“A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.”

William Blake.

Ah, “The Doubloon.” This is my kind of chapter (ch. 99). It’s all about interpretation, or the search for (and imposition of) meaning. It explicitly dramatizes the process we all go through every day, where we take notice of part of the world (something that is the case) and create a way of understanding it as it relates to our lives. This is a very normal part of the way human beings interact with our surroundings, and is in fact necessary to formulating the narratives we recognize as our selves and our lives.

Note that this is not the argument Ishmael makes in favor of interpretation. He says, “And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher.” In his view, what gives the world worth is the significance in it that can be divined by human beings; the world has meaning insofar as it means something to people, but no intrinsic value. This seems to me an extreme anthropocentric view, but not necessarily an uncommon one. Just an unreflective one.

So in the course of this dramatization of interpretation, we see eight different characters all try their hand at “reading” the doubloon that Ahab nailed to the mast at the beginning of their voyage as a guaranty to the sailor who first raises Moby Dick. (Other than the obvious meaning, of course, which is the one they all drank to during that weird ceremony.) Ahab’s interpretation, while dramatic and almost mythologically Norse in its pessimism, is also kind of funny: Looking at the various devices on the coin—mountains with fire, a tower, and a crowing rooster, and a segment of the zodiac—he sees Lucifer, Ahab, Ahab, Ahab, and the unrelieved misery of life, which begins in pains and ends in pangs. But also, it’s not for nothing that Ishmael keeps calling Ahab “monomaniacal.” This is very nearly solipsism in action.

Starbuck starts out as a foil to Ahab in his reading—he sees the mountains as a symbol of the Trinity, so that even when he passes through the dark valley between them, God still strengthens him and the “sun of Righteousness” still shines down on him—but then he remembers that the sun is only up about half the time, on average, which leaves human beings looking for hope and comfort much of the time (wait for it) in the dark. So even though he finds some devotional meaning in the doubloon, it is on the whole a somewhat depressing exegesis for Starbuck. Nonetheless, it’s a pretty clear application of the hermeneutic method involved in reading the Book of Nature, whereby everything created has a theological lesson within it, if you can just find the key.

Then Stubb gets up and sneaks in two interpretations. In the first one, he sees the doubloon as a piece of money, just as good for spending in commerce as any other piece of money. It’s a wonderful puncturing of the portentous mode Ahab and Starbuck both operate in, but it’s also a welcome nod to the fact that objects and experiences are embedded in the world and entangled with other people and places. Both Ahab and Starbuck find insular, self-centered meanings in the doubloon, but Stubb instead immediately recognizes how the doubloon is enmeshed with the rest of the world. Then he looks more carefully, convinced by Ahab and Starbuck’s long faces that there must be a deeper meaning, and descries a very long zodiacal version of the Sphinx’s riddle that supposedly charts a universal course for the life of man. (Women don’t count for much on a whaler, you might have noticed.)

When Flask looks at the doubloon, he literally sees nothing but the monetary value of it. (A special note from my Norton Critical Edition, on Flask’s line “It is worth sixteen dollars, that’s true; and at two cents the cigar, that’s nine hundred and sixty cigars”: “The arithmetic seems shaky.”) Unlike Stubb, he doesn’t seek a deeper meaning; he’s satisfied with his pragmatic observation of “a round thing made of gold.” I see this version as an important recognition of the thingness of the doubloon, regardless of what meanings a more reader-response-type approach yields.

The Manxman uses his special training in esoterica to identify the doubloon as half of a zodiacal prophecy of when the ship will encounter Moby Dick. I read this one as a small parody, actually. Daryl brought our attention to prophecy in the novel, and there’s always the possibility that’s at play here, but this one is so general that I suspect it’s much more like an ancestor of Maslow’s hammer. The Manxman knows something most people don’t, and everything he sees tends to be through that lens.

Queequeg comes in for comic relief, mistaking the doubloon for a fancy button. There may be a point to make here about constructed reality—if Queequeg’s pants lose a button and he sews a doubloon on in its place, that doubloon is now a button (as well as a doubloon and whatever else it may be)—but I wouldn’t want to strain that one too much, so I’ll just say it’s possible.

And then Pip. Pip is a character who makes me very sad, so I’m uncomfortable reading his mad babble anyway, but here it also feels to me like the kind of thing that might mean something if you try very hard to interpret it, but then probably won’t turn out to have been worth the trouble. So I don’t try. (My white flag, I wave it.) His reading of the doubloon can, however, illustrate the troubled extremity of personal meaning-making, since the significance he finds is available to him only. That is, even though he apparently finds some meaningful content in the doubloon, he can’t share it with anyone, because he spends most of his “on-screen” time in an interpretive community of one.

It’s very interesting to me that this chapter comes so late in the book. In a way, it’s kind of a programmatic chapter; it announces the book’s concern with meaning and interpretation by showing characters interpreting an object to create meaning. (I love that trick.) But I have a feeling that passages doing this work so explicitly usually come much earlier in books where they appear, to give the reader fair warning of what’s afoot—and to give us a chance to play along. Curious, then, that it’s only near the end that we’re asked to start looking for Rashomon Dick, the Allegedly White Whale.

Flashback!
When I was in high school, I commuted into Berkeley twice a week for a class at Cal on Chinese history. I would occasionally delay my trip home with a sidetrack to the gorgeous old Berkeley Public Library, where I found the first CD section of any library in my experience. It was like skooB dlO srednaeroC darnoC lraC for me in there, dusty, golden-dim, and magical (or at least my memory re-creates it that way). One day I found a box set of something called Nixon in China, and I figured it was the serendipity that often strikes in places chock-full of books: I was taking a Chinese-history class, this was at least partly about China, why not check it out and give it a try?

