A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies

M. Boswell, S. Burn, M. Boswell, S. Burn

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137078346
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Criticism of the work of David Foster Wallace has tended to be atomistic, focusing on a single aspect of individual works. A Companion to the Work of David Foster Wa ll ace is designed as a professional study of all of Wallace's creative work. This volume includes both thematic essays and focused examinations of each of his major works of fiction.

C H A P T E R 1

---

Almost a Novel: The Broom of the System

Patrick O’Donnell

A new broom sweeps clean, but the old broom knows the corners.

—Irish Proverb

When I say: “My broom is in the corner,”—is this really a statement about the broomstick and the brush?

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (29)

The Broom of the System is apprentice work, a young man’s novel about his generation, in much the same way that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920) is about the fabled jazz age generation and the amorous adventures of the homophonically named Amory Blaine. Both wise and wise-ass, Broom is clearly the product of the smartest kid in the class (and he really was). It could only have been written—this first novel, initiated as a senior thesis—by someone who has read everything he could get his hands on from the age of five, and absorbed it all not semiotically or hermeneutically, but in the manner of granular synthesis, a method of assimilating sound and information, according to the The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Music, comprised of sound “grains” assembled into

short snippet[s] of about ten to a hundred milliseconds, an elementary particle as opposed to a complex soundscape. By combining different grains over time, and by overlapping several grains at the same instant of time, interesting sonic effects can be produced. The synthesis techniques in which different sound grains are combined is known as granular synthesis. . . . Since its inception, many composers have utilized granular synthesis as a musically powerful technique to create and manipulate complex sonic universes using basic particles” (Sarafin 207).

Think of granular synthesis in terms of writing, and this seems to me a fair ballpark description of how Wallace writes, or how he processes reading into writing. This comparison is based more on a reading of his fiction than on personal observation, which in my case was slight: he dropped into a couple of sessions of my course on narrative theory at the University of Arizona (we were reading Roland Barthes, who was still in vogue at the time, S/Z to be specific), he sampled, he wandered off. He was clearly not cut out for the long haul of a seminar; he had moved on to other venues, restless, endlessly absorbing, sampling, trying it on for size and noticing the tight fit, the lack of oxygen in the room.

At the time and for many years afterward, I confess, as Wallace’s fame and cult grew, I more or less ignored his fiction, even as I was investing time and books and considerable energies into the teaching and study of contemporary American fiction. I don’t think it was personal—I barely even registered his presence in the class, save to notice what appeared to be the affectation of a headscarf and a distracted air that I took to be a sign of boredom but which easily could have been the look of one whose wheels spun at a much higher speed than normal. No, my view of Wallace for a long time—I am embarrassed to admit it—was that he was (as many of those critical of his fiction have repeatedly said) a Pynchon wannabe: the same encyclopedic excess, the same slapstick comedy spinning into the absurd, the same range and heft and heavy demands on the reader, save that (I thought) with Pynchon the payoff was bigger because (I thought) one got a world as complex, with as many blind alleys and odd characters and strange places on the map to explore, as the real one.

What I didn’t notice, from first to last in Wallace’s writing, is the quality and depth of affect that he achieves in navigating the relational terrain between the culture one inhabits, identities, and emotion—a terrain Pynchon rarely explores, obsessed as he is with processes of signification. Pynchon’s writing is semiotic; Wallace’s is that of a naturalist, in the sense that he is interested in the affective, environmental relations between objects, animals, humans. The same author who writes The Broom of the System writes one of the most engaged and probing discussions of the relation between the human pleasure principle and animal suffering in “Consider the Lobster,” where lobsters, “basically giant sea insects,” are transformed into affective entities via a meticulous scrutiny of the specificities of natural science (CL 237). While Pynchon experiments with language in the hermeneutic mode (how many connections can one make between dispersed word-strings with the Gadamerian hope that a quantitative array will eventually instantiate a qualitative enlargement of perspective?), Wallace experiments with language in the antinomic mode (How do we adapt ourselves to the inexorable frayed ends, blunt oppositions, and dissociations of human experience? How do we feel about having to do so? How does the writer sample the frayed, the blunt, the dissociative at the granular level, thus rendering experience as symptomatic?). In its interrogative registers, granularity, and cultural specificity, Wallace’s fiction, from first to last, requires a kind of sampling, a mode of reading that locates its partialities and inconsistencies, paying more attention to its noise and distortions than its harmonies. It is within this framework that I wish to consider Wallace’s first novel by scrutinizing a small sample of its elements.

