Infinite (De)coding, or “His wit’s as thick as a Tewkesbury mustard.”
At a high school reunion in what I will call the Year of the iPhone 16, a classmate recommended I read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), which I promptly dismissed as pretentious. I majored in literature and have read some whopper works of fiction, including James Joyce’s Ulysses and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, but Infinite Jest is just the type of book I tend to eschew for its popularity among men who showboat really long books in the same way they measure the length of their Johnsons (a metaphor the character Rod “the God” Tine, Sr. would appreciate). Perhaps Wallace was hip to that metaphor, as well, and meant to have much of the book go over the unsuspecting knob’s head, cony-catching some numbskulls with his southpaws, Hal et al (See footnote 268 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQThnv8c2uI). I myself would not have understood the extent of his project, namely the conundrum of anonymity (disguised with Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, etc., and etymologically deconstructed on page 796, “As One Body”, along side Cynewulf, the poet, whose works anticipate cryptography), if I had read it in the wake of its publication, if there were no Wikipedia/Wiktionary or Internet whatsoever, and if I had not recently come across the Oxford Shakespeare Fellowship (https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org ) and their decoding of texts demonstrating that Edward de Vere, the 17 Earl of Oxford is responsible for Shakespeare’s works and possibly others’.
On the surface, Infinite Jest appears to be merely a spoof of Hamlet, the title of which (Infinite Jest) references Hamlet’s reminiscing about the court jester Yorick in Act 5, Scene 1:
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at
it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment,
that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one
now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?
It is unclear to me who or what serves as Yorick in Infinite Jest other than Dr. James Orin Incandenza's film company Poor Yorick Entertainment — in Elizabethan times, it might have been the skull of comedic actor Richard Tarlton. I also didn’t positively identify Horatio, who at times seems to be Hal’s “brother”, Mario, and yet may actually be Ortho Stice when he’s angry. There are many aspects of the novel I have been unable to and unwilling to even attempt to decode, but there is so much coding present that I cannot [sic] actually present all of my theories here. I probably have gotten a bunch of the decoding wrong, and I apologize if my ramble becomes incoherent — it is compounded by the tangential nature of the novel.
One of the names that first overtly indicated to me that the Oxford/Shakespeare identity is a possible key code for Infinite Jest is Otis P. Lord (p. 321), the referee for the game Eschaton, i.e. the end of history (which at the time of Infinite Jest’s publication was popularized by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Soviet Union). If one watches enough Alexander Waugh videos (https://www.youtube.com/@alexanderwaugh7036) decoding Shakespeare’s sonnets and other texts, one will come to know that “T” can stand pictorially for “ox” or “Trinity”, i.e. “Oxford” or “God/Lord”, and that “P” is part of the Christian symbol Chi Rho. Otis P. Lord decoded is possibly “Our God is Christ the Lord” or, if “P” is taken as “play”, “Our Oxford is Lord of the Play”. During Eschaton (an allusion to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove), the tennis courts are set up with a map of the world, not unlike the Elizabethan playhouse The Globe, i.e. “All the world’s a stage” (As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7).
In fact, tennis, famously played by Oxford and his rival Philip Sidney, serves as a metaphor for the playwright’s art. Wallace writes about the young tennis players at Enfield Tennis Academy (ETA = Edward Oxford Anonymous?), who are being taught (most ardently by Schtitt, a possible former Austrian Nazi) to focus on their game, not fame:
The idea that achievement doesn’t automatically confer interior worth is, to them, still, at this age, an abstraction, rather like the prospect of their own death — ‘Caius Is Mortal’ and so on. Deep down, they all still view the competitive carrot as the grail (p. 693).
Though I know “Caius is Mortal” is from Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, I learned from Waugh’s videos that Gaius Claudius Nero, a Roman emperor who wrote and performed in plays, is code for Oxford, who a noble wrote and performed in plays:
O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever
The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom.
