Consider the Writer

David Foster Wallace's "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky."

“What exactly does “faith” mean? As in “religious faith,” “faith in God,” etc. Isn’t it basically crazy to believe in something that there’s no proof of? Is there really any difference between what we call faith and some primitive tribe’s sacrificing virgins to volcanoes because they believe it’ll produce good weather? How can somebody have faith before he’s presented with sufficient reason to have faith? Or is somehow needing to have faith a sufficient reason for having faith? But then what kind of need are we talking about?”¹

I know, I’m kicking this off with some big questions. This quote, believe it or not, appears in “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” from David Foster Wallace’s essay collection Consider the Lobster. It is a book review, examining literary scholar Joseph Frank’s five-volume analysis of Dostoevsky’s life and writings. At the time of the essay’s publication, only four of the five volumes were finished, and there was uncertainty as to whether the fifth volume would ever be completed² (in Wallace’s own words, Frank was “not exactly hale”³). It wasn’t until 2003, seven years after the publication of this essay and ten years before Frank’s death, that the final volume was completed. The essay is structured in an interesting way, interlacing serious literary criticism with sincere, wide-eyed questions such as the one quoted above. This was very well done, as I believe it highlighted the two very different lessons that can be taken from Dostoevsky’s own writing.

As discussed in Wallace’s essay, Dostoevsky was a religious man. This likely stemmed from a long bout of imprisonment, in which he was sentenced to death for his participation in an insurgent revolutionary political group, and brought to a mock execution before being set free with a warning. Admittedly, my knowledge of Dostoevsky and Joseph Frank’s work is limited to the contents of “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” but from what I’ve gathered, Dostoevsky was a radical socialist, a trendy political movement in mid-1800s Russia, but after being imprisoned with the lower class that he was trying to “liberate” with his political actions, he learned that they actually despised people like him, and that his revolutionary ideas were actually making everything worse. At this point he became a staunch political conservative. And in all likelihood, it was his experience of being close to death that sparked his interest in Christianity.

Wallace notes the irony in the fact that Dostoevsky’s writings influenced Nietzsche and the entire nihilist school of thought, which was by definition areligious. Could this be because the spiritual and atheistic lenses with which one can view the world are not really that different after all, and are merely two different ways of defining the same fundamental truths? Or does it merely speak to the fact that it is completely out of an author’s hands how his work will be received after it is written? Wallace notes that the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who was writing under the regime of Joseph Stalin, downplayed the political undertones in Dostoevsky’s writing, glossing over his anti-Soviet themes.⁴ This type of self-censorship was necessary for survival in Soviet Russia, but it ended up having deeper consequences than merely forcing individual writers into silence. Consider the generation that grew up reading Dostoevsky through this Soviet lens, with literary analyses from people like Bakhtin coloring their understanding. Consider that this younger generation had probably been indoctrinated, at least to some extent, into Soviet thinking. Subtle anti-Soviet messages would likely not register, simply because their minds were not primed for them.

This is a frightening thought. We tend only to see in a work of literature what we are capable of seeing, which is in many cases limited to what we expect to see. You’ve likely heard of “confirmation bias”—the phenomenon in which we tend fixate disproportionately on things that confirm our existing worldview, and ignore things which go against it. If we go into a work of literature with our assumptions already made, can we really understand what the author is trying to say, or will it only work to confirm ideas which we already believe, with everything new passing right over our heads? This argument falls apart when taken to its extreme—we would be utterly incapable of learning anything new at all if we were driven solely by our confirmation bias and unable to gauge new meanings from literature—but it still holds some weight. An entire generation of Soviet thinkers missed a significant amount of Dostoevsky’s message,⁵ simply because this message was not present in their coursebooks or their understanding of the world. An entire school of Nihilists took Dostoevsky’s religiously fueled writings and used them to construct their own atheistic worldview. Of course, one need not agree with everything that an author believes in order to be inspired by them. Nietzsche, an atheist, may simply have been unpersuaded by Dostoevsky’s spirituality, and chose instead to focus on the parts of his writings that he did agree with.⁶ Even so, how many students of Nietzsche have read Dostoevsky through the lens of Nihilism, strongly atheist in their leanings, missing the religious themes in their entirety? It is impossible to read a piece of literature without missing something. What in Dostoevsky’s writings had Joseph Frank missed? What have I missed, in everything I’ve ever read, simply because I haven’t considered an idea before, and therefore couldn’t see it? Whats the point⁷ of writing, if people are only going to get out of it what they put in?

We tend only to see in a work of literature what we are capable of seeing, which is in many cases limited to what we expect to see.

