“Should I find it depressing that the young Dostoevsky was just like young U.S. writers today, or kind of a relief? Does anything ever change?” —David Foster Wallace (“Feodor’s Guide,” 28 n. 21).
I. Ideology, Belief, and Translations
In his Understanding David Foster Wallace (2003), Marshall Boswell contends that the contemporary American novelist David Foster Wallace, in his novel Infinite Jest, makes “overt” the theme of
artistic patricide through the novel’s intricate allusions to two primary texts of patrimonial anxiety, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. The Hamlet references are ubiquitous, beginning with the novel’s (and film’s) title . . . while the Dostoevsky references are a bit more muted and hence less important.1
I disagree with Boswell simply based on the poor logic of the claim that the Dostoevsky allusion is insignificant because it is the more subtly embedded of the primary intertextual allusions. Second, I contend that Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is much more important to Wallace’s overall aesthetic agenda than the more obvious Shakespeare allusion. Wallace has patterned Infinite Jest so meticulously after Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880) that in many significant ways, Infinite Jest is a rewriting or figurative translation of The Brothers Karamazov into the contemporary American idiom and context.2 First, it is clear from Wallace’s [End Page 265] essay, “Feodor’s Guide”—a review article of Stanford scholar Joseph Frank’s multivolume biography of Dostoevsky—published in the Village Voice Literary Supplement (1996) just three months after the release of Infinite Jest (January 1996), that Wallace aligns himself with the Dostoevskyean tradition.3 Next, there is a real similarity between the fiction of Dostoevsky and Wallace, in terms of plot, themes, stylistics, and in the correspondence between both artists’ unflinching eschatological depiction of debased and despairing human nature toward a redemptive end.4
In “Feodor’s Guide” Wallace comments on the “excruciatingly Victorianish translations” of Constance Garnett (26 n. 5) and also critiques the then-recent translation of Crime and Punishment by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky by quoting from their translation:
“‘Now is the Kingdom of reason and light and . . . and will and strength . . . and now we shall see! Now we shall cross swords!’ he added presumptuously, as if addressing some dark force and challenging it.” Umm, why not just “as if addressing some dark force”? Umm, can you challenge a dark force without addressing it? Or is there, in the Russian, something that keeps the above from being redundant, stilted, bad? If so, why not recognize that in English it’s bad, and clean it up in an acclaimed new Knopf translation? I just don’t get it.
(26 n. 5, author’s emphasis)
Wallace then questions what the ubiquitous Dostoevskyean phrase to “fly at” somebody really means: “it happens dozens of times in every FMD novel. What, ‘fly at’ them in order to beat them up? To get in their face? Why not just say that, if you’re translating?” (26 n. 6). Wallace is not being mean-spirited toward the valuable work of Pevear and Volokhonsky, and it is clear that he deeply admires Dostoevsky’s works; it is precisely because he reveres Dostoevsky that he finds it lamentable that his thematic and stylistic brilliance do not translate well into millennial American English. As neither a fluent speaker of Russian, nor an expert in Russian literature, Wallace is clearly in no position to translate Dostoevsky’s works; he is, however, in a unique position to translate in a more figurative sense. What Wallace achieves with Infinite Jest, however, is a transposition of The Brothers Karamazov into the specific ideological environment of contemporary America. Just as Dostoevsky’s “particular foes were the Nihilists, the radical progeny of the ’40’s socialists” (29 n. 23), Wallace’s “foes” are the contemporary literary ironic nihilists, the type that refuses to countenance or confront serious moral issues through art, according to Wallace.Wallace tempers his nihilistic conception, however, when he concedes that it is inaccurate to claim that we have rejected all moral principles as did the radical nihilists of Dostoevsky’s time: “maybe it’s not true that we today are nihilists. At the very least we have devils we believe in. These include [End Page 266] sentimentality, naïveté, archaism, fanaticism. Maybe it’d be better to call our art’s culture one of congenital skepticism” (24, emphasis added).
A further reason why Dostoevsky’s works do not translate well, or are easily misunderstood by the contemporary reader, is that the “devils” of our time (“sentimentality, naïveté, archaism, fanaticism”) are mainly what the contemporary American reader distills from Dostoevsky. We often find the (translated) language of Dostoevsky’s fictions embarrassingly sentimental and naïve (because of the characters’ sincere expression), replete with archaisms (linguistic and cultural), with the characters often fanatical in their actions. While Dostoevsky’s work has never been more relevant for contemporary American culture, his works nevertheless appear to be the very type of fiction that we should shun as naïve and fanatical. We cannot get past the surface translations. We have, instead of regarding Dostoevsky as an exemplar of a courageous writer for our time as well as his own, embraced Dostoevsky’s heir, Nietzsche; we have spurned belief and now cling to an individualism that privileges solipsistic gratification over communal values. This modern lack of belief philosopher Leszek Kolakowski calls a “massive self-aware secularity” (8) introduced by “the prophet of modernity,” Nietzsche.5 In “Feodor’s Guide,” Wallace writes that “in our own age and culture of enlightened atheism we are very much Nietzsche’s children, his ideological heirs; and without Dostoevsky there would have been no Nietzsche; and yet Dostoevsky is among the most deeply religious of all writers” (27 n. 9). Infinite Jest calls this contemporary atheism “enlightened self-interest” and “unconsidered atheism.”6
That Dostoevsky was such a religious writer may have something to do with his untranslatibility. But if we compare Dostoevsky’s time with our own, and substitute “belief” and “ironic skepticism” for Dostoevsky’s “faith” and “atheism,” then perhaps there is more congruence betweenDostoevsky’s fiction and our time than we are aware. The word “atheism” now seems to be a quaint, anachronistic word in a culture where atheism has become the environment instead of a position as it was in Dostoevsky’s time. Nevertheless, and this is Wallace’s point throughout his essays and fiction, contemporary American culture has lost something important when “belief” is confused with sentimental or fanatical religious belief. In “Feodor’s Guide,” Wallace states that “we believe that ideology is now the province of SIGs [Special Interest Groups] and PACs [Political Action Committees] all trying to get its slice of the big green pie—and, looking around us, we see that it is indeed so” because “we have abandoned the field” (24). In “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” Wallace addresses the specific ideological groups we have, for him, abandoned the field to: “fundamentalist Christian movements” and the “literary and academic fields,” among others (n.p.). These ideological groups display that contemporary America is “desperately removed from what’s really important: motive, feeling, belief [End Page 267] and its absence” (n.p., emphasis added). For the published version of this essay, “Feodor’s Guide,” Wallace confines his discussion to the literary arts and belief, but in the original version he attacks right-wing conservative movements and the academy. In a short interview, Wallace speaks about the importance of a type of fiction that engages and antagonizes a sense of belief:
believing in something bigger than you is not a choice. You either do or you’re a walking dead man, just going through the motions. Concepts like ‘duty’ and ‘fidelity’ may sound quaint but we’ve inherited the best and the worst, and we’ve got to make it up as we go along. I absolutely believe in something, even though I don’t know what it is.7
Wallace’s concern with belief is often yoked to his concern with American cultural solipsism; belief is essential, in his view, to considering something that is larger than the immediate subject, something that shifts the solitary perspective beyond the self-absorbed concerns of the contemporary individual. Although Dostoevsky held deep-seated religious convictions, it is, however, important to recall that The Brothers Karamazov is “a work of secular literature.”8 It is further important to note just how intensely religious belief was bound up with day-to-day life in nineteenth-century Russia, and that religious belief informed politics and social policy. To advocate a socialist utopian ideal was also to advocate an atheistic worldview. Religious expression in Dostoevsky is also political expression. That we often associate the religious belief of Dostoevsky’s works with the more naïve and fanatical religious belief of our time is often to misread Dostoevsky and miss out on his important cultural commentary.
