I’ve had great fun with Infinite Summer. I mean, any time with Infinite Jest is well spent, as far as I’m concerned, but the IS community made it a new experience all over again, and added so much to my reading (and future rereadings) of the book. I think this whole project might actually have been something like the apotheosis of reading IJ, the ultimate Aufhebung (I’m treading deep water here, and may end up over my head) of the solitary experience of reading a novel so sincerely concerned that people only connect. The guides at IS brought various perspectives, the forums really opened things up, and the bloggers did some fantastic detailed work to enrich the reading; I particularly want to thank Daryl, Jeffrey, and Aaron for their dedication and insight.

What I’ve been less pleased with is my own participation here. My posts have, overall, been somewhat shallower and more disjointed than I was hoping for when I undertook to blog along with IS. Now that I don’t feel the constraint of the spoiler line, and won’t have the “news cycle” of the week’s reading schedule to write against, I want to rectify that. So I’m going to finish up my own Infinite Summer this fall with a few more posts on some things I didn’t get to. First up: Eschaton.

Wraiths, huh? Jeffrey at Infinite Tasks has expected a ghost for a while now, which goes to show that some people pay a lot more attention to things like Hamlet parallels than some other people. (In truth, the college course I first read this book for was organized around the theme of postmodern ghost stories [House of Leaves, The Body Artist, Infinite Jest, and Beloved—quite a quarter], and still I was surprised when J.O.I.’s wraith showed up. I got so involved in the book that I forgot that part.) But I don’t think any of us expected Lyle to have been a wraith the whole time, although it does explain how he could survive on sweat and Diet Coke alone. Wraith activity wraps up the riddle of why objects are mysteriously appearing around E.T.A. in odd places; the first one, if I remember correctly, was the cinematic tripod that the U.S.S. Millicent Kent found during “MARIO INCANDENZA’S FIRST AND ONLY EVEN REMOTELY ROMANTIC EXPERIENCE, THUS FAR.” When I say “why,” there, though, it’s only the “why” of causation (“Because they are being moved by at least one wraith”). The “why” of intention, the “for what reason?,” I haven’t reasoned out.

Is there any connection between the abbreviation “E.T.A.,” Johnette Foltz’s misreading of Hal’s “weird woolly-white jacket with A.T.E. in red up one sleeve and in gray up the other” (p. 786), and Gately’s dream of himself and Joelle “in a Southern motel whose restaurant’s authoritarian sign said simply EAT” (p. 846)? Probably not, I suppose. Just half the available permutations.

What are we to make, in that same dream, of Joelle’s inhumanly beautiful body topped with Winston Churchill’s head? We’ve seen that description before: It’s Ortho Stice on p. 636. It’s Stice who seems to be most affected by the wraith activity at E.T.A., and Joelle is strongly connected to J.O.I. Perhaps J.O.I. is attempting to get to Hal through tennis, using Stice as a tool, the same way he used Joelle to try to get to Hal through film. Hal’s near-loss to Stice (including some incredibly unlikely points for Stice that may have been shepherded by a wraith) seems to be one of the catalysts that leads to the changes in Hal through the second half of the book.

Why does the header on p. 851 include the “GAUDEAMUS IGITUR” that accompanied Interdependence Day headers 12 days before? Is it just because of the fund-raising gala that day? That seems a weak explanation for the presence of such a charged tag.

On that day, at what may be almost 5:00 a.m., Hal finds a bathroom window open (p. 864); who left it open? Was it the person he sees through the window, stretched out over three rows of the bleachers like deLint at the Hal/Stice exhibition match for Steeply (p. 867)? Who is that person, and why do they just lie there under deeper and deeper snow? For that matter, was the window left open by someone going out, or to allow someone in? And most vexing (in its incongruousness), why does the clock in the bathroom have the wrong date on it (p. 865)? The time seems probably correct—it says “EST0456,” and Hal tells us his dream woke him that morning “before 0500h.”—but the date is two days behind. Someone could have changed the date, obviously, but who, and for what purpose? It wouldn’t make sense as an A.F.R. tactic, since they plan to arrive that day in the stead of the Québecois kids. Puzzling.

