Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will by David Foster Wallace
Despite the heavy workload, Wallace managed to produce a first draft of the philosophy thesis well ahead of schedule, before winter break of his senior year, and he finished both theses early, submitting them before spring break. He spent the last month or so of the school year reading other students’ philosophy theses and offering advice. “He was an incredibly hard worker,” Willem deVries told me, recalling the bewilderment with which he and his fellow professors viewed Wallace. “We were just shaking our heads.” By the end of his tenure at Amherst, Wallace decided to commit himself to fiction, having concluded that, of the two enterprises, it allowed for a fuller expression of himself. “Writing The Broom of the System, I felt like I was using 97 percent of me,” he later told the journalist David Lipsky, “whereas philosophy was using 50 percent.”
Given his taste for experimental fiction, however, Wallace didn’t assume, as he prepared to leave Amherst, that he would be able to live off of his writing. He considered styling himself professionally after William H. Gass, the author of Omensetter’s Luck (a novel Wallace revered), who had a Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell and whose “day job” was teaching philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis. Wallace toyed with applying to Washington University for graduate school so he could observe Gass firsthand. But in the end, he chose to attend the University of Arizona for an M.F.A. in creative writing, which he completed in ’87, the same year he published The Broom of the System and sold his first short-fiction collection, Girl with Curious Hair.
Even with those literary successes, however, Wallace soon suffered another serious crisis of confidence, this time centered around his fiction. He later described it as “more of a sort of artistic and religious crisis than it was anything you might call a breakdown.” He revisited the idea that philosophy could provide order and structure in his life, and that year he applied to graduate programs at Harvard and Princeton Universities, ultimately choosing to attend Harvard. “The reason I applied to philosophy grad school,” he told Lipsky, “is I remembered that I had flourished in an academic environment. And I had this idea that I could read philosophy and do philosophy, and write on the side, and that it would make the writing better.”
Wallace started at Harvard in the fall of ’89, but his plan quickly fell to pieces. “It was just real obvious that I was so far away from that world,” he went on. “I mean, you were a full-time grad student. There wasn’t time to write on the side—there was 400 pages of Kant theory to read every three days.” Far more worrisome was the escalation of the “artistic and religious crisis” into another wave of depression, this time bordering on the suicidal. Late that first semester, Wallace dropped out of Harvard and checked into McLean Hospital, the storied psychiatric institution nearby in Massachusetts. It marked the end of his would-be career in philosophy. He viewed the passing of that ambition with mixed emotions. “I think going to Harvard was a huge mistake,” he told Lipsky. “I was too old to be in grad school. I didn’t want to be an academic philosopher anymore. But I was incredibly humiliated to drop out. Let’s not forget that my father’s a philosophy professor, that a lot of the professors there were revered by him. That he knew a couple of them. There was just an enormous amount of terrible stuff going on. But I left there and I didn’t go back.”
Though Wallace abandoned it as a formal pursuit, philosophy would forever loom large in his life. In addition to having been formative for his cast of mind, philosophy would repeatedly crop up in the subject matter of his writing. His essay “Authority and American Usage,” about the so-called prescriptivist/descriptivist debate among linguists and lexicographers, features an exegesis of Wittgenstein’s argument against the possibility of a private language. In Everything and More, his book about the history of mathematical ideas of infinity, his guiding insight is that the disputes over mathematical procedures were ultimately debates about metaphysics—about “the ontological status of math entities.” His article “Consider the Lobster” begins as a journalistic report from the annual Maine Lobster Festival but soon becomes a philosophical meditation on the question, “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” This question leads Wallace into discussions about the distinction between pain and suffering; about the relation between ethics and (culinary) aesthetics; about how we might understand cross-species moral obligations; and about the “hardcore philosophy”—the “metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics”—required to determine the principles that allow us to conclude even that other humans feel pain and have a legitimate interest in not doing so.
Those are just explicit examples. Wallace’s writing is full of subtler philosophical allusions and passing bits of idiom. In Infinite Jest, one of the nine college-application essays written by the precocious protagonist, Hal Incandenza, is “Montague Grammar and the Semantics of Physical Modality”—a nod to Wallace’s own philosophy thesis. A story in his short-fiction collection Oblivion, “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” shares its title with the 1979 book of anti-epistemology by the philosopher Richard Rorty. The story “Good Old Neon” invokes two conundrums from mathematical logic, the Berry and Russell paradoxes, to describe a psychological double bind that the narrator calls the “fraudulence paradox.” At the level of language, Wallace’s books are peppered with phrases like “by sheer ontology,” “ontologically prior,” “in- and extensions,” “antinomy,” “techne.”
Perhaps the most authentically philosophical aspect of Wallace’s nonfiction, however, is the sense he gives his reader, no matter how rarefied or lowly the topic, of getting to the core of things, of searching for the essence of a phenomenon or experience. His article on the tennis player Roger Federer delves into the central role of beauty in the appreciation of athletics. His antic recounting of a week-long Caribbean cruise penetrates beneath the surface of his own satirical portrait to plumb a set of near-existential issues—freedom of choice, the illusion of freedom, freedom from choice—that he saw lurking at the heart of modern American ideas of entertainment. “I saw philosophy all over the place,” DeVries, his former professor, said of Wallace’s writings. “It was even hard to figure out how to single it out. I think it infuses a great deal of his work.”
