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brightbeautifulthings · 4 years

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"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy."

Fun Fact: I ran a David Foster Wallace blog (andtoyouitsjustwords) for about two years while I was in graduate school. I closed it down and moved the content I wanted to this one when I finished school and realized I wanted to read Every Book Ever, not just the literary ones, but it was a fond time of my life, and he remains one of my favorite authors.

Tumblr doesn't have a large Wallace fandom, but @infinite-jest-again, @sylvanshiner, @gayjewish, and I are banding together for the summer's slowest rereading of Infinite Jest. I'm super excited to be revisiting a book that blew my mind the first time I read it--but I was also trying to pound it in a month on top of classes, thesis, and teaching. I expect this experience will be a lot more chill, and the slow pace will allow us to pick apart every detail (or, as Marie put it, to "notice the water " 😂). We'll be using the schedule designed by the Infinite Summer people, but where they average around fifty pages a day, we're giving ourselves a week for each benchmark for Infinite Slow Summer!

Week 1 (p. 1-63)

"I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear" (p. 9).

[tw: drug/addiction mention]

I love the first chapter of this book. Wallace really hits the ground running with what is chronologically the last event of the novel, and this scene sets up a near-endless string of questions for how we got to this place. It's clear that something terrible has happened to Hal Incandenza, and while he's having no trouble with a coherent thought process ("I am in here" (p. 3).), he is devastatingly unable to communicate with anyone in the room. I'd argue it could almost work as a short story because the metaphor made concrete is so strong. It's an inherent flaw of communication that what I'm saying may not be exactly what you're hearing, that there's always that gap, however small, in understanding another human. We've all felt that "familiar panic at feeling misperceived" (p. 8) at one time or another. For Hal, this is not a metaphor; it's terrifyingly physical. ("I am not what you see and hear" (p. 13).)

Somehow, Wallace manages to inject humor into a scene that, upon closer inspection, is utterly haunting, but the image of Avril Incandenza running around her garden screaming, "Help! My son ate this!" (p. 11) about a bit of basement mold never fails to make me laugh. The following Erdedy chapter also ends up being humorous with him splayed in indecision in the middle of the room (possibly another philosophical anecdote made concrete in Buridan's donkey). For both Hal and Erdedy, the ritual of getting high seems as addictive as the drug itself. It's reassuring, I think, to start the book off on a strong note, in case we worried we were in for a thousand pages of tedious slog. It can be both, but it's often heartfelt, insightful, and funny as well, and the payoff is well worth the effort. I could probably write paragraphs about every chapter in this section; I don't know how Wallace manages to pack every page with so much meaning, but there's nothing haphazard about this book, despite its size and varied focus. Everything seems to be there for a reason.

"...and some days presents with delusions about people's mouths moving but nothing coming out" (p. 30).

Hal's conversation with a professional conversationalist who turns out to be his father (J.O.I./Himself) is loaded with potential plot points and philosophical intention. J.O.I. is under the impression that Hal doesn't speak, but he seems to be alone in this; Hal is obviously talking to him in this scene, but the way that he talks is fascinating. As Marie pointed out, so many of the conversations in this book are non-conversations. All the characters struggle to communicate, and communication is a topic Wallace struggles with throughout his writing career. Hal has a really specific way of responding to how a person said something instead of what they said. He's commenting on the grammar and vocabulary of Himself's speech rather than on the content of it (grasping the mechanics more than the meaning, which is symbolic, basically, of Hal's entire problem), while Himself seems to have a pre-arranged script in his head regardless of the responses he gets from his son. The result is an utter failure to convey meaning on either side. Like a lot of Wallace stuff, it's funny on a surface level and haunting beneath that, since Hal and Himself's inability to talk to each other drives so much of the novel's conflict.

I'm including a Q&A section under the cut where I attempt to work out some of the major plot events of the story and keep track of the questions I have as I'm reading. However, since this is a reread for all of us, it will contain overall spoilers for the novel. Proceed with caution if you're not familiar!

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS. TURN BACK BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE.

Questions & Working Theories

[tw: drug mention]

Q: What happened to Hal? (Obvi) - Hal purposely ate the DMZ. He even says in this section, "I cannot make myself understood, now. Call it something I ate" (p. 10). I never bought this explanation, though, because later in the book it seems like Hal is making an effort to come off drugs. - The mold Hal ate as a child had long-term effects, and something (coming off drugs?) may have triggered his current condition. Also supported by, "Call it something I ate" (p. 10). - Aaron Swartz has a very convincing theory that Hal accidentally ate the DMZ when The Wraith placed it on his toothbrush. (Again, supported by above.) Hal is an excellent communicator but lacks feelings, and J.O.I. was attempting to create something that would draw his son out of himself. - Hal was injured when the A.F.R. attacked Enfield Tennis Academy. There's a weird line in this chapter: "I once saw the word KNIFE finger-written on the steamed mirror of a nonpublic bathroom" (p. 16). This is likely also the work of The Wraith, indicating some kind of violence, perhaps the A.F.R. attack on Enfield.

Q: Why was Hal hospitalized "almost exactly one year back" (p. 16)? - The side effects of the DMZ were first starting to appear. - Hal was injured in the A.F.R. attack.

It's clear, also, that this was when Hal met Gately. Although they never have an on-page scene together that I recall, Hal refers to the two of them attempting to dig up J.O.I.'s head to find the Entertainment, alongside a masked John Wayne.

Q: Who is mailing out the Entertainment? - Swartz suggests that it's Orin Incandenza, who later under threat of torture releases it to the A.F.R. This seems well-supported by the text, since the initial cartridge is mailed from Arizona, and it's conveniently sent to a medical attaché with whom Avril probably had an affair (per J.O.I.'s conversation with Hal).

Q: How did Orin find out about the Entertainment?

Q: What happened to John Wayne that he can't win this year's WhataBurger competition?

Q: What "sordid liaison" (p. 30) with the M. DuPlessis, who dies in a later chapter, did the Incandenza family have?

#david foster wallace #infinite jest #infinite slow summer #infinite summer #infinite jest readalong #yrstruly

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brightbeautifulthings · 4 years

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Week 20 (p. 651-808)

"Hal himself hasn't had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny; he finds terms like joie and value to be like so many variables in rarified equations, and he can manipulate them well enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he's in there, inside his own hull, as a human being -- but in fact he's far more robotic than John Wayne" (p. 694).

