The End Again

"What Wallace liked best about the essay (and what I, undoubtedly for that reason, have come to like best myself) was its defense of Infinite Jest’s ending. The book’s “lack of resolution” was the subject of a disagreement with his editor--one of the only ones, Wallace recalled, upon which he held a hard line. “And it has indeed caused bitter gnashing of personal teeth,” Wallace wrote, “that so many reviews hated the end. So your essay -- which has a slightly different take on the function of silence and restraint than I did, but is very, very close (plus complimentary about it, which makes you I think the first person to be so in any kind of print), made me feel good, real good. I hope readers other than you can see what the end’s at least trying to do (whether it succeeds is, I’ve accepted, not for me to judge).” I hope other readers see it too."- Excerpt from the introduction to a thesis paper on IJ by Chris Hager.

Here is a link to the thesis: http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/thesisb.htm

And here is what DFW approved as being an interpretation of what the end of his novel was attempting to accomplish (in the process of putting it all here, you get most of the essay linked to above):

"The prevailing early critical take on this novel -- ‘This book is very long, frequently brilliant and frequently confusing, and it totally lacks closure’ -- suggests unsurprisingly that, while its traditional qualities are evident to everyone (including qualities of a postmodern, experimental tradition), whatever is original about it is nothing if not mysterious. Sven Birkerts, the lone diagnostician of Infinite Jest’s relevance to American literature, claims the novel takes the ‘next step’ in fiction because it has “internalized some of the decentering energies that computer technologies have released into our midst” (108), and several subsequent writers have in turn quoted his conclusion. Birkerts in fact is wrong, but he is on to a little something -- Infinite Jest’s structure does internalize something of late twentieth-century technological energy, but something remarkably ‘centering.’ The text inscribes a parabolic curve (diving into an engaging world & plot, then turning and pulling out of that world and lumbering towards a close as gradual as any novel’s beginning), oriented symmetrically about a vertex (a crucial point, though different from a climax) located at the novel’s precise mathematical center. And, as with most parabolic curves nowadays, Infinite Jest’s text functions rather like a satellite dish: the resolution that reviewers complain the novel lacks isn’t in the text, but sits chronologically & spatially in front of the novel proper, which, as a satellite dish, serves to focus myriad rays of light, or voices, or information, on that central resolution without actually touching it.

Birkerts’ assessment is meanwhile woefully incomplete: he fails to ask (and answer) the question, Why write a formal analog of late twentieth-century communication -- something which, by its very nature, needs no elucidation (the state of communication in the late twentieth century is: everybody has a terminal hook-up to everything and to endless information)? The answer is that the text’s structural ambition is a necessarily speculative organizing trope for a narrative of speculation -- speculation on the notions of ‘author’ and ‘character,’ on the nature of fiction after postmodernism, on the limits of language and on the novel’s own boundaries."

...

"Infinite Jest’s particular profound void is a great chronological gap, and its untouched and untouchable focus (the absence which has raised reviewers’ ire) is a seminal crisis that occurred in the gap. It concerns Harold Incandenza and Donald Gately, the two major characters. Hal Incandenza narrates the novel’s first seventeen pages, which comprise a kind of prefatory epilogue to the novel proper: most of the subsequent thousand pages take place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, one year before the novel’s beginning (Year of Glad), and never catch up⁴. The first seventeen pages reveal that some crisis has occurred, but it occurred some time after the novel’s next thousand pages.

Our proof that something noteworthy has happened is that, in those first seventeen pages, Hal Incandenza -- during an interview at the University of Arizona for admission & a lucrative tennis scholarship -- has a mysterious seizure, and looks to all present to be only borderline homo-sapiens. Mysterious, because Hal is narrating the novel at this point -- his mental faculties appear, to readers, intact -- and because throughout the subsequent (chronologically anterior) novel, Hal will be not just functional but absolutely brilliant. His account of this fateful interview at Arizona coincides with his later (in the novel) / earlier (in his life) quirky, precocious intelligence: his observations of his surroundings are meticulous, his awareness of his own being, extraordinary, and extraordinarily peculiar. “62.5% of the room’s faces are directed my way, pleasantly expectant,” as he looks around. “My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it. I compose what I project will be seen as a smile” (5). For the first ten pages, though, he says nothing aloud, his coaches & teachers from the Enfield Tennis Academy his champions. “I’d tell you all you want and more,” Hal says to readers, as university officials grill him about a low SAT score, “if the sounds I made could be what you hear” (9) -- and can anyone hear sounds precisely as they were made? one must wonder. When finally he must speak aloud, we readers hear Hal say the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated, say the kinds of things only a prodigious eighteen-year-old mind could say. Those present hear only “subanimalistic noises and sounds” (14).