That Wallace chose one of his epigraphs for “Feodor’s Guide” from Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862)— “At the present time, negation is the most useful of all”—is significant when we consider that Dostoevsky spent much of his literary career engaging the ideology of Turgenev. In tracing the countless literary, mythical, and biblical intertextual quotations and echoes and allusions throughout The Brothers Karamazov, Terras observes that “the figure of the Devil [Karamazov, 11.9.634] fits the image of a man who, in one way or another, accompanied Dostoevsky through virtually all of his adult life, Ivan Turgenev” (Reading, 116). AlthoughDostoevsky admired Turgenev’s literary ability, he nevertheless personally disliked Turgenev and rejected both his “pessimistic agnosticism” (118) and his “attacking Russia in print and moving to Germany and declaring himself a German” which “offended Dostoevsky’s passionate nationalism” (Wallace, “Feodor’s Guide,” 27 n. 14). In a letter, Dostoevsky wrote ofTurgenev’s short story “Phantoms” that “there is a great deal of trash in that piece: something pettily nasty, sickly, senile, unbelieving from weakness, in [End Page 268] a word, the whole Turgenev and his convictions. (However, the poetry in it will redeem a great deal)” (qtd. in Terras, Reading, 118, original emphasis). Interestingly, Turgenev’s story was published in Dostoevsky’s journal,Epoch, which, in conjunction with Dostoevsky’s passing praise of Turgenev’s prose signifies a perhaps modest respect for his contemporary. Turgenev, for his part, declared Dostoevsky to be a “latter-day de Sade” and considered Dostoevsky’s characters to be “bywords for depravity and degeneration.”9 As such, Turgenev’s works are parodied and challenged throughout much of The Brothers Karamazov.
Wallace acknowledges—through a Turgenev quotation that emphasizes absolute cultural negation and nihilism—Dostoevsky’s ideological commitment in his fiction, and provides an example of the type of literary nihilism that Dostoevsky fought. Wallace subtly suggests that the same kind of cultural nihilism of Dostoevsky’s time is apparent in contemporary American literature. Wallace thus closes the circle of intellectual progression through Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and back to the contemporary moment: he picks up the literary mantle bequeathed by Dostoevsky to engage “Nietzsche’s children, his ideological heirs” (27 n. 9), and employs a Dostoevskyean methodology to engage them. Translator and scholar, Ignat Avsey, calls The Brothers Karamazov a “panorama of Dostoevsky’s most passionately held beliefs and ideas” (xxiii). Dostoevsky’s final novel is a “novel of belief,” belief in humanity’s necessary ability to confront the darkest aspects of itself and redeem them through language.
II. The Brothers Incandenza
There are strong thematic connections between the two novels that emphasize that Wallace has endeavored to rewrite The Brothers Karamazov. First and foremost, The Brothers Karamazov examines father-son relationships, while Infinite Jest also explores the disastrous consequences of three generations of fathers on the Incandenza brothers, Orin, Mario, and Hal. Both fathers, James Incandenza and Fyodor Karamazov, are drunks; both compete with their eldest sons for the affections of a woman: Incandenza and Orin for Joelle van Dyne and Karamazov and Dmitri for Grushenka. Dostoevsky once wrote that in the four Karamazovs could be obtained “a picture of our contemporary reality, our contemporary educated Russia” (qtd. in Frank, Mantle, 690); similarly, the Incandenzas are constructed to be representative, in their various interests, levels of education, and life philosophies, of millennial America. Dostoevsky’s narrator breaks up his narrative to heighten the suspense. Book 8, chapter 6 ends with investigator Pyotr Ilyich knocking at Grushenka’s door—for three chapters, as Frank writes, “frozen like a character from Tristram Shandy” (Mantle, 651); similarly, Infinite Jest’s narrator, in classic Dostoevsky fashion, abandons Don [End Page 269] Gately after he is shot for over two hundred pages before returning to him and enlightening the reader that Gately has tenuously survived (Jest, 601, 809). Characters from both novels are doubled or mirror each other, specifically in Infinite Jest where the variations on names emphasized the point: succeeding tennis academy headmaster, Charles Tavis, has a variety of cognomens, but is most commonly referred to as C. T. which reflects former halfway house staffer, Calvin Thrust; Don Gately is reflected in halfway house resident Doony Glynn; Joelle van Dyne’s radio persona, Madame Psychosis, is reflected in Gately’s stepfather, known only as the MP after his military-service assignment, and the deadly street psychedelic DMZ is also known as “Madame Psychosis” (170), among many others.10
Terras observes that the “inserted anecdote is a special feature of The Brothers Karamazov” (Companion, 103), and Pevear notes that Dostoevsky’s characters
are not only speakers; most of them are also writers: they write letters, articles, poems, pamphlets, tracts, memoirs, suicide notes. . . . Words form an element between matter and spirit in which people live and move each other. Words spoken at one point are repeated later by other speakers, as recollections or unconscious echoes.
(xvii)
Infinite Jest similarly revels in the written and spoken word in an array of genres and styles: letters (663–65, 1006 n. 110, 1047–52 n. 269); a transcript of a puppet film of government officials (385–86); email (139–40); a filmography (985 n. 24); tattoos (207–11); essays (138–40); a curriculum vitae (227); screenplays (172–76); halfway house transcripts (176–81); dictionary definitions (17, 900); a table of active terrorist groups (144); a calendar of “subsidized time” (223); a magazine article (142); an examination question and essay response (307–08); signs (518, 720, 952); slogans and mottoes (81, 513); a memoir chapter (491–503); bumper stickers (891); government transcripts (876–83); T-shirt slogans (128, 156); mathematical equations and tables (330, 1023–24 n. 123); a magazine interview transcript (1038 n. 234); newspaper headlines (438); spy interrogation transcripts (787–95, 938–41); telephone conversations (242–58); intertextual quotation from Joyce’s Ulysses (112, 605), Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (118) to William James (1053 n. 280), Mark Twain, Don DeLillo, and Harold Bloom (911, 1077 n. 366) and beyond; and plagiarized academic articles (1056 n. 304) all merge to make this novel a celebration of the written word in a massive hybrid of speakers’ voices. As with The Brothers Karamazov, specific words and phrases are spoken and recalled by other, unrelated characters. In Infinite Jest the wraith “pirouettes” before the hospitalized Gately and inserts the word (“PIROUETTE“) (Jest, 832, author’s emphasis and caps) into Gately’s mind during this significant episode; the word further [End Page 270] repeatedly emerges throughout the novel in other characters’ dialogue, description, and thoughts (84, 261, 459, 613, 840, and etcetera). Similar descriptions—”pubic spiral of pale blue smoke” (239) and “a little pubic curl of smoke” (613)—for different characters’ actions emphasize the spoken quality of the narration, and the narrator’s aspiration to poetic turns of phrase (“Bored-eyed guys in white cotton blew blue bubbles and loaded her in the back of a leisurely sirenless ambulance”) (906) as well as his limited range and repetition. Mario’s unresolved illegitimacy reflects the unsolved illegitimacy of Smerdyakov.
The Brothers Karamazov is, in Terras’s words, a “novel of suspense” (Companion, 107) as it gradually builds to its monumental conclusion and leaves the reader speculating about what will happen to the brothers: “the fate of the three Karamazov brothers is left hanging in the balance as the novel ends” (109), whereas in Infinite Jest readers must speculate about the fate of Don Gately and Hal Incandenza, whether the deadly samizdat is recovered by terrorists or government agents, or whether the entire novel is itself a jest and whether Gately’s dream-hallucination about exhuming James Incandenza’s grave is to be taken as foreshadowing or delusive.