As it turned out, the opera itself—for it was indeed the sole recording (at the time) of John Adams’s first opera—on the subject of Richard Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972, wasn’t all that relevant to the class. But I did have background information on the Cultural Revolution, and on Mao Zedong, Jiang Qing, and Zhou Enlai, so in that respect it was a great help. No, instead those three discs introduced me to the man I consider the greatest American composer of “classical” music (we can get into what those quotation marks mean if you really want to). From the day after I first heard the mysterious, solemn opening lines of the opera, I scoured local press and the Internet for mention of a live performance.

For 11 and a half years I checked every opera company in whatever area I lived in, hoping to find Nixon in China listed for their season. (In the meantime, I ended up buying that box set and practically memorizing most of Act I.) I had a close call about two years ago, with an announcement that the opera would receive its Northern California premiere, but that collapsed under suggestive circumstances. Then, one day last fall, out of the mailbag and into my mailbox dropped a promotional card advertising Long Beach Opera‘s brand-new production—the opera’s first performances in the LA area since the first Bush presidency. I got tickets as soon as I could, and then I had to wait another six months for the night. But finally it came.

I had seen most of the original Peter Sellars production on video, and given how much the opera is really about re-presentation (for a capital-T Theory exploration of this, see Peggy Kamuf’s “The Replay’s the Thing”; the short version is that it’s about a self-consciously produced media event, and addresses that with techniques like musical vamps during news-photo tableaux), I was curious how it would be re-presented in a new production. The answer is: successfully, in two opposite ways.

As with any opera, some of the action in Nixon in China is dictated by the score. Adams is justly proud, for example, of the onstage arrival of the Spirit of ’76 (Air Force One), and there is a ballet in the middle of the opera. The stage director has to choose whether to present these moments “literally” or to stylize them. (If I were a stage director, I’d certainly be unable to resist putting an airplane on the stage.) In this production, Peter Pawlik takes a sort of magically realist approach to most of the scenes; a quadrant of the airplane pulls forward out of the backdrop, and there’s a miniature proscenium arch on the stage-within-a-stage for the ballet, and a banquet-hall set. They’re slightly abstracted, but generally realistic and easily understandable. In fact, as the LA Times‘s Chris Pasles points out, Pawlik sets Act III back in the banquet hall rather than in Sellars’s floating-theater-space barracks—a definite improvement on the original. This approach, which I’ll call the literal one, is accomplished very well in the production. The opening, particularly, is beautiful, with blue dawnlight silhouetting the chorus against a scrim to reproduce the misty February morning.

Then in two scenes—Nixon and Kissinger’s meeting with Mao and Zhou, and Pat Nixon’s sightseeing trip—the literal approach goes out the window and a more stylized aesthetic takes over. Compare the new production and the original: This is from LBO’s version of this scene. (There are four of those big red chairs, and please ignore the woeful caption from the OC Register, who might be expected to know a little more about their hometown president than that.) When Mao’s triune secretary deadpans to Pat Nixon in three-part harmony “Here are some children having fun,” a row of wooden children is rolled out with their upraised right arms all attached to one pole, so that a chorister can flick them back and forth in a synchronized flag-waving. The pig whose ear Pat scratches is a cutout side of pork hanging on a rack. It’s quirky, and funny.

And here’s where I get to take the critic’s step back and be judicious yet opinionated. I am usually quite open to abstract stagings; I enjoy the intellectual effort they spark, and personally I find the Verfremdungseffekt enormously productive, when well used. In the scene with Nixon and Mao, for instance, while I didn’t particularly appreciate the way the giant chairs turned the principals into children, I thought the maneuvering of the chairs around the stage (they’re on wheels, pushed around by chorus members) made an exciting counterpoint to and expansion of the political and philosophical sparring in the magnificent libretto, and gave Mao an excellent opportunity to menace and harangue Nixon at one point. The trouble, however, comes in the unevenness that results from alternating between literal and stylized presentations. This production uses a fundamentally inconsistent staging, and because the literal first scene was so thrilling (airplane! On stage!), the stylized second scene was disappointing. But taken separately on their own merits, the stylized thread and the literal thread are equally successful. I’d love to see either one woven through the whole opera, but that’s not so much a complaint as a plea to be embarrassed with riches. When we took our seats, I leaned over to Eric and told him, “This could basically be terrible and I’d probably still love it.” It was great; and I loved it.

You should imagine me typing that with entirely straight-faced fingers, depending on how you think I mean “fantastic” (read: fabulous). The show is outright ridiculous, in very many ways; take the premise, for instance: Nine drag queens compete to be “America’s next drag superstar,” which title they must earn through a series of Project Runway– and America’s Next Top Model–style challenges. (Isn’t that how everyone becomes one of America’s drag superstars?) RuPaul, in male and female drag, is both mentor and host (respectively), shot with the most lovingly Vaseline-slathered lens you’ve ever encountered in a nonmedical context. In each episode, after he gives the girls (even in interviews, out of drag, they refer to each other by their drag names and female pronouns; it’s delightfully disorienting) their challenge, he reminds them of the scoring rubric. They are judged on:

• Charisma;
• Uniqueness;
• Nerve; and
• Talent.

Then he tells them not to fuck it up. (I’m quoting.) At each judging, the bottom two are required to lip-sync for their lives, and then one receives Ru’s benediction (“Shantay, you stay”) while the other has to “sashay away.” The guests and guest judges are amazing—Bob Mackie, Michelle Williams (who cried watching drag queens lip-sync her song “We Break the Dawn,” and not in the bad way), Jenny Shimizu, Lucy Lawless, Charo.

