[This is the table of contents and excerpts from a book I wrote with my friend, William C. Dowling. The book is available at Amazon.com]

A READER’S COMPANION TO INFINITE JEST

BY ROBERT H. BELL AND WILLIAM C. DOWLING

1 PREFACE

3 THE OPENING EPISODE

10 SUBSIDIZED TIME

25 SCENE 1: ETA

37 SCENE 2: ENNET HOUSE

45 SCENE 3: THE ARIZONA OUTCROPPING

59 SCENE 4: METRO BOSTON

69 PLOT 1: THE SAMIZDAT

79 PLOT 2: QUEBEC SEPARATISM

87 PLOT 3: MADAME PSYCHOSIS

93 PLOT 4: ESCHATON

102 COMPENDIUM OF MAJOR CHARACTERS

161 DIRECTORY OF MINOR CHARACTERS (AND REAL PEOPLE)

213 ACRONYMS, SLANG TERMS, AND IDIOMS

228 THE PLOT OF INFINITE JEST: A PRECIS

280 KEY THEMES AND NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES

PREFACE

One reviewer of Infinite Jest gave up on the very first page.

The book is too big to read in bed, she complained. You can’t skim it. You look at the first page and you have no idea what it’s going to be about. So she wrote a review that wasn’t a review: a list of all the reasons why she hadn’t been able to read the novel.

We’re here to tell you not to give up on the first page, or even after the opening episode. You have to say “episode” because, as you’ll soon learn, Infinite Jest doesn’t have chapters. The book occasionally gives you a heading saying when the following episode or episodes took place—for instance, the opening episode bears a mysterious notation to the effect that it took place in the “Year of Glad,” whatever that’s supposed to mean—but then it jumps around: from location to location, from year to year and decade to decade, from narrative voice to narrative voice.

All this is part of its meaning. Infinite Jest is a story about the fragmented, alienated, lonely quality of life in the modern age—a world where it’s possible to see everyone as an isolated consciousness locked away within the cage of the skull, communicating only with great difficulty with others. A world where a false sense of community—all we have left by way of meaningful relations with other people—is created by advertising slogans and brand names and “media reality,” which are not a basis of any real or authentic co-existence with other people. Infinite Jest is, as one of its characters says later on in the story, a world where almost everyone’s life is “a hell for one.”

In this situation, you’ll see, the mind is likely to jump around a bit. So are stories about people whose lives are discontinuous with other people’s lives. So is the reality of characters who seek desperate refuge from their solitude in drugs or alcohol or impersonal sex, which includes almost everyone in Infinite Jest.

That’s why you shouldn’t despair, as the reviewer did, at the impenetrability of the first page of the story. As thousands of readers have found, Infinite Jest rewards those who stick with its densely-imagined world, a world with real human beings living in a society that mirrors our own, going through real and heart-wrenching experiences. It spans the social spectrum from the gutter life of drug addicts like Poor Tony Krause and Don Gately to the upscale world of middle-class specimens like Geoffrey Day and Ken Erdedy. In a way, Infinite Jest stands in the same relation to our world that the great Victorian novels—Dickens’ Bleak House, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Trollope’s The Way We Live Now—stood to theirs. It simply mirrors a radically different social reality. If it’s “difficult,” that’s only because modern life has become difficult, at least for anyone who aspires to genuine humanity in a world being drained of the human by the impersonal forces of an advertising-and-marketing system that penetrates everyone’s consciousness to one or another degree.

Infinite Jest is, in short, a little bit the like the children’s rhyme about Humpty Dumpty. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we find ourselves lying on the ground, broken into fragments, isolated and alienated and hearing our own voices echoing back to us from the void. But there’s one difference. In the children’s rhyme, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Infinite Jest does want to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, and, if the response of the thousands of passionately loyal readers it has already gained is anything to go by, it succeeds in doing so for those who are willing to enter entirely into its world.

Our Reader’s Companion is meant to ease your entry in the teeming, complex, and sometimes confusing world of Infinite Jest. There are a lot of questions it won’t try to answer— figuring out how Infinite Jest “works” is one of the great rewards of reading the book—but it will give you what might be called a road map through Wallace’s intricate landscape of modern alienation, desperation, and, finally, hope and redemption. The sections immediately following this preface will help get you started, and then, as you read Infinite Jest, you can use our compendium of characters and dictionary of acronyms and special terms to clear up things that have left you scratching your head. Our goal is to bring out the other side of Wallace’s vast narrative with a sense of having kept your bearings all the way through.

Above all, we want to keep you from being one of those people who gives up on the first page, or who, having found Infinite Jest too “difficult” for their taste, wrongly imagine that the problem is with the novel rather than with themselves.

Opening Episode

The opening episode of Infinite Jest is confusing not because it thrusts you right into the middle of a scene you’ve never encountered before—every novel does that—but because it gives you a world as seen by a narrator (Hal Incandenza) who’s in the middle of a nervous breakdown. Or, since “nervous breakdown” seems to imply a pathology of some sort—the world is okay, it’s the patient going through a psychotic episode who’s the problem—we might say that the book opens with a narrator who’s looking straight into the eyes of the terrifying possibility that it’s the world that’s psychotic.

As we’ll see, this is one of the central organizing principles of Infinite Jest. The notion of a “nervous breakdown” is in a way reassuring. If modern society is stable and coherent, and if someone we know starts living in a hallucinatory reality that is, as we say, “out of touch” with its norms, then we’ve got what amounts to a medical problem on our hands. Consultation with a psychiatrist, maybe a regular dose of Prozac or Zoloft, in extreme cases perhaps electroshock therapy, will bring the person back into touch with reality, and everything can go on from there.

But there’s an alternative possibility, and it’s the one with which Infinite Jest opens. It’s the possibility that we live inside a social reality—the world of SUV’s and TV sitcoms and satellite pornography and endless bombardment by brand-name advertising—that is itself psychotic, in which case getting “out of touch” with one’s reality wouldn’t be insane at all.

The narrator in the opening episode of Infinite Jest is, as we’ve said, one Hal Incandenza. As the story progresses, we’re going to find out a great deal about Hal—he’s one of the three central characters in the novel—but at this point all we understand is a few particulars about his personality and background. He’s a top-ranked junior tennis player applying for admission to the University of Arizona on a tennis scholarship. He is intellectually brilliant—as a teenager he was writing essays on “Montague Grammar and the Semantics of Physical Modality”—but for some reason he has gotten such low scores on the SAT that the University of Arizona has serious questions about his academic ability.

The three Deans in the room keep hammering away at a single point: since a lot of talented athletes come to college with grades they didn’t really earn, on the basis of papers written for them by other people and tests on which they cheated, how is the University of Arizona supposed to know that Hal’s so-called “brilliance” isn’t something rigged up by his sponsors at the Enfield Tennis Academy, the combination private-school-plus-tennis-camp from which he will receive his degree? What if he gets to college and, as his extremely low SAT scores seem to indicate, can’t handle the work at the University of Arizona?

So far, this is a scene that we might encounter in any novel: a young man being challenged about the authenticity of his academic record by a Dean of Admissions, a Dean of Academic Affairs, a Dean of Athletics. But as everyone who picks up Infinite Jest and opens it to the first page finds out, there is something weird going on here.

