Niti Bagchi, Brian Edgar, Ronah Sadan,Josh Salzman, Greg Tuculescu, - led to a number of points I make in my sections ofthe Reader's Companion. For taking time out from her own research to listen, red pencil in hand, during 30 hours of copyediting in which the manuscript was read aloud - the intellectual equivalent, surely, ofDon Gately'sjob at the Shattuck Shelter For Homeless Males - Linda Dowling deserves more than gratitude. In addition, my discussions with her ofvarious troublesome points in Ir!finite Jests narrative structure were especially helpful in writing Chapters 3 and 4. 315
Notes Stephen Burn, David Foster WaDace 's bgimXe Jest. New York: Continuum Publishers, 2003: 55 Sven Birkerts, "The Alchemist's Retort, The Atlantic Monthly, February 1996 : 106- 1 13. Cited by John S. Rickard, Joyce 's Book of Memory: The Mnemotechnic of
Ulysses (Duke U P, 1999), p. 12. Quoted by Zadie Smith in ''The Limited Circle is Pure," The New Republic, November 3, 2003 : 34. We borrow the remark from Philip Weinstein. Burn, 33. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fi're. New York: Vintage Books, 1989: 289. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. 6 vols. New York: Modern Library: 2, 142.
