On Endings and Endnotes

I started this journey with endnotes.  It seems fitting, and altogether appropriate, to end with endnotes.

There have been various thoughts/methods for accounting for/dealing with the endnotes.   I liked the suggestion that the back and fro was reminscent of a game of tennis, and I had some sympathy with the reader who was reading chunks of ten footnotes at once to save on page turning!

Skipping the endnotes, however; not an option.

At this point I consider myself as something of an afficionado of endnotes, with some competence in the field of spotting and classifying the different species thereof:

• Simple clarification. Sub-divided into:
• Informative, but neither useful nor interesting (unless someone would like to correct me on either score!) ie fine pharmaceutical detail with regard to Substance.
• Useful information to render the text clearer, ie derivation of acronyms.
• Tangential
• Does not give the expected information, adressses another issue entirely
• Addresses the expected issues, but in a fashion which can only be described as discombobulating.
• redirection ie Q.v. here Note 301 sub
• Exposition ie JOI filmography
• Large portions of the story!

I could go on… but this is mainly procrastination to avoid discussing IJ’s ending. So just one last word on endnotes; I don’t know why DFW used endnotes. I would like to think that the to and fro-ing was intended to indicate how far the reader is prepared to slavishly go in pursuit of (the) entertainment. But the truth is that the endnotes become enjoyable. Particularly because you don’t know whether you might get a pay-off, or zilch… That’ll be the addictive seeking thing, then.

But and so and but so I finished IJ.

Usually, as the conclusion of a story hoves into view, end of book anxiety kicks in. It’s funny, but this did not happen with Infinite Jest. Sure, I had had a few pangs of worry during the first half of the book, wondering if anything would come together, at all, ever… but by the last hundred pages or so an unnatural calm had descended.

It had, quite reasonably, crossed my mind that an anti-confluential ending, endings, might be likely. I was resigned, and more than resigned, to this. One hundred pages from the end the book has given you so much that you don’t feel that you are owed anything further.

That was reason. In reality, yes, there was a pang of disappointment.

The Entertainment remains a matter of speculation, the skull retreiving antics of Hal and Don Gately fail to materialise. As many others have done, I immediately returned to the beginning to read the first seventeen pages again. (Pleasingly annular in itself.) But it wasn’t until I had been on a quick reconnoitre of fellow infsum participants that I found a way to view the ending with satisfaction. The moral of my tale: do not attempt IJ without back-up!

Infinite Summer, a recap of recent posts:

• Week 12 – ‘It Happened Again’ or ‘Why I Can’t Do It Anymore’
• Week 11 – Infants, Over-sized Feral, and Otherwise
• Week 10 – Blue Skies and Proust
• Week 9 – Matters Mainly Mathematical and Meta

“It Happened Again” or “Why I Can’t Do It Anymore”

As Infinite Summer proceeds I have become aware of a tendency to occasionally seek refuge in a glib post.

I am tempted to do so again this week, in large part as a result of Don Gately’s fight against the temptation to Entertain:

“This was a trauma-pro in a white coat here making reassurances of legitimate fucking use.  Gehaney heard him; what the fuck did the Flaggers want from him?  This was hardly like slipping over to unit Unit #7  with a syringe and a bottle of Visine.  This was a stop-term measure, a short-gap-type measure, the probable intervention of a compassionate unjudging God.  A quick Rx squirt of Demerol – probably at the  outside two, three days of a Demerol drip, maybe even one where they’d hook the drip to a rubber bulb he could hold and self-administer the Demerol only As Needed.”

On the last occasion when this became an issue I had just (tearfully) read DFW’s exposition on anhedonia…

“The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts.  Everything becomes an outline of the thing.  Objects become schemata.  The world becomes a map of the world.  An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location.  Ie the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA, Unable To Identify.”

…and clinical depression:

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square.  And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing.  The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise.”

I am fortunate enough to have never experienced addiction to Substance, anhedonia or clinical depression.  But even so it was impossible to read these sections without experiencing a strong inclination to Identify.  But and also a disinclination to claim to understand what cannot be understood, only felt.  Whilst I am in no way entitled to do so, the delusion of Identification is a part of DFW’s genius.

I mention this, this week, partly in response to the first anniversary of DFW’s death, which was this Saturday, 12th September. 

I have tried to read Infinite Jest without reference to the suicide of DFW, in part because I would not expect to have a claim on the life of a living author, and no more have I a claim on an author in death.  But, as with the passages above, as the anniversary came upon us I found myself once again straying beyond the boundaries of entitlement.