TITLE

An antinomy of old news: two familiar epigraphs, one from the philosopher who is widely acknowledged as one of David Foster Wallace’s primary intellectual sources, and one familiar to those of Celtic heritage, both coincidentally overlapping with their figuring of the relation between corners and brooms.¹ Here, I am not so interested in frontally addressing the relationship between Wittgenstein and Wallace that others have previously assessed (justly troubling notions of influence and source), as I am in pursuing Adam Kelly’s call, in reading Wallace, “to show as precisely as possible (Wallace teaches us that absolute precision is necessarily impossible) how Wallace’s radical method for waking readers up to agency operates in his texts, and how this technique is linked to his highly original style” (“Death”). Understanding how Wallace articulates a relation between “agency” and “technique” in The Broom of the System—one that carries the dual sense inherent in Kelly’s formulation of awakening and alarming the reader—will demand a partial inventory of the novel, made up as it is of intentionally mismatched parts, precise in themselves, but imprecise in their joining.

The title of the novel is, indeed, indicative of Wallace’s concern with “agency” as comprising an interactive and highly mutable ratio of “self” to “other,” which for Wallace is homologous to the relation of part to whole (we can consider Wallace’s generic sense of the novel as a totality made of up of many discursive and rhetorical parts). Wittgenstein’s elaborate discussion of the broom-object in Aphorism 60 of Philosophical Investigations is, in part, a reflection on the linguistic relation between part and whole and a querying of the method that enables the figuring of that relation. The questions raised by Wittgenstein’s thought experiment are as fundamental to rhetoric and the structuralist poetics of the novel as they are to philosophy: when it is recognized that the object (or language system, or novel) is comprised of parts, what becomes of its status as a whole? Who determines which parts are essential to the whole, and which are ancillary (Wittgenstein’s question might be applied ad infinitum to a series of smaller parts: the brush composed of bristles and wood, the bristles composed of animal hair or polyester blends that are parts of an animal or strands of fused elements, etc.)? To what extent is each part a whole unto itself, and to what extent is a part not a part and a whole not a whole unless the two are matched and joined instrumentally, aesthetically, rhetorically?

These questions pertain to a form of philosophical investigation that Wallace conducts in The Broom of the System, beginning with its title, which refers to his exploration of the post-systematic nature of a contemporary “reality” made up of multiply mediated and, often, colliding forces, granular singularities, and narratives. Positing the relation of part to whole as an open question, and accepting that relation as indubitably asymmetrical and recursive comprises much of the work of The Broom of the System. The novel comprises a totality where binaries like “part/whole,” “self/other,” and “system/chaos” are rendered dynamic in their deconstitution (Wallace breaks down a massive reality into its particularities and specificities) and recognized for their exclusions and the cultural logics that undergird them. The “excluded middle” of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) that Oedipa Mass had registered abjectly as hermeneutic “bad shit” becomes in Wallace’s hands an arena—the novel itself—where a contentious, fractious, and dynamic set of relations between asymptomatic particularities and incorporative entities, identities self-destructive and obsessively domineering, and broken systems and generative disorders are allowed to play themselves out (181).²

