Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  Struck transposes clearly nonadolescent uptown material like this into: ‘The variable of the game isn’t so much a matter of the train, but the player’s courage and will.’

  ‘The last few instants, vanishingly small, when the player may hurl himself athwart the expanse of track, across timber ties, creosote stench, gravel and scarred iron, amid the ear splitting scream of the whistle almost overhead, able to feel the huge push of terrible air from the transport’s cow catcher or express train’s rounded nose, to go sprawling in the gravel past the tracks’ other side and roll to see wheels and flanges, couplings and driving rods, the furious back and forth of transverse axles, feeling the whistle’s steam condense to drizzle all around —— these few seconds are known, familiar as their own pulse, to the boys who assemble and play.’ Struck’s now progressed to grinding the whole heel of his hand into his eyesocket, producing a kind of ectoplasmic pinwheel of red in there. Did like even pre-bullet railroad engines have flanges and cowcatchers and whistles that steamed?

  In a disastrous lapse, Struck copies hurl himself athwart, a decidedly un-Struckish-sounding verb phrase, verbatim into his text.

  ‘… that the true variable which renders le Jeu du Prochain Train a contest and not merely a game involves the nerve and heart and willingness to risk all of any or all of the five waiting beside you at the track. How long can they wait? When will they choose? Their lives and limb worth how much Queen-headed coin this night? More radical by far than the American youth automobile game of “Chicken” to which its principle is frequently compared (five, not one, different wills to comparatively gauge, in addition to your own will’s resolve, and no motion or action to distract you from the tension of waiting motionlessly to move, waiting as one by one the other five quail and save themselves, leap to beat the train…,’ and then the sentence just ends, without even a close to the parenthesis, though Struck, with a canny sense for this sort of thing, knows the analogy to Chicken’ll ring just the right bell, term-paper-wise.

  ‘Le Jeu’s historic best, reportedly, however, ignore their five competitors completely, concentrating their entire attention on determining the last viable instant in which to leap, regarding the last, final, and only true opponent in the game to be their own will, mettle, and intuition about the last viable instant in which to leap. These nerveless few, le Jeu’s finest —— many of whom will go on to directeur future jeux (if not, often, to membership in Les Assassins or its stelliform offshoots) —— these nerveless and self-contained virtuosi never see their opponents’ flinches or tics or the darkenings at corduroys’ crotches, none of the normal signs of will faltering which lesser players scan for —— for the game’s finest players frequently close their eyes entirely as they wait, trusting the railroad ties’ vibration and the whistle’s pitch, as well as intuition, and fate, and whatever numinous influences lie just beyond fate.’ Struck at certain points imagines himself gathering this Wild Conceits guy’s lapels together with one hand and savagely and repeatedly slapping him with the other — forehand, backhand, forehand.

  ‘The cult’s game’s principle is simple. The last of the six to jump before the train and land intact wins the round. The fifth through the second to leap have lost, but acquitted themselves.

  ‘The first in a round to quail and jump walks home from there, alone under the moon, disgraced and ashamed.

  ‘But even the first to quail and jump has jumped. Far beyond prohibited, not to jump at all is regarded as impossible. To “perdre son coeur ” and not jump at all is outside le Jeu’s limit. The possibility simply does not exist. It is unthinkable. Only once, in le Jeu du Prochain Train’s extensive oral history, has a miner’s son not jumped, lost his heart and frozen, remaining on his jut as the round’s train passed. This player later drowned. “Perdre son coeur,” when it is mentioned at all, is known also as “Faire un Bernard Wayne,” in dubious honor of this lone unjumping asbestos miner’s son, about whom little beyond his subsequent drowning in the Baskatong Reservoir is known, his name denoting a figure of ridicule and disgust among speakers of the Papineau Region vulgate.’ Disastrously, Struck blithely transposes this stuff too, with not even a miniature appliance-size bulb flickering anywhere over his head.

  ‘The game’s object is to jump last and land still fully limbed upon the opposite embankment.