In the larger construction of both novels two groups are featured prominently and reflect each other: Ennet House, the alcohol and narcotics halfway house, resembles Dostoevsky’s monastery; both “houses” rely on similar beliefs in a higher power, and both contain residents of varying commitment. Significantly, Wallace’s original manuscript version of Infinite Jest maintains that Ennet House “smells like God” (qtd. in Moore, 14) instead of the novel’s “smelled like an ashtray” (Jest, 591), which emphasizes that the rehabilitation center is a place of retreat from the maximally ironic culture that surrounds it. The Alyosha-like character, Mario, from his perspective, “felt good both times in Ennet’s House [sic] because it’s very real; people are crying and making noise and getting less unhappy, and once he heard somebody say God with a straight face and nobody looked at them or looked down or smiled in any sort of way” (591, author’s emphasis).
The valorization of children is notable in both novels. Joseph Frank writes that the depiction of the child Ilyusha and his classmates allowed “Dostoevsky to fulfill his long-cherished desire to depict the relation between a charismatic Christian figure and a group of children” (Mantle, 599), which Wallace reflects with the children of E.T.A.; Infinite Jest’s Eschaton debacle, the nuclear analog game played on a tennis court (Jest, 321–42), in which nearly every student is severely injured, reflects Ilyusha’s stone-throwing fight with his classmates (4.3.176–80). In his notebooks, Dostoevsky expressed a desire to write “a novel about children . . . with a boy hero” (qtd. in Terras, Companion, 12), which was accomplished in The Brothers Karamazov. Similarly, Infinite Jest can also be said to be a novel about [End Page 271] children with a boy hero: on the surface, there is the obvious connection to the children of E.T.A.; below this is the ramification that many of the characters are emotionally infantile and remain in a “spiritual puberty” (694). In a long segue on ironic art and depression (694–95), the narrator remarks that the ubiquitous “weary cynicism” of millennial America is essentially a mask to cover “gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté,” the “last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America” (694). Through Hal, the narrator remarks, however, that “what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human . . . is probably . . . to be in some basic interior way forever infantile” (694–95). Further, Don Gately, who turns out to be the novel’s unlikely hero, is, in the eyes of Mario (the other possible hero-candidate), a “square-headed boy” and a “slow boy over a class theme at Ringe and Latin special” (593). According to Terras, “the psychology of children is as complex as that of adults and that children are as capable of great good and great evil as any adult—reappears in The Brothers Karamazov” (Companion, 12), which emphasizes both novels’ detailed treatment of children.
Especially important in the doubling of the novels is character doubling. Mario Incandenza resembles Alyosha Karamazov in a number of thematically important ways, but particularly in matters of belief. Because of Mario’s physical deformities and limitations (Jest, 79, 312–17, 589) he is foremost “a born listener” (80), and is the type of person with whom all the characters speak sincerely: “bullshit often tends to drop away around damaged listeners, deep beliefs revealed, diary-type private reveries indulged out loud” (80). He is also the only character in the novel who is neither cynical nor ironic, who “doesn’t lie” (249), is sincerely joyful (85), and displays a genuine charity toward all other characters (772, 971), much like the patient, loving, and ever-listening Alyosha. Alyosha is ambiguously described at times as “slow [and] underdeveloped” (1.4.26), a “sickly, ecstatic, poorly developed person . . . a meager, emaciated little fellow” (25), “very strange” (1.3.18), a “holy fool” (21), a “novice” (18), who always tells the truth (2.7.78–79), wears “a foolish grin” (82), and is a “lover of mankind” (18). Both, after a fashion, are Dostoevskyean “idiots,” and both are religiously oriented: Mario’s “nighttime prayers take almost an hour and sometimes more and are not a chore. He doesn’t kneel; it’s more like a conversation” (Jest, 590). Mario, in addition to his physical limitations, is further academically impoverished (317), though is somehow also strangely considered the “family’s real prodigy, an in-bent savant-typegenius” (317). He further exhibits Alyosha’s civility in his continual smiling and features, among his idiosyncratic gestures, a Dostoevskyean “extra-inclined half-bow” (316, 317) which he deploys in response to “citizens’ kindness and cruelty” alike (316). [End Page 272]
That Wallace has written Mario to be an Alyosha figure is best viewed in the narrator’s anecdote regarding Head Trainer Barry Loach (967–71). The anecdote is a digression branching off from the narrator’s description of the E.T.A. students’ pre-match preparations in which Barry Loach moves about taping ankles and caring for various tennis ailments. The narrative style of the anecdote and its origins are both taken from Dostoevsky. The narrator twice comments that he will tell the anecdote “in outline form” (Jest, 967) and “in outline, it eventually boiled down to this” only (969), yet amusingly takes five pages to “outline” Loach’s history while abandoning the original narrative thread that originally permitted the Loach digression, which recalls Dostoevsky’s narrator’s exuberant style. In book 3, chapter 1, the narrator, in discussing Fyodor Karamazov’s servants, claims to “have already said enough, however, about Grigory” (92), yet devotes the entire ensuing episode to Grigory, nevertheless. The Loach anecdote, moreover, is intertextually borrowed from the significant “Rebellion” chapter of The Brothers Karamazov where the brothers Ivan and Alyosha reacquaint themselves (5.4.236–46) and that introduces the famous Grand Inquisitor chapter (5.5.246–64). “Rebellion” opens with Ivan’s admission that he cannot understand “how it’s possible to love one’s neighbors” (236) and then relates an anecdote about a saint who embraces and cares for a “a hungry and frozen passerby” who had “asked to be made warm,” presumably by human contact, even though the ragged man was “foul and festering with some terrible disease” (236–37); the saint lies down with him, embraces him, and even breathes into his mouth (236) and takes the man’s filth upon himself and into himself. Similarly, in Infinite Jest, Barry Loach is the youngest son in a staunch Roman Catholic family; the mother’s “fervent wish” is that one of her children “enter the R.C. clergy” (967). Through a series of mishaps the last brother before Barry himself enters a Jesuit seminary, to the relief of Barry who is studying for a career in “the liniment-and-adhesive ministry of professional athletic training” (967). The elder brother, however, suffers “a sudden and dire spiritual decline” in which his “basic faith in the innate indwelling goodness of men” withers, causing “a black misanthropic spiritual outlook” (967–68). A “series of personal interviews” between the brothers ensue in which Barry tries to restore the brother’s lost faith. The brother, however, “smile[s] sardonically” at Loach’s efforts, knowing that Loach’s self-interest partially motivates his efforts at restoring the brother’s faith:
but he was not only desperate to preserve his mother’s dream and his own indirectly athletic ambitions at the same time, he was actually rather a spiritually upbeat guy who just didn’t buy the brother’s sudden despair at the apparent absence of compassion and warmth in God’s supposed self-mimetic and divine creation, and he managed [End Page 273] to engage the brother in some rather heated and high-level debates on spirituality and the soul’s potential, not that much unlike Alyosha and Ivan’s conversations in the good old Brothers K., though probably not nearly as erudite and literary, and nothing from the older brother even approaching the carcinogenic acerbity of Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor scenario.
(Jest, 968–69)
Significantly, the narrator here somewhat self-reflexively, yet still indirectly, mentions the very passage from which he has culled this anecdote and refashioned it—from the discussions between Alyosha and Ivan prior to and including the Grand Inquisitor chapter. The narrator takes Dostoevsky’s narrator’s own anecdote, a long discourse on belief, from the mouth of Ivan and uses it as the basis of Infinite Jest’s own disquisition on belief and the “perfectibility of man” (968). Infinite Jest’s amateur narrator draws attention to his status as such by even comparing his anecdote with The Brothers Karamazov; he further uses a peculiar archaism to describe the outcome for the older brother: “and then what happened with the spiritually infirm older brother and whither he fared and what happens with his vocation never gets resolved” (970, emphasis added).