We get a lot of emphasis in these November 20 sections on how Hal’s subjective experience of his emotions doesn’t match up with his external expressions, but we also learn that this mismatch appears to have begun on Thursday, November 19. (For Thursday, see n. 321: “Thursday, 12 November”; for November 19, see p. 899: “The woman behind the register at the Shell station last night had recoiled as I approached to present my card before pumping, as if she too had seen something in my expression I hadn’t known was there.” Incidentally, that’s two days after the horrible, excruciating Robert Bly–type meeting in Natick, “the most distant and obscure Tuesday P.M. Meeting” [p. 795].) Interestingly, Stice and Mario read sadness in Hal, while Kenkle and Coyle see great amusement; Hal professes neither. I think somebody slipped Hal some DMZ, but as far as I can tell, there’s no E.T.A. narration of November 19 to back me up or contradict me. My instinct is to strongly believe that it was Pemulis (we know he wants Hal to take the DMZ, and we know he’s not above drugging people without their knowledge), but again, there’s no direct evidence either way. Pemulis tries to talk to Hal about the DMZ on p. 908, and in an undated and context-free graf on p. 916 he finds his stash missing, which together may indicate that someone else has got their hands on the stuff.

We get about 75 pages of suspense about why Troeltsch is snoring in Axford’s room, until Coyle drops it on Hal that Troeltsch asked for a room switch. I figure that probably had to do with the bad blood that would necessarily arise between Troeltsch and his erstwhile roommate Michael Pemulis after Troeltsch ate “some enormous wedge of putrid deal-cutting cheese” (p. 1075) with regard to John Wayne’s drugging. (Also interesting—and pointed out at Infinite Summer and probably on numerous of the blogs—is that even when Wayne’s speech becomes a major plot point, he never speaks for himself “on camera.” We get reports of what he said, and in other places we get “interpretations” of things he has said, but we never hear him speak.) Any particular reason why Axford, though? Perhaps Troeltsch just wanted to switch away from Pemulis, and Axford was willing because he and Pemulis are close enough that Axford is the only person other than Pemulis and Hal in on the DMZ caper. Which does make him the only other person (excepting the Antitois) who knows that Pemulis has any DMZ, and where Pemulis might keep it. . . . (This may also be relevant to the fact that, as the Infinite Summer folks have worked out, Axford is probably the narrator of the very last E.T.A. section, beginning on p. 964.)

And I don’t know what to make of Gately’s dream about digging up J.O.I.’s head with Hal (p. 934). I’m not sure it can be squared with Hal’s brief mention on p. 17 of the actual digging up. I’m tempted to read Gately’s dream as nonliteral, particularly because of the appearance of Joelle “with wings and no underwear.” Even more, though, the whole mood of the thing doesn’t seem to work. In the dream, Gately and Hal are apparently working to avert a Continental Emergency by digging up J.O.I.’s head (and presumably locating the Master of the Entertainment), and then they find the head and are somehow too late. But if John Wayne (who is not mentioned in Gately’s dream) is forcing them to dig up the head, it must be in pursuit of the Master for the A.F.R., in which case timeliness could hardly avert a disaster; it would rather help perpetrate it. But if it’s a dream-logic dream, rather than a true-prediction dream, I don’t know what we’re supposed to get out of it.

I suspect Hal’s panic attack that starts on p. 896 is the reason for his first-ever trip to the emergency room (p. 16; note particularly that he mentions a “psychiatric stretcher”); the nearest emergency room to E.T.A. would be the same emergency room that’s nearest to Ennet House (St. Elizabeth’s), so it seems likely to me that Hal and Gately meet in the hospital.

So many questions. I don’t know whether the answers can all be worked out; infinitedetox thinks they can’t, and uses the Sierpinski gasket in a wonderful argument for why they aren’t presented that is nevertheless unconvincing on the matter of whether they are knowable. But I guess, to a certain extent, I’m OK either way. I enjoy trying to find the answers, particularly in the company of the Infinite Summer participants, but if it turns out that some of the plot questions are ultimately irresolvable—well, the plot isn’t one of the reasons that Infinite Jest is my number 1 book.

