pp 317-320 Marathe and Steeply begin to get at the tactical purpose of the Entertainment. While Marathe is vague about his cell’s involvement in the samizdat’s dissemination, he does speculate about why it is the most effective weapon an anti-US terrorist could employ: because there’s no coercion involved. The Entertainment can simply be offered, and the people of the United States—a society which has repeatedly demonstrated that it will choose that which is both most pleasurable and most lethal, that it will reliably act against its best interests—will choose it. The first deliberate choice to consume the Entertainment is all it takes; like an addict’s first hit of a Substance, the self-control will immediately begin to slip away.

“Now is what has happened when a people choose nothing over themselves to love, each one. A U.S.A. that would die—and let its children die, each one—for the so-called perfect Entertainment, this film. … Us, we will force nothing on U.S.A. persons in their warm homes. We will make only available. Entertainment. There will be then some choosing, to partake or choose not to.” (318)

Wallace also presages the Bush era (very cleverly and presciently, by having a future [2009] character voice a fictionalized version of a real-world eventuality that hadn’t yet transpired in 1992-1995, when Wallace was writing the book) and the Bush doctrine’s response to 9/11, when Marathe says, “Your Sans-Christe Gentle was in this one part correct: ‘Someone is to blame‘” (319). An enemy must be identified, and blame must be placed. But never internally; never on the Self. Always externally, on the Other. Us versus them, with us or against us, etc.

Likewise with the platitudinous appeals to Freedom, wielded like a cudgel against dissent and dissatisfaction: “Always with you this freedom! For your walled-up country, always to shout ‘Freedom! Freedom!’ as if it were obvious to all people what it wants to mean, this word. But look: it is not so simple as that. Your freedom is the freedom-from: no one tells your precious individual U.S.A. selves what they must do” (320).

So what happens when no one tells our precious selves what to do, and we are more or less able to do pretty much whatever we want? We confuse the ability to do something with an imperative to do it. Self-will run riot, in the language of AA, produces a nation of people out of control, indulging every appetite without limits. Marathe observes the way postmodern American culture turned its back on God and religion during the latter half of the 20th century: “Someone taught that temples are for fanatics only and took away the temples and promised there was no need for temples” (319).

By Marathe’s lights, we threw the baby out with the bathwater—getting rid of spirituality’s good bits along with religion’s bad ones, supplanting our temples with the religion of the Self and the primacy of individual appetite fulfillment until we had no spiritual compass. “And no map for finding the shelter of a temple. And you all stumble about in the dark, this confusion of permissions. The without-end pursuit of a happiness of which someone let you forget the old things which made happiness possible” (320).

pp 321-342 8 November, Interdependence Day. Gaudeamus Igitur. (Latin: “Let us rejoice.”) Not the most joyful of I-Days, this, during the YDAU, with a chaotic Eschaton about to unfold at ETA, the upperclassmen in various states of chemical incapacitation, and Ennet house getting a new, veiled, resident.

Eschaton. From the Greek eskhatos, the theology of Judgment Day, of last things. The map expands, stretching over four tennis courts, to represent the world. Confusion arises between the world and its representation, as Pemulis, Penn, and Ingersoll argue about just where the real world and the game world begin and end. Where is the boundary? Are the principal characters in Infinite Jest plagued by a similar inability to distinguish between real and imagined worlds? Perhaps addicts like Hal, Gately, Himself, and others find the world flattened into a map they’re unable to navigate, a map even more difficult to traverse when it is obscured, as Eschaton’s map is obscured and eliminated (demapped) by snow. They are the people Marathe describes: without a map to find the shelter of a temple, wandering amidst a confusion of permissions and a without-end pursuit of happiness.

Otis P. Lord (or “O Lord” as the narrator playfully calls him at one point) plays God until he loses control and is destroyed by his subjects. (The world turns its back on God.) Ingersoll strikes. Chaos ensues. Hal is paralyzed. Lord travels in a parabola through the air and punctures the horizontal plane of the monitor’s screen. The chapter ends, as so many do, in “a moment of chaotic stasis” (Carlisle 209).

pp 343-379 Oh, hello, My Favorite Part of the Whole Book.

The narrator, sometimes appearing to be situated in Gately’s perspective and at other times not, acts as a kind of surrogate for the collective wisdom of AA and Recovery. Here, Marathe’s ideas about the sources of (and solutions to) spiritual unhappiness are reframed in the language of AA and the context of Meetings. Marathe’s “precious individual U.S.A. selves” take the form of the addicts.

An addict without a higher power is like the unhappy U.S.A. individual without a map to find the shelter of a temple. An addict who would take refuge in irony or avoid responsibility by placing external blame on the Other is doomed. These truths are demonstrated by the speakers in this chapter: the new guy who “makes an ironic gesture” and whose Sharing is “so clearly unspontaneous, rehearsed” (367) receives a cool reception from the astute, suspicious Group, while the nervous, unvarnished new guy is embraced because he is unironic and Real, surrendering to the Group.

Likewise with causal attribution, i.e. external-blame-placing, as practiced by the girl who’s also a member of the “splinter 12-Step Fellowship” whose acronym reads WHINERS (372) and who had to share a room with her catatonic foster sister who was repeatedly diddled by her father (note the recurrence of Bernini’s St Theresa in this chapter). A horrific, sad story, but attributing her ensuing stripping/Substance usage to it spells “death, speaking-on-Commitments-wise” (370). But a contrast is here presented too, in the form of the “round pink girl with no eyelashes at all” (376) and her story, which incorporates no causal attribution into her addiction narrative, but whose story is flat-against-the-wall tragic, so that I found myself choking up when I first read it in a laundromat on Gloucester Road in November 1998 while waiting for my whites to dry, and have had the same reaction with each subsequent read-through.

What AA does for the addict is this: it removes the element of self-will just long enough for the addict to Give Up, to Surrender, to Come In. It puts the brakes on the confusion of permissions and slows down the stumbling about in the dark and halts the “without-end pursuit of a happiness.” It allows the addict to subsume the will and the Self in Getting Active With Your Group and Giving It Away. Addicts in Recovery become apostates from the religion of the Self which Marathe decries and become singularly focused on the Group, on the fellowship and Service (a more benign version, perhaps, of the ways in which Marathe and Schtitt both advocate a sublimation of the self in the service of the State).

AA gives the addict a temple (however artificially or temporarily, until he constructs for himself a more meaningful, enduring one) in which he can hew to the slogans and the regimen and the Commitment to a Higher Power—all of which may, yes, at first seem hackneyed and trite and Limp to Gately and countless others, running counter as they do to fashionable Western notions of postmodern irony and cynicism and the relentless construction of the new in place of the old … but at the far extreme of which lies, perhaps, Too Much Fun.

Is that the alternative to all that Limp sloganeering and kneeling? Is Too Much Fun preferable for the characters in this novel, for our precious U.S.A. selves? See what Too Much Fun has wrought: addiction to Substances and Entertainment, a gradual but inexorable vacuity of the soul and slow spiritual death in this real world—and in the satirically hyperbolic world of Infinite Jest, a nightmarish death immediately following that fleeting glimpse of the yellow smiley face, whether adorning cartridges containing the lethally entertaining Entertainment or atop the shoulders of Gately’s Sergeant-at-Arms yanking to their doom the people who get off their knees to go back Out There, to leave the temple.