I N F I N I T E J E S T

[zero]

I finally finished this monstrous book of David Foster Wallace's. It took like three days of straight reading from like dawn on to plow through the last chunk. Although I was taking breaks to read other stuff of his from Consider The Lobster.

This will interest precisely one of you (Alexis) as she finished the book a while ago. I'm trying to track down a few leads right now but I'd highly recommend anyone who's a serious reader think about picking it up.

[bradm]

Could you give some more details/description? Is it fiction? Non-fiction? Plot? Subject/genre?

Aloha,

Brad

[zero]

Okay here goes without spoiling reading the book.

It's a vaguely dystopian and clearly parodic but believable glimpse into the near future maybe 2027 or something. Years are now subsidized as in Year of The Depend Adult Undergarment (Y.D.A.U. when much of the book takes place) or Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar. Slowly an image of a world with major waste displacement needs emerges. There is a Great Concavity where much of the NNE of the United States once was. Canada, US and Mexico are now ONAN (Organization of North American Nations). Then of course Quebecois seperatism has raised to the level of jihadist terrorism with the most feared cell of post-FLQ menaces being the dreaded Assassins de Fauteuil Roulent (A.F.R.) or the Wheelchair Assassins of Quebec.

The book largely takes place at the Enfield Tennis Academy (ETA) and at Ennet House a halfway house that sits at the bottom of the hill. Somehow this vision of the future, a countless string of junkies, tennis prodigies, government agents, insanely volatile drugs and Entertainments link together into an anticonfluential mess.

[allison]

Is the O.N.A.N acronymn supposed to reference the biblical Onan? Or just a fluke?

[zero]

I don't think there are too many 'flukes' in DFW but I think that might be coincidental. I can't remember Onan, if you told me I'd know better if there was a connection.

What a fucking whacked out book. It's like this neverending story (literally!) universe wrapped in paperback.

[bradm]

I can't remember Onan, if you told me I'd know better if there was a connection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onan

The word onanism, an older term for masturbation, derives from his name because of one interpretation of his actions in the Bible.

Aloha,

Brad

[allison]

Onan- the guy who spilt his seed on the ground(not sure of the actual words), was killed by God and forever became a poster boy for the sin of masturbation. I'm pretty sure the actual sin that was being committed was failing to provide his dead brother with an heir.

[timouse]

In his novel Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace depicts a future North American society governed by the Organization of North American Nations, abbreviated O.N.A.N. Those opposed to the foreign policy of said government are known as anti-O.N.A.N.ists.

[zero]

Definitely intentional. DFW loves that sort of screwball punny humour. Anti-onanists was clearly the kicker. I actually just tipped onto a document called The Connectedness of All Events: A Study of Wallace's Infinite Jest (Greg Carlisle). I'm sure it's the kind of thing he'd address. Whereas Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake are considered great literature they are debatably bad reading. I'd argue DFW is the Joyce of our generation because his work will stand the test of years of scholarly inquiry and is perhaps not highly readable but highly engaging.

[zero]

I think I just figured out a handful of really weird things going on in the book.

There's this ultra-powerful drug called DMZ (kind of like DMT presumably) that one of the tennis guys gets ahold of- Pemulis - the guy's a total dude. Anyways through trying to figure out how the DMZ got in play I think I realized that the end of the book (which never takes place it just sort of drifts off) is actually in part contained in the beginning. I remember getting a feeling at one point the entire novel was like a mobius loop or rather a spliced segment of the mobius loop but now I think it's not just one piece it's the entire loop. Insane book!

[zero]

It's like the book starts once you finish reading it.... and it takes a LONG time to read.

[djmelbatoast]

I'm in. Think I'll head to Chapter's tomorrow.

[shainhouse]

I'm on page 347. I have just started, essentially. Alexis and I were talking about it a few weeks ago. This book is amazing, but exhausting.

