I’ve pained and obsessed over the recognition of genius in others for a long time now and finally feel like I’ve made some progress in my own thoughts: this is the most I will ever have to say about a book I read only a third of before giving up.

This, this, a story told to me with all the confidence of a young man so filled with self-belief and enthusiasm for a tale that he might well explain the entire plot of a film he enjoyed to me after I had just answered ‘Yes, I did see it.’ [1]

To those of you who identified a general “first-book-problem-feel”, the following: almost completely paraphrased, apart from the DFW bits- I made them up obvs.

Robert McKee says: There must be an inciting incident very early on in the story- if possible, in the very first scene. If a scene does not progress your story, it is there most likely for background information. Cut it out! Find another way to put in that information.

DFW says: There must be an inciting incident at some point, surrounded by volumes of superfluity that wrap it up in 100 pages of background information before the next plot point arises. Tell the story out of order for no apparent reason, undercutting almost all story progressions you have. For example, if two characters are going to date, show them in bed together, and then explain how they first met- since your audience already knows that they are together, the excitement will instead come from… from um… [2]

Robert McKee says: it doesn’t need to be cut out of your story if it isn’t advancing the plot only if you are being funny.

DFW says: Exactly! Just as well I’m always funny.

(I say: this in particular strikes me as a bit of a risk. Occasionally hilarious, sometimes very funny, but frequently incomprehensible and at that point, since it doesn’t advance the plot, purely self-indulgent. Depending on how much you weight each of these properties might well determine your overall enjoyment- that’s something I can’t predict for sure.)

Anton Chekhov says: Cut a good story anywhere, and it will bleed.

DFW says: Hide your story under a thick callus, that chapters may be shorn off in their entirety with no harm done whatsoever to the sequence of events.

Anton Chekhov says: Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.

DFW says: Lay guns on the floor, the walls, cover your characters in guns and meticulously detail every occasion on which they ever encountered a gun. May none of them go off.

[The developers of the game Half-Life 2] say: Give the player a hint of the true depth of the world, and let them fill in the rest themselves.

DFW says: The first gun that Lenore ever encountered was a Smith & Wesson M&P22 with a scratch on the hilt from where her father snatched it off her at age 11 and it scraped on the steel buckle of his Versace patent leather belt given to him as a present by Lenore’s great grandmother on the… And the second gun she ever encountered was… and the gun’s owner was…

Stephen King (On Writing) says: I’m not particularly keen on writing which exhaustively describes the physical characteristics of the people in the story and what they’re wearing… I’d rather let the reader supply the faces, the builds, and the clothing as well... if I describe (my Carrie), it freezes out yours, and I lose a little bit of the bond of understanding I want to forge between us. Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s. When it comes to actually pulling this off, the writer is much more fortunate than the filmmaker, who is almost always doomed to show too much… including, in nine cases out of ten, the zipper running up the monster’s back.

DFW says: the zipper was of stainless steel (that is a steel alloy with a minimum of 10.5% chromium content by mass) manufactured by…

Anton Chekhov says: Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

DFW says: Tell me the moon is shining, its angle, proportions, the exact hue and how it relates personally to each of the characters and the first time they saw the moon and how exactly the moon has and will always affect them because when they were five their mother first used bad language in front of them on the vernal equinox. This is what is known as “characterisation”.

Marina Abramović says: To be a young and famous artist is the killer.

DFW says: To be a young and famous artist is- the goal!

Ira Glass says: (well, all of this, worth a watch for storytellers)

DFW says: Hehehe. Wait, seriously?

Samuel R. Delany in Dhalgren says: Should I triumph over my laziness, I suspect I would banish all feeling for economical expression which is the basis of style. If I overcame my bitterness, I'm afraid my work would lose all wit and irony. Were I to defeat my power-madness, my craving for fame and recognition, I suspect my work would become empty of all psychological insight, not to mention compassion for others who share my failings. Minus all three, we have work only concerned with the truth, which is trivial without those guys that moor it to the world that is the case.