Let me be cruel, not unnatural.
I will speak ⟨daggers⟩ to her, but use none (Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2).
Caius is a form of Gaius and, incidentally, also refers to Cambridge University, Oxford’s alma mater. So “Caius is Mortal” can be read as “Oxford is Mortal”, while his plays have been immortalized under the name Shakespeare. Wallace celebrates this/rubs it in with the phrase “Gaudeamus igitur”. “Gaius” happens to be a cognate of “gaudeō”, “to rejoice”: “Gaudeamus igitur, iuvenes dum sumus”, “Let us therefore rejoice, while we are still young”, i.e. Carpe diem, which brings to mind the 1989 film Dead Poet’s Society and Robin Williams doing Shakespeare in the voice of Marlon Brando and John Wayne, two actors referenced in Infinite Jest.
Wallace uses various coding devices. Another is the anagram. On page 1069, Wallace describes a WETA broadcast with a Joan Sutherland intro being played over the the tennis academy’s intercom while Michael Pelumis consoles a distraught Possalthwaite. Of course, this required a visit to Wikipedia, where I discovered Sutherland was an operatic soprano whose last performance was as Hamlet’s Ophelia. With this biographical detail and Possalthwaite’s psychological misery, as well as the unorthodox spelling of his name, as clues, I was able to unscramble his name: Ophelia was TTS. As Wallace uses a lot of acronyms, I can be confident he is referring to Takotsubo Syndrome, also known as broken-heart syndrome. Similarly, when Wallace refers to Todd Possalthwaite by his initials, T.P., he could be referring to experimental anti-anxiety drugs TP-003 and TP-13. It should be noted that the number 3 can be represented by “T”, and may be another reference to God and/or Oxford.
By deduction, Michael Pelumis should be Laertes, comforting his sister Ophelia and whose name (Laertes’) means “gatherer of the people”. Michael is an archangel known for defending the faithful and, on page 156, Pelumis, the academy’s drug-dealing kingpin and Eschaton programmer, is briefly compared to rallier of people Julius Caesar: “Michael Pemulis is nobody’s fool, and he fears the dealer’s Brutus, the potential eater of cheese, the rat, the wiretap, the pubescent-looking Finest sent to make him look foolish.” Both Caesar and Laertes meet untimely ends, and Pelumis is expelled from school. If [sic] “Pelumis” has another meaning, such as relating to his father’s pederasty, I have been unable to determine this with certainty. Some possibilities include the code “Michael is P mule”, or “Michael is Christ’s mule”/ “Michael is the play’s ass”, and the anagram “mule’s Pi”. Pemulis is something of an anti-Christ, described on page 50 as “reptilian” and on page 908 as having horn-like cowlicks. On page 568, he pretends to be Troeltsch, James (i.e. Iago) to blindfolded Idris Arslanian (i.e. Othello). Other anagrams of Pelumis’ name include “impulse”, “impels us”, “lip muse” and “is plume”, dubious Shakespeare/Oxford references that leave one with the sickly feeling that there are lot of false leads and real dangers of getting lost in tedious decoding.
Some scholars claim that Oxford went by pen names other than Shakespeare and give him credit for the works of such writers as Thomas Nashe and Robert Greene. Likewise, the characters of Infinite Jest have multiple identities. Harold James Incandenza, Hal, could be one manifestation of David Foster Wallace, as Pemulis refers to Hal as “The Incster”, i.e. the author. As regards Hamlet, Hal appears to be Hamlet, but Hal is the name for Henry V in Henry IV, when he was still hanging out with John Falstaff and Edward “Ned” Poins (Michael Pemulis?), before becoming king and winning at Agincourt. Oxford’s ancestor, Richard de Vere, the 11th Earl fought with Henry V at Agincourt, and so Hal (in Infinite Jest) is also Oxford, in addition to being Hamlet and Wallace.
