Infinite Jest: meaning of subsidized time products?

Kind of obvious thing to think about, but I wonder if the years of Subsidized Time are meant to provide hints or general themes.

I don't know if it would be as specific as linking years to what happened in them, but I do think it is meaningful that three of the years Maytag, Depends, Glad, refer to cleaning or hygiene, which are thematic throughout the book. It could also just be that Johnny Gentle, F.C., is more likely to approve those products, being an obsessive-compulsive himself.

It could just be simple humor: "Year of the Trial Sized Dove Bar" is pretty hilarious, no?

I always thought the subsidized time thing was one of the less imaginative, more sophomoric attempts at humor in IJ. Just not my thing, I guess. I think there's probably something to the names, though. And it's also worth noting that the "trial size Dove bar" in question is also a reference to cleanliness/hygiene. Wallace confirmed at a reading that the kind of Dove bar he was thinking of was soapy, not chocolatey.

I had this argmument with Enrique. I think the main goal of subsidized time was to keep from having to identify any particlar years and keep the story timeless. If DFW had identifed particular near-future years, it may have been a problem for future readers and the novel's potential classic status. Otherwise, I do not think the slight humor is worth the further complication of having a difficult timeline on top of the complicated tale and cast of dozens. Enrique or Sutpen or someone had some devestating rejoinder that I must have blocked from my memory.

3:
If I was once so annoyed by that suggestion that I felt it warranted devastation, I must have been having a pretty bad day. I think that sounds reasonable, though it's worth noting that it *is* possible to identify the actual years if you do a little bit of dot-connecting. I think the Year of Glad is 2009 or something like that. There are all sorts of thematic reasons why Wallace might have used that trope, of course. I'm sure no one on this forum would have much trouble imagining them--saturation of consumer culture, etc.

>2 Sutpen: oh, I totally disagree. Considering Wallace was writing in 1996, I think there was still a lot of weltschmerz to be wrung out of the subsidization of life. I remember how unbelieving and horrified several years later that they would let the (war) Memorial Arena in my hometown be replaced by the "Save-On-Foods Centre", and how the only people mad about it were a few veterans, and it even got me down last year when I saw Leonard Cohen there, because that is a sacrament and it should not take place in a building with save-on-foods on the side. Much like a lot of the superficially sophomoric humour, I think it's too full of pathos for that charge to hold.

And isn't the "Year of Glad" the year that ONAN falls? That's something to be glad about. Either way, I like the resonance, the way it promises a better future, but still a subsidized one, and so everything's all true and fake and real and better and awful again.

5: I completely agree with you.

Having been raised to absolutely abhor advertising, and having read such tomes as Toxic sludge is good for you! over and over again, I didn't really think it was heavy handed. I thought it was bloody realistic.

We had a "civic auditorium" that was understood to be a public building, now it is named after some donor it does not have that public feeling. City after city has succumbed to subdizing itself by letting companies and wealthy individuals put their names and products on public stuff that is largely paid for by taxpayers who get no recognition at all.

I like the irony of "The Year of Glad".

Brethren, if you'll now turn to page 223 of your copy of the Holy Infinite Jest, under the chapter titled "CHRONOLOGY OF ORGANIZATION OF NORTH AMERICAN NATIONS' REVENUE-ENHANCING SUBSIDIZED TIME™, BY YEAR," our IJ study can then commence ...

You'll see that DFW conveniently listed each year in chronological order for us, and looking at year (6), DFW made it clear that the years were not nebulous, out there in some indefinite future, but very purposely specified for our chronological edification:

"(6) Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile (sic)" (the bold is mine)

And that would, thus, make "(1) Year of the Whopper" = 2002, and "(9) Year of Glad" = 2010.

I think "Yushityu" is very funny, crass 'n crude man that I am, like "Hugh G. Rection" is funny too. Rabelasian humour gallore in I.J.

And "Year of Glad," my God, just hit me, does not trash and refuse play a Hugh G. role in I.J. I think so.

Some college kid could probably write a dissertation just on the names of subsidized time and their allusions to themes and motifs, et cetera ...

from the 'pedia:

"In the book's future, advertising's relentless search for new markets has led to a world where, by O.N.A.N. dictate, years are referred to by the name of their corporate sponsor.

1. Year of the Whopper
2. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad
3. Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar
4. Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken
5. Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster
6. Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office Or Mobile sic
7. Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland
8. Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment
9. Year of Glad

"Most of the events in the novel take place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (YDAU), and critics have debated which year this coincides with in the Gregorian Calendar.