DFW says: (weepily a la Renee Zellwegger) You lost me at “economical expression”.

I’ve kept my own writing mostly well-hidden, never seriously pursued publication and pained about not adhering to all of these rules, but here’s someone who starts writing at the same age as me, can gleefully forget about all of them and be praised to high heaven (I will explain how to handle this kind of jealousy in due course).

This is the heart of postmodernism. Or wait, is it? All these things I seem to have collected after the age of 22, as a somewhat crude but nonetheless useful comparison. None of the writing seemed to be to be a knowledgeable revelation of the conceits of storytelling, it was much more accidental. As an example, I have a friend who works as a camera technician and made a postmodernist short film that was really good, but he wondered why his boss advised him not to use Godard’s techniques in future- well, you need to know the rules before you can break them, this we know. It’s not that I have a problem with the rules being broken, it’s my suspicion that they went by unknown. And I have grown to believe and maintain that “quirk” in storytelling is some form of enemy.

To use DFW’s analogy, the different parts of a broom might indeed be useful for different applications, but in this case we shouldn’t be forced to choose parts. Without enough glue to hold the thing together, I don’t know what it is, but it’s not a broom.

Back to the jealousy: if you want to be jealous of someone, you have to be jealous of everything, so the aphorism goes. Wallace fans should most definitely read Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself where his suffering, self-doubt and unenviable smoking and junk food habits come to light- and by the way, not the useful Proustian suffering or the brand of anger-fuel that stokes Dostoyevsky’s creativity furnace, but a kind of useless almost Scottish yawning stretch of misery, so it seems to me. And let’s talk about that too. A book like this, so sprawling, warm and large can only come from a similar country- as a Scot, I’ve chosen the wrong role model. And the chapters with the short story ideas: what’s his point? Have you never had a failed short story concept? If they were chapters in Broom that just consisted of the short story I’d still want them excised and put somewhere else, but at least then it would make sense but no, it’s like a treatment that’s been halfheartedly converted into a convenient conversation, yet more evidence that this is a work far from a British claustrophobic minimalism that would be more interesting for me at least [3].

In the pointless self vs. DFW that I conducted, I’ve since decided that it’s noble to do any work well, and competition is far too diffuse for exact comparisons between any of us- what a relief. This is most apparent in artistic circles, but I see it extending to work of any form. This of course you already knew but as a scientist I'm not one to believe something without witnessing the evidence.

Finally: Screenwriter Larry Cohen says: Anything in life is going to be disastrous for you if you live your life to please other people… (and all the rest here at 5:00 min onwards)

So, best of luck to all individuals doing anything! We’re all trailblazers in our own way, and even when our disciplines don’t lend themselves to fame, we'll know when we’ve caught the big fish, and ultimately that might be the extent of our satisfaction. That will be good enough for us!

If you found any of this useful, it’s a greater joy that you did so than that you read it from me, and that was the anxiety release of 1/3 of The Broom of The System.

[1] As I go on to discuss, apparently info-dumping is fine now. Here are some thoughts on Goodreads reviews in general.

I’m a chemical engineer but I don’t understand the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Entropy is disorder and disorder always increases, you cannot make a 100% efficient heat engine. Fine, but I don’t know what that means.

Entropy is defined as follows:
dS = dQ/T
That is, an infinitesimal change in disorder is equal to an infinitesimal change in heat divided by absolute temperature. Fine. But I don’t know what that means.

That doesn’t make me a bad chemical engineer. And I can use the Second Law because it’s been written down and understood by someone else, but that still doesn’t mean that I understand it.

Why, if you are a writer or otherwise, would you need to love and understand every enormous complex book that comes your way? Would you need to pretend to understand it, ever?

