Wow. A guy takes a week off and the IJOASa/oBC just keeps going: Laura reports having finished the book, which I think is just ridiculous of her, but what can you expect from a Canadian? Meanwhile, I am thrilled to hear from Dan that his "leave the book at work and only read it during lunch" initiative was a miserable failure.
Maria has found time in the midst of returning to the States from Japan to post a couple of really thorough and thoughtful entries. Katie, an IJ veteran, provides a nice snapshot, literally, of her initial experience reading the book. And while in Chicago last weekend I was able to touch base with a few IJOSASa/oBC members like Aden, Joe, Ransom, Chad, and Mark, who are reading the book even if they're not blogging about it, which I think is just fantastic. (I asked Aden, who's from Tempe, if the city-wide shadow-casting phenomenon is accurate as described in the Marathe/Steeply scenes, and he said it's probably not possible, at least in any of the Arizonan cities or mountain ranges he's familiar with. But I'm not yet ready to give up hope.)
For my own part, I suppose that I am flagging, as Laura pointed out in response to my last post. Perhaps my initial goal of documenting every single chapter and page was overly ambitious, though I do think it was important for the first couple chunks I covered. Now that my notes are a couple hundred pages in, the book has plateaued a little, and I think most of the introductory matter is behind us.
So forgive me if my notes going forward aren't as thorough as they have been. I'm still going to try and pick up a few threads from my first two posts, and continue to provide background that first-time readers will find helpful.
This time around I want to focus on pp. 135-211, a relatively small chunk that still dispenses a wealth of information and also begins to effect the narrative's circling/looping/settling motion that I tried to describe earlier. Maria and Laura have done a better job that I at articulating the book's fractal nature, so I won't try to flog that dead barrel of pigeons any longer. But I think you'll find—I hope you'll see—that here is where the chapters begin to pool, balloon, ferment, etc. so that we're returning to already-established characters and themes: getting deeper rather than broader. And then the next time around I'll hope to cover even more pages.
pp. 137-138. The introduction to Ennet House, with some background on the Boston Metro AA community. As far as I've been able to tell, the anonymous founder of Ennet is not someone who appears anywhere else in the book—it's not Himself, or anyone else we already know. Though I welcome efforts from anyone who'd like to challenge me on this or offer theories as to the identity of the Guy Who Didn't Even Use His First Name.
pp. 138-139. This is the beginning of a section of seemingly miscellaneous documentation from various sources. Notice that the chapter headings in this chapter swell in length and contain rampant editorialization, even as the sections they head seem to shrink. This first one is a hilarious email thread in which an insurance claims adjuster passes along the first page of a claim from Dwayne "Dooney" Glynn, who will later show up as a recovering addict at Ennet House. His problem, aside from getting into an accident at his construction job, is that "he was trying to do the job alone." This reinforces the theme of the isolation and loneliness from which so many of the novel's characters suffer. More to the point, his problem is that he was trying do exactly that which Lyle proscribes on p. 128—"Let not the weight thou wouldst pull to thyself exceed thine own weight"—resulting in another instance of hyperbolic, Looney-Toonsesque physical comedy. A lot of people in this book fail to heed Lyle's advice.
pp. 140-142. More insight into Hal in the form of a paper he wrote in seventh-grade. Pretty funny stuff here, but also instructive. Whenever I read this passage I end up trying to fit the novel's main characters into one of the two hero-categories Hal describes, McGarrett or Furillo. They don't map over perfectly, but these are the incomplete formulations I've come up with: McGarrett = people of action = Don, Orin, Pemulis, Mario, Marathe, Lenz, terrorists. Then, Furillo = people of reaction and/or inaction = Hal, Himself, Erdedy, Gompert, Steeply, Joelle. Again, these aren't perfect, and maybe I'm trying to force too much into too narrow a category.
pp. 143-144. Special Agent Hugh Steeply goes undercover and into drag as journalist "Helen" Steeply to write a hilariously bad article for Moment magazine about a woman whose exterior artificial heart was stolen by a transvestive who happens to be Poor Tony, in case you didn't catch that.
pp. 144-151. This is a really entertaining chapter that I can envision being part of a separate abortive short-story idea by DFW (this might also be true of the preceding short and seemingly random snippets). This is the first time I've read this passage since the advent and near-ubiquity of iSight built-in video cameras, video-chat technology, and online telephony, and I am astounded at how accurately DFW characterizes this technology and the culture to which it gave rise.
