Play Nice

Conning the Text in David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System

            Some decades ago, fictional writing had an identity crisis. Its authors came into contact with new theories of language and questioned the position of their work as a transparent view of any sort of "reality" that a reader may experience. The reader, after all, does not directly experience the events in a novel; he or she experiences only the novel itself—a written work that creates its own meaning. Arriving at the conclusion that the novel must become conscious of itself as a written work, authors like Thomas Pynchon and Don Delillo charted a new course for contemporary fiction that would divide critics, inspire authors and annoy most readers: the ironic, self-referential, "metafictional" novel. These novels were heavily based on structuralist and post-structuralist theory and gave cause for critics to cry about the "death of fiction," an event that latter-day writer David Foster Wallace attempts to erase (or at least postpone) through his own novels, particularly The Broom of the System. Holding Wallace's works up to the theories he tries to move beyond, namely those put forth by Derrida, demonstrates the extent to which contemporary fiction is ensconced in its own self-referentiality and the difficulty in breaking free from that position.

Worthwhile analysis of The Broom of the System is few and far between. The works that do exist look at The Broom of the System as an explication of Wallace's attempt to escape the solipsism he finds in most contemporary thought (specifically, postmodern fiction and "postmodern" theories of thinkers like Derrida) through Wittgenstein's theory of language as shown in the Philosophical Investigations and position the novel within a larger context of contemporary fiction.1 These critical essays, Marshall Boswell's Understanding David Foster Wallace and Lance Olsen's "Termite Art, or Wallace's Wittgenstein," focus on how Wallace uses characters and situations in his plot to illustrate his take on Wittgenstein as a way to escape his own "coldly, cerebral take on fiction and Austin-Wittgenstein-Derridean literary theory." But critics have not addressed whether or not he achieves his goal of deferring his fear that he (and his text) is "nothing but a linguistic construct" (McCaffery). As Boswell states, Wallace "uses Wittgenstein's elegant model to escape from what he regards as the dead end of postmodern self-relexivity," but does he, or more important, can he escape the meaning the text writes in itself? This paper will be concerned with the answer to that question and attempt to find out how Wallace's argument against Derrida through a particular reading of Wittgenstein succeeds or fails.

The basis for Wallace's thought that he may be "nothing but a linguistic construct" stems from one idea about the workings of language that both Derrida and Wittgenstein agree on: the importance of context in creating meaning because of a lack of a definite "center." For Derrida, the center "orient[s] and organize[s] the coherence of the system" ("Structure" 278-8). Once the "structurality of structure had to begin to be thought," (e.g. fiction's turn towards metafiction) this center was removed and an "absence of transcendental signified" emerged. Removing this center removed a stable context to refer back to; nothing was left except language. When Wallace worries that he is "nothing but a linguistic construct," he is concerned that Derrida is right, that he is not a "construct of God" or a "construct of man" but indeed a construct of the only medium left that creates meaning—a "construct of language."

In place of the center, Derrida proposes that only language exists. This is not, however, a definite center, as language without a transcendental signified "extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely" ("Structure" 280). In other terms, the meaning of words is not stable and changes constantly. The fluidity of context allows this "infinite play" to occur. Derrida defines context as "the set of presences which organize the moment of [the written sign's] inscription" and posits that there is, present at the moment of inscription, "the intention, the meaning which at a given moment would animate [the scriptor's] inscription" ("SEC" 317). The meaning present at the moment of inscription, however, is anything but stable. It has "the always open possibility of its extraction and grafting" into other contexts which would allow the sign other possibility of communicating a meaning ("SEC" 317). Thus, the sign's meaning is not written into the sign itself, but drawn from the context. For Derrida, language makes its own meaning without any sort of human presence. Wallace's "coldly cerebral take on ... Derridean literary theory" takes this lack of a human presence behind the written sign perhaps too literally: not only is the meaning of the written sign derived from the language, the meaning of Wallace himself is derived from that sign. As Lenore, Broom's protagonist, says, "Suppose ... all that really exists of my life is what can be said about it?" (Wallace 119). She speaks the same worry that Wallace has: that she is nothing but a "linguistic construct."

