Anticonfluentialism is an artistic philosophy and postmodern film and literary movement coined by American author David Foster Wallace, who presents it as the invention of the fictional filmmaker James Orin Incandenza Jr., in Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest.
Endnote 61 of the novel describes it as follows:
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 in any kind of meaningful confluence.
In simpler terms, anticonfluentialism is when a film or book plot has several separate story lines and points of view, which the reader is given to expect to intersect eventually, joining a greater centralised plot in the "big picture" of the setting, but instead these subplots never intersect at all, and their characters never meet. This idea exists in defiance of the narrative tendency to coax readers to willingly suspend disbelief at the unlikelihood of a given set of characters encountering one another, because it is normalised in literature that it is narratively necessary for all subplots in a story to converge on one eventual arch-plot.
It should be noted that the intentional "near miss" of two characters encountering each other is not an anticonfluentialist subversion of expectations, if their failure to encounter each other still results in a unified plot which is caused by the actions of both characters, and affects the interests of both characters at a later time. A plot is only anticonfluential if subplots genuinely never unify into any clear arch-plot affecting each other or caused by each other, even indirectly.
An example, using the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, would be if Bilbo Baggins' adventures in The Hobbit had no connection to Frodo Baggins' adventures in The Lord of the Rings, but also happened at the very same time period as Frodo's adventures: they had no familial relation, they were not from the same place, they did not both know Gandalf nor both encountered Gollum, and the One Ring came into Frodo's possession by means other than inheritance from Bilbo. Were this the case, Bilbo's adventure would be a disconnected story of stealing a shiny rock from a dragon and helping some dwarves trick and kill that dragon, with no bearing on Frodo's adventure to destroy the One Ring: the only thing the two characters would have in common, is living in Middle-Earth before the departure of the Elves into the Undying Lands. For all these legendary events to take place at one time, yet be fully unrelated to each other, would be anticonfluential.
Infinite Jest itself has been variously interpreted as an anticonfluential book, an attempt to demonstrate the principle, but whether this is rightly the case is left as an exercise for the reader. There is room to argue that a confluence of themes, and characters arriving at like-minded conclusions and downfalls are, themselves, sufficient grounds to argue against anticonfluentialism, even if the narrative lines themselves do not directly intersect, because these perspectives converge on giving the reader a unified argument or ethos.
Iron Noder 2020, 9/30