  ‘Expresses are 30 k.p.h. faster than conventional transports, but a transport’s cow catcher mangles. A boy struck head on by a moving train is shot as from a cannon, knocked out of his shoes, describes a towering, flailing arc, and is transported home in a burlap sack. A player caught beneath a wheel and run over is frequently spread out along a hundred red meters or more of reddened track, and is transported home in a number of ceremonial asbestos and nickel mining shovels provided by the Jeu’s older and frequently dismembered directeurs.

  ‘As happens more often, purportedly, a boy who has dived more than half way across the tracks when he is struck and hit, loses one or more legs —— either there on the spot, if lucky, or later, under surgical gas and orthopedic saws applied to what are customarily violently angled masses of unrecognizably contuded meat.’ The paradox here for Struck as plagiarist, who needs something with sufficient detail to be able to basically just rehash, is that this thing here has almost too much detail, much of it purple; it doesn’t even seem all that scholarly; it seems more like the Wild Conceits Bayside C.C. guy seemed to get more and more tipsy as the thing went on until he felt free to make a lot of it up, like e.g. the contuded-meat bits, etc.

  What’s interesting to Hal Incandenza about his take on Struck, sometimes Pemulis, Evan Ingersoll, et al. is that congenital plagiarists put so much more work into camouflaging their plagiarism than it would take just to write up an assignment from conceptual scratch. It usually seems like plagiarists aren’t lazy so much as kind of navigationally insecure. They have trouble navigating without a detailed map’s assurance that somebody has been this way before them. About this incredible painstaking care to hide and camouflage the plagiarism — whether it’s dishonesty or a kind of kleptomaniacal thrill-seeking or what — Hal hasn’t developed much of any sort of take.

  ‘It is frightfully simple and straightforward. Sometimes the last of the six to jump is struck; then the second to last leaper becomes the last and victor, and advances, each winner literally “surviving” into the game’s next round, a sort of sextupled semi final, six rounds of six Canadian boys each: the, quote, “Les Trente-Six ” for the evening. The initial rounds’ boys —— those who have been neither the last nor the disgraceful first to leap —— are permitted to stay at the le passage à niveau de voie ferree, assembled to become the semi finals’ silent audience. The entire Le Jeu du Prochain Train is customarily conducted in silence.’ In a disastrous and maybe unconsciously self-destructive set of lapses, Struck rehabilitates the prose but keeps a lot of the hallucinatory specific descriptive stuff in, unfootnoted, though there’s obviously no way he could pretend to have been there.

  ‘The surviving losers from among the Les Trente-Six then swell the ranks of the silent gallery as the six nerveless winners —— the finalists, this night’s “attendants longtemps ses tours ” —— some bleeding or gray with shock, survivors already of two separate long delayed leaps and hairbreadth escapes, eyes blank or closed, mouths working in savored distaste, await the nightly 2359 Express, the ultra ionized “Le Train de la Foudre” from Mont Tremblant to Ottawa. They will jump athwart the tracks in front of its high speed nose at the final moment, each trying to be the last to leap and live. It is not rare for several of the le Jeu’s finalists to be struck.’ Struck tries to decide whether it’d be unrealistic or unself-consciously realistic to keep using his own name as a verb — would a man with anything to camouflage use his own name as a verb?

  ‘… that several among the La Culte du Prochain Train’s survivors and organizational directorate went on to found and comprise Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents is beyond sociohistorical dispute, though
the precise ideological relation between the B.S. era’s simultaneously chivalric and nihilistic Cult of the Train’s savage tournaments and the present’s limbless cell of anti-O.N.A.N. extremists remains the subject of the same scholarly debate that surrounds the evolution of northern Quebec’s La Culte de Baiser Sans Fin into the not particularly dreaded but media savvy Fils de Montcalm cell credited with the helicoptered dropping of the 12 meter, human waste filled, pie shell onto the rostrum of U.S. President Gentle’s second Inaugural.