The narrator is a peculiar hybrid of complex vocabulist and Shakespearean Dogberry; he tells a remarkable story, but frequently falters with malapropisms which seem to signify that the novel is intended to be taken as spoken and that the narrator gains and loses narrative momentum as he proceeds. His use of “whither he fared” is, first, grammatically wrong. And “whither” immediately recalls “wither” in regard to the brother’s spiritual decline, and although his final outcome is unstated, the association with “wither” implies that he continues to decline. The brothers resolve the dispute through a “Challenge” (970) in which Barry dresses himself in ragged attire, does not shower, and places himself alongside Boston’s downtrodden; he is only to ask people “just to touch him. Viz. extend some basic human warmth and contact” (969); if he is successful then the older brother will have his faith in humankind rekindled. The result is that passersby take Loach’s request as panhandler’s argot and give him money instead of honoring his request; because of his success at receiving donations, the other panhandlers complicate matters by adopting his phrase. Eventually, Loach himself spiritually declines, his “own soul began to sprout little fungal patches of necrotic rot” (970), and becomes one with the downtrodden street people until Mario Incandenza happens to pass by and shake “Loach’s own fuliginous hand” which “led through a convoluted but kind of heartwarming and faith-reaffirming series of circumstances to B. Loach, even w/o an official B.A., being given an Asst. Trainer’s job at E.T.A.” (971). In a complex intertextual twist the Alyosha-figure, Mario(as saint), performs the crucial action that redeems Barry Loach (through [End Page 274] human contact), who is indirectly himself, a figure from Ivan’s own evocation (diseased man), and the spiritually infirm older brother, whose suspended status recalls Ivan whose own status remains unclear at the conclusion of The Brothers Karamazov.
III. The Euclidian Weltanschauung
The significant and often-repeated refrain of nihilistic unbelief, “everything is permitted” (5.5.263, 11.9.649), that emerges at the end of the Grand Inquisitor chapter is reflected in the many dialogues between Infinite Jest’s spies, Hugh Steeply and Rémy Marathe, in their discourse on American happiness, freedom, and free will, and the “confusion of permissions” (Jest, 320) that results from the contemporary American “Anything is going” attitude (320, author’s emphasis and syntax), [or] the reliance on “rational principles alone (then ‘anything goes’)” (Avsey, xxiii). Ivan’s “Euclidian” conception of the world—he has “a Euclidian mind, an earthly mind” (5.3.235)—indicates the limits of his belief; he cannot reconcile the problem of human suffering, particularly of children, that would enable a non-Euclidian belief system (5.3.235). As a novel devoted, in part, to tennis, the appearance of Euclidian formulations in Infinite Jest is unsurprising, yet there remains a certain Dostoevskyean Euclidian subtext to the novel that implies an intertextual echo of Ivan’s “geometric” worldview. Ennet House resident Doony Glynn hallucinates a “flat square coldly Euclidian grid” of the sky “instead of a kindly curved blue dome” for “several subsequent weeks” after ingesting the famous hallucinogen, DMZ (542). On the next page, the narrator interpolates that “Glynn hadn’t come right out and said Euclidian” (543, author’s emphasis), emphasizing through repetition the significance of the term. That the narrator repeatedly mentions that certain words are his own instead of the actual characters’ themselves emphasizes his narrative control, as with the narrator of Dostoevsky’s novel; for example, “a lot of these are his own terms” (Jest, 590) and “(N.B. The words are my own; the doctor expressed himself in a very learned and special language)” (Karamazov, 12.3.672). E.T.A. students have for required reading E. A. Abbott’s Flatland (1884), a Victorian mathematical novel about a two-dimensional land populated by various geometrical-shape beings (Jest, 282); Orin Incandenza is compared by his uncle Charles Tavis to “a 2-D cutout image of a person [rather] than a bona fide person” (286). In a section on types of depression and “anhedonia”—the term borrowed from William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)11 —the narrator gives an example: “the devoted wife and mother finds the thought of her family about as moving, all of a sudden, as a theorem of Euclid” (Jest, 692, emphasis added). The narrator here goes so far as to quote James who himself quotes a Professor Ribot, who coined the term anhedonia: “the thought [End Page 275] of his house, of his home, of his wife, and of his absent children moved him as little . . . as a theorem of Euclid” (qtd. in James, 125, emphasis added). That the narrator is intent on emphasizing James’s passage and anhedonia as a Euclidian (earthly, unspiritual, and unbelieving) orientation is demonstrated by his own citation in one of the novel’s many endnotes (Jest, 1053 n. 280). The incredibly depressed Hal “finds terms like joie and value to be like so many variables in rarified equations” (694, author’s emphasis). The implication of these Euclidian associations is that most of the characters of Infinite Jest have an Ivanesque Euclidian belief system. They are “earthbound,” in a “spiritual torpor” (692), spiritually dead, and ignore the spiritual aspects of their lives, the potential for belief in something greater than themselves—that is, they have no belief in anything beyond the “hot narrow imperatives of the Self” (Jest, 82), which maintains their interactions with others as merely cold intersections with other geometrical beings as in Abbott’s Flatland.
The continual conflict between reason and faith that characterizes much of The Brothers Karamazov, thus, also informs Infinite Jest but in a modified, contemporary idiom. Infinite Jest substitutes The Brothers Karamazov’s religious orthodoxy and nihilism for the more acute problems of millennial American (dis)belief: a jaded, ironic perspective and solipsistic pursuit of individual “happiness”:
except [Coach] Schtitt says Ach, but who can imagine this training serving its purpose in an experialist and waste-exporting nation that’s forgotten privation and hardship and the discipline which hardship teaches by requiring? A U.S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness.
(83, emphasis added)
Coach Schtitt’s conception of the contemporary American situation is chillingly Euclidian with its cold intersections, straight and flat pursuits that lead only to a lonely and ultimately illusive conception of happiness: “the happy pleasure of the person alone” (83). For coach Schtitt there must be a something to believe in beyond the base desires of the individual subject: “any something. The what: this is more unimportant than that there is something” (83, author’s emphasis), which recalls Wallace’s own remark that there must be something external to the interests of the immediate subject: “I absolutely believe in something, even though I don’t know what it is” (“1458 Words,” 42). The Québécois spy Marathe admonishes Steeply, “choose with care. Love of your nation, your country and people, it enlarges the heart. Something bigger than the self” (107, emphasis added). [End Page 276] Without belief in something the implication is that Infinite Jest’s characters are submerged in a rational-nihilistic existence that eschews belief inanything but the pursuit of narrow self-interest: “nothing to contain and give the meaning. Lonely” (83)—very much akin to The Brothers Karamazov’s coolly rational and spiritually vacant Ivan who strategically pursues his own course and later suffers a mental collapse as a consequence of his spiritual disintegration.
IV. “Dream Duty”
Some of the memories have to be confabulated or dreamed.
(Jest, 951)
We thereby enter the realm of novels.
