'What Is To Be Done?' Nikolai Chernyshevsky

Beauty is life; beautiful is that being in which we see life as it should be according to our conceptions; beautiful is the object which expresses, or reminds us of life.

The Aesthetic Relations Between Art and Reality.
Chernyshevsky.

Vera Pavlovna lives under the thumb of her gorgon-like mother, who wants to marry her off to the owner of the tenement block where they reside. Vera has aspirations of her own, and makes friends with the tutor of her kid brother, a medical student named Lopukhov. Through subterfuge, and in order to save her from a loveless marriage and lifelong servitude to her family – the usual lot of women of her class- he marries her, snatching her out from under the nose of the other suitor and her mother. They set up house together, in separate rooms, and Vera feels liberated from what she calls ‘the cellar’, signifying her life and expectations before her marriage. Vera sets up a small business as a seamstress, and with the help of some other girls, the business takes off and expands; they open branches, and run the operation as a cooperative, with all the girls living together and sharing the profits. Soon, she falls in love with Lopukhov’s friend and classmate, Kirsanov. Lopukhov, realising that he is in the way, and that his marriage to Vera was only in order to help her achieve her independence, removes himself from the scene, with the assistance and under the guidance of an extraordinary man, Rakhmetov, so as not to block their happiness. Eventually, Kirsanov and Vera marry, and all live happily ever after.

Despite its rather unprepossessing plot and premise, this 1863 novel, now all but forgotten except by die-hard Russophiles, was probably the single most important literary work in Russian of the second half of the 19th century. The revolutionary Plekhanov said it was the most important work in Russia since the introduction of the printing press; Lenin knew the book by heart, and borrowed the title for one of his own key texts; Marx called Chernyshevsky the only original mind of contemporary economists; and copies of the journal in which it first appeared were regarded as precious heirlooms for generations of Russians.

The reasons for the impact of this novel lie in the external historical context and the internal subject matter and its treatment. The 1860s was a period of growing radicalism. The highly autocratic Tsar Nicholas had died, to general relief and rejoicing, in 1855, and the new Tsar, Alexander II had introduced reforms, culminating in the emancipation of the peasants in 1861. However, for many, the new reforms had not gone far enough, and the lot of the peasants had not really been effected by the emancipation. The new generation of middle class students - the sons of priests, middle level clerks and minor officials –the raznochintsy, the intelligentsia, the men of mixed background- wanted more. After the debacle of the Crimean War, in which the incompetence and corruption of the Tsarist regime were made clear for all to see, this restlessness in the raznochintsy radicalised into the formation of Russia’s first revolutionary group, Land and Freedom, in 1861. The sons were determined to wrest the future of Russia away from the fathers. The country was being united by the rapid development of railroads and print media, and literacy was on the rise. Turgenev’s novel of 1862 Fathers and Sons had caused widespread and heated discussion (and rioting), and Dostoevsky’s book of the same year Notes from the House of The Dead had alerted its readers to the injustices and horrors of the Tsarist penal system. The key figure in this ferment was Nikolai Chernyshevsky, philosopher, Westernizer, teacher, polemicist, underground revolutionary, literary and social critic of the leading journal of the time, The Contemporary, political prisoner and exile. In this his first novel, written in prison, Chernyshevsky described the raznochintsy, not as they were, but, more importantly, as how they should be according to our conceptions. This was both in keeping with Chernyshevsky’s aesthetics and his politics. Let’s look at how these interact in the novel.

Chernyshevsky’s aesthetics were social utilitarian, and can best be summed up by the quote from his Master’s thesis given above. Art should have a social purpose, to show how things should be, and thus help to bring those things into being. The criteria for beauty was how far the art work helped to bring about social change. His portraits of the three protagonists of the book were intended, therefore, to show how men and women could live together in equality, respecting their equal rights. Rather than having life and depth as characters, they are more ciphers of an ideal. Lopukhov and Kirsanov are described as being almost exactly like each other, interchangeable, as they are for Vera. The portrait of Rakhmetov, the extraordinary man, is intended to show the ideal revolutionary, and to describe the process of becoming committed to the revolution, and the form that commitment should take. His portrait includes Christ-like elements, and his backstory draws on ancient Russian hagiographies in its elements of renunciation of worldly goods and passions, the embracing of asceticism in the service of a higher ideal, and the rigorous training of mind and body according to the dictates of revolutionary necessity. The narrator specifically tells us that Rakhmetov has no purpose in the story other than to provide a contrast to the other characters, to show the reader how ordinary the other characters are: If I hadn’t shown you the figure of Rakhmetov, the majority of readers would have misunderstood the main characters of my story, seeing them as heroes, whereas they are in fact ordinary people. …No, my friends, it is not they who stand too high, it is you who stand too low. As Vera and her men stand in relationship to the reader, as models for what should be, so Rakhmetov stands in relation to the other three. Rakhmetov is both a symbol of the necessity for commitment to revolution, and a symbol of the utilitarian aesthetic: Rakhmetov has been introduced to fulfil the principal, most fundamental requirement of art, and exclusively to satisfy it says the narrator.