There was a code implanted in my brain that set off quite recently and programmed me to voraciously consume and purge out art. I mean to say that 2+ years ago when I never needed to care about writing fiction I only read Murakami about 2 maybe 3 times a year, because his were the only books that resonated with me. I used to enter bookshops and think ‘Wow, look at all these books- who the hell reads all of this? I’ll have one Murakami, please.’ And that was just dandy. It is no surprise to me that if now programmed to read 100 books/yr I genuinely like/love about 5 of them and understand around 20-25, depending on how many enormous complex meticulously WTF books I have chosen to read that year. And that’s just fine. And in trash there are moments of greatness, and in “really important works” sometimes there’s none at all. And that’s just fine too. Reading anything is just what you’re doing right now, it’s scanning your eyes left to right over a bunch of ordered letters, no matter what those letters seem to communicate.

It’s no secret to either of us that the reason we communicate on this site is not through an interest in how respectively clever or verbacious either of us are- I submit that such an interest would only serve to distance us. Why then, if that is true, would that change for writing reviews or fiction?

[2] In ...Becoming Yourself he will suggest that the non-linearity of his writing reflects the non-linearity of modern life. Yet Robert Musil writes in an extended musing in The Man Without Qualities that “our activities no longer follow a logical sequence” in 1000+ pages of linearly-structured albeit Modernist prose. I suspect that Wallace’s non-linearity is part of his apparent fondness for quirks.

[3] Although if we’re saying this is acceptable and enjoyable practice, here’s an essay I wrote about Facebook for my own satisfaction, but that I never found a proper home for (oh well, bump it where it doesn’t belong! Apparently that’s totally okay now).

Why Facebookman is the worst superhero ever:

He’s pretty, with evidence from every angle, or for girls the single practiced angle, the rejects disposed of in a touchscreen bin. He goes to restaurants and clubs. He’s an extrovert, like a decent chunk of the population. He travels to infinite destinations, although mostly the locations whose tourist boards pay for them to appear in Hollywood films. He’s in love, which cannot be seen, but that doesn’t stop Facebookman: his relationship is documented in posts to and from his beloved. When there is a tragic news event, Facebookman is capable of real human emotion. He’s a “nice guy”. Good and evil do battle in everyone but him.

What does a well-lived life look like? Clearly he believes it has an appearance. The Bucket List and Things To Do Before You Die address death and the need to ‘Make The Most of It’. ‘It’ used to be life, now It’s trying to be Facebookman. And foreign travel used to be a luxury: ‘You’ve never had it so good’, said the PM in the 50s. Now it’s a necessity, a thing to do before we die, before we kick the bucket. You haven’t lived until you’ve jumped out a plane, touched a dolphin, smashed through your living room window whatever but it’s Pics Or It Didn’t Happen. Who takes the time to choose a holiday they will enjoy the most, who looks at the sky and wonders why, who’s taking naps as they please without fear? Well everyone does, they just don’t put it on Facebook, but when so much of their time goes into planning and executing “life”, they don’t do “the rest” enough. But it’s TL;DR, takes time and effort and time is finite just like our lives. Us twenty and thirty-somethings are so concerned with dying and Making The Most Of It, rarely doing either. In later life it’s Keeping Up With The Joneses 2.0, “School Reunion: Who Lost?” forever, appearances that are kept up while you sleep.

When it’s so prevalent, how many people will understand when you choose to be anything but the preened expensive socialite with undiagnosed Life-Dysmorphic Disorder?

Postmodernist literature was in its prime once the TV was everywhere, and in part illustrated the quantity of stories and level of choice, the customisability of spare time, the blandness of real life compared to the action, comedy, horror, tragedy of TV. Every postmodernist argument has accentuated a thousand-fold with internet dependence. Postmodern angst is rife: it must be said with humour, self-deprecation, apology, narcissism- anything which stops it from sounding sincere, but ultimately accumulating into a hyperbolic neural algorithm of crap.

