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David Foster Wallace's student thesis to be published posthumously

Most university graduates would shy away from the thought of their undergraduate dissertation being shown to anyone other than an examiner, but a US publisher is promising that the late David Foster Wallace's thesis, due for publication later this year, will "restore logic and language to their rightful places".

Author of the acclaimed novels Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System, and praised by Don DeLillo for sentences which "shoot rays of energy in seven directions", Wallace committed suicide in 2008. His unfinished final novel, The Pale King, is lined up for publication next year; now, academic publisher Columbia University Press has announced that it will bring out his undergraduate thesis, a critique of Richard Taylor's argument for fatalism, in December.

The publisher said the writing would allow readers to experience "the developing perspective of this major novelist, along with the beginning of his lifelong struggle to establish solid logical ground for his soaring convictions". It is publishing Wallace's essay as Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, alongside Taylor's original article and other works on fatalism that Wallace refers to in his critique.

An introduction from New York Times magazine editor James Ryerson says the "real accomplishment" of Wallace's writing "is not technical or argumentative but more like a moral victory".

"David Foster Wallace's intellectual powers have been used to set aright a world momentarily upended by an intellectual sleight of hand," writes Ryerson, who believes there are parallels between Wallace's early philosophical writing and his fiction. "He enlists clinical argument in defence of passionate intuition. He restores logic and language to their rightful places."

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Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will

David Foster Wallace, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will , Steven M Cahn and Maureen Eckert (eds.), Columbia University Press, 2011, 252pp., $19.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780231151573.

Reviewed by Daniel Speak, Loyola Marymount University

I accepted the invitation to review this collection, headlined by Wallace's undergraduate senior thesis, on something of a lark. Though I knew Wallace's fiction at the time only by reputation, I had been impressed by the graduation address he delivered at Kenyon College in 2005. This address, you will likely recall, had gone more or less viral among academics because of its profound and quirky defense of the value of a liberal arts education (sending up the whole graduation speech genre while nevertheless saying the sorts of things we have been hoping to hear from sweaty commencement speakers since we first were forced to attend these events). Of course, I was also aware of Wallace's 2008 suicide and the convulsions in the literary world it had caused. Frankly, however, I had my worries that the publication of his undergraduate thesis was a purely opportunistic endeavor under these circumstances. I convinced myself that accepting the invitation might nevertheless have at least two positive results. First, I could use it as a provocation and motivation to tackle Wallace's supposedly mind-bending Infinite Jest (1000+ pages!). Second, an honest and negative assessment of the philosophical merit of the volume, I told myself, might cast some useful light on the opportunism I was afraid was behind its publication.

Having confessed my antecedent suspicions, I now publicly repent them. Fate, Time, and Language contains a great deal of first-rate philosophy throughout, and not least in Wallace's extraordinarily professional and ambitious essay -- an essay that, at 80 pages, composes about a quarter of the volume. The collection (including Wallace's contribution) is tightly focused around the traditional problem of fatalism, especially as this problem was invigorated for contemporary philosophy by Richard Taylor's characteristically elegant and inventive explication in his 1962 Philosophical Review article (also included in the volume). Quite apart from the inclusion of Wallace's essay, the collection of essays in response to Taylor's article could stand alone as a useful (if short) anthology. The addition of Wallace's essay, together with the various bits of reflection on his life as a student and writer, make it both intellectually rich and psychologically illuminating.

Structurally, the volume is composed of four parts. First, there is an excellent general introduction by James Ryerson that provides some useful history with respect to both the contemporary fatalism debate and Wallace's intellectual development up to and after the completion of his thesis at Amherst College in the spring of 1985. In addition, Ryerson does some explaining to non-philosophers of how the central argument of Wallace's thesis works (here I think philosophers will do better to skip these explanations and read the thesis itself first -- not because there is anything misleading in Ryerson's treatment but because it seems clear to me that Wallace's argument will be able to speak for itself). Finally, Ryerson connects Wallace's philosophical interests to his larger work as a novelist and essayist.

The second part of the volume attempts to provide the immediate philosophical background to Wallace's thesis: a collection of thirteen short essays beginning with Taylor's initial essay and followed by the most important responses to it appearing over the next three or four years (and each appearing in either Analysis , The Philosophical Review , or The Journal of Philosophy ). These essays are of a uniformly high quality authored by visible figures in the field (including, for example, John Turk Saunders, Bruce Aune, and Steven Cahn). There are also two further short notes from Taylor himself, commenting on the responses provoked by his argument. All of this quite nicely serves the stated purpose of putting Wallace's essay in context and raising the level of intrigue with respect to the central problem it addresses and the solution it offers. In addition, however, these background articles also provide an illuminating glimpse into the mood and methodology of professional philosophy in the 1960s.

The third section opens with Maureen Eckert's brief introduction to Wallace's essay, which emphasizes the new formal resources for semantics and modality that emerged in the 1970s in the work, in particular, of Saul Kripke, David Lewis, and Richard Montague. As Eckert notes, Wallace's strategy (remarkably sophisticated in its own right, but especially so for an undergraduate) was to bring these new resources to bear on the old problem. With all of the stage-setting now in place, Wallace's thesis, entitled "Richard Taylor's 'Fatalism' and the Semantics of Physical Modality," is printed in full.

Finally, the volume concludes with Jay Garfield's short recollection of Wallace as a student (especially during the writing of his senior thesis) and an appendix. The appendix is Richard Taylor's earlier (1957) article "The Problem of Future Contingencies."

