Carefully Controlled Chaos

The structure of this novel is incredibly fascinating. After my last post about how fractured the book had re-gotten, I’ve hit a stretch of another 30 or so pages (206 down, 19.1% of the novel) that are more conventional – continuing the development of actual stories (Hal’s day-to-day existence at the Enfield Tennis Academy, and the stories of the addicts at the nearby Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House [redundancy is intentional]).

So the constantly shifting narrative style has made me curious about the “method” behind DFW’s “madness” (incidentally, the novel’s title is derived from Hamlet – Yorick was “a fellow of infinite jest” – and the novel is bursting with other Hamlet references). And but so, in a 1996 radio interview soon after the book was published, DFW reveals that Infinite Jest is structured like a Sierpinski Gasket (pictured).

I’m certainly no mathlete, but from the best I can tell, a Sierpinski Gasket is a fractal – a geometric shape that can be broken into smaller versions of the same shape ad infinitum. Fractals are used to define highly irregular geometric figures, as well as to bring mathematical order to ostensible chaos.

In Infinite Jest, themes, characters and narrative strains are introduced briefly, then returned to later and expanded, but with bits and pieces of the other narrative strains, characters and themes woven in. This pattern continues for 1,079 pages. And in some way or another, everything is interconnected.

This Sierpinski Gasket business is very briefly mentioned in the introduction of the guide book I’m using, but I paid it no heed then because I didn’t understand it. And I’m still not sure I do, but what I do understand is that it’s just another stark example of DFW’s brilliance. The structure of a novel is usually one of the first choices a writer makes (fiction-writing cliché – think: the movie Wonder Boys: “you’re always telling us that writers make choices..." ), but that usually means deciding if a story will be told in chronological order, or include a flashback here and there, or if it should start out with a few parallel narrative strains that are eventually merged. DFW said "Screw that, I'm using an incredibly complex mathematical proof as my structure." Simply stunning.

PS: Happy Halloween!