Hal’s mother, grammarian Avril Mondragon Tavis Incandenza, Ed.D., Ph.D., (p. 898) daughter of a Canadian potato farmer, is Sally Jean Foster Wallace, English professor and daughter of a Maine potato farmer, and both are logically Queen Gertrude in Hamlet. However, Wallace, a graduate of Amherst College (the alma mater of Henry Clay Folger, founder of the Folger Shakespeare Library), seems to be telegraphing a code to the reader when from page 27 he indicates that etymology is very important to Hal, who is something of a wonder with the Oxford English Dictionary, or O.E.D. (Oxford Edward de Vere?). A reader might then pick apart Hal’s mother’s name as follows: Avril = April (the birth month of both Oxford and Shakespeare); Mondragon = lit. Mount Dragon, the standard of Pope Gregory XIII as well as the place where he instituted the Gregorian or solar calendar in 1582 (Oxford is referred to as the sun, while Mondragon could be interpreted as Shakespeare); Tavis = twin (Oxford/Shakespeare); Incandenza = sunlight/anger (Oxford/Shakespeare); and Ed.D., Ph.D. = Doctorate of Education, Doctorate of Philosophy (It is an education to know that Edward de Vere would have been educated enough to write the plays of Shakespeare, while Shakespeare, on the other hand, might have had a personal philosophy but no education to write his plays, and as such, a degree in Shakespeare studies is a phony degree).
With my passing acquaintance with the decoding of Shakespeare as Oxford, I went deeper, taking the beginning letters “AMTInEdDPhD” as code for “Am God Incarnate Edward de Vere, Phoebus, Diana” or perhaps “Am God Apollo, Edward de Vere, Shakespeare”. So not only is Hal perhaps Oxford/Shakespeare, it appears Avril is Oxford/Shakespeare, as might be every character in Infinite Jest: Axford (Oxford), Aubrey de Lint (Aubrey de Vere), Schact (Spear), and Idris (the first man to write; Idris Arslanian is also called Id and Ars, i.e. the instinctive Shakespeare and the artist Oxford), just to name a few. However, if Hal (aka Hamlet) is little Edward de Vere, pre-god-like, then Avril (aka Queen Gertrude) is Queen Elizabeth I, as Edward became a ward of the state when his father John de Vere died, possibly by the hand of Elizabeth’s lover, Robert Dudley, which makes John de Vere very much like King Hamlet. For my purposes, Hal is a teenage Wallace, Hamlet and de Vere, while Avril is Wallace’s mother, Queen Gertrude and Elizabeth I. That said, Hamlet borrows from other sources, such as French and Greek, and may be based in large part on the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots and James Hepburn following the murder of Henry Stuart, an intrigue with which Oxford was acquainted.
Going one step deeper, I found that the characters of Infinite Jest are avatars for contemporary figures, too. Wallace gives a specifically outrageous height for Avril as 197 cm, which I took to be a sum in Pythagorean numerology (as Wallace makes frequent reference to the Trivium and Quadrivium). I plugged names into an online generator (https://suspha.github.io/numerology/), trying a number of combinations that mirrored Avril’s full name until I hit upon “US First Lady Nancy Davis Anne Frances Robbins Reagan BA”. At this point, I became physically sick: one, because I was heading way off the deep end into an ocean of dubious encryption and, two, because encrypting a text with contemporary events is a puzzling game, not good or interesting literature. The tedious details required for encoding the text, lending nothing to subtext (see Charles Baxter’s The Art of Subtext), tend to make the prose a tiresome slog. In essence, the novel becomes an inside fraternity joke that is untranslatable into any other language.