The first weirdness is this: Hal doesn’t talk. He can’t talk. At the beginning of the scene, all the talking is done for him by one Charles Tavis, whom we later to find out to be his uncle and the head of the Enfield Tennis Academy where Hal got his training in both tennis and academic subjects. Also present in the room is Aubrey DeLint, an E.T.A. tennis coach who will later emerge as one of the feared disciplinarians of the institution. He says a few words, but it is CT who does most of the talking, hilariously trying to cover up with manic chatter the fact that the three Deans are facing an 18-year-old boy frozen into silence by some fearful and as-yet-unrevealed mental condition.

Let’s pause a second to notice something in the preceding paragraph. Did you note that “Enfield Tennis Academy” became “ETA” as we were recounting what goes on in the room where Hal is being interviewed by the three Deans? Or that “Charles Tavis” somehow became “CT” as we continued?

This is something that goes on almost constantly in Infinite Jest, and it’s one of the reasons that superficial readers find the novel “confusing.” But in fact anyone who reads the story with anything like real attention soon realizes that the practice of reducing the names of person, institutions, and organizations to acronyms is a kind of survival tactic in a world where saying everything at full length every time would drive everyone crazy. But note that Infinite Jest isn’t being intentionally confusing or obscurantist here. In ordinary life, we begin referring to organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous as “AA” because it’s a useful shorthand, one that saves us repeating the longer term every time we want to mention it. We say NASA because saying “National Aeronautics and Space Administration” would soon drive us and our friends crazy. We talk about “MIT” rather than “the Massachusetts Institute of Technology” because the full name is too much of a mouthful to keep repeating in an extended conversation. We refer to public figures as “FDR” or “JFK” because they’ve become so well known that using their full names at every mention would be unnecessary and cumbersome.

This is what is going on in the opening episode of Infinite Jest, and will continue to go on as the story develops along a multitude of different narrative lines. There is, as they say, bad news and good news about the effect thus obtained. The bad news is this: Infinite Jest takes place in a world-of-the-near-future in which there are vast geopolitical changes on the North American continent, with a multitude of governmental organizations, secret terrorist groups, and social service departments corresponding to nothing in the world of contemporary American readers. So an acronym like O.N.A.N.C.A.A.—to choose just one from the opening episode—will mean nothing at all to you when you begin the story. Such acronyms are confusing, one of the reasons why readers easily frightened by “difficulty” in literary works give up on Infinite Jest in the first few pages.

Here’s the good news. Just as the familiar acronyms of our own world—think of FDR, JFK, NASA, NCAA, IRS, FBI—make it easier for us to converse and think without a lot of needless repetition, the acronyms of Infinite Jest’s world very soon become familiar and easy, a source not of confusion but of time-saving ease of reference. There’s more. Just as “JFK” and “FBI” give those who know what they mean a comfortable sense of inhabiting a shared social reality—imagine trying to explain to someone from Outer Mongolia what “NASA” stands for!—the acronyms of Infinite Jest soon begin to lend a depth and solidity to the world of the narrative that draws us in and makes us citizens of its imagined reality. The acronyms are one of the ways Infinite Jest takes us out of our own world and into the world of Hal Incandenza and Don Gately and the others, where we soon learn to operate as comfortably as we do in our own world of JFK and FBI and NASA.

Now. There’s something else confusing about the opening scene of Infinite Jest. The big problem for the reader is that Hal is talking to us—he’s obviously an articulate young man, someone who’s read a lot, has a huge vocabulary, who notices his surroundings in great and sometimes almost hallucinatory detail—and it takes a while to figure out that, for the three Deans sitting at the table, he is an absolutely silent figure sitting there with a neutral, even “dead,” expression on his face. (He’s been coached in this by his uncle Charles Tavis and Aubrey DeLint, who are aware that he’s walking on a knife edge. He’s very close to a complete nervous breakdown, and any tiny stimulus might set off a scene in which Hal’s face breaks into an expression of pure torture and he begins making animal noises instead of speaking in language.) So part of the trick of reading the opening episode is to gradually let dawn on you not what you are hearing from Hal—we’re inside his head, so to speak, where he remains perfectly articulate—but what the three University of Arizona Deans sitting across the table from him are seeing: a totally silent young man with a strained expression on his face, who seems incapable of answering their questions.

Here we have the main point of the opening episode. Infinite Jest is a world where scores of characters exist “inside their heads,” living out a private reality that has no point of contact with the world outside themselves. Again and again we’ll be asked to imagine the world as it looks from inside the mind of a character who is slipping into psychosis, or drug-induced hallucinations, or terror brought on by a paralyzing anxiety, and then to imagine this same character as he would look to you or me if we just saw him as we were walking down the street. (Another point of Infinite Jest is that you and I, walking down the street in what we take to be an entirely “normal” reality, are in fact inhabiting a pretty phantasmagoric world ourselves. It’s just that we haven’t seen its weirdness yet. But we will by the time we finish the story.)

The opening episode of Infinite Jest is a short scene. What happens, briefly, is this. Hal’s uncle, Charles Tavis, tries for as long as he can to cover up for Hal’s pathological silence—his inability to answer even the simplest question or make the most ordinary remark without entering into a psychotic state where he falls to the floor, writhing, and makes animal sounds and screams. So long as he can just sit there and concentrate on keeping his facial expression “normal,” he’ll be all right. But this is the plan that falls apart when the three Deans, realizing that they’re being kept from seeing something about Hal that they feel they need to know before he’s admitted to the University of Arizona, ask CT and Aubrey DeLint to leave the room.

That’s when Hal has his crackup, and it’s with that crackup that the opening episode ends: Hal on the floor of a men’s room, being physically restrained by the administrators who were freaked out by the contorted facial expressions and animal noises he began to make as soon as he tried to answer their questions. In Hal’s head, there now occurs the memory of a similar episode that happened to him almost exactly a year ago, when he had to be carried off to the Emergency Room under physical restraint. Remembering that episode, his mind shifts to the hospital worker who came and looked down at him curiously and, having a moment to spare, asked him not what was wrong, but what his “story” was (“So yo then man what’s your story?”).

With the hospital worker’s question, Infinite Jest as a narrative properly begins. The essential thing for you to realize as you now begin to read is that everything that happens in this vast sprawling novel—you have almost a thousand pages to go when the hospital worker asks Hal for his story—is in effect a single gigantic flashback. This is a principle familiar to you both from literature and film: a chance association carries the story back to some earlier episode that supplies background or explanation of what we’ve been seeing so far. The difference is that Infinite Jest is, so to speak, all flashback, until the final pages when, in a different setting and in the mind of a different character, the story comes full circle and we end where we began.

By the time that happens, though, every character in this teeming story will have undergone important changes, and we ourselves will have learned to see our own society in radically different terms. In that transformation lies Infinite Jest’s hope of redemption in a world in which we, like Hal in the opening episode, have been locked away within the private world of our isolated consciousness with no awareness that our isolation is tragic.

Subsidized Time

The very first page of Infinite Jest bears the cryptic heading “Year of Glad.”