Derrida further elaborates on this idea of a mark's fluctuation of meaning through context in "Signature Event Context" when he illustrates how he feels language operates with regards to the author/addressee relationship as shown through the mark:

The possibility of repeating, and therefore of identifying marks is implied in every code, making of it a communicable, transmittable, decipherable grid that is iterable for a third party, and thus for any possible user in general. All writing, therefore, in order to be what it is, must be able to function in the radical absence of every empirically determined addressee in general. And this absence is not a continuous modification of presence; it is a break in presence." ("SEC" 315-6)

Here, Derrida defines writing as an act that contains meaning within itself, as evidenced by its ability to exist as a "grid" that operates without the presence of any actual authors or addressees. He later qualifies this even more by stating, "For the written to be written, it must continue to 'act' and to be legible even if what is called the author of the writing no longer answers for what he has written..." ("SEC" 316). For Derrida, it would appear that no actual human being enters into language; it is a sphere with no humanity.

Wittgenstein's side of this argument shifts, depending on which text one reads. His two most famous works are the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus  (his "early" work) and the Philosophical Investigations (his "later," posthumous work)2. The Tractatus, famously, aligned itself with the concept of a "personal language" and a "picture theory" of language. Wallace explains his conception of Wittgenstein's ideas3:

The Tractatus's picture theory of meaning presumes that the only possible relation between language and the world is denotative, referential. In order for language both to be meaningful and to have some connection to reality, words like tree and house have to be like little pictures, representations of real trees and houses. Mimesis. But nothing more. Which means we can know and speak of nothing more than little mimetic pictures. Which divides us, metaphysically and forever, from the external world. (McCaffery)

The picture theory of language's metaphysical division from the external world troubles Wallace and, as a result, he chooses to take the Philosophical Investigations as his influence. Explaining his choice, Wallace says:

One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism. And so he trashed everything he'd been lauded for in the Tractatus and wrote the Investigations, which is the single most comprehensive and beautiful argument against solipsism that's ever been made. Wittgenstein argues that for language even to be possible, it must always be a function of relationships between persons (that's why he spends so much time arguing against the possibility of a "private language"). So he makes language dependent on human community, but unfortunately we're still stuck with the idea that there is this world of referents out there that we can never really join or know because we're stuck in here, in language, even if we're at least all in here together. (McCaffery)

Other scholars agree with Wallace, claiming that Wittgenstein refuses "an all-encompassing theory of any mental act. Instead he insists that there are only a wide variety of contexts in which we can glimpse, from different perspectives', the many ways it makes sense to speak of these acts" (Altieri 1400). Wallace takes these contexts to primarily be "functions of relationships between persons."

Aside from straightforwardly explaining his allegiance to the Investigations, Wallace has numerous references within The Broom of the System to its ideas and to the book itself. When the action begins and Lenore Sr. disappears from the retirement home (a disappearance that causes a chain reaction of events that will drive the action of the novel), the only items left in her drawer were "notebooks ... and her copy of the Investigations, and a small piece of fuzzy white paper" (Wallace 40). Drawings of specific circumstances mentioned in the Investigations also turn up, such as a barber with an exploding head and a man walking up a hill (Wallace 42, 244). These drawings later turn out to be illustrations of the "language-games" referred to in the Investigations meant to illustrate how meaning is derived from context, specifically the context of human community (Wallace 244-5). The reader also comes to find out that Lenore Sr. "studied classics and philosophy and who knows what else under a mad crackpot genius named Wittgenstein" and "teases [her grandchild] with a certain strange book," (Wallace 73). Boswell points out that the "strange book" turns out to be the Investigations and "it is also the key to understanding Wallace's audacious first novel" (Boswell 23).

Wallace's point, then, is that we must look at human interactions in order to see where meaning in language comes from, much along the lines of Wittgenstein's belief, paraphrased by Altieri, that "If we are to speak of origins at all we must learn to stop at what can be recognized as a valid beginning for philosophical reflection, and that beginning lies not beneath the signs but in the relationships and contexts of action which they carry with them" (Altieri 1418). Boswell, specifically relating this to Wallace's understanding of Wittgenstein, says that Wittgenstein "proclaims that there is no way to get at the essence of language except by means of language" (like Derrida), but that we should "cease thinking of words as having meanings in and of themselves and begin to conceive of them as having functions in various real-life situations, which he liked to call 'games.' The meaning of a word is therefore determined by its use in a given situation, say, a sentence" (Boswell 25). Essentially, Wittgenstein looks at the "relationships and contexts of action" where Derrida goes "beneath the signs." However, analyzing the workings of language in this manner only serves to push aside the view Derrida takes that meaning is inherent in language without the need for an author/addressee; it does not present an alternate method.