This last question may be unnecessarily bleak. Of course we can be exposed to new ideas. Otherwise, we would all believe the same thing: that which we had come into the world knowing in infancy. The fact that so many people believe in so many different things is a testament to the fact that communication works as a means to expand people’s minds. But, we are foolish if we forget that communication is imperfect, if we forget that every single one of us, when looking at the same painting or reading the same book or listening to the same music, is internalizing something completely different.

I tend to operate under the assumption that there is an objective reality apart from the realities which we construct in our heads. This may be correct, and it may not be. There are many philosophers who disagree with this. I also tend to assume, when I am not thinking critically, that my thinking is consistent with this objective reality. This is certainly not the case, at least most of the time. All of our realities are inconsistent with one another, we all exist within vastly different worlds. This is the realization that plagued the mind of Rene Descartes, that inspired his experiment of examining each and every one of his beliefs and rejecting all that could not be deduced logically from absolutely nothing.⁸ Distrusting his own senses and group consensus, the only thing that Descartes could say with absolute certainty was that he existed (I think, therefore I am), and that God existed.

Descartes’ belief in God illustrates one of two aforementioned points. Some scholars have theorized that Descartes’ belief in God was a product of his time. They purport that, just like Bakhtin’s politically correct analysis of Dostoevsky, Descartes’ analysis of the existence of God was influenced by what was acceptable under the rule of the Church. He lived at a time when you could be sentenced to death for denying the existence of God, so it is not inconceivable that he might add that statement to his writing in order to appease the Church and potentially save himself from execution. But, is it not also conceivable that these atheistic scholars are the erroneous ones, going to great lengths to deny the spirituality contained in Descartes’ writing, in an attempt to mold it into their own worldview? Who’s to say which one of these possibilities is correct? Were the readers seeing within the work that which they wished to see, or was Descartes limited by the confines of his environment and forced into self-censorship? We can look at more of Descartes’ writings, see if his belief in God is evidenced throughout. This can still be explained away by the naysayers with the same argument, that he was merely trying to appease the Church. Conversely, an atheistic-leaning statement by Descartes could be used as evidence to suggest that he did not believe in God. However, this assumption ignores the fact that people’s beliefs are fluid, and that one can consider an idea without steadfastly holding onto it.

This brings us back to Wallace’s question: “Is somehow needing to have faith a sufficient reason for having faith?” Descartes would probably say yes. After all, we construct our realities almost entirely on faith. Wallace is speaking here about faith in God, of course, and how absurd this faith can seem in a secular society. But we take so many things based on faith. We have faith that our senses reflect the external world. We have faith that the laws of the physical world are what scientists understand them to be, despite most of us having only a rudimentary understanding of these concepts. We have faith that the people around us are real and not mere figments of our imagination. We need this faith in order to not descend into complete madness. When faith is demystified in such a way, it does not seem quite as crazy (and, in fact, individuals who eschew faith altogether may appear to be the craziest, as it is nearly impossible for them to function in society). In this sense, yes, needing to have faith is sufficient reason for having it. Let’s extend this argument to faith in God, now. Might Wallace’s desperation to make sense of his spiritual yearnings be evidence for the fact that this type of faith may be necessary, too? We seem to have an innate need for meaning in our lives.⁹ Furthermore, while we no longer sacrifice virgins to volcanoes or anything quite so “primitive,” we still have our own rituals and superstitions which may seem absurd to onlookers. Doesn’t this suggest that the need for faith is true, fundamentally, even if that truth cannot be seen, touched, or heard? Is our modern obsession with empirical evidence, our assumption that scientific proof is the only way of ascertaining truth, doing us more harm than good?

Is our modern obsession with empirical evidence, our assumption that scientific proof is the only way of ascertaining truth, doing us more harm than good?

Wallace seems to detest our overly rational minds, on some level. He states in the essay:

“The big thing that makes Dostoevsky invaluable for American readers and writers is that he appears to possess degrees of passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we—here, today—cannot or do not permit ourselves.”¹⁰

He describes modern American novels as

“so thematically shallow and lightweight, so morally impoverished, in comparison to Gogol or Dostoevsky.”¹¹

He derides “serious” modern fiction for shying away from sentimentality and strong moral convictions:

“Frank’s bio prompts us to ask ourselves why we seem to require of our art an ironic distance from deep convictions or desperate questions, so that contemporary writers have to either make jokes of them or else try to work them in under cover of some formal trick like intertextual quotation or incongruous juxtaposition, sticking the really urgent stuff inside asterisks as part of some multivalent defamiliarization-flourish or some shit.”¹²

This last comment is a reference to a technique that Wallace used throughout his own essay. Throughout the essay he poses many “unknowable” questions about the existence of God and what it means to be a good person throughout the essay, but he posed them abruptly, self-consciously alienating them from the rest of the text. He felt more comfortable regarding them separately—if criticized for posing nonsensical unimportant questions in a “serious” work of literature, he could purport to be “in on the joke,” not really giving the questions any weight. In this way, he was able to distance himself from their sincerity.