  ‘As with the La Culte du Prochain Train, the Cult of the Endless Kiss of the iron mining regions surrounding the Gulf of St. Lawrence, coalesced around a periodic, tournament style competition, this one comprised of 64 adolescent Canadian participants, of whom one half were female. 6 Thus, the first round pitted 32 couples, each of which consisted of one male and one female Quebecker.’ Struck is trying to phone Hal, but gets only his room’s wearisome phone-machine-message; can you ever say pitted without some kind of against in there someplace later in the sentence? Struck envisions the Wild Conceit scholar utterly strafed by this time, the guy’s eyes crossed and his head lolling and having to cover one eye with a hand just to see a single screen, and typing with his nose. But with the apparent self-destructive credulity that characterizes many plagiarists, no matter how gifted, Struck goes ahead and puts in the complementless pitted, imagining forehand and backhand slaps all the while. ‘Of each pair, one half, designated by lot, filled his or her lungs to capacity with inhaled air, while the other exhaled maximally to empty his or hers. Their mouths were then fitted together and quickly sealed by an organizing cultist with occlusive tape, who then expertly employed the thumb and fore-finger of both hands to seal the combatants’ nostrils. Thus, the battle of the Endless Kiss had been joined. The entire lung contents of the designatedly inhaled player was then exhaled orally into the emptied lungs of his or her opponent, who in turn exhaled the inhalation back to its original owner, and so forth, back and forth, the same air being traded back and forth, with oxygen and carbon dioxide ratios becoming progressively more Spartan, until the organizer holding their nostrils closed officially declared one combatant or the other to be “evanoui, ” or, “swooned,” either fallen to the ground or out on his or her feet. The theoretics of the contest lends itself to an appreciation of the patient, attritive, grinding down tactics of traditional Quebecois Séparatisteurs such as Les Fils de Montcalm and the Fronte de la Libération du Québec, as opposed to the viciousness and brinksmanship of “Le Prochain Train”’s Root Cult’s disabled heirs. The figurative object of the “Baisser ” competition appears —— according to Phelps and Phelps —— to involve using what one is given with maximally exhaustive levels of efficiency and endurance before excreting it back whence it came, a stoic stance toward waste utilization that the Phelps somewhat cavalierly employ to illuminate the Montcalmistes’ relative indifference to a continental Reconfiguration that constitutes Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents’ whole “raison de la guerre outrance.” ’ b (back to text)

  305. (she thought then) (back to text)

  306. Some of her and Jim’s best arguments had been over the connotations of ‘Everybody’s a critic,’ which Jim had liked to repeat with all different shades and pitches of ironic double-edge. (back to text)

  307. Joelle van Dyne and Orin Incandenza each remember themselves as the original approachee. It’s unclear which if either’s memory is accurate, though it’s noteworthy that this is one of only two total times Orin has perceived himself as the approachee, the other being the ‘Swiss hand-model’ on whose nude flank he’s been furiously tracing infinity signs all during the Moment Subject’s absence. (back to text)

  308. = point of view. (back to text)

  309. In the Chestnut Hills Shopping Center on Boylston/Rte. 9, which the E.T.A. A-squad staggers past several times a week, on runs — a chain, but a very top-shelf and fine one, and the Brookline Legal puts on a particularly fine marine spread, and the boniface seemed to know Dr. Incandenza and called him by name, and brought him a double bonded without being asked. (back to text)

  310. Jargon: Film/Cartridge Studies. (back to text)

  311. Trilateral North American immigration bureaucracy. (back to text)

  312. Boston AA jargon. Y.E.T. is ‘You’re Eligible Too,’ a denial-buster for those who compare others’ ghastly consequences to their own so far, the point being to get you to see the street-guy with socks for gloves drinking Listerine at 0700h. as just slightly farther down the same road you’re on, when you Come In. Or something close to that. (back to text)

  313. The bureaucracy of Québecois pensions, which had ruled against buying anything more than a used Kenbeck pacemaker for Marathe’s father, now deceased. (back to text)

  314. See Note 304 supra. (back to text)

  315. Marathe’s malentendu of live-in. (back to text)

  316. Like e.g. the times C.T. and the Moms would come out to Logan to pick Mario and Himself up from a filming trip, Mario lugging gear, Himself damp and pasty from the cabin pressure and not enough leg-room and his sportcoat pockets always clicking with little plastic bottles with unopenable caps, and in the car up to Enfield Mario’s uncle would keep up an Opheliac mad monologue of chatter that would get Himself’s poor teeth grinding so bad that when they pulled over to the breakdown lane and Mario came around to open the door and let Himself lean out and be ill there’d be grit in the throw-up that came out, white dental visible grit, from all the grinding. (back to text)

  317. © B.S. 1981, Routledge & Kegan Paul Plc, London UK, wildly expensive hdcover; not on disk. (back to text)

  318. Maine having been lost altogether, recall. (back to text)

  319. Incandenza family idiom for leftovers. (back to text)

  320. Main library, M.I.T., East Cambridge. (back to text)

  321.

