You probably thought I’d given up on the IJOASa-oBC.

But no, I’m just dragging my feet a little, while at the same time streamlining things: addressing bigger chunks while skipping others, in an effort to really focus on what I’m finding most important and striking during this particular read-through.

pp 219-240 One of a handful of darkly epic chapters, like the 1960 Junior and Senior Incandenza scene, from which all the book’s themes radiate outward, triangles cut from the gasket. The drizzle accompanying Joelle to Molly’s party fits the mood of what she’s about to do, and the description of her walk toward the party portrays a slice of outdoor urban Boston even as the narration deepens in its interiority, going further and further into the mind of the woman about to demap herself.

Joelle is walking toward “that most self-involved of acts, self-cancelling, to lock oneself in Molly Notkin’s bedroom or bath and get so high [high, like an arrow that must return to earth] that she’s going to fall down [the descent of the arrow] and stop breathing and turn blue and die” (222)—turning blue, going back into the blue, from where so many things in this book spring but where people go to die and where Joelle’s headed, to join Jim himself—Himself—in the blue.

Piercing this deepening interiority are two chunks of decidedly exterior data, the first being a straightforwardly chronological listing of ONAN’s years of Subsidized Time (finally), the second being Helen P. Steeply’s putative CV.

Near the Endless Stem on Charles St, Joelle hands a twenty to an ostensible panhandler who’s almost certainly one of Marathe’s compatriots in the AFR, then comes precipitously close to choosing a more efficient and entertaining way to demap herself than the high-and-blue plan—picking up and examining an unmarked copy of what is almost certainly the Entertainment, then returning it to the slot in the “odd adverting display … she’s had her last fling with cartridges” (224), her last fling being the creation of the very film she’s just unwittingly refused to view—even though to do so would spell both a release from her present cage and an entrapment in a different, more lethally entertaining one … unless it’s a decoy cartridge, planted by an AFR rival.

What follows Joelle into Molly’s apartment is the most vividly rendered party scene I’ve encountered, an excruciatingly obnoxious instance of that most excruciatingly obnoxious subgenus of party: the Gathering of Academics. The horrifically condescending ways intellectuals speak to each other, oblivious to everyone but themselves; the narcissistic antics of drunk people at parties everywhere; the awkwardness of the dateless attendee, Joelle, who remains at a remove from the proceedings, which she observes for a bit before heading for the bathroom.

The most information we’ve gotten so far about the film Infinite Jest comes in snippets of overheard conversation between insufferable film scholars. Joelle observes the self-involved behavior of Molly Notkin and Melinda (she of the great tits). Two party guests discuss the Brady Bunch (232), or the Brady kin, a pun on the Bradykinesia (a “slowed ability to start and continue movements, and impaired ability to adjust the body’s position … can be a symptom of neurological disorders, particularly Parkinson’s disease, or a side effect of medications”) that afflicts Mario and possibly other characters. The Incandenzas = The Brady Bunch.

Joelle’s overdose and possible death is cast in blue, as previous deaths—DuPleiss, Bobby C—have been. The tub is blue, the smoke is blue, the scene accented by “mercuric red,” just as Bobby C’s death filled the air with red feathers. The scene flips again to the exterior, to imaginary or possibly real helicopters scanning the night sky with searchlights, “fat fingers of blue light coming from one sky, searching” (240).

Ascent and descent are key movements throughout the book and especially in scenes involving death. Weapons descend; souls ascend; tennis balls and chunks of waste alike are catapulted into parabolic flight; characters ascend from the US Southwest to its Northeast and descend back the other way. References to Bernini’s “Ecstasy of St Theresa” permeate this book; Joelle’s scene contains one of them. In the sculpture the “lambent angel” pierces St Theresa’s heart again and again with an iron arrow, or spear. This action is effected symbolically throughout the book—this scene being one such instance, as Joelle hopes to stop her own heart—and quite literally, in one grisly instance.

pp 299-306 Poor Tony’s seizure and possible death achieves a dark symmetry with Joelle’s overdose and possible death. They are both addicts, but they are moving, respectively, away from and toward their addictions, both at great speed. Joelle’s obliteration is intentional, desired; Tony’s is, presumably, not. In both scenes there is a searing desperation.

Joelle’s descent is private, as hidden (veiled) as she can manage, though she does choose a crowded party as its site, withdrawing into the bathroom. Meanwhile, Tony withdraws in a bathroom, his condition rendered with unflinchingly graphic detail, eventually emerging to try and cop from a resource of last resort, the Antitoi brothers. (SPOILER? ALERT) These are the shopkeepers who possess both the master copy of the Entertainment and, until Pemulis bought it from them, several doses of the incredibly potent DMZ.

Both Tony and Joelle are surrendering—not Surrendering in the AA sense discussed later, but certainly letting go, so that survival becomes immaterial, and is fled from, in Joelle’s case. Tony’s descent has a reddish cast to it, leaving the reader to search for the contrasts that Joelle’s blue descent draws against his. His leather coat is red, his wig auburn. He is terrified to appear in public due to his involvement in the drug deal gone sour that left Bobby C dead, but he’s also the one who literally stole a woman’s (artificial, exterior) heart—perhaps a crude variation on Bernini’s tableau.

Poor Tony’s descent takes place on a subway car when he finally seizes (306), haunted by his sonless father, who loved the Red Sox and hated what Tony had become. Like the searchlights from Joelle’s helicopters, Tony’s final moments involve fingers—fat, gloved fingers he attempts to bite off (SPOILER? ALERT) in a macabre foreshadowing of his own circumstances in the back room of the Antitoi’s shop later on. Someone is yelling “Give him air!” which Tony hears as, “Give in, err”—the final call to surrender, to complete the descent and reach the nadir of his wasted life thus far.