So here’s why I think the smiley-face-embossed cartridge cases Marathe sees in Pat Montesian’s cabinet at Ennet House (p. 750) contain the duplicable Master of the Entertainment. It’s less rigorous reasoning, I admit, than I usually go for (see the title of the post), but for now I’m comfortable with a preponderance-of-the-evidence situation here.

Counting the chain of custody backward link by link, we learn on p. 754 that Clenette Henderson brought the cartridges downhill from E.T.A. as donations. We know Clenette works at E.T.A. as “one of the nine-month temps from down the hill” (p. 527), and on 11/11/Y.D.A.U., at dinnertime, Hal sees Clenette on her way back down to Ennet House with “a bulging backpack on her back, as in bulging maybe with dumpster-pilferage” (pp. 633–4).

(Some quick and disappointing timeline work proves that that backpack can’t contain the cartridges in question—Pat says Clenette brought them down “this afternoon,” so the question becomes, On which day does Marathe try to check in to Ennet House? Unfortunately, on p. 776 he tells Kate Gompert he has spent all day trying to find Madame Psychosis; Kate, who has stumbled into the bar to recover from being slammed into a lamppost by Poor Tony Krause when he stole her handbag—on 14 November [p. 682]. So that’s a bummer, but it doesn’t rule out the possibility that donie-cartridges from E.T.A. are somewhat regular, as Pat’s casual mention of them may even hint. I’ll take that hint, anyway.)

But why to believe that a backpack bulging with dumpster-pilferage might contain cartridges? It turns out we’ve seen cartridges consigned to the trash at E.T.A. The Tunnel Club does it, the same day that Hal sees Clenette with her backpack, on p. 670:

One whole box on its side with its frayed strapping tape split has spilled part of a load of old TP-cartridges, old and mostly unlabelled, out onto the tunnel floor in a fannish pattern, and Gopnik and Peterson complain that the cartridge-cases’ sharp edges put holes in their Glad bags, and Blott is dispatched with three bags of cartridges and fruit rinds, each only about half full, back to the lit vestibule outside the Comm.-Ad. tunnel’s start, where a serious pile of bags is starting to pile fragrantly up.

In the impressionistic mode of criticism I’m about to adopt, the throwaway nature of this moment tags it for my attention. That is, the Tunnel Club scene builds to a comic anticlimax that I think is a misdirection. I think the Goonies lightheartedness Paul notes is designed to conceal an important plot-mechanical revelation.

I’m building here on Daryl’s idea that the Tunnel Club scene might somehow represent an underworld scene. There are certainly cues for that association—the punishment angle, the heat, the subterranean location—but like Daryl, I wouldn’t want to be forced to push it. Instead, it seems to me we’re meant more specifically to think of Himself’s grave.

Remember from note 234 that Himself was buried “in the Moms’s family plot. St. Quelquechose Quebec or something. . . . Heart of the Concavity. . . . Bad ecocycles, real machete-country” (p. 1041). And there’s a suggestion on p. 31 that an entertainment cartridge may be implanted in Himself’s head, which dovetails with p. 993′s note that the Master cartridge of Infinite Jest (V?) may be “vaulted sui testator.”

We’re reminded over and over again in this section of the Concavity, directly and indirectly. The direct references are easy: Kent Blott insists he’s seen a “Concavitated feral hamster” (p. 668), and there’s a whole catalog of the various horrors of the Concavity—mile-high toddlers, skull-deprived wraiths, marsh gas that melts your face off (p. 670). Then, innocently, in the next graf after this parade of horribles related to the Concavity, come the TP cartridges. The indirect reminders of the Concavity that I notice are on p. 667. In the same graf, we have the tunnels characterized as essentially overgrown (with trash) during the warm season (which sounds like the Moms’s family plot’s “bad ecocycles”) and we see wrappers for cans of Habitant pea soup, which we know is a favorite of Marathe and the Antitois, all Quebecois.