In keeping with the utilitarian aesthetic, large parts of the novel are taken up with conversations between the characters in which Chernyshevsky’s philosophy and politics are put forward in dialogue form, in an attempt to educate the reader, and to show how one should live according to the dictates of theory, in full revolutionary consciousness. One of the key ideas is ‘rational egoism’, roughly summarised as the notion that everyone is motivated by self-interest, that one never knowingly acts against his own best interests (Chernyshevsky was heavily influenced in his thinking by the English Utilitarians), and that a full awareness of this will show one the way forward. Thus, when Lopukhov is debating with himself how to deal with his friends’ love for each other he says: How true the theory is: egoism plays with man. I concealed the most important thing… I was silent because it wasn’t to my advantage to speak. It’s pleasant to observe as a theorist the tricks that egoism plays in practice. As a result of this awareness he makes his decision to withdraw. For Chernyshevsky, and the characters in his novel, this rational egoism is constantly balanced against altruism, as immediate personal ends have to be sacrificed for social ends which will only have personal benefit in the long term. The goal of society and personal development is to achieve the state where one’s own personal self-interests converge with those of the majority, creating the best conditions for the individual and for the common good.

Another key idea is that of complete equality between the sexes, on every level, domestic, economic and political. Vera and Lopukhov can only enter each other’s rooms with permission; and they establish a third room, the neutral space, where they talk and take tea together. Vera starts her workshop at the instigation of her husband, so that she will have economic independence. Chernyshevsky lambasts traditional notions of marriage and jealous love, which include the idea of possession, both in a sexual sense and an economic one: What filth, what pure filth – “possession”. Who dares possess another person? burning words in view of the status of the peasants, who, although they had been given political emancipation, still remained in debt to their previous owners. This relationship of equality between the sexes is symbolic of the relationship of equality between the classes, and it’s in this that Chernyshevsky aligns himself with the key figures of European socialism. The description of the workshops which Vera and her sisters start, and the lodging houses they instigate is long and detailed, showing the influence of Robert Owen’s cooperatives, and Fourier’s phalansteres. In Vera Pavolovna’s Fourth Dream, the most famous and radical part of the novel, in which Vera’s dream of the coming Golden Age to be achieved by revolution, an agrarian Utopia is depicted. This has strong similarities with William Morris’s Utopian vision in News from Nowhere, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, and influenced Zamyatin’s We. The symbol for this coming Utopia is a huge crystal palace complete with electricity, modelled along Paxton’s Crystal Palace, an image of technological modernity.

Apart from the political ideas and the utilitarian aesthetic, perhaps the most interesting thing about the book from a literary point of view, is the various strategies Chernyshevsky adopted to deal with the censorship. Although Chernyshevsky predicted the revolution in the book as taking place in 1865 (two years after the writing of the book, and some years after the final events depicted in it), the revolution is not named or described directly. There is copious use of euphemisms: the common cause, the extraordinary man, matters of concern devoted to nothing or no one in particular, and elliptical references to revolutionary groups of which Lopukhov and Kirsanov are members. The novel has three beginnings. The first describes a ‘foolish’ incident and the ramifications of that incident. The second is a preface from the author which voices conventional platitudes about the lack of the skill of the writer, and humbly hopes his readers will forgive him. This preface both hides and signals to alert readers the way to decipher the revolutionary ambiguities: when I address you, it behoves me to spell everything out –since you are merely amateurs, and not at all experts at deciphering unstated meanings. The third beginning starts the story proper with an account of Vera’s childhood and life in her ‘cellar’, before her liberation and the dawning of her revolutionary consciousness. At the end, the novel disintegrates in a series of small snippets of prose alternating with poetry, both Russian and foreign, contemporary and traditional, but all with heavily disguised revolutionary themes, signifying not an ending, but a possible new beginning. Chernyshevsky himself appears again and again in the novel, breaking the frame in a kind of pre-Brechtian verfremdungseffekt, warning the reader not to expect certain things, to expect certain others, arguing with an invented figure, the sarcastically named perspicacious reader, alluding to his imprisonment in highly veiled terms, addressing the characters directly, and commenting on the action and the conversations: I understand how much Lopukhov is compromised in the eyes of my enlightened public by Marya Aleksaevna’s sympathy for his way of thinking. But I don’t wish to play favourites and won’t conceal the evidence. The participation in the plot of the revolutionary Rakhmetov is bordered around with complex alienating strategies: first the ‘perspicacious reader’ interrupts the story to note how he thinks that Rakhmetov will play a prominent role in the narrative, then Chernysehvsky replies that on the contrary he will play neither a principal role nor a secondary one, nor any role at all in the rest of my novel. Why has he been introduced then? exclaims the perspicacious reader in vexation. I’ll tell you later, replies Chernyshevsky, and you can try to guess. For that purpose I’ll put a long thick black line between sections. See what good care I take of you? Then, after a thick black line in the text, follows the incident in which Rakhmetov is involved in the plot, followed by a new numbered section entitled: A Conversation with the Perspicacious Reader, Followed by His Expulsion. These strategies are designed –as Chernyshevsky himself tells us- to highlight the fact that the portrait of Rakhmetov is intended to spur the reader to revolutionary commitment.