Other than the supposed Pythagorean number, there are indications that Nancy Davis, a Reagan (“regent”, like a queen) is Avril Tavis, an Incandenza (“radiant”, like a queen). Avril’s nickname is “Moms” while Ronald Reagan’s pet name for Nancy was “Mommy”. Likewise, Nancy called Ronald “Ronny” while Dr. James Orin Incandenza is known as “Himself”. Encouraged by these findings, I looked for more clues in the characters surrounding Avril and Nancy, and on page 898 between Moms and Himself is Lyle, the guru who bears a striking resemblance to the astrologer Joan Quigley, hired by Nancy following the assassination attempt on Ronald. The assassin, John Hinckley, Jr. was supposedly suffering from erotomania induced by Jodi Foster’s performance as Iris Steensma in Taxi Driver. Missourian Jodi Foster is very similar to Kentuckian Joelle van Dyne (aka Lucille Duquette), star in the deadly entertainment video Infinite Jest and who is the supposed inspiration for Himself or for someone else putting Himself’s head in a microwave oven.
It is hard not to notice that HmH is not a perfect acronym for Headmaster’s House, home of the Incandenzas, and that it resembles a pictogram of a palace, perhaps Hamlet’s Home, or Elizabeth I’s palace, Whitehall, where some of Oxford/Shakespeare’s plays were performed. HmH is then an ambigram for HwH, Whitehall, and, following the Nancy Reagan lead, White House, which points to further decoding of the text. As Avril Mondragon Tavis shares a name with but is not biologically related to Charles Tavis, head of staff at Enfield Tennis Academy, so too Nancy Davis Reagan shares a name similar to Donald Thomas Regan, White House Chief of Staff, who referred to Mrs. Reagan as “dragon lady” (a convenient Taming of the Shrew reference, too?). And taking a clue from etymology again, “Thomas” and “Tavis” both mean “twin”. As chiefs of staff, the overthinking Charles Tavis, or CT (a pun on “critical thinking” or “conspiracy theory”?) and Regan appear to be Polonius in Hamlet, which leaves the very important Claudius. The only one who would benefit sexually from the death of Himself is John Wayne, Yale hopeful, who is caught by Pemulis in a compromising football stance with Avril dressed as a cheerleader. And the only one to benefit from the death of the cowboy president Ronald Reagan is Vice President Bush, Yale cheerleader and graduate, who was once described by comedian Dana Carvey as Mister Rogers trying to be John Wayne.
To recap, to add and to clarify: Hal = Edward de Vere, Hamlet, US citizenry represented by Wallace?; Moms = Elizabeth I, Gertrude, Nancy Reagan; Himself = John de Vere, King Hamlet, Ronald Reagan; CT = William Cecil, Polonius, Donald Regan; Joelle van Dyne = oral poison?, hebenon in ear, in-the-eye-poison Jody Foster; and John Wayne = Robert Dudley, Claudius, George H.W. Bush. If the latter is a correct assumption, HwH could mean Herbert Walker’s House (with Yorick’s skull being Geronimo’s, supposedly stolen by his daddy, Prescott Bush, Sr. for his college fraternity). And if Joelle van Dyne (aka Jody Foster), as the veiled disfigured P.G.O.A.T. (Prettiest Girl Of All Time), is Venus, the morning star, Lucifer, the anti-Christ, then something certainly is rotten in the state.
The biggest scandal of the Reagan administration appears to have been the Iran-Contra Affair, which has been partly detailed in the films American Made starring Tom Cruise and Kill the Messenger starring Jeremy Renner. This is my jumping off point when considering the duplicitous agents Remy Marathe and Hugh/Helen Steeply (p. 88) standing on a mountain overlooking the desert city of Tucson (“at the base of the black mountain”) while the setting sun casts their shadows in “Goethe’s well-known ‘Bröckengespenst’ phenomenon”. It is April 30, Walpurgis Day, as in Goethe’s Faust, when witches ride around Mt. Bröcken on their brooms farting, and both agents let one rip, Steeply on page 108 and Marathe in response on page 429 (Are we in Macbeth territory, too?). Venus (aka Lucifer) rises and American youth (on Spring Break?) gather for a bonfire and party down below; one cannot help think they are blasting Black Sabbath’s song “Walpurgis”, aka “War Pigs”, while ingesting anyone of the legal, illicit or scheduled substances Wallace names throughout his tome.