So there’s our Concavity angle. The death component is actually where the little scene peaks, with the smell of “a like decay-element” (p. 672) and some sub-14′s creative misquotation of the Bible (“This is Death. Woe unto those that gazeth on Death,” p. 673). Every time I read this scene, I actually expect the Tunnel Club to find J.O.I.’s head in that fridge, not just mayonnaise, orange juice, sandwich meat, and maggots.

The point I want to make is that these impressions all combine to suggest that the Master of the Entertainment may be among the cartridges the Tunnel Club hauls out for disposal. The text doesn’t make any definite statement on the matter; in fact, it doesn’t even explicitly raise the subject. But I’m arguing that it implicitly associates these trash cartridges with death and the Concavity so that when we make the speculative connection between them and the cartridges donated to Ennet House that bear the smiley-face symbol we’ve come to associate with the Entertainment, we can also connect them to the suspected disposition of the Entertainment’s Master.

So, y’know, Q.E.D.

The structure of Infinite Jest is curious: It doesn’t make the book difficult to read (as long as you catch the places like page 391, where the printing is off and the space before the first section on the page is missable), but it does make it challenging to understand. To a certain extent, reading IJ is like channel-surfing, and to that same extent, it’s a basically familiar exercise. Some sections cut off apparently arbitrarily, as if the reader were no longer being entertained and had therefore switched the channel, while other sections, like Molly Notkin’s party, go on longer, interrupted now and then by little foreign bits in the same way that commercials punctuate a TV broadcast. The trick is connecting the fragmented sections of text to each other across great expanses of other stuff in ways that create meaning—for instance, it appears from p. 254 that Hal Incandenza himself narrates the section that begins on p. 61, and then we have explicit confirmation in note 123 that Hal is at least occasionally the narrator. (And now I find I could have saved myself some trouble by rereading this Larry McCaffery interview with DFW. At least I know I’m on the right track.)

But the jigsaw-puzzle aspect of the structure isn’t what I’m primarily interested in writing about; instead, I want to talk about the necessary corollary of a fragmented structure: the space between fragments. For the most part, these spaces function just as scene changes. They’re like a literary equivalent of a jump cut, making an obvious and visible break in continuity to establish that something different is happening. But every so often, I think DFW thematizes the spaces so that they’re more just a formal device. I’ll give an example first, then make the argument. This is the end of the “Erdedy waits for his pot” section (long sentence, but I’m quoting in full because the length adds to the effect):

He thought very broadly of desires and ideas being watched but not acted upon, he thought of impulses being starved of expression and drying out and floating dryly away, and felt on some level that this had something to do with him and his circumstances and what, if this grueling final debauch he’d committed himself to didn’t somehow resolve the problem, would surely have to be called his problem, but he could not even begin to try to see how the image of desiccated impulses floating dryly related to either him or the insect, which had retreated back into its hole in the angled girder, because at this precise time his telephone and his intercom to the front door’s buzzer both sounded at the same time, both loud and tortured and so abrupt they sounded yanked through a very small hole into the great balloon of colored silence he sat in, waiting, and he moved first toward the telephone console, then over toward his intercom module, then convulsively back toward the sounding phone, and then tried somehow to move toward both at once, finally, so that he stood splay-legged, arms wildly out as it something’s been flung, splayed, entombed between the two sounds, without a thought in his head.

Then we get a space. An important one, actually, because it’s marked with that open dot (which I haven’t figured out the significance of yet).

So here’s my argument: Here, and in a number of other places throughout the book, the space between sections of text represents not just a shift in focus, but the actual interpersonal gulf that makes other human beings’ interior states ultimately unknowable. I’m fairly certain this is an old problem in philosophy—how can we know anything about the thoughts and emotions of another human being? (I don’t really know from philosophy, so I may be off base here.) We basically only have two ways of knowing what’s going on inside another person: They can tell us, or we can infer from cues we observe. The trouble is that these are both unreliable methods. Depending on a person to tell us how they feel leaves us powerless in the absence of that communication, and requires that the person be trustworthy and forthcoming on the subject. (It also forecloses any possibility of independent verification.) And inferring is, of course, susceptible of all the failures of interpretation and reading that always bedevil that kind of activity.