Infinite Summer, a recap of recent posts:

• Week 11 – Infants, Over-sized Feral, and Otherwise
• Week 10 – Blue Skies and Proust
• Week 9 – Matters Mainly Mathematical and Meta
• Week 8 – Spitting in the Wind

Infants, Oversized Feral, and Otherwise

A developing theme over the last hundred pages or so, and one which, at a lesser level, I have tried to ignore for much of the book, is children, infants, and abuse.

There are many references to Joelle’s own personal Daddy which, whilst not conclusive is, at best, creepy.  Less easy to dismiss is the word ‘diddled’ which appears quite frequently, and invariably causes a wince.  I have to wonder why DFW chose that word, which clearly lacks the necessary gravitas in relation to the matter addressed.

Even more disturbing is the scene involving Pemulis’ brother, Matty, who is raped as a child, by his father.  No surprising use of language here, just a horrifying passage to read.

In endnote 269, Orin’s one time doubles partner, Marlon Bain, holds forth on definitions of abuse.  Some rather strange comparisons are made between the nature of tangible abuse and parenting so perfect as to be harmful.

Endnote 304 features the welcome reappearance of the feral infant:

“…that the prenominate oversized infants reputedly do exist, are anomalous and huge, grow but do not develop, feed on the abundance of annularly available edibles the overgrowth periods in the region represent, do deposit titanically outsized scat, and presumably do crawl thunderously about [...] essentially passive icons of the Experialist gestalt.”

On page 793 the truth of Joelle’s own personal Daddy is finally revealed. Does repressed intent constitute abuse? It seems fairly clear, that in this case, it does.

And then the section which concludes with the complete, and horridly memorable, infantilisation of Kevin Bain:

“So Hal’s most vivid full-colour memory of the non-anti-Substance Meeting he drove fifty oversalivated clicks to by mistake will become that of his older brother’s doubles partner’s older brother down on all fours on a Dacronyl rug, crawling, hampered because one arm was holding his bear to his chest, so he sort of dipped and rose as he crawled on three limbs towards Hal and the needs-meeter behind him, Bain’s knees leaving pale tracks in the carpet and his head up on a wobbly neck and looking up and past Hal, his face unspeakable.”

As the home straight comes into sight, questions abound, for which I have, at best, only tentative answers but, being late with this post the spoiler line has moved on and an additional thirty pages makes this revelation, a clue to the nature of the Entertainment:

“A magically entertaining toy to dangle at the infant still somewhere alive in the boy [...] To ‘bring him out of himself’ “

We also find Don Gately, as a relatively large infant encaged by the bars of a crib, and as a large adult encaged in a crib-like hospital bed.

Can’t quite pull it all together, but it becomes clear that none of the child references are isolated. I remain uncomfortable with the use of child abuse as symbology, but as the connection between infantilisation and the Entertainment becomes apparent, then so does the abusive nature of over parenting, by parents or State.

Infinite Summer, a recap of recent posts:

• Week 10 – Blue Skies and Proust
• Week 9 – Matters Mainly Mathematical and Meta
• Week 8 – Spitting in the Wind
• Week 7 – Providentially Rodential

Blue Skies and Proust

I am [not] here.   Hopefully.  I should be in Scotland, having written this several days ago, before having read the week’s quota…  Frankly, it’s all a bit of a mess.

I am still reading Swann’s Way, 140 characters at a time, on Twitter.  I suppose the manner of Proust’s writing is so all encompassing that it would be surprising if one could not find a quote for every conceivable occasion, but I have been particularly interested in applying it to IJ.  Here is a tweet I found earlier:

“spectators looked, as into a stereoscope, upon a stage and scenery which existed for himself alone,”

As I travel around the infsum blogs this phrase is so obviously applicable to Infinite Jest.  Many “spectators” are sharing their personal view of the “stage and scenery,” but, as the various strands are recast into the contexts through which each individual can best arrive at an understanding, the variety is quite astonishing.  Allow me to demonstrate:

Infinite Detox

Infinite Tasks

Infinite Zombies

And there are many other worthy candidates, also.

But here is the other Proustian quote that caught my eye this week:

“The only thing wanting is the necessary thing, a great patch of open sky like this.”

It has been an odd summer.  Every (rare) glimpse of blue sky and scudding clouds has put me in mind of Infinite Jest.  Proust talks here of sky in the context of the one desirable thing, and I think he is using it to delineate freedom.  Not a novel notion.  But one that does not exist in Infinite Jest.