We’re all guilty of it, but don’t worry about resenting and deleting everything that’s on there: “no regrets” is one of Facebookman’s superpowers, it’s not for us mortals. But can we say how we feel without caring, submit our real thoughts knowing that they could be shot down by anyone, at any time?

I don't think that anyone needs or is able to be the living embodiment of the things they believe in. Rigid principles are one of the things Facebook subtly encourages, a permanent record of all activity stretching out years with the potential to be thrown back in our faces by friends, family, prospective employers, every keystroke in an invisible database to be used against you.

Still, it’s not fair to judge something without suggesting an alternative: so what about a life which involves constantly trying to recontextualise what we already do? A silent life, a life not necessarily in pictures? Take the following quote from Proust as an example:

“The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.”

Facebook is currently the opposite, a spiritually vacuous e-wasteland forcing those hundred others to see the world through the eyes of a single non-existent individual. But can we use it to see the world through each other? Saying how we feel, giving too much away? If there is ever backlash, snideness, postmodern angst-y retorts, we’ll just be constantly iterating our life hypothesis and taking in new information, which requires mistakes. We won't be bullied into doing otherwise; fixing everything in place; never pushing boundaries; allowing subjects to become taboo; being “nice”.

If we did start posting honestly all the time, the effect wouldn't be too noticeable or revolutionary, we would feel it through the intent of the words and begin to enjoy each other’s online presence.
At best, the competition can end if you want- there were no winners.
At least, you saw it through my eyes. I will always sympathise with you if you feel Facebook status anxiety: terrifying in its consumption, but completely trivial if you choose it to be.

this was published 10 years before Infinite Jest. much like in IJ, every single character in this novel is broken, defective, missing some vital piece. one is missing a leg, one is missing a penis, many lack morality, or empathy, or confidence, or even any self-identity. but in infinite jest, you end up really liking a bunch of them -- their defects make them lovable, or you love their good qualities in spite of their defects. but in this novel, i sort of grew to despise all but one. i pinned all my hopes on this one. and this one, well, let's just say that after i read the last page i really wanted to punch David Foster Wallace in the balls, so he would know how he made me feel. asshole.

asshole.

Wallace wrote this book while he was still a grad student, and published it when he was 25. in some ways, it shows, i think. some parts are great. there are many stories within the story, as it takes place at a publishing firm and we get glimpses of many of the "submissions". the plot is actually pretty amazing, one of the most intricate webs i've ever come across. but by the last page, i totally despised every character. worthless pieces of crap, every last one.

and i think maybe wallace knew that he did that and didn't care, because the point was not to tell a story, but to investigate some of the deep philosophical underpinnings of language and telling and understanding our own life as narrative and whether what we feel has any meaning if we never act on it, tell at least one other person how we feel, and possibly just find out that we can't, we can't ever get anyone else to understand how we feel.

but then he shouldn't start out telling such an engrossing tale and then make me loathe him at the end. asshole.

Odio-amo este libro. Un oxímoron esperable al leer una novela de David Foster Wallace. Es creo que la novela de él que más se centra en el humor.

Maybe a 2.5.

DFW's style is undeniably playful, witty, and, in this undergrad thesis incarnation, extremely Pynchon/Delillo/Gaddis-lite in nature, and that's to its benefit and detriment, because this debut is such a mess, which, at times, leads to chaotic idiosyncrasies and a clear instinct to throw everything possible at the wall/page while also frequently being absurdly trite and overly intellectualized to no end. I do not care for most of these characters. I find much of the dialogue entertaining though, which is an interesting dichotomy considering the characters are the key to dialogue.

The ending resolves naught in a way far less meaningful than something like The Crying of Lot 49, and I didn't even like it then, so a flop was had, especially given how genuinely awful the evangelical ending is here.

I say all this, but this kind of just made me more intrigued by the notion of Infinite Jest, because, although this is meh to bad in manner, there is a clear voice and probing acerbicity that I imagine develops into something grand as everyone says. Maybe.