But, you point out triumphantly, look at that sentence about Erdedy. It’s full of direct description of his interior state! It draws the very picture of his thoughts! There is no uncertainty! And we’ve have nine and a half pages of that! Yes, that’s true. That’s the great authorial privilege of free indirect discourse: immediate access to your characters’ minds cloaked in the illusion of impersonality. And DFW exercises that privilege freely throughout IJ, so freely in fact that we cannot definitively say who is (and even who is not) the narrator in most parts of the book. But I think as a writer (and—based on readings I’ve been to and interviews I’ve heard and read—as a person) he recognizes that this is rigged. Much of this book’s focus is on communication and understanding, and how vulnerable the interactions between people are to being misconstrued; combine that focus with DFW’s postironic wariness of irony and it becomes clear that he cannot uncritically reproduce the total knowledge of characters’ interior states that is generally a hallmark of third-person narration.

What I’m saying is, DFW doubles back and undercuts this authorial privilege. In that sentence about Erdedy, I see a turn from unreflective authorial mind-reading to exterior observation right after that delightful description of how the noises sound to Erdedy; after that point, the sentence describes him from the viewpoint of an observer. It’s almost clinical, suddenly, objective and cold, practically likening Erdedy to a bug pinned in a display case. Even the last clause—“without a thought in his head”—can’t be free indirect discourse, because you can’t genuinely formulate the thought, “I don’t have a thought in my head.” What’s remarkable to me about this turn is how fast it is. At the end of the sentence, I feel suddenly lonely and sad, and totally cut off from Erdedy. It’s as if the camera that was trained on him and showed his thoughts has quick-zoomed out to very great heights, pulling the keening of a cold wind into the great distance between the reader and the character. It’s like the first half of Ray and Charles Eames’s Powers of Ten in fast-forward.

This isn’t the only place in the book where I see this withdrawal from a character’s consciousness. There’s some of it in the Marathe/Steeply conversation (pp. 92 and 109), which seems appropriate, given how much of that conversation involves trying to read hidden currents of loyalty and intention. Oddly, I think Orin’s viewing of Joelle’s recordings of him in action (pp. 298–9) have a similar feeling, even though they seem to zoom in the opposite direction. My guess is that that feeling comes from the reduction of Orin to a highly scrutinized image, even though he’s the one doing the scrutinizing; if anything, it makes him seem isolated from himself. The Eschaton ends with a sky-oriented pictorialization of the scene of broken and bleeding children that establishes a similar distance. And p. 626, the kidnapping of the WYYY student engineer, does the same kind of thing.

What these retreats from omniscience do is re-create the actual lived human condition of not being able to know another person conclusively. There is a gap between you (any you) and everyone else that you cannot bridge on your own. In these parts of the book, after forcibly reminding you of that gap through the narration, DFW then symbolically illustrates the gap with white space. And I know that sounds a little pat, when really it just amounts to making this move primarily at the ends of sections rather than within them—but that’s the way the book is structured. The effect of always having a white space after these moments is to visually underscore the impact of what has just happened.

(Lucien Antitoi’s death is an amazing counterexample, where the white space seems instead to indicate all the world, but I want to post about that another time.)

IJ is highly skeptical of any person’s ability to understand another on their own. That is, one-sided communication (based in interpretation only) fails regularly in the book. Conclusively correct readings (of anything) are rare in IJ. The only scenarios that ever seem to work out are the ones where characters actively work together to understand each other, correcting misinterpretations when necessary and building connections to each other. My favorite example of this dynamic in the book is the relationship between Gately and Joelle. They start out literally unable to communicate (check Gately’s dumbfoundedness on pp. 366–7) and then progress through some very expressive not-necessarily-communication (pp. 531–538) to Joelle’s beautiful confirmation of her identity to Gately after he gets shot: “‘And Lo,’ she says softly,” knowing the right way to comfort and validate him. The only bridge over the space is communication.

Quick note: I’m still doing Infinite Summer, but it’s Little League World Series time right now, which means posting, if it happens, will be sparse. See you after the championship!