The target problem of this volume is, of course, perennial. According to the form of fatalism that Taylor's influential paper appears to commend, whatever does occur is the only thing that ever could have occurred. This applies also to occurrences that are actions. Thus, whatever you in fact do is the only thing you ever could have done. As Taylor puts it, the fatalist "thinks he cannot do anything about the future." What is especially spooky (or suspicious) about fatalism is that this counterintuitive conclusion about our powerlessness over the future is supposed to follow from what initially appear to be uncontroversial and largely formal commitments. In other words, fatalism is the claim that it is something like a conceptual or semantic truth that no one acts freely. Taylor constructs his fatalistic argument from six presuppositions and a story. [1] The six presuppositions are:

1. Any proposition is either true or, if not true, then false.

2. If one state of affairs is sufficient for another, then the first cannot occur without the second occurring.

3. If one state of affairs is necessary for another, then the second cannot occur with the first occurring.

4. If one set of conditions is necessary for another, then the second is sufficient for the first (and conversely).

5. No agent can perform an act in the absence of some necessary condition for the occurrence of that act.

6. The mere passage of time does not enhance or decrease an agent's powers or abilities.

The story, inspired by Aristotle, goes like this:

Let us now imagine that I am a naval commander, about to issue my order of the day to the fleet. We assume, further, that, within the totality of other considerations prevailing, my issuing of a certain kind of order will ensure that a naval battle will occur tomorrow, whereas if I issue another kind of order, this will ensure that no naval battle occurs. Now, then, I am about to perform one or the other of these two acts, namely, one of issuing an order of the first sort or one of the second sort. Call these alternative acts O and O ' respectively. And call the two propositions, "A naval battle will occur tomorrow" and "No naval battle will occur tomorrow," Q and Q' respectively. We can assert, then, that if I do act O , then my doing such will ensure that there will be a naval battle, whereas if I do O' , my doing that will ensure that no naval battle will occur (p. 46).

But now we have the makings of an argument that either the commander didn't have the power to issue O or he didn't have the power to issue O' . That is, we have the makings of an argument for the conclusion that, appearances notwithstanding, none of us ever enjoys the sort of genuine two-way power we ordinarily associate with free will.

The argument goes like this:

1'. If Q is true, then it is not within my power to do O' (for in case Q is true, then there is, or will be, lacking a condition essential for my doing O' , the condition, namely, of there being no naval battle tomorrow).

2'. But if Q' is true, then it is not within my power to do O (for a similar reason).

3'. But either Q is true or Q' is true.

\ 4'. Either it is not within my power to do O , or it is not within my power to do O' .

In sketching Wallace's distinctive response to Taylor's argument it is worth noting first what seems most to have drawn and kept his attention here. More than one of Wallace's teachers recount that he appeared to have been sincerely disturbed by something like the form of the argument. Reflecting back on his initial discussions with Wallace about the thesis project, Garfield recalls that the young Wallace "was outraged that Taylor sought, and claimed to have derived, an explicitly metaphysical conclusion from purely logical or semantic premises; and he was genuinely offended by the failure of professional philosophers to have put things right" (p. 220). Not only does this reveal a sophisticated philosophical sensibility, it also allows us to see both why Wallace was not satisfied with many of the responses to Taylor's argument that had already appeared in the literature and what was unique in his own approach. Showing that the Taylor argument is unsound simply would not be enough for Wallace, since this would leave the structure of the argument (and its aspirations) essentially intact. What needed to be vindicated was the thought that a metaphysical conclusion cannot follow from purely semantic premises. Therefore, what needed to be shown was that the Taylor argument is invalid -- that the conclusion does not follow from the premises (and the assumptions underlying them). For this reason, Wallace makes every effort to maintain Taylor's six assumptions.

Wallace's strategy for revealing the invalidity in the Taylor argument is to demonstrate the logical nonequivalence of two propositions that the argument runs together. Notice that premises 1' and 2' of Taylor's argument are derived, by the application of something like contraposition, from the stipulations that the occurrence of O will ensure that Q is true and the occurrence of O' will ensure that Q' is true. Given these physical modalities, we can conclude that the falsity of Q would physically necessitate the absence of O and the falsity of Q' would physically necessitate the absence of O' . Having taken these points into consideration, there are still two different ways to understand the claim expressed in 1' (and the same point could be made, obviously, with respect to 2'):

MT1: If there will be no sea battle tomorrow, then today it is not physically possible for the commander to issue the order.

MT2: If there will be no sea battle tomorrow, then tomorrow it will not be physically possible for the commander to issue the order today. [2]

To bring out the nonequivalence, Wallace develops a sophisticated semantics for the physical modality he takes to be at work in Taylor's argument (the "not within my power" locution of Taylor's argument should be understood in terms of physical -- rather than logical or metaphysical -- impossibility). With the semantics worked out, Wallace is able to offer a formal argument for his claim that while (the properly formalized expression of) MT1 entails (the properly formalized expression of) MT2, the converse is false. Furthermore, Wallace argues that, while it is only MT1 that can get us to fatalism, Taylor's argument can, at best, establish only MT2.

This is, of course, far too quick an explication of Wallace's argument and it does little justice to the insight and rigor of his work. In particular, what I have said above may have slipped past you without commanding your recognition. He really does develop, essentially from scratch, a sophisticated semantics for an intuitive brand of physical modality (that he titles "system J") modeled on the work in logical modality of Kripke and Montague. And he really does deploy this system to reveal the formal nonequivalence between MT1 and MT2 in this system. Thus, what Wallace takes himself to have shown is that accepting the validity of the fatalist argument would require rejecting his system J. It turns out to be very difficult to see how one would go about rejecting system J. It is, therefore, not as surprising as you might have anticipated that Jay Garfield reports: "I regarded his argument as decisive then, and I still do." I have noted Garfield's considered assessment not in order to scrutinize it but only to emphasize the serious treatment this volume (and Wallace's thesis in particular) merits. Whether or not Garfield's judgment can ultimately be vindicated, the judgment itself gives the readers of this review a forceful reason to take Wallace's argument seriously.