There is, perhaps, a “healthy” or steady state to be achieved in this mediate comprehension of reality, but Wallace is more interested in observing the limit-conditions of a performative, deconstituted “real” that—as he writes of the vision of his favorite director, David Lynch—“is about somebody turning into somebody else,” where the long-short scrutiny of a facial expression “is just held there, fixed and grotesque, until it starts to signify about seventeen different things at once” (SFT 151, 163). One of Wallace’s favored techniques is to exaggerate to the point of absurdity to make visible the grotesqueness of agency or identity conceived in certain ways. Thus, Norman Bombardini, the owner of the building that houses the publishing firm of Frequent & Vigorous, the employers of the novel’s put-upon heroine, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman. Presiding over a genetic engineering concern with a murky agenda, Bombardini (his name says it all) is the operatic limit-case of The Broom of the System. Announcing the parameters of “Project Total Yang” to Lenore and her obsessive boyfriend and boss, Rick Vigorous, in a restaurant where Bombardini is in the process of consuming nine steak dinners, he articulates an incorporative fantasy that exists at the extreme end of the novel’s sliding scale marking the fuzzy and dynamic relationship between “self” and “other”:

“A full universe, Vigorous, Ms. Beadsman. We each need a full universe. Weight Watchers and their allies would have us systematically decrease the Self-component of the universe, so that great Other-set will be physically attracted to the now more physically attractive Self, and run in to fill the void caused by that diminution of self. Certainly not correct, but only half of the range of valid solutions to the full-universe problem. Is my drift getting palpable? Just as in genetic engineering, Vigorous. There is always more than one solution.”

“I think I—”

“An autonomous full universe, Vigorous. An autonomously full universe, Ms. Beadsman.”

“What should I do with these mints, here?”

“I’ll just take that bowl, thank you. Rather than diminishing Self to entice Other to fill our universe, we may also of course obviously choose to fill the universe with Self” (BOS 91)

Following the binary logic of “Project Total Yang,” Bombardini plans to keep eating until he incorporates everything else, but his specific target or “significant other” in this regard becomes Lenore, whose problem lies at the opposite end of the spectrum: “she simply felt—at times, mind you, not all the time, but at sharp and distinct intuitive moments—as if she had no real existence” (BOS 66). But the “full/empty” binary that both Bombardini and Lenore (at moments) map onto “self/other” binary—indeed, the entire question of thinking of objects and identities in binary terms—is deflected by Wittgenstein’s aphorism and the novel’s title: if an object can no longer be thought of as merely the collection of its parts, if the relation of part to part and part to whole is assymetrical and recursive, and if the entire room of the system is rendered problematic by the mere object of the broom that would sweep it of its impurities, then the idea of reality as comprised of “yin” and/or “yang” becomes moot. One aspect of Wallace’s investment in narratively tackling the familiar question of self versus other is rendering of this relation in affective terms: one is always partly full or partly empty; fullness and emptiness are dynamic physical states registered in the body that signify, at the extreme, sublime or impoverished emotional conditions as well as states of being and nonbeing. In fact, both Bombardini and Lenore implicitly recognize, from their positions of extremity (Bombardini, by novel’s end, a destructive engine by virtue of his sheer size; Lenore receding into the invisibility of the West), the erroneous logic of the binary that Wallace both elaborates and contests in the novel. Bombardini says it himself: “There is always more than one solution” even though he does not manage to think it through (BOS 91). If there is more than one solution, then there are more than two, et cetera (to use one of Wallace’s characteristic expressions). The narrator goes on in the inventory of Lenore’s consciousness to state that “as if she had no real existence, except for what she said and did and perceived and et cetera, and that these were, it seemed at such times, not really under her control. There was nothing pure” (BOS 66, emphasis added). “Nothing pure” might be considered an alternative title for a novel in which the system, because it is not one, cannot be swept (clean).