I'm pretty much over this week-to-week business. Now that the end is in sight (roughly 300 pages), I'm abandoning the schedule and reading as much as I can. Scheduling reading has only ever worked for me as far as it goes. I prefer to immerse myself, however much a novel like IJ seems to discourage that. The book is always structurally interesting, but it starts to get more complicated now as various characters and plots begin to almost slide into one another. There's a cool series of scenes where Matty Pemulis observes Poor Tony, Kate Gompert, and Ruth van Cleve pass by, with Lenz running around the fringes, where pretty soon all the paths intersect at some point, with or without the characters (or the reader) noticing. There's a lot in here about J.O.I.'s films, which seem increasingly unnecessary (but so much of the book is, and is meant to be). The section on the Incandenza family from Joelle's perspective provides some of the clearest insight we have of them, and they are indeed one of the saddest families in literature. We also get Joelle's history from Molly Notkin, both interestingly told from outside perspectives, as if main characters can't be trusted to see their own families clearly.

Week 21 (p. 809-981)

I forgot how totally frustrating it is to near the end of this book and realize the plot isn't going to wrap up in any sort of satisfying way. Wallace commented in an interview (I forget which) that he didn't need to talk about what happens at the end of the book because we know what happens. Buddy, YOU know what happens. The rest of us are here flailing about trying to fit a thousand pieces together, as I suppose we're meant to. We know that the A.F.R. is planning to infiltrate Enfield by the end of the novel, that Poutrincourt is one of their spies ("...which is the slip that indicates that Poutrincourt's figured out that Steeply is neither a civilian soft-profiler nor even a female ... and would require an almost professionally hypervigilant and suspicious person to notice the significance of" p. 1052)., and that John Wayne has some vague connection besides simply being Canadian. We know that, given Orin's capture at the end, they will probably have a Master copy of the Entertainment very soon. What we don't know is how that all goes down, what the fallout is for O.N.A.N., or how Hal gets to be in the state he is in the first chapter (DMZ? AFR? I still can't decide).

"...but it couldn't ordinarily affect anybody or anything solid, and it could never speak right to anybody, a wraith had no out-loud voice of its own, and had to use somebody's like internal brain-voice if it wanted to try to communicate with something, which was why thoughts and insights that were coming from some wraith always just sound like your own thoughts, from inside your own head, if a wraith's trying to interface with you" (p. 831).

This seems like the most compelling motive for J.O.I. to want to dose Hal with DMZ, if in fact he did. Wraiths can only talk to someone who has slowed way down and is no longer experiencing time the way humans normally do--which sounds exactly like what happens when someone ingests DMZ. By the end of the novel (the beginning chapter), we know that Hal can no longer communicate with the outside world, but that there's nothing wrong with his brain voice ("I am in here" p. 3). Will Hal and Jim finally get to have a conversation?

It's clearer than ever that something has happened to Hal though. I don't know if there's any support for the DMZ toothbrush theory--I was actively looking for it and didn't find any, other than the DMZ obviously being missing when Pemulis goes to get it and Hal and other E.T.A. kids vigilantly guarding their toothbrushes. If it's true, it's a leap, but making a leap may be the only way to make sense of that particular conundrum. Whatever has happened is getting worse, as people continually interpret Hal's facial expressions as either very sad or very amused, when we know he's neither. Most tellingly, the narrative switches to first person point of view, Hal telling his own story for the first time (chronologically, if not structurally).

"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 ... 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 and nothing comes out ... while the sad kid holds something terrible up by the hair and makes the face of somebody shouting in panic: Too Late" (p. 934).

It seems like Gately eventually recovers, since we know he goes with Hal to help dig up J.O.I.'s head (verified in chapter one when Hal recalls it). It's possible the Wraith told him about the Entertainment, and this seems especially plausible when Gately somehow knows the plot of the Entertainment while he's still lying in the hospital. It's also possible that Joelle told him about it; through her conversation with Steeply (p. 940), we know that she knew the Masters were buried with Himself--which, ironically, is now buried in the Great Concavity. I'm still not clear about how John Wayne got involved, but there's this super oblique comment in an endnote about Bernard Wayne, a potential A.F.R. member who had not jumped when the train arrived and later drowned (p. 1060), which could potentially be John's father or grandfather.

I had forgotten that the 'Swiss' hand model was actually Luria P----. There are two obvious nods to other novels near the end here, with Fackelmann's A Clockwork Orange style end, and Orin's business with the cockroaches echoing the rats in 1984, specifically his nonsensical shouting "'Do it to her!'" (p. 972). Her who? Luria? Avril? All Subjects in general? I'm a little curious as to why Wallace bothered to make the references. He was doing well on the graphic horror all on his own, no need for outside references.

I'm amused by how many of my questions in my Q and A section are still unanswered. I thought if I paid closer attention on a second read that I would pick up more of the plot things I'd missed on my first, but I don't think that was the problem. I think it's that those answers simply aren't to be found in the actual text. Of course, they can point us toward various conclusions, and the novel certainly encourages us to speculate and make connections, but I don't think the actual answers are there. I have some more thoughts on this, and I'll likely have a review up this week or next.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS. TURN BACK BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE.

Questions & Working Theories

[tw: drug mention, infidelity, incest, statutory rape]

Q: What happened to Hal? (Obvi) - Hal purposely ate the DMZ. He even says in this section, “I cannot make myself understood, now. Call it something I ate” (p. 10). I never bought this explanation, though, because later in the book it seems like Hal is making an effort to come off drugs. - The mold Hal ate as a child had long-term effects, and something (coming off drugs?) may have triggered his current condition. Also supported by, “Call it something I ate” (p. 10). - Aaron Swartz has a very convincing theory that Hal accidentally ate the DMZ when The Wraith placed it on his toothbrush. (Again, supported by above.) Hal is an excellent communicator but lacks feelings, and J.O.I. was attempting to create something that would draw his son out of himself. - Hal was injured when the A.F.R. attacked Enfield Tennis Academy. There’s a weird line in this chapter: “I once saw the word KNIFE finger-written on the steamed mirror of a nonpublic bathroom” (p. 16). This is likely also the work of The Wraith, indicating some kind of violence, perhaps the A.F.R. attack on Enfield. - "A surreal memory of a steamed lavatory mirror with a knife sticking out of the pane" (p. 951). A: Still unclear, but I'm leaning more toward DMZ than A.F.R. on this read. We can see Hal's symptoms growing worse from the Eschaton game onward, and in the last chapters, people think he's either laughing or grimacing when he's not feeling either of those things. Still super interested in the mirror/knife asides though. Is this part of the A.F.R. attack?

Q: Why was Hal hospitalized “almost exactly one year back” (p. 16)? - The side effects of the DMZ were first starting to appear. - Hal was injured in the A.F.R. attack. - It’s clear, also, that this was when Hal met Gately. Although they never have an on-page scene together, Hal refers to the two of them attempting to dig up J.O.I.’s head to find the Entertainment, alongside a masked John Wayne. A: Unclear. See above.