A coupla-three examples: I don't video-chat very often, for precisely the reasons DFW gives: it requires full-on engagement with my interlocutor and nothing less than total attention to the conversation. I can't wash the dishes, do my laundry, or be naked while I'm chatting through video. Video-chat is crappy for multi-tasking.
Also, we haven't gotten quite to the point of polyurethane masks to wear while we video-chat, but Apple does offer its silly Eiffel Tower backdrops for iSight users, along with various other imaging effects.
Finally, while the technology may not have run its course, the impulse to eschew video- and other forms of online chatting is strong among many people I know, and I share it. We're not reverting to rotary-telephones and landlines or handwritten letters, by any means, but good old cellphone conversations and the relatively leisurely prose of emails is beginning to seem more attractive in direct proportion to the ubiquity and convenience of videophony—for me, at least.
pp. 151-156 give us more of ETA and some wonderful little scenes with Pemulis' clean-urine business etc. I am curious about the paragraph at the top of p. 156, where the narrator acknowledges that Himself was "revered as a genius in his original profession [optics?] without anybody ever realizing what he really turned out to be a genius at, even he himself, at least not while he was alive." Would that thing that he turned out to be a genius at be film? More to the point, the genius required to create a lethally entertaining film?
pp. 156-169. As if to answer those questions, this chapter provides one of the book's most sustained scenes, presented entirely as a monologue delivered by James Incandenza, Sr., to his ten-year-old son Jim, aka Himself. I can't overstate how important this chapter is, though you probably had no trouble twigging to that.
For one thing, we now have a more or less conclusive way of sussing out the chronology of Subsidized Time—something that many lazy reviewers, including Dale "Peckerhead" Peck, have claimed is impossible (Burn 26). If Himself is fifty-four at the time of his death in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, and ten in 1960, that means that the YT-SDB is 2004. According to the listing of Subsidized Years provided later in the book, the first year of Subsidized Time was the Year of the Purdue Wonderchicken, which would place that year in 2002. Most of the novel's main action occurs in the Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment, which is 2009. The Year of Glad is 2010. Stephen Burn is particularly helpful in figuring this out, and the chronolgy at the end of his book is indispensable.
Meanwhile, Carlisle points out that, given the timeline of Subsidized years, the lengthy chapter headings on p. 140, p. 142, and p. 172 contain glaring errors in chronology (presumably intentional on DFW's part) when they state the years since Himself "passed from this life" (140, 172) and "took his own life by putting his head in a microwave oven" (142). What do these discrepancies, not to mention the aforementioned editorialization within the chapter headings' authorial voice, say about the narrative reliability and identity of the novel's third-person, omniscient narrator?
Anyway. The James Incandenza Senior/Junior chapter in the Winter of 1960 is dense with thematic information. There's the physical/body theme: the way Senior chastises his son and Marlon Brando for an apparent lack of grace and the careless way they yank objects to them—echoing Lyle's advice about pulling great weights—though it turns out Senior actually reveres Marlon Brando's kinesthetic awareness, which only appears careless. By telling his son to table his intellectual/optics pursuits—urging him to put down his Columbia Guide to Refractive Indices Second Edition and pick up a tennis racket—is Senior trying to erase the Cartesian mind/body distinction and make him (Junior) into a MacGarretesque man of action? Stephen Burn argues that "the elder Incandenza" (Himself, or Junior in this chapter) grows up to continue collapsing the Cartesian duality, a "reductionist strategy" that is "recognizably materialist" (Burn 44). Incandenza Senior wanted to figuratively divorce his excessively cerebral son from his head, a task Junior would take upon himself forty-four years later—quite literally, and with a microwave.