If there is a clear shortcoming in Wallace's thesis, it is that Wallace has misunderstood certain aspects of Taylor's argument and motivations. This possibility is brought out (gently) by Steven Cahn both in his very brief introduction to the background essays and in his epigraph to the appendix (included, one thinks, to help emphasize just the point Cahn makes in his introduction). It is true that for all Wallace says in his essay he may indeed have thought that Richard Taylor was a fatalist; which would have been a mistake -- a mistake that, Cahn reports, has been quite widely made even by professional philosophers. Taylor's infamous fatalism paper was intended, it seems, not as a defense of its title position but rather as a reductio ad absurdum of the six presuppositions on which his argument depends. As the appendix paper makes clear, Taylor followed Aristotle in rejecting presuppositions 1 and 6. That is, Taylor believed that the truth-value of future contingent propositions is indeterminate and that the passage of time alone could make the determining difference (thereby affecting the powers of agents). On a related note, recall Wallace's resistance to the idea that a metaphysical thesis could be established by appeal to purely semantic premises. Upon reflection (and, again, Cahn makes this point), the sixth presupposition does not appear to be a purely semantic claim. It seems, instead, to be a full-blooded metaphysical claim (about the relationship between time and power). But even if Wallace was mislead about Taylor's wider aims and motivated by a misunderstanding (an explanation of which I can't quite reconstruct) of the status of the fatalist argument's premises, his essay is impressive philosophy. It is possible that its most important contribution will be to return some contemporary attention to the ancient problem and to the worthy work of Richard Taylor.

Having read Infinite Jest alongside the collection under review here, I cannot ignore the parallels between Hal Incandenza (the novel's intellectually precocious teen-aged central character) and the collegiate David Foster Wallace -- who feverishly wrote his thesis in the Amherst philosophy department during his senior year while also penning a complete novel for a second thesis in the English department. [3] In a gesture we are now in position to appreciate, Wallace has Hal Incandenza submit an essay for his college applications entitled "Montague Grammar and the Semantics of Physical Modality". Perhaps more tellingly, we find Incandenza late in the novel, trying to come to terms with his own almost involuntary intellectual precision, noticing that "The dedication and sustained energy that go into true perspicacity and expertise were exhausting even to think about." Whatever this kind of dedication and sustained energy ultimately exacted from Wallace himself, reading his careful and fulsome response to Taylor's fatalism argument reveals that it did contribute to his being an enormously promising philosopher. I find it hard to disagree with Garfield in his conclusion that had Wallace stuck with philosophy, and had he lived, he would have been a major figure in our field. There is also no denying the strange excitement of looking in on the development of a young and uniquely powerful intellect. Those who have read John Rawls' undergraduate thesis will, I think, have a similar experience in reading Wallace's.

[1] Actually, Taylor tells two stories, but we don't need them both here.

[2] I have tried to put these disambiguations in natural language (rather than in the various more formal languages Wallace deploys).

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To the Editor:

In his superb and highly sophisticated review of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel, “The Pale King” (April 17), Tom McCarthy stops to take a look at the publication of “Fate, Time, and Language” — Wallace’s undergraduate philosophy thesis, along with commentary by other authors — about the seminal and controversial 1962 essay “Fatalism,” by the philosopher Richard Taylor. In that essay, based on a set of at least seemingly persuasive logical axioms, Taylor (as have many before him) argued that, logically speaking, the future is essentially as set in stone as the past. McCarthy writes, “That the assertion is ridiculous isn’t the issue” — begging the question right off the bat, it seems to me. Whether it is ridiculous or not is precisely the issue that Wallace and Taylor discuss seriously and disagree seriously about. McCarthy summarizes what he considers the refutation of Taylor’s position, more or less as argued by Wallace’s thesis: “Taylor has assumed a single-lined, inevitable flow from past to future — whereas, even considered logically, each point in this progression in fact splits, along the lines of possibility, into divergent strands.” Along the lines of possibility, yes. Each point contains lots of possibilities, but only one of those possibilities actually occurs. There is no real-world “split,” unless perhaps in the recently posited alternate universes that surround us, such as the one in which I decided not to write this letter — one that may seem pretty appealing if the reader has gotten this far. Only one thing happens here.

Wallace’s novel and essay and McCarthy’s review are excellent demonstrations that the issues of will and choice and agency are, in our era of neurobiological investigations, not sterile and abstract. They are descending from the lofty and, yes, sometimes ridiculous heights of philosophy into the real world of human moral, social, jurisprudential and political actions. (See Daniel Wegner’s wonderful book “The Illusion of Conscious Will,” published a few years ago.) Did you know that if I hold a gun to your head — no, no, a pie to your face — the motor command to mush it there precedes my consciousness of the decision to do so?

DANIEL MENAKER New York

As a co-editor of “Fate, Time, and Language,” I want to clarify a matter obscured in Tom McCarthy’s review: David Foster Wallace wrote no work with this title. His senior thesis at Amherst College was titled “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical Modality.” The book McCarthy reviewed includes Taylor’s original essay, criticisms of it that appeared in leading philosophical journals, Taylor’s replies to his critics, Wallace’s monograph and a related article by Taylor that sheds further light on his views.