Even Wallace, who consciously attempts to show that meaning does occur between people, cannot escape the infinite 'play of signification." This is best shown through how he sets up an attack on Derrida's ideas through the characters in Broom of the System, but due to the context created through the work, the reader must still look to the text (and not a human context) to find meaning and that meaning can easily run contrary to Wallace's intentions of disproving Derrida's text-centered view of language.

The very form of the novel mimics the beginnings of "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." Where Derrida proposes that an "event" has occurred which caused the "structurality of structure" to come into question, Wallace presents two similar ruptures: a form-based rupture and a plot-based rupture ("Structure" 278-80). The former rupture comes as the first chapter occurs in the year 1981 at Mount Holyoke, where the protagonist, Lenore, is visiting her older sister. In addition to the first appearance of Lenore, Wallace introduces the characters Andrew "Wang Dang" Lang and Mindy Metalman, who later figure prominently into the story (Wallace 3-21). The "structure" of the characters' context is set: "Wang Dang" (or W. D.) Lang as the stereotypical drunken frat boy, Lenore as an enemy of W. D. and Mindy as a complacent counterpart to W. D. (Wallace 12-21). An interesting point to note is that 1981 is the year after Derrida finished his Thèse d'État and the year before it was published in English as "The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations" (Yeghiayan). Like Derrida's identification of the break caused by structuralism, this dating could very well be pointing to a year that solidified deconstruction's influence and break with structuralism.

In the next chapter, a "rupture" occurs where the novel no longer is set in 1981, but in 1990. The action stays in 1990 for the remainder of the novel with the exception of the fourth chapter, which relates the creation of the Great Ohio Desert (G.O.D.), a man-made desert that will serve as "Something to remind us of what we hewed out of" (Wallace 54). This chapter, however, presents itself in the form of a transcript, that is, an account related in the present-tense that is in fact a past event. Because the chapter locates itself in 1972 through the heading and the time of the action, the temporality of the chapter has more weight structurally than subsequent temporal breaks in the novel, but it still cannot be seen as a true "break" along the lines of the first chapter. The transcript itself is an artifact. It exists outside of any definite temporality, being the same in 1990 as it is in 1972. Presenting these events in the form of a transcript/artifact, Wallace dates the event of the Great Ohio Desert's creation without creating a definite break with a linear, 1990-based temporality of the novel. Thus, this rupture is ambiguous—it could just as easily be a transcript from 1972 read in 1990 as a transcript from 1972 read in 1972—and defaults to the temporality of the the surrounding chapters, set in 1990, that provide the context.

A similar "false break" occurs when Wallace inserts a transcript of the wedding of Lenore's parents into the narrative between two unrelated sections (Wallace 153-156). Unlike the chapter  transcript of the Great Ohio Desert's creation, this transcript is a section of a larger chapter, so that it relates past events without fracturing the temporality of the narrative at that point—similar to a character recounting the past to explain the present. The form of these two "false breaks" is important because there is no reason for them to be recountings of the past as opposed to actual chronological breaks in the narrative. Given the form of many modernist and postmodernist novels (e.g. Generation X or even Wallace's own later, heavily footnoted works like Infinite Jest), there is adequate precedent for Wallace to create a true break at these points and fragment the text. The only reason to present them as false breaks would be to retain a linear temporality in the narrative and locate a single true break at the beginning between the chapter actually set in 1981 and the following chapters set in 1990.