[M]

hey luke -- i read this book, around 8 or so years ago ... completely loved it.

however, i had what i thought was a really fucked up thing happen... my book contains pages 25 - 52 in duplicate succession. and pages 953 - 984 are missing.

page 985- 1078 contains the footnote end sections... so essentially, my book has no official end of the story. (which i think is what you are referring to above, correct?)

when you talk about the story "looping" do you mean that your version of the book literally contains duplicate pages and misses others (as mine did) or do you mean the plot itself loops.

i thought for the longest time that the jest of the book not ending was part of the point of the story... but when i realized years later that noone else seemed to have the same published version i did, i thought it a bit odd.. but it sounds like your version may be like the one i have.

the bizarre thing was that a friend of mine's copy at the time was completely different than mine. let me know what your version of the book is like.. this used to drive me nuts!

[phorbesie]

this sounds crazy, it's going on my list.

[Alexis]

hey mary...i hope you still have that copy of the book. it might be worth something someday! it definitely sounds like a printing error.

when luke said that it doesn't end, the story literally doesn't end. i knew i had like 5 pages left to read and the story wasn't anywhere near finished. it left me with a lot of questions and a pretty pissed off attitude. 6 weeks of reading and 1000+ pages later and i don't get a fing ending?!?!?

i just grabbed my copy, which is the first paperback edition with an isbn number of 0-316-92117-3. if your isbn # is 0316920045 then you have the hardcover and none of the following will be relevant to figuring out your issue.

my copy has the body of the story ending on page 981 with footnotes from 983-1079. i know there is one rather lengthy footnote that is pretty much verbatim a section of the novel, but i don't have any parts of the novel that are just pages repeated sequentially. are the page numbers at the bottom repeated...as in 25, 26...51, 52, 25, 26? or do the page numbers go up with the text being the same?

i don't think my copy is missing an ending...i think it's a bit of a joke on the reader to just leave it the way it was left.

[M]

wow! that's insane...mine is not a hardcover. ...sounds like it was definitely a printing error then!! it totally messed with my head when i read it that way!

[zero]

Great 8 years ago. Why does it not surprise me that M(rs.) Rock 'n Roll beat me to the punch on this one? And Shain stick with it, as one critic put it (I think it was the novelist Jay McInerney i.e. Bright Lights, Big City- who DFW was thrust into the spotlight of being the next McInerney or Bret Easton Ellis) there are many uninteresting passages in Infinite Jest but few uninteresting sentences. It's DFW's line-by-line prose and insanely erudite view on everything that makes Infinite Jest such a winning proposition. Also much of the investment you make early on in characters you think are going nowhere later pay, sometimes immense, dividends.

Infinite Jest ten years after is a really compelling way to read the book though. DFW despite his outlandish parodies that one is supposed to accept as fact, like waste catapults that fling garbage out of Boston into the Concavity, is actually a fairly prescient futurist. He anticipated what we now except as convergence with his TP or teleputer that runs 'pulses' or cartridges that are basically on demand and post breakdown of the major broadcasting corporations. He deals swiftly with the whole (future) videophone boom and the unanticipated 'physiognomic' anxiety it creates and the masking technologies that address this anxiety. Some of it is very believable.

The more time I spend with the research the more I realize that there is incredible evidence of design in the work. I rationalized early this morning that the novel starts in a cluster like the big bang and flows outward in a stream of images, characters and plot lines that gradually coalesce into more recognizable strands. The novel continues to expand like a belt of stars forming a galaxy and then the reader reaches the end of that galaxy and drops off into space (the end). Alexis' frustration is shared by a number of readers who need resolution. Like the experimental 'apres-garde' film of the novel's patriarch J.O. Incandenza, DFW steers towards anticonfluentialism.

In terms of the 'ending' I think what happens and what DFW suggests is that the reader can project a variety of endings on their own, also chronologically the beginning comes almost right after the end- hence the loop. Now what I realize is that there is incredible evidence of design at work. This was an accusation made about the experimental films of the tennis academy founder (Incandenza)- that critics didn't realize how technically stunning they were no matter how much their content was lacking.

In a 1996 radio interview, Wallace said that the structure of the unedited first draft of Infinite Jest was based on a fractal object called a Sierpinski Gasket, generated geometrically by an iterative proces of cutting smaller triangle-sized holes out of larger triangles.