It’s not clear what that’s supposed to mean. Year in which everyone is glad? Year in which Hal, whose story we are about to begin, is glad? Or, given that Glad sandwich bags are a major consumer item in American supermarkets—and also, as we’ll find out, are favored by drug addicts as a way of passing around substances like cocaine and marijuana and doses of prescription drugs like Demerol—could this somehow be a year in which the Glad brand name has assumed some sort of importance for everyone inside the novel?

The last of these possibilities is the one that explains the heading. When we enter the world of Infinite Jest, we are also entering the world of something called Subsidized Time, in which major American corporations or brand names bid against each other for the right to have the entire society mention the name of their product every time they write something into their appointment calendar. The world of Subsidized Time is, in short, one in which consumerism has so thoroughly penetrated American consciousness that people wake up every morning into a social reality in which brand name advertising and the most ordinary facts of personal life— getting up, getting dressed, going out the door—are no longer separable.

Readers who love Infinite Jest and try to explain to their friends about Subsidized Time are likely to get some strange looks. Isn’t there something awfully cartoonish about the idea of a society in which even the calendar carries the name of corporations and products?

The answer is, yes and no. There is something cartoonish about the idea of having corporations bid against each other for the right to have the coming year called “The Year of the Whopper” or “Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland” or “Year of Glad,” but the point of Infinite Jest will be that most Americans are already living inside that social reality and haven’t noticed it yet. A major theme of Infinite Jest is that we’ve all been turned into cartoon characters, two-dimensional people, by a world in which people no longer have souls. They exist merely as bundles of consumer preferences, and one way Infinite Jest shows this is by raising to the level of cartoon-reality certain aspects of American social existence that we otherwise take for granted. The convention of Subsidized Time is one means of doing this.

The way Infinite Jest attempts to awaken the consciousness of its readers can be illustrated by a story that’s sometimes told about an experiment involving frogs. Frogs, belonging as they do to the reptile family, are cold-blooded. This means that their blood temperature at any given moment is the same as that of the surrounding -- or circumambient, as we will hear Don Gately learn to say -- atmosphere. This is why lizards lie on rocks in the sun at the beginning of the day: they are waiting to absorb enough body heat to get on with the rest of the day.

Here is the experiment with the frog. It turns out that if you boil a pot of water on the stove and then toss a frog into the pot, it will jump right back out again. Who wouldn’t? But if you take the same frog and put him in a pot of cold water standing on top of a stove burner, and then heat the water up a few degrees at a time, the frog finds the increased warmth grateful and relaxing and does not jump out. If you keep heating the water up a little bit at a time, even to the point where its temperature is close to the point of boiling, the frog will stay in the water. When you increase the temperature to boiling, the frog stays right there and boils to death.

One of the major themes of Infinite Jest is that advertising and consumerist ideology work just this way. There’s never a big change, the kind of thing that makes you want to jump right out of the water. Instead, there’s a slow creep that works unobtrusively in a million different areas of social life, so that nobody ever picks out any one thing as being a threat to what one character in Infinite Jest calls the “interior worth” of human beings. Think about this: a hundred years ago, no one in American society would have thought of wearing clothing that carried brand names—turning yourself into a billboard for a product would have been thought of as vulgar or dehumanizing.

Move forward fifty years and we find that it has become routine to feature brand names and slogans and logos on articles of clothing—the LaCoste alligator, the Calvin Klein logo, tee shirts with Budweiser and Coke and Pepsi on them—and that fewer and fewer people see this as odd or repulsive. Fast forward to the year 2000, the end of the millennium and, in Infinite Jest, the beginning of Subsidized Time, and we find not only a world saturated with advertising—caps and shoes and shirts and pants covered with names like Nike and GAP and Old Navy—but brand names and logos screaming at us from every conceivable angle of social reality: bus stops and train platforms and TV spots and pop-ups on our computer screens and spam in our e-mail and late-afternoon telemarketers and even scenes in movies where corporations have paid to have their products “placed” in a prominent position in scenes featuring the leading characters.

One answer to the charge that Subsidized Time in Infinite Jest is cartoonish, then, is that we’re already living inside a cartoon—and exist, ourselves, as cartoon characters rather than three-dimensional human beings—and, like the frog in the bathtub, have been wholly unaware of what’s going on. We’re perilously close to boiling to death, in other words, and the point of certain motifs in Infinite Jest is to turn the heat up suddenly, in hopes of making us jump out of the water before it’s too late.

The way in which Subsidized Time is not cartoonish is that it is a carefully worked-out element in a phantasmagoric social reality in which everything really has become both two-dimensional and advertising-saturated, so that the world Before Subsidization has become a receding memory. There may be an element of cartoonishness to the way all this happens, but, as with the frog in the bathtub, it’s shown to have happened so gradually that the characters in the story aren’t aware of what’s been going on. The people who live in Subsidized Time are, in short, all of us as we might be imagined to exist in a social reality that keeps on developing just the way it has been developing for the last century, until it reaches its logical conclusion in a world totally saturated by consumer consciousness.

As important, David Foster Wallace shows its cartoonish character by never reporting the crucial events in straightforward terms. For instance, the key figure in the inauguration of Subsidized Time is Johnny Gentle, a Las Vegas singer who unexpectedly gets elected president of the United States. Subsidized Time is his brilliant inspiration—or, at least, he is made to think it is his own inspiration by Rodney Tine, the sinister Chief of Staff who manipulates Gentle in matters of policy—but our introduction to the election of Johnny Gentle and Subsidized Time comes not through newspaper reportage or even TV or radio news but as a filmed puppet show put on at the Enfield Tennis Academy as part of its annual celebration of Interdependence Day, one of the key events in the calendar of Subsidized Time. By the time we figure out where “Year of the Whopper” and “Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland” come from, in short, we’re already gazing at their invention through layers of parody. The serious point of the joke, and of what we’ve been calling the cartoonish character of motifs like Subsidized Time, is that Americans have already been living in the midst of a parodic social reality for a long time, and haven’t understood their own situation.

Let’s start with Johnny Gentle, usually referred to in Infinite Jest as “Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner,” or “JGFC.” Gentle is a character familiar enough in American society dominated by media and entertainment: the sort of aging crooner—Frank Sinatra, Tony Williams, Perry Como—to whom one’s parents listened, or, in the case of younger readers of Infinite Jest, to whom their grandparents listened. Such crooners speak the endearing language of an older epoch in show business, as when they twirl their microphones or inform their audiences that they have “gorgeous souls,” and they are today more likely to perform in Las Vegas night clubs or lounges than on TV. Johnny Gentle is a creature of this world, wholly unpuzzled when his fringe political party—CUSP, for “Clean U.S. Party”—pulls an upset victory that carries him into the White House, wholly clear about what he wants to achieve once he gets there. He is, we are told at a certain point, the first president of the United States to twirl his microphone by its cord when making his Inaugural Speech.

