IJ study archive

Gately and Hal: The Withheld Meeting

essay

Two arcs, one syntax

Infinite Jest opens inside one man's head and closes inside another's, and the novel's whole architecture hangs between them. The first sentence is Hal's: "I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies" (p. 3, scene 001). The last is Gately's: "And when he came back to, he was 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" (p. 981, scene 185). Between those two first-person shores lie a thousand pages in which the book's two load-bearing characters — the boy prodigy going down and the recovering burglar climbing up — never once stand in the same room. They are introduced as deliberate opposites: Hal the seventeen-year-old lexical and tennis prodigy, ranked fourth in the nation, raised on a manicured hilltop academy; Gately "a twenty-seven-year-old oral narcotics addict" and "more or less professional burglar" who "was, himself, unclean and violated" (p. 55, scene 016). And the two institutions that hold them sit on the same Enfield rise — the tennis academy on its carved-flat hilltop, the halfway house on the hospital grounds below it — mirror facilities for the same disease, one training children to feed a hunger and the other teaching adults to survive it (addiction-and-recovery carries that mirroring in full).

How deliberately the book keeps them apart is checkable. Across the entire novel — every scene, every endnote — the names "Hal" and "Gately" never appear in the same sentence. The closest the text ever comes is the famous sentence on the far side of the book's missing year, where one of the two names has to be a pronoun because its owner is speaking: "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" (p. 17, scene 003). One projected scene, narrated by neither its shovel nor its watchman, placed in the single spot the novel cannot reach: after its own last page and before its first. Everything this essay traces — the near-misses, the mirrored collapse, the addiction run from both ends, the father's ghost shuttling between them — converges on that sentence, and on the question of why the book promises the meeting and then withholds it.

The near-miss architecture

The two plots are entangled long before either man could know it. The burglary that establishes Gately in his first scene — the Brookline home-invasion in which the bound and head-cold-blocked Guillaume DuPlessis slowly suffocates behind his gag (pp. 55–60, scene 016) — kills a right hand of the anti-O.N.A.N. leadership, and the text twice ties the lethal Entertainment's circulating copy to that night at hedge distance: Steeply's "this alleged Master copy from the DuPlessis burglary" (p. 489, scene 098) and Fortier's "samizdat cartridge of Entertainment burglared from the death of DuPlessis" (p. 724, scene 147). The novel is careful never to close the loop — no page opens DuPlessis's safe or puts a cartridge in Gately's hands, and the he-handled-the-Master trail is held strained — but the endnote attached to the job lets the reader see "several shelves crammed tight with upscale arty-looking film cartridges" over the safe (endnote 18, p. 985), and the hedged attributions stand. The continental manhunt that will end at the Incandenzas' door is set moving, on the record's own showing, through Don Gately's crime scene. And the thing that manhunt is for was planted even earlier, in Hal's half of the ledger: the "professional conversationalist" scene has already told a ten-year-old Hal — in his disguised father's paranoid patter — about the "priapistic-entertainment cartridge implanted in your very own towering father's anaplastic cerebrum" (p. 31, scene 005). By page 60 the book has issued both halves of its final image: the head, and the man who will help dig it up.

The one time the two arcs touch on the page, the touch is engineered to miss. On the morning of 17 November, five days after the shooting, Hal walks down the hill and knocks at the halfway house's front door to ask for a meeting schedule — and the scene's first five words name the miss before Hal is even visible: "In Don Gately's medical absence, Johnette F. had worked five straight night shifts on Dream Duty" (p. 785, scene 158). Hal arrives at Gately's post, staffed by Gately's stand-in, on an errand into Gately's world, while Gately lies intubated in St. Elizabeth's; and the scene registers the visitor only as an anonymous "upscale kid" whose talking has "the quality of somebody who'd just lately put down the pipe and/or bong" (p. 786) — Johnette never learns his name, and Hal's outsider status is stamped by the book's own shibboleth: he says "The Ennet House," and the appended endnote explains that "People outside the Boston AA community always use The and say The Ennet House; this is one way to always tell somebody new or from outside the community" (n.323, p. 1066). The scene's closing sentence quietly promises that the miss matters: "Much later, in subsequent events' light, Johnette F. would clearly recall the sight of the boy's frozen hair slowly settling," the "clear upscale odor-free saliva almost running out over his lower lip as he fought to pronounce the word without swallowing" (p. 787) — the narration flagging a future in which these events cast light, and then never narrating it. Even the boy's stated reason for knocking is the dyad's epitaph: he "didn't know whom else to call" (p. 787). The one person the book has spent 500 pages qualifying to take that call is in the Trauma Wing.