To me, the show is plainly wonderful. But when I tried to describe it to a friend of mine, he nearly had an allergic reaction. (He can’t handle Beyoncé either, who is, let’s face it, a female drag queen.) And that’s when I remembered Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp.’”

By my lights, Sontag’s essay is not a triumph. It’s generally conclusory throughout (“Life is not stylish.” Well, says you), and where it attempts to reason, it is often either offensive or wrong. Or both. What’s most frustrating for me about the essay, then, is its quicksilver flashes of brilliance, the bits where Sontag succeeds in “getting down something of this particular fugitive sensibility.” When she talks about camp’s attention to “the degree of artifice, of stylization,” that rings a bell. “The great stylists of temperament and mannerism” sounds exactly right. And most of all, camp “understand[s] Being-as-Playing-a-Role.” These notes I recognize from my own experience; and taken out of context like I’m doing here, they could be from a magazine profile of a drag queen. These truths about camp exactly describe drag (which must be, I suppose, the ultimate enactment of camp—even though Sontag seems to suggest that intentional camp can’t be good, before she contradicts herself). So if she understands it so well, at least in some parts, how does Sontag miss the point so badly in others?

If you watch the first season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, you’ll see just how wrong Sontag is when she calls camp “disengaged, depoliticized—or at least apolitical.” You’ll see her error in basing camp in a “psychopathology of affluence.” You’ll understand the deep misprision in her bare assertion that camp is a “solvent of morality,” propounded by gays to make us more acceptable in a consequently less-moral world. This will all be clear to you because you’ll see actual drag queens doing drag.

The contestants cover a wide variety of approaches to drag. Porkchop and Tammy, for example, are comics; Ongina is a genderqueer warrior; Shannel is a showgirl; Rebecca is a tired little Latin boy in dress; and Bebe and Nina are creatures not of this world. Bebe and Nina give the lie to Sontag’s disparagements through their approach to drag, which is dignified and powerful. They cast a remarkable spell, and I think I’ve worked out how they do it. I don’t mean the makeup-and-artifice part—you can look that stuff up—but the way they hold their audiences in thrall. It’s a combination of glamour and guts.

The widespread gender norms we are mostly all embedded in make a man in a dress a figure of mockery. He is a ridiculous person, suitable for laughing at. Bebe and Nina know this, but through the force of their wills they are able to persuade the audience to forget. They wear their vulnerability like couture, and radiate such an honest refusal to be afraid, such a “state of continual incandescence” (Sontag again), that it doesn’t occur to the audience to take them as anything other than what they present themselves as. Which, importantly, is never real women. They do not seek to be mistaken for actual women, though it is of course a compliment to their technique if someone is fooled. Instead, they present themselves as men creating the illusion of female personae, an illusion that requires the audience’s collaboration if it is to stand up. Their special power is inducing the audience to collaborate in this way, and that power comes from the strength of will involved in unreservedly exposing themselves to ridicule. The show of vulnerability demonstrates a strength that the audience can’t help but respect.

Which is why I thought it was so outrageous that Rebecca made it to the final three with Bebe and Nina. Those two are true gender-performance artists, whereas Rebecca couldn’t even be bothered to blend her blush. Her goal was to be girl-sexy, which is a fine thing, and an impressive accomplishment for a man, but it doesn’t hold up to the amazing projection of the other two. Girl was outclassed, and she knew it the whole time.

I can’t say with complete confidence that The Best of Gene Wolfe is the best of Gene Wolfe (although Clute says yes), but it is astoundingly good, and remarkably consistent. If I’m putting together a team of books that can hold their own in a short-fiction cage match before Flannery O’Connor’s Complete Stories ultimately delivers the death blow, I’m torn between this volume and its sibling, Endangered Species. On the one hand, “The Death of Doctor Island,” “Seven American Nights,” “Petting Zoo,” “The Tree Is My Hat” (which I’ve always had a special affinity for because it was the first Wolfe story I felt I had truly understood), and particularly “The Eyeflash Miracles”; on the other, “The Last Thrilling Wonder Story,” “When I Was Ming the Merciless,” “The HORARS of War,” and “Silhouette.” (I haven’t yet got my hands on The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories, so for all I know it’s got a shot at the roster too.)

My point is, while I might quibble over the exact contents of a short-fiction collection called The Best of Gene Wolfe, it will inevitably be among the most gripping, exciting books of stories and novellas I have read. And it is.

I’m not really interested in writing a story-by-story review, though, or a subjective defense of Wolfe’s writing. Instead, I thought I might pay some analytical attention to Wolfe’s technique. Let me draw another circle around myself, even smaller: I’m going to look at one particular kind of technique Wolfe often uses, a species of unreliable narration.

Much of Wolfe’s work is written in the first person. He has said, “It always seems to me that if you have a narrator, if the narration is not by an all-knowing, all-seeing author, . . . then the narrator is damn well going to be unreliable. Real people really are unreliable narrators all the time, even if they try to be reliable narrators.” One interesting thing about Wolfe’s versions of the unreliable narrator is the ways in which they are unreliable. He often presents an in-story explanation for their possible unreliability. One narrator may at some point eat a hallucinogenic candy without knowing it; one is unconsciously in denial about his identity; a couple excise pages from their journals (which are the text) because they expect those journals to come into police custody. (In another example, which I will address again, it’s not the narrator who is unreliable—the work is in the third person—but the central character, who often serves as a kind of interpreter of events. He may have been contacted by a deity, or he may have a brain lesion.)