Why isn’t this cartoonish? Well, partly because Infinite Jest’s portrayal of Johnny Gentle is dominated by memories of another U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, who ascended to the presidency from his beginning as an actor in Hollywood B-movies like Bedtime for Bonzo and host of TV’s General Electric Theater. Infinite Jest isn’t “anti-Reagan” in the way of the academic or intellectual liberals whose creed involves a real and reflexive hatred of Ronald Reagan and his presidency—Johnny Gentle is, in his own clueless way, an endearing character—but its point is a serious one: in a society where B-movie actors and TV hosts have already been elected to the American presidency, it is hardly cartoonish to imagine a scenario in which the same victory is won by an aging Las Vegas crooner. If it is, we are already living inside that cartoon. (When we get to ETA, the tennis academy attended by Hal Incandenza, we’ll find out that one book everyone has read is Edwin Abbott’s Flatland, a mathematician’s attempt to imagine the world as it would exist in two dimensions, as it does for characters in a cartoon.)

A second reason that Johnny Gentle is hardly cartoonish—or that, being cartoonish, he is hardly an exaggeration of our own American society—is that he combines features of other notoriously shallow U.S. politicians in an age when politics has become almost entirely a matter of media manipulation of the electorate. Thus, for instance, Gentle will echo the line that brought down the presidency of the first George Bush (“No new taxes. I said no new taxes. Read my lips”) in a scene where Gentle reminds his listeners that he’s against changes in social policy: “I told them on Inauguration Day. I said look into my eyes: no new enhancements.” But, once again, this doesn’t mean that Infinite Jest is in any superficially ideological way “against” George Bush or Republicans generally. The point, a much deeper one, is that we live in an age where electoral choices are made by an uninformed, distracted, and media-manipulated electorate, and where all politicians are likely to be a version of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner.

Despite his claim that his presidency will bring about no new enhancements, though, the Gentle administration does bring about major changes not simply in American politics, but in the relation of America to the rest of the world. Part of the fun of Infinite Jest lies in tracing the hilarious process through which the United States absorbs Mexico and Canada to become the Organization of American States (O.N.A.N.), with the presidente of Mexico and the Prime Minister of Canada becoming simply members of the President’s cabinet. We are not going to spoil the fun by tracing it in detail here. But certain elements of the change are necessary to understanding Subsidized Time, and those we will mention.

To understand the reasons for Johnny Gentle’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, you have to understand the dilemma in which Infinite Jest sees America plunged into at the turn of the millennium. The United States is the world’s only remaining superpower, which leaves Americans for the first time in their history without an enemy. A dangerous situation, as Johnny Gentle recognizes, for when history was thoughtful enough to provide enemies—Germany in the first part of the twentieth century, Germany and Japan at its midpoint, the Soviet Union in the second half—the sense of mutual hostility was strong enough to give Americans a sense that they had something in common with each other. With the end of the Cold War, there exists nothing but a society filled with isolated or detached souls, trying to achieve meaning through consumer hedonism but failing to achieve any sense of community or spiritual coherence.

The political genius of Johnny Gentle lies in his sense that the new enemy in this situation need not be a foreign nation but simply dirt—the viruses and other microbes of which so many Americans live in terror, or the dust and clutter of ordinary life, or, finally, the waste constantly generated by a consumer society in which everything comes wrapped in five layers of plastic backed by glossy cardboard, or plastic bottles and foil candy bar wrappers, or styrofoam peanuts and other packing materials. Johnny Gentle’s solution is simple and elegant: C.U.S.P., his Clean U.S. Party, proposes to empty out the thinly-populated region of the northeast United States that includes Maine, Vermont, northern New York and Massachusetts—this will become in Infinite Jest the area known, from its shape on the map, the great Concavity—and to make it a huge garbage dump for the rest of the nation.

More about the Concavity in a moment, but let us pause a moment to say something about Johnny Gentle’s mania for cleanliness, an unspoken obsession so obviously general among Americans of the millennium that he swept to victory over the two major parties that remained mired in an older politics of defense, social programs, and the like. In general terms, Gentle’s mania is modeled on that of Howard Hughes, the eccentric billionaire whose absolute horror of microbes led him to live a secluded life carried out as far as possible in antiseptic conditions—telephones wiped down with disinfectants as soon as they had been used by anyone other than Hughes, surgical masks worn by anyone ushered into his presence, etc. Many of the details that go into Infinite Jest’s portrait of Gentle are drawn directly from stories told about Hughes in the last years before his death.

Yet the obsession with dirt is not peculiar either to Howard Hughes or Johnny Gentle, Infinite Jest wants us to see. In a time when medical care has improved dramatically and longevity has increased amazingly, every middle-class American has become a version of Hughes and Johnny Gentle. Thus, for instance, the nation’s endless fascination with HIV—called simply “the Virus” in Infinite Jest—and the books written about the Ebola virus and other terrifying infectious diseases supposedly lying in wait just beyond the borders of civilization, in Africa and elsewhere, and the disproportionate media attention given to outbreaks like Legionnaire’s Disease and Lyme Disease, and a country where the dream of the middle class is to live in ceramic-tiled surroundings with an endless supply of hot soapy water to scrub away the germs. What Gentle and C.U.S.P. have seen, in short, is that microbes, invisible, malevolent, mysterious, lying in wait on every household surface, have become the Enemy, and the expulsion of physical filth or waste a national obsession powerful enough to carry Gentle and his party into the White House.

As we’ve said, we’ll leave it to you to trace out the exact stages through which the victory of Gentle and C.U.S.P. leads to what throughout Infinite Jest is called the Reconfiguration: the absorption of Mexico and Canada into the new Organization of American States, with gigantic airborne waste disposal vehicles constantly passing overhead as huge catapults hurl O.N.A.N.’s waste into the great Concavity where northern New York and New England used to be. All that is necessary to understand Subsidized Time is that it is born as an immediate consequence of the Reconfiguration, and is carried out under the sign of what Infinite Jest describes as the new O.N.A.N. heraldic design, “a snarling full-front eagle with a broom and a can of disinfectant in one claw and a Maple Leaf in the other and wearing a sombrero” (153). For what Johnny Gentle and C.U.S.P. discover is that absorbing two previously independent countries, and then emptying out a large region of the northeast United States to use as a gigantic waste receptacle for the mega-nation thus created, costs a great deal of money.

In the old United States in which Johnny Gentle was elected president, the problem of raising the money to create and fund the Concavity waste-disposal system would have been negligible. In a booming economy, where an endless cycle of consumption is driven by constant advertising, it’s only necessary to pass taxes that will provide funding. But here C.U.S.P. faces a problem. Because of certain changes in the technology of entertainment broadcasting, there are no longer television revenues, or corporate revenues as those are sustained by TV advertising, to pay for expensive measures like Reconfiguration. For the world of Subsidized Time is also one in which broadcasting—now called “spontaneous dissemination” by those old-fashioned enough to subscribe—has largely been replaced by home-entertainment cartridges played over high-definition teleputers (TPs). Worse, even spontaneously-disseminated programs can be transferred to cartridges by software that automatically removes commercial spots. Paradoxically, a society wholly given over to advertising and mindless consumption has produced technology that permits viewers to escape advertising altogether.

The stroke of genius that leads Johnny Gentle to invent Subsidized Time comes when he makes a presidential appearance—protected from germs by an “oxygenated Portabubble”— at a postseason bowl game played by two college football teams. Or rather, at the post-game dinner at a Chinese restaurant where the placemat reminds him of the ancient Chinese practice of naming years after various animals: the Year of the Tiger, the Year of the Rat, etc. For in attending the bowl game Gentle thought he would simply be making an appearance at a college football contest. He is going, his aides have told him, to something called the Forsythia Bowl. But when he actually arrives he discovers that what he has come to watch is only incidentally a college football game. It is an advertising vehicle for the corporate sponsors who use it to advertise their products: the Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox-Kemper-Insurance-Forsythia Bowl. College football, in short, has become another element in American life wholly absorbed by the TV networks and “the ad rates their huge overheads’ slavering maw demand” (411).

