Infinite Jest Liveblog Part 5: The End?

credit to: Cody Hoyt

So... I finished it. I knew beforehand that the ending was abrupt, but I wasn't expecting that. Not that I thought it was a bad ending, though, don't get me wrong. To be honest I think it was the best (and quite possibly only) way it could have ended. I still threw it down and yelled "what the fUCK?" several times upon getting to that last sentence, but I'm glad it ended how it did.

I could write about the whole "what the heck happened" thing, but there are a lot of people online who have done a much better job of that than I ever could, so I'll leave that part to them (N.B. of course these are still their interpretations, and not all of these people agree with each other on what happened, but for me at least it was nice to read up on what other people thought so I could compare it with my own ideas and reach some kind of conclusion on it for myself)

http://dfan.org/jest.txt

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend

https://tradepaperbacks.wordpress.com/wordswordsword (I've been reading along with this liveblog, and have found it tremendously useful, so I definitely suggest it to anyone who's planning on starting this book).

And as for interpretations on the book itself, I highly recommend this essay on it - a little long, but totally worth it and really really brilliant: http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/thesisb.htm

Now, my own thoughts... I have a lot but I'll try to keep them brief.

Throughout the whole book I kept thinking of the Entertainment as something fatally pleasurable. As described by Steeply, Marathe, and many other characters, you keep watching it over and over because it's the greatest, most wonderful feeling you have ever experienced and you never want it to end. This, however, isn't ever actually stated as being true. Yes, people watch it over and over again but because nobody sees it and lives to tell the tale, we don't actually know what exactly it is that keeps people watching. All we know of the Entertainment comes from JOI and Joelle, and Joelle's description of it is that describing it as fatally pleasurable was meant as a joke, like her saying that she wears her veil because she's fatally beautiful, but in actual fact she's horrifically disfigured. So what if the trap isn't pleasure, but understanding? Entertainment doesn't necessarily have to be pleasurable, it just has to be entertaining - and there's something inescapably lonely about Entertainment for its own sake. Like the novel Infinite Jest, maybe the film Infinite Jest doesn't give you closure - that somehow through the death-as-mother scenario (in Gately's dream Joelle's final word to him after he wants desperately for her to kill him is "wait") you are fatally compelled to go back to the beginning and try to understand it, and each time you do it makes a little bit more sense, you take it apart a little more and things start to come together but that only leads to more and more questions until you're trapped in an endless cycle of questioning. You cannot escape unless you get rid of your own innate need to understand - literal "analysis paralysis". Remind you of anything?

W/r/t the ending, I think the thing is that finding out what happens next isn't the point. You're plopped down into this novel's universe for a while, you experience it, and then you're pulled right back out again. To use a quote from Gately, "it occurred to him if he died everybody would still exist and go home and eat and X their wife and go to sleep". JOI's passages about figurants and his attempts to not have them in his own films also seemed to me to reflect the novel itself. We get Hal, we get Gately, but we also get Erdedy and Wardine and Poor Tony and Barry Loach. Every single character is equally im- and unimportant.

The length of the novel, the complexity of it, seemed to me to not be some kind of turn-off or a sign that DFW was trying to be smarter than everyone else in the room, but in fact the opposite. Reading this book is kind of like going through your own little 12-step program, one of the largest results of which is learning to get out of 'analysis-paralysis'. Understanding every tiny minute detail, getting all of the math and the politics and the tennis and the long involved drug terminology -- that's not the point. The point is that you don't have to 'get' everything, you don't have to break everything down and have a hold on it all. It felt like a kind of trap for "intellectuals", we who are so used to always being right, always having the answers for everything. We, like Hal "obsessed with the fear the [he] was somehow going to flunk grief-therapy", are obsessed with getting this book "right". "Here was a top-rank authority figure and I was failing to supply what he wanted ... I'd never failed to deliver the goods before".

When you really think about it, most of what this book attempts to do is get across simple, single-entendre principles. Like the cliches of Boston AA that sound simple and banal but are incredibly difficult to actually implement: cliches about love, and family, and happiness, and what success actually means. By placing them in a long and complex novel, we are almost tricked into repeating these cliches for ourselves -- and as with a 12-step program, once you repeat a cliche long enough you start to believe in it.

“The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. ” 

- "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction"