Footprints in the Labyrinth: A Study of Complexity in Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Wallace's Infinite Jest

Periodically, in the history of literature, ambitious texts emerge that challenge the reader, presenting a labyrinthine and obscure experience, forcing a slow, at times frustrating examination that demands attention to subtle clues. Yet, despite a significant resistance to a totalizing understanding of these works, it is still possible to investigate the deep structures that underpin these phenomena. This study explores the framework of two novels: Finnegans Wake (1939), the final work of James Joyce, and Infinite Jest (1996), the maximalist masterpiece by David Foster Wallace, aiming to uncover which formal devices have allowed the authors to amplify the centrifugal forces of these literary objects. Nonetheless, to prevent a complete disintegration of the material, regulatory mechanisms must exist – ones that cool down entropy and serve as narrative anchors. Chaosmos of Alle is the name Joyce gives to this dual movement of controlled dispersion, which persists as a background radiation even in postmodern maximalist novels. Scrutinizing the mechanisms that articulate the chaos-cosmos function also means approaching the points of rupture and continuity that define the theory of the novel, in order to trace the path that led to the creation of such complex works. This is made possible through the content embedded in the form, which, once brought to the surface, casts onto the background of the novels the marks of time that shaped two particularly change-intensive phases of history.