Q: How did Gately, Hal, and John find out about the Entertainment in order to dig it up? How did they discover where it was hidden? - Himself actually mentions that the cartridge has been implanted in his head when he’s talking to Hal as a posed conversationalist. However, this is all the way back in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, when Hal is only ten-going-on-eleven. Hard to imagine that Hal remembered what was basically a throw-away comment, let alone understood its meaning. - The Wraith may have told Gately about it while he was lying in the hospital, the same way Gately somehow knows the plot of the Entertainment while he's there. - Joelle may have told them about it, since from her conversation with Steeply, we know that she knows that all the Masters were buried with Jim, which is now buried in the Great Concavity. A: Unclear, but several plausible scenarios.

Q: Who is mailing out the Entertainment? - Swartz suggests that it’s Orin Incandenza, who later under threat of torture releases it to the A.F.R. This seems well-supported by the text, since the initial cartridge is mailed from Arizona, and it’s conveniently sent to a medical attaché with whom Avril probably had an affair (per J.O.I.’s conversation with Hal). - Some support for this theory during one of Hal and Orin's phone conversations: "'What are you doing going to the post office? You hate snail-mail. And you quit mailing the Moms the pseudo-form-replies two years ago, Mario says'" (p. 244). Why is Orin at the post office, if not to mail more copies of the Entertainment? - However, as Marie pointed out, we don't know for sure that Orin was in Arizona in April YDAU. He's there in October, but there's a flashback of him in New Orleans in July that doesn't mention the year. If it was YDAU, Orin couldn't have postmarked the Cartridge from Arizona in April. - Orin also asks Hal directly about the days leading up to Himself's death, and he seems suspiciously interested in whatever film he was working on. "'Did he have film-related things with him when he flew somewhere? A film case? Equipment?'" (p. 250). However, if he already knew about the Entertainment back in April, why ask Hal about it in November? - This conversation is continued in a lengthy endnote where Orin asks about the definition of samizdat ("the generic meaning now is any sort of politically underground or beyond-the-pale press or the stuff published thereby" (p. 1011) and comments, "'So you'd have no idea why The Mad Stork's name would come up in connection with somebody saying samizdat?'" (p. 1011). Again, it's suspicious that he's even asking, but also, if he already knows about the Entertainment, why bother to ask? Is he trying to find out, or just trying to find out what Hal knows about it? Why? - "...place the likely dissemination-point someplace along the U.S. north border, with routing hubs in metro Boston/New Bedford and/or somewhere in the desert Southwest" (p. 549). Obviously, the Southwest could be Orin, but who's distributing it in Boston? Orin before he moved? I'd guess the Antitoi brothers, but their copy turned out to be blank (or seemed to be, if it was played on the wrong model). Orin has motive to want the medical attache dead for the affair with his mother, but why the film scholar, the avant-garde film festival, and the members of the Academy of D.A.S.? Were these Himself's rivals, or people Avril also had affairs with? - "Swiss cuckolds, furtive near-Eastern medical attachés, zaftig print-journalists: he felt ready for anything" (p. 597). - "There was reason to think M. DuPlessis had received his original copies from this relative, an athlete. Marathe felt U.S.B.S.S. felt this person may have borne responsibility for the razzles and dazzles of Berkeley and Boston, U.S.A." (p. 723). Did Orin give a copy to DuPlessis, or did he send it to him to kill him? A: It seems pretty clear on a re-read that it is Orin sending out the Entertainment, either from Boston before he left it or from Arizona where he currently lives, or both. I'm still not clear how he knew about it in the first place though, in order to dig it up. Between Orin's capture/torture at the end and the Antitoi brothers' having copies of DuPlessis's stolen cartridges, it seems certain that the A.F.R. will soon locate a Master copy. (The Antitoi's turns out to be Read-Only p. 725.)

Q: How did Orin find out about the Entertainment? - Joelle might have told him, though this was after her disfigurement and their breakup, so I'm not sure why she would. A: Unclear.

Q: When did Orin transfer from New Orleans to Arizona? - In June YW-QMD, Orin was still with the New Orleans Saints, per the mail between him and Avril (p. 1006-7). - In October YDAU, he's in Arizona. Q: Unclear.

Q: What happened to John Wayne that he can’t win this year’s WhataBurger competition? A: SUPER UNCLEAR. Thanks for nothing. We know he survived the A.F.R. attack (if Steeply didn’t stop the attack) because he’s in the off-page graveyard scene with Hal and Gately. Was he an A.F.R. target after that for going against them?

Q: What “sordid liaison” (p. 30) with the M. DuPlessis, who dies in a later chapter, did the Incandenza family have? - Still not clear, but it sounds like J.O.I. either purposely or under duress gave a Master copy (or copyable copy) of the Entertainment to DuPlessis, or had it stolen from him before or after his death, and it was then stolen by accident when Gately robbed and killed DuPlessis. ("Whether or not the A.F.R. ever even recover this alleged Master copy from the DuPlessis burglary..." (p. 489).) A: Best guess is that Avril had an affair with DuPlessis, Orin/Jim discovered the affair (possibly with a name written on the fogged up glass of Avril's car), and Orin sent him a copy to kill him, which he didn't watch (because he died? Not clear on the timeline). The copy was then stolen by Gately and ended up with the Antitoi brothers.

Q: Is Marathe a double-agent, or is he just pretending to be a double agent? - Marathe has betrayed the A.F.R. and is aiding Steeply and the Americans in finding the Entertainment in order to get medical care for his wife. - Marathe is only pretending to betray the A.F.R. in order to get more information from Steeply. A: Marathe is a double-agent, and is actually betraying the A.F.R. "The A.F.R. believed Marathe functioned as a triple agent, pretending to betray his nation for his wife, memorizing every detail of the meetings with B.S.S. ... M. Fortier did not know Marathe had reached the internal choice that he loved his skull-deprived and heart-defective wife Gertraud Marathe more than he loved the Separatist and anti-O.N.A.N. cause of the nation of Québec..." (p. 529).

Q: Where did the tripod set up in the middle of nowhere on the ETA grounds come from? - The U.S.S. Millicent Kent set up the tripod as an excuse to get Mario alone. - This is the possibly the first instance of the Wraith's work. He's responsible for most of the odd occurrences at ETA, and "Mario said his late dad had used a somewhat less snazzy IV-model Husky back in his early days of making art-films..." (p. 122).) A: The Wraith put it there. "But it's true. The Husky VI tripod of Mario's near-fatal encounter with the U.S.S. Millicent Kent was only the beginning" (p. 632). After this, the instances of objects being in odd places around E.T.A. increases dramatically.

