ABSTRACT
The concluding chapter returns to the premise of the opening chapter, that reading the novel might make one better. Using the Eschaton episode’s proclamation that “map is not territory,” it is wary of overstating the case for the kind of redemption that reading can offer, yet does not immediately surrender to the claim of the distinction. What happens on the map (the novel)—the apprehension of insight and imagined possibility—is itself something the reader experiences and thereby knows as a territory of its own kind. That the reader comes to experience the novel is significant if its insights are to become credible, existential, and trustworthy. Thus, the chapter explores the ways in which certain modes of reading approximate the essential experiences of hearing, touching, and facing that the characters know in the narrative world. Through analysis of particular passages, this chapter shows the connection between hearing and the reader’s act of curiosity and attention, between touching and reading with empathy, between facing and the reader’s act of identification. The novel makes these experiences available to the reader and they are significant, but likely not the only or main point. Map is distinct from territory and reading about recovery, even reading in the most engaged way, is not the same as Abiding. Leslie Jamison said that she remembered that Infinite Jest insisted that “sometimes I just needed to sit there and, like hurt.” Those who Abide, though, have no manual. Thus, finally, the novel must boot its reader out from any immersion in the text, must fail as an entertainment in order to place the reader back in the world where hearing, touching, and facing are not mediated by the page. That page is the reader’s cage. Through strategies of fragmentation, polytextuality, denial of closure, and simply through characterization that puts the deep values of the novel off the page (no one in the novel gets better by reading), Wallace puts his reader back in the world where getting better is not only possible, but urgent.