Whether using Goethe’s Faust, Christopher Marlowe’s (Oxford/Shakespeare’s?) Doctor Faustus, or Marvel Comics’ supervillain Dr. Faustus as reference, it is unclear who Marathe and Steeply are [sic], except unnamed spies using pseudonyms: spooks, spectres. The only spies in Hamlet are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whose Elizabethan-era models may have been Henry Howard, 1st Earl of Northampton and his cousin Charles Arundell, former friends whom Oxford accused of being Catholics and who in turn accused Oxford of pedophilia. Catholicism and pedophilia, as with Pelumis’ father, are prominent in Wallace’s Boston-set novel, which makes one wonder if Cardinal Bernard Francis Law and John “Jack” Geoghan aren’t models for Crocodile Eugenio “Ferocious” Francis Gehaney (“gehan” being Old Saxon for “to confess/to explain”), but these do not fit his character. With his tattoo a la Rita Hayworth (something of a ferocious woman who liked to drink), military service in ‘62 (circa Bay of Pigs) and getting sober in the time of Nixon (p. 209 and 468), Eugenio Francis probably refers to burglars in the Watergate Scandal (see All the President’s Men with Dustin Hoffman), particularly Eugenio Martinez (worked in the CIA and so was associated with George H.W. Bush and Allen Dulles) and Frank Sturgis (worked with the CIA and implicated in the Kennedy assassination, another Hamlet-like saga). The epigram-loving Crocodile Francis also seems to be a reference to Francis Bacon and his epigram “It is the wisdom of crocodiles, that shed tears when they would devour.” Infinite Jest’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern/Northampton and Arundell, Marathe and Steeply, seem to draw on different contemporary spy sources.
Marathe’s boss is Fortier, leader of the legless Quebec separatists (avatar for Front de libération du Québec, FQL), who are beefy-armed assassins in fauteuil de rollent, a French/English phrase meaning “wheelchair”, according to Wallace, that parallels fort in bras, “strong in arm”, Fortinbras in Hamlet. And yet, Marathe, clearly not a Québécois name, screeches “Decode me!”: “AM T HERA”, “I am the god Hera”, the god of marriage. On page 87, the area of Tucson Marathe overlooks is given the code 6026. Telephone area codes are one number shorter and postal codes are one number longer, indicating this set of digits should probably be added together continuously to get one final number: 6+0+2+6=14 —> 1+4=5. (Otherwise, like some kooky secret handshake, it’s possibly a Masonic year or address.) In Pythagorean numerology, the number five stands for marriage, the union of the male and female. A series of coincidences or not, Dr. Faustus conjures the spectre of Alexander the Great; the male name Alexander comes from a version of Hera, Hera Alexandros (“defender of men”); Steeply associates Marathe with his fellow Canadian, the personal physician for Saudi Prince Q__________; in the Iran-Contra Affair, only one person matches the description of the physician according to Wikipedia — Adnan Khashoggi, whose father had been physician to the Saudi king; and the only person with the name Alexander associated with Khashoggi who could organize weapons transfers with Iran is Alexandre de Marenches, onetime WWII French resistance fighter who escaped to Algeria and later reformer of French intelligence, SDECE, which supposedly funded Quebec separatists as well as facilitated the smuggling of heroine made from Turkish poppies into the United States (i.e. the French Connection — more about that later).