Q: Who is the narrator in some of these sections about ETA? - It's a distinct voice from the sections that have conversations, but it also sounds a little like someone talking to us. ("I want to be like that. Able to just sit all quiet and pull life toward me..." (p. 128). Is this a character? A: Unclear. The only clear first person POV character we have in the novel is Hal. In some ways, the narrator's voice does sound a lot like Hal's, but if this is the case, he also discusses himself in third person a lot (which... Hal is pretty removed from himself, so that's not entirely impossible). I'm not confident enough to say that Hal is the mystery narrator throughout the book though.

Q: Are the effects of DMZ the effects we see in Hal in the first chapter? A: Very likely. Whatever starts in the Eschaton game grows worse toward the end of the novel, as people continually interpret Hal's facial expressions as either very sad or very amused, when we know he's neither. Most tellingly, the narrative switches to first person point of view, Hal telling his own story for the first time (chronologically, if not structurally).

Q: Why do Hal's symptoms in the Eschaton game seem more like DMZ side effects than marijuana side effects? Was there DMZ mixed with it? Was it purposely mixed in, or was it the work of the Wraith? - This is the first time we see Hal with similar symptoms as the ones he has in the first chapter, which seems to suggest that--whether or not the DMZ and marijuana are related, whether it was intentional or not--Hal did take the DMZ on Interdependence Day YDAU. - Pemulis goes looking for the DMZ later on, which seems to suggest it wasn't intentional, at least not on his end. Hal also doesn't consciously acknowledge that he's going to take it in this chapter either. - Mario reflecting on his brother: "He can't tell if Hal is sad. He is having a harder and harder time reading Hal's state of mind or whether he's in good spirits. This worries him. He used to be able to sort of preverbally know in his stomach generally where Hal was and what he was doing, even if Hal was far away and playing or if Mario was away, and now he can't anymore" (p. 590). Why the change? DMZ-related? - "But the crisis of faith that cost Stice the match had concerned a different Hal, Hal can tell. It's now a whole new Hal, a Hal who does not get high, or hide, a Hal who in 29 days is going to hand his own personal urine over to authority figures with a wide smile and exemplary posture and not a secretive thought in his head" (p. 635). If Hal took the DMZ on purpose, does he know it will be out of his system in a month? What else could have created a "whole new Hal"? It seems like a leap to think that quitting marijuana is the sole cause of all the changes. A: Very likely that Hal took DMZ, maybe more than once, starting at the Eschaton game.

Q: Who is Mario's father, Jim or Charles? - This is more of a detail question than anything because I'm not sure I care about the answer. It certainly doesn't seem to matter to Mario. He obviously bonded a lot with Jim over film in a way that seems almost worshipful at times, and I'm always in the camp of family is who you choose, not necessarily who you're related to. Also, Charles seems repelled by Mario, whereas Jim apparently loved him and spent time with him, so fuck Charles. A: Unclear.

Q: Is Charles Avril's half-brother or step-brother? - Again, this is a detail question, although one is significantly grosser than the other if they're having an affair, which it sounds like they are/were. ("...the thing it's not entirely impossible he may have fathered asleep up next to the sound system..." (p. 451).) That’s... not really a question if they weren’t sleeping together. Fuck you twice, Charles. - "Charles Tavis is probably not related to the Moms by actual blood" (p. 900). A: According to Hal, he's most likely her step-brother, though it doesn't seem like anyone ever cared enough to verify this.

Q: Was Pemulis selling DMZ to the Antitoi brothers, or buying it from them? - "Bertraund had been starry-eyed enough to agree to barter the person an antique blue lava-lamp and a lavender-tinged apothecary's mirror for eighteen unexceptional-looking and old lozenges the long-haired old person had claimed in a jumble of West-Swiss-accented French were 650 mg. of a trop-formidable harmful pharmaceutical no longer available and guaranteed to make one's most hair-raising psychedelic experience look like a day on the massage-tables of a Basel hot-springs resort..." (p. 482) A: Unclear, but I'm guessing buying, since Pemulis ends up with it and, as far as we know, the Antitoi brothers don't.

Q: What's the significance of Lucien Antitoi's spirit immediately after his death? Does this have an impact on the Wraith's activities? - "...and is free, catapulted home over fans and the Convexity's glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world's well-known tongues" (p. 489). A: It seems like the Wraith's activities amplify after Lucien's death. If he knows that Hal is in danger from the A.F.R., he might be trying to rally Gately to help.

Q: If Pemulis has Avril's affair with John Wayne to hold over her, why is he still expelled at the end of the novel? A: WOOPS. Peemster accidentally dosed John with 'drines, as well as his very public tennis opponent. Can't help feeling Pemulis unfairly got the worst of it, while Avril got in zero trouble for having an affair with a teenage student. Also, hilariously, Hal already knew about the affair and didn't care about it.

Q: What's up with John Wayne and Hal? - "...John ('N.R.') Wayne opened up the ajar door a little more and put his whole head in and stayed like that, with just his head in. He didn't say anything and Hal didn't say anything, and they stayed like that for a while, and then Wayne's head smoothly withdrew" (p. 560). - "I could somehow tell for sure that John Wayne's head was inside the open door. I could feel it clearly, almost painfully. He was looking down at me lying there on the Lindisfarne carpet. There was none of the gathering tension of a person deciding whether or not to speak. I could feel my throat's equipment move when I swallowed. John Wayne and I never had much to say to one another. There wasn't even hostility between us" (p. 956). A: No idea. There’s the possibility that John is a spy for the A.F.R. the same as Poutrincourt, but I’d thought they had to infiltrate the tennis academy because they didn’t have another spy already in place. Thanks to the weird endnote, we know he has some connection, but I’m not totally sure what it is.

Q: Do Pemulis's descriptions of the effects of annulation have anything to do with how DMZ affects people, or the effect the mold Hal ate as a child had on him? It seems oddly similar to how Hal is experiencing time in the first chapter. Is this how J.O.I. stumbled onto it? - "'Accelerated phenomena, which is actually equivalent to an incredible slowing down of time", "relativity of time in extreme organic environments" (p. 573). A: Could be one of a million metaphors in this book.