The calm of Hal’s narrative wavers not a bit during the eloquent statement that is to all the world a seizure, not even when university officials take him to the emergency room -- a routine to which Hal seems accustomed: “There are, by the O.E.D. VI’s count, nineteen nonarchaic synonyms for unresponsive, of which nine are Latinate and four Saxonic” (17). Hal’s heard them all, apparently, from all manner of ER physicians, none of whom presumably thought Hal could understand any of them. “I am in here,” Hal says on a few occasions during this section, a mute defense that he lives within his tennis-prodigy’s body, even if his prodigious mind is trapped by a tragically literal inability to communicate with those around & unlike him, “who use whomsoever as a subject” (9). Within pages, a year-younger Hal will be demonstrating incomparable intelligence, formidable tennis, and full communicative function; as for what brought about the change, Hal ‘says,’ “Call it something I ate” (9). At least a few of the novel’s many threads of plot suggest what Hal ‘ate,’ but Wallace never depicts the eating. The plot lines that best promise cataclysm concern the novel’s two life-threatening material entities."

...

"Early in Infinite Jest, Michael Pemulis, Enfield Tennis Academy student and friend of Hal, has lately obtained DMZ, a rare hallucinogen. DMZ, Pemulis tells confidantes & fellow recreational drug-users Hal & Axford, is something like LSD multiplied by something exponential. It was “used in certain shady CIA-era military experiments” (in Infinite Jest’s 21st century, the CIA has long-since given way to the Office of Unspecified Services) to the end of “getting the enemy to think that their guns are hydrangea, the enemy is a blood-relative, that sort of thing” (28). Whether these facts come out because Pemulis has done genuine research or just read Great Jones Street is a little hard to say, given that Pemulis is an eccentric among eccentrics, with a poster of someone called ‘the Paranoid King’ over his bed and a “habit of looking first to one side and then over to the other before he says anything. It’s impossible to tell whether this is unaffected or whether Pemulis is emulating some film-noir-type character” (211). Pemulis, Hal and Axford plan a foray into this drug’s recesses of potential for a few weeks hence.

Shortly before his death in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, Hal’s father, James O. Incandenza, completed work on a film, Infinite Jest -- an entertainment so hideously perfect it prompted Jim’s grisly suicide involving a microwave oven⁵. The movie more or less died with J.O., who left behind instructions that it be buried with/in (or perhaps in place of, given the details of his death) his head. It comes to our attention, and to the attention of 21st-century America, only because a copy of it shows up in a conspicuously unmarked package at the home of an important Arab-Canadian in Boston, who watches it… and watches it… and doesn’t stop watching it. The curious and the would-be rescuers who come to his home each in their turn become catatonic before the transfixing movie they encounter in his living room.

With these two hazards lying in wait, it’s no wonder something happens to Hal. It’s the novel’s ambiguity regarding which one is responsible for Hal’s transformation that has inspired complaints of lack of resolution. (One reviewer writes, “It takes a special kind of nerve to write a book with roughly the mass of a medicine ball and then end it so abruptly and unsatisfactorily that the poor reader perversely finds himself wishing it longer” [Kipen, 1].) The ‘poor reader’ indeed is left speculating: maybe when Hal was trying to kick his marijuana habit and Mike Pemulis was telling him that his body would always need a Substance, some substance, just maybe a less metabolism-discombobulating substance than marijuana, Hal turned to the incredibly potent DMZ, one dose of which left him un-addicted & physically able but spastic & uncommunicative; maybe a copy of his dad’s movie finally made its way to its rightful audience (James Incandenza began work on Infinite Jest to combat what he saw as his son’s retreat into solipsism) and Hal, somehow transcending the entertainment-hungry people dropping like flies in Back-Bay apartments watching the thing, managed to watch it without dying, eking out a private existence but unable ever again to communicate; maybe a Quebecois terrorist group organized a mass distribution of the movie and all America’s seen it and, after the initial widespread death, managed to turn a catatonic, entertainment-hungry existence into a semblance of a functional life and now see Hal, the one person who resisted the temptation to watch it or who could transcend its effects, the one remaining real human being, as some kind of freak; maybe Hal can communicate in some mystical way, maybe just with readers or with the ghost of his father, who has visited him and spoken with him and taught him to communicate in a language-transcendent supernatural way that only works with ghosts or readers; for that matter, maybe Hal’s been called on by a ghost to avenge his father’s death, and his inability to communicate is the result not of entertainment-hungry catatonia but of paralysis and guilt and a maladjusted relationship with his adulterous mother.