Broom's second type of rupture occurs when the symbolic center of the protagonist, represented by Gramme Lenore Beadsman, disappears. Wallace takes great care in setting up the great-grandmother as the "center" around which the plot revolves. The crux of the novel, Lenore Beadsman's worry that she is "less a person in the world than a construct of language," comes from her conversation with great-grandmother, Lenore Beadsman (Boswell 31).  Even without actually having presence throughout the story, Gramma Beadsman still controls the action, a deus ex machina that, we later find out has been feeding Lenore's bird baby food that allows it to talk (and, subsequently, to appear on a talk show called "Friend with God") and influencing Lenore through her father, Stonecipher Beadsman III, and psychologist, Dr. Jay (Wallace 94-99, 276, 309-11). As Boswell points out, "indeed, nearly every major plot development in the novel eventually points back to [Gramma Beadsman]" (Boswell 32).

Not only does Gramma constitute the cause/center of the plot of the novel, she also may or may not be the protagonist, Lenore. The reader finds evidence of the "disorientation and identity-confusion" that inspire Lenore to visit a therapist early on in the novel in the form of name confusion. When she arrives at Gramma's nursing home—a frequently visited place where Lenore is known to the staff—to find her gone, Lenore's identity is first called into question. Approaching the sign-in desk, the exchange occurs:

"Hi, I'm Lenore Beadsman," Lenore said, a little out of breath.
The nurse stared at her for a second. "Well that's not terribly amusing, is it," she said.
"Pardon me?" Lenore asked. The nurse gave her the fish-eye.
"Oh," Lenore said, "I think the thing is we've never met. Madge is usually here, where you are. I'm Lenore Beadsman, but I guess I'm here to see Lenore Beadsman, too. She's my great-grandmother, and I—" (Wallace 29)

The nurse misinterprets Lenore's introduction to mean that Lenore is playing the part of Gramma Lenore Beadsman—a ruse the nurse does not find "terribly amusing." The nurse then cuts off Lenore when she tries to explain, still believing that Lenore is pretending to be Gramma Lenore. The two Lenores merge into a single, divided entity. Single metaphysically, but divided physically. As her brother points out, Lenore already has the mentality of Gramma Lenore, a fact proven as she regurgitates Gramma's theories to her therapist, Dr. Jay (Wallace 249, 119). Lenore visits Lenore to "see" herself and to gain a greater understanding of her own identity. Cementing the link between Lenore and her great-grandmother is the fact that the name "Lenore" is not a family name, as Lenore's grandmother's name is "Concardine" and her mother's name is "Patrice" (Wallace 43, 153). When Gramma Lenore suddenly isn't there anymore, a center that has disappeared, Lenore's "disorientation and identity-confusion" comes to light (Boswell 33-5). She finally realizes that she is a physical body without a stable, present center to rally around (Wallace 119). Where at one point, she had the pre-structuralist, present Gramma Lenore to guide the way, now all Lenore has is Derrida's conception of center: a Gramma/center that is "paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not a part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center" ("Structure" 279). Gramma controls the structure and is at the center of the totality of the novel's plot, but does not physically manifest herself aside from a possible symbolic appearance at the conclusion. Consistently referenced and never directly in the midst of the action, she is absent yet present, the "center that is not the center." Gramma's disappearance and the subsequent questioning of identity that Lenore goes through mirrors Derrida's idea that the "absence of a transcendental signified" (a stable, present Gramma) "extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely" ("Structure" 280). No one's place in the narrative system is concrete and, by the end of the novel, the context changes and everyone becomes a different person. The exact nature of their persons, however, is not a definite conception gained from a communication from author to reader, as Wallace would like it to be. Rather, it is a nature that must be drawn from the context of the text, ambiguous to the end and, at best, merely an identification of reader with the  author-less written word.

The running theory in the book is that Gramma has run away because she believed that "meaning is use" and "she feels, felt, as if she had no function, over there, in the nursing home," so she ran away (Olsen; Wallace 150). However, this proves false one page later, as the reader discovers that Gramma was involved in a project with Lenore's father to develop a baby food that enhanced speaking abilities in children (Wallace 151). Herein lies a contradiction: if Gramma had a use being present in the baby food project, then why would she become absent? Boswell presents the most coherent argument:

...Gramma makes herself useful by disappearing, and the person who benefits most from this act is Lenore. Even more important, Gramma can also correct an error Lenore has been making all along, chiefly of imagining the meaning of her name, and hence her life, as founded on outside referents rather than on its own function within a system. Now that false referent is gone, and in the absence thereby created Lenore encounters what Gramma has been leading her toward all along: the wide-open space of Wittgenstein's language-game, where meaning is achieved through functional and constructive interaction with others rather than through the referential connecting of words to their objects. (Boswell 34)