#infinite jest #david foster wallace #infinite slow summer #infinite summer #infinite jest readalong #yrstruly

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brightbeautifulthings · 4 years

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Week 14 (p. 470-506)

[tw: death, violence, eye horror, racism]

More of Marathe and Steeply pondering out loud the overall themes of the novel, which are probably some of the most grounding chapters in the book. I'm not sure we'd totally know what to make of it without their commentary, since trying to string together coherent connections in a thousand pages is a kind of mental gymnastics. Some of those connections are stranger than others. What begins as a scene of Gately running errands weirdly (but sort of artfully) segues into a disturbing scene between the A.F.R. and the Antitoi brothers. There are plenty of things grim or uncomfortable or flat out distasteful about this book, but sometimes the graphic violence kind of jumps out and stabs you in the eye, say, with a railroad spike. It ends with an oddly spiritual image that I have spoilery questions about below the cut.

There's a very funny scene of Erdedy at an A.A. meeting that was published in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and I confused the shit out of myself the first time I read IJ, wondering how the hell this scene in the middle of a thousand page novel I’d never read was familiar to me. It also contains racist depictions of African American characters' speech patterns, and I doubt this particular section would be published now. The humor in the scene doesn't depend at all on harmful stereotypes and would in fact, be a lot more funny if I wasn’t spending so much energy cringing at it. So many of the little racist asides could have easily been edited out of the entire novel to make it less offensive.

Week 15 (p. 507-538)

[tw: mental illness, OCD]

Hal is again acting weird in this section, cataloging all the blue things with an "involuntary grin" (p. 520). It's not clear if it's because he's ingested DMZ and starting to feel its effects or if it's because every character in this novel is Emphatically Weird, and his neuroses look pretty mild next to everyone else's. It's astounding to me that of all the problems these characters face (rampant alcoholism, Tavis's pathological openness, Avril's OCD, Politeness Roulette, and fear of open spaces, disembodied voices, alienating her children, etc.), Himself found that the most pressing one was Hal's inability to emote. Hal is one of the most functional characters on the page at any time, and while he readily admits having difficulty relating to his family, aside from Mario, he and Stice are "at complete ease with one another" (p. 521), which doesn't strike me as a terribly unhealthy absence of connection, communication, or emotion. (In any case, who could blame him for being a little robotic as a defense mechanism against the Incandenzas.)

"'Don, I'm perfect. I'm so beautiful I drive anybody with a nervous system out of their 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 if they can only have me right there with them at all times everything will be all right'" (p. 538).

Alongside Hal and Orin's, Gately and Joelle's are some of the best conversations in the book. Joelle has an intellectual's habit of commenting on the way things are said (pretty much the embodiment of irony), while Gately may speak in cliches but is much better at getting to the reality of things (embodiment of sincerity), yet they still manage to communicate in a way that's effective, insightful, and often funny. He thinks he's not that smart and worries other people will pick up on it, but he keeps up with her just fine. Gately notes that when Joelle talks about the veil, she doesn't sound like herself (more like she's reciting someone else's ideas from rote, imo), and, interestingly, Gately's voice almost seems to start to match hers by the end of some of the discussions.

Questions & Working Theories

Q: Was Pemulis selling DMZ to the Antitoi brothers, or buying it from them? (It sounds like he’s selling it, but why?) - "Bertraund had been starry-eyed enough to agree to barter the person an antique blue lava-lamp and a lavender-tinged apothecary's mirror for eighteen unexceptional-looking and old lozenges the long-haired old person had claimed in a jumble of West-Swiss-accented French were 650 mg. of a trop-formidable harmful pharmaceutical no longer available and guaranteed to make one's most hair-raising psychedelic experience look like a day on the massage-tables of a Basel hot-springs resort..." (p. 482)

#infinite jest #david foster wallace #infinite slow summer #infinite summer #infinite jest readalong #yrstruly

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brightbeautifulthings · 4 years

Text

Week 1 | Week 2-3 |

Week 4 (p. 138-168)

[tw: drug mention, alcoholism]

This section introduces some interesting ideas on the novel's agenda and what Wallace might have been trying to do with whatever you want to call the literary fiction that comes after postmodernism (post-postmodernism? that's a rabbit hole nobody really wants to fall down, but we'll go with it for lack of a better word). In Hal's essay, he describes "the hero of non-action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond calm, divorced from all stimulus..." (p. 142). There are arguments to be made that Hal, himself, is this hero of non-action, since little that happens to him in the book is engineered by him. This is another reason I don't quite buy the Hal-purposely-took-DMZ theory, since it's contrary to much of his character, which +/- just watches while things happen to him. Hal is not a character with a lot of agency, yet he's still a hugely compelling character. I think there are also arguments to be made that Wallace had every intention of writing this book about Hal and non-action, but that it was somewhat eclipsed by Gately and his narrative--and we know later on that Gately is not a hero of non-action at all.

It's easy to draw a parallel between Hal's conversation with J.O.I. as a conversationalist and Jim's conversation with his own father as a child, even down to the style: they're both purely dialogue, and we have to rely on characters' comments in order to discern what they're doing or how they're reacting. I have an allergy both to condescending lectures and drunken ranting, so this section was uncomfortable for me. It's not hard to see how that brand of parenting influenced Himself, how he went so far in the opposite direction in terms of success and still managed to end up in a similar place. It makes me worry for Hal (but, honestly, what about this book doesn't make us worry for Hal).

Week 5 (p. 169-210)

"By repeating this term over and over, perhaps in the same rhythm at which you squeeze a ball, you can reduce it to an empty series of phonemes, just formants and fricatives, trochaically stressed, signifying zip" (p. 174).

[tw: drug mention]

I'm super interested in the description of DMZ and its effects here, but I'm not sure I understand it. Wallace writes, "...whereby the ingester perceives his relation to the ordinary flow of time as radically (and euphorically...) altered" (p. 170). It sounds like DMZ changes a person's experience of time, and Pemulis adds the description "kinetic even in statis" (p. 996), which sounds a lot like Hal's hero of non-action theory. At first glance, this doesn't seem to track with Hal in the first chapter though. He seems firmly grounded in the timeline, at least well enough to describe everyone and their conversations chronologically. Then again, if he were speaking much faster or slower than the average human, would that come off grotesque and terrifying to the listener?

While there's an argument to be made that Hal eating the mold as a child had something to do with his retreat inside of himself, I think there's also an argument that it's just as much nurture (nurtural?) as chemical. J.O.I. raised him to be a tennis prodigy, which obviously has various psychological effects on the kids at Enfield. Hal is taught to break the game down to its component parts and practice them until he doesn't have to think about them, to reduce them down so far that they barely mean anything on their own. Is it any wonder he does that with language and life in general too? In a lot of ways, those kids are conditioned to be robotic. Hal is just the best at it, after maybe John Wayne, who comes off even more removed in the few glimpses we have of him.

Questions & Working Theories

[tw: drug mention]

Q: Are the effects of DMZ the effects we see in Hal in the first chapter?