The reason the novel doesn’t tell you is that it doesn’t matter what ‘happened’ to Hal, because the novel conveys the unspeakable relevance of what did happen -- the ‘literary object,’ in Sartre’s terms -- far less ambiguously, and can do so only thanks to the ambiguity of discrete events. With the parabola as structural trope, that curve’s mathematical properties can indicate the significance of what happened to Hal (not the real event that is the cause). It is the ethereal focus of the text’s parabolic curve, the thing that happened to Hal, and whatever did happen lies at the intersection of every character’s and event’s narrative vectors -- vectors the novel notes but doesn’t follow through all the way to intersection -- vectors which, if they do not move towards a center by chance, are drawn there by their author: not Dave Wallace but James O. Incandenza, the optical wizard whose inventions and cinematic work with special lenses surely at least once employed a reflective parabolic curve."

...

"And at the curve’s outer edges -- just after the beginning and shortly before the end -- another pair of mirror passages offers the greatest hint readers get as to Hal’s (and Don Gately’s) fate. En route to the emergency room during his seizure, Hal remembers a scene that takes place in the chronological gap between the novel’s end & beginning: “I think of John N.R. Wayne, who would have won this year’s WhataBurger, standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father’s head” (16-17). More than nine hundred pages later, Don Gately (who never meets Hal, during the novel) “dreams he’s with a very sad kid and they’re digging some dead guy’s head up and it’s really important” (934). If Gately dreams forward to the same moment Hal remembers, that moment seems a likely candidate for Intersection of Vectors, Focus, &c.; but as tantalizing as the revelation of that moment is, it’s still pretty ambiguous. We don’t know how Don Gately & Hal Incandenza ever teamed up, and we don’t know whether they find Infinite Jest in Hal’s dad’s head or whether Quebecois terrorists have already seized it in their apocalyptic plot to undermine the United States. In Gately’s dream, the movie’s not there, in the head -- but it’s only a dream. From Hal we learn that fellow tennis-player John (‘No Relation’) Wayne would have won their upcoming tennis tournament, but something went wrong -- certainly something did for Hal, too -- and, of finding the film and not finding it, we can only speculate which is the worse fate. We don’t know whether Hal & Wayne & Gately end up watching the lethal film.

And we didn’t know, when we read Hal’s account of that episode on page 17, who Don Gately is, who Hal’s father is, or why anyone might want to dig up his head; when Gately dreams the same scene, it’s as significant as Hal’s description was gibberish, to readers. That accrual of information can suggest to the reader a simply linear narrative, but the novel’s ending’s much-touted ‘lack of resolution’ is a relentless reminder that this narrative is no mounting line of plot & progress of data, and that all those ambiguities are vitally important. Near the novel’s end, passages revealing new information concerning the novel’s intricate plot of Quebecois terrorist conspiracy become fewer and farther between, and the closing passage doesn’t even take place in the book’s present tense, but years before, in Don Gately’s memory. In the last sentence, a drugged Don Gately (who’s long recovered from his Demerol addiction, we’ve learned in the novel) comes to, “flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out” (981).

The effect of this ending (evidenced in part by reviewers’ near-unanimous disgruntled dwelling on it) is to leave the reader as beached as Don Gately, the narrative tide run out and taken all it might yet have held for readers with it. As in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, the tidal imagery here at the end of Infinite Jest reminds readers (and ought to have reminded reviewers) that the repeatable never resolves, nor certainly does it end, except to regenerate or reincarnate. Infinite Jest maps the ceaseless tidal crescendo & decrescendo with the parabola, the descendant of gravity’s rainbow (the map of rocket flight), and it is not,

as we might imagine, bounded below by the line of the Earth it “rises from” and the Earth it “strikes” No But Then You Never Really Thought It Was Did You Of Course It Begins Infinitely Below The Earth And Goes On Infinitely Back Into The Earth it’s only the peak that we’re allowed to see, the break up through the surface, out of the other silent world, violently… (Pynchon, 726)

The great and infinite ellipse breaks not only the earth’s surface, but another illusory boundary: as Pynchon envisions the parabola coming from a “silent world” into what is visible, the parabolic text of Infinite Jest breaks from the ‘undifferentiated silence of inspiration’ (Sartre) into visible language, cut off to readers at its breaking & re-entry points. Calling for ‘resolution’ here is tantamount to calling for a novel utterly disconnected from its inspiration, its substrata; for a novel that ruins the speculative richness of its ambiguity with the stultifying precision of data."

