Bear with me.
First of all, I'm assuming that there's a one-year gap between the action at the end of IJ, which takes place on 11/20 YADU just before the WhataBurger tournament, and the scene with Hal at the beginning of IJ, which takes place just before the WhataBurger tournament during the Year of Glad.
If you want to check out the evidence for this one-year gap, go over to the discussion titled Infinite Jest (V?). And if jumping back and forth between topics in different discussions reminds you--and it sure reminds me--of turning back and forth between the text of IJ and the endnotes, then that's a good thing, no?
Anyway/whatever: On page 17, Hal remembers John Wayne "standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father's head." This had to happen during the one-year gap because Hal and Gately never meet in the novel.
On page 934, Gately has the same dream, but he's dreaming of something that will happen in the future, a kind of deja-vu in reverse: "He dreams he's with a very sad kid [Hal] and they're in a graveyard digging up some dead guy's head up and it's really important, like Continental-Emergency important . . . and later the sad kid is trying to scream at Gately that the important thing was buried in the guy's head and to divert the Continental Emergency to start digging . . . [and finally] the sad kid holds something terrible [JOI's head exploded in the microwave oven] up by the hair and makes the face of somebody shouting in panic: Too Late."
So what're they trying to dig up? Maybe it's the master copy of the entertainment; maybe it's the antidote, an anti-entertainment, but all the cartridge masters "designated Unviewable . . . were, in fact, along with his case of special lenses, [and this is important too, but even more stuff inside of square brackets gets too messy] interred right there with J.O. Incandeza's dead body" (n. 160, p. 1030).
A footnote to this note reveals that JOI is buried in "the now over-lush potato-growing country . . . [in] Quebec, just over the border from what is now the eastern Concavity." In another fever nightmare, Gately "dreams he's riding due north on a bus the same color as its own exhaust, passing again and again the same gutted cottages [abandoned during Reconfiguration? (see pp. 398-407)]. Previously, Gately has never left the metro Boston area in his entire life, and "due north" is in the direction of irradiated wastelands and giant feral hamsters--Quebec.
So well yeah, Gately and Hal are at JOI's grave in Quebec digging up what's left of his head, but it's "Too Late"--capitalized and italicized, no less--to avert the "Continental Emergency." Maybe the anti-entertainment is unavailable or maybe the master copy is missing, but whatever it is is Out There.
Could be, too, that it's been Too Late for a while. Obviously, the mid-Eastern medical attache received a copy. On her way to the party where she tries to commit suicide, Joelle may have come across a copy in "an odd advertising display of . . . a man in a wheelchair, in a coat and tie, his lap blanketed and no legs below, his well-fed face artistically reddened with some terrible joy, his smile's arc of the extreme curvature that exists between mirth and fury, his ecstasy terrible to see . . . looking straight up, or having a seizure, or ecstatic, his arms also up and out in a gesture of submission or triumph or thanks, his oddly thick right hand the receptacle of the black spine of the case of some new film cartridge" (p 224). Sounds like someone who's viewed the entertainment
The cartridge is like the one the medical attache received: "no mention of title, no blurbs or quoted references to critics' thumbs, the case's spine itself bare black slightly pebbled generic plastic, conspicuously unlabelled" (p. 224). Immediately after looking at it and putting it back in its display, Joelle thinks of JOI, who "at the end had filmed her at prodigious and multi-lensed length, and refused to share what he'd made of it . . . . Her mental name for the man had been 'Infinite Jim' (pp. 224-5).
In the next few pages, there are numerous references to JOI's last film, "the allegedly fatally entertaining and scopophiliac thing Jim alleges he made" (p. 230), and when Joelle gets to the party, people are discussing the "ultimate cartridge-as-ecstatic-death rumor" that's "been going around . . . since Dishmaster" (p. 233), about four years earlier. One party-goer reports a friend saying "he's lost contact with three colleagues. He said a good bit of Berkeley isn't answering their phone" (p. 223).
So for sure, the entertainment is Out There, maybe its been Out There for a while, and maybe it's spreading. Continental Emergency, indeed.
Finally, buried in the middle of n. 114 (p. 1022) is the fact that the Year of Glad is "the very last year of O.N.A.N.ite Subsidized Time" [my emphasis]. Why would it be "the very last year"? Did everything stop sometime during YG? Maybe because everybody, or almost everybody, turned into ecstatic zombies like the medical attache? Maybe that's why it's called the Year of Glad. And unlike the other years of Subsidized Time, the Year of Glad doesn't advertise a specific product--it's simply Glad--which is sponsored by the Glad Flaccid Receptacle Corporation (p. 1022). "Flaccid receptacle" would be a pretty good description of someone who's viewed the entertainment.
So one possible reading of IJ is that the world ends sometime during the Year of Glad. It solves some--namely, what happened?--but not all of the puzzles in the novel.
On the other hand, things (other than Hal) seem pretty normal at the U of A during his interview. People are at work, and the WhataBurger's in progress. My head's going around and around, back and forth through the text like an endless tape loop, beginning at the end and ending at the beginning, an infinite jest, for sure.
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