In keeping with that quote, Wolfe’s narrators are often not (wholly) deliberately unreliable. They tend simply to not know as much as they suppose—or as much as you might ordinarily want your narrator to know. This ignorance of the limits of their knowledge can lead to narratorial assertions that to the reader plainly cannot be true, but to the narrator obviously must be. Alternatively, the narrators are often mystified or confused by events in the story. Sometimes they merely report the cause of their confusion then throw up their hands; sometimes, though, they try to explain what has happened. In these cases, they are frequently wrong: They may accurately note the facts that have occurred while missing the meaning of those facts, or they may strenuously attempt to divine an ultimately unconvincing interpretation of the facts. Wolfe plays some of these miscues for comedy, but some of them are crucially dramatic, and one at least is the engine for an entire series of books.

The in-story narrators are not the only avenues Wolfe uses to introduce uncertainty; even in his third-person work, the narration often tracks close to one or more characters, without the kind of distance between narrator and narrated that is necessary for an omniscient perspective. Indeed, at explanatory or interpretive moments, Wolfe often exercises the third-person narrative prerogative of diving into a character’s thoughts; the narrating voice in fact doesn’t explain at all, ceding its authority instead to that character and temporarily adopting a first-person point of view—with all the same reliability risks outlined before.

But none of this has yet touched on the subject I want to wrestle with, which is the technique (the writerly craft, that is, not the specific operations) of this unreliable narration. Brace yourselves for the simile I’m about to lay on you:

It’s as if the substance of one of these unreliably narrated works—the characters, the setting, the plot, etc.—is a magnificent cubic sculpture, baroquely burrowed through, complex with caverns and crystalline with combs. The narration is then a polished brass facing affixed to the surfaces of the cube. When you first see the sculpture, the brass is all you observe. It’s aesthetically self-consistent, pleasing, perforated here and there with curious gaps, but a finely made thing. Thanks to the spaces inside, the sculpture is only a little heavier than it looks. It makes satisfactory sense as an aesthetic object, but something about those punchouts haunts you. You keep coming back to the sculpture, turning it over in your hands, looking at it from different angles. Then one day you notice that, at this new angle, you can see through one of the perforations into the cube’s cathedral interior, and suddenly the whole sculpture makes a deeper and more awesome sense. Now that you know what angle to look from, the gaps in the surface all show chambers and structures in the heart of the cube that reveal an organization you only suspected before. You see details that were wholly concealed, and echoes you couldn’t have matched to each other; what seemed merely decorative now stands in prominent dialogue with other areas, and some region that occupied your attention now melts into a fuller pattern.

The trick here—and I use the word not to demean Wolfe’s accomplishment, but to emphasize its intentionality and createdness—is the writing of a narration that seems like a complete piece of art and yet still, perhaps almost subliminally, hints at a fuller conception that supersedes and frequently contradicts it. This isn’t quite unreliable narration, and it isn’t quite obfuscation; given the religious bent of much of Wolfe’s fiction (or, more properly, the religious interpretations that much of Wolfe’s fiction permits and sometimes encourages), it probably makes more sense to see in this tactic a palimpsest of the Book of Nature: careful observation and contemplation of the “natural” (that which is presented directly to the senses) leads to the revelation of what was hidden.

And I wish I came up with these interpretations earlier in the process of writing these posts, because it feels like there’s a lot more to say in that direction—but if I’m going to say it, it’s going to be in a different post. For now, Seacrest out. (Spooky: it’s like EROCK and Matt Roe know who I am…)

Uninitiated adults who might be parked in a nearby mint-green advertorial Ford sedan or might stroll casually past E.T.A.’s four easternmost tennis courts and see an atavistic global-nuclear-conflict game played by tanned and energetic little kids and so this might naturally expect to see fuzzless green warheads getting whacked indiscriminately skyward all over the place as everybody gets blackly drunk with thanatoptic fury in the crisp November air — these adults would more likely find an actual game of Eschaton strangely subdued, almost narcotized-looking. Your standard round of Eschaton moves at about the pace of chess between adepts. For these devotees become, on court, almost parodically adult — staid, sober, humane, and judicious twelve-year-old world leaders, trying their best not to let the awesome weight of their responsibilities — responsibilities to nation, globe, rationality, ideology, conscience and history, to both the living and the unborn — not to let the terrible agony they feel at the arrival of this day — this dark day the leaders’ve prayed would never come and have taken every conceivable measure rationally consistent with national strategic interest to avoid, to prevent — not to let the agonizing weight of responsibility compromise their resolve to do what they must to preserve their people’s way of life. So they play, logically, cautiously, so earnest and deliberate in their calculations they appear thoroughly and queerly adult, almost Talmudic, from a distance. A couple gulls fly overhead. (327)

That’s intelligent, empathetic, supple writing, with some birds practically borrowed from Elizabeth Bishop at the end (and “blackly drunk with thanatoptic fury in the crisp November air” is something special), and it’s just one sample. The rhythmic juxtaposition of long segments on Cold War geopolitical simulation and little punctuations of other business—including repeated reminders that these are, after all, children (“A couple ostensible world leaders run here and there in a rather unstatesmanlike fashion with their open mouths directed at the sky, trying to catch bits of the fall’s first snow”)—is powerfully effective. The plot of this section (for a clear breakdown, see infinitedetox’s “Eschaton in Bullet Points”), based as it is on a children’s game about nuclear apocalypse and (repeated phrase!) “the remorseless logic of game theory,” has an inexorability to it that is apparent from the beginning: 12-year-olds playing a game that can finish with massive nuclear exchange and global annihilation will always finish that way. The end is predetermined; the suspense, then, is in how that end comes. The extended technical passages and small interruptions increase this suspense by hanging the development of the plot over your head just a little longer, which in turn heightens the payoff when the situation devolves past the promised in-game conflagration to a vicious real-life brawl. (For me, the bottom of 335 is where events go irreversibly into motion: “Hal can almost visualize a dark lightbulb going on above Ingersoll’s head.”) Reading just for appreciation of craft, rather than for plot or metatext, I’m amazed by DFW’s adeptness at managing so many characters—and the characters they play in their game—and so much incident in such a finely constructed manner.