Through these, and other strategies, The discourse is always disrupting the normal experience of reading a novel by preventing the reader from settling into an alternative novelistic reality, in favour of awakening a fully conscious awareness of the didactic purpose of the book.

Come up out of your godforsaken underworld, my friend, come up. It’s not so difficult. Come out into the light of day, where life is good; the path is easy and inviting. Try it: development, development

Tell everyone that the future will be radiant and beautiful. Love it, strive toward it, work for it, bring it nearer, transfer into the present as much as you can from it.

Chernyshevsky on Tolstoy

He is interested in observing how a feeling that arises immediately out of a given situation or impression turns into another feeling when it is subjected to the influence of memory and the power of association that the imagination has…

'A Hero of our Time' Mikhail Lermontov

There are two men within me – one lives in the full sense of the word, the other reflects and judges him.

Lermontov’s masterpiece consists of three sections of the diaries of one Pechorin, an upper-class professional soldier, with two framing tales and a preface in which the narrator ‘Lermontov’ relates how he came into possession of the diaries, and describes his meeting with Pechorin. The novel is set in the mountains, garrisons and spa towns of the Caucasus and Black Sea coast, and is packed with incident (a duel, womanising, smugglers, balls, midnight trysts, skirmishes, Russian roulette) and psychological observation. Published in 1840, three years after Pushkin’s death, it forms a bridge between the neoclassical and Romantic literature of the 1820s and 1830s, and that of the psychologically and socially realistic literature which began to appear after the middle 1840, a link between the world of Pushkin and that of Dostoevsky. This can be seen most clearly in comparing it with Pushkin’s approach to character, and in its prose style.

It is a truism in Russian literary criticism that Lermontov’s Pechorin and Pushkin’s Onegin reflect the ‘superfluous generation’, the young intellectuals from the noble class who felt powerless to do anything under the prevailing autocratic conditions of their time. These figures both originate from Byron’s Don Juan and Childe Harold; both suffer from spleen and ennui as a result of their alienation from the political and intellectual life of their country. However, their characterisation is somewhat different. Pushkin restricts his description of Onegin to outside observations of what he does, how he feels, how he reacts to and effects other people. Onegin only reveals his thoughts in conversation with others and in the letter of Canto 8. These communications are necessarily tempered with considerations for the receiver of the message and must be taken with a pinch of salt as genuine expressions of self. This externality of characterisation is partly the result of Pushkin’s verse form, in which realism is subjected to the demands of versification, and partly to do with the conventionalities of the period, the influence of a Byronic conception of character in particular.

Lermontov takes Pushkin’s Onegin and develops him. Like Onegin, Pechorin suffers from spleen and a sense of worthlessness; but this is tempered with an active nature: he is an army officer in an imperial army and takes part frequently in skirmishes with the local population; he hunts, has adventures, rides his mounts to their deaths, and indulges, like his prototype Don Juan, in amatory pursuits. Pechorin’s cruelty is more pronounced than Onegin’s. Unlike the externality of Pushkin’s presentation of Onegin, Pechorin expresses his internal life through his diary, which allows him to present his thoughts to himself (and us – the implied reader of the diary). Pechorin says of himself As a boy I was a dreamer and dwelt with loving care on the dark and radiant images traced by my restless eager fancy. And what did it bring? Weariness……And when I came into this real life I had lived it through already in my mind and found it boring and disgusting…

