Two Ways to Draw Infinite Jest's Sierpinski Gasket
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I don't think I would say Infinite Jest has three plots, it feels like it does because the plot never happens, we get the setup and then it is dropped right when it actually starts. We can view it as three plots but those plots don't provide anything useful towards understanding. They would be more accurately viewed as triangles, they are containers for information.
Edit: I also don't think we can fully interpret Infinite Jest through the Sierpinski structure, that was the structure of the first draft which was something like 500 pages longer and had the bulk of the novel in the end notes. It has been too long since I last read it to say what the structure of the final form of the novel is but I think he may have just made the gasket more linear; he keeps repeating the full triangle but each time he goes a bit deeper with the iterations.
But I like your vertices (family, education, and society).
You're making me think that there's something to the fact that you could 'seed' the Gasket with different vertices as well. Something I learn when re-reading is that you can bring so many interpretations and perspectives to this novel and still come out with an entertaining and valid experience of it. In that respect, I like the idea that you can use different triplets to seed the Gasket!
You're correct that we can't lean fully on the Sierpinski idea. Wallace mentions in his interview that after those edits, the book became more like a 'lopsided' Sierpinski Gasket "it looks basically like a pyramid on acid" (https://www.kcrw.com/shows/bookworm/stories/david-foster-wal...).
Separate from the Gasket thing, but I like your point about the footnotes. I wish people spent more time on those. I've heard commentary on the structure of those. Some folks talk about the 'self referentiality', as text (obviously) references footnotes, and there are even instances of footnotes referencing the main text! I've also heard that the back-and-forth emulates the back-and-forth in a tennis match, although that one seems less interesting.
Edits: fixed spelling mistakes Edit: I added your 3 vertices idea and the fact you can invert the 3 vertices to the post, thank you! I attributed back to this thread.
Would it make more sense to just dive into the middle and see what converges out then?
What put me off it is it just kind of reads like a rambling stoner conversation.
I'd say there's a lot of groundwork laid in the first 60 - 100 pages or so. After that, I honestly don't think it would be harmful to cherry pick interesting passages from the book. You could research interesting sections of the novel and target those for a first pass read through, then maybe later read it sequentially. There aren't really plot spoilers as the book is somewhat plotless.
Even still, I'd recommend the first read through be sequential. My first read through was, but I also skipped around a little bit. My favourite thing about DFW is his writing style. Also might help to whet your appetite for his voice by reading something like "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", which is a hilarious anecdote and commentary about his trip aboard a cruise liner.
In general, I'd say the best advice is to free yourself from the burden of 'understanding' the novel on your first read through and just enjoy the chaos. Besides, there is so much ambiguity in the novel that, even if you do crystallize some understanding, there's likely many alternative interpretations. That's where the re-reads get really fun.
> What put me off it is it just kind of reads like a rambling stoner conversation.
Yeah well, that book may not be your cup of tea then. The book _is_ rambling, plus a lot of the characters _are_ actual stoners/addicts/recovering addicts. But keep in mind that most of the book is in the third person, not in the first (as the first few pages would make you assume).
I found Ulysses more engaging. I have a copy of Gravity's Rainbow which I will try to get into at some stage.
Past a certain point on my first successful read through, maybe ~300 pgs in, I started realizing that, with very few exceptions, the more abstruse, boring, or frustrating the vignette, the more powerfully it ended; and at that point, I couldn’t put it down. So, in my opinion, skipping around would not make it more fulfilling, and would certainly not make it make more sense (and I do think it would be easy to understate how much they do compose together into a functioning plot for the novel). I could only advocate cultivating an appreciation of the individual vignettes themselves as more-or-less complete short stories.
after i had enough context to start making connections, I couldn’t put it down
Any thoughts appreciated!
Something I want to do is read the footnotes alone in 1 whack and see what that experience feels like. I haven't done this yet, but I feel like it could illuminate exactly how much of what I latently remember about the novel is located in the footnotes.
Love this piece!
I will surely blog about it on davidfosterwallace.nl in the coming weeks (it'll be in Dutch though).
Even still, I strongly recommend reading it sequentially. But my first read through, I did skip ahead to some interesting passages other folks had written about, and that re-invigorated my interest in the novel. DFW's voice is so idiosyncratic and interesting. That's what kept me coming back.
A key part of how to see if someone is just parotting acceptable opinions vrs is actually having an opinion, is to make them explain it. If its a generic "oh you need to read it, its great" or parotting of popular talking points, that person is not serious about their taste. They use the art as an ornament to make their personalities more interesting than actually engaging with the art in any meaningful way.