As far as Wallace’s fiction is concerned, the most philosophically intriguing text is the novel he wrote when his own philosophical efforts were most intense: The Broom of the System. In some way—though it’s not obvious at first in what way—the book is clearly supposed to be “about” Wittgenstein’s philosophy. The plot follows a young switchboard operator named Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman as she searches for her great-grandmother, a former student of Wittgenstein’s at Cambridge University who has disappeared from her nursing home. Gramma Beadsman had been a dominant and intellectually bullying figure in Lenore’s life, forever hinting that she would prove to Lenore “how a life is words and nothing else”—a haunting suggestion that seems to be the source of Lenore’s persistent anxiety that she herself might be just a character in a novel. Gramma has left behind in her desk drawer several objects that are potential clues to her disappearance, including a copy of Philosophical Investigations.
The Broom of the System takes its title from a philosophical lesson that Gramma Beadsman once imparted to Lenore’s younger brother, LaVache. While sweeping the kitchen floor with a broom, Gramma asked LaVache “which part of the broom was more elemental, more fundamental,” the handle or the bristles? LaVache replied that the bristles are the essence of a broom. But Gramma corrected him, insisting that the answer depends on the use to which the broom is being put: if you want to sweep, the bristles are the essence—in effect, the meaning—of the broom; if you want, say, to break a window, its essence is the handle. “Meaning as use,” Gramma intoned. “Meaning as use.” The reader familiar with Wittgenstein will recognize in Gramma’s words the governing slogan of his late philosophy: “the meaning of a word,” he wrote in the Investigations, “is its use in the language.”
In his letter to
By the time Wallace started writing Broom, he had developed a serious interest in Wittgenstein’s late philosophy. As his relationship with technical philosophy cooled, he became increasingly curious about approaches to philosophy that, for all their differences with one another, were united in their opposition to the kind of work with which he previously self-identified. He was intrigued not only by Wittgenstein’s late philosophy but also by J. L. Austin’s “ordinary language” philosophy and even Jacques Derrida’s radical conception of philosophy as a metaphysically arrogant form of literature. Jay Garfield told me that when he was working with Wallace on the philosophy thesis, they often spoke about whether the meaning-as-use account of language in the Investigations, which toppled the account of language that Wittgenstein had provided in the Tractatus, also threatened the sort of formal semantics on which he and Garfield were hard at work.
Those new curiosities about the relation of language to reality mark another point of connection between Wallace and his character Lenore, who worries that language suffuses reality to the point of constituting it. Indeed, at the simplest level, Lenore just is Wallace, and The Broom of the System is just a fictionalized retelling—a “little self-obsessed bildingsroman,” Wallace called it—of the intellectual struggles he was then undergoing, struggles not only between philosophy and literature but also between technical philosophy and its philosophical alternatives. “Think of The Broom of the System,” he told McCaffery, “as the sensitive tale of a sensitive young WASP who’s just had this mid-life crisis that’s moved him from coldly cerebral analytic math to a coldly cerebral take on fiction and Austin-Wittgenstein-Derridean literary theory.” This transformation, he explained, had a disturbing side effect, shifting the young WASP’s “existential dread from a fear that he was just a 98.6-degree calculating machine to a fear that he was nothing but a linguistic construct.” Lenore, with her apprehension that she may be nothing more than a character in a novel, is giving voice to Wallace’s own anxieties about crossing into a wholly new relationship with language.
Understanding The Broom of the System as an autobiographical roman à clef is a useful first step in grasping Wallace’s literary-philosophical aims, but his engagement with Wittgenstein’s philosophy was a more profound and lasting affair than that reading alone suggests. In both his early and his late work, Wittgenstein addressed the doctrine of solipsism, the philosophical position that holds (in its most radical form) that nothing exists apart from your own mind and mental states. Like fatalism, solipsism is an extreme and counterintuitive view that is nonetheless difficult to disprove. Also like fatalism, it was an idea that bewitched and bothered Wallace, absorbing his intellect and artistic imagination and becoming a lifelong fascination. In his interview with McCaffery, Wallace said that “one of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me” is the handling of solipsism in his work. In Broom, Wallace sought to do some measure of novelistic justice to this aspect of Wittgenstein’s thought.
Broom, then, belongs to the genre of the novel of ideas—books like Voltaire’s Candide and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, which all but instruct the reader to interpret them in light of certain schools of thought. (Candide is usually read as a parody of Leibnitz’s metaphysics, Nausea as a vision of Sartre’s existentialism.) In his essay “The Empty Plenum,” published in 1990, Wallace called this genre of writing “INTERPRET-ME fiction” and argued that it had a special role to play in the life of the mind. As he knew from chasing the “click” in math and technical philosophy, there are areas of inquiry that might seem remote from the concerns of everyday life but that can, in fact, offer an array of intimate emotional and aesthetic experiences. Even for the reader with an appetite for it, however, a theoretical work can be so intellectually taxing, so draining of one’s mental energies, that what Wallace called the “emotional implications” of the text are overlooked. The novel of ideas is at its most valuable, he contended, not when making abstruse ideas “accessible” or easy to digest for the reader, but rather when bringing these neglected undercurrents to the surface.
