‘Mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained’: narrative iteration in Infinite Jest

Abstract

As David Foster Wallace suggested, our lives consist of ‘enormous amounts of what seem like discrete bits of information coming, and the real kind of intellectual adventure is finding ways to relate them to each other and to find larger patterns and meanings’. It is possible to argue that in his novel Infinite Jest almost every narrative section is connected with, and iterated in, other narrative sequences. In this view, it is as if the whole novel were the narrative inscription of an incomplete series of mental calculations. This very ‘infinity of infinities of choice and execution’, whilst being ‘mathematically uncontrolled’, is ‘humanly contained’, because it interacts with the cognitive processes enacted by readers. Consequently, Wallace’s fiction appears to be symptomatic of a cultural and scientific context in which both mathematics and literature are conceived as relational strategies dealing with the complexity of human life.