I love Nashville. Not the city (I’ve never had the pleasure of visiting), but the 1975 film by Robert Altman. Altman was something of a cinematic David Foster Wallace, creating long and sprawling narratives that were superficially “rambling” and profoundly intricate, and which focused almost exclusively on the characters and the relationships between them. Nashville tackles half a dozen stories at least, some big and some small, and all in parallel. That is to say, it’s more like a collection of loosely knitted short stories than a single chronicle–minor characters occasionally stray from one plotline to another, but by and large the narratives are like strands in a rope, twined but distinct. The only thing resembling convergence in Nashville is the end, when most of the characters find themselves attending the same political rally (long story).
Twenty years later, Altman made a similarly structured film entitled Short Cuts and, in this one, there’s no unifying event whatsoever.99 And Short Cuts is often cited as a progenitor for another of my all-time favorite movies, Magnolia (this one by the wonderful Paul Thomas Anderson), which also features a number of stories that fail to fully intersect.100
This type of film doesn’t really have a strict genre classification, but henceforth I shall call them: anticonfluential.
Of course, I did not know such a word existed until recently. And maybe the term didn’t exists, until Wallace-via-J. O. Incandenza, made it up. But once I saw it, the word, “anticonfluence”, in the pages of Infinite Jest, I thought I knew what I was in for. I figured that the three storylines–E.T.A., Ennet, and Marathe/Steeply–would never merge, that the rich kids would do their drills on the hill, and the down-and-out would keep coming back, that Marathe and Steeply would talk and talk and talk, and never the thrain would meet.101 And where this would catch others by surprise, I would close the book with the smug satisfaction of having foreseen all this as early as endnote 24.
And then Steeply appeared in the stands of an E.T.A. game, and Marthe rolled into Ennet House. And no sooner had I hastily adjusted my hypothesis to fit the new data (Steeply and Marathe will serve as the bridge between E.T.A. and Ennet, but the school and the shelter will not directly interact) when Hal arrives at Ennet, asking for NA brochure. Even Lenz and P. T. Kraus shared an alley, albeit briefly.
The moral here, methinks, is: stop trying to outguess Wallace, because that dude will punk you hard.
With all this anti-anti-confluence afoot, it would be easy to overlook what is, to my mind, the biggest revelation in the book thus far. Waaaaay back on page 693, Hal muses on anhedonia:
Hal himself hasn’t had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny; he finds terms like joie and value to be like so many variables in rarified equations, and he can manipulate them well enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he’s in there, inside his own hull, as a human being — but in fact he’s far more robotic than John Wayne. One of his troubles with his Moms is the fact that Avril Incandenza believes she knows him inside and out as a human being, and an internally worthy one at that, when in fact inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows.
Since the first page of Infinite Jest (or, rather, since page 223, when we learned that the first page falls chronologically after the rest), the big question in my mind has been: what terrible thing happens to Hal, that leaves him sounding like “Like a stick of butter being hit with a mallet”? But this passage turns that first chapter on its head. Because although Hal feels empty inside in Y.D.A.U., by Year of Glad he’ll be saying “I am in here.” The question now becomes what wonderful thing happens to Hal, that makes his life complete?
Misc.
Thumbs Up?: Of the aforementioned Nashville, Roger Ebert said: “after I saw it I felt more alive, I felt I understood more about people, I felt somehow wiser.” And after his recent column about A.A. garnered multiple recommendations for Infinite Jest, Ebert said of the novel “I have it right here. Started it once, am starting again.” One can only imagine what kind of review he will provide at its end.
Zeno’s Paradoxes: As Kevin and others have noted, Wallace said he structure the novel “like something called a Sierpinski Gasket, which is a very primitive kind of pyramidical fractal”. By fractal, I took Wallace to mean this: that there exist in the book large “things” (themes, motifs, situations, events) that appear nearly identical to smaller “things”, save only scale (in much the same way that the large triangular Sierpinski Gasket is composed of smaller triangles, which are composed of smaller triangles still). But endnotes 324 and 332 are showing the novel to be fractal in yet another sense.
One property of fractals is that they can expand endlessly.102 The example commonly given is the coastline of a fjord. From a high altitude there is a ragged but definite coastline, of what appears to be 100 kilometers. But when you zoom in a bit you see that the ragged bits meander in and out to such a degree that the true length of the coast is a few more kilometers than you had originally thought. You zoom in more and discover that there is still more coastline, this adding additional meters to the total. Zooming in further adds centimeters. And then millimeters. And then microns.
So too does the total page count of this novel seem to be growing right in front of our eyes, now that we are finding entire chapters squirreled away in the endnotes. I get into bed, flip ahead to see how many pages I have to read to read before reaching the next break, and discover it to be eight; 14 pages later I close the book, having reached it. It’s like a house in a Harry Potter novel, that appears to be a hovel from the outside and yet somehow contains 12,000 square feet inside.
Pre-quadrivial : Oh god, that “17 can actually go into 56 way more than 3.294 times” flier made me laugh and laugh.
And the house in the Harry Potter novel is a sports locker compared to the house in House of Leaves.
Thatt flier was the single funniest thing in the book.
I’m not sure I understood this one, but I also read it a little while ago (I’ve strayed from the syllabus a bit) and could just be forgetting the details. At any rate, could someone explain?