Wallace began writing “The Empty Plenum” in Boston in the summer of 1989, as he readied himself to begin the philosophy program at Harvard. The essay is an extended appreciation of David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress (“a work of genius,” in Wallace’s estimation), which came out in ’88, a year after The Broom of the System, and which was also “about” Wittgenstein’s philosophy. It was an emotional reckoning, as Wallace read it, with the discussion of solipsism in Wittgenstein’s early work. Wallace felt that Markson’s novel had succeeded in uniting literature and philosophy in a way that he, in Broom, had tried but failed to do. (Wallace pronounced Broom “pretty dreadful.”) The circumstances in which Wallace was writing the essay only underscored for him the importance of Markson’s accomplishment. As Wallace prepared to seek a renewed merger of philosophy and fiction in his own life, at Harvard, he celebrated Markson as a novelist who, with the utmost artistry, had already fused the two. In defiance of “the rabid anti-intellectualism of the contemporary fiction scene,” Wallace wrote, Markson had demonstrated the still-vital role of the novel of ideas in joining together “cerebration & emotion, abstraction & lived life, transcendent truth-seeking & daily schlepping.” Markson had delivered on Wallace’s literary-philosophical ideal of “making heads throb heartlike.”
To understand the philosophical ambitions of Broom it is worth first looking in detail at what Wallace thought Markson had done. Markson’s novel, a work of experimental fiction with a lean style reminiscent of Samuel Beckett, is narrated by a painter named Kate, who appears to be the last person alive and who has been alone on earth for many years by the time the novel opens. Kate doesn’t so much narrate (for she has no audience) as write into the void, tapping out on a typewriter declarative statement after declarative statement in simple paragraphs of just one or two sentences. Unlike many novels of ideas, Wittgenstein’s Mistress doesn’t feature cerebral characters or lofty discussions. Though Kate makes highbrow allusions, her grasp of history and literature and philosophy is idiosyncratic and shaky. As Wallace noted, in Kate’s hands intellectual ideas are “sprayed, skewed, all over the book.”
After many years roaming the earth, futilely looking for anyone else, Kate has retired to a beach house, where she is writing out her thoughts. She does so with a peculiar controlled indirection, free-associating but looping back again and again to a recurring set of personal preoccupations—compulsively trying to keep straight the memory of what has been lost, organizing and reorganizing scattered memories of her own life and her piecemeal knowledge of the world to which she once belonged:I do remember sitting one morning in an automobile with a right-hand drive and watching Stratford-on-Avon fill up with snow, which must surely be rare.
Well, and once that same winter being almost hit by a car with nobody driving it, which came rolling down a hill near Hampstead Heath.
There was an explanation for the car coming down the hill with nobody driving it.
The explanation having been the hill, obviously.
That car, too, had a right-hand drive. Although perhaps that is not especially relevant to anything.
The possibility increases that Kate’s narration is unreliable, that she is mentally unhinged, as it becomes clearer that the onset of her peculiar experience of the world coincided with a profound personal loss. The book imparts a double-layered feeling of loneliness and isolation: Kate’s is the voice of a writer trapped not only inside her own head but also inside a world that now exists only through her own continual reconstructing of it. The text she types, Wallace wrote, “is itself obsessed & almost defined by the possibility that it does not exist, that Kate does not exist.”
What does any of this have to do with Wittgenstein? Part of the achievement of Markson’s novel, one of the ways in which it avoids the pitfalls of many novels of ideas, is that it doesn’t require any understanding of Wittgenstein. The novel operates on its own terms. But the allusion to Wittgenstein in its title, its repeated citation of the first sentence of the Tractatus (“The world is all that is the case”), and its stylistic affinity with that book (the Tractatus is also composed of short aphoristic paragraphs) all invite the reader versed in philosophy to wonder what Markson is up to. “This isn’t a weakness of the novel,” Wallace stressed. “Though it’s kind of miraculous that it’s not.”
Wallace had read the Tractatus, of course (he wrote to Lance Olsen that he thought its first sentence was “the most beautiful opening line in western lit”). He knew that Wittgenstein’s book presented a spare and unforgiving picture of the relations among logic, language, and the physical world. He knew that the puzzles solved and raised by the book were influential, debatable, and rich in their implications. But as a flesh-and-blood reader with human feelings, he also knew, though he had never articulated it out loud, that as you labored to understand the Tractatus, its cold, formal, logical picture of the world could make you feel strange, lonely, awestruck, lost, frightened—a range of moods not unlike those undergone by Kate herself. The similarities were not accidental. Markson’s novel, as Wallace put it, was like a 240-page answer to the question, “What if somebody really had to live in a Tractatusized world?” Pronouncing the novel “a kind of philosophical sci-fi,” Wallace explained that Markson had staged a human drama on an alien intellectual planet, and in so doing he had “fleshed the abstract sketches of Wittgenstein’s doctrine into the concrete theater of human loneliness.”