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brightbeautifulthings · 4 years

Text

Week 1 | Week 2-3 | Week 4-5 | Week 6-7 | Week 8-9

Week 10 (p. 359-390)

"Do exactly as you please--if you still trust what seems to please you" (p. 356).

[tw: drug references, addiction]

AA and addiction are two of the major threads of the novel, and walking through AA meetings with Gately is filled with plenty of insight. Wallace brings a kind of universality to the experience in the way that all addiction cycles are +/- the same, barring the details, and how empathizing with other addicts is one of AA's major goals. Empathy is a common theme in Wallace's work, and it's all over this book. There's also a theme about surrendering your will to something bigger than yourself (e.g., Marathe and Steeply's conversations, the tennis players at Enfield) that surfaces in the AA meetings too.

"...his blank black-on-yellow smile never faltered as he sincerely urged you to have a nice day. Just one more last nice day. Just one" (p. 359)

Gately is a really sympathetic character at this point in the narrative, where he has quite a bit of sobriety under his belt and he's genuinely trying to stay clean, to empathize, and to remain humble. If Hal represents the dangers of irony in this story, then Gately represents the benefits of sincerity and empathy. It almost feels like Wallace is apologizing for Gately's dream about the shepherd in the smiley face mask pulling addicts back into addiction by calling it banal, but it's far more unsettling than cliche (smiley faces being extremely sinister in IJ).

"'The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you'" (p. 389).

[tw: child death, pedophilia, ableism]

Unfortunately, Wallace seems at pains to be as gross as possible as the meeting continues, because all this book needed was blatant ableism, pedophilia, and dead babies in the same chapter. I get the point he's trying to make: the content of the stories doesn't actually matter as much as how they're told (performed or sincere), but gross.

It's a relief to get to an excerpt of the interview between Steeply and Orin in the endnotes, which is formatted like Brief Interviews with Hideous Men in a Q and A style--only there are no Q's. Instead, we're forced to interpret what Steeply may have asked through Orin's answers alone, and it's a clever way of making sure we're paying attention. (Also, Orin could easily be a character in BIWHM.)

Week 11

Oops! Guess who didn't do her reading last week? And guess who doesn't have time to read double this week to catch up? I'm going to keep on with the schedule, just a week behind, instead of killing myself trying to get back on track. I'm updating about it partly to show the reality of tackling a book like this: it doesn't always go as planned! I'm bound to hit a ten-page endnote at some point and not meet my reading goals. The other reason is to have a more accurate record of how long it takes me to read this mf.

#david foster wallace #infinite jest #infinite slow summer #infinite summer #infinite jest readalong #yrstruly

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brightbeautifulthings · 4 years

Text

Week 1 |

Week 2 (p. 64-94)

"TE OCCIDERE POSSUNT SED TE EDERE NON POSSUNT NEFAS EST-- They Can Kill You, But the Legalities of Eating You Are Quite a Bit Dicier" (p. 81, 994).

[tw: drugs/addiction, depression]

Nice of them to start this section off with our first major endnote, an eight-page list of J. O. Incandenza's film oeuvre. Truly riveting. However, this endnote is a prime example of one of the things that sets Wallace above other writers of his kind, in my opinion. It's a bit tedious to read, yes, but it's important that we do. This isn't just throwaway information. There are clues buried in there about the kinds of issues J.O.I. struggled with throughout his life, particularly about the hallucination (?) he has that Hal doesn't speak. Also, I didn't notice on my first read, but this provides the first clear timeline we have of the novel's events. The years of subsidized time are purposely confusing, but here we have them laid out in order. It also gives us a rough date for Joelle's accident when she begins appearing veiled in his films (YTMP). Anybody can put tedious lists in their books or make reading purposely difficult (and I have attitude about writers who do this for no reason), but IJ really is as clever as it claims to be. This is still my favorite graphic of subsidized time, made by Poor Yorick Entertainment. I was thinking about printing it out and using it as a bookmark to help me keep track of the timeline.

Most of this section is given over to introducing characters that will recur throughout the novel rather than advancing any of the current ones. We meet Kate Gompert in a somewhat harrowing depiction of clinical depression, which Wallace struggled with throughout his life. Her addiction cycle is eerily similar to both Hal's and Erdedy's. We also meet Marathe and Steeply for the first time, whose recurring conversations sort of anchor the rest of the varying narratives but are underwhelming in these first few pages. Not sure how I feel about the uncharitable descriptions of Steeply's cross-dressing for his undercover work. I have to assume it's there for humor, since it sounds too ridiculous to be believable. Like a lot of humor from the 90s though, it comes off insensitive.

Week 3 (p. 95-137)

"'What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love'" (p. 108)?

This section opens on our first good look at the tennis players at ETA, with Hal at the center. Watching them bond while exhausted after the day's lessons and games, and then again with their Little Buddy groups, gives us some insight into the major players: Hal, Pemulis, Stice, and a little bit on John (N.R.) Wayne. I found it interesting that Wallace basically tells us what to think about this scene a few pages later when Hal is describing the "togetherness" quality of the complaining; it's a little heavy-handed on a second read, but maybe something in 1,000 pages needs to be if we're ever going to catch it. There's also a more subtle comment here about the inability of language to capture reality when the boys are searching for better phrases to describe exhaustion. Language failures are all over this book, but it's particularly ineffective at capturing things like pain, exhaustion, addiction, depression, etc.

One of my favorite sections is this next excerpt of Marathe and Steeply's conversation. It has a lot of "This Is Water" overtones where they discuss choosing what to worship, and how Americans are distinctly bad at choosing things that are good for them. Marathe, a Canadian, (along with Schtitt talking to Mario about tennis some pages ago) suggests that it's better to choose something bigger than yourself, like your country or a cause, otherwise what you basically end up worshiping is yourself. He seems to be implying that if you choose another person, it's ultimately for selfish reasons. However, we also know that what Steeply says about not being able to choose what to love might apply to Marathe and his wife; he'd betray his country and his cause for the love he can't help but choose. Then again, it's not totally clear whether he is actually a double or triple agent at this point.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS. TURN BACK BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE.

Questions & Working Theories

[tw: drug mention]

Q: When did Orin transfer from New Orleans to Arizona?

Q: Where did the tripod set up in the middle of nowhere on the ETA grounds come from? - The U.S.S. Millicent Kent set up the tripod as an excuse to get Mario alone. - This is possibly the first instance of the Wraith's work. He's responsible for most of the odd occurrences at ETA, and "Mario said his late dad had used a somewhat less snazzy IV-model Husky back in his early days of making art-films..." (p. 122).)