But let’s read for metatext! There were some great readings of this section when it came up on the Infinite Summer schedule: Gerry Canavan made an imposingly deep connection between Ingersoll and postmodernism (and exposed to me my own impatience with Baudrillard); infinitedetox keyed Eschaton to Yeats’s “The Second Coming” and looked at collapsing boundaries between reality and fiction; Chris Forster considered the merging of reality and that which represents reality (and speculated on the identity of IJ’s narrator); and Daryl Houston contemplated the blurring of referential frames generally. These are all insightful constructions of the text, and they catch on to the feeling that this section is about something, that it’s dramatizing some literary or philosophical argument. I want to build from Chris’s idea and suggest that the argument is over engagement with “reality,” the world—everything that is the case.

Eschaton is fundamentally a representational game. Everything about it is intended as abstraction from actual fact: The courts stand for a map (which represents the Earth), shoes symbolize subs, all-caps acronyms signify either nation-states and their alliances (whose leaders are impersonated by the players) or military equivocations (which encode more direct expressions of truth). We’re even told flat-out in the first graf that the game’s appeal comes from, among other factors, “a complete disassociation from the realities of the present.” It’s the breach of this abstraction that so enrages Pemulis:

Players themselves can’t be valid targets. 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 territory. They’re part of the map, not the cluster-fucking territory. You can only launch against the territory. Not against the map. It’s like the one ground-rule boundary that keeps Eschaton from degenerating into chaos. Eschaton gentlemen is about logic and axiom and mathematical probity and discipline and verity and order.

. . . . .

[T]he reason players aren’t explicitly exempted in the ESCHAX.DIR is that their exemption is what makes Eschaton and its axioms fucking possible in the first place. . . . [B]ecause use your heads otherwise nonstrategic emotions would get aroused and Combatants would be whacking balls at each other’s physical persons all the time and Eschaton wouldn’t even be possible in its icily elegant game-theoretical form. . . . Players’ exemption from strikes goes without saying, Pemulis says; it’s like preaxiomatic. (338)

For Pemulis, Eschaton is a totalizing abstraction that rejects all of the messiness of real life (which, from what we know about his household, is an understandable longing) and replaces it with math.

(Tangent here that began as a mere parenthetical but blossomed. Remember that in n. 324, Pemulis gives Postal Weight a pep talk about how, when the loving father has failed you, math will always be there and will always be true. This is Pemulis’s consolation for a childhood that the narrator refuses, on 154, to even tell us about, but that we know of from Matty Pemulis’s memories starting on 682—no wonder he tells Postal Weight to “never trust the father you can see.” So that’s what Pemulis has riding on the permanence of Eschaton’s icy elegance and discipline and order: the belief that there is, after all, anything in the world that can be trusted. Of course he gets so upset to see that all melted. And now I’m terribly, terribly sad for him that that was taken, and mildly menaced by the specific form his abandonment of the Eschaton players “to let them all lie in their own bed” takes.)

And but so Pemulis sees Eschaton as a complete system of abstractions that permit play within their limits (like the lines of a tennis court, maybe, only more so). But I think his point about the players only being part of the map, not of the territory, is wrong. It gets confusing, because the representation seems to go in the wrong direction: The map in this case is real objects in a particular configuration, and the territory (the signified) represented by the map is fictional. But look at it this way: The map is a physical representation of the game state. (O. Lord, as God, spends some of his time “removing vaporized articles of clothing from sites of devastating hits and just woppsing them up or folding them over at the sites of near-hits and fizzle yields,” 328.) Changes to the map are only meaningful to the game state in terms of what already completed changes of the game state they reflect; changes made to the map cannot initiate changes of the game state. (This is why snow on the map wouldn’t matter to the territory.)

Except in the case of players attacking. That is the one time in the game (as it is explained) that changes of the game state—the territory—are effected by interaction with the map. In fact, interactions with map and with territory become united; it’s not a change to one reflecting a change to the other, but instead changing both in one action. It’s a special case that amounts to an inversion of the rules, which is my explanation for why it’s not mentioned in the rules at all. The way I read this setup, Eschaton is presented as a complete abstraction of physical engagement that is fundamentally dependent on (wait for it) physical engagement with the apparatus of the abstraction. At the heart of Eschaton’s icy elegance is the whacking of a ball, powered by the lived systems of highly trained athletic human bodies. The rules can’t take cognizance of this fact, because it negates them. To admit that the game’s abstraction is built on this physical effort is to reveal that abstraction as a sham.

So this rigid differentiation that infinitetasks sees as fiction from reality, Chris sees as representation from reality, and Daryl sees as one referential frame from another—it can’t be done. Taken as a symbol of this effort to differentiate the one from the other (which I think it is), Eschaton shows that the effort must fail. It can’t be accomplished in the first place (the rules can’t be complete), and the pretense that it can be accomplished will ultimately drop. That’s what we see when the game veers into mayhem that actually hospitalizes at least one child. [UPDATE: To see the argument that underpins this declaration, go here.] For me, the distinction that this scene argues can’t be made is that of the self from the world. I take the abstraction of Eschaton to stand for a withdrawal from the facts of the world—exactly the way Pemulis (the main spokesperson for Eschaton in the text) uses it. This understanding of the game puts it in a panoply of escapist and disengaging strategies in IJ: drug use, irony, compulsive sex, emotional detachment, entertainment consumption. (I could probably go on.) Like all of those strategies, this abstraction is unsustainable, and leads eventually to bad, bad trouble.