Contrary to McCarthy’s claim, Columbia University Press did not publish Wallace’s thesis as a “kind of tie-in” to “The Pale King.” The publication is justified not by Wallace’s later literary accomplishments but by the high quality of his philosophical thinking. The issues he explores were not created, as McCarthy suggests, in the world of “analytical philosophy,” but extend back to Aristotle. They do not concern, as McCarthy unsympathetically puts it, “bean-counting,” but whether statements about our future actions are already true or false, a controversy that has its theological counterpart in the age-old conundrum of whether God’s omniscience is compatible with free will.

McCarthy seems uninterested in such issues, but Wallace found them fascinating, and the detailed analysis he offered will surely be required reading by those who henceforth undertake a serious study of the knotty problem of fatalism.

STEVEN M. CAHN Old Greenwich, Conn. The writer is a professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

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David Foster Wallace: a brief biography

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Philosophical Sweep

To understand the fiction of david foster wallace, it helps to have a little wittgenstein..

The following is adapted from “A Head That Throbbed Heartlike: The Philosophical Mind of David Foster Wallace,” an introduction to Wallace’s undergraduate honor thesis in philosophy, which has just been published by Columbia University Press as Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will .

I. “A special sort of buzz”

When the future novelist David Foster Wallace was about 14 years old, he asked his father, the University of Illinois philosophy professor James D. Wallace, to explain to him what philosophy is, so that when people would ask him exactly what it was that his father did, he could give them an answer. James had the two of them read Plato’s Phaedo dialogue together, an experience that turned out to be pivotal in his understanding of his son. “I had never had an undergraduate student who caught on so quickly or who responded with such maturity and sophistication,” James recalls. “This was this first time I realized what a phenomenal mind David had.”

The experience seems to have made an impression on David as well. Not long after he arrived at Amherst College in the early 1980s, he developed a reputation among his professors as a rare philosophical talent, an exceptional student who combined raw analytical horsepower with an indefatigable work ethic. He was thought, by himself and by others, to be headed toward a career as a professor of philosophy. Even after he began writing fiction, a pursuit he undertook midway through college, philosophy remained the source of his academic identity. “I knew him as a philosopher with a fiction hobby,” Jay Garfield, a professor now at Smith College who worked with Wallace at the time, remembers. “I didn’t realize he was one of the great fiction writers of his generation with a philosophy hobby.”

For most of college, Wallace’s main philosophical interests were in the more technical branches of the subject, such as mathematical logic and the philosophy of language. One semester, he took a seminar on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose early work grapples with the writings of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, two of the founders of modern logic. As Wallace recollected in 1992 in a letter to the novelist Lance Olsen, he was “deeply taken” in the seminar with Wittgenstein’s first book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). Along with its controversial arguments about the nature and limits of language, the Tractatus introduced some indisputable formal innovations, including a method of analyzing the propositions of modern logic by way of “truth tables.” To some, the book might have seemed forbiddingly spare and exacting; Wallace remembered being moved by its “cold formal beauty.” When the seminar moved on to Wittgenstein’s so-called late philosophy, in which he repudiates the ideas and austere methodology of the Tractatus in favor of new assumptions and a looser, less mathematical style, Wallace was not immediately impressed. He wrote to Olsen that at first he found Philosophical Investigations , the crowning statement of the late philosophy, to be “silly.”

Wallace would later identify his attraction to technical philosophy in aesthetic terms: It was, he suggested, a craving for a certain kind of beauty, for the variety of imaginative experience characteristic of formal systems like mathematics and chess. In an interview with the literary critic Larry McCaffery published in 1993, Wallace explained that as a philosophy student he had been “chasing a special sort of buzz,” a flash of feeling whose nature he didn’t comprehend at first. “One teacher called these moments ‘mathematical experiences,’ ” he recalled. “What I didn’t know then was that a mathematical experience was aesthetic in nature, an epiphany in Joyce’s original sense. These moments appeared in proof-completions, or maybe algorithms. Or like a gorgeously simple solution you suddenly see after filling half a notebook with gnarly attempted solutions. It was really an experience of what I think Yeats called ‘the click of a well-made box.’ The word I always think of it as is ‘click.’ ”

For his honors thesis in philosophy, Wallace continued to chase the click, writing a highly specialized, 76-page work on the metaphysical doctrine of fatalism (which holds, quite radically, that human actions and decisions have no influence on the future). Brace yourself for a sample sentence: “Let Φ (a physical possibility structure) be a set of distinct but intersecting paths j i – j n , each of which is a set of functions, L’s, on ordered pairs ( ), such that for any L n , L m in some j i , L n R L m , where R is a primitive accessibility relation corresponding to physical possibility understood in terms of diachronic physical compatibility.” There are reasons that he is better known for an essay about a cruise ship.

II. An “artistic and religious crisis”

One of the many impressive aspects of Wallace’s work on the thesis was that he was able to sustain his philosophical focus long after having begun a countervailing transformation: from budding philosopher to burgeoning novelist. The transition was set in motion toward the end of his sophomore year, when a bout of severe depression overcame him. He left school early and took off the following term. Wallace would suffer from depression for much of his life, and he tended to avoid public discussion of it. On a rare occasion in which he did allude publicly to his hiatus from Amherst, in his interview with McCaffery about a decade later, he described the episode as a crisis of identity precipitated by mounting ambivalence about his future as a philosopher. “I was just awfully good at technical philosophy,” he said, “and it was the first thing I’d ever been really good at, and so everybody, including me, anticipated I’d make it a career. But it sort of emptied out for me somewhere around age twenty.”

