Endnote 24 (from page 64)
You've just been sent to endnote 24 from page 64 — from the sentence about Dr. James O. Incandenza's turn to "'après-garde'" filmmaking and his "very gradual spiral" into his late father's drinking. The note is eight and a half pages long, and it is exactly what it looks like: a complete scholarly filmography of the man's roughly 78 works, with a headnote about archival problems, a format key, and six sub-footnotes of its own (a–f, parked at the end). It's deadpan comedy played absolutely straight, and nothing in it needs memorizing — read it the way you'd read any strange catalog, letting entries catch you, and flip back to the body whenever you've had enough.
Terms, in order of appearance
- B.S. (p. 986) — the catalog's dating: "Before Subsidization," i.e. before the corporate-sponsored calendar of the chapter headers.
- incunabula (p. 986) — real word: books printed before 1501.
- Latrodectus Mactans (p. 987) — real Linnaean name of the black widow spider; here one of Incandenza's production companies.
- Poor Yorick (p. 990) — his last company; Hamlet, holding the jester's skull: "Alas, poor Yorick... a fellow of infinite jest."
- après-garde (p. 992) — the p. 64 coinage: after-guard — behind its time rather than ahead of it.
- Tête-Bêche (p. 993) — the Canadian archivist's surname; French: head-to-tail.
- sui testator (p. 993) — legal Latin: by the will-maker's own arrangement.
After you read: three things
1. It's the obituary you just read, refracted into synopses. The Tucson father of p. 63, with his "obsessions with death by spider-bite," surfaces in Widower — a father on a Tucson property "immolating poisonous spiders" (p. 987) — and in the company name Latrodectus Mactans. The optics fortune becomes two annular-fusion infomercials (pp. 986–87), one punningly titled Some Reflections. And the McGill grammarian of p. 64 appears by name, debating Steven Pinker in Union of Theoretical Grammarians in Cambridge (p. 987). Read the synopses with pp. 63–65 still in your head; the catalog is a life in code.
2. One of these films, you've already lived through. It Was a Great Marvel That He Was in the Father Without Knowing Him (p. 992): "A father (Watt), suffering from the delusion that his etymologically precocious son (Smothergill) is pretending to be mute, poses as a 'professional conversationalist' in order to draw the boy out." That is the scene you read on pp. 27–32, compressed to a log line. The catalog and the novel are covering the same family.
3. The book's own title runs through the list. Infinite Jest (I) (p. 986) is "Incandenza's unfinished and unseen first attempt at commercial entertainment"; remakes (II), (III), and (IV) recur down the catalog, every one unfinished, unseen; and the final entry, Infinite Jest (V?) (p. 993), carries one credit, "no other definitive data," praise quoted from essays although "no scholarly synopsis or report of viewing exists," and a Master cartridge "either destroyed or vaulted sui testator." Whether that entry has anything to do with the man you watched rewatching an unlabeled cartridge on pp. 33–37 is not something either document says.
Written only from this endnote and pages before its callout on p. 64. Safe to read before you start.