JOI and his father dismantle the notorious box spring in a room which is “white, blue and powder blue.”  That phrase suggested blue skies and fluffy clouds, but in the aftermath of the Eschaton debacle  the waiting room is seen to be decked out with a scary amount of blue and

“also the overenhanced blue of the wallpaper’s sky, which the wallpaper scheme was fluffy cumuli arrayed patternlessly against an overenhancedly blue sky, incredibly disorientating wallpaper [...] “

Further, we learn that:

“Hal loathes sky-and-cloud wallpaper because it makes him feel high-altitude and disorientated and sometimes plummeting.”

Avril’s notorious grammatical corrections are also committed through the medium, naturally, of a blue pen.  Blue is beginning to become associated with control.

Blue skies not such a good thing, then.  Too much freedom, à la Marathe, or a deceptive freedom which doesn’t actually exist?  I’m not sure but, recently sitting in a gazebo in a formal gardens, I glanced upwards.  Perhaps this view of the sky is more representative of IJ…

To add a bizarre and, perhaps, irrelevant, personal note, the “cage” gave an illusion of safety, where the open sky had not previously implied danger.

Infinite Summer, a recap of recent posts:

• Week 9 – Matters Mainly Mathematical and Meta
• Week 8 – Spitting in the Wind
• Week 7 – Providentially Rodential
• Week 6 – An aside

Spitting in the Wind

So here’s the thing. Each week I trawl the infsum sites, and am invariably dazzled by the depths of insight to be found there. When I find a blog post which investigates the same subject that I have chosen to touch upon it’s like comparing a thesis, (theirs) with a scrawled infant school handwriting exercise, (mine.) I’m not bitter [weeps into laptop] but I do feel like redundant.

Which is why I have chosen, this week, to investigate the usage of spit in Infinite Jest.

The last hundred pages or so have featured rather a lot of spit. Like many themes in Infinite Jest the significance does not become apparent immediately. To mention spit once could be considered misfortune, twice starts to look like carelessness, three times is significant.

Spit is encountered first in the context of excessive saliva production as a symptom of marijuana-detox, as drool after Hal’s anaesthetised dental encounter, and finally in the bizarre form of the synthetic saliva-monger…

And this is significant how?  Well, it is representative of a pattern that appears repeatedly throughout the novel.  Reading the book in discrete chunks it is noticeable that mentions of some seemingly random object or attribute will suddenly show a marked increase in frequency, before falling off sharply,  the fluctuations of various items overlapping and recurring erratically.  Examples so far include: rats, square heads (who could forget the skull-less head of the non-feral infant conforming to the shape of the box it is contained within…?), bugs, smiley faces, the colour blue and, of course, spit.

This meshes beautifully with an item on seeking that I read last week. (My thanks to @WaltPascoe via @adamdrici for highlighting this extraordinarily apposite article.) My simplistic interpretation is as follows: The activity of seeking is more rewarding than the actual reward, creating a cycle of seeking. But repeatedly performing the same search becomes unsatisfying, novelty is required too. The shifting pattern of keywords in Infinite Jest constitutes an exact parallel, and this is why it is quite literally “addictive.” The irony is that if this cycle of seek and reward is habitually of short duration it can “make it nearly impossible for us to give sustained attention to a long piece of writing.” (Incidentally, the research into this phenomenon was initially performed on rats apropos the conversation between Marathe and Steeply)

But I’m damned if I can figure out what spit represents.  Fortunately, the recursive nature of the book suggests that spit will return at some point, in a light bulb burst of clarity.  That, or I’m spitting into the wrong spittoon…

As the boundaries of good taste recede rapidly into the distance there is little point now in flinching from the “potty” incident. An unfortunate accident involving Mrs Lenz and the toilet facilities of a greyhound bus:

” ..so forcefully ensconced into the recesstacle that she was unable to extricate, [...] and Mrs Lenz’s plaintiff shouts for Help were unavailed by the passengers that were arising from back up off the floor and rubbing their sore noggins and hearing Mrs Lenz’s mortified screams from behind the potty’s locked reinforced plastic door, but were unable to excretate her [...] and Mrs Lenz was wedged beyond the reach of arm-length and couldn’t reach the deadbolt no matter how plaintiffly she reached out…”

So but this kind of word play occurs all the way through Infinite Jest, but this was the first really concentrated burst that I noticed. And so but then I am going to have to read the whole thing again to extract all this heretofore unlooked for goodness and I don’t think my fast slipping grasp of grammar will survive the ride.

Infinite Summer, a recap of recent posts:

• Week 7 – Providentially Rodential
• Week 6 – An aside
• Week 5 – Perception, Anticonfluence and The Emperor’s New Clothes
• Week 4 – Madame Pyschosis/Joelle van Dyne/metempsychosis*