All right, then. Fuck you, Dave. The sixth meeting of the fucking Infinite Jest Online Appreciation Society and/or Book Club is hereby called to fucking order.

pp 407 - 442 I’m going to try not to say anything elephant-in-the-room obvious about the Eric Clipperton chapter. In fact, I’m going to try and accomplish the seemingly impossible feat of getting through the rest of this novel, and my discussion of it, without mentioning the events of September 12 any more than necessary. Which might not be possible. And who’s to say how much is necessary? For now, I’m doing this for myself, for the selfishest reasons, because once I’ve started something, leaving it unfinished is horribly depressing, a sign of my failure to follow through; also, I’m clinging to some poorly reasoned notion that by staring into the center of the greatest work by a man who I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to think about as little as possible over the past week, by finally after a week’s embargo reading eloquent summaries that I wish were the last word but know are not, by going through it rather than around it, I’ll “get over” it all somehow.

But that’s all much easier said than done, so bear with me.

The placement of the Clipperton chapter’s second half directly before the chapter where Gately is cleaning the Shattuck Shelter is especially effective. For young privileged tennis prodigies who get too wrapped up in their singular goal of getting to the Show, Eric Clipperton’s saga provides a grim reminder that there might be more important things in life. An even stronger dose of perspective, of course, might be provided by Gately’s job janitoring the Shattuck Shelter for Stavros Lobokulas every morning at 0500h—because despite the indignities described in extensive, vile detail on 435-436, Gately is Grateful.

We return to the Interdependence Day banquet/film screening via Clipperton via Gately via the History of Reconfiguration, circling the narrative and resettling with Hal and the rest of the kids at the table, now narcotized by excess dessert not unlike Steepley and Marathe’s hypothetical child after too much candy. We are asked by Mario’s take on history to believe that the Subsidization of time was inspired by Orin’s gravity-defying punting, as witnessed by Gentle in BS 2002. The narrator allows that this is probably an exaggeration, but it reminds us of the Incandenza clan’s influence on history, as we’ll later learn just how Himself developed the technology behind annulation, allowing Gentle and the United States to send from itself that which cannot return, much like Orin does with his football.

pp 442-449 Back to Gately and AA, delving further into Gately’s early biography. We learn about his heartbreakingly bad childhood, his now-vegetative mother, the provenance of the cognomen Bimmy, the MP, Herman the Breathing Ceiling, etc. In sum, we are developing a more complete, sympathetic picture of Gately. This is what makes Gately the greatest protagonist in Western literature since maybe Holden Caulfield, in my ever-so-humble et cetera. Especially in the past week, in various online memoria, Don Gately has been compared to both Stephen Bloom and his own creator with fearsome regularity and tragic aptness. Now is perhaps the only time these comparisons won’t seem grandiose, and that window is already closing.

Because it’s here that Gately hears the joke about the fish, the joke that DFW himself told at his now heavily and deservedly reprinted and referenced 2005 Commencement Speech at Kenyon, a text I read back when it was first published but which I haven’t been able to make it all the way through at any point during the last ten days—a text I’ve been avoiding, along with a host of others penned by and about the man, shunning them like old favorite songs forever associated with exes. It concluded thusly:

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness—awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

I hope that one day soon I can look at things like the Kenyon speech with an honest eye. For now, all I can say is that I’m glad he included the fish joke in his speech—that he reprised it, as it were, from its use in this chapter (445). Lying wide awake late at night, with no people or Entertainments to distract me, I find myself intoning in my head with varying degrees of conviction the thought: “This is water. This is water,” and haunted by the same hollow desperate haunted thought: He obviously didn’t make 50 without wanting to do what he eventually did. He forgot this is water.

But Gately apparently hasn’t, at least not yet. “And his dreams late that night … seem to set him under a sort of sea, at terrific depths, the water all around him silent and dim and the same temperature he is” (449). Think about this sentence and Gately’s underwater state in relation to the final line of the novel and Gately’s position relative to the sea.

On pp 449-450 We get a very brief section about Hal’s dream where he is losing his teeth, which dream-image can have all kinds of meanings, none of them good. The section concludes with WYYY’s new broadcasts sans Madame Psychosis, “but not without any spoken voice as foreground” (450)—the haunted state of no-voice recurring throughout the book, of characters being unable to speak or otherwise make themselves understood: Hal, his father, DuPleiss, Gately (later) and very soon the hapless Lucien Antitoi (against-you).

pp 475-489 I love and dread this chapter: I love it for the description of Gately driving the Aventura through Boston to Bread & Circus, and for the descriptions of Boston and its denizens as Gately passes them, alternating with his interior thoughts. I love the descriptions of the college students at the bottom of 477 and the Portugese and Brazilian neighborhoods on 479. I love that “there is something baggy about the sky” (478)—the return of the breathing-ceiling imagery. And then on the top of 480 we get an elegant, nearly seamless transition of perspective from Gately to Lucien that follows the trajectory of “a thick flattened M.F. cup, caught by a sudden gust as it falls, twirling … and blown spinning all the way to the storefront of one ‘Antitoi Entertainent’” (480). Gately is the one who set that cup in motion, with the Aventura, and its collision against the shop’s door mimics the knocking sound that will soon enough herald the AFR’s arrival. This is the second time Gately’s actions have been mistaken for those of more sinister agents, the first one of course being DuPleiss’ death, which was either a botched burglary or geopolitically calculated terrorist assassination, depending on your POV.