Looking out over the same area code as Marathe, Steeply is also a marriage of the male and female as the dedicated spy Hugh Steeply disguised as Moment journalist Helen Steeply. Another coincidence or not, another spectre Doctor Faustus conjures is that of Helen of Troy; again, Marathe’s Greek Hera Alexandros is Alexandre de Marenches of the Safari Club; according to Wikipedia, “The creation of the Safari Club coincided with the consolidation of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). The BCCI served to launder money, particularly for Saudi Arabia and the United States—whose CIA director in 1976, George H.W. Bush had a personal account” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_Club); and Theodore “the Blond Ghost” Shackley was supposedly CIA contact for the Safari Club, who seems to serve as a match for Steeply, a name that appears be a portmanteau of Theodore Shackley, George Smiley (from le Carre spy novels) and Tom Stoppard (writer of the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead). Shackley was also accused of smuggling heroine into the United States (again, more on that later).
Don’t take me too seriously — this is all a delightful CT (conjectured theory [sic]) — but as Rosencrantz (“rose wreath”) and Guildenstern (“golden star”) Marathe and Steeply are both forlorn romantics bound to die for their causes as their stars cross, so to speak, under the morning star, Venus, which has served as the symbol both of Hera and Helen of Troy, of Iliad fame. The one Oxford/Shakespeare play that is based on the Iliad is Troilus and Cressida, in which the Trojan Troilus falls for the Trojan Cressida but whose union is foiled when Cressida encounters the Greek Diomedes (“Zeus measures”, Hera’s opposite/compliment). According to Oxfordians, this play is based on Philip Sidney’s one-time betrothal to Anne Cecil, who eventually became Oxford’s wife. To me, crazy though I may be, Marathe (AM HEART) is Oxford-Diomedes and Hugh/Helen Steeply is Sidney/Cecil-Troilus and Cressida, and the mountain Marathe and Steeply are perched upon no longer is Bröcken but Ida overlooking Troy. Oxford and Sidney also cross under another Venus/star, Penelope Rich, in their poems “Venus and Adonis” and “Astrophil and Stella”, respectively. Oxford is further represented by the star on his coat of arms, from ancestor Aubrey II de Vere at Antioch, in the midst of Mount Silpius during the First Crusade.
The rivalry carries over into philosophies, with Sidney (aka Steeply) being a Ramist and Oxford (as Thomas Nashe?) encouraging people to HATE RAM (another Marathe anagram) (See Wikipedia “Ramism”). And both Oxford and Sidney seem to have sought the favor of Elizabeth I; though only Sidney was allowed the honor to go to war for her. As Marathe and Steeply have their philosophical tête-à-tête on the mountain, Marathe asserts,
I am seated here appalled at the naïveté of history of your nation. Paris and Helen were the excuse of the war. All the Greek states in addition to the Sparta of Menelaus attacked Troy because Troy controlled the Dardanelles and charged the ruinous tolls for passage through, which the Greeks, who would like very dearly the easy sea passage for trade with the Oriental East, resented with fury. It was for commerce, this war. The one-quotes “love” one-does-not-quote of Paris for Helen merely was the excuse (p. 105).
During this diatribe about war and commerce, Steeply is smoking Belgian cigarettes called Flanderfumes, an allusion to the Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604) in which Philip Sidney fought and died for England against Spain, from which England was purchasing most of its tobacco at the time — though the reason for the war is often given as the refusal of Protestant Elizabeth I, as a type of Helen, to marry a Catholic Spaniard. While the ascendancy of King James VI and I put to bed the marriage/heir issue, the colony at Jamestown (1607) was still founded for the expressed purpose of breaking the Spanish tobacco monopoly. The Helen of Infinite Jest is Joelle van Dyne, her person and the video of her Marathe and Steeply are so eager to recover. Marathe is supposedly motivated by his helmeted wife’s need for medical treatment, but his economic goal as a wheelchair assassin is the independence of Quebec and perhaps revenge for the pollution of his country, which has been turned into a dump called the Concavity. This conjures Marathe’s other anagrams, AM EARTH and AM HATER, as well as Hera’s symbol, the cows roaming the Concavity.