The only reaction that matters should be your personal one and what resonates with you.
Also, what is our "Identity" if not the sum of all our influences?
My comment spoke more about how society just drip feeds us influences via marketing and with an external motivation. That means they are screwing with our very identity itself. My point is that curating those influences is important and shaping your own identity instead of basing it on universal acclaim, reviews, "what does the world think/what must be the right way to think".
There’s a book written by David Lipsky where he followed and interviewed David Foster Wallace (author of Infinite Jest) upon the release of Infinite Jest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Although_of_Course_You_End_Up_...
There is also a movie which is faithful to the book.
The only AI piece is the banner image, because I can't draw. All other images are attributed (Wikipedia, YouTube).
I got the idea for this post after listening to Wallace's interview with bookworm (linked in the post), and subsequently researching Sierpinski Gaskets on YouTube (where I saw the Numberphile and ViralHog videos).
Edit: I actually went ahead and removed the banner image from this post. Thank you for pointing out this signal!
Even old archives are great to search for visuals and shows the passion that you've put in to the writing.
Anyway, the text of the article doesn't feel LLM to me and on first scan, neither the structure. They don't care about minutiae in this way nor do they follow threads. Theirs is a bunch of oh-so-pompously-and-fake-eruditely dispensed rehashes with little pounce.
I don't think substance is right: I think it's about freedom from it, or maybe a "higher power" of some sorts, mysticism maybe.
I think it makes more sense, also in the context of what Wallace said elsewhere ("This Is Water"): "Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.(...)"
Also: do you know https://samizdat.co/digest/? Looks like an interesting project which ties nicely into your idea
At risk of marking myself a "lit-bro" I think the book is proving solidly prophetic.
If you're on page 600 though, there's no spoilers.
Edit: and yes, DFW presaged a lot with this book! Especially around how entertainment has evolved and the negative impact it has. The 'doom scroll' feature is literally called 'infinite scroll' in the software industry. Scary stuff :-/
It's pure coincidence too as I read TPK in January and knew I had to read more DFW fiction as soon as I could.
Er, it kind of predicts the internet, but everything else?
Quebec separatism? Corporate sponsored calendar? All of North America under the same flag? Dumping toxic waste in/on Québec instead of Africa ?
none of things actually happened
Two of these things were already on the go. Or kind of...
The Québec independence movement has been mainstream for a long while and is fairly successful despite attempts to scupper it, such as installing completely bilingual prime ministers etc. Maybe one day it will reach its ultimate goal.
The "sponsored calendar" is probably Wallace's parody of various dedicated years, days and months we have. We do have World Mental Health Day, Black History Month, Gay Pride Month, the International Year of Whatever. We had a "Year of Gaelic" in Scotland which I only heard about half way in. The difference being that these are not generally purely advertising initiatives, although many corporations have tried to hijack them.
The internet long precedes the publishing of Infinite Jest.
A more solid prophecy would be InterLace and the teleputer (analogous to streaming and smartphones, respectively).
I do think the Entertainment is a solid prophecy of doom scroll / infinite scroll, which is now showing up in basically every application.
The videophony chapter is also especially prophetic when you consider the prevalence of things like filters. I actually noticed the other day on a Google Meet that there is a 'touch up my appearance' feature. Wild.
This one is a lark, but one funny thing, although very different from ONAN (Mexico + USA + Canada), is that we're kind of witnessing an 'ONAN' world cup (all the matches are in these exact three countries). Again, obviously different from ONAN in Infinite Jest, but I thought that was funny.
I'm not sure he predicted the internet, as you mentioned, as the internet was invented in the 60s. If you meant the world wide web, that was created in 1989, popularized in 1990. IJ came out in 1996, so my instinct is that DFW knew about the internet/www when he wrote the book.
Yes, he was definitely prophetic about filters. I remember that bit.
(On an unrelated note, I saw a thread elsewhere about whether Kurt Cobain was a frequent internet user. He could have been since he lived long enough, but he never left much trace if he was.)
I think this reality is something many folks are still in denial about. Like, how many times do you see an add depicting some translucent person's distorted cervical spine, referencing 'devices' in all their various forms as the cause. The entertainment / devices we use every day are literally causing morphological changes in our bodies. That's so dark, and I think loads of people simply choose not to think about it. Is ignorance bliss? Maybe for those hypnotized by the various 'entertainments' in their lives. But for people like yourself, who actually witness it, I'd say Infinite Jest is a useful, cautionary tale.
Then there is the narcissism. I witnessed a beautiful sunset from the bus over green fields last week and I presumed a woman was filming it... Then I realised she was photographing herself. Oh dear.