John Wayne is 17 (years old), Avril Incandenza is 56 (years old). “Goes into” implies division and “going forth and multiplying” at the same time. Pemulis is sharing the time he walked in on the two.
I agree on the flier and it’s such a great encapsulation of the wit of Pemulis.
Whoopsie. You seem to be missing an endnote.
You probably already knew this, but PT Anderson considered Altman such a personal hero that he went to work for him as an Asst. Director on Altman’s last film, and when was the last time (if ever) that you heard of an established director going to work as an assistant to another director just so he could learn more from him?*
Oh, and as there has been occasional postings on the forum about ideal casting for an imagined IJ movie/miniseries, PT Anderson’s films give some good possibilities for what seems to be proving the hardest role to imagine a casting for: Gately: Philip Seymour Hoffman or John C. Reilly might either one still be just barely young enough to play the role (Reilly seems the more natural fit), and Paul Dano, co-starring in PTA’s last movie, seems like he could pull it off, too! He’s not huge, size-wise, but tall enough that he could probably seem appropriatly Bimmy-sized if necessary.
*I think I heard somewhere that Anderson was actually hired as the backup in case Altman proved too frail to finish the movie, which, if true, is still a pretty strong vote, on both director’s parts, for the mutual affinity and respect at work.
Short Cuts was unified by an earthquake.
And I think “Magnolia” was unified by a storm that was biblical–in more ways than one.
Itza spoiler, maybe, to mention the Ennet House character interaction with ETA? If not, let me know. Another incident of characters seeming invisible through their physical attributes (and our innate bias w/r/t same).
It’s funny because earlier I’d read the section where the wraith dismisses Altman (with Schwulst?) as “a poseur”–I really puzzled over it for a moment. How is he a poseur? I wanted to know. But of course, the wraith fails to elaborate.
wow thanks to your fjord example now I get fractals
Magnolia’s right up there in my top ten. Very cool to be reminded of a film that makes me “feel more alive”. Gets forgotten sometimes in the crush of daily events what would be your antidote to it all. Gonna rent it pronto.
While we’re on Philip Seymour Hoffman: for me, the nearest thing to DFW on screen so far has been Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. The same exaggeratedly quirky sensibility allied with a sincere ambition to deal with the largest questions possible through modes of artistic allegory. They both move me in what I think are similar ways(though with works of genius, comparisons are necessarily difficult).
A little off topic but, in my opnion, the real literary progenitor of Synechdoche is Steven Millhauser. Largely his novel Martin Dressler, but also just about every third short story h ever published deals with simalcra. The first time I saw the movie, I stuck around for the credits because I really thought Millhauser would get a mention somewhere in there.
I think the barrier to recognizing these kinds of structures is experiential, i.e. reading books and seeing movies in America trains us to see a linear narrative, and so other narratives unsettle us. Of course, Altman’s narratives are linear as well, he just hides this in a pleasantly shambling surface. A lot of this has to do with how he conveys dialogue; rather than characters taking turns speaking in ways specifically written to further, or explain, the story, he has people chat in a more natural way, so we learn about them as characters rather than plot devices. He always works towards an event that gives a context to what we have seen, but he does it towards the end with an earthquake or assassination, reversing convention. He didn’t invent this, of course, it’s just that we are not as familiar with it. For Fellini making “Nights of Cabiria,” it was more natural, and that movie is, I think, the ne plus ultra of how to make that style work. On the other hand, I think “Magnolia” is appallingly bad. PT Anderson’s approach to characters made up to look natural, but we get so much lecturing about how a person is and thinks, and so much fussy camera activity that asserts emotional content rather than proving it, that everything ends up as false, insincere, a bill of goods. Altman at his best is completely sincere and charming, while Anderson is consistently phony.
I followed Ebert’s blog post and read most of the 1000+ comments after seeing it linked on this blog recently, and noted with pleasure the number of recommendations for IJ. I don’t know if he’ll ever post anything resembling a review of it, but I’d love to read one.
Very interesting observation on Hal and whatever change(s) occur between Y.D.A.U. and Year of Glad…I had never considered it from that perspective before.
I have been growing increasingly intrigued by the themes of muteness (some real, some imagined), of being trapped (caged) in one’s own body, and of being unable to communicate or make others understand, and how this plays off the 12-step emphasis on “hearing” others. To hear the Hal of page 693 in the 12-step sense is to hear butter and mallet. I have the same feeling you do: “what wonderful thing happens to Hal” to give him an inner life by the Year of Glad?
misterAyed laid out similar thoughts in more detail in the forums, in an Aug. 2 entry in the What happened to Hal? thread of the General Discussion forum (**General Discussion not spoiler-free)
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George Grella, re; Magnolia, that’s terribly harsh, the worst criticism I’ve ever heard of P.T. Andersen. You feel the same way about “Boogie Nights”? I don’t agree with you at all–except for adoring Altman. (But Matthew is I’m sure much more capable than defending Anderson than I am.)
Prolixian: What does “to hear butter and mallet” mean?
It’s from the book and the OP comments:
“Since the first page of Infinite Jest (or, rather, since page 223, when we learned that the first page falls chronologically after the rest), the big question in my mind has been: what terrible thing happens to Hal, that leaves him sounding like “Like a stick of butter being hit with a mallet”?”