why pemcandenza works

am i just like dosed with sunshine and dmz simultaneously, making this site? not quite.

so let's get down to why you clicked. why does pemcandenza work. firstly let me just say dfw, for all of his spot-on predictions about our world in the 21st century, could not even dream of conceiving the mind that is mine. i don't say this in a pretentious way. what i merely mean to say is that pemcandenza can only be alluded to by those with horrible splotches on their brains.

pemcandenza for those not in the know (but you sort of have to be if you're reading this) is the combination of hal and michael's last names, being incandenza and pemulis respectively. known somewhat colloquially as inculis and in esoteric circles even hike, pemcandenza is in no way canon and never will be. but that doesn't necessarily matter. what matters is that we as human beings have expansive minds; minds that seek to create and explore and minds that want other minds to know what it's like to, as dfw puts it, "be a fucking human being." so it's okay, i think, to see infinite jest in a different lens.

hal as a character, firstly, is one who doesn't fit into e.t.a. we come to understand that this is because he is essentially an amalgamation of his parents' wants and not his own, and that his entire identity is that of a fraud's, but at the end of the day we can simply say he doesn't fit in. if you've read any of the links found on the front page of this site you'll know that, at least in my opinion, infinite jest is a story about self-expression and what it means to finally feel like you can express yourself, in the first place. hal only speaks about being a real human being, not just a robot, when he is understood the least. the kindest character in the book (mario, duh) is the height of a fire hydrant and needs to wear a vest to stand upright. the weird and possibly even reviled are those who are themselves, truly. don't you think pemulis is sort of like hal's antithesis? and i mean but if pemulis is hal's antithesis and pemulis is also the anti-christ according to dfw, maybe hal is christ? but i digress. my point is the peemster, despite not being affluent (which hal very much is), has this mordant quality about him that lets him fit into e.t.a. it's this brass-faced lying technique that scares hal so much. and hal as i've been saying doesn't have this ability, can only make his entire personality memorizing syntax and diction. in this way they're opposites, but they're still incredibly close. isn't that a sweet dynamic?

true, so what? this isn't new information. the phrase "opposites attract" has been floating around for decades now. but i think it matters, in a way, for someone like me. endnote 332 mattered.

you can only understand how genuinely tragic pemulis' downfall is by considering why he does it all. sure, he slips up with the wayne freakout, but this expulsion was obviously building for a long, long time. and we see that mikey actively, actively throws fuel onto the fire. he manages to buy hal thirty days before a urine test to no benefit of his own, making himself look guilty of drug usage in the process, but he does it anyway, doesn't he, despite knowing that hal is the son of the headmistress and that his own ass is on the line more than anybody else's. hal even says himself that pemulis can pass a urine test no matter the circumstances. and even when he discourages hal's quitting drugs altogether, it's not because he wants to party and because he needs someone to smoke with. he does it because he knows hal, and he knows that it will affect hal in ways neither of them are sure about, and he ends up being right. he shares his experience about growing up with different types of addicts in allston and knows that there is something crooked within hal that goes deeper than bob hope.

but hal in the end finds pemulis "boring" and the gods themselves seem to strike the bastard down, as his dmz gets stolen, his best friend won't talk to him, and his future is basically over. for the record, i'm not mad about this ending and it does what infinite jest sets out to do perfectly. but because i'm not dfw, he and i aren't set out to do the same things.

we see pemulis feel deeply for hal in a way that doesn't exist anywhere else at e.t.a. nobody at the academy sacrifices in the way that pemulis does, especially not for someone like hal, who inherently has the upper hand in life. he in a sense gives his life for hal. and pemulis as explained by the book does not care what other people think of him--it's one of the reasons he seldom apologizes. but despite this he's able to feel bad when hal asks why pemulis has been avoiding him all week. he's able to "sell land" for no personal gain whatsoever. in a school where students fight for rankings and literally torture themselves (though i will admit much of it falls under cruel and unusual) to be number one, pemulis consciously throws away and semblance of opportunity that e.t.a gives him. this deep connection the two of them have feels underappreciated by hal, at the very least. it's this both subconscious and conscious devotion that leaves me feeling like i'm don gately lying on a beach, sometimes.

but this is also why i have hope, on some level. hope that hal, who becomes less of a shell by the end (or shall i say the beginning?) of the book, would by that point understand and appreciate what his "best friend in the whole world" had done for him. has done for him. i don't think it's hard to say that hal and pemulis love each other; it's just that they're both broken people, and for hal it's hard to understand what it is to be loved and to love someone right back. and i think that at the end of the day part of what makes infinite jest infinite jest is reading about people finding each other and loving each other in a world where years are sponsored and feral babies lurk. it's reading about how people at the end of the day are just people. pemulis breaks hal's generational truama by ultimately continuing his own, and it hurts, it's devastating, and it's this pain that brings me back to these two time and time again.