The feral livestock of the Concavity are rampant versions, too, of the Charging Bull of Wall Street, and the bull economists of the Reagan era were Alan Greenspan and his mentor Paul Adolph Volcker, portrayed as Elliot Kornspan and Keith “the Viking” Freer doing curls on page 198 (where Pelumis leans over and whispers “Pussy” in very BS 1980-90s fashion into Kornspan’s ear). And the economic motivations behind war, i.e. Iran-Contra, were NAFTA, expelling Communist influence from the Americas, and oil in the Middle East. In the latter case, Venus along with the gibbous moon over Marathe and Steeply is the Islamic symbol of the crescent moon and star, while their Pythagorean number 5 stands for the Five Pillars of Islam. Considering the Central/South American aspect of Iran-Contra, I found the significance of Venus included rituals to secure ample rain and fertile soils and involved human sacrifice, namely captured enemies (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017oeps.book...60S/abstract).
In their fain animosity or seeming collaboration, the revolutionary AFR Remy Marathe (in his wheelchair) may in fact be Son of the American Revolution Franklin Delano (originally the French “de Lannoy”, a family from the Belgian city Tourcoing, then part of the Spanish Netherlands) Roosevelt, and Hugh Steeply (from “steep” or “steeple”), FDR’s very distant cousin Winston Churchill (who liked to smoke Cuban cigars, the tobacco of his ancestors’ enemy: the Spanish). On their mountain, perhaps at Yalta on the Crimea, both are surveying the world, discussing the importance of Greece in the post-WWII struggle with the Soviet Union. Though, as Helen, Hugh Steeply is Churchill’s Conservative successor, Margaret Thatcher, and perhaps Remy, with his pistol, is also cowboy Ronald Reagan a la James Brady, or that other John Wayne, Son of the American Revolution H.W. Bush.
Wallace gives hints throughout Infinite Jest that the book is circular, like a crown of sonnets, using the words “annulation” and “Kekulan knot”, a benzene ring (which has been used, among many 20th-century things, to produce pharmaceuticals) and an ouroboros (a snake biting its own tail). Enter The French Connection, a movie starring Gene Hackman as New York narcotics police officer Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, who foils a heroine shipment from France. As Wallace opens the novel with Remy Marathe and Hugh/Helen Steeply, he closes it with their semi-doppelgängers, the identity forger Gene “the Faxman” Fackelman and his girl Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, two drug addicts. Fackelman is modeled on Hackman and Pamela Hoffman-Jeep is a combination of Dustin Hoffman (think Tootsie, Midnight Cowboy, All the President’s Men and Lenny rolled into one), the alien Jeep from the Popeye comic, and Pamela from Philip Sidney’s poem The Arcadia. Just as Hugh Steeply draws his pseudonym Helen from from the Greek for “torch”, Fackel is likewise German for “torch”, and just as Steeply and Marathe stand on various mountains Black/Bröcken/Ida, Fackelman along with Hoffman-Jeep meet their end in the midst of a mountain of blue Dilaudid pills (another Bröcken? The Arcadia’s Mt. Parnassus, sacred to Dionysus and home to the oracle at Delphi?) (circa p. 978).
Marathe’s doppelgänger appears to be Pamela, a Greek like Hera Alexandros — though it seems likely Remy Marathe = Gene Fackelman and Helen-Hugh Steeply = Pamela Hoffman-Jeep. That said, I’m hesitant to make one-to-one correlations. Who is Bobby C, who executes Gene and Pam, other than England in the Hamlet play? And are Marathe and Steeply really only Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? Since they exhibit similarities to Oxford and Philip Sidney/Anne Cecil, Marathe and Hugh/Hellen Steeply also exhibit similarities to Hamlet and Laertes/Ophelia. For the play Hamlet, Laertes is perhaps modeled after Thomas Bricknell, an under-cook whom a 17-year-old Oxford killed while practicing fencing at the home of his guardian William Cecil, Polonius in the play. Cecil’s real son, Robert was deformed not unlike CT’s Mario (White House Press Secretary James Brady after the assassination attempt?) and was a model for Richard III. Every character as a manifestation of Oxford/Shakespeare bleeds into the other, is fractal.