Q: Who is the narrator in some of these sections about ETA? It's a distinct voice from the sections that have conversations, but it also sounds a little like someone talking to us. ("I want to be like that. Able to just sit all quiet and pull life toward me..." (p. 128). Is this a character?

#david foster wallace #infinite jest #infinite slow summer #infinite summer #infinite jest readalong #yrstruly

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brightbeautifulthings · 4 years

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Week 16 (p. 539-580)

[tw: animal death, addiction, drug use]

I don't have a lot of commentary on Lenz's spree of domestic pet killings. He's obviously meant to be a repulsive character, and he is. By contrast, Green and Gately sound like the two nicest guys you could ever meet, and Green's history is much more sympathetic than Lenz's. As gross as it is being in his head, I can see why it's here, since Lenz has a way of justifying just about everything, down to his continued drug use. A handful of funny malapropisms too, which at first seem like typos until I realized that even the narrative style is reflecting Lenz's perspective, and those are his mistakes. Given the scene with the A.F.R. and the Antitoi brothers, Orin's being stalked by men in wheelchairs and seduced by a woman with the same accent seems far more ominous than it did before.

Week 17 (p. 581-619)

[tw: animal death, violence, severe injury]

There are spoilers in all my updates since this a second read, but things are especially spoilery ahead!

Together with the Eschaton game, this scene with Gately marks the thematic center of the novel and the turning point for Gately's narrative arc. It's effectively tense despite what seem like Wallace's best efforts to undermine the tension. This is not a book one can get "lost" in for long periods of time because it's constantly reminding you that you're a human reading a (very heavy, sometimes arduous) book, but it's never more apparent than right here. The novel starts building tension with Green observing Lenz killing a dog and being chased by angry Canadians, and then detours into a couple other unrelated POVs right in the middle of the scene. (There is a lot of inexplicable hostility toward Canadians in this book. Is that a 90s thing? I'm not aware of any particular grievances Americans have against Canada, but maybe I'm missing something.)

The danger has an oddly calming effect on Gately ("his smile now as empty as a pumpkin's grin" p. 615), but I personally was feeling his feelings for him. The violence is graphic and excessive, and it's almost cerebrally painful to see Gately getting hurt while protecting that asshole, Lenz. But also, would Gately be the "hero of action" of this book if he stepped aside? There's a particular moment of sweetness when he recognizes Joelle as Madame Psychosis. I ship it, though this isn't a shipping-type book since basically everything that happens to these characters is terrible.

Questions & Working Theories

Q: Who is mailing out the Entertainment? - Swartz suggests that it’s Orin Incandenza, who later under threat of torture releases it to the A.F.R. This seems well-supported by the text, since the initial cartridge is mailed from Arizona, and it’s conveniently sent to a medical attaché with whom Avril probably had an affair (per J.O.I.’s conversation with Hal). - Some support for this theory during one of Hal and Orin's phone conversations: "'What are you doing going to the post office? You hate snail-mail. And you quit mailing the Moms the pseudo-form-replies two years ago, Mario says'" (p. 244). Why is Orin at the post office, if not to mail more copies of the Entertainment? - However, as Marie pointed out, we don't know for sure that Orin was in Arizona in April YDAU. He's there in October, but there's a flashback of him in New Orleans in July that doesn't mention the year. If it was YDAU, Orin couldn't have postmarked the Cartridge from Arizona in April. - Orin also asks Hal directly about the days leading up to Himself's death, and he seems suspiciously interested in whatever film he was working on. "'Did he have film-related things with him when he flew somewhere? A film case? Equipment?'" (p. 250). However, if he already knew about the Entertainment back in April, why ask Hal about it in November? - This conversation is continued in a lengthy endnote where Orin asks about the definition of samizdat ("the generic meaning now is any sort of politically underground or beyond-the-pale press or the stuff published thereby" (p. 1011) and comments, "'So you'd have no idea why The Mad Stork's name would come up in connection with somebody saying samizdat?'" (p. 1011). Again, it's suspicious that he's even asking, but also, if he already knows about the Entertainment, why bother to ask? Is he trying to find out, or just trying to find out what Hal knows about it? Why? - "...place the likely dissemination-point someplace along the U.S. north border, with routing hubs in metro Boston/New Bedford and/or somewhere in the desert Southwest" (p. 549). Obviously, the Southwest could be Orin, but who's distributing it in Boston? I'd guess the Antitoi brothers, but their copy turned out to be blank (or seemed to be, if it was played on the wrong model). Orin has motive to want the medical attaché dead for the affair with his mother, but why the film scholar, the avant-garde film festival, and the members of the Academy of D.A.S.? Were these Himself's rivals, or people Avril also had affairs with? - "Swiss cuckolds, furtive near-Eastern medical attachés, zaftig print-journalists: he felt ready for anything" (p. 597). Q: Why do Hal's symptoms in the Eschaton game seem more like DMZ side effects than marijuana side effects? Was there DMZ mixed with it? Was it purposely mixed in, or was it the work of the Wraith? - This is the first time we see Hal with similar symptoms as the ones he has in the first chapter, which seems to suggest that--whether or not the DMZ and marijuana are related, whether it was intentional or not--Hal did take the DMZ on Interdependence Day YDAU. - Pemulis goes looking for the DMZ later on, which seems to suggest it wasn't intentional, at least not on his end. Hal also doesn't consciously acknowledge that he's going to take it in this chapter either. - Mario reflecting on his brother: "He can't tell if Hal is sad. He is having a harder and harder time reading Hal's state of mind or whether he's in good spirits. This worries him. He used to be able to sort of preverbally know in his stomach generally where Hal was and what he was doing, even if Hal was far away and playing or if Mario was away, and now he can't anymore" (p. 590). Why the change? DMZ-related?

Q: If Pemulis has Avril's affair with John Wayne to hold over her, why is he still expelled at the end of the novel?

#infinite jest #david foster wallace #infinite slow summer #infinite summer #infinite jest readalong #yrstruly

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brightbeautifulthings · 4 years

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Week 12 (p. 391-432)

"It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase" (p. 414).

If there's been a point where I almost gave up on this, it was with this week's reading. It didn't do me any favors to take a week off, since it got me out of the headspace, and this was an extremely dull section to step back into. Wallace has a gift for purposeful tedium; it's at its peak in The Pale King, but he gives it a nice warm-up round here with the history of O.N.A.N., Gentle's administration, and a weird segue into the decline of advertising and the rise of teleputers, where everyone now watches entertainment cartridges instead of cable TV. I get why it's important, particularly to the theme of total freedom (to choose our entertainment, to eat candy until we die, to watch a cartridge that kills us) and how damaging that can be in both obvious and insidious ways. But it's especially dull right here on the heels of a lot of political drudgery. I'll give him credit though. Wallace had an eerie eye for the direction media was going to go in, and his teleputer sounds a lot like streaming services except for the fact that it doesn't involve the internet. He underestimates advertisers though, since it turns out people are willing to sacrifice little bits of freedom for all kinds of things, including free stuff. Since I don't have to pay to use this platform, I don't mind having ads on it. Then again, the internet was only around a scant five years before this book was published, and that's a big game changer.