Indigesto.
Noiosissimo.
Lo ammetto: non ci ho capito niente.
Non sono riuscita a trarre un senso qualsiasi da questa incomprensibile, demenziale e farneticante accozzaglia di personaggi e di situazioni assurde, che non trovo affatto divertenti.
Eppure mi sono impegnata, e ho tenuto duro fino alla fine, e poi ancora ho letto la prefazione di Bartezzaghi, io che salto sempre le prefazioni: tutto, per scoprire ove risiede la famosa genialità di D.F. Wallace che manda in visibilio tanti stimati lettori.
Si vede che mi manca quel quid necessario per comprendere DFW; così come al liceo mi mancava il quid per afferrare il senso della trigonometria, materia che per me è rimasta sempre un buco nero.

Σε λίγες ημέρες κυκλοφορεί από τις εκδόσεις Κριτική το πρώτο μυθιστόρημα του David Foster Wallace [μετάφραση & επίμετρο: Γιώργος-Ίκαρος Μπαμπασάκης]

Μια ιδιοφυώς στημένη κωμωδία με σκοπό να ασκήσει σκληρή αλλά και βαθύτατα ανθρώπινη κριτική στην ατμόσφαιρα και τη νοοτροπία που δέσποζαν στις Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες τη δεκαετία του 1990. Ο David Foster Wallace, στο πρώτο του μυθιστόρημα, δείχνει το δυναμικό ταλέντο και την πολύπτυχη ευρυμάθειά του. Ένας συναρπαστικός συνδυασμός υψηλής φιλοσοφίας και ποπ κουλτούρας, ένα ισχυρό κοκτέιλ από Βίτγκενσταϊν και Ντεριντά με δόσεις από σκουπιδοτηλεόραση, φοιτητοπαρέες και κραιπάλες. Μια τρελή ιστορία βιομηχανικής κατασκοπείας και παθιασμένων ερωτικών σχέσεων. Το ντεμπούτο μιας λαμπρής λογοτεχνικής σταδιοδρομίας.

Critical Problems on the Line

Could it be that Lenore Beadsman and Leopold Bloom have more in common than just their initials (Broom/Bloom, get the clue?)? Both are engaged in a fairly closely detailed tour of their respective cities. Both are described in and through a variety of literary styles, often comedic, digressions, and innovations. Both exist in order to demonstrate points about language as much as to carry the narrative along. And the auxiliary characters to both are a pretty rum lot of social freaks, incipient psychopaths, and grasping businessmen, sometimes simultaneously. I mean come on. How much proof do you need. Somebody’s a plagiarist, so’ ‘nuff.

Well no. Maybe these are coincidences. Leopold exists in a down to earth descriptive world that Lenore simply doesn’t share. Leoplod encounters genuine streets and authentic shops and pubs (look ‘em up!). Lenore exists in a universe that sustains corporate entities like Hunt & Peck, Stonecipheco, Rummage and Naw, or Frequent & Vigorous, the latter being merely a tax dodge masquerading as a publisher. These simply don’t exist in the telephone directory, much less Google maps. None of your modernist realism there. No way, José.

Then again, there is the determinism versus free will thing going on in both. And the associated questions of religion. Some subjects are just untalkaboutable as Leopold and Lenore each might say. Does that make these subjects spiritual, or nonsense, or maybe even Catholic? Not to mention the suggestions in the text that words aren’t often used in ‘official’ ways, in fact that there may be no official ways at all. Oh, and there’s lot of odd sex involved too. You’ve got to admit that’s a pretty creepy connection, all this primitive non-verbal stuff. That’s code, man, and no mistake.