Boswell posits that Gramma makes herself useful to Lenore by showing Lenore her usefulness within the system of the novel. Gramma Lenore again becomes Lenore as she (Lenore) searches for Gramma and perpetuates her (Gramma's) centrality within the text. Gramma is, again, present in Lenore through her absence, allowing Lenore to question her place within the system of the plot. However plausible this explanation may be, it could be otherwise given the events in the novel, which hints at the inescapable importance of meaning-from-text in written fiction over meaning-from-human-relations. The usefulness of Gramma's absence, ostensibly helping Lenore find her own self, is complicated by the textual evidence that she is not necessarily moving from a sphere of un-usefulness as Wallace and Boswell would have one believe, but she is moving from possessing usefulness in one sphere to possessing usefulness in another. Through her absence, Gramma ceases to have a function within the baby food production, even disrupting it by taking the notebooks with the formula (Wallace 40). Running away proves the coward's way out, the very opposite of "functional and constructive interaction with others" that creates meaning: a functional and destructive interaction with particular others, namely the baby food company. This is one of several points where Wallace wants to say one thing, but his text could (and does) say another, catching him in the self-reflexive trap he tries to avoid.

Lenore's relationship with two characters changes drastically with her great-grandmother's disappearance4: her boyfriend Rick Vigorous and her opposition and future lover, Andrew W. D. Lang. From the second chapter onward, Wallace positions Rick Vigorous as the emotionally- and physically-incapable boyfriend of Lenore who, instead of physically fulfilling their relationship, tells her stories (Wallace 22-27, 104-114, 180-194). Once Lenore's center/Gramma disappears and the context changes, however, Rick's status as the boyfriend comes into question. Rick, knowing that his relationship with Lenore is changing for the worse, consistently seeks affirmation, pines over her in his journal and tries to assert himself as the dominant force in her love life (Wallace 57-69, 72-4, 78, 84, 103, 197, 235-6, 269-70, 283, 288-9, 349, 440-2). Through the narrative, he goes from believing that Lenore finds in him "the complete lover" to fraudulently introducing her as his "fiance" to handcuffing her in the Great Ohio Desert to remain forever physically and mentally attached to her (Wallace 58, 269, 440).

As the center and context changes, so does the reader's understanding of Rick's "complete lover" status. The reader realizes that the meaning of "Rick as a 'complete lover'" is actually quite the opposite. Rick is not so well-endowed and compensates through being verbose (Wallace 137; Boswell 37). Not only is Rick an incomplete lover, but by the end of the novel, he is Lenore's former lover and the paramour of Mindy Metalman, his childhood crush and the wife of W. D. Lang  (Wallace 462-4, 466-7).

W. D. Lang, on the other hand, begins to fill the place of a boyfriend, a place formerly filled (or at least occupied) by Rick. After Lang's re-introduction into the life of Lenore, Lenore remains skeptical as to his true personality, telling Rick that he was the reason she garnered her family's ire and refused to attend Mount Holyoak (Wallace 288). Lang, however, appears penitent and wants to make sure that Lenore doesn't hold the nine-year-old incident against him (Wallace 258-9). As Rick estranges himself more and more from Lenore, Lang becomes closer and closer, eventually ending up "cuddling" in bed with Lenore (Wallace 408-17). At this point, his good ol' frat boy attitude—so carefully cultivated by Wallace throughout the novel, from his original appearance as  an intoxicated pledge to Rick finding him in a bar to his misogynistic comments about the waitress at a Gilligan's Island-themed bar—disappears and the "true" Andrew Lang comes out (Wallace 3-21, 223-35, 301). As it would seem, Lang is a much more caring and sensitive individual than previously thought. He not only appears gentle during their "cuddling," but defends her against Rick during the handcuffing incident in the Desert, solidifying the happily-ever-after situation of Lenore and Lang as a couple (Wallace 441-2).