  Q.v. for a confirming example 1930h. Thurs., 12 November Y.D.A.U., Rm. 204 Subdorm B:

  ‘No, look, it’s still Rise Over Run. The derivative’s the slope of the tangent at some point along the function. It doesn’t matter what point until they give you the point on the test.’

  ‘Will this even be on the Boards? Do they go past trig?’ ‘This is fucking trig. They’ll give you word problems that may involve changing quantities — something accelerating, a voltage, inflation of O.N.A.N. currency over U.S. currency. Differentiation’ll save you half the time, all those triangles inside triangles to figure change with trig. Trig’s a Unit-bender on rate-changes. Derivatives’re just trig with some imagination. You imagine the points moving inexorably toward each other until for all practical purposes they’re the same point. The slope of a defined line becomes the slope of a tangent to one point.’

  ‘One point that’s in fact actually two points?’

  ‘You use your goddamn imagination, Inc, plus a couple prescribed limits. Which they won’t fuck with you on limits on the general test, trust me. This is a big pink titty compared to an Eschaton calculation. You move the two points you’re doing Rise-over-Run on infitesimally close together, you end up with a plug-in formula.’

  ‘Can I tell you about my dream now and then we’ll use the momentum from that to plow through this?’

  ‘Just write this on your wrist or something. Function x, exponent n, the derivative’s going to be nx + xn-1 for any kind of first-order rate-of-increase thing they’re going to ask you. This assumes a definable limit, of course, which no way they’re going to fuck with you on limits on the fucking Boards.’

  ‘It was a DMZ-dream.’

  ‘Do you see how you’re going to apply this to a rate-of-increase-type little story they’ll pose?’

  ‘It involved your experimental soldier, the massive dose.’

  ‘Let me just close this door, here.’

  ‘It was the Leavenworth convict. The one you said had left the planet. The one belting out Ethel Merman. It was horrific, Mikey. In the dream I was the soldier.’

  ‘So you’re now going to assume a r
eal you-know-what experience will be similar to the experience of a nightmare.’

  ‘Aha. Why nightmare? Why do you assume it was a nightmare? Did I use the word nightmare?’

  ‘You used the word horrific. I assume it wasn’t a romp through the heather.’

  ‘In the dream the horror was that I wasn’t really singing “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” I was really screaming for help. I was screaming like “Help! I’m screaming for help and everybody’s acting as if I’m singing Ethel Merman covers! It’s me! It’s me, screaming for help!” ’

  ‘A Rusk-level dream, Inc. A standard nobody-understands-me dream. The DMZ and Mermanization were incidental.’

  ‘There was a quality of loneliness to it, though. Unlike anything. To be screaming that I’m screaming for help instead of singing a show-tune and to have the wardens and doctors gathered around snapping their fingers and tapping their feet.’

  ‘Have I mentioned DMZ doesn’t show up on a G.C./M.S.? Struck tracked this down off an obscure Digestive-Flora footnote. It’s the fitviavi-mold base. If the stuff shows up at all it shows as a slight case of imbalanced yeast.’

  ‘I thought only girls got yeast.’

  ‘Inc, don’t be so fucking naïve. Data number two is Struck is halfway toward nailing down that this stuff’s original intent was to induce what they called quote transcendent experiences in get this chronic alcoholics in the like 1960s at Verdun Protestant Hospital in Montreal.’

  ‘How come everywhere I turn this fall now everybody’s suddenly mentioning Québec in all kinds of radically different contexts? Orin’s calling with some protracted obsession about anti-O.N.A.N. Québecers.’

  ‘… Tavis up and announces Québec are the lambs in this year’s fundraiser. Your Mum’s from Québec.’

  ‘And then this term of all terms I take Poutrincourt’s insurgency class, which is basically a Québecathon.’