The epochal birth of Subsidized Time occurs at the moment when Johnny Gentle (Famous Crooner) realizes that the advertising-vehicle status of events like the Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox-Kemper-Insurance-Forsythia Bowl can be combined with the Chinese custom of giving names like Year of the Rat to years on the calendar. Again, readers who find this cartoonish as a mode of parody should simply pause and turn their eyes away from Infinite Jest to the society around them. As this paragraph is being written, for instance, a quick glance at the TV schedule of college football games comes up with the following: the Tostitos Corn Chips Fiesta Bowl, the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, the SBC Communications Cotton Bowl, the FedEx Orange Bowl, the Nokia Sugar Bowl, the Mazda Tangerine Bowl, the Toyota Gator Bowl, and many more. In December and early January, in a nation that has been transformed, as Infinite Jest puts it, into “an entertainment market of sofas and eyes” (611), millions of Americans will sit down to watch spectacles like the Tostitos Corn Chips Fiesta bowl without the slightest suspicion that there is anything weird about their doing so. If there is a mindless superficiality to the idea of Subsidized Time—and, without question, there is—neither the mindlessness nor the superficiality is coming from Infinite Jest.

There you have, in short, the explanation of those mysterious section headings—Year of the Whopper, Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad—that on a first acquaintance make Infinite Jest so forbidding to new readers. At a point not very far into Infinite Jest, we are given a chronology of Subsidized Time, or, as the novel puts it, a “Chronology of Organization of North American Nations’ Revenue-Enhancing Subsidized Time^TM”:

(1) Year of the Whopper

(2) Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad

(3) Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar

(4) Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken

(5) Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster

(6) Year of the Yushityou 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade for Infernatron/Interlace TP Systems for Home, Office, Or Mobile (sic)

(7) Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland

(8) Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment

(9) Year of Glad

A couple of notes on how to imagine Subsidized Time as you’re making your way through Infinite Jest. First, knowing that the year 2000 was the end of our present system—the years Before Subsidization, as Infinite Jest will usually put it, as in “1960 B.S.”—you will feel a temptation to translate the years of Subsidized Time into their “normal” equivalents: the Year of the Whopper as 2001, for instance, and the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad as 2002, and so on. For a number of reasons, it’s probably best to resist this temptation. The most important is that Subsidized Time doesn’t just represent a new way of counting calendrical time, but a whole new way of dealing with social reality. Just as Americans today see nothing strange about sitting down on the sofa to watch something called the Tostitos Corn Chips Fiesta Bowl, the people in Infinite Jest see nothing odd about dating things that happen them in terms of the Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken.

If you can manage to get yourself into the state of mind demanded by Subsidized Time—or to recognize that most of us are already in that state of mind without realizing it—you’ll have no problem making sense of a lot of episodes that look strange from our B.S. perspective. Consider, for instance, one of the newspaper headlines in the ETA puppet show that traces the rise of Johnny Gentle and the C.U.S.P. party, the Reconfiguration and the creation of the great Concavity for waste disposal, and the birth of Subsidized Time as a way of paying for it all: “FREAK STATUE OF LIBERTY ACCIDENT KILLS FED ENGINEER.—Header: BRAVE MAN ON CRANE CRUSHED BY 5 TON CAST IRON BURGER” (398).

If we’ve absorbed the idea that Subsidized Time means that every new year in the calendar belongs to a major corporation or one of its products, we’ll almost automatically make sense of this: the right to “own” a year of the U.S. calendar involves not only the publicity that comes from having everyone in American society plan their daily lives in the name of some brand or product, but to have the Statue of Liberty brandish a symbol or logo of the product for that entire year: “NNYC’s harbor’s Liberty Island’s gigantic Lady has the sun for a crown and holds what looks like a huge photo album under one iron arm, and the other arm holds aloft a product. The product is changed each 1 Jan. by brave men with pitons and cranes” (367). The 5-ton cast iron burger that kills the Federal engineer, in short, is our assurance that this must be happening in the Year of the Whopper. And “NNYC” is “New New York City,” the New York that has come into existence when the Reconfiguration removed a previously-existing upstate New York from the map forever, to create the great Concavity.

Or, similarly, if we notice that the Year of the Yushityu 2007's signal product has an uncharacteristically long and cumbersome name—”Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install Upgrade for Infernatron/Interlace TP Systems for Home, Office, or Mobile (sic)”—we’re likely to notice as well that, in an era of total technological transformation, this was an especially important year. For the “TP” system announced in the Yushityu corporate slogan is a “teleputer,” a kind of composite television-computer device that has come to be universal in the era of Subsidized time. The “cartridges” that the Yushityu permits you to view contain everything from films to TV programs to aerobics shows to tennis-training tapes. In the world of Infinite Jest, such cartridges are omnipresent and universal.

As we’ll see below, the plot of Infinite Jest turns on a cartridge—it’s called The Entertainment, or simply the Samizdat—made by an experimental film maker. It is, as one character puts it, “lethally entertaining.” Anyone who watches The Entertainment is frozen into a posture of pure self-gratification, wanting nothing but to see it again and again, rejecting food and water and ignoring all attempts at conversation, until they finally waste away and have to be removed from the premises by those who have not yet been enslaved. In one episode in Infinite Jest, a viewer put into a room as an experimental subject is told that he must, as the price of each new viewing, cut off a thumb or finger with an orthopedic saw and pass it out under the door to those who operate a remote control. The price is not too much to pay: the bloody digits come out, one by one, and the subject gets his reruns of The Entertainment.

We’ll discuss the logic of The Entertainment, and the way it stands as a metaphor for the soullessness of a society driven by consumerism and self-gratification, below. At the outset, the point to keep in mind is that its logic is the logic of Subsidized Time, an era in world history—not too remote from us, it sometimes seems—in which society as little more than “an entertainment market of sofas and eyes” has transformed actual human beings into empty parodies of themselves, and in which the power of advertising to saturate human consciousness has become total or complete.

One other point needs to be made about Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, before we leave his invention of Subsidized Time. Almost in passing, it is mentioned early on in Infinite Jest that Gentle’s political opponents, among them Hal’s mother Avril Incandenza, have gone to court to try to block the “Gentle administration’s Title-II/G-public-funded-library-phaseout-fat-trimming initiative” (288). This is the darker side of the world of Subsidized Time. It is not only that in the new “floating no-space world of personal spectation” (620) symbolized by Johnny Gentle there will be nothing more than the endless and empty self-gratification offered by TPs and cartridges, but that books and reading will be actively discouraged until the entire society has forgotten that there ever was such a thing as losing yourself in a book. This is why Infinite Jest, not only as a book but as one that refuses to yield up its riches to anyone who resists the pleasures of “difficult” reading, sets out to offer a single gigantic antidote—a kind of cure—to the mentality of those living in Subsidized Time.

The most important year in Subsidized Time is the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment—a kind of diaper for senior citizens or others unable to control their bladders—which is the year immediately preceding the Year of Glad. As you’ll find once you’ve actually entered the world of Infinite Jest and begin to register events in terms of its time scheme, the Year of Glad is something we encounter only in the opening episode of the story. All the rest of the novel’s action takes place in a time period between 1960 B.S. (“Before Subsidization,” remember?) and the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. The question of what happened to the “missing year” is one of the keys to making sense of Infinite Jest as a narrative.

COMPENDIUM OF MAJOR CHARACTERS

Hal Incandenza

One traditional kind of narrative is the coming of age story, or Bildungsroman. The saga of Hal Incandeza in Infinite Jest is an inverted Bildungsroman—a story not of maturing, affirming his identity, and moving beyond the self into the world, but of unraveling, losing his way, and retreating deep inside himself.

Born in 1992, Hal’s childhood was lived in suburban, bucolic Weston, Mass., remembered in nostalgic detail, a childhood in some respects idyllic, when a gifted, beloved boy could explore freely his wide-ranging interests. He loses this paradise at age seven when his parents founded the tennis academy.

By age eleven, Hal also loses lost touch with his father. Sent to be interviewed by a “professional conversationalist,” Hal characterizes himself as a “continentally ranked junior tennis player who can also recite great chunks of the dictionary, verbatim, at will, and tends to get beat up and wears a bow tie” (28). He says that his father is “having this hallucination that I never speak” (29). He calls his father “Himself.” The conversationalist, Hal soon realizes, is actually Himself in disguise. Father and son remain conspicuously disconnected.

A gifted, hard-working student, Hal is especially eager to please the Moms. He shares her interests in culture and aesthetics, literature and linguistics. His seventh grade essay on “the tangled fates of broadcast television and the American ad industry” (411) provides a cogent history of the Entertainment business in the Subsidized era. Another precocious essay for “Introduction to Entertainment Studies” compares two TV heroes, Captain Steve McGarett of “Hawaii Five-O,” “homing in on the truth,” and Captain Frank Furillo of “Hill Street Blues,” “navigating cluttered fields . . . a post-modern hero, a virtuoso of triage and composure and administration” (141).

Wise, or at least clever, beyond his years, Hal seems enabled by the author’s loving solicitude, endowed with deep feelings and astute insights--a privileged character in a deplorable state. In that seventh-grade essay, Hal contends that the hero since the B.S. 1980s is trapped “in the reactive moral ambiguity of ‘post-’ and ‘post-post’- modern culture,” and that we await “the catatonic hero” (142). In Hal, we get that hero. Hal Incandenza is as smart and chillingly inhuman as Hal the Computer in 2001.

On April 1, Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar (2004), Hal’s life changes forever, when the boy, age “thirteen going on really old”(248) finds his father’s body. Hal goes into traumatic shock, and is dispatched into “grief-therapy” with another therapist. It doesn’t help. Hal manipulates language well enough to compel others and perhaps persuade himself that “he’s in there, inside his own hull, as a human being” (694). His glibness often works: the Moms “believes she knows him inside and out as a human being” (694).

Hal feels he isn’t “delivering the goods” to the counselor, and despairs of satisfying the counselor and getting out of therapy. Characteristically, Hal’s strategy is intellectual, calculated to bypass the emotional process that he undoubtedly needs. Studying grief-therapy terms, “library-derived,” Hal teaches himself how to grieve; he performs brilliantly: “I was in The Zone, therapeutically speaking” (256). He tells the therapist what may or may not have happened, that he entered the kitchen that fatal day, starving after hours of arduous practice, thinking “That something smelled delicious!” For this innocent, outrageous reaction, he is now able to forgive himself, he announces. Though his “traumatic grief was professionally pronounced uncovered and countenanced and processed” (257), the past is not forgotten nor is Hal’s trial concluded.

As with his older brother Orin, Hal’s ordeal is temporarily masked by athletic prowess. At sixteen Hal bursts forth as a tennis star, second only to John Wayne as ETA’s most promising player, ranked #4 under eighteen in the US and sixth-best on the continent. But simultaneously, Hal becomes addicted to the high resin marijuana called “Bob Hope.” Daily descents into the ETA underground Pump Room become an elaborate ritual, a “subterranean covert drama” (52) Hal cherishes. Some days Hal can’t wait for his pre-supper “one hitter” in the Pump Room. He gets “secretly high so regularly these days this year that if by dinnertime he hasn’t gotten high yet that day his mouth begins to fill with spit” (114). “Secretly high” Hal becomes synonymous with his initials.

Despite his drug problems, Hal remains a kind, sensitive young man. He likes being an ETA Big Buddy, mixing practical tennis advice with Life 101, and he generally provides sage counsel. He tells his Little Buddies that suffering and resentment build character and community, though he’s not sentimental about it: “We’re all on each other’s food chain. All of us. It’s an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We’re each deeply alone here. It’s what we all have in common, this aloneness” (112). He knows that the bitching and moaning are “ritualistic” and therapeutic for them all; “the suffering unites us.” One must learn “the pragmatics of expressing fear,” to “be on guard” (175). The Game “is about managed fear” (176). “Expect some rough dreams” (176).

This fall, YDAU, Hal receives frequent late night phone calls from long incommunicado Orin, playing football in Phoenix. Orin’s sexual escapades disgust Hal: he is a seventeen-year-old virgin, partly to compensate for his brother’s predatory promiscuity. Orin thinks sex might awaken Hal’s buried life, “so shut down talking to him is like throwing a stone in a pond” (1040). Orin comments, “I’m surprised you were even there. In person. I was expecting the Disembodied Voice” (1009). The narrator confirms that “in fact” Hal is “far more robotic than John Wayne,” and “has not had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny” (694). Their conversations are also strained by Hal’s smoldering resentment of the way Orin has cut off their mother. Orin’s take is that Hal remains unhealthily obsessed with their mother’s approval, and still lives for her applause.

Hal’s crisis crystallizes at the annual Eschaton tournament, when the elaborate war-game runs amok. Hal is paralyzed, unable to react when kids including his own Little Buddy are injured. Eerily detached, Hal “feels at his own face to see whether he is wincing” (342). In “guiltily sickening stomach-pit shock from the afternoon’s Eschaton debacle and his failure to intervene” (410), Hal smokes Bob Hope four times that day.

On November 10, Hal, Axhandle, and Pemulis are summonsed to explain Sunday’s “horrendous Eschaton fiasco” (510). Inside Tavis’s office a surprise awaits them: a “scrubbed young button-nosed urologist in an O.N.A.N.T.A. blazer” (527) collecting urine samples. The next day, to everyone’s surprise, Hal is almost beaten by Ortho Stice in a nonchallenge exhibition match; abruptly trying to go clean, Hal shows the effects of withdrawal. On the court he is “strangely affectless, as if deep inside some well of his own private troubles” (637). His “face registered nothing” (680). DeLint tells Hal “You just never quite occurred out there, kid” (686), a formulation which chills Hal “to the root.”

