Eschaton is too cool of a part of the book -- and it's too niche, too deep of a thing -- for me to include it in another already sort of-long post. The idea is that now it's isolated so I can write more about it without making anyone feel too tired because "I just want to get an overview of the plot and why is he writing all of this garbage about a game that does not and can not exist."
Eschaton is a game the students in the Enfield Tennis Academy play every Interdependence Day. Michael Pemulis perfected it and, as such, he is the Best Player Ever. His moves are the stuff of legend. As a senior student, he doesn't play anymore -- the game is generally reserved for younger kids, though it's by no means for children -- and has stepped into a sort of Overseer role. He has veto power over calculations, but not rulings; those are reserved for the God player, a kid named Lord.
The general idea of Eschaton is as follows: God thinks up some sort of Doomsday Scenario for the players to react to. They form teams, representing various factions -- LIBSYR, SOVWAR, REDCHI, SOUTHAF, INDPAK, though these are never really clarified -- and each faction gets a bucket of tennis balls, each yellow fuzzy sphere representing a 5-megaton nuclear warhead. Eschaton is played over six tennis courts, and factions take turns lobbing the tennis balls -- Eschaton is permitted to survive at the ETA because it requires actual tennis skill -- onto various objects strewn about the courts (territories). A shirt can represent a radio tower, for instance. The winner of Eschaton is the faction that sports the highest damage given / damage taken ratio.
During this time, God is running around with a cart with a computer in it. He's calculating destruction dealt, keeping track of the ratios, and doing all sorts of complex math. He also wears one of a few different beanies to reflect the general mood of the game at any given time.
Eschaton is, I think, a perfect microcosm for what Infinite Jest is all about stylistically. I would almost recommend reading this section -- roughly 25 pages long -- before committing to reading all of Infinite Jest. If it were available as a separate essay for Kindles or something (not unlike how the John McCain essay from Consider The Lobster is available for $1.99), I would definitely tell you to plop down the money and give it a shot before plunging into the deep end. It's sort of perfect.
Why? Why is it representative of the book as a whole? In these twenty-odd pages, you get a taste of everything to love (or hate) about Infinite Jest. Sure, you don't get introduced to the AFR or the Recovery House, and the characters you do meet are transient and don't develop any real relationships with one another, but the section pretty clearly goes through the range of emotions one runs through while reading the book proper.
First, it starts with esoteric abbreviations that are either (A) explained once and then abbreviated every other time or (B) never explained because you understand that it stands for some sort of warring group of countries and the specifics don't matter. Then you hit a mother fucking endnote about the Mean Value Theorem For Integrals. It's, like, a calculus proof. There are graphs in the back of the book. I am not joking. You read how God calculates the scores and stuff, and you see this superscript above Mean Value Theorem and you say, "Oh, this shouldn't be too bad," and you get hit with a like postmodern math textbook for a while and you start getting pissed off but then you realize it's written pretty wonderfully: Pemulis, a math guy, is explaining the Theorem to Hal, an English guy, so that he (Hal) can transcribe it; Hal interjects in Pemulis's long-winded speech and puts "sic" everywhere because fuck Pemulis and his math bullshit, the guy can't even write, and it ends with "P.S. Wolf spiders ruleth the land," which is just the most badass sentence ever.
So the kids are playing this game and it's incredibly dense. There's negotiation talks, the abbreviations get worse (SACPOP, which I'm now noticing "went total SACPOP on" is a synonym for "beat" we see in the Sports Report) and now the abbreviations are interacting with each other -- e.g., "LIBSYR has no choice but to SACPOP REDCHI lest they lose the MAMA" -- and it's incredibly frustrating and then there's a "2 [pi symbol] / (1 / total Toronto area in m^2)" just hanging out in the main text and you're thinking there's just no way this is important.
But it takes a turn. Somewhere along the line, you get used to it. You accept that this is how it's going to be. You laugh when that poor bastard is high on 'drines and falls out of his chair for what feels like an hour. Hal smokes weed in public -- a rare feat, as he likes the secrecy of getting high in secret almost as much as he likes the getting high -- and he's trying to spit his chewing tobacco at the same time but it just isn't happening. The pages turn more readily, and then something amazing happens.
The kids become kids again. Two teams are negotiating and one kid takes a tennis ball and hits it right into a girl's head. She's furious. You can't hit a person, she's on the map, but not the terrain! Like, yes, the court is the map, and the shirts are on the map, but they're actually on the terrain, which is why you can hit them. The players' invulnerability is a like pre-axiom that makes Eschaton possible. And then the girl breaks free and starts spiking tennis balls at the kid who hit her. Other players smell blood in the water and follow suit.
Then they start fighting. Children, pretending to be heads of state during a nuclear war, are having knuckle-dragging brawls on the tennis courts.
God takes his white beanie off and puts on the red one on, the one with the little propeller, and he starts flicking the propeller because this is a "worse-case-&-utterly-decontrolled-Armageddon-type-situation." All of this is written as though a reporter on the sidelines is relaying the action. No one speaks directly. Action after action and jesus god he is running around, flicking this pinwheel on his beanie, "Stop! Help!" How funny is that.
Eschaton makes the transformation from esoteric game that hurts you when you try to read about it to an incredibly vibrant, funny section that flows like water. In those twenty pages, it evolves just like the book itself does.
AND IT'S THE BASIS OF A MUSIC VIDEO BY THE DECEMBERISTS! HOW FUCKING COOL IS THAT?
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