A debilitating panic followed. “Not a fun time,” he went on. “I think I had a kind of midlife crisis at twenty, which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity.” He moved back home to Illinois, “planning to play solitaire and stare out the window,” as he put it—”whatever you do in a crisis.” Though he now doubted that he should devote his life to philosophy, he was still drawn to the topic and found ways to engage with it, even dropping in on a few of his father’s lectures at the university, where he monopolized the discussion. “He came to some of my classes in aesthetics, and tended to press me very hard,” James Wallace told me. “The classes usually turned into a dialogue between David and me. The students looked on with ‘Who is this guy?’ looks on their faces.”

During this time, Wallace started writing fiction. Though it represented a clean break from philosophy, fiction, as an art form, offered something comparable to the feeling of aesthetic recognition that he had sought in mathematical logic—the so-called click. “At some point in my reading and writing that fall I discovered the click existed in literature, too,” he told McCaffery. “It was real lucky that just when I stopped being able to get the click from math logic I started to be able to get it from fiction.” When he returned to Amherst, he nonetheless resumed his philosophical studies (eventually including his work on Taylor’s “Fatalism”), but with misgivings: he hoped he would ultimately be bold enough to give up philosophy for literature. His close friend Mark Costello, who roomed with him at Amherst (and also became a novelist), told me that the shift was daunting for Wallace. “The world, the reference, of philosophy was an incredibly comfortable place for young Dave,” he said. “It was a paradox. The formal intellectual terms were cold, exact, even doomed. But as a place to be, a room to be in, it was familiar, familial, recognized.” Fiction, Costello said, was the “alien, risky place.”

Wallace’s solution was to pursue both aims at once. His senior year, while writing the honors thesis in philosophy, he also completed an honors thesis in creative writing for the English Department, a work of fiction nearly 500 pages long that would become his first novel, The Broom of the System , which was published two years later, in 1987. Even just the manual labor required to produce two separate theses could be overwhelming, as suggested by an endearingly desperate request Wallace made in a letter to William Kennick, the Amherst professor who had taught his Wittgenstein seminar. “Since you’re on leave,” he wrote, “are you using your little office in Frost library? If not, does it have facilities for typing, namely an electrical outlet and a reasonably humane chair? If so, could I maybe use the office from time to time this spring? I have a truly horrifying amount of typing to do this spring—mostly for my English thesis, which has grown Blob-like and out of control—and my poor neighbors here in Moore are already being kept up and bothered a lot.”

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, a philosopher now at the University of New Hampshire and the principal adviser on Wallace’s thesis, 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.”

III. “INTERPRET-ME fiction”

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 “hard-core 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 Lance Olsen, Wallace revealed that Gramma Beadsman was “based loosely” on Alice Ambrose, “a very old former Smith professor who lived near me”—Smith College is part of the Five Colleges consortium to which Amherst belongs—”and had been one of the students whose notes were comprised by Witt’s Blue and Brown books.” Though Wittgenstein’s late philosophy was published posthumously, parts of it were available during his lifetime in the form of two sets of students’ notes known as the “Blue Book” and the “Brown Book”; the “Brown Book” notes were dictated to Ambrose and another student, Francis Skinner, during classes at Cambridge in 1934–35. As the great-granddaughter of Alice Ambrose/Gramma Beadsman, Lenore, like Wallace himself, is the descendent of a philosopher with an amanuensis-like connection to Wittgenstein: James Wallace’s mentor, Norman Malcolm, served as the sounding-board and assistant for the writing of Wittgenstein’s final philosophical work, On Certainty .

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.

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 bildungsroman ,” 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 wrote “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.”

IV. “A kind of philosophical sci-fi”

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 Tractatus ized 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.”

V. “The loss of the whole external world” The particular form of “human loneliness” to which Wallace was attuned was the sense of seclusion suggested by solipsism. Kate, Markson’s narrator, seems to be in a situation like this, her world constituted entirely by her mental states. She shares this predicament with the traditional metaphysical subject of epistemology—the knowing consciousness, the “I” of Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am”—who begins his intellectual journey trapped in his own mind, concerned that everything might just be a figment of his imagination (though he ultimately builds his way out of those confines to reach the external world). Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus , runs into the concern that his argument leads to solipsism—and his striking response is to agree, after a fashion, that it does. “There’s a kind of tragic fall Wittgenstein’s obsessed with,” starting with the Tractatus , Wallace explained to McCaffery. “I mean a real Book-of-Genesis-type tragic fall. The loss of the whole external world.”

How did Wittgenstein get to this point? The Tractatus is concerned with a disarmingly basic question: How is language possible? When we consider the world around us, everything seems to interact with everything else causally , in accordance with the laws of nature. The exception is a certain strange thing we call language, which somehow manages to interact with other things in the world in an entirely different way: it represents them meaningfully. The ability to represent things allows us to communicate, enables us to deal with things that are not actually present to us , and provides the fabric of our mental life, our daily thoughts. But how is it, exactly, that language produces meaning?

In the Tractatus , Wittgenstein argues that for words to represent things, for sentences to stand for states of affairs, language and reality have to share something in common. To explain what this commonality is, he introduces his so-called picture theory of meaning. An ordinary spoken or written sentence, he contends, when properly analyzed or disassembled into its component bits, reveals an elementary structure of logical parts and factual parts. This elementary structure, he argues, literally pictures reality: objects in the world correlate with the words in the sentence, and the relations among and between objects in the world correlate with the relations among and between the words in the sentence. A sentence has a certain elementary structure; things in the world can stand to one another in a certain structure; the identity of these two structures simply is meaning. A meaningful sentence depicts a possible state of affairs in the world; a meaningful and true sentence depicts an actual state of affairs in the world; anything in language that does not depict a possible state of affairs—that is, anything that does not depict possible fact —is, strictly speaking, meaningless.