One can only imagine Onegin saying the same thing. Pechorin is drawn with more psychological complexity than Onegin, and is more tormented: My whole life has been nothing but a series of dismal, unsuccessful attempts to go against heart or reasons. An enthusiast turns me cold as ice, and I fancy that frequent contact with a languid phlegmatic would turn me into an ardent idealist. He describes (in a conversation recorded in his diary) the way his nature was formed in opposition to the world, in an astonishingly perceptive piece of self analysis that is more modern and more realistic than anything in Pushkin: Everyone saw in my face evil traits that I didn’t possess. But they assumed I did, and so they developed. I was modest, and was accused of being deceitful, so I kept to myself. I had a strong sense of good and evil; instead of kindness I received nothing but insults, so I grew resentful. I was sullen, while other children were gay and talkative. I felt superior to them, and was set beneath them, so I became jealous. I was ready to love the whole world, but no one understood me, so I learned to hate. I spent my blighted youth in conflict with myself and my world. Fearing ridicule I hid my best feelings deep within me and there they died. I spoke the truth but no one believed me, so I took to deceit. Knowing the world and the mainspring of society I became adept at the art of living, Yet I saw that others were happy without that art, enjoying for nothing the advantages I’d worked so hard to gain. This is completely alien to the spirit of Onegin, but one can begin to hear the whispers here of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man.

Pechorin articulates a greater awareness than Onegin of the possibilities of the two main temptations for the superfluous man: lust and power. Of lust he says, again with great psychological acuity I often wonder why I’m trying so hard to win the love of a girl I have no desire to seduce and whom I’d never marry. … It can’t be that restless urge for love we suffer from in youth, that drives us from one woman to the next till we meet one who can’t abide us. That’s when our constancy begins, our true never ending love that might be described mathematically by a line stretching from a point in space. The reason for this endlessness is simple: we can never attain our goal – our end, that is ; and of power, he chillingly says: ambition is nothing more than a lust for power and my chief delight is to dominate those around me. To inspire in others love, devotion, fear –isn’t that the first symptom and the supreme triumph of power? To cause another person suffering or joy, having no right to do so –isn’t that the sweetest food of our pride? What is happiness but gratified pride? If I thought myself better and more powerful than everyone else in the world, I should be happy. If everyone loved me I should find inexhaustible founts of love within myself. Evil begets evil. This opens the way for Dostoevsky’s nihilist Stavrogin.

Although both characters bow their heads to fate, the manner of their bowing is different. Onegin in his letter to Tatiana, says, My life depends on your decision/And I surrender to my fate. This is an entirely conventionally poetic expression (Nabokov in his commentary on this couplet gives an exhaustive and exhausting account of other Romantic writers who use the same sentimental expression, in three languages), a mere literary device. In contrast to this conventionalised phrasing, in the last section of his diary, The Fatalist, Pechorin relates two incidents to illustrate his growing belief that everything is written. A fellow officer, during a discussion on the topic, in an attempt to prove that everything is written, plays a game of Russian roulette. The pistol misfires, and although there is a bullet in the chamber, it does not go off. The same officer is then murdered by a drunken Cossack on his way home, proving that it was written he would die that day. Pechorin reflects: How can one not be a fatalist after this? Yet who really knows if he believes a thing or not? How often our beliefs are mere illusions or mental aberrations. I prefer to doubt everything. Such an attitude makes no difference to a man’s determination – on the contrary, as far as I‘m concerned, I always go more boldly forward when I know nothing of what lies ahead. After all, the worst you can do is die, you’ve got to die sometime. Pechorin’s position is close to Diderot’s in Jacques le Fatalist: Everything which happens to us in the world, good or bad, is written up above… and the title of this section also points to Diderot.

Lermontov attended Moscow University at a time when the philosophies of Schelling and Hegel were becoming influential there. The relationship between the individual and history (fate) was a key concern of the period, especially for the disenfranchised sons of the nobility, whose confidence and position had been severely weakened by their aborted coup of December 1825, and whose ranks had been cruelly decimated by the Tsarist reaction to the coup. Belinsky, who was also at Moscow University a few years after Lermontov, reached his early, extreme position of reconciliation of reality: the individual is powerless to effect change in the face of historical circumstances which are governed by ineluctable laws; therefore, to struggle against historical circumstances (autocracy) is pointless and achieves nothing; better then to reconcile oneself to reality. It is not too far- fetched to assume that Lermontov was exposed to these ideas and had them in mind when he wrote in the closing pages of his novel: We can no longer make great sacrifices for the good of mankind or even for our own happiness, because we know it is unattainable; and as our ancestors plunged on from illusion to illusion, so we drift indifferently from doubt to doubt. Only unlike them we have no hope, nor even that indefinable but real sense of pleasure that is felt in any struggle, be it with man or with destiny. Lermontov, like his hero Pechorin, rejected this Hegelian passivity, joined the army and went off to test his mettle and do dashing things amidst spectacular scenery. Belinsky also, later, rejected this reconciliation of reality and became the period’s foremost social critic and agitator for reform. The Hero of our Time, not least in all the ironies of its title, is thus a portrait of the dilemma faced by young men in the 1830s, and their differing reactions to it.