The calendar then stages a second, stranger proximity. In the Year of Glad frame Hal recalls "the only other emergency room I have ever been in, almost exactly one year back" (p. 16, scene 003) — a psychiatric stretcher, a Québecois-accented stranger beside it — which self-dates the visit to about late November of YDAU, the very band of weeks in which the record last shows Gately in St. Elizabeth's Trauma Wing. The text leaves the location unstated, and this essay follows the archive in asserting nothing more; but the design is visible either way: in the novel's densest month its two protagonists are laid out flat within days of each other, in unnamed proximity, each strapped to the horizontal. A new reading in the archive gives the pattern its best formal account: Warren's character-system analysis argues that the book's violent on-page convergence of minor characters — Poor Tony, Ruth van Cleve, Kate Gompert, Lenz, colliding in the streets while the principals are kept apart — prefigures and models the unrecorded convergence of Hal and Gately (warren-narrative-modeling). The misses, on that account, are not plot economy but the shape of the book.

Addiction from both directions

Read side by side, the two biographies are one story told twice with the signs reversed, and the hinge of both is a gifted body at seventeen. Gately was a two-way football prodigy told by every coach he was a Division-I lock; the substances took it from him on a slide — the flunked English, the withdrawn year — that ended the October afternoon of his last season, when he came in "after football, his last season, at age seventeen" (p. 449, scene 092) to find his mother mid-cirrhotic-hemorrhage, lit the first cigarette of his life from her leftover pack, and never went back. Hal at seventeen is at the other end of the same arc, ranked fourth in the nation with the slide still ahead of him: his substance doesn't take the game in one afternoon but by leak — the "whole new and chemical-free Hal" (p. 635, scene 122) who, in deLint's verdict on the Stice match, "just never quite occurred out there, kid" (p. 689, scene 132). The book even arranges for Gately to mourn his loss on an Incandenza: ironing forged IDs in a stripped apartment, he watches a walk-on B.U. punter the announcers call "a lock for a pretty much limitless pro ball career" until he "found himself starting to cry like a babe" (pp. 915–16, scene 173) — weeping at the televised image of Orin, a brother of the boy he will someday dig beside, though the text never names the punter and Gately never learns whose gift he was grieving through.

The two men then run the substance in opposite directions, and each direction exposes the other's cost. Hal's addiction is above all a practice of concealment — the Pump Room ritual, the one-hitters, the secrecy he is "as attached to... as he is to getting high" — and so his abstinence, when the urine test forces it, is concealment too: he quits alone, tells almost no one, and the narration marks the price in its own capitals — "The issue's the horrific way his head's felt, increasingly, since he abruptly Abandoned All Hope" (p. 796, scene 160). What withdrawal uncovers in him is not craving but vacancy: the appalled question "whether the Bob Hope had somehow become not just the high-point of the day but its actual meaning" (p. 853, scene 165). Gately's sobriety is the exact structural opposite — public, institutional, spoken aloud from podiums, held in company — and it runs on the doctrine he manufactured on a jail-cell floor and cashes in the Trauma Wing: "For he had Abided With The Bird" (p. 859, scene 166); "It's a gift, the Now: it's AA's real gift: it's no accident they call it The Present" (p. 860, scene 166). Offered the exact molecule of his ruin on medical authority, in pain past imagining, he keeps asking his heart whether one dose would count as relapse, and "his heart was declining to comment" (p. 819, scene 161) — and he Abides anyway. The criticism has long read the pair as inverse trajectories — descent into solipsism against climb out of it (boswell-understanding-dfw; nichols-dialogizing-postmodern-carnival) — and the book's cruelest comedy is what happens when the descending line reaches for the ascending one's equipment: Hal's one recovery attempt is a catalogue of solitary approximations, the rehearsed "My name's Mike" (p. 797, scene 160), the out-of-date meeting booklet, the Inner-Infant circle where he "envies a man who feels he has something to explain his being fucked up, parents to blame it on" (p. 805, scene 160). Gately had precisely those parents — the vodka, the beatings, the jewelry-box father — and built the climb out of them; Hal, who had every privilege except an audible interior, cannot even get the door right. The apparatus that saves the burglar fails the prodigy who needed it intellectualized first (hal-collapse walks the mechanisms; the crux pages own the verdicts).