(Karamazov, 12.11.730)
At the end of the “Grand Inquisitor” episode Alyosha makes a modest observation regarding Ivan: “for some reason he suddenly noticed that his brother Ivan somehow swayed as he walked, and that his right shoulder, seen from behind, appeared lower than his left. He had never noticed it before” (5.5.264, emphasis added). Joseph Frank notes that, according to traditional “folk beliefs,” the “devil is associated with the left side,” and that Ivan is associated with “the dread spirit” he has “just evoked so approvingly in his Legend” (618). Ivan will later, during Dmitri’s trial, somewhat unwittingly identify himself with “folk custom” (12.5.685), emphasizing his sinistral link with the devil. This subtle emphasis on Ivan’s left side recalls the inordinate emphasis Infinite Jest places on left-handed—or “SINISTRAL” (Jest, 832, author’s emphasis and caps)—things. Frank further contends that “Ivan’s influence is shown to have been harmful even on the level of the plot action” (618) as Alyosha suddenly recalls—and “several times, later in his life, in great perplexity, he wondered” (Karamazov, 264)—how he could “so completely forget about his brother Dmitri” when he had “resolved that morning, only a few hours earlier, that he must find him, and would not leave until he did” (264). What is implied here is a certain narratorial “devilry” on the part of the chatty and playful narrator in which the sinistral emphasis actually alters the course of the narration: the folk belief alters Alyosha’s crucial action which potentially leads to the novel’s disastrous conclusion as Alyosha is not present with Dmitri who is soon to be accused of murder. What is further significant is the ways in which Alyosha—the narrator’s “hero” (3) and, thus, favorite—becomes aware of circumstances and, consequently, acts and speaks. The narrator goes to great lengths to emphasize that Alyosha’s thoughts are instantaneous, do not emerge from previous thinking, as though they are planted or embedded into his consciousness: “this strange little observation flashed like an arrow through the sad mind of Alyosha” and “for some reason he suddenly noticed” (264) and [End Page 277] “Alyosha suddenly had a flash of recollection that the day before, when he had left his brother and gone out of the gazebo, he had seen, or there flashed before him, as it were, to the left, near the fence, a low, old green garden bench among the bushes” (5.2.223, emphasis added). He is frequently baffled and puzzled about how he arrived at these, quite often, peculiar thoughts which tend to have a significant impact on the novel’s events: “‘Pater Seraphicus—he got that name from somewhere—but where?’ flashed through Alyosha’s mind” (264, emphasis added).
The significance is that the sudden introjection of thoughts intoAlyosha’s mind draws attention to the narrator, who inserts these random thoughts that significantly alter the plot, or direct it. Further, Ivan, just before taking his leave of Alyosha, states, “and now you go right, I’ll go left” (264), which emphasizes Ivan’s atheistic inclination. Pevear observes that “the left is the ’sinister’ side, associated with the devil, especially in depictions of the Last Judgment” (787 n. 36). Ivan accentuates his left shoulder; Captain Snegiryov’s “mouth became twisted to the left side, his left eye squinted,” emphasizing the wretched conditions that he and his family live in and foreshadowing his dramatic rejection of Ivanovna’s gift (4.7.211); Smerdyakov has a “squinting left eye” that is synonymous with his smirking (5.6.267, 268). Earlier, during Alyosha’s visit to Captain Snegiryov’s wretched cottage, the cottage is described particularly with “the left” side mentioned six times (4.6.197–98) which emphasizes Alyosha’s perspective of the cottage, for we see it from his view, as “the depths” (198) for he is called an “angel” throughout the novel, one that delivers messages (“angelos, a messenger”) (Pevear, xviii); in this regard, Alyosha can be said to be plumbing the depths of human misery, his specific role. Alyosha has been sent by Katerina Ivanova with two hundred roubles for Snegiryov as compensation for Dmitri’s ruthless humiliating of Snegiryov by pulling his beard and beating him. Alyosha’s perspective of Captain Snegiryov is particularly instructive in discussing the narrator’s “devilry”: “at the table, finishing the fried eggs, sat a gentleman of about forty-five, small, lean, weakly built, with reddish hair, and a thin red beard rather like an old whiskbroom (this comparison, and particularly the word whiskbroom, for some reason flashed through Alyosha’s mind at first glance, as he later recalled)” (198, author’s emphasis). On the next page Snegiryov brings up the “encounter” with Dmitri, the “one concerning the whiskbroom” (199), to which Alyosha responds: “what whiskbroom?” In the succeeding episode (chapter 7) the reader discovers the significance of “whiskbroom” as not only a nickname for Snegiryov’s ruddy beard, designated by Ilyusha’s schoolmates, but also as a disparaging name for Ilyusha himself, again devised by Ilyusha’s enemies (205). What is significant is that the narrator sows thoughts—like the baffling word “whiskbroom”—into Alyosha’s mind without him possibly being able to understand how or why he has these thoughts, which, first, draws attention to the narrator, and, more [End Page 278] importantly, to the artificiality of the entire narrative. Similarly, Infinite Jest’s wraith interpolates significant words (“ghostwords”) (Jest, 884) and thoughts into his characters which suggest that the narrator himself makes up theentire story. Thus, a significant congruity, in terms of narrative construction, between The Brothers Karamazov and Infinite Jest is in their narrators’ fabulism. It is quite possible to view both novels as (twice) fabulated by their respective chatty narrators, who convey the narrative events like an “amateur writer” (Pevear, xv) or an “‘amateur’ narrator” (Terras, Companion, x), and who tell magnificent and wide-ranging stories. Such a reading of The Brothers Karamazov explains the narrator’s odd claim to provide a “biography of my hero, Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov” (3), when the narrator’s purpose in relating the complicated events can hardly be considered biographical.
The narrator’s claim to biography is itself a fiction within its immediate fictionalized context; coming from the narrator’s “mouth” makes the entire narrative that is the novel proper twice fictionalized. In other words, The Brothers Karamazov itself can be read as an elaborate joke:
Dostoevsky was always drawn by the idea of comprehensively encapsulating the spirit of his times, of making a definitive creative assessment of his epoch and, by his own admission, attempting it on no less ambitious a scale than Dante’s Divine Comedy. In a structural sense the world he presents is an intricate collage of conflicting views in different perspectives. It is above all a microcosm, devoid of any historical panorama. The location is a farcically obscure, monumentally insignificant “one-horse” town rejoicing in the name of Skotoprigonyevsk [meaning "cattle pen"] . . . This ridiculously unlikely name, mentioned only once, is immediately followed, to heightened comic effect, by the narrator’s apology for being obliged to reveal it at all. There is a disconcerting momentary suggestion that everything is just a big joke, the author’s face dissolving in a clownish grin, and the materializing of the reader’s worst fears that he has just been strung along all the time. But this is a story-teller’s trick: to relax the grip, only to tighten it again abruptly a split second later.
(Avsey, xxvii, emphasis added)
Avsey’s overall conception of the novel is astute, and he makes only one mistake in his description of Dostoevsky’s novel—that the “author’s” face dissolves in a clownish grin, instead of the narrator’s. It is essential to recall that Dostoevsky’s prefatory “From the Author” note is intended byDostoevsky to be a definite part of the fictional apparatus of the novel itself, and that this narrator is an “author” in his own right, and that his fabulous conceit of making the entire narrative up—not to mention writing it as spoken language: “the style of The Brothers Karamazov is based on the spoken, not the written, word” (Pevear, xv)—prevents the entire exercise [End Page 279] from devolving into an authorial pose, game, or contempt for the reader. That is, because it is the narrator who fictionalizes a fiction (the plot, or events contained within the novel), the “joke” is not a spiteful one. Just as the work is not a “biography,” and just as Alyosha is not a “hero,” so the narrator’s words are not “true.” The audacity of the enterprise alone—of compiling a narrative to rival Dante’s—is impossible to perform without a modest wink and nudge. But this is not to diminish The Brothers Karamazov’s power, its authenticity, or, its “truth”—for everything in the novel is nonetheless true despite being constructed as a fictionalized fiction.