The solution? Exactly the same one the book offers over and over again, in various forms: Engage. Connect. Communicate. Deal with the facts of the world as they are, not as you wish them to be. Real life is messy and often unkind, but withdrawing from that mess and unkindness will not fix it. As Gately learns on 446, “the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it.”

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.

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.

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.

Week 4, on the other hand, is much more conventionally gratifying. For one thing, it’s almost a parade of plot and backstory. Joelle’s time at Molly Notkin’s party is almost 21 straight pages of incident. Perhaps this is the influence of Molly’s chairs talking, but this whole section feels almost like a Nouvelle Vague film to me. It’s poetic, it’s elegiac from the very beginning, it’s filled with flashbacks and reminiscences. The present-time plot is pretty compact: Joelle’s at a party, she remembers stuff, then she goes into the bathroom, cooks up, and tries to die. That “she remembers stuff” part, though, opens wide, just like one of Gately’s AA “slogans that looks so shallow for a while and then all of a sudden drops off and deepens like the lobster-waters off the North Shore.” The time Joelle spends wrapped in memory amounts to the most sustained backstory we’ve yet had in Infinite Jest, I think, and a fair portion of it involves Incandenzas.

(Some of it also involves Joelle’s own personal Daddy in ways that make me uncomfortable: He tells Joelle “over and over again how she was prettier than this [movie star] or that one right there,” then she has this whole sexualized response to being at the movies and feeling “about to be entered by something that didn’t know she was there and yet was all about making her feel good anyway, coming in,” then she and her own personal Daddy sit there in the dark theater, “his hand in her lap her hand in the box and rooting down past candy for the Prize.” I feel led to an inference.)

The parade continues, after a short description of E.T.A. and surrounds, with 16 pages of Hal filling Orin in on things he really should already know. But rather than feeling contrived, it strikes me as a pretty economical bit of writing, in that it’s a hefty infodump that’s also designed to develop characters. We learn quite a bit about both Hal and Orin through here, not the least of which is that it is fully in character for Orin to have skipped his own father’s funeral. It’s a funny stretch of writing (“‘That something smelled delicious!’ I screamed”), but it’s also terrifyingly sad; imagine being 13 and coming home to find your own father’s body in that condition, and then being put into a counseling situation with a person who isn’t prepared to recognize your coping methods as valid. Think about how lost and devastated you would be. (I can’t find it now, but I could swear I remember reading DFW say he wanted to write something so sad it would make you sick.)

Then, after some other stuff that’s not really plot or backstory (although we do meet Geoffrey Day, who was introduced to us in note 304 as G. T. Day, M.S., when Struck was working so very hard not to write his own paper), comes another 17-page section on Orin and Joelle.

At this point, reading Infinite Jest is somewhat like reading The Name of Rose. Here’s a passage from the “Postscript” to The Name of the Rose:

After reading the manuscript, my friends and editors suggested I abbreviate the first hundred pages, which they found very difficult and demanding. Without thinking twice, I refused, because, as I insisted, if somebody wanted to enter the abbey and live there for seven days, he had to accept the abbey’s own pace. If he could not, he would never manage to read the whole book. Therefore those first hundred pages are like a penance or an initiation, and if someone does not like them, so much the worse for him. He can stay at the foot of the hill.

Eco makes the early part of the book strenuous reading on purpose, but not gratuitously; it’s strenuous because it requires the reader to adopt the pace and style of an alien milieu (a 14th-century mountain abbey), but it’s necessary because the whole book takes place in that milieu. Likewise, the early going in Infinite Jest can be disconcerting and difficult, but that’s partly because the book takes place within an unfamiliar, saturated media space, and partly because it strives for effects that rely on overcoming the social fragmentation it depicts—and those effects are much more powerful if the book can first instill in the reader a sense of that fragmentation. I don’t think week 3′s reading (or indeed any of IJ) is difficult just for the sake of it. It’s always in pursuit of the book’s ultimate goals, which do not include pissing off the reader. It looks like we’ve reached a point in IJ where the foundations have been laid and we can really get moving. We’ve climbed the hill, and now it’s time to see what happens up here.

What’s interesting to me about the section of Infinite Jest on the schedule for that week is how much of it is made of embedded documents. I may be fudging the boundaries of the week’s assignment a little bit, but starting at page 138, there’s a 13-page flurry of intercalations that almost amounts to an evidentiary record, with still more over the next 40-ish pages. Coming to these bits feels a little like reading a novel about the Civil War and finding a letter from a Union soldier to his wife pressed between two of the pages, and then a photo of John C. Calhoun, and then a newspaper clipping about a Fourth of July celebration in 1860, and then an editorial cartoon on John Brown. It reminds me of the DBQ (document-based question) on the AP U.S. History exam. It says, Here are some documents you should use with the knowledge you’ve already gathered to create a context.

What’s funny, then, is that none of these documents are actually useful to the plot. The first one, the worker’s-comp-scam e-mail, is funny in a way that reminds me of Abbott and Costello: Every stage of the joke sets up the next one so clearly that you can actually predict what’s coming, but still it’s funny. Kevin’s post at Infinite Summer wonders about the propriety—and, more to the point, the effectiveness—of embedding received text in the book without very clear markers, but I think wheat pretty well settles the question for me with his suggestion that it’s the scammer who’s trying to pass the text off, not DFW-as-author. In any case, it’s pretty much just a comic interlude with some thematic ties to things going on around it in the book: Glynn supposedly gets himself in trouble by “trying to do the job alone” (as dislexicon notes, this was a specific alteration DFW made from the received text), and of course the entire slapstick accident described is a result of ignoring Lyle’s advice from nine pages before: “And the Lord said: Let not the weight thou wouldst pull to thyself exceed thine own weight.”

