The Brothers Karamazov and Infinite Jest

The register of symbols within Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and the Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky is steered towards identical purpose; redemptive beginning. Both novels end with a beginning (though the end which is a beginning is at the beginning of Infinite Jest, I suppose as it ought to be). What is difficult to comprehend is how Wallace had the patience to write this novel so faithful to a tradition of moral conviction and believe in intrinsic sense and redemption if most people were simply to revel in its complexity, its apparent mystery and cryptic nature, without rather saying that what David Foster Wallace means to say is rather simple: everything is complicated as well as being simple. Sometimes the greater difficult is getting peopler to look.

Things such as trauma or interior suffering are rarely understood by the people who often meet it, even though they feel this way themselves. Instead they project values which they have come to identify as their own; issues of validation and the emphasis upon the understanding and good will of the father become crippling sources of trauma and frustration, levelling out the ability of the individual to live his or her own life. The brothers in Infinite Jest are like the Brothers Karamazov; they have a father who commits to exhaustive, debauched behaviour. But Foster Wallace just inverts this. You see, Foster Wallace was probably dumbfounded that nobody understood the simplicity of what he was doing: simple creating a reality in which the father in the Brothers Karamazov was now a famous and renowned figure and he transfers the criticism into a new model. The validation James Incandenza finds in the public, he does not feel he needs with his family. 

He exhausts his own need to find validation with his father, physically and academically, whilst leading a debauched and less stable life. His balance is lost, even if he does find the solution to annular fusion, validate the American public's fascination for very competitive  sports such as tennis, and also entertain them with a cartridge that induces a fatal catatonic bliss. That father has lost his humanity in the need to find the most extreme source of validation and understanding and his wife's designs to maintain control actually result in the trauma of her children, who cannot imagine a situation when anything could be beyond her own control. So, essentially, we have simple premise, simple story. 

The same situation with Dostoevsky: the critics simply transform the piece of literature into something cryptic in order to make more mysterious and inaccessible the work. The stupidity of this closing of the register of symbols is all too apparent to me and it is perhaps a failing of David Foster Wallace himself, who has such a high regard for the subtleties of literature, which only diminishes the works ability to diffuse into wide cultural space, making Infinite Jest more or less a work which advocates simplicity and the actual communication of ideas rather than the intense exploration of them through the self, which leads to social fragmentation and isolation, and even the dystopian vision of America that Wallace paints. 

The truth is that Wallace himself wanted to create art, whereas I always wanted to read something that could help people find meaning within themselves, which no doubt this novel does. But it is tiresome, like listening to someone who feels like he needs to sit down with someone exclusively for several weeks and explain to him just what has been their oversight when simpler means are possible. But, in a way, the novel brings a recognition forward: Wallace did not craft all of this from his imagination; he used his experiences in recovery, within tennis, within competitive academia. Dostoevsky had the same sort of varied and frantic life as Wallace, and was seen to be a unique genius, without the reader being able to quite understand that all this time the resource was the reader himself. The inspiration was life itself, and the things that we do not see. That a genius leads you to the threshold of your mind is maybe the great truth here. 

A genius starts something new, or at least shows that where we thought there were neat divisions, and rules and regulations, there are in fact very few of those, and that the areas of mutability and change are very widespread. So, in a way, David Foster Wallace is a genius, but the word itself is a bit of a nonsense word, because in truth everyone is, when the choose to see complexity within simple shapes, when they begin to see folds of personality and a history imbedded in someone they know. Just like Dostoevsky; you grow up in a harsh climate and you start to either accept in and live within it, and learn from it in a non-abstract, not complex way, or you watch it from a distance and you also learn to love it though your severe awareness distresses you and condemns you to anxiety and depression. So, good discovery today: even if you invent annular fusion you still have to be a good father.