At this point, when the events are coming to what should be a solid climax and presenting what should be the meaning of the story, the text creates ambiguities that overshadow any author-to-reader meaning (i.e. meaning created through the "function of relationships between persons") that Wallace attempts to create. Through his characters, Wallace tries to show that humans create meaning between themselves because there is no definite center around which to rally—Lenore's "cuddling" with W. D. Lang that brings out his non-good ol' boy side, Rick's handcuffing incident in the G.O.D., Rick and Mindy's newfound affair—but he cannot escape the fact that the text ultimately dictates its own meaning beyond Wallace's intentions. The text says more than intent at the author's initial inscription. Lang's caring personality while "cuddling" with Lenore and his subsequent defense of Lenore in the Great Ohio Desert is easily called into question because the text has shown otherwise throughout the entire story, specifically his verbal attack on his own wife, Mindy (Wallace 175-9). The reader is still left questioning: Is Lang's new personality his "true" personality, or is it (as the reader is led to believe about Lang's good ol' boy side) a facade created by the context of his receiving the love of Lenore? If the answer is "yes," then Wallace's message gets through: context and function create meaning. If the answer is "no," and this is indeed Lang's "true" self and his good ol' boy personality is gone for good, then the reader has a definite, concrete center, one with no play—the antithesis of what Wallace tries to show.

Other questions arise as well. Are Lenore and Lang "meant" to be together? The first chapter and Lenore's anti-Lang stance throughout the novel say, "No," but the  apparently happy ending, with Lenore and Lang in bed, Lang fulfilling the part of the relationship left open by Rick says, "Yes." Is a Rick-and-Mindy affair a possibility? It would seem so, as they are half-naked together in a room, but then the opposite presents itself, as Mindy appears to want information out of Rick, but doesn't seem to care if she gets it (Wallace 466-7). Is her motivation for the alleged affair to get some nebulous information or is it because she finds him "very attractive" as she claims (Wallace 389)? Again, the meaning of the story changes depending on the context the reader draws from the text. If one would try to fit Wallace's assertion that meaning is gained from functions within human systems of interaction, then Lenore is meant to be with Lang, as she has finally found her place within the system of human interaction and can be fulfilled (by Lang). Likewise, Mindy and Rick would not be able to end up happily-ever-after, as they have not, plot-wise, found their place within a system of human interaction. Rick has not given up his insistence on words as absolute referents to reality in favor of a human-interaction based system of meaning generation, as shown by his story in the G.O.D. that melded into reality but failed to fully actualize the solidifying of his relationship with Lenore (Wallace 440).

The big question looming over all others is the question of the reappearance/non-appearance of the center/Gramma at the end (Wallace 457). As the reader is told early in the novel, Gramma cannot internally regulate her temperature and must stay in a constantly 98.6 degree environment. At the conclusion of the novel, the reader finds that the telephones at Lenore's work (a consistent issue throughout the novel) have been malfunctioning because the lines have heated to 98.6 degrees, an above-normal temperature. Most critics take this to mean that Gramma has made her home in the telephone lines, even though she does not physically appear and others claim that she has died. If the former is true, then Wallace's theory passes through to the reader. The center is gone, completely and forever and play reigns supreme, unless, of course, Lenore and Lang end up happily ever after, in which case Wallace would be symbolically claiming that the disappearance of the center would allow meaning to settle down and become stable, contrary to all the theories he tries to put forth in the novel. If the latter is true and Gramma does exist in the tunnels, then she, the center, is alive and well and fully present, grounding the action. That is, of course, unless Lang and Lenore's happily-ever-after scenario is just a temporary state of affairs (as we are lead to believe by Lang's marriage to Mindy, which was at first happy and then went south, as well as Lenore's relationship to Rick, which followed the same path), in which case there would be a present center and play amongst the players in the narrative.

However much Wallace wants to put aside Derrida's idea of the words creating meaning in place of Wittgenstein's more practical focus on meaning as "functions of relationships between persons," he cannot escape the fact that, especially when written, "the set of presences which organize the moment of [the written sign's] inscription" that align themselves with the author's intent cannot be guaranteed to match up to the same meaning the reader draws from the text (McCaffery; "SEC" 317). In the end, ambiguity of the text reigns in written work, overshadowing and subverting the meaning created through the author/reader relationship. The play of signification is not stable and the reader creates a mediated connection with the author through the text.

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