Yeah, but there sure isn’t a lot of this telephone mixup business that Leopold ever had to deal with. I forget, did he even have a telephone? But Lenore finds it a major headache; it’s sort of central to her life. In fact her whole town suffers; it’s like a running joke. So Cleveland can’t be Dublin; Lake Erie ain’t the River Liffey no matter what anyone says to the contrary. And what would Lionel know about baby food, toxic or not? Bupkis is what Leopold would know about baby food. But Lenore was presumably brought up on the stuff and it’ll sure be a large part of her future. And there wasn’t even one cockatiel in Leoplold’s’s life, nowhere, ever.

So I think I’m entitled to make a firm conclusion about the state of affairs here. Wallace never heard of Joyce. There, I’ve said it. I’m proud to be out of the closet. And for all those critics out there who never mentioned the two together, you left an important, if much needed, gap in the market to be filled. Remember: You read it here first.

This is my introduction to DFW. This book is pretty impressive for being written by a 24-year-old. The problem is this book doesn't hold together really well. It feels like it has a plot but in the end you think about it and it didn't really have one. I didn't care too much for the end of the book and I felt like even though there were a lot of really funny parts, most of the humor is very awkward. I do want to go deeper into Wallace's works.

A very enjoyable book, which is lighter in tone than Infinite Jest but still very complex.

I finished this over a week ago, while travelling up to Scotland for a walking trip on Skye, and it is no longer fresh in the memory since I have read other things since.

As in Infinite Jest, Wallace has created a fictional landscape of considerable complexity - an Ohio governor who decides to create a desert (the Great Ohio Desert, so like O.N.A.N. a silly acronym) as a tourist attraction, a bird whose ability to talk is enhanced by an untested learning drug, and a man who wants to eat everything, literally. The core of the story is more of a rites of passage tale, and for the most part the story avoids the narrative jumps and lengthy footnotes that made Infinite Jest so confusing. The book has a philosophical underpinning that I wouldn't claim to understand.

I can't help thinking that Wallace struggled with form and structure, and this one ends ambigiously in mid sent-

And so but then...

Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.
—p.3

David Foster Wallace's work has definitely become more problematic to read and review since the first time I encountered The Broom of the System back in 2002, before his suicide in 2008 and subsequent revelations about his personal, real-world abusive behavior. The male gaze pervades Wallace's first novel from its first sentence onward—and the fact that Wallace is usually gazing through a female character's eyes doesn't really make that any better.

The whole novel's difficult to read without wincing now, in fact; the rest of that first chapter, for example, involves a dorm-room encounter with two visiting frat boys at a women's college, showcasing a sexually-abusive dynamic that, however common, no longer seems at all "normal," despite what big sister Clarice tells fifteen-year-old Lenore Beadsman shortly thereafter:

"I don't think it's too different anywhere else, Lenore," says Clarice. "I don't think it is. You get used to it. It's really just common sense."
—p.9

What seems weirdest about these college girls, though, isn't the way they watch each other, nor their matter-of-fact resignation to the inevitability of being assaulted on-campus—it's that they all talk so much like Wallace writes. His unmistakable blend of sesquipedalian vocabulary and vernacular diction (so much in evidence throughout Infinite Jest as well) is already fully-developed here:

"The thing is Lenore you just don't know. These things are so unbelievably tiresome, unpleasant, we went all first semester and you just really literally get nauseated, physically ill after a while, ninety-nine point nine percent of the men who come are just lizards, reptiles, and it's clear awfully fast that the whole thing is really just nothing more than a depressing ritual, a rite that we're expected by God knows who to act out, over and over. You can't even have conversations. It's really repulsive." And she drinks water out of the Jetsons glass.
—Clarice Beadsman, p.11

If you can get into the rhythm of such sentences (and keep in mind that everyone with any sort of speaking rôle in The Broom of the System converses in the same convoluted, disjointed way), it'll help with your... appreciation (I won't necessarily say enjoyment) of this novel.

But then and so...