Thoroughly shaken, Hal watches a JOI film titled Wave Bye Bye to the Bureaucrat, about a guy who bangs into a little kid with “thick glasses and a bow-tie.” Hal gets hung-up trying to remember who played the little kid, which is probably important to him because the actor is an image of himself as a boy. The film is unusual for Himself in that it features a rare “clear internal-conflict moment,” with a frankly “unhip earnestness” (689), that Hal finds this secretly moving. A measure of his state is that any feeling remains strictly “secret.” But he’s not, we hope and believe, beyond repair. A cartridge Hal especially likes by Himself is “mostly about a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive” (694). Hal “theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of really being human.”

It’s such perceptions, again approaching the narrator’s lucid and scathing comments on spectation, that sustain our admiration for Hal through his degrading fall, and despite his adamant withdrawal. The only person Hal communicates with at all is his brother and roommate Mario. He confesses his addiction, until now safely secret. Trapped by the ONANTA rep demanding a urine sample, he was temporarily saved by Mike Pemulis, who persuaded the guy “to give us thirty days” (772). That will get him through the big tournaments and give him a month to get clean. Still Hal feels guilty and petrified that he won’t be able to get or stay clean, that he will be exposed, humiliated, and disgraced. Frustrated by Mario’s confusion and misunderstanding, he tells Mario “You can get mad at somebody and it doesn’t mean they’ll go away,” and he asks impatiently, “Are you in there?” (784). Both the remark and the question pertain all too obviously to his own sense of loss. Hal says he feels a “hole. It’s going to be a huge hole, in a month. A way more than Hal-sized hole” (785).

On Thursday, November 12, Mike Pemulis tutors Hal for the forthcoming math SATs, and urges Hal to join him in a “meaningful transcendent DMZ-type” (1064) interlude before the WhataBurger Tournament in Tucson. Hal is wary and reluctant. Pemulis unhelpfully insists that addict is “just a word” (1066). At least Hal knows better. After a drug-free week, recognizing the severity of his addiction, plagued by nightmares and constant saliva, Hal drives to Natick, MA for a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. He finds the NA meeting in process, with nine or ten adult middle-class males, and a round middle-aged guy up front holding a teddy bear, saying, “I’d like to suggest we men all hold our bears tight and let our Inner Infant nonjudgmentally listen to Kevin’s Inner Infant expressing his grief and loss” (800). Hal wonders “what the etiquette is in NA about getting up and leaving right in the middle of somebody’s Infantile revelation of need” (803). It’s true that the scene is ridiculous and hilarious; it’s equally important that Hal is precluded from moving out of his cage by his intellectual sophistication and ironic defenses. Expressing grief and loss is exactly what Hal could never do.

On November 20 Hal wakes before dawn, again suffering symptoms of withdrawal. Reflecting his hopeless, strung-out state, the “whole scene had an indescribable pathos to it” (868). It’s snowing heavily, windy and terribly cold. Hal hopes the big ETA exhibition, fundraiser, and party will be called off. He wonders whether his beloved Bob Hope had become “not just the high-point of the day but its actual meaning” (853). Hal’s recorded message for his answering machine suggests an answer: “This is the disembodied voice of Hal Incandenza, whose body is not now able . . .” (854) Now Hal’s body, stirring but stricken, reacts: he has a panic attack, like a bad trip: “just intense and vivid. It wasn’t like being high, but it was still very: lucid.”

It’s notable that we are for the first time since the opening episode inside Hal’s consciousness—with him, or closer to him. Perhaps this narrative segue indicates some movement on Hal’s part, toward closer apprehension of his anguished feelings. That he can touch and move the reader is a sign of life and, perhaps, a spark of hope. But recovery won’t come easily, of that we are sure. Lying on the carpet of Viewing Room 5, Hal struggles for a semblance of control. He realizes that “if it came down to a choice between continuing to play competitive tennis and continuing to be able to get high, it would be a nearly impossible choice to make. The distant way in which this fact appalled me itself appalled me” (898). Hal thinks that it “seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end . . . It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic” (900). He thinks about Hamlet again, wondering why the hero, “for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost” (900). (This isn’t true of Shakespeare’s play, but it may be important that Hal believes it).

Mike Pemulis, the Mephistopheles of self-medication, wants to discuss their DMZ weekend but Hal cuts him off; trying to purge his body within thirty days, “I do not need you launching temptation-rhetoric my way” (908). It’s a blizzard of historic proportions, as Hal watches TP and day-dreams. He contemplates feigning a fall, to “be the faultless victim of a freak accident . . . the object of compassionate sorrow rather than disappointed sorrow” (954-955).

Our last image of Hal is of a young man forlornly watching entertainment and considering his family: his mother’s aging, his father’s counsel to Orin about how pornography misrepresents sex, intimacy that can be “profound and really quite moving.” Hal regrets that he never once had “a conversation nearly that open or intimate with Himself.” In comes John Wayne, who (Hal thinks) has in a sense replaced Himself; Hal believes that John Wayne had been “involved with the Moms sexually” since he arrived. With chilling detachment, Hal imagines his mother and her young lover having sex.

If we’re encouraged by the book’s sustained regard to maintain faith in and hope for Hal, optimism is based on slight signs and marginal movement. Hal considers the connection between the Moms’s “passion for hiddenness and the fact that Himself had made so many films titled Cage--without connecting the Incandenza history of “hiddenness” to his secret addiction. The wraith visiting Gately confides that “his own personal youngest offspring, a son, the one most like him” (837) seemed to become a figurant—increasingly “blank, inbent, silent, frightening, mute” (838), more and more of a “hidden boy.”

To this extent the story of Hal ends in stasis, another instance of the tragic family romance, the perilous effects of parents upon children, the terror of intimate relations, the pain offspring bring to their parents, and the cycle of despair. Hal is stuck in Analysis-Paralysis, defined in AA parlance as addicts “also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking” (203).

Yet it’s also important to reiterate that when the book ends it links back to its beginning, making the whole narrative another of the many cycles it contains. That opening episode, it will be recalled, takes place one year after the last episodes recounted in the narrative. It’s also crucial to notice, after we leave Hal, a scene in one of Don Gately’s fevered dreams: “he’s with a very sad kid and they’re in a graveyard digging some dead guy’s head up and it’s really important, like Continental-Emergency important and the sad kid is trying to scream at Gately that the important thing was buried in the guy’s head and to divert the Continental Emergency to start digging the guy’s head up before it’s too late, but the kid moves his mouth but nothing comes out . . . Too Late” (934).

Whatever this signifies about the connection between Don Gately and Hal—some meeting between them, perhaps in the hospital, or some mystical communion between their spirits—Gately’s vision conveys the centrality of Hal in Infinite Jest: a boy tortured by the gruesome death of his father, haunted by his father’s spirit, isolated, fortified partly against his mother’s needs, and unable to communicate--trapped inside himself, a reluctant actor, paralyzed. The rest is silence.

Etc. . .

DIRECTORY OF MINOR CHARACTERS AND REAL PEOPLE

--“Oo Is ‘E When ‘E’s at ‘Ome?” (834)

E. A. Abbott: (1836-1926) 281. Author of Flatland (1884), a novel popular at ETA. Flatland is a fantastic, two-dimensional world of length and breadth.

Shoshana Abram: 756. A girl at Enfield Tennis Academy; rooms with Carol Spodek.