In 1822 Pushkin wrote: Precision and brevity – these are the two virtues of prose. It demands matter and more matter- without it, brilliant expressions serve no purpose. In this it differs from poetry. This serves as a model for his own prose style. Pushkin was no word painter in his prose - in contrast to his poetry, where his word painting is sublime- and his prose moves swiftly and sparely from incident to incident: I lived the life of a young oaf, chasing pigeons and playing leapfrog with the serving boys. Meanwhile I had turned sixteen. Then the course of my life changed. is how he sketches in the youth of the hero of his final novel The Captain’s Daughter. Lermontov on the other hand, is a masterly word painter, not only in his psychological descriptions, but also in the descriptions of the Caucasus: In the west a pale moon was about to sink into the black clouds that hung like tattered shreds of curtain on the distant peaks…Far away on the horizon groups of dancing stars wove wondrous patterns, fading one by one as the pale light of dawn spread over the deep violet sky and lit up the virgin snow on the steep mountain slopes. Dark mysterious chasms yawned on either side of us. Wreaths of mist coiled and twisted like snakes, sliding down the folds of the neighbouring cliffs into the abyss as though they sensed and feared the approach of day. There was peace in heaven and on earth.
It was like the heart of a man at morning prayer.
Lermontov is the master of the well- chosen simile, a device that Pushkin abhorred in his prose. For Pushkin, matter meant incident, while Lermontov found matter in accurate and painterly descriptions of nature, and closely examined psychological states. While Pushkin’s prose style looks back to the French philosophes, Lermontov’s looks forward to the dense prose of Dostoevsky, the social realists and further, to the symbolists of the Silver Age.

It might be regarded as invidious to compare two such different geniuses as Pushkin and Lermontov. However, their lives and posthumous fates were linked. Lermontov’s poem, The Death of a Poet, written in the immediate aftermath of Pushkin’s death, and casting blame for it on the court and the machinations of those around the Tsar, earned him three years of exile, and the adulation of the young and the intelligentsia. After Pushkin’s death, his mantle passed to Lermontov, whose fame subsequently eclipsed Pushkin’s. It did not last long, however, as just over a year later, at the age of 27, he was also shot dead in a duel.

The Dream
A vale in Dagestan, the noon sun gleaming,
There, bullet-stricken, motionless I lay;
My wound was deep, and had not ceased its streaming
As drop by drop my life blood oozed away.

I lay alone there in the sandy hollow;
The cliffs rose sharply, shelving all around,
The sun burned down on hilltops bare and yellow
And on me too: my sleep was deathly sound.

I dreamed a scene of lights and glowing dresses,
An evening feast back home I seemed to see;
And youthful wives with flowers in their tresses
Held cheerful conversation about me.

But taking no part in this scene of gladness,
A certain one sat thoughtful and apart;
Her soul had conjured up a scene of sadness
And, God knows how, it had possessed her heart.

A vale in Dagestan came in her dreaming;
A well-known body in that valley lay;
The body bore a chest wound black and streaming
And blood ran down, and cooling, ebbed away.

Spurious Quotation # 20

Gershwin's great gift to music lay in the fact that he opened a whole new sonic landscape for the minor third.
Nadia Boulanger

Collingwood on art

Art is the community’s medicine for the worst disease of the mind, corruption of consciousness.

'Infinite Jest' David Foster Wallace

...

Notes and Errata



1. Although in the novel the millennium has been and gone, there are no references at all to real contemporary American or global political events of the time of writing. Chapstick, Pledge, and Skevener in their study The Endless Loop of History: Space Time in the work of DFW (London 2001) have already noted the way Infinite Jest divorces itself from history by the use of sci fi elements. They note how compared with the American post moderns, whose works interact with real historical time, Infinite Jest takes place in an ahistorical, allegorical time.

2. DFW’s invention of Subsidized Time, and the renaming of years after products and companies shows the way in which the soul-rotting effects of advertising infect time as well as internal and external space (cf: Phillip K Dick’s adverts projected onto the moon in The Man in the High Castle). Otherwise, the ubiquitous presence of advertising in contemporary daily life is absent from the novel.

3. This ambiguity notwithstanding, the internal chronology of the novel is accurate, spanning a frame of nine years, with flashbacks to before standardized time, in the backstories of the characters. However, narrative chronology is severely disrupted in the huge gap between the events of the plot as they can be discerned by the careful reader, and the highly fractured discourse in which those events are presented anti-chronologically. Chapstick et al argue that this is one of DFW’s greatest contributions to post post post post modernism. However, it’s more accurate to see this as merely an extension of the achronological games of the modernists (starting in media res, use of flashbacks, flash forwards, open recursive endings etc –cf: the work of Muriel Spark for examples of similar achronology), and, as such, while brilliantly handled here, it is not as original as they claim.