The next segment of text is where the headers start to really get out of control. We got a slight foreshadowing of this on page 121, with “MARIO INCANDENZA’S FIRST AND ONLY EVEN REMOTELY ROMANTIC EXPERIENCE, THUS FAR,” but the introduction to Hal’s paper “The Emergence of Heroic Stasis in Broadcast Entertainment” is a doozy. (See Gerry Canavan for an interesting and theory-informed reading of what’s going on here.) Ah, but where, you ask, did that title come from? Did you miss it somewhere? Well, probably not. But when the Dean of Admissions at the University of Arizona read it off on page 7, in the middle of a list of essays Hal submitted with his application (which for some reason also includes “A Man Who Began to Suspect He Was Made of Glass”; I’m very curious how that relates to his father’s film The Man Who Began to Suspect He Was Made of Glass), you probably didn’t have any particular reason to remember it. Again, though this embedded document is a fun read, and stylistically even more of a whiplash from the previous segment than we’ve already grown accustomed to in IJ, it doesn’t have any bearing on the plot. The subject of media studies is clearly relevant to the book’s obsession with entertainment consumption. But even more evocative is Hal’s paper’s thesis that North American culture’s understanding of heroism is shifting more and more away from action of any kind. There’s a quick description of Captain Frank Furillo as the previous dispensation’s “‘post’-modern hero, a virtuoso of triage and compromise and administration,” that sounds suspiciously like Charles Tavis, but the most tantalizing bit is the final graf. (Back to Nick Douglas’s post at Infinite Summer last week; he touches on this part specifically.) It’s tough to read Hal’s description of

the hero of non-action, the cataonic hero, the one beyond calm, divorced from all stimulus, carried here and there across sets by burly extras whose blood sings with retrograde amines

and not think of his evacuation to the men’s room during his abortive admissions interview—where, after all, we first read about this paper. This is one more example of the book’s fractal structure, from that “Bookworm” interview I’m not going to keep linking to (check a couple posts back).

The next section of the book is “Helen” Steeply’s hilariously poorly written Moment article on Poor Tony Krause’s purse snatch/heart theft. This is the most curious of these embedded documents, to me, because it’s so little connected to anything the book is trying to do. Yes, it’s Steeply’s cover, and yes, it describes an incident involving Poor Tony. Outside of that, though, the only thing I find notable about it with regard to IJ as a whole is how miscommunication about what “She stole my heart!” means led to a “tragic, untimely, and, some might say, cruelly ironic fate.” Otherwise, I got nothin’. If anyone reading this has a clue what else this section of the book might be doing, please chime in.

Then there’s a quick-hit listing of terrorist anti-O.N.A.N. groups, complete with a legend for the codes describing the character of each group’s resistance. This part doesn’t even try to pretend to be a narrative; it’s basically just an index, straight-up information. In fact, more than anything it seems to resemble an appendix to a report on the History of Canadian Unpleasantness.

Next comes the undisputed champion of headers in this book. I’m going to lift the veil of spoilers just this once to asseverate that there is no other header in all of Infinite Jest that can compete with this beauty:

WHY—THOUGH IN THE EARLY DAYS OF INTERLACE’S INTERNETTED TELEPUTERS THAT OPERATED OFF LARGELY THE SAME FIBER-DIGITAL GRID AS THE PHONE COMPANIES, THE ADVENT OF VIDEO-TELEPHONING (A.K.A. ‘VIDEOPHONY’) ENJOYED AN INTERVAL OF HUGE CONSUMER POPULARITY—CALLERS THRILLED AT THE IDEA OF PHONE-INTERFACING BOTH AURALLY AND FACIALLY (THE LITTLE FIRST-GENERATION PHONE-VIDEO CAMERAS BEING TOO CRUDE AND NARROW-APERTURED FOR ANYTHING MUCH MORE THAN FACIAL CLOSE-UPS) ON FIRST-GENERATION TELEPUTERS THAT AT THAT TIME WERE LITTLE MORE THAN HIGH-TECH TV SETS, THOUGH OF COURSE THEY HAD THAT LITTLE ‘INTELLIGENT-AGENT’ HOMUNCULAR ICON THAT WOULD APPEAR AT THE LOWER-RIGHT OF A BROADCAST/CABLE PROGRAM AND TELL YOU THE TIME AND TEMPERATURE OUTSIDE OR REMIND YOU TO TAKE YOUR BLOOD-PRESSURE MEDICATION OR ALERT YOU TO A PARTICULARLY COMPELLING ENTERTAINMENT-OPTION NOW COMING UP ON CHANNEL LIKE 491 OR SOMETHING, OR OF COURSE NOW ALERTING YOU TO AN INCOMING VIDEO-PHONE CALL AND THEN TAP-DANCING WITH A LITTLE ICONIC STRAW BOATER AND CANE JUST UNDER A MENU OF POSSIBLE OPTIONS FOR RESPONSE, AND CALLERS DID LOVE THEIR LITTLE HOMUNCULAR ICONS—BUT WHY, WITHIN 16 MONTHS OR 5 SALES QUARTERS, THE TUMESCENT DEMAND CURVE FOR ‘VIDEOPHONY’ SUDDENLY COLLAPSED LIKE A KICKED TENT, SO THAT, BY THE YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT, FEWER THAN 10% OF ALL PRIVATE TELEPHONE COMMUNICATIONS UTILIZED ANY VIDEO-IMAGE-FIBER DATA-TRANSFERS OR COINCIDENT PRODUCTS AND SERVICES, THE AVERAGE U.S. PHONE-USER DECIDING THAT S/HE ACTUALLY PREFERRED THE RETROGRADE OLD LOW-TECH BELL-ERA VOICE-ONLY TELEPHONIC INTERFACE AFTER ALL, A PREFERENTIAL ABOUT-FACE THAT COST A GOOD MANY PRECIPITANT VIDEO-TELEPHONY-RELATED ENTREPRENEURS THEIR SHIRTS, PLUS DESTABILIZING TWO HIGHLY RESPECTED MUTUAL FUNDS THAT HAD GROUND-FLOORED VERY HEAVILY IN VIDEO-PHONE TECHNOLOGY, AND VERY NEARLY WIPING OUT THE MARYLAND STATE EMPLOYEES’ RETIREMENT SYSTEM’S FREDDIE-MAC FUND, A FUND WHOSE ADMINISTRATOR’S MISTRESS’S BROTHER HAD BEEN AN ALMOST MANIACALLY PRECIPITANT VIDEO-PHONE-TECHNOLOGY ENTREPRENEUR . . . AND BUT SO WHY THE ABRUPT CONSUMER RETREAT BACK TO GOOD OLD VOICE-ONLY TELEPHONING?