Wittgenstein draws from the picture theory of meaning some arresting philosophical conclusions. The Tractatus regards as nonsensical, as literally meaningless, any claim that cannot be reduced to discrete facts about things in the world—for instance, any statements about ethics or aesthetics (“goodness” and “beauty” don’t refer to actual things or properties). Another such type of nonsense, according to Wittgenstein, are metaphysical statements, claims about the supernatural, say, or the nature of the world as a whole. How language relates to reality—the very subject of the Tractatus —is itself, however, a concern about the world as a whole. This is the central irony of the Tractatus : its own claims are, strictly speaking, meaningless. They can be used only to try to show , but never to state , anything true. (This is the source of Wittgenstein’s famous parting image of his book as a ladder that his reader must “throw away” after “he has climbed up it.”)

For Wallace, the most disquieting feature of the Tractatus was its treatment of solipsism. Toward the end of the book, Wittgenstein concludes, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” This is a natural corollary of the picture theory of meaning: Given that there is a strict one-to-one mapping between states of affairs in the world and the structure of sentences, what I cannot speak of (that is, what I cannot meaningfully speak of) is not a fact of my world. But where am “I” situated in this world? By “I,” I don’t mean the physical person whom I can make factual reports about. I mean the metaphysical subject, the Cartesian “I,” the knowing consciousness that stands in opposition with the external world. “Where in the world,” Wittgenstein writes, “is a metaphysical subject to be found?”

On the one hand, the answer is nowhere. Wittgenstein can’t make any sense of the philosophical self—any talk of it is, strictly speaking, nonsense. On the other hand, Wittgenstein can get some purchase on this question. He draws an analogy between the “I” (and the external world) and the eye (and the visual field): Though I cannot see my own eye in my visual field, the very existence of the visual field is nothing other than the working of my eye; likewise, though the philosophical self cannot be located in the world, the very experience of the world is nothing other than what it is to be an “I.” Nothing can be said about the self in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, but the self is made manifest insofar as “the world is my world”—or, as Wittgenstein more strikingly phrases it, “I am my world.” This, he declares, is “how much truth there is in solipsism.”

“I am my world” is what Wallace had in mind when he spoke of “the loss of the whole external world” in the Tractatus . There is no difference, ultimately, for Wittgenstein between solipsism and realism (solipsism “coincides with pure realism,” he writes). For Wallace, this was a harrowing equation, the dark emotional takeaway of the Tractatus ’s severe anti-metaphysics. This was also, for Wallace, what Markson had rendered imaginatively in his novel. Without ever raising these ideas explicitly, Markson had conveyed them with a special kind of clarity. Wittgenstein ’ s Mistress , by echoing the Tractatus ’s brusque, dreamlike sentences and placing Kate in a cold, lonely, self-as-world cosmos, had managed, as Wallace put it, to “capture the flavor both of solipsism and of Wittgenstein.” What’s more, Wallace felt Markson had done something that even Wittgenstein hadn’t been able to do: he humanized the intellectual problem, communicating “the consequences, for persons, of the practice of theory ; the difference, say, between espousing ‘solipsism’ as a metaphysical ‘position’ & waking up one fine morning after a personal loss to find your grief apocalyptic, literally millennial, leaving you the last and only living thing on earth.” That was something only fiction, not philosophy, could do.

Solipsism, sometimes discussed as a doctrine but also evoked as a metaphor for isolation and loneliness, pervades Wallace’s writing. “Plainly, Dave, as a guy and a writer, had a lifelong horror/fascination with the idea of a mind sealed off,” Mark Costello told me. “His stories are full of sealed-off people.” The self-obsessing narrator of “Good Old Neon,” who has committed suicide and addresses the reader from beyond the grave, says “you’re at least getting an idea, I think, of what it was like inside my head,” of “how exhausting and solipsistic it is to be like this.” The high-school students at the tennis academy in Infinite Jest wrestle with the question, “how we can keep from being 136 deeply alone people all jammed together?”—a problem that one of them diagnoses in intellectual terms (“Existential individuality, frequently referred to in the West. Solipsism”) and another in emotional ones (“In a nutshell, what we’re talking about here is loneliness”). The novelist Jonathan Franzen, one of Wallace’s close friends, has said that he and Wallace agreed that the fundamental purpose of fiction was to combat loneliness. The paradox for Wallace was that to be a writer called for spending a lot of time alone in one’s own head, giving rise to the feeling, as he wrote in “The Empty Plenum,” “that one’s head is, in some sense, the whole world, when the imagination becomes not just a more congenial but a realer environment than the Big Exterior of life on earth.”

VI. “ The single most beautiful argument against solipsism that’ s ever been made.”

Could solipsism be overcome? In The Broom of the System , Norman Bombardini, a very wealthy and very overweight man who owns the building in which Lenore works, bemoans what he calls “the Great Horror”: the prospect of “an empty, rattling personal universe, one where one finds oneself with a Self, on one hand, and vast empty lonely spaces before Others begin to enter the picture at all, on the other.” He devises a solution, a kind of spoof of the Tractatus ’s line “I am my world,” which is to keep eating until he grows to infinite size, making himself coextensive with the world. (He calls the scheme “Project Total Yang.”) Bombardini is only a minor character in the novel, and fittingly so, for the bulk of The Broom of the System is concerned not with the solipsism of early Wittgenstein but rather with the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein—who roundly rejected solipsism. Just as Markson conjured the solipsism of the Tractatus into an artistic creation, so too did Wallace hope to summon, in Broom , the anti-solipsistic worldview of Philosophical Investigations .