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno: (1903-1969) 450. German philosopher.

Spiro Agnew: (1918-1996) 280. Vice-President under Richard Nixon, 1969-1973.

Alan Alda: (1936- ) 647. Actor who played Captain “Hawkeye” Pierce on the 1970’s TV show M*A*S*H.

Alfonso: 178. A drug addict at Ennet House.

Woody Allen: (1935- ) 944. Film director and actor, comedian.

Robert Altman: (1925- ) 835. American film director.

Lord Jeffrey Amherst: (1717-1797) 310. British general, who recovered Newfoundland from the French after the surrender of Montreal.

ETC. . .

THE PLOT OF INFINITE JEST: A PRECIS

--“are you just looking for some Cliff-Note summary?” (1012)

3-10. Hal Incandenza is being interviewed for a tennis scholarship to the University of Arizona. Hal’s Uncle Charles is doing most of the talking on behalf of Hal who appears incapable of speaking for himself. The Dean of Admissions is concerned with the incongruity between Hal’s grades at ETA and “verbal scores that are just quite a bit closer to zero than we’re comfortable with” (6). Finally, Hal says, “I cannot make myself understood, now . . . Call it something I ate” (10).

10-17. Hal remembers early family life with his eldest brother Orin and their mother, whom they call “The Moms,” at their home in Weston, MA before Hal’s father founded ETA. Hal at age five ate a large patch of mold, which horrified his mother, an obsessive-compulsive woman who “refused ever even to go into the damp basement” (11), and reacted hysterically. Hal desperately tries to explain himself to the University administrators, but his protests emerge as animal-like sounds and frightening gestures. Horrified, the Deans think he is having a seizure. As Hal is taken to an Emergency Room, he recalls that he was taken to this ER almost exactly one year earlier.

ETC . . .

KEY THEMES, NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES, STRUCTURAL PRINCIPLES

“What am I?” (1071): The Problem of Personal Identity

We’ve seen that in the opening episode Hal Incandenza, utterly lost, makes a puzzling reference to Don Gately. For the ensuing 972 pages, they never meet, nor does either think at all about the other. Then, late in the novel, Gately describes a dream about a kid, evidently Hal, at his father’s grave, screaming about a cartridge buried with his father. Now there may well be a logical explanation for this gap that is a connection, or connection that is a gap. But this crux suggests, above all, the problem of personal identity in Infinite Jest. Most of us believe or want to believe that personal identity, at least our own, is reliable, dependable, and fundamental.

Somewhere, somehow, beyond our frame of reference, the psyches of Don Gately and Hal Incandenza intersect or overlap. At such moments, Infinite Jest suggests that identity is more porous, fluid, and elusive than we might suspect or customarily believe. The vexed problem of personal identity is dramatized in many forms throughout Infinite Jest. There is the familiar crisis of adolescent identity facing ETA students “staring down the barrel not of Is anything true but of Am I true, of What am I, of What is this thing, and it made them strange” (1071). Hal and Pemulis, and many other characters, take mind-bending, consciousness-altering drugs—-terms suggesting, perhaps too optimistically, the liquidity of identity. Addicts at Ennet House try desperately to locate and reassert some sort of self separate from the Substance, the spider, the poison. Hugh Steeply, master of disguise, is in drag and becomes “Helen Steeply.” His interlocutor Marathe is a double agent who is actually a triple agent, or regarded as such, or pretending to be, or . . . Marathe’s articulation of selfhood is a baffling question: “ . . . have I merely pretended to pretend to pretend to betray” (94). Where if anywhere is the there there?

While Infinite Jest conducts a rigorous, comic, outrageous interrogation of personal identity, it affirms—surprisingly-- some basic elements or attributes of identity. It is significant that there is an answer to Marathe’s seemingly unanswerable question, “have I merely pretended to pretend,” etc. Indeed, this insistence upon or hope for meaningful selfhood is one important way in which David Foster Wallace differs from and corrects his post-modernist predecessors, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. In Infinite Jest there indeed appears to be, provisionally and potentially, a there there, some enduring tendencies or qualities we are tempted to consider the bedrock self, or at least the inchoate stuff of personal identity. Two instances of this substantially enduring self are Don Gately and Mario Incandenza. The spirit of Don Gately is capable of great change yet heroic endurance; as he modestly puts it, he abides. The heart of Mario Incandenza moves outward and assimilates others, yet always remains simple and steadfast. We do not doubt the essential nature or persistent identity of Gately or Mario.

In maintaining some belief in selfhood, especially the persistence of memory and the possibility of willed, earned identity, Wallace distinguishes himself from postmodern repudiation of the self. Wallace’s receptivity to traditional notions of the self indicates some affinities with William James, whose books surface in Infinite Jest, on the significance and possibility of personal identity (as well as on the viability of occult and supernatural “experience”). One commentator on Infinite Jest, underscoring Wallace’s philosophical interests, distinguishes between “a modernist poetics preoccupied with epistemological concerns (problems of knowing) and “postmodernist practice dominated by ontological concerns (questions of being).”[1] It seems naïve to suggest that modernists like Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, Joyce, Faulkner, or Ellison were not seriously concerned with questions of being. But in considering Infinite Jest, the terms Modernist and Postmodern remain useful. The same critic is surely right to say that Wallace breaks with postmodernism and recalls Joyce’s Ulysses. In its explorations of questions of being, Infinite Jest does not merely recycle infinite ironies, nor always defer meanings, nor produce endless futility.

Etc.

SLANG TERMS AND IDIOMS

Annular fusion: A technology that uses the waste deposited in the Concavity for “a type of fusion that can produce waste that’s fuel for a process whose waste is fuel for the fusion” (572). The word annular implies a circular or ring-like cycle.

Bit: a jail sentence

Bob Hope: marijuana

Boosting: steal

Brody, “did a Brody”: committed suicide

B.S.: Before Subsidization, when corporations began to purchase rights to a calendar year. Subsidization begins in 2002.

Click: a kilometer on the odometer (military slang).

Concavity / Convexity: The territory formerly known as northern New England, forcibly given to Canada in the Reconfiguration and now a vast dump for US waste. The “Concavity in our map” is “a new Convexity in theirs” (1018).

Crew: gang. But also “crewed on him” (130).

Crocodiles: old bunch of AA guys

Demapped: wiped out, killed; see “map.”

Etc. . .

IJA’s: Infinite Jest Acronyms

2R: Second-year medical resident (921)

3S: Single-Serving Size (425)

AA: Alcoholics Anonymous (137)

AAA: Highest level of minor league baseball (523)

AAOAA: Anti-Anti-ONAN Activities' Agency (549)

AB: Artis Baccularatum (Latin: Bachelor of Arts) university degree (227)

ABD: All-But-Dissertation (227)

AC: Air conditioner (42)

ACDC: American Council of Disseminators of Cable (412)

ACOA: Abused Children of Alcoholics (1050)

ACOG: Abused Children of Gamblers (1050)

ACONA: Abused Children of Narcotics Addicts (1050)

ADA: Assistant District Attorney (55)

ADD: Attention Deficit Disorder (905)

A/DF: Ace to double fault ratio (656)

AEC: Atomic Energy Commission (65)

AFL: Armenian Foundation Library (303)

Etc . . .