There's the ubiquity of spiders in the garage and in Senior's flashback—he obviously loathes them, yet he knows the species name of the black widow—Latrodectus mactans, which ends up being the name of one of Himself's production companies. He (Senior) even believes, rather ludicrously, that it may have been a spider he slipped on when experienced his career-ending injury as a youngster.
There's the omnipresent theme of paternal lineage, expectations, and failure. This passage contains a variation on one of my favorite lines in the book: "Talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost" (173). Senior says: "Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever" (168).
We get the story of Senior's spectacular and painful failure during the one and only tennis game his father ever attended. (Maria has written beautifully about this scene.) He is insistent that he was "in [his] body"—again, that materialistic invocation that also echoes Hal's deceptively simple statement "I am in here," from the first chapter.
We get an exquisitely agonizing description of his drunkenness—the alcoholism he would bequeath to Himself. At the end of the chapter he is maudlin: clearly drunk, profusely apologetic and regretful. Here we see a distillation of so many of the book's other themes and characters: failures, losers, addicts, sinners. The chapter ends with Senior drawing the obvious but tragic parallel between his injured self being dragged off the court and his adult self being dragged into the house at the end of a bender: stooped, wounded, destroyed.
pp. 172-176. Tennis and the feral prodigy. A wealth of information about ETA and the formative years of a competitive tennis palyer. Also a rare glimpse inside Hal's head, assuming this monologue is a true representation of Hal's thoughts on tennis (which I'm going to go ahead and assume it is).
Notice that at the top of p. 174 there's reference to "justifying your seed," not for the first time. The multiple meanings of seed are pertinent. Consider what it would mean for fathers, specifically James Senior or Junior, to justify their seed, i.e. their offspring. Consider whether either of them succeeded in this. Consider that the biblical caracter Onan, after whom North America is now named, was guilty of spilling his seed frivolously, wasting it—of not justifying it.
On p. 175 we get the first of a couple references to Fellini's 8 1/2. Consider that during the main action of the novel, in November of YDAU, there have been eight and a half years of Subsidized Time. (I'm not suggesting that this neat little coincidence is anything more than a neat little coincidence—though it might be. This book is full of these neat little coincidences, of course, and I love them.)
pp. 176-181. More Ennet House. (I fucking love the Ennet House scenes; there could never be too many of them.) This is, of course, a series of one-sided dialogues—monologues, really, delivered by various residents. Using contextual information from here and elsewhere you can figure out who some of the speakers are, and the order is this, as near as I can tell: Nell Gunther, Tiny Ewell, Morris Hanley, [not sure], Alfonso, [not sure—maybe Gately], [not sure—maybe Gately], [not sure], Randy Lenz (probably), Bruce Green, Tiny (again), Lenz (probably) again (probably), Wardine (probably), [not sure], [not sure], Tiny (again), [not sure], [not sure], [not sure], [not sure].
pp. 181-193. Madame Psychosis! This is not the first we've heard of her, technically; we know that the "incredibly potent" drug DMZ, which Pemulis recently procured, also goes by the name Madame Psychosis. Now we know that she is the mysterious hostess of a cult-favorite late-night program on MIT's radio station FM 109-WYYY FM (which consider that, as far as I know, FM radio dials don't go that high). Also, Carlisle posits that horizontality is a recurring theme in this book: characters and objects are are often horizontal, lying down, inactive. Are the Ys in the station's call letters, then, supposed to indicate the Y (vertical) axis of a Cartesian coordinate system? Are we supposed to look for vertical divergences from the book’s prevailing horizontality, and what bearing does the Cartesian coordinate system have on the Incandenza's patrilineal obsession with the Cartesian mind/body distinction?
"Madame Psychosis" is an obvious pun on the Greek word metempsychosis, which means the migration of the soul from one body to another (Burn 57), a phenomena that occurs metaphorically throughout the book, and—the argument could be made—literally, on a couple of occasions. Madame Psychosis broadcasts from a radio studio deep within the MIT student union which is shaped and decorated, rather grotesquely, like a giant human head with various internal components—the tongue, the eyeballs, the brain and its parts—in various degrees of exposure. Here's that motif of disembodied heads again, rendered hugely and literally.