The Investigations offers a conception of language that is diametrically opposed that of the picture theory of the Tractatus . In Wittgenstein’s early work, language is something sublime, logical, abstract—something with a defining structure or essence that, if you think hard enough, you can puzzle out in your head. In the Investigations , by contrast, language is seen as a messy human phenomenon, part of social reality—a rich variety of everyday practices that you figure out the way a child does, by publicly engaging in them, getting the hang of the unspoken rules by which communities use them. The shift in imagery is from language as a picture to language as a tool . This is the point of the Wittgensteinian mantra “meaning as use”: If you want to understand the meaning of a word or phrase or gesture, you don’t try to figure out what it represents ; you try to figure out how to use it in real life. Wittgenstein called the rule-governed social practices that determine meaning “language games.”

As Wallace was delighted to discover when he immersed himself in the Investigations later in college, the implications of this view for solipsism are potentially devastating. Given Wittgenstein’s conception of language as a public phenomenon, whereby words get their meaning only by virtue of their shared use, what are we to make of the notion of a strictly private language, the voice of a solipsistic “I” who is speaking only to himself, in his own unique tongue, reporting private sensations and entertaining private thoughts in an otherwise barren world—the voice of a person living entirely in his own head? Wittgenstein’s answer was that this idea, though seemingly viable, at least as a thought experiment, is in fact incoherent. The meaning of words is their use; the use of words is a matter of following rules; and following rules is entirely a social affair. There cannot be thought apart from the use of language—and language can operate only within a set of social practices. Thus there is no private thought without a corresponding public reality. “An ‘inner process,’ ” as Wittgenstein put it, “stands in need of outward criteria.” To phrase it in Cartesian terms: I think, therefore I am part of a community of others .

Wallace told McCaffery that Philosophical Investigations was “the single most beautiful argument against solipsism that’s ever been made.” Though the anti-private-language argument has been extraordinarily controversial, Wallace heralded it as though it were an indisputable mathematical proof. “The point here,” he wrote in “Authority and American Usage,” while giving a summary of Wittgenstein’s argument, “is that the idea of a private language, like private colors and most of the other solipsistic conceits with which this reviewer has at various times been afflicted, is both deluded and demonstrably false.” Solipsism was dead. Loneliness—at least that image of loneliness—was an illusion.

The defeat of solipsism was half of what Wallace sought to capture in Broom . But while Wittgenstein may have “solved” solipsism for Wallace, there was a catch—a final entangling conundrum with its own frightening implications—which Wallace also wanted to convey. On its face, the account of language in the Investigations seems pleasantly, reassuringly everyday: language is an ordinary, familiar, social, custom-bound human activity. But in other respects the account is quite extreme. Because all language and thought take place inside some language game or other, there is no transcendent, non-language-game standpoint from which you can step back, as it were, and see if any language game is better than any other—if one of them, for instance, does a better job of mirroring reality than another. Indeed, the question of whether any language game accurately represents reality can be asked only within some other language game, which operates according to its own set of nonevaluable conventions. In his early work Wittgenstein was in the business of stepping back from language, appraising its relation with reality, and pronouncing which uses connected us with something real and which did not; the Investigations is in another business altogether, describing without judging, merely “assembling reminders for a purpose,” in Wittgenstein’s phrase.

In Wallace’s view, Wittgenstein had left us, again, without the possibility of contact with the outside world. As he told McCaffery, the Investigations “eliminated solipsism but not the horror.” The only difference between this new predicament and that of the Tractatus was that rather than being trapped alone in our private thoughts, we were trapped together, with other people, in the institution of language. This was warmer than solipsism, but, as another form of being sealed-off from reality, it was cold comfort. Explaining this disheartening realization, Wallace said that “unfortunately we’re still stuck with the idea that there’s 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.”

In The Broom of the System , these two dueling emotional reactions—the fear of being trapped in language and the relief that at least we’re all trapped in it together—are given playful expression. Lenore suffers from a fear, as she explains to her psychiatrist, that Gramma Beadsman is right that “there’s no such thing” as “extra-linguistic anything .” (Wallace’s metafictional joke is that, for Lenore, as a character in a novel, there really isn ’ t any reality other than language.) Lenore’s boyfriend, a magazine editor named Rick Vigorous, soothes her throughout the book by compulsively telling her stories. Each of his stories is a not-so-thinly veiled allegory of the problems in their relationship, so that, even within the confines of the novel, Lenore and Rick become characters joined together in a reality constituted entirely by language. In the novel’s climactic scene, a televangelist-charlatan named Reverend Sykes provides another image of this same double bind: escaping loneliness together in a language game, but sealed off from a higher reality. He asks the members of his TV audience to lay their hands on their TV screens in unison in order to commune with God—to join together in what he calls a “game” that will give everyone the consoling impression of making contact, together, with the ultimate transcendent referent. “So friends,” Sykes says, “laugh if you will, but tonight I have a game for us to play together. A profoundly and vitally important game for us to play together tonight.” His patter culminates in a three-sentence exhortation, the lines of which invoke the ideas of “meaning as use,” language games, and the struggle against loneliness: “Use me, friends. Let us play the game together. I promise that no player will feel alone.” Compared to the artful techniques of Markson’s novel, these devices may seem clunky, but the intellectual aspiration was much the same.

