INFINITE JEST: Its Structure

James Joyce rules !!!!

Has Halitosis !!!!

At p. 300 +, I'm interested. I don't recall p. 223. But I will tonight.

4> keep us posted.

Perhaps an inconsequential preliminary regarding the structure of IJ (but of interest to this and many more dorky, mathematically-minded diehards):

In a '96 interview with Michael Silverblatt, DFW acknowledged that the first draft of IJ was based on "fractals", or specifically, a "Sierpinski gasket". What I've taken away from this, more than anything else, is that IJ is so vast it's its own self-contained cosmos. Not like a solar system, but a black hole. The "iterations of fractals" (or, the cutting out of triangles from each previous cut-out triangles (see the diagrams in the links above), and thereby replicating triangles ad infinitum from the area of the original triangle -- replicating even as they become microscopic -- are like the elements comprising the vacuum that is IJs inescapable black hole.

IJs Sierpinski gasket architecture also reflects the novel's core conceit: "recursive loops;" best conceptualized in the novel through "The Entertainment" (i.e., the film, Infinite Jest, starring Madame Psychosis*, by the auteur and anti-hero, James O. Incandenza).

Even if you don't care about this geometry shit just know the novel is organized, even though it may appear at first glance like one big chapterless** mess.

~~~~~

* obviously plays off "metempsychosis" -- or the transmigration of souls -- and consider the infinite replicative possibilities in that through the aeons.

** IJ is divided into twenty-eight chapters. New chapters begin every time you see a shaded-in circle at the top of a page. Curious that DFW didn't signify chapter breaks with shaded-in triangles.

In the beginning, was the ending.

In the most recent NYRB there is a brilliant essay from Elaine Blair on Wallace and Inifinte Jest (and the Pale King and and). She nails, in my limited view, Wallace's concerns about civic duty and the portrayal in Infinite Jest of what she calls "mid-period Gately." She also has a great comment about Wallace's style in Inifite Jest:

Wallace is famous for his ear for idiomatic expression, but he is often assumed to be merely listening rather than reconfiguring his generation’s impoverished English at every turn. Jonathan Raban, for instance, has written in these pages of Wallace’s “absolute fidelity to the patterns of (American) speech and thought I hear around me.”* Would that this were the case. In fact Wallace takes our unremarkable, stammering colloquialisms and works them into monologues that are verbally and grammatically complex and highly literary, while also sounding like a real voice speaking to us. But it could only be the voice of one person, and it could only be written. Imagine trying to adapt the above passage for dialogue or voice-over. Could you make the words sound natural if you had to speak them? Wallace has worked a reverse-Promethean theft, taking our humble spoken idioms and delivering them to the gods, to the firmament of high literary art.

The whole thing is here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/dec/06/new-brilliant-start/?page=1
It involves some spoilers but I don't know that they are spoilers that matter.

I can't imagine anyone ever topping the paragraph you quote, slick, in describing how exactly Wallace worked his magic. Thanks for that.