Let’s marvel in silence for a moment, shall we?

A header like that puts an awful lot of pressure on the text that follows it; it’s like coming to the stage after David Sedaris in a group reading. Lucky for all of us, then, that what comes next appears to be one of the book’s most popular set pieces: the six-page cultural history of the rise and steep crash of video telephony. To be honest, it’s not my favorite part of the book. There’s a little too much apparently earnest psychologizing of the entire human race for my taste, in an otherwise mordantly satiric socioeconomic setup. (To me, the best element of this section is the rows of empty masks hanging beside the telephone.) But it’s high-quality satire, and a really sharp speculative post hoc market analysis. Again, though, it’s specifically introduced as a contextualizing history of the world of IJ, not as any kind of narration. It works a lot of the book’s themes—communication, social commodification, emotional immaturity, withdrawal from community into isolation—but it doesn’t forward the story at all. None of the last 13 pages, in fact, has made any progress, plotwise; it’s all been cacophonous background.

So that changes for a few pages. We get some actual incident, with the drug testing at E.T.A. (and I still don’t know the punch line to Pemulis’s joke about what you call three Canadians copulating on a snowmobile). And then there’s another set piece. This one, James Incandenza Sr.’s monologue about Marlon Brando and tennis and not underestimating objects, is not technically an embedded document—it’s just a monologue, pitch-perfect like Erdedy’s wait for the woman who said she’d come, like the (less perfect) narrations by Clenette and yrstruly. But I think we get a document sneaked in here anyway: This is the episode that I would say forms the basis of James O. Incandenza’s film As of Yore, so in a sense this section is like having the film inserted into the narrative. Not the same as, I understand, but similar in a way that resonates with the other documents in this part of the book (especially given the form of the very next one).

There’s another short section of plot, and then we have the actual narration script of an actual film: Mario’s Tennis and the Feral Prodigy, narrated by Hal. I don’t have much to say about this bit, except to note how its focus on process and learning mirrors the litany of new facts that residents at Ennet House acquire (starting on page 200). I think this is the first time so far in IJ we’ve seen such a close parallel (close both physically and thematically) between the E.T.A. strand and the Ennet House strand. In particular, a lot of the things that E.T.A. students and Ennet House residents are both expected to learn involve coping mechanisms, and making it through grueling hardship through unrelenting effort.

The next bit’s nature as a document is foregrounded in the header: It’s specifically identified as “SELECTED TRANSCRIPTS,” rather than selected moments, or some such. The section consists of 20 snippets of monologue, only some of which are actually connected to each other (like Nell’s flying attack with a fork and her victim’s indignant retelling). It’s practically an Altman film. And while it gives a great snapshot of what one probably representative afternoon at Ennet House is like, again, it forwards nothing. It’s pure background and context—enjoyable, but, purely in terms of narrative progress, extraneous. (I take it as understood that one of the things we’re supposed to glean from this giant bolus of non-plot is an understanding that plot progression is not one of the main points of the book.)

Finally we get a long (moody) present-time narrative section, with the 10/22/Y.D.A.U. broadcast of “Sixty Minutes More or Less with Madame Psychosis” and the ways the show’s engineer and the Enfield Incandenzas spend that time. Funny, then, that we practically get a transcript of the radio show—this portion of IJ, anyway, seems so bent on embedding documents in the text that it’ll even back up a level and embed them in a narrative section. This one, at least, feels like it does have plot implications. For instance, actual characters from one of the stories being told in the book appear, and do things. But even more, the focus in the narration and in the action (Mario’s rapt beside the radio) on Madame Psychosis’s show hints that it’ll become important, one way or another. This episode of the show is just an hour-long reading of a recruitment flyer for the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed, but there’s a feeling that something momentous will come of it eventually.

The last embedded document in the week’s reading is really something of a throwaway, and it’s not so much embedded as hidden in plain sight. I admit I may be reading too much into this, but on page 214, when Pemulis describes one of the Army’s DMZ test subjects as “found later in his Army cell, in some impossible lotus position, singing show tunes in a scary deadly-accurate Ethel-Merman-impression voice,” it just sounds too ridiculous and similar to this for me to think it’s an accident.