anticonfluentialism

magical thinking would dictate that as soon as I saw the word "anticonfluentialism," I was immediately drawn to it.

One of Chris Forster's Infinite Jest blog posts conveys the seduction aptly, in his post called "A Final, Belated, Infinite Summer Post" (October 15, 2009). The post is dedicated to analyzing the seeming unresolution of IJ's ending. Let it be said here that I haven't finished the book; in fact, we've only just begun; yet I'm teased by the tantalizing complexity of the plot and never would have believed any resolution was coming anyway, so my supposition is or seems to be confirmed.

back to Foster's post:
..."So one solution to the novel’s apparently untidy ending (Infinite Detox calls the ending “a reader-hostile kick in the nuts”), is to reconstruct the missing coherence from implications and hints from elsewhere in the novel. Another is disavow coherence completely, to read coherence as Gerry does, as an Entertainment-like seduction to be resisted. Because the novel offers no tidy, definite ending, it is tempting to read Infinite Jest as an instance of what the novel describes at one point as “anticonfluentialism.” I find such a reading, though, at odds with the novel in other ways. Endnote 61 describes anticonfluentialism as “An après-garde digital movement, a.k.a. ‘Digital Parallelism’ and ‘Cinema of Chaotic Stasis,’ characterized by a stubborn and possibly intentionally irritating refusal of different narrative lines to merge into any kind of meaningful confluence” (996). To my mind this is not simply a delightful red-herring, but a deliberate provocation on Wallace’s part (there are other such moments in the novel I think)."

Every morning, I have this feeling.