The Broom of the System, David Foster Wallace

There are beginning sentences in the history of literature remembered by everybody: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” (One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez); “Call me Ishmael” (Moby-Dick, Herman Melville)… the beginning proposed by David Foster Wallace should also be one of them: “Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman.” (3) A sentence that establishes the tone, the piercing thoughts and, above all, the irony of the text that is just about to bloom.

Year 1981, in a feminine university dorm, three residents are visited by Lenore, the little sister from one of them. They drink, smoke, talk… in a curious combination of juvenile expressions, academic jargon and over-the-top cultisms, until two boys from a nearby university get into the scene: the party is capsized. Tension, friction and, above all, an overwhelming feeling of impotence: “Just because you’re bigger, physically, just take up more space, you think -do you think?- that you can rule everything, make women do whatever stupid rotten disgusting stuff you say you want just because you’re drunk?” (18) But, unfortunately, as it turns out, yes they do.

David Foster Wallace’s writing quality is incommensurable. The chapters become stories that we want to learn about, tales that claim our full attention. We want to know what happens to the man suffering from a double vanity disorder (he suffers vanity but is obsessed with pretending that he is not), or Lenore’s great-grandmother who, with other 20 residents, has disappeared from the care home where she was staying, or the obese Norman Bombardini who has decided to eat the world, literally…

David Foster Wallace uses cleverly several narrative registers in order to show us spaces, feelings and characters. So we see, in a theatrical form, the Governor of Ohio decision to build a fake desert in the middle of the State as a caution to the citizens, just to remind them to be alert, to have a negative reference on sight, as a contrast, to see how well they are. And, facing the panto represented by most of the politicians, choosing a theatrical form turns out to be neither casual, nor innocent.

The fifth chapter is explained via Rick Vigorous, the editor and boss of Lenore who doesn’t live up to his surname. He is in love with her despite their age gap and explains us how the two of them met. Without dialogues, only with a detailed description, transforming Lenore’s direct speech in a reported speech.

“She studied classics and philosophy and who knows what else under a mad crackpot genius named Wittgenstein, who believed that everything was words. Really. If your car would not start, it was apparently to be understood as a language problem. If you were unable to love, you were lost in language. Being constipated equalled being clogged with linguistic sediment.” (73) And, despite Rick Vigorous’ bitter irony, Wittgenstein was right: the world is but words. Without them we would be unable to delimitate, understand, define, communicate, reality. Without words, everything would be but a homogeneous inextricable mass: a never-ending ocean.

Beautiful image of the family Spaniard (Lenore’s sister, her husband and her children) performing a family function: first of all, they put on masks with their own portraits on them and recite the family virtues. Then, they put on masks with the writing “family member” on them and lose their individualities for the benefit of the family. Just as wrong as that, but also as real: the masks game that all of us play daily.

When Lenore visits her brother at Amherst Campus, we go back to the importance of language in this history. We already knew that Lenore’s great-grandmother had been a student with Wittgenstein and that she lived her life through language. Now, though, we see how the brother aims to explain the great-grandmother disappearance by following the logics of her linguistic thoughts which gives us (the readers) a good amount of interesting conversations about meaning and words. Playing with antinomies (the drawing of a barber whose head ends up exploding because he faces an action dilemma in which acting and not acting overlap each other and he doesn’t know what to do), visual tricks (the drawing of a man in a lining surface that most people tend to see as him climbing up but Wittgenstein asked whether he was, in fact, climbing down)… and, amidst it all, Rick, who has joined Lenore in this trip because Amherst was his university, finds himself attacked by the memories and looks for shelter in a pub where chance (maybe a bit too far stretched, and that is not the first, nor the last time that fate becomes a narrative mechanism in the novel) wants that he finds the husband of his ex-neighbour. “Ti symptosis” (234) calls it Lang, “what a hell of a coincidence“. (234) And a bigger coincidence if we take into consideration that this same Lang is the same man who appeared in the first chapter when Lenore visited her sister at her campus. But, no matter what, life is full of this odd, inexplicable, coincidences. And many more that we are not aware of.

Following with the philosophy of language, Rick Vigorous quotes (without directly naming him) Austin and his theory of performative words: “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.” (285)

“Lang constructs Lenore, constructs her the way we each of course construct, impose our frameworks of perception and understanding on, the persons who inhabit our individual networks.” (343) Esse est percipi, but also, the construction of reality, of individuals, through our own notions. We construct characters, people, those who surround us and, quite often, we find out that they end up being too similar to our creations up to the point where we begin to doubt whether they are like that because we have “made” them like that or if we have “perceived” them like that because they just were like that to begin with. But, if we accept that reality does not exist without our own perception of it (our concept of “reality“, I mean) it is much more plausible to lean towards the first option.

“No symbol is merely a symbol, Rick. A symbol is valid and appropriate because its reference is real.” (346) But that doesn’t mean that this reference is unchangeable. That’s where lies, too often, the mistake committed by too many. The references of our symbols (let’s say, for instance, the words in our vocabulary) are purely arbitrary, a convention and, therefore, timely and changeable. Wittgenstein built up a dictionary with his students in which the different words had the meaning, the referent, that they all agreed on that was the most adequate. It was, probably, a much more coherent language than ours, more useful and practical but, unfortunately, it didn’t transcend its condition of private language. And maybe it could never be more than that because it is extremely difficult to change human habits because we all tend to concede a universalised, absolute and unchangeable truth to everything constructed by us. So big is our egocentrism. And, in the meantime, we are still using this language full of ambiguities and faults that cannot guarantee that our receiver understands exactly what we are willing to transmit.

“Attachment to things, to places, to other living beings requires in my view expenditures of energy and attention far in excess of the value of the things thus brought into the relation of attachment.” (351) And, too often, we have this same feeling in our daily struggle to connect with the world and those around us. Just like Osvaldo Lamborghini used to say in his last years of reclusion in his flat in Barcelona, why should we get out if no one wants us at all?

And the ending, sudden, unfinished (literally, the last sentence is left unfinished) shows one of the main qualities of this book: the intelligent and clever depiction of the paradoxes of language, narrative and reality.

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David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (Abacus)