Consider that this chapter opens with the description—mediated through a radio performer's imitation of his father—of a football punter who we can all but assume is Orin. Consider that Madame Psychosis should know exactly who Orin is, given what we eventually learn about her. Consider that Mario, who is huge-headed much like Don Gately, is one of MP's most devoted listeners. Consider that Mario should also know exactly who MP is, given what we eventually learn about her.
Consider that the student engineer, who works within the aural medium of radio, would opt to enter/exit the union (head) through the side (ear) doors rather than the front (eye) doors. Consider the importance of televisual entertainment to this novel, and the significance of Mario's and MP's and the student engineer's apparent preference for the more esoteric and outmoded audio forms of entertainment.
The narrator's description of MP's show could also, at times, apply to Infinite Jest itself: "The monologues [chapters?] seem both free-associative and intricately structured, not unlike nightmares" (185); "it tends to give you the feeling there's an in-joke that you and she [DFW?] alone are in on."
pp. 193-198. A description of the former military-hospital complex in which Ennet House is located. The seven buildings of the complex "resemble seven moons orbiting a dead planet" (193); I wonder if it's significant that on the previous page a caller to MP's show points out that "the moon, which of course as any sot knows revolves around the earth, does not itself revolve" (192).
On p. 194 we learn that Don Gately has never seen a ballet—consider his ignorance of ballet in light of his possibly balletic movements at a crucial moment later in the novel. On p. 197 we learn that the curtains in the female side's bedroom windows are almost always billowing; consider the significance of billowing movement elsewhere in the novel. (Kate Gompert knows from billowing, we'll later learn.)
Ennet is at the bottom of a hill, on whose flattened and denuded top we have ETA. This is about as blatant a metaphor for class divide as you can have in literature, and we see it in countless books, none of which come to mind right now. Ennet's residents, most of them indigent financially and otherwise, climb the hill to serve the needs of the wealthier Enfield residents, including the ETA community. This hill and other geographical features of Enfield will factor prominently into the class divide and the interaction of the Ennet and ETA populations.
pp. 200-211. This is one of my favorite passages in the novel. I have typed out the first few pages of this passage I don't know how many times over the past decade as I've quoted and reproduced it in various places. I remember being so taken with this chapter when I first read the book in my student flat in London in December 1998 that I immediately went up to the tiny cramped computer lab on the top floor of the flat and waited my turn at one of the obsolete-even-back-then-PCs so I could type this chapter into a Word document and save it on one of my little floppies and add it to my Canon of Excerpts from Brilliant Literature.
And that's before I even knew Thing One about—or had any first-hand knowledge of or experience with—Substance dependency.
A lot of these "exotic new facts" (200) are obviously true, and even intuitive; some of them I'm not so sure about and wonder on whose authority DFW is reproducing them. Some of them are fictive—who really knows how much a forged passport will cost in the fictional 2009 of the novel?—and some of them must be based on research. But some of them seem so complex and true—especially the ones about Substances and addiction—that I can't imagine how DFW would know them without having immediate, graphic experience with them.
There's been a lot of speculation in critical literature and on the Internets about some pretty personal facets of DFW's biography and what his own experiences might have been with depression and/or Substance addiction. For my own money, I don't really care what they might have been—that's his business, and what matters here is how accurately and vividly he's rendered them within a work of fiction.
But I have to say, it's hard for me to imagine how any human intellect, however advanced, could produce passages so evocative, and observations about depression and addiction so dead-on, without having had some very up-close experiences with same.
As we know from the acknowledgments, DFW did a lot of research for this book—especially the staggeringly good AA passages coming up—by going to Boston Metro AA meetings. But this sort of stuff goes beyond that. This stuff is … well, I've done a lot of reading about addiction and alcoholism, both fictional and non-, most of it written by self-proclaimed experts, and none of it comes anywhere near this level of emotional acuity. Like depression, addiction is a disease and a cultural phenomenon that, at its most involved and advanced, defies verbal articulation. But there are a couple passages that come close, and this is one of them.
Posted: July 25th, 2008 under IJOASa-oBC, Literature.
Comments: 4