Two mutenesses

In the book's final stretch the mirroring turns anatomical. Gately's November is spent mute: intubated, "raped"-throated — "He can breathe OK, but something in his raped throat won't let whatever's supposed to vibrate to speak vibrate" (p. 813, scene 161) — reduced to "barnyard sounds" (p. 855, scene 166), experiencing the state as "some combination of invisibility and being buried alive" (p. 834, scene 162). Hal's Year of Glad is the same condition photographed from outside: the deans hear "Like an animal," "Subanimalistic noises and sounds," a voice that "Sounded most of all like a drowning goat. A goat, drowning in something viscous" (pp. 13–14, scene 003), while inside the noise a lucid voice files its minority report — "I am in here" (p. 3, scene 001); "I am not what you see and hear" (p. 13, scene 003); "I cannot make myself understood, now" (p. 10, scene 001). Two prodigies of self-presentation — the performer who always supplied what the audience required, the burglar whose size did his talking — both end the book strapped down and unintelligible, one on a psychiatric stretcher, one in a Trauma Wing bed.

But the two mutenesses run in opposite directions, and the difference is the novel's whole argument about presence. Gately's silence fills: the moment he cannot speak, half the book's cast files into his room to confess — Tiny Ewell's childhood frauds, Pat's weeping, Joelle's veiled bedside visits (the romance that grows there is joelle-gately) — and the man who can only moo becomes the novel's great receiver, more use to the people around him dumb than most characters are fluent. His muteness is the burglar's old "sensory triage" converted into a final vocation: presence without a voice. Hal's trajectory is the negative: a voice without presence, fluency that goes on producing grammatically perfect signal that no receiver can parse — the interiority-to-surface channel closing in him across the same weeks it is being forced open in Gately, who in sobriety is learning, memory by surfaced memory, to feel things and say so. Hal "just never quite occurred out there"; Gately, mute, pinned, and in maximal pain, is the most there anyone in the novel ever manages to be. The one condition, worn by the two of them, asks the book's root question from both sides: what is a self worth if it cannot be transmitted — and what transmission is left when the voice is gone? (communication-and-solipsism owns the general case.)

The wraith between them

The two arcs do cross once inside the covers — but the crossing is conducted by a third party, and it is the book's darkest joke about fathers. The wraith of James O. Incandenza, who "has been sitting, still as a root, in the chair by Gately's bedside for the wraith-equivalent of three weeks," can speak only through a living person's internal brain-voice — and the interior it borrows is not his son's but Gately's (pp. 827–45, scene 162). Into the burglar's fevered head the dead filmmaker pours everything he could never transmit to Hal: the theory of "figurants," "these surreally mute background presences" of the sitcom crowd (p. 834); the confession that "No horror on earth or elsewhere could equal watching your own offspring open his mouth and have nothing come out" (p. 837); and the purpose of the lethal Entertainment itself — "to contrive a medium via which he and the muted son could simply converse," to bring the boy "out of himself," "A way to say I AM SO VERY, VERY SORRY and have it heard" (p. 839). The father who built a killing cartridge to reach one prodigy finally gets his conversation — with the other one, a stranger, the wrong mute, who is never once told the son's name: in every scene of Gately's corpus, the word "Hal" does not appear. Warren's reading gives the scene its right weight — Gately as medium in the occult sense, the wraith's apology routed through the one interior in the book humble enough to host it (warren-narrative-modeling; ghosts-wraiths and fathers-sons carry the wraith's reality question and the paternal dossier respectively).