It is a peculiar mistake or misconception to confuse Dostoevsky and his narrator (the preface’s “author”), something that even the more highly regarded Dostoevsky scholars like Ignat Avsey and Joseph Frank do. Pevear, however, begins his discussion of the narrator by noting that the “first voice to be heard” is the narrator’s, and that “needless to say, he is not Dostoevsky” (xv). Pevear rightly goes on to claim that “the brief note ‘From the Author’ at the start of the book . . . accomplishes a number of important things by way of introduction, but above all it introduces us to the whole stylistic complex of the narrator’s voice” (xv, emphasis added). Pevear then carefully analyzes the preface and meticulously extracts all the telltale stylistic features that identify the narrator—not the writer, Dostoevsky—in it and that, naturally, recur throughout the text. That Dostoevsky made his narrator his mouthpiece for his “most passionately held beliefs and ideas” (Avsey, xxiii) does not reduce to Dostoevsky being the controlling narrating voice of the novel. Terras concurs with Pevear by distinguishing between Dostoevsky and his narrator, but remains assured that a second installment of the novel was planned: “the narrator points out in his very preface that this is only the first of two parts, with the second to be set thirteen years later” (Companion, 109, emphasis added). However, the narrator’s disingenuous claim to a sequel is itself part of the fictional apparatus, if not one of the novel’s major artifices, its “joke”:
I would not, in fact, venture into these rather vague and uninteresting explanations but would simply begin without any introduction—if they like it, they’ll read it as it is—but the trouble is that while I have just one biography, I have two novels. The main novel is the second one—about the activities of my hero in our time, that is, in our present, current moment. As for the first novel, it already took place thirteen years ago and is even almost not a novel at all but just one moment from my hero’s early youth. It is impossible for me to do without this first novel, or much in the second novel will be incomprehensible. Thus my original difficulty becomes even more complicated: for if I, that is, the biographer himself, think that even one novel may, perhaps, be unwarranted for such a humble and indefinite hero, then [End Page 280] how will it look if I appear with two; and what can explain such presumption on my part?
(3–4)
The absurdity of the quoted passage alone is enough to highlight the narrator’s tongue-in-cheek posture: he would begin without an introduction, yet continues at length regardless, indirectly revealing his chatty manner and unlikely trepidation over such a modest thing, the inclusion of an introduction; he peculiarly draws attention to a proposed second novel at the expense of the one at hand—naturally it is “impossible to do without the first novel” and the reader of the time could hardly be expected to have interest in a second novel when the first one was just being released; that the second novel would be “incomprehensible” without the first one is a comic overstatement; the faux-agonizing, false nail-biting posture of worrying about the second novel’s reception (“how will it look if I appear with two”) over the one immediately at hand is comically absurd. Indeed, “what can explain such presumption” on the narrator’s part? The question itself is left open, but open-ended in a rather obfuscatory manner: “being at a loss to resolve these questions, I am resolved to leave them without any resolution” (4) which possibly indicates—rather indirectly—that the novel itself will be left unresolved. This comic befuddlement over resolving to leave the question unresolved signifies that a second novel, or what Dostoevsky commentators call a sequel, is pure fantasy: part of the fiction that is the novel—there was no intended sequel; rather, the entire preface rather amusingly draws the reader into the present volume with its engaging, friendly and somewhat muddled deliberations. In response to his own unresolvable question, the narrator continues:
To be sure the keen-sighted reader will already have guessed long ago that that is what I’ve been getting at from the beginning and will be annoyed with me for wasting fruitless words and precious time.To this I give the ready answer: I have been wasting fruitless words and precious time, first, out of politeness, and, second, out of cunning.
(4, emphasis added)
Now, strangely, the narrator has a “ready answer”—following on the heels of the last sentence’s confusion—and plays with the reader, knowing that the reader will potentially be “annoyed” at his prevarication. Yet he claims to annoy the reader out of “politeness,” strangely enough, but more importantly “out of cunning” (4). It is this “cunning” that signifies that what is to follow is to be taken seriously, yet as a “serious joke”; only the careful, “keen-sighted” reader will realize that any talk of a sequel is a ruse at the outset of such a mammoth novel. The further comical jabs at the Russian critics and comically polite agreement that the preface is entirely “superfluous” only [End Page 281] underscores the narrator’s style, his delight in wordplay, and his status as an amateur narrator. That he is an amateur, however, does not take away from the very powerful events he relates.
The narrator claims that the events that he will recount “already took place thirteen years ago” and that what he calls the “main novel,” “the second one” is to be set “in our time,” “in our present, current moment” (3). Yet there is something not quite right about this assessment, either, for The Brothers Karamazov—putatively not the main novel, according to the narrator—most definitely is set in the “present, current moment.” In fact, there is little if anything to signify that this work is set in the past, culturally, historically, and, most importantly, ideologically: “the book thus recounts events that supposedly occurred thirteen years earlier, although no attempt is made to preserve a strict historical coloring” (Frank, Mantle, 573).12 The narrator stresses that the present volume is set thirteen years ago, yet makes it a very contemporary work. Frank justifies the narrator’s incongruity by claiming that “because he also wished to indicate the future importance of Alyosha, he felt it necessary to say a few words about him outside the framework of this first story” (574, emphasis added), yet the preface is the story. The narrator’s repetitive emphasis on the second novel’s chronological setting is a ruse, for the first novel addresses the very chronological and ideological moment that he suggests will be forthcoming in the sequel. That this dubious narrator even speaks these words, aside from the clumsy expression, alone, is enough to bring them into question, particularly as he is so idiosyncratic and often claims not to have the entire story, so to speak.
Yet Frank reads the narrator literally: “Ivan’s future thus remains unknown, and this uncertainty was no doubt intended to sustain interest for the next volume” (Mantle, 698–99, emphasis added); and “but now that the first volume of The Brothers Karamazov had been completed, [Dostoevsky] threw himself, with his usual assiduity, into the task of gathering material for his revived Diary of a Writer” (707, emphasis added); and “the narrator explains that [Alyosha] will become more important in a second volume (which, regrettably, Dostoevsky never lived even to begin)” (573, emphasis added). That Dostoevsky was so ill upon completion of The Brothers Karamazov and yet threw himself into composing Diary of a Writer (1877) instead of the proposed second volume suggests itself that he had no such intention. This is not to say that Frank is critically naïve, for he does acknowledge the question of whether “this ‘author’ is Dostoevsky himself or the fictional narrator of his story” (572)—though even raising the question presupposes a critical naïveté regarding the distinction between a writer and a fictional persona—preferring to compromise with both views by contending that The Brothers Karamazov has “two types of narration,” “expository” and “dramatic” (572). Indeed, but there is nothing to indicate the presence [End Page 282] of “two narrators” (572), as Frank claims. There is only one narrator, one that is dramatically present in parts and yet recedes like a ghost in others. Frank also contends that “the fictional narrator”—not just “narrator”?—”never presents himself directly” (574), but, again, this is simply inaccurate as the narrator addresses the reader throughout, “somewhat disconcertingly, addresses the reader in the first person,” according to Avsey (xxiv).