4. Actually, this is not correct. The theme of waste management (also the underlying structure of Don DeLillo’s novel Underworld) reflects some of the anxieties of the 90s, the decade in which the novel was written: namely, global warming, environmental concerns, nuclear waste management, including its export to third world countries, the trading of carbon emission points, futures swaps in carbon footprints etc. DFW is here simply satirizing contemporary concerns; and a Freudian reading of this theme is both unnecessary and not really illuminating, Don Gately’s work as a shit hoser notwithstanding.

5. DFW’s use of spurious knowledge and scholarship (including a spurious academic apparatus at the back of the book) has been amply commented on, especially the doubtful physics of J.O. Incandenza’s work with lenses and nuclear annulation, and the iffey math involved in the Eschaton game. By his use of the spurious DFW is not only satirizing the discourse of academic knowledge, but making a serious point about the extent and typology of knowledge itself. Once knowledge becomes so specialized as to become comprehensible to only a very few –those firmly inside the discourse- what status does that knowledge gain? To those outside the discourse, the knowledge can only be taken on trust, and therefore all manner of hoods may be winked. In this case the boundaries between the fictional and the real become blurred, a matter for argument. We are used to questioning the reliability of the narrative voice in fiction, but not so able to question in the same way the reliability of academic discourse or specialist knowledge. The presence of the spurious next to the real infects the real, inviting us to extend our distrust of fictional narrative to non-fictional exposition, the fiction (le mensonge) and the truth become mirrors of each other.

6. Rubbish. Not true at all and totally erroneous, if not sheer and utter nonsense.

7. The title of a work stands in metonymic relationship to the content of the work: War and Peace, for example, signifies the two main themes and structuring devices of that novel. For existing books, (real, read books), the title summons up everything we know or remember about the book. Where that work is non-existent (fictional, spurious, lost or simply unknown/unread) the title acts as an empty signifier, which we can fill with our imagination, effectively writing the work ourselves in a flash. Barthes calls these bookless titles prolepses; Nabokov creates summaries and detailed commentaries for them (in Pale Fire and The Real life of Sebastian Knight); Borges bases his whole stylistics on this process of metonymic expansion; and Eco fills entire imaginary libraries with these fantastical books. DFW for his imaginary works, like Hoffmann, has a penchant for excessively long and humorous titles, whose length guides us in this process of creation cf: Good Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms that Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space With Mind-Boggling Efficiency (title of one of J.O. Incandenza’s entertainments), and Mousetraps and their Influence on the Character and Achievement of the Feline Race (title of one of Murr’s books from Hoffmann’s The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr).

8. For further discussion on the influence of Murr in Infinite Jest (the supernatural goings on at ETA, the circular structure, description of highly irrational, psychotic states, themes of education etc etc) readers are referred to my forthcoming study: Master Abraham’s Magic Lense: The Infinite Prescience of Hoffmann (University of Formosa 2023)

9. Gaps in the filmography notated thus: “Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED” are the subject of Rowena Spitrack-Bagstock’s unpublished phd thesis (Cornell 2011), in which she bravely – some would argue foolhardily- tries to draw links between French theory –namely the silences of Macherey- and the use of typography in Infinite Jest. In 2000 pages of densely argumentative prose she sets forth the idea that the space created in the mind of the reader by these silences/gaps in the filmography is only partially filled by the cacophony of the alternating typeface. I remain unconvinced.

10. Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Hamlet 2.2

11. Linguistics is of course an important theme in the novel. Hal has memorized the OED, and his college admission essays focus on language. Avril Incandenza’s important work as a militant prescriptivist – biro-ing in apostrophes on public signs, her debate with Pinker and subsequent participation in the MIT language riots, her incredibly patronizing correction of Mario’s syntax- is undermined by the rambling sentences and grammatical inaccuracies of DFW’s prose style, which eschews the ‘literary’ in favour of a contemporary talkiness, effectively asserting a descriptivist position as counterbalance. Perhaps DFW’s greatest break with the post modernists of the previous generation is his refusal to acknowledge the norms of a literary/linguistic aesthetics which has its roots in the 19th century prose stylists. Even the great post-modern writers Pynchon, Gaddis and DeLillo employ a writing style that has echoes of T.S Eliot (in his Prufrock mode), Beckett, Joyce, Dickens, Dr Johnson, Pope, Woolf etc. These writers create moments of recognizable beauty amidst their post-modern games; or at least, we can say, moments of sensitivity that are more in tune with our notions of beauty inherited from the canonical tradition. DFW, however, deliberately creates a style of great ugliness, even ineptitude, with redundant grammar, valley speak, the use of fillers such as like and everything like that, huge, rambling compound sentences consisting of end-on-end clauses, eschewing precision, eschewing subtlety, eschewing focus in favour of a kind of mad abundance of detail. Avril Incandenza would have a fit if she were to read the prose in which she is presented. Of course, any writer worth his salt can do the characters in different voices, and DFW shows a Joycean facility for writing indirect free discourse that both indivuates the characters’ internal lives and creates a whole range of stylistics. There are passages in which the English takes on the syntax of Quebecois French, resulting in a hideous mash of language: The upper hinge squeaks no matter the oil, as the shop drives Lucien crazy by becoming again dusty each time the door is opened to the street’s grit, and from the dust of the alley with so many dumpsters behind the back room which Bertrand refuses not to open the iron door of, to spit. This linguistic ugliness is not always only a function of characterization, however, but is also used by the narrator for descriptive passages.

12. DFW is the supreme master of discourse collage, fusing totally separate discourses to huge comic and satirical effect. The Eschaton game, in which the discourse of diplomacy and warfare is constantly interrupted by the discourse of children’s games is an excellent example, as is the description of Mario’s Interdependence Day entertainment.

13. DFW more than any other writer of his generation has really caught the tenor of the times; the way thoughtful analysis has been subsumed in a kind of gooey, Oprah-emotion. The poverty of thought is expressed in a kind of rubbish heap of language, piling emotive detail on emotive detail rather than the thoughtful stripping away of superfluous words. The high school prose bludgeons the subject and the reader, working by an accumulation of feeling rather than by skewering a thought with a neatly expressed aphorism or a well turned phrase.

14. Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, they are the life, the soul of reading. Laurence Sterne

15. Thaddeus L. Incebince III, in his monograph The Brothers Incandenza (Spohringer Verlag 2000), has written extensively on the pervasive influence of Dostoevsky on Infinite Jest. Briefly summarized, this study dwells on the structural similarities between the elevated dialogue scenes of Helen Steeply and Marathe and those of Ivan and Alyosha. Incebince also sees the severely handicapped but innocent Mario as another incarnation of the epileptic ‘holy fool’ Prince Myshkin from The Idiot, and draws interesting parallels between the Quebecois terrorists and the revolutionaries of Demons. He notes how both Dostoevsky and DFW focus on the ‘humiliated and insulted’ of their times, the urban ‘poor folk’ in the former’s case, the (reformed) drug addicts and hideously deformed in the latter’s, and how both use students as protagonists. Incebince’s best chapter analyses the influence of Notes from Underground on Infinite Jest especially how the theme of consciousness appears in both books. The relentlessly foregrounded consciousness of the Underground Man (Consciousness is man’s greatest misfortune) which complicates his relationship with the world, in the opening scene of Infinite Jest, tips over the edge, becoming a radical and violent split between how Hal articulates himself to himself (and how we overhear this: I am in here.) and how the other characters respond when Hal tries to articulate this consciousness to them. To himself – and us- Hal is not just a boy who plays tennis, but has an intricate history. Experiences and feelings. I’m complex. Others react to this self-revelation with horror and violence. Incebince notes how this reaction – and the self-revelatory speeches of the addicts at their meetings- goes some way to fulfilling Prince Valkovsky’s dictum from Dostoevsky’s Humiliated and Insulted: If it could come about that each of us were to describe his innermost secrets –secrets which one would hesitate to tell not only to people at large, but even to one’s closest friends, nay, to fear to admit even to one’s own self - the world would be filled with such a stench that each one of us would choke to death. Perhaps from sensitivities surrounding DFW’s suicide, Incebince shys away from suggesting that DFW, like Dostoevsky, portrayed the consciousness of his times as a pathology; but nonetheless, it’s possible to see a continuum stretching from the existential crisis of the Underground Man to the clinical depression of Kate Gompert, and to read both of these as dispatches from the front in the battle for the integrity of the self in an increasingly fractured and dehumanizing era.

16. The actual quote from Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk is: There is a crack in my soul, and I can hear it trembling, quivering, stirring deep inside me.

11. His sentences have a feverish, hysterical, idiosyncratic pace and their lexical content is an all but maddening fusion of belles-lettres, colloquialisms, and bureaucratese. His digressions were prompted more by the language than by the requirements of a plot. Reading him simply makes one realise that stream of consciousness springs not from consciousness but from a word, which alters or redirects one’s consciousness. This is Brodsky writing about Dostoevsky’s use of Russian, but Incebince convincingly argues that it could just as well apply to DFW’s use of English.