More interestingly, this is the first solid example of objects around Enfield behaving in ways they shouldn't be: Stice keeps waking up with his bed on the other side of the room, despite no one else having access to it. I feel like Wallace is trying to divert our attention from it with Stice's conversation with Lyle, who tells him not to "underestimate objects" (p. 394). Objects, hell. Enfield is haunted! (By probably the weirdest ghost I've ever seen in fiction.) There's also a quick little philosophical discussion between Marathe and Steeply about how hedonism is kind of a dead end, to which Steeply never manages to give a good response. It feels a bit like Wallace yanked it right out of an intro to philosophy class, but it ties in nicely with the novel's themes of fatal levels of freedom.

Week 13 (p. 433-469)

"Something you can't see or hear or touch or smell: OK. All right. But something you can't even feel?" (p. 444)

[tw: addiction]

Some of the political drudgery continues in this section despite its trying to be a parody, but it picks up more as we start to get to know Gately better. (In my opinion, the book is always at its best when we're with Hal or Gately, but I'm strongly driven by good characters.) A lot of the AA stuff that Gately struggles with, like not quite believing in a Higher Power yet still asking it for help twice daily, seems to be Wallace's overly analytical mind poking its way into the narrative. The takeaway seems to be that fighting addiction can't be approached intellectually, and for people like Wallace who think of themselves as primarily intellectual beings, that's a major struggle. There's a kind of philosophy here that action is more powerful. It doesn't matter what Gately thinks; it matters what he does. Do the right things, and the thinking will follow. Also, did I mention that Gately is a hugely sympathetic character? He wasn't the only one crying over his first year of sobriety.

"...and the static, momentumless music as subject instead of environment is somehow terribly disturbing: Hal listened to a few minutes of the stuff and told his brother it sounded like somebody's mind coming apart right before your ears" (p. 450).

[tw: incest, infidelity]

Tennis drills at ETA are more information than any non-tennis player ever needed to know about tennis, but the scene helps us get to know Hal and the other players a little better, as a group and as individuals. It also helps us, more obliquely, with the internal politics and scandals of the academy. Is Tavis Avril's half-brother or step-brother? Because one of those is significantly grosser if they had an affair--one that may or may not have fathered Mario, apparently. Adding this to my Q’s, although I’m not sure I want to know.

Questions & Working Theories

[tw: infidelity]

[tw: incest]

#infinite jest #david foster wallace #infinite slow summer #infinite summer #infinite jest readalong #yrstruly

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brightbeautifulthings · 4 years

Text

Week 1 | Week 2-3 | Week 4-5 | Week 6-7

Week 8 (p. 284-317)

"Describe-the-sort-of-man-you-find-attractive-and-I'll-affect-the-demeanor-of-that-sort-of-man" (p. 290).

[tw: addiction, withdrawal, sexism]

Gately calls interaction with some of the Ennet House residents "an adventure in fucking pathos" (p. 275), but I have a lot more trouble with Orin than I do with most of them. He's such a gross version of toxic masculinity, a punting, brother-abusing, schmoozing womanizer. Fortunately, Hal is in perfect agreement with the reader on this, and he rarely lets his older brother's more disgusting qualities go without comment. (We also get the sense that Orin doesn't like himself much either.) We hit maybe the most hellacious endnote here too, in an extended phone call between Orin and Hal. I have a lot more patience for tedium this read. Judging by my margin notes I, like Hal, couldn't wait for that conversation to be over on my first read, but this time I was really trying to follow the Separatist politics. It seems like O. raises a good question in wondering what their ultimate end goal really is. While there are definitely some ableist representation issues with Mario, he's still one of my favorite characters in the novel, and his relationship with Hal breaks my heart. Also, if Poor Tony's withdrawal scenes don't make readers want to never, ever pick up a substance, I don't know what will.

Week 9 (p. 318-358)

"'It's snowing on the goddamn map, not the territory, you dick!'" (p. 333)

[tw: drug references]

I think the Eschaton game has been described as the heart of the book, and that makes sense even though it's not at the physical middle. (I don't think it's chronologically in the middle either, but I would need a physical list to keep track of when things happen.) It brings to the forefront one of the central themes of the novel, which is what happens when there's crossover between the real and the map. This is another metaphor made concrete, and I struggle to wrap my head around it. I think it has something to do with what happens when constructs (like the physical map of the game on the tennis court) are invaded by actual reality (snow falling on the court, players of the game being hit affecting/not affecting what happens in the actual game). Once reality is acknowledged, the construct falls apart. I feel like this could be interpreted as a critique of metafiction. Once you bring the work itself into the fictional world, it's doomed to eventually self-destruct. (Pemulis is right, by the way. Attacking the players of a game doesn't mean you win the game.)

What's really interesting about the game is sidelined to the actual action of it, where Hal and the other Big Buddies are watching from outside the court. Hal decides not to smoke marijuana with them in public and then does it anyway: "At some point Axford has passed the remainder of the cigarette back over toward Struck without looking to see that Struck is no longer in his chair, and Hal finds himself taking the proffered duBois and smoking dope in public without even thinking about it or having consciously decided to go ahead" (pp. 331-2). We know that Hal has already smoked at least once today and seems able to keep this +/- a secret, so the effect this has on him is strange: - "causing Hal Incandenza to laugh out loud despite himself" (p. 337) - "Hal finds himself riveted at something about the degenerating game that seems so terribly abstract and fraught with implications and consequences that even thinking about how to articulate it seems too complexly stressful that being almost incapacitated with absorption is almost the only way out of the complex stress" (p. 340). - "For a brief moment that Hal will later regard as completely and uncomfortably bizarre, Hal feels at his own face to see whether he is wincing" (p. 342). That last is one of my favorite lines in the book, easy to overlook and assume it's a side effect of the marijuana, but is it really? All those look way more like Hal in the first chapter, where he's abstractly stuck in a cycle of his own thoughts and can't seem to control his own facial expressions. And it's interesting that it only happens after he takes a hit. The boys had planned to do the DMZ that weekend. Did they? Was it mixed in with the marijuana? Was it intentional or not?

Questions & Working Theories

#david foster wallace #infinite jest #infinite slow summer #infinite summer #infinite jest readalong #yrstruly

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