"Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace

I began reading Infinite Jest on a suggestion of a friend who I had asked to recommend me not something long or in any terms a classic in conventional literature terms, but a challenge. My hardest experience reading a novel was with Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time", mostly because of the complex nature of the book and the sheer emotional involvement it required. Since then I had not been confronted with something so deeply personal on the part of what the author meant to convey, and what had been rendered into art with such patience and obvious empathy. Whilst it is sometimes difficult to empathise with Proust the man, Foster Wallace reminds me more or less of a latter- day Dostoesvky who he immensely involved in his writing and is not overwhelmingly concerned with the presentation. 

The density of language in Wallace is set in the background of street terms and abstract acronyms and symbols which Wallace himself has coined but it is barely the point. Wallace means to be artistic by confronting language with experience, or trauma against language, and his intention is made clear by opposing conventional language. The reflections of Proust worked well because of their involuntary nature and this is popularly known in neuroscience and literature. Proust's mirror of society is a detailed and involved personal perspective, and is meaning-forming within the reader because of its honesty. The reminiscing is obviously restrained and comes through despite the author's initial impressions of the nature of other people. But both authors write from experience, and both try to penetrate the veil that lies between integrity and veneer. This is why it was difficult to absorb this novel without taking it personally; it is honest, and hugely self-sacrificing. 

Both authors use their lives as the sketches with which to recall and artistically weave their significant genre-passing thoughts into a narrative which is not a narrative. I reading of Proust as not being a novelist at all, and the same seems to carry through with David Foster Wallace, though this seems to be the point. The novel, of course, is invention and artifice and in terms of honest rendition it is difficult to introduce all the realistic elements of daily life into a proper focus with the novel's tendency towards familiarity and conscious recognition. Both Proust and Wallace look at the unconscious, the unseen, and their narratives are highly inaccessible because what they mean to evoke is latent feeling and get closer to universal values or a certain truth politics. 

There are clear reasons for Wallace's highly complex and symbolic text here, with most references coming from within Wallace's earlier work and his experiences in alcoholics anonymous, weaving in ideas from science fiction, classic authors such as Dostoevsky and even theories of complexity from within mathematics, literature and philosophy: they are all part of a personal and, therefore, nonlinear communication which taken place at conscious and subconscious levels. This acts as a bridge between the perception of reality and the reality itself which can often take individuals by surprise. If we long to be entertained by a text we might choose to read a novel which might communicate a set of morals or ideas without quite reaching into unfamiliar depths. 

However, if we choose to take the offering of an intense personal experience on Wallace's part rendered into strangely positive light, we are of course experiencing what he intended (or what I recognise he did). The trouble is that it is a strange and formidable claim on the author's part that everything makes a certain sense and that in order to see that we must render all possible events out of their likeliest trajectories. That it might be possible to render a world possible where guilt was not established as cause, but rather another, less expected root, is what Wallace communicates here. Like Proust he renders into a torn yet complete canvas the many sketches of his life which serve to establish that life might be understood, given that understanding was the objective of life. 

Wallace's morality is a sort of overwhelmed and tattered morality which reveals the less shimmering and desirable explanations for suffering and seeks a compromise away from being enamoured of the power of control, responsibility only for the self, or of the infallibility of intellect or already garnered knowledge. Wallace simply took the time to write this down and hopefully the reader might take the time to pick it up and understand some of the devastating yet ultimately profound things that Wallace so determinedly sought not to be washed out at sea or, in the words of the philosopher Michel Foucault, not simply written for himself as if on sand before the tide comes in.