

Fractals and Stories - shashashasha
http://basecase.org/2012/12/fractals-and-stories/

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stevenrace
Extending into written text, the narrative of 'Infinite Jest' was modeled on a
Serpenski Gasket [1].

I'd be interested to hear of other novels formed of fractals.

[1] <http://kottke.org/07/12/infinite-jest>

~~~
celoyd
Author of TFA here.

Discussing that very Wallace–Silverblatt exchange with a friend is one of the
reasons I picked this as a Contextmas topic. I’m delighted to see someone else
picking up on it. To me, “Infinite Jest” feels a lot like folk art in this
way.

This also connects with DFW’s zoom effect, at least the way it feels to me: he
keeps getting deeper and deeper into a topic or situation, and you keep seeing
the same structures go by (or are they quite the same?), and before long you
don’t really know where you are in relation to the starting point, but it
doesn’t matter.

I think the numbing effect that critics like James Wood complain about,
analogous to the “but so what” feeling of fractal zooms, is exactly what he’s
going for. Or at least part of it.

The topic that I didn’t want to actually dig into, but I hope I point the
reader at obliquely a couple times, is how people use synecdoche and metaphor
in fiction. I don’t know how to talk about this in a way that seems fresh,
clear, and honest. So instead I talked about things on either side of it. It’s
a writing style I’ve been experimenting with lately that seems to scratch
certain kinds of itch I get.

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tantalor
Quick fiddle I wrote to draw this, <http://jsfiddle.net/ECYBq/1/>