Probability Theory

Percolation, Fractals, Phase Transition

M.SHINODA, Existence of phase transition of percolation on Sierpinski carpet lattices, Journal of Applied Probability 39 (2002),1-10.

M.SHINODA, Non-existence of phase transition of oriented percolation on Sierpinski carpet lattices, Probability Theory and Related Fields 125 (2003), 447-456.

The earliest Sierpinski Gasket?

The image on the left shows Neolithic art patterns engraved on kerbstone 67 on the northeast circumference of the burial mound at Newgrange, an Irish passage tomb dating from approximately 3000 BC. The image on the right is a closeup that suggests the beginning iteration of the Sierpinski gasket!

[bradm]

I claim "Kerbstone 67" as a band/song name.

Aloha,

Brad

[zero]

Phishtaper gave me a great song title the other day with a Dead lot/suspect narc story: Cops Don't Wear Airwalks.

Brad how much do you know about Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (why do I get William Gibson and Stephenson mixed up all the time). One technique DFW uses is constantly skewing the point of view character and also morphing the third person omniscient narrator to reflect the internal dialogue of characters from different socio-economic and educational backgrounds. I gather something similar happens in Stephenson or Gibson.

Also do you know the Pynchon novel Rainbow's End because I gather a lot of the experimental post-modern fiction techniques DFW uses are considered highly Pynchon-ian. I just had a mega mega geek moment when I realized that Verner Vinge's bracing work of futurism has the same title minus an apostrophe. I've got about 8 novels to read in the next month.....

[bradm]

Brad how much do you know about Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (why do I get William Gibson and Stephenson mixed up all the time).

I think the only Stephenson I've read is "Snow Crash" and "The Diamond Age." "Cryptonomicon" has been on to-be-read list for a while now.

One technique DFW uses is constantly skewing the point of view character and also morphing the third person omniscient narrator to reflect the internal dialogue of characters from different socio-economic and educational backgrounds. I gather something similar happens in Stephenson or Gibson.

I'm not sure I'd characterize Gibson or Stephenson that way; ISTR Gibson's "Neuromancer" / "Count Zero" / "Mona Lisa Overdrive" series and the two Stephenson books I've read to be pretty much straight narrative.

Also do you know the Pynchon novel Rainbow's End because I gather a lot of the experimental post-modern fiction techniques DFW uses are considered highly Pynchon-ian. I just had a mega mega geek moment when I realized that Verner Vinge's bracing work of futurism has the same title minus an apostrophe. I've got about 8 novels to read in the next month.....

I think the Pynchon novel you mean is actually titled Gravity's Rainbow, and I've read it (along with his "V" and "The Crying Of Lot 49"). I found GR to be a frustrating book, one that seemed intended more to be studied than enjoyed. I found some of the techniques (e.g., switching narrative voice in mid-sentence, having one paragraph talk about something, and having the next paragraph start, "And here comes..." with a sudden arbitrary shift of subject) he uses in GR to be actually kind of annoying; they got in the way of me keeping track of what was going on in the novel. (I'd also count "V" as the worst, most frustrating, book I've ever read. By mid-way through the book, the narrative made no sense, I had no idea who the characters were or what their relationships were, and ended up just having the words go in my head as I turned the pages. Ugh.)

If you want to add another, I think similar, book to your list, Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany is an interesting read. It's heavy, and hard to understand, and sits more in the SF genre than Pynchon (though "Gravity's Rainbow" was actually nominated for a Nebula Award). Delany is probably the most literate of SF/fantasy writers (he's actually a literature professor), and some of his earlier works (e.g., "The Einstein Intersection", "Nova") explore myths quite heavily.

Aloha,

Brad

[zero]

Yes of course Gravity's Rainbow that was too convenient. I think you're right about Pynchon being for studying. That's what DFW is really trying to bridge is high and low culture, most avant garde art and literature is to his estimation and mine very boring and actually rather painful. He wanted to bridge the gap between avant-garde fiction much of which he feels is 'hellaciously unfun to read' and commercial escapism. I'd say he's done just that.