This self-imposed distance from his own was clearly harmful to Wallace. He expresses contempt for it in this essay, longing for a modern writer who could produce “a piece of morally passionate, passionately moral fiction [that] was also ingenious and radiantly human fiction.”¹³ He asserts that a modern writer today wouldn’t dare try to write with Dostoevsky’s sincerity and moral conviction, that he would be reflexively laughed at and judged. Is this true? Is modern fiction really devoid of such sincerity? Or has Wallace simply not come across such fiction, due to his own propensity towards fiction that confirms his own biases, his own moral impoverishment? Writing anything that bares one’s true soul is an act of courage—it is possible that there are just as many courageous writers today as there were in Dostoevsky’s time, and that hindsight just hasn’t identified them for us yet.

Wallace was a sad man. He was lonely. This loneliness is apparent in all of his writing. His novel Infinite Jest was a long, self-indulgent work about addiction and depression and alienation. In his essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” he writes:

“[L]onely people are usually lonely not because of hideous deformity or odor or obnoxiousness—in fact there exist today support and social groups for persons with precisely these attributes. Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.”¹⁴

He is speaking generally, talking about how lonely people in America are drawn to television as a means to satisfy their “voyeurism” without dealing with the self-consciousness that comes with dealing with people face-to-face. But I believe that Wallace was referring to himself with this statement.¹⁵ It seems too strong a statement to be made merely as an observation of others. It hits too close to home. Sadly, Wallace never seemed to dispense with his loneliness, never found the sincerity that he sought. His writing stayed shrouded in pretension, an unfortunate stain on his legacy. Distracted by his often obnoxiously large vocabulary and his self-indulgent smugness, it is easy to overlook how remarkable Wallace was. He viewed the world around him with a clarity that not a lot of people possess, and was an absolute master of his craft.

In 2008, twelve years after writing “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” David Foster Wallace’s wife found him dead in their house. He had hanged himself hanged himself. Clearly, he could not make sense of the nagging questions that haunted him. Perhaps he pondered the meaning of life too many times, and, dissatisfied with his lack of answers, concluded that the answer was “nothing.” It saddens me that such a great mind could be in such pain. But sometimes, darkness is illuminating. We can all learn from his triumphs and his mistakes, incorporate them into our consciousness. In his despair there is a lesson: needing faith is a sufficient reason for having faith. Whether this manifests in you as faith in God, or Tao, or yourself, or in anything else, there is a need in all of us to have faith in something with embarrassing sincerity. We must do this courageously, earnestly, and unironically. We must be vulnerable, for the despair that arises from the alternative is infinitely more crippling than even our deepest fear of being seen.

1. David Foster Wallace, “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky.” Consider the Lobster. p. 259-260

2. I wonder what it must feel like, to complete your life’s work—a thirty-year endeavor—and then go on living. Is it satisfying, to look back on what you’ve done, retire proudly with the knowledge that you’ve done well, that you’ve recorded a history that might otherwise have been forgotten? Or is it lonely?

It is impossible to consider this without delving into that nagging omnipresent question of the meaning of life, that question that haunts people, consumes them, drives them into madness, yet still cannot be answered. Cannot be answered to anyone’s satisfaction, at least, with any kind of substance. The best answer I can come up with is “it’s subjective,” or “it’s unknowable,” and even these answers are accompanied by a huge asterisk. There may be an objective meaning of life out there, somewhere in the universe, and if this is the case, individual conceptions of the meaning of life, as varied and important as they are, are almost certainly always wrong. “It’s unknowable” seems a safer statement, but even this cannot be ascertained for sure. Might somebody be transcendent enough to intuit the answer to this question? A holy man or woman, the likes of a Buddha or a Jesus? And even if it cannot be expressed in language, is it not “known” on some deep level by everybody, in that Jungian “collective unconscious” that we all share, the oneness of the universe, or any other conception of something greater pulsing within us that you might subscribe to? In that case, it is not consciously knowable, but may be knowable by some definition, at its core.