Lucien is the saddest example of one who cannot make himself understood. Like Mario, he is supposedly damaged, though like Mario he seems more content than his supposed intellectual superiors. He and Bertrand are the ones who received the DMZ tablets and the Entertainment from Sixties Bob, the “wrinkled long-haired person of advanced years” (481) acting as a fence for Gately and Kite, who unwittingly stole the Entertainment from DuPleiss. The Antitoi’s then sold the DMZ to Pemulis, of course, but the Entertainment’s still in their shop, though of course they don’t know that, but Marathe and the AFR do.

Notice the omnipresence of glass and other reflective/reflective surfaces, mirroring (sorry) the refractive properties of other surfaces in the novel, most notably Himself’s innovative lenses. My brother recently came up with an interesting theory that Mario represents, among other things, a lens. For one thing, he’s named after Jim’s father’s father, who made a small fortune by inventing X-Ray Specs (313). There’s his obvious facility with cameras and lenses, but also his thought and intellect are distorted, in a way: “Hal’s brother is, technically, Stanford-Binet-wise, slow, the Brandeis C.D.C. found—but not, verifiably not, retardd or cognitively damaged or bradyphrenic, more like refracted, almost, ever so slightly epistemically bent, a pole poked into mental water and just a little off and just taking a little bit longer, in the manner of all refracted things” (314, emphasis mine).

But so anyway. The AFR come into the shop and it’s soon clear that their leader is, in fact, Marathe. This complicates our heretofore more or less sympathetic feelings toward Marathe, since he has almost certainly ordered Bertrand’s execution and is about to preside over Lucien’s. None of glosses of this scene I’ve read—not Carlisle’s, nor any of the theses I’ve skimmed over at The Howling Fantods—fail to realize the significance of this scene, particularly page 489, where Lucien actually dies (and which happens to be the mathematical midpoint of the novel’s main text (which begins on p 3 and ends on p 981, so: 981 - 3 = 978 ÷ 2 = 489)].

I’ve always contended that if this novel has a climax, it is Lucien’s death. This scene is the convergence of two of the novel’s massive forces—Gately and the Separatists—and is also among the tightest and most complex scenes in terms of action and import. All of the balls are in play by this point, and from here on out it’s a game of attrition; from here on out Wallace will only be removing elements of the structure he’s erected, rather than adding to it. Corraling nearly a thousand pages and hundreds of characters and dozens of plot threads in such a way so that your novel’s climax arrives at its exact median—well, it doesn’t get more meticulous than that. This book is the furthest thing from random or haphazard, and I invite those who might suggest otherwise, especially at impolitic junctures, to kindly go fuck themselves.

(For the record, I did not notice the arithmetic of the page numbers on my own, though I wish I could claim I did. That neat observation, and the one I am about to discuss, came from one Mr Chris Hager, and I am duly grateful.)

Lucien’s death is the only one which takes place during the novel’s main action (November YDAU). It is possibly the book’s most poetic and tragic death, even more so than Himself’s. But it also offers a morbid sort of promise, of transcendence and liberation. There is much to suggest that the characters who die in this novel are freed from various afflictions, most notably the failure to adequately communicate. This is certainly true of Lucien, who, “as he finally sheds his body’s suit … [is] newly whole, clean and unimpeded, and is free, catapulted home over fans and the Convexity’s glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world’s well-known tongues” (489).

A couple things are happening here. First, Lucien’s muteness is immediately undone, and he is able not just to communicate, but to communicate with bell-like clarity and in many languages at once. Unless I’m mistaken, this is the novel’s first instance of truly paranormal activity of the sort which will only increase as we proceed. What’s more, Lucien is sounding an alarm, and a call to arms. Who is he attempting to warn? And what is the warning? Is he rushing off to tell Jim Incandenza that the AFR is coming for his surviving family members? It would certainly seem so, given Himself’s imminent appearance as the Wraith. In death, can Himself and Lucien understand and communicate all that they could not in life?

A third thing might be happening here, which I hesitate to even bring up, but here goes. The man himself warned against sifting through writers’ works for clues about their psyches, but here we all are doing it anyway. And how can I or any other even halfway observant and still bereaved reader not see in this passage the narrator’s and author’s hope that death brought transcendence, that, as so many religions teach us, that death is not the end, but only the beginning? How can we not shudder from now on when we read Lucien’s death or so many of the other deaths of characters the man created only to destroy, and how can we interpret these deaths in any other way?