...

"And it seems to be working, J.O.’s labor of love for Hal; as everything around him is increasing strange (especially Ortho Stice’s visitation), Hal begins thinking in the rhetoric of his father’s pleas that he ‘get out of himself,’ care for something, anything, outside of himself, producing a paragraph that unifies all the novel’s characters’ addictive pursuits -- drugs, tennis, entertainment, and the writing and reading of novels. Here near the end of the novel, Hal has begun narrating again:

It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately -- the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly…. Stice asked whether I believed in ghosts. (900)

Hal might not himself believe in ghosts just yet, but everything is pointing towards a time when he will -- when, perhaps, he will understand the extent & nature of his communication with them (one, in particular) and turn wholly out of himself, to connect with them, to the detriment of his outward appearance’s conformity with social protocol."

...

"The appearance of the wraith, though, makes such expression suddenly and immensely possible for Gately (if only to one, ghostly reader -- but also, of course, to all readers of the novel), and the novel’s last two hundred pages feature far more exposition of his history than the first eight hundred did. Having heard the penance-narratives of Ewell, Day, et al., he’s been exposed to a kind of literary tradition, which he can emulate or to which he can respond, mediating it through his own history. The only thread of narrative that seems to wax during the novel’s last hundred pages (central plot lines like Quebecois conspiracy are fading fast) consists of Gately’s memory of the period of his life shortly before he ‘Came In’ to AA, and got sober; and it’s this narrative that ends the novel, with Gately coming out of a horrific interval of drug use, his waking on the beach signifying that Gately has also awakened to history, confronted and begun to serve time for his history; and that this is another reason the novel ends without ‘resolution’ -- it ends precisely when Gately finishes, when the telling of it is no longer part of his penance. Infinite Jest has an unmistakable introduction: en route to the ER, Hal Incandenza predicts that “It will be someone blue-collar and unlicensed, though, inevitably -- a nurse’s aide with quick-bit nails, a hospital security guy, a tired Cuban orderly who addresses me as jou -- who will, looking down in the middle of some kind of bustled task, catch what he sees as my eye and ask So yo then man what’s your story?” (17). Infinite Jest does begin as Hal’s story, but it makes no promises of remaining so; it’s Gately’s story by the end, and just as Hal opened the book explaining What Has Happened to him, Gately will close it once he’s made the same explanation about, and for, himself."

...

"Assuming Don Gately can’t actually remember ‘the wobbly blur’ through which he looked up out of his crib, his dream has a direct hook-up with Jim Incandenza, here. So while Gately’s pretty clearly seeing some variant, at least, of Infinite Jest, he might well be seeing some non-lethal version, the unimpaired artistic vision from which J.O. began, his mind’s intent, as he meant Hal to see it; for probably the most interesting thing we learn about the film from Don Gately’s dream’s report of it is Death’s one-word closing proclamation: Wait. Which, ironically, is precisely what viewers of the actual film refuse to do, lending the film its awesome power -- they insist on watching again, immediately, at all costs. Their essentially solipsistic desire for continued gratification is the impulse J.O. sought to combat in his son, sought to replace with a willingness to wait, to forbear addictions and endure the ineluctable pain of sobriety, isolation, of years before Death will set you free and be your mother, years spent committed to things outside the self, concealing that the only persistent, and ultimately selfish, desire is for Death’s liberty -- concealing an innate self-loathing, a guilt-ridden fear that you’re ever only the sum of your lusts (‘However truly you believe there’s a sickness to existence that can never be cured, if you’re depressed you will sooner or later surrender and say: I just don’t want to feel bad anymore’), for which you must always do penance.

Hal Incandenza’s and Don Gately’s penance might consist in saving the Continent from disaster, and if Infinite Jest failed to reach Hal, it at least reached Don Gately; and if Don Gately (spurred on by his dreams from J.O.) enlisted Hal’s help in a last-ditch effort to save the Continent, he perhaps accomplished what Jim had envisioned: to engage Hal in the ‘black miracle’ of caring about something. If Hal, a chronic analyst who could give Hamlet a run for his money, refuses to hear his father’s ghost (“It’s always seemed a little preposterous,” he muses, “that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt, never once doubts the reality of the ghost [900]”), then it’s left to Don Gately as grave-digger to unearth some gravely significant head; and if he can only get Hal to begin, ‘Alas, poor Yorick,’ then Infinite Jest and all that Wallace has given the phrase to mean will also have to exit his mouth, never again mute. Ultimately, it’s unclear whether J.O. or Gately is the real author of Hal’s transformation, and ultimately, it makes no difference."