What Gately does with the transmission is dream the dyad's future. In the fever serial he "dreams he's with a very sad kid and they're in a graveyard digging some dead guy's head up and it's really important, like Continental-Emergency important" (p. 934, scene 175) — and every detail of the dream is this essay's material folded into one image. The kid's condition is Hal's terminal state, dreamed by a man who has never met him, a year before the Year of Glad frame states it: "the sad kid is trying to scream at Gately that the important thing was buried in the guy's head," but "the kid moves his mouth but nothing comes out" (p. 934). Gately's own condition is the addict's: "Gately's the best digger but he's wicked hungry, like irresistibly hungry, and he's eating with both hands out of huge economy-size bags of corporate snacks so he can't really dig" (p. 934) — the strongest back in the book disabled at the decisive moment by exactly the compulsive consumption the whole novel anatomizes. And the verdict the dream pronounces on the errand is the one the endgame's adjudications preserve: the kid "makes the face of somebody shouting in panic: Too Late" (p. 934).

The meeting the last page promises

So the partnership the book projects is doubly attested — Hal remembers it from one side of the missing year (p. 17, scene 003), Gately dreams it from the other (p. 934, scene 175), two witnesses who never compare notes — and the archive's verdicts, which this essay takes as given rather than reargues, hold the event itself favored as a real occurrence of the missing year, with its position inside that year, and everything about its outcome, kept open under the finding that the ending is engineered to be undecidable at exactly that stratum (the ledgers: the grave-dig, the ending cluster). Gately's survival into the digging year is likewise favored — the dig needs a living Gately, and the freezing beach of the last page sits in his past, not his present (Gately's fate). What broke Hal stays the book's most contested machine — withdrawal favored, the famous wraith-toothbrush dose strained, the self-dose open — and the walk through it belongs to hal-collapse and the hal-dmz ledger. The reading this dyad adds is not a mechanism but a shape: whatever felled Hal, the book's two chronologies are handed one shared, unnarrated scene, and the only partnership its central pair ever gets is posthumous to the text.

That the meeting is withheld on purpose is now about as well-attested as anything in the composition record. The ending adjudication holds the holes-are-design reading strongly-supported, and the author's-side testimony brackets it from both ends of the process. Wallace's own resolution ration, in his reply to his editor's plea for more ending: "We know exactly what's happening to Gately by end, about 50% of what's happened to Hal, and little but hints about Orin" (dtmax-2009-the-unfinished) — the dyad's two members deliberately resolved to different depths, the climber granted an ending, the faller granted half of one. The editor's first read, December 1994, greeted the Gately strand as finished art while the rest was still under negotiation: "The ending of the novel, the horror of Gately's hitting bottom, is gorgeous and very very powerfully sad" (pietsch-letter-dec-1994). And Pietsch's 2016 retrospective closes the frame with the flattest editor-side statement on record that the aclimax was a shared decision: "We discussed the fact that the story doesn't narrow to a dramatic conclusion, and that some readers would find its ending frustrating. He was content with this" (iw-pietsch-2016-full).

Why content? The dyad itself is the best answer the book offers. A novel whose two halves annealed on the page — prodigy meets burglar, shovels in the loam, the head found in time or not — would deliver exactly the terminal, self-completing satisfaction the book spends a thousand pages diagnosing as the Entertainment's kill mechanism; the reading is graded only open as a causal claim about composition, but as an account of the shape it fits the evidence like a glove (the-ending holds the full debate). What the book does instead is stage the meeting as a rhyme and leave the annealing to the reader: it gives its first page to Hal's last day and its last page to Gately's first bottom — the boy who ends lucid inside a body that broadcasts animal noise, the man who begins flat on his back on a freezing beach with the tide way out — and between them one sentence of shared syntax, "Donald Gately and I," in which the book's two great buried voices finally stand in the same clause, off the page, over the father's grave, too late. Hal's first words are the dyad's thesis: "I am in here." The novel's answer, worked out over the whole length of Gately's arc, is that "in here" is not where a self is proved — presence is; and the meeting in which the two might have said so to each other is precisely the gift the book, being neither an entertainment nor a séance, declines to fake.

Sources

This essay is anchored in the novel's own pages (scenes cited inline); the secondary record it draws on:

The essay above stays in paraphrase; the novel's own words on all this are gathered on the addiction and recovery, dreams, and ghosts and wraiths quotation pages.

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