Just a Few Thoughts on Infinite Jest, True Detective, and Narrative Machinery
It’s neither particularly efficient nor effective to run too far away from your influences and to that end I don't want to run away from my obvious affection for David Foster Wallace; so too do I not want to overwhelm everything else I say here by saying: hey, I really like David Foster Wallace. Because: just as his imitators are generally lazy about the imitation (as I certainly am); so are his critics of his stylistic tics, and so too are the critics of those who are influenced by him. I do happen to like David Foster Wallace, and I say that as a way to mention that I once came upon a thing where he spoke about the narrative shape he was trying to achieve in Infinite Jest, that he saw it as a kind of fractal shape, triangles piled on top of triangles, that it was written in the shape of a thing called a Sierpinski Gasket, and (my guess is) the purpose of mimicking that sort of obtuse shape-set was to figure out a way to meditate on narrative itself. That there is an inwardness to Infinite Jest, an inwardness reflecting an inwardness, and that kind of perpetual repeating inwardness is a sort of what the book is trying to get at as it itself recurs re: the modern/contemporary world[1].
At exactly no point in time have I thought to myself, "Writing a long book about Centralia will reveal something about the contemporary condition", nor have I thought, "Here's a particularly torturous narrative form -- copy it!" But it has occurred to me that there's a certain kind of joyfulness that comes with a longer form, an opportunity not only to look closely at torturous minutiae[2], but also to ask serious questions about how it is that information presents itself in the world you are constructing and as such how it is that that information speaks to the condition of the world you are creating. And thus my original thought was: bury the narrative in a set of story lines that stretch across the page in the form of footnotes, and make sure there are multiple timelines that create factual dissonance, and, you know, make your shit really complicated.
But I had the opportunity to watch five consecutive episodes of True Detective a few days ago and it began to occur to me that there’s something interesting occurring in the narrative shape of that show that reminds me of Infinite Jest and in fact reminds me of A Thing I Can’t Quite Put My Finger On, But I’m Sure I Wanted to Accomplish. Which is that the narrative is so divided – first of all, there are (at least) two separate timelines, and the earlier timeline is being parsed out by two separate re-tellings of that narrative, and the present-day-narrative (the one occurring in the interviews) has the weird obligation to simulatenously reveal things about the past (like, “What the fuck really happened back in 1997”) as well as the present, (“What the fuck is going on here?”) and somehow make both reveal the truth about...well, both.
Which is to say, there’s a kind of recursiveness there, a mirror on a mirror.
True Detective is hugely uneven – sometimes great, sometimes a half-assed David Fincher TV show – but it’s a similar issue: that bigness (in Infinite Jest, in Centralia, in a murder investigation told over eight hours of television) allows that joyfulness mentioned above (that you can really let loose on whatever it is you enjoy doing) but invites a really, really large set of structural problems. Because you can choose anything, you can choose fractals, you can choose a set of mirrors, and the thing that strikes me most is this: if your structural work is smart enough, 10% of your readership will notice it.
But if it sucks, everyone will.
[1] I know how ridiculous that sentence is. Maybe it’s just a big, messy book. But there’s something sort of cool about imagining it as a kind of perpetual folding-under, I think. And cool to try to understand what that means in practice.
[2] That’s the biggest bonus, obvs.