It is worth noting that, in his discussions of Markson, Broom , and solipsism, Wallace was engaging throughout in what you might call a “strong misreading” of Wittgenstein’s work. His explications of Wittgenstein’s philosophy are not always convincing or strictly true. Highly questionable, for instance, is his assertion of what he called “the postmodern, poststructuralist” implications of the Investigations , which entail that we can’t make true claims about the real world (a popular reading of Wittgenstein that many scholars hotly dispute). More straightforwardly wrong is Wallace’s claim that Wittgenstein shared Wallace’s own horror of the picture of the world in the Tractatus . Wallace told McCaffery that the reason Wittgenstein “trashed everything he’d been lauded for in the Tractatus ” and developed the philosophy of the Investigations was that he “realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.” Wallace also contended, in “The Empty Plenum,” that the impoverished role granted to ethics, aesthetics, and spiritual values in the Tractatus was “a big motivation” for its disavowal.

In truth, however, the biographical literature suggests that Wittgenstein was perfectly at ease with the solipsism of the Tractatus , as well as oddly, even mystically consoled by its suggestion that ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual truths are unutterable. As for the development of the late philosophy, it seems to have had its origins not in a fear of solipsism but rather in two deeply resonant objections: a technical criticism that the British mathematician Frank Ramsey made in 1923 about the Tractatus ’s treatment of the matter of “color-exclusion” and a playful challenge, posed by the Italian economist Piero Saffra, that Wittgenstein provide the “logical form” of a meaningful hand gesture.

It’s possible that Wallace’s own anxieties about being “trapped” in his own head colored or confused his reading of Wittgenstein—that he projected them, in philosophical terms, onto the Tractatus and the Investigations , resulting in an overemphasis on solipsism and giving Wittgenstein’s treatment of the doctrine an alarmist, even hysterical cast. But given Wallace’s otherwise sure-handed feel for philosophical texts, it seems likely that his distortions were at least in part intentional, offered in the service of artistic and emotional “truths.” That would certainly be consistent with the ideal of fictionalized philosophy that he strove for in Broom and venerated in Wittgenstein ’ s Mistress —a kind of writing that blended scholarly command and poetic reimagining.

Whatever the explanation for his preoccupation with solipsism in Wittgenstein, Wallace never abandoned his fixation on sealed-off people. Few readers of Infinite Jest will forget the lonely fate of the Hal Incandenza, who becomes so alienated from the world that his speech becomes unintelligible to others, or the lifeless zombiehood that befalls anyone who watches the novel’s eponymous film, which is so entertaining that its viewer becomes incapable of doing anything other than watch it. But Mark Costello pointed out to me an important irony: for someone as obsessed with isolation as Wallace, he was “obviously a social novelist, a novelist of noticed details, on a near-encyclopedic scale.” Where other novelists dealing with solipsism, like Markson and Beckett, painted barren images with small compressed sentences, Costello observed, “Dave tackled the issue by massively overfilling his scenes and sentences to comic bursting”—indeed to the point of panicked overstimulation. There was a palpable strain for Wallace between engagement with the world, in all its overwhelming fullness, and withdrawal to one’s own head, in all its loneliness. The world was too much, the mind alone too little. “You can’t be anything but contemptible living for yourself,” Costello said, summing up the dilemma. “But letting the world in—that sucks too.”

It’s not exactly what you’d call an intellectual conundrum. But it was the lived one.

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Imperially Alone: David Foster Wallace and The Role of Fiction

ROONEY, THOMAS,EDWARD,MARK (2016) Imperially Alone: David Foster Wallace and The Role of Fiction. Masters thesis, Durham University.

This thesis explores the life and work of American writer David Foster Wallace. Through examining his fiction and non-fiction, it charts the development of his ideas and also attempts to identify the driving intention and goals behind his writing. Wallace’s work is analysed with particular regard to his literary style, recurring themes of entertainment, addiction, loss of self and isolation. His work is also compared with a contemporary writer: Bret Easton Ellis. This thesis has been researched through use of Wallace’s body of work, critical writing on Wallace, and Wallace’s papers held at the Harry Ransom Archive at the University of Texas in Austin.

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David foster wallace:, an inventory of his papers at the harry ransom center.

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Wallace and I: cognition, consciousness, and dualism in David Foster Wallace’s fiction

Redgate, Jamie Peter (2017) Wallace and I: cognition, consciousness, and dualism in David Foster Wallace’s fiction. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Though David Foster Wallace is well known for declaring that “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being” (Conversations 26), what he actually meant by the term “human being” has been quite forgotten. It is a truism in Wallace studies that Wallace is a posthuman writer whose characters are devoid of any kind of inner interiority or soul. This is a misreading of Wallace’s work.

My argument is that Wallace’s work and his characters—though they are much neglected in Wallace studies—are animated by the tension between materialism and essentialism, and this dualism is one of the major ways in which Wallace bridges postmodern fiction with something new. My project is itself part of this post-postmodern turn, a contribution to the emerging field of cognitive literary studies which has tried to move beyond postmodernism by bringing a renewed focus on the sciences of mind to literary criticism. As yet, this field has largely focused on fiction published before the twentieth century. I expand the purview of cognitive literary studies and give a rigorous and necessary account of Wallace’s humanism.

In each chapter I discuss a particular concern that Wallace shares with his predecessors (authorship; selfhood; therapy; free will), and explore how Wallace’s dualism informs his departure from postmodernism. I begin by setting out the key scientific sources for Wallace, and the embodied model of mind that was foundational to his writing and his understanding, especially after Barthes’s “Death of the