The beauty and the madness of considering questions such as this is that they seem to only serve to create more questions. This may lead one to ask what the point of these questions even are, if they have no answers. What’s the point of plummeting down the proverbial rabbit hole? In asking this, one comes full circle. By asking what the point of life is, we are led to a deeper, more desperate iteration of the same question: what’s the point of even asking?

It’s a pretty frustrating condition, the one we’re in, with more questions than answers. It’s made more frustrating still by our fixation with proof, which leads to questions like the ones posed by the aforementioned David Foster Wallace quote : “Isn’t it basically crazy to believe in something that there’s no proof of?”

But what is proof, really, and when we search for proof, are we looking in the wrong places?

3. “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” p. 257

4. George Orwell speaks about this type of self-censorship in his essay “The Prevention of Literature.” He goes a step further, though, and argues that this need for constant censorship could lead to prose literature’s complete demise. I’m not sure if I agree with his assertion that human nature can be stamped out in such a way. There will likely always be dissidents, no matter how oppressive the culture. But, as was likely the case in Soviet Russia, these unorthodox voices can certainly be hidden from public view, and thus lost to history.

5. Of course, a large portion of the Russian population was too occupied with their politically-driven starvation to worry about Dostoevsky at all, and the ability to read him at all was a privilege reserved for a very fortunate minority. This affluent minority might have even supported communism (remember Dostoevsky’s socialist political leanings before his imprisonment). Furthermore, in a place where dissenting voices were silenced, it was probably difficult for anti-Soviet messages to spread very far.

6. This is a valuable lesson to learn for today’s public. There is a tendency for people to discount everything that a person says, simply because they do not agree with one or two of their ideas. If we subject all of our thinkers to such treatment, we may quickly find that there are no voices left.

7. Here we go again.

8. Indulge me for a moment. If I see a bird playing the violin dancing upon the counter of the coffee shop that I am currently sitting in, and nobody else in the shop sees this, then they will determine that I am crazy. But why? Could I not just as well be the only sane person in a shop full of lunatics who cannot see something that is so obviously there? You will likely say no. Group consensus is the best measure that we have for measuring our own realities up against that evasive objective reality. In this instance I’m outnumbered, and the voice of the majority wins. But, as we previously established regarding Soviet Russia’s blindness towards the anti-communist themes in Dostoevsky’s writings, sometimes group consensus can be wrong. Knowing this, couldn’t I argue that I’d be mad to trust the words of all of the other people around me, who could simply be blind, or worse, actively trying to deceive me? Wouldn’t it be more wise to trust my own senses, which are so clearly telling me that the bird is right there in front of me, and that I can see him, hear his music, and that if I reached out to touch him I’d almost certainly feel him there?

We may be willing to discount the existence of violin-playing birds dancing on counters. Enough of our experiences have shown us that this is an impossibility. We’ve never seen a bird playing a violin, and everything that we know about birds and violins tells us that birds cannot play violins. We’ve also become pretty convinced of the fact that if an entire coffee shop full of people is in consensus that something is not there, with the exception of one outlier, then it is the outlier who is wrong. But we’ve accepted the fact that our senses can differ in other instances. It’s been established that children can hear frequencies that adults cannot. If a child in a room full of adults hears a high-pitched sound that the adults can’t hear, the child is not insane—her senses are just more keen than the people around her. So, while we may feel absolutely certain that this violin-playing, dancing bird cannot exist, there is still a very small amount of room for doubt. Perhaps the bird exists on some type of cosmic plane of existence that only the outlier can see. This seems absurd, but can we know it for certain? There is room for doubt in all things.

My point in all of this is not to argue for the sanity of people who see things that aren’t there. It is merely to illustrate that, even in the most absurd of cases, things may not always be as they seem.

9. It is for this reason that totalitarianism is so easily instated in atheistic societies. As German philosopher Hannah Arendt writes in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, “[totalitarian rulers’] regime is not a government in any traditional sense, but a movement…”

Our instinctual yearning for a higher purpose in life has been hijacked by many deceitful rulers throughout the ages. Most if not all institutionalized religions took humans’ desire for meaning and faith in a higher power and twisted it to accomplish their own aims. Totalitarian governments do the same thing with the atheist societies that they rule. Their population, devoid of any intrinsic meaning yet hopelessly searching for it, easily succumb to utopian promises of a better society driven by man, and they follow these rulers with the same fervor as followers of the Church in the Middle Ages.

If humans throughout history have been so easily manipulated in such a way, doesn’t this suggest that there is an instinct within us that desires, even “needs” faith?

10. "Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” p. 271

11. id.

12. id.

13. “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” p. 274

14. David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, p. 23.

15. Another example of Wallace emotionally distancing himself from his audience to avoid vulnerability.