"One theory is that YDAU is 2011. The most compelling evidence for this is Don Gately's age in the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland (27).4 Gately was 9 during the 1992 Los Angeles riots,5 placing his birth around 1983. This identifies the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland as 2010 and YDAU as 2011, meaning that Subsidized Time began in 2004.

"Critic Stephen Burn, in his book on Infinite Jest, argues that YDAU corresponds to 2009: the MIT Language Riots took place in 1997 (n. 24) and those riots occurred 12 years before YDAU (n. 60). Also, if the "2007" in "Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile" refers to the pre-subsidization-style numerical date convention, then YDAU (which comes two years later) is 2009.

"But November 4, YDAU, falls on a Wednesday (176) and November 8 on a Sunday (325). If Subsidized Time is parallel to real-world time, this means that YDAU would be either 2009 or 2015. Yet Thanksgiving of the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad (YTMP) falls on 24 November (793). Accordingly, YTMP has to be either 2005 or 2011, meaning that YDAU would be 2011 or 2017, respectively.6"

Says it all, really. DFW had the usual prescience of genius.

9:
Wow.

5:
Yeah, I guess the fall of ONAN could be something to be glad about. To me, finishing IJ and then turning back to the chronological end of the book and seeing "Year of Glad" is one of the really sad experiences you can get reading IJ. You've just finished this book that paints such a bleak picture of the world and what it does to people, and then YEAR OF GLAD is shoved in your face, kind of highlighting the cynical way in which advertising/corporations/etc, even (maybe especially) when they're pretending to care about you and your happiness, emphatically do not care about you or your happiness. Their affected good cheer and optimism is a pose that is meant to get you to do something. That's it.

So yeah, the way I read it, "Year of Glad" is one of the bleakest phrases written in the book.

>10 Sutpen: well, sure. And all the glimpses we get into YG are super bleak too. I think it's not just flat irony, though, as effective as that might have been--it's less the contrast between glad and sad then between glad and the utter unknowability of what's happening next. If everything is awful, it's less affecting for the reader than sort of affectation-of-hope-that-you-want-to-believe-is-more-that-an-affectation.

7: I knew it was one of you that shot me down!

Just found this very interesting thread and I agree with a lot of (contradictory) things being said here: the joke of subsidized time is both annoying and brilliant/prescient, both dated and timeless. But despite my mixed feelings, I love the potency of "Year of Glad" as the first chapter title/chronological end of the book. Thematically I don't think "Year of Glad" is primarily about waste or refuse--or at least, no more than anything else in the book is--as much as it is about containment, clean-up. As we can glean from Hal's (damaged) existence in an apparently still orderly world, the threat posed by The Entertainment has been contained, at least partially dealt with, as of the Year of Glad. This is a "good" thing in very simple terms, but it also speaks to the book's baleful theme of systems accumulating toxic damage, half-assed solutions to systemic problems breeding still more complex webs of problems, etc. The Entertainment has entered the system without revolutionarily disrupting it... without forcing a perhaps beneficial reexamination of society. (There is at least one scene showing the government's proposed response to dealing with the Entertainment that I've forgotten the details of that speaks to this). It's a bitterly ironic happy ending... which of course makes it all the sadder.

I've always found an interesting parallel between Wallace's not-really-so-happy happy ending in "Infinite Jest" (poor Hal!) and Altman's triumphantly cynical ending to "Nashville," also a tremendous work of adolescent satire. In "Nashville" the toxic country music star system results in the violent death of singer Barbara Jean, right in front of a shocked American audience. Out of this collective confusion, an unknown singer stumbles onstage, a microphone thrust in her hand. She sings a stirring song that speaks right to that moment, a patriotically-tinged anthem called "It Don't Worry Me." The dazed audience comes back to life, clapping along to the song. It's triumphant, upbeat... and also a willful and tragic erasure, the system (too) swiftly restoring itself. You chop off its head (Barbara Jean) and it grows right back.

I think that many of you are missing one of the simpler points about introducing subsidised time (aside from commentary on the commercialisation of everything in late-20th century American life and the humor)... It leaves the reader much more unaware of when things are happening within the framework of the story until he lists the years in chronological order on page 223.

Yeah - I read it in the Salon a couple of years ago and someone told us about page 223 ahead of time so I had it dogeared along with the Incandenza filmography footnote and about a half a dozen other relevant topics so I'd be less confused as I read.