PLOT

The plot of The Broom of the System is an assemblage of half-finished stories, intentions gone awry, and discursive trajectories: despite its mass, the novel can be considered an ode to incompletion. Chronologically, it begins in 1981 in the Mount Holyoke dorm room of Clarice Beadsman, Lenore’s sister. Lenore, aged 15, is checking out the college scene, and there encounters future principals of the novel Melissa Sue Metalman (“Mindy”), a roomate, and Andrew “Wang-Dang” Lang, one of two intrusive frat boys from Amherst. After this sideways origin story, we are cast forward in time to late August, 1990 where we next encounter Lenore working as a switchboard operator in Cleveland at Frequent & Vigorous, a directionless firm mired in navel-gazing and incompetence, and conducting a treacherous affair with the domineering Rick Vigorous, the parodically phallic off-rhyme of his name suggesting his failure as both a businessman and a romantic partner who is hyperaware of his “freakishly small penis” (BOS 137). With the singular exception of Chapter 4, dated 1972, which transcribes a meeting between the governor of Ohio, Raymond Zusatz, several aides, and Ed Roy Yancy, vice-president of Industrial Desert Design, Inc., in which the planning of an immense artificial desert—The Great Ohio Desert, or GOD—is discussed, the remainder of the novel takes place between August 25 and September 11, 1990. Dates are important to Wallace: he scatters them liberally throughout the novel. Every chapter is dated by year, and many of them are sectioned into alphabetical parts, but the sporadic dating and layout of the chapters typifies the asymmetry that extends to every corner of the novel. The longest of 21 chapters is Chapter 11, which runs over 75 pages and is sectioned into 9 alphabetized parts; the shortest is Chapter 19, consisting of 2 sentences, and the remainder run the gamut in terms of length and plot complexity.

The mismatch and hybridity of the novel’s parts goes well beyond these structural and temporal elements. Its story arcs (they might be better described as story squiggles) are conveyed through a mélange of discourses: transcripts of “rap” sessions between “Dr. Curtis Jay, Ph.D.” and Lenore, who is seeing the analyst to address her feeling that she does not exist (Rick Vigorous is also one of Jay’s patients—the fact that they are both seeing the same analyst further complicates their relationship); long conversations at a restaurant, on a plane, in a bar between Rick and Lenore in which Rick recounts shaggy dog stories he has received as editor of F&V’s literary magazine—actually his own as he appears to be sole contributor to the publication; excerpts from Rick’s journal, some of them containing entries from a sequence of stories he is writing about the adventures of an alter ego, one “Monroe Fieldbinder,” who takes on multiple roles as a parodic noir detective, insurance agent, Hemingwayesque hunter, and voyeuristic neighbor; dialogues with Lenore’s parrot, Vlad the Impaler, who has acquired the capacity to ventriloquize human speech at an advanced level in an assemblage of sentence-fragments from multiple speakers; an article excerpted from a professional advertising magazine; a transcript of a wedding; a passage from the duty log of a Chicago emergency room doctor; and letters, dreamwork, jokes, aphorisms, assorted puzzles, and codes.

The Broom of the System is thus an encyclopedic novel—one that contains multiple knowledges, discourses, styles, lists, and catalogues.³ It may also be considered as pastiche, in Fredric Jameson’s sense of what constitutes postmodern parody: “the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter” (Postmodernism 17). However, Jameson’s severely limited definition is contested by Wallace’s use of “linguistic masks,” “dead languages” (Vlad the Impaler comes immediately to mind), and “idiosyncratic styles” to appositely (and comically) convey a satirical portrait of American capitalism and the middle class in the 1980s, especially as these formations infiltrate the self/other dynamics of human relationships. The Broom of the System can be equally considered within the framework of “Menippean satire,” which Northrop Frye defined as a “loose-jointed narr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• 1  Almost a Novel: The Broom of the System
• 2  A Fiction of Response: Girl with Curious Hair in Context
• 3  David Foster Wallace and the Mathematics of Infinity
• 4  “Webs of Nerves Pulsing and Firing”: Infinite Jest and the Science of Mind
• 5  “Location’s Location”: Placing David Foster Wallace
• 6  Mediated Immediacy in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
• 7  “ . . . ”: Language, Gender, and Modes of Power in the Work of David Foster Wallace
• 8  “The Constant Monologue Inside Your Head”: Oblivion and the Nightmare of Consciousness
• 9  “The Chains of Not Choosing”: Free Will and Faith in William James and David Foster Wallace
• 10  The Pale King, Or, The White Visitation
• 11  The Novel after David Foster Wallace
• Works Cited
• Notes on Contributors
• Index