After its sordid and thoroughly mundane beginning, The Broom of the System veers into speculative fiction—it's decidedly not science fiction (the ridiculous recurring spasms of technobabble about Centrex phone systems, for example, make that plain), nor is it fantasy, but Wallace's uniquely hallucinatory yet matter-of-fact recitation of the impossible still strays far beyond the confines of mere mimesis. The shift happens suddenly, around page 44, when we learn about the Great Ohio Desert, a massive engineering project conceived as a tourist attraction and carved out of the Wayne National Forest in southern Ohio (a real place, by the way—with no desert in sight—one big chunk of which is just a few miles north of where I grew up). The G.O.D. was constructed back in the 1970s, which thrusts this novel into alternative history as well. It's even possible to draw a faint but direct line between The Broom of the System and Bug Jack Barron, a classic SF novel of the 1960s. (I won't state the connection openly, since it's rather spoilery unless you've read both books, but both have plot lines involving the rich using glandular extracts for nefarious purposes.)

And then sometimes it seems Wallace was just goofing around—he gives characters names like, I kid you not, "Judith Prietht," or the more recondite "Neil Obstat" (from the Latin phrase n  nihil obstatn), which when they appeared tended to jar me out of even the most otherwise-believable scenes.

So but and then...

Wallace's most consistent genius, though, was portraying the endless gradations of misery—far more than fifty shades of gray—perceptible to someone intimately acquainted with depression:

"I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that's odd, isn't it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?"
—Rick Vigorous, p.79

Well, that, and the fact that with David Foster Wallace one never really knows what comes next...

"I sense the closeness of Cleveland. Can you smell that? A smell like removing the lid from a pot of something that's been left in one's refrigerator just a little too long?"
—R.V., p.268

Then so but and...

Wallace does seem to be well aware that his own work is not, shall we say, immune to criticism... for example, he slyly puts these words into Rick Vigorous' mouth, ostensibly talking about manuscripts from Frequent and Vigorous Publishing's slush pile—although it seems pretty clear that Vigorous wrote the stories himself, which makes for an additional layer of meta-awareness:

"What shall we say? Perhaps that it tends to be hideously self-conscious. Mordantly cynical. Or, if not mordantly cynical, then simperingly naïve. Or at any rate consistently, off-puttingly pretentious. Not to mention abysmally typed, of course."
—Rick Vigorous, p.307

—and—

"It's when people begin to fancy that they actually know something about literature that they cease to be literarily interesting, or even of any use to those who are. You're perfect, take it from me."
—R.V., p.308

And then but so...

If you've already encountered David Foster Wallace's later work, The Broom of the System is unlikely to change your opinion either way—for good or ill, this novel already contains just about every characteristic that makes people love and hate his other output. I found it ultimately unsatisfying myself, upon second reading—although I really did like and have to mention the beautiful packaging of this Penguin trade paperback, with its cover by fine artist and tattooist Duke Riley.

And then, but so also... I did, somehow, manage to read the whole thing—again.

n  The Word Out of Systemn

Funny, witty and disinhibited, David Foster Wallace's Broom of the System prend à la légère the theories of Wittgenstein and Derrida right from the title, whose significance is partly revealed in a dialogue between Gramma Lenore and her grandson, whom she asks about the more elemental part of the broom – the bristles or the handle. When he points the bristles, she triumphantly yells:

Aha, that's because you want to sweep with the broom... If what we wanted a broom for was to break windows, then the handle was clearly the fundamental essence of the broom...

And that’s how we should enter Wittgenstein’s world ruled by language games, on the principle (contradicting Plato’s theory, of course) that ideas exist only within language. I said “we should”, because it is Wallace’s world we truly enter, a world where everybody simulates knowing the bounds within which a statement makes sense and maybe they do, but no one really communicates, so great is their desire to assert themselves and only themselves. All that is not “themselvesness” is, to use a word Rick employed to characterize his relationship with Lenore, “untalkaboutable” and uninteresting because is “elseone”.