But let’s return to the blue Mt. Dilaudid: Getting high with Fackelman before his end is Don Gately (a Hal doppelgänger?), who later becomes one of the monitors at Ennet House (aka Brighton Marine Health Center, where Wallace stayed, too) — a halfway house for recovering addicts that is located below the Enfield Tennis Academy as Bethlem “Bedlam” Hospital was located near the playhouses in Elizabethan London and that seems to serve as the stage for the play within the play, like the one in Hamlet. Gately’s story doesn’t end with Fackelman, however, but at the end of the novel in a flash forward to St. Elizabeth Hospital, where he is recovering from a gun wound sustained in a Romeo + Juliet-type brawl. In his delirium from the worsening infection, the dumb Gately is visited by the ghost of Himself (author of the Infinite Jest film starring Joelle van Dyne) who puts big words into his head, an apt metaphor for the Oxford/Shakespeare symbiosis. It’s also apt that we end with our Ennet House hero, as an ennet is a type of duck, perhaps Daffy in Looney Tunes, a salute to J. Thomas Looney (1870-1944), the originator of the Oxfordian theory that Shakespeare is Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. Like J.T. Looney, Wallace might have been a bit crazy to peruse such a (de)coding project, but he certainly wasn’t daff. (Note: HmH cook Mrs. Clarke, avatar for Bush cook Ariel De Guzman with her Tex-Mex fiesta, appears to be another early Oxfordian in the know, Eva Turner Clark.)
Infinite Jest has come to be a lodestar for other works of film, literature and journalism. In film, the Coen brother’s The Big Lebowski is the bowling return to Wallace’s tennis volley, with the abiding Jeff “El Duderino” Lebowski (combined with Walter’s brute strength and Donny’s cultural illiteracy) as the Abiding Don Gately and with the epigram-quipping cowboy, “Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you”, as Ferocious Francis. (The Coens also use Wallace’s “mirthless chuckle” in a line of Hail, Caesar!) In literature, Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings is Infinite Jest from a non-cryptic Jamaican perspective. In terms of investigative journalism, Infinite Jest’s publisher Little, Brown and Company released CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (2019). Wallace makes mention of the BS 1960s and LSD and one of his characters, Tex Watson, seems to have been pulled from the group of individuals involved in the Manson-led Tate-LaBianca murders, in which Abigail Folger, relation of the founder of the Folger Shakespeare Library, was killed. In Shakespeare’s day, there was a Watson (Thomas), too, a writer supposedly under the patronage of the 17th Earl of Oxford and very possibly another nom de plume.
While I admire how Infinite Jest gives me the screaming fantods for the BS 1980s-90s, I’m not so interested in Wallace’s overt coding, even though I was seduced to solve it. Dr. Katherine Ellison, past fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library and chair of Illinois State’s Department of English in the Year of the iPhone 16, says of decoding texts, “To me, the solutions are not all that interesting. What interests me is the thinking that inspires secret writing and the impact that it has on us as a culture” (https://news.illinoisstate.edu/2024/03/deeper-meaning-ciphers-reveal-more-than-hidden-messages/). I’d like to know whether secrecy is necessary, or whether complete transparency can be achieved. What does secrecy do to the state of democracy? The public’s psyche? (See Errol Morris’ Netflix series Wormwood.) At what point does realpolitik result in real good? Does the government work in the interest of Lady Liberty (transformed into the ad-bedecked “Libertine Statue”in Infinite Jest) or for personal profit? Is it a conflict/war within, or not? Is it for irony or honor that George H.W. Bush’s face has been put on a $1 coin? Who bears the brunt of government policy, the policymakers or the people on the street? And where is personal freedom found, in endless choices or in discipline of choice? Which is a good place to end and begin again.