Avsey himself is not immune to conflating Dostoevsky and the narrator when he argues that “the author does not speak in his own name; there is the anonymous, shadowy figure of the narrator” (xxiv), but backtracks here: “but then his [Alyosha's] turn was due to come later in the major novel to which Dostoevsky alludes in his prologue ‘From the Author,’ but which never saw the light of day, for Dostoevsky died three months after completing The Brothers Karamazov” (xv). All of this, however, raises the point of the intentional fallacy, which Wallace observes that Frank “never in four volumes mentions the Intentional Fallacy or tries to head off the objection that his biography commits it all over the place. This is real interesting to me” (“Feodor’s Guide,” 25 n. 2). Wallace indirectly praises Frank for this as it gives the biography a “tone” of “maximum restraint and objectivity” (25 n. 2). Part of Frank’s conflation of Dostoevsky with the narrator is a wish that Dostoevsky had, indeed, written a sequel, for the novel ends tentatively; the future of its characters remains largely undetermined, something that Infinite Jest has been criticized for even in a time when readers’ expectations are routinely frustrated. Avsey himself moves, in a single paragraph, from describing the “narrator’s apology” to the “author’s face,” from a fear of the novel being “a big joke,” but what I would prefer simply to call “twice fabulated.” Avsey contends that this is “a story-teller’s trick,” but this raises the question of precisely who is doing the telling. If we assert that it is the narrator’s story, as we surely must, then there can be no harm in the narrator fabulating his entire narrative; but if we assert that the note “From the Author” is Dostoevsky himself—which is unlikely in the extreme for then Dostoevsky would have conflated himself with his narrator and fictional characters by calling Alyosha his “hero”—then Avsey’s “big joke” possibly takes on a more sinister cast. It is a jest, in a sense, a playful one, but not at the reader’s expense—it is not a metafictional collapse that ultimately has contempt for the reader as Wallace has claimed in essays and interviews.13 Rather, it is a fairly obvious strategy that is given away on numerous occasions: through Alyosha’s sudden and uncontrollable thoughts—that quite impossibly “occur,” a significant word that the narrator obsessively uses throughout Infinite Jest, mainly for Gately, Infinite Jest’s own unlikely “hero,” the utterly fallible postmodern chivalrous knight14 (Jest, 601–19)—and Alyosha’s inability to account for these random thoughts; his bewilderment about the things he does and the things he says, as though they were guided by an external [End Page 283] hand; and through the interpolated, almost telepathic, thoughts that he experiences (“whiskbroom,” for example). Pevear contends that Alyosha “seems little more than a reactor to events” (xviii), a reactor to the guiding hand of the narrator just as Don Gately is carried along and influenced by the narrator’s dictates in Infinite Jest.15 That both novels are, in this sense, “jests” does not, however, diminish their respective truth. They tend, in this regard, to take on the aspect of a dream.
In the first scholarly assessment of Infinite Jest, Tom LeClair observes that Wallace’s novel “can also be read as a metafictional allegory of . . . aesthetic orphanhood” (33). In fact, like most encyclopedic literature Infinite Jest can be read on numerous levels. A great deal of Infinite Jest is devoted to the relationship between contemporary art and contemporary American culture: “the U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to” (Jest, 694). Both novels, in fact, bear a striking resemblance in the ways in which they use aesthetics to comment on their respective culture’s ideologies, which enhances the novels’ dreamlike feel. Further, both novels make use of dreams and hallucinations and intentionally make the distinction between dreams and hallucinations ambiguous; they are further complicated by making the distinction between dreams/hallucinations and the narrative reality vague and ambiguous. It is my contention that both novels are aesthetic allegories, are fabulated stories of the narrators’ design and devising, and, as such, achieve a new stylistics or aesthetic that allows them to transmit their respective ideological messages—messages that are eschatological (dramatizing dark themes) and concerned with a type of redemption via language. Both novels have such a preponderance of dreams, hallucinations, and feverish characters (many characters suffer from a “brain fever” in The Brothers Karamazov and Gately is, for the most crucial portion of Infinite Jest, “mute and feverishly semiconscious”) (Jest, 828). Zosima’s mise en abyme and dreamlike biography, Ivan’s dream-hallucination of the devil—which he cannot determine to be real or hallucinated—and Dmitri’s trial chapters, in which the narrator constructs an aesthetic allegory between the dueling trial lawyers who themselves use aesthetic tropes of the Novel and fiction to defeat the other’s arguments, all contribute to make these novels surreal, dreamlike narratives which implies that both works are narrator-fabulated. Their stylistics are visionary themselves in their manipulation, but are also visionary in the sense that both novels literally present dream visions.
In the trial sequence, the narrator is relentlessly intrusive and full of caveats regarding his inability to recount the events (12.1.656); he curiously misses much of what transpires and “still others” that he “forgot to remember” (659); his descriptions are “partly superfluous” and vague, “all that must have been so” and “I did write down in full, at least some parts of them” (12.2.662); he inconsistently claims that Grigory was “questioned so much that I cannot even recall it all” (664), yet continues to quote [End Page 284] the defense attorney’s questioning verbatim; he observes trivial details: “it should be noted, a great many people declared that she was remarkably good-looking at that moment” (12.4.679); he chooses to quote verbatim the highly amusing but utterly irrelevant questioning of the Moscow doctor over whether he had given an apple or bag of nuts to Dmitri as a boy (12.3.674); and he quotes the attorneys’ closing statements at what would appear in toto, yet the narrator claims that he will not provide the speeches in detail but will “only take some parts of [them], some of the most salient points” (12.10.728). The courtroom proceedings are so heavily mediated, contradictory, and comical that the impression one has is of being on the receiving end of a spoken story, but one in which the events related did not necessarily occur. The presiding judge’s “attitude” is said to be “rather indifferent and abstract, as, by the way, it perhaps ought to have been” (12.1.659), although the reader is left speculating how the judge “ought” to feel this way, unless the events are themselves narrator-fabulated.
The peculiar emphasis on language throughout the proceedings, instead of evidence, reaffirms this, perhaps, intuitive impression of fabulism: Dmitri continually blurts out words, like “Bernard!” (12.2.668), which Terras notes is part of Dmitri’s “private language” (Companion, 404), and claims after one of his exclamations, rather confusedly, “it just came out!” (661) which implies the narrator’s complicity; Grigory “speaks in hisown peculiar language” (664); a witness is said to have “introduced aterrible quantity of Polish words into his phrases” (670); Dr. Herzenstube’s phrases “came out in German fashion” (12.3.671), he cannot find simple words to complete his sentences (672), and prizes his “potato-thick and always happily self-satisfied German wit” (674). Everything is “suddenly recall[ed]” (12.4.679), thoughts “flash” through characters’ minds (12.1.660, 12.4.677), ideas “lodged” in their heads (12.3.671) as though surreally occurring. The attorneys use aesthetic tropes in calling each others’ accounts “fantastic,” a “novelistic suggestion,” and a “novel” (726–27, 730, 731, 732, 734, 749, 750), which implies an aesthetic subtext. The narrator, through the defense attorney, speaks of the town’s prejudicial treatment of Dmitri in determining his guilt beforehand, and remarks that “an offended moral and, even more so, aesthetic sense is sometimes implacable” (726), which is possible to read as a subtext addressed to both Dostoevsky’s critics and contemporaries.
In a chapter on Dostoevsky’s early “aesthetics of transcendence,”Joseph Frank writes:
Dostoevsky insists both on the importance of an artist’s personal contribution (what he calls, in relation to himself, “fantasy”), as well as on the necessity for such “fantasy” to be oriented toward the society of its time, that is, “realism.” It is precisely as such a “fantastic realism” [End Page 285] that he will later define his own artistic quintessence.
(Liberation, 93, emphasis added)
Terras similarly argues that “art and the art of the novel are one of the subjects of The Brothers Karamazov” and further observes that “the question of the relationship of art to morality and to reality receives some careful attention” (Terras, Companion, 108). It is in the mouth of the tormentedDmitri—the novel’s poet—that The Brothers Karamazov’s most crucial aesthetic allegory is stated, in the ideal of the Madonna and Sodom (3.3.100–08). In the first of Dmitri’s three delirious monologues, he observes that”beauty is a fearful and terrible thing” (108) because “it’s undefinable,” and that where “the shores converge, here all contradictions live together” (108). Dmitri’s outburst is an ecstatic commentary on the proximity of both human beauty and terror residing in the same place, the human heart. The great riddle and mystery, for him, is how
some man, even with a lofty heart and the highest mind, should start from the ideal of the Madonna and end with the ideal of Sodom. It’s even more fearful when someone who already has the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not deny the ideal of the Madonna either. . . . What’s shame for the mind is beauty all over for the heart. Can there be beauty in Sodom? . . . did you know that secret? The terrible thing is that beauty is not only fearful but also mysterious. Here the devil is struggling with God, and the battlefield is the human heart.