17. A Yearbook of Wheelchairs and other Ambulatory Devices for the Disabled Available in North America (Springer Verlag 1995 edition). Readers are invited to consult this reference work in their local library.

18. Actually, although the novel appears to be highly digressive and loosely structured (one of James’s loose baggy monsters, perhaps) it is in fact just as highly structured and intricately wrought as any 19th century novel. The action is centered around two loci: the Enfield Tennis Academy and the Enfield halfway house are locations both removed and isolated from the outside world, where individuals are in a state of transition, of becoming. Gradually, connections (structural, thematic and plot) between these two locations and groups of protagonists become clear. The thematic spine of the novel, buried in the notes and errata, is the spurious filmography of J.O. Incandenza, in which themes, symbols, images and even events present in the text are signaled, foretold or echoed. An example, taken at random, is the Medusa theme, in which beauty is so terrible it is veiled, indistinguishable from ugliness (as in the fate of Madame Psychosis), signaled in the title of Incandenza’s cartridge: The Medusa vs the Odalisque, in which the spectators turn to stone, effectively what happens to those who see the Infinite Jest cartridge. Interestingly, a whole team (funded by Yushityu) has been set up at the University of Yushittinme in Japan to study and plot in detail the relationship between the text and the filmography.

19. DFW, in exasperation perhaps at the illiteracy of his fans, remarked in an interview, that everything in the novel has a place and a reason for being there. This, of course, is part of the craft of any novel, and hardly the literary innovation his fans claim it is. DFW might have referred his readers to Bleak House or Middlemarch for, again, 19th century examples in which every detail is connected, and connection itself is the main theme. DFW’s great achievement, of course, is that he has managed to sustain this acute attention to detail and craftsmanship over such length and such variety of material, and at the same time to sustain the illusion of chronic digression, irrelevancy and sheer chattiness.

20. The links between addiction and freedom in the novel are the subject of a mysterious unpublished, incomplete, anonymous ‘found’ phd thesis, which explores in detail the conversations between Steeply and Marathe concerning freedom. This strange and possibly fraudulent document argues that the urge to freedom in the North American soul has been replaced by an urge for voluntary submission to entertainment; that the restless, radical, frontier spirit of America has atrophied into the gullible couch potato (cf: the passing reference to Oblomov –the first description in literature of the slacker- in the text p.282) due to a surfeit of entertainment, leisure time, and consumer goods. Infinite Jest portrays this condition.

21. The actual quote is from p.320: There are no choices without personal freedom…We say that one cannot be human without freedom…Your freedom is the freedom from, no one tells your precious individual USA selves what they must do. It is this meaning only, this freedom from constraint, and forced duress. But what of the freedom to? Not just free from. Not all compulsion comes from the without…how for the person to freely choose? The symbol of our inability to freely choose, is of course, the Entertainment, on the one hand, and the various addictions on the other. And the Entertainment is itself a symbol of addiction, an addiction to pleasure.

22. The irony is of course that addicts in recovery replace one addiction for another, in that they become addicted to AA.

23. Another nod to Dickens is in the bizarre and euphonius names DFW chooses for his characters. ‘Anne Kittenplan’, ‘LaMont Chu’, ‘Randy Lenz’, and the ‘Prettiest Girl Of All Time’ are modern day equivalents of ‘Dolly Varden’, ‘Bradley Headstone’, ‘Silas Wegg’, and ‘The Infant Phenomenon’.

24. Bikkhu Nobodhi Isindere is currently working on a monograph exploring the links between Gately’s realization that Everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not abiding in the present (p. 861) and the Buddhist notions of the self and the world as a projection of that illusory self. Bikkhu Nobodhi also sees strong parallels between Gately’s notion of abiding within, and the Buddhist notions of sammā-sati (right mindfulness) and sammā-samādhi (right concentration). An endless Now stretching its gull wings out on either side of his heartbeat. (p. 860) is a form of Enlightenment, argues the reverend Bikkhu.

25. Harold Bloom (lampooned in endnote 366 of Infinite Jest ) defines canonicity as: strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange. By this definition at least, it is safe to assume that Infinite Jest, the most important work of fiction in English, probably, since Gravity’s Rainbow, looks set to become canonical.

26. Briefly summarized the argument runs like this: The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the chief obstacle to a perpetual motion machine, the Philosopher’s Stone of physics. Were the Second Law to be overcome, a system would have no entropy, and an infinite loop of energy would be established. This is symbolized in the novel by annulation, a type of fusion that can produce waste that’s fuel for a process whose waste is fuel for the fusion (p.572), the loop of the Entertainment, and the circular structure of the work, in which the beginning follows the end.