In a subtle parody of Derrida’s terminology, Wallace creates his own words to describe a world that forever fights against communication, afraid to be swallowed by revealing too many or simply too meaningful words (what’s Norman Bombardini other than a big, fat, word attempting to monopolize all possible senses?)

The book is thus made of monologues, of false interpretations and comical changes of the context in order to serve a purpose, like the delicious absurd religious meaning a reverend gives to the licentious words of a loquacious bird:

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Use me. Satisfy me like never before.
REVEREND SYKES: Tonight we must attempt to see together that to be satisfied in a spiritual sense is to be used.

Add to this maybe the most interesting figure of the narrative, Rick the Vigorous, this “sperm without a tail”, who suffers of “penis shmenis” and hides his impotence, like Scheherazade her fear of womanhood, behind endless stories with supposedly curative powers:

“Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really do what one says. ‘Love’ is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.”

As for Lenore, she is the girl that once fascinated the author with her wish to be rather a character in a novel than a real person. For says Antichrist:

…Lenore has you believing with your complicity, circumstantially speaking, that you’re not really real, or that you’re only real insofar as you’re told about, o that to the extent that you’re real you’re controlled, and thus not in control, so that you’re more like a sort of character than a person, really- and of course Lenore would say the two are the same, now, wouldn’t she?

Caryn James reproached the book a certain weakness of argumentation and a scholarly interpretation of the philosophical ideas: “There is too much flat-footed satire of Self and Other, too much reliance on Philosophy 101.” I’d say it’s first and last a ludical quarrel with serious problems, with all the teribilism of a 24-year-old author who wasn’t afraid to make fun a little of sacred monsters.

Even the end seems to be an amused reply to Derrida’s famous “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”. Sure it is. It’s the tunnel of the telephone company where Lenore disappears; it’s the cold hand of the television that grabs Rick. It’s the broom that shatters every system. With which part, yours to decide

Ο πρώτος μου David Foster Wallace τολμώ να πω ότι με μάγεψε. Στην αρχή, μέχρι να καταλάβω τι γινόταν είχα χαωθεί αρκετά και αναρωτήθηκα αρκετές φορές τι στο καλό λέει και πού στο καλό το πάει και η πλοκή δεν έβγαζε νόημα και οι χαρακτήρες ήταν ό,τι να ναι και τι σκάλωμα γενικότερο υπάρχει με τις λέξεις τέλος πάντων; Και εκεί ήταν που μου τα 'σκασε: οι λέξεις! Και τότε έβγαλαν όλα νόημα: οι λέξεις, η έννοια των λέξεων δεν ήταν απλώς ένα σκάλωμα των χαρακτήρων αλλά το όλο νόημα του βιβλίου. Η πλοκή δεν έχει και τόση σημασία. Ο τύπος έφτιαξε μια ολόκληρη ιστορία (λίγο τρελούτσικη ομολογουμένως), δημιούργησε τόσους χαρακτήρες (με ένα σωρό ψυχολογικά) και όλα για να περάσει το "μήνυμά" του. Το βιβλίο αυτό ήταν η πτυχιακή εργασία (η μία από τις δύο) του Wallace για τις προπτυχιακές του σπουδές στην Φιλοσοφία και Αγγλική φιλολογία. Για να μιλήσει για κάποιο επιστημονικό θέμα, ο τύπος έφτιαξε ολόκληρη ιστορία. Στα 24 του είχε γραφή καλύτερη από πολλούς συγγραφείς με χρόνια στο επάγγελμα (πράγμα που με βάζει σε σκέψεις για τη γενικότερη απέχθεια που αισθάνομαι όταν ακούω το εκνευριστικό "έχει ταλέντο"). Το βιβλίο διαβάζεται αργά, λίγο βασανιστικά, αλλά πολύ απολαυστικά! Για το infinite jest θα χρειαστώ κανα χρόνο...