(3.3.108)
Terras writes that this portion “must be seen in part as a comment directed at the novel itself” (Companion, 108). Dimitri further notes that even in Alyosha, “an angel,” the “same insect lives and stirs up a storm in [his] blood” (108). Dimitri contends that the two seemingly opposed and contradictory forces of beauty and horror reside, at once, in the human breast. There is no separation: good and evil proclivities remain conjoined within the human will, and the implication is that we choose what we give ourselves over to.
Wallace appropriates Dostoevsky’s aesthetic in Infinite Jest. The entire novel is obsessively descriptive of dreams, nightmares, and hallucinations, and the stylistics of the novel itself emphasize the dreamlike quality of the novel and its events. It is frequently difficult to extract the actions of characters from their dreams, to note the termination of dream sequences and the continuation of the plot. The narrator is deliberately vague in this aspect, the “dream-of-dream-type ambiguity” (830): “Gately begins to conclude it’s not impossible that the garden-variety wraith on the heart monitor, though not conventionally real, could be a sort of epiphanyish visitation” (Jest, 833), and: “then [Gately] considered that this was the only dream he could recall where even in the dream he knew that it was a [End Page 286] dream, much less lay there considering the fact that he was considering the up-front dream quality of the dream he was dreaming. It quickly got so multilevelled and confusing that his eyes rolled back in his head” (830). Early in the novel Hal narrates that “I am coming to see that the sensation of the worst nightmares, a sensation that can be felt asleep or awake, is identical to those worst dreams’ form itself: the sudden intra-dream realization that the nightmares’ very essence and center has been with you all along, even awake: it’s just been . . . overlooked” (61, author’s elision and emphasis). This exposition on the indistinguishability of dreams from regular consciousness recalls both Ivan’s inability to distinguish the visitation of the devil from a dream, hallucination, or reality: “‘It’s as if I’m awake in my sleep . . . I walk, talk, and see, yet I’m asleep’” (11.10.654).Ennet House staff work a night shift called “Dream Duty” during which they make themselves available for the nightmare-afflicted residents (Jest, 272). In one of the more notable stylistic moments of the text, two ofGately’s dreams are merged in a single paragraph:
Somebody overhead asked somebody else if they were ready, and somebody commented on the size of Gately’s head and grippedGately’s head, and then he felt an upward movement deep inside that was so personal and horrible he woke up. Only one of his eyes would open because the floor’s impact had shut the other one up plump and tight as a sausage. His whole front side of him was cold from lying on the wet floor. Facklemann around somewhere behind him was mumbling something that consisted totally of g’s.
(974, author’s emphasis)
The passage is significant in two ways. First, “if they were ready” recalls the gunshot episode’s concluding line (“‘Ready,’” 619) where the residents prepare to lift the wounded Gately. Second, the sentence beginning “Only one of his eyes,” signifies Gately’s dream transition to another dream, a dream of a flashback from Gately’s drug-addicted youth that concludes the novel itself. The stylistic consequence of the novel’s many dream segments signifies that the entire narrative is itself a dream, that it is dreamed up, so to speak, by the narrator.
Incandenza’s film, “‘The Medusa v. the Odalisque’” (396–97) indirectly recalls Dimitri’s ideals of the Madonna and Sodom and the battle of representation that faces the artist in depicting both the good and evil proclivities of the human subject in art. Incandenza’s film is a heavily metafictional film of a dramatic play in which two mythological figures fight each other on stage; both figures’ appearance respectively turns viewers into either stone (Medusa) or a gem (Odalisque), with the result that the play’s audience within the film eventually catches glimpses of either of the two combatants and is ossified. The film’s appearance in the novel is [End Page 287] a strategic commentary on the paralyzing ends of contemporary metafictional art, but the intertextual reference to Dimitri’s aesthetic discourse also partially signifies that we are at all times both good and bad, that the horrid Medusa and the attractive Odalisque reside within us simultaneously at once.16 Wallace elaborates this point in his essay on the filmmaker David Lynch.17 For Wallace, Lynch is a “weird hybrid blend of classicalExpressionist and contemporary postmodernist, an artist whose own ‘internal impressions and moods’ are (like ours) an olla podrida of neurogenic predisposition and phylogenic myth and psychotic schema and pop-cultural iconography” (Supposedly, 199, emphasis added). Infinite Jest, further recalls Dostoevsky’s aesthetic of what Joseph Frank calls “fantastic realism” (Liberation, 93) in the wraith’s discourse on filmmaking, and his aesthetic of “radical realism” (836) in which the wraith, when animate, endeavored to represent all actors’ voices, peripheral and prominent ones alike. Although the wraith speaks here of his own filmic aesthetic, the crucial subtext is that each person is, in an aesthetic trope, an individual film: “every member of which was the central and articulate protagonist of his own entertainment” (835–36). The narrator’s aesthetic trope masks the real content of the wraith’s discourse, that each and every American lives in a universe of one, each living his or her own dream-entertainment in real, lived life, and that, as such, every person lives potentially solipsistically, isolated from others.
Wallace’s primary goal throughout his fiction and essays is to communicate—”art, after all, is supposed to be a kind of communication” (Supposedly, 199)—and emphasize a sense of this isolation in readers, an isolation that he finds to be continually re-enforced by both the commercial and avant-garde American arts. Dostoevsky’s narrator pursues a similar course. In “The Mysterious Visitor” subchapter of Father Zosima’s biography, the narrator (through the mediation of the Visitor, Zosima, and Alyosha) describes an eschatological vision of the individual, the “period of isolation“:
for all men in our age are separated into units, each seeks seclusion in his own hole, each withdraws from the others, hides himself, and hides what he has, and ends by pushing himself away from people and pushing people away from himself. He accumulates wealth in solitude, thinking: how strong, how secure I am now; and does not see, madman as he is, that the more he accumulates, the more he sinks into suicidal impotence. For he is accustomed to relying only on himself, he has separated his unit from the whole, he has accustomed his soul to not believing in people’s help, in people or in mankind, and now only trembles lest his money and acquired privileges perish. Everywhere now the human mind has begun laughably not to understand that a man’s true security lies not in his own solitary effort, [End Page 288] but in the general wholeness of humanity. But there must needs come a term to this horrible isolation, and everyone will all at once realize how unnaturally they have separated themselves from one another. Such will be the spirit of the time.
(6.2.303–04, author’s emphasis)
What Dostoevsky’s narrator annunciates as an eschatological nightmare vision of his time is reflected in the eschatological vision of Wallace’s narrator, where all characters are Euclidian in their belief system; pursue only economic fulfillment through highly individualistic means; and their entertainment and art upholds the solitary existence that both novels move to aggravate in their respective readers. Infinite Jest’s characters repeatedly transpose the American motto, E Pluribus Unum (“out of many, one”) into the solipsistic “E Unibus Pluram” (“from one, many”) (Jest, 1007 n. 110) which indicates the extent to which they have given themselves to their own highly individualistic quest for happiness. Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor remarks that “the mystery of man’s being is not only in living, but in what one lives for” (5.5.254, emphasis added), which is further echoed in Hal Incandenza’s solipsistic musings:
it now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately—the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight—from in the form of a plunging—into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose?
(Jest, 900, emphasis added)
While Dostoevsky and Wallace differ, they remain united as authors of belief, and their major novels express the nature of the individual struggling for belief in something larger than the self. Both are concerned with the eschatology of the individual subject and fashion their novels as aesthetic allegories, or dreams and visions—a “dream-logic” (Supposedly, 200)—of the eschatology of the human individual.
Imperial, by William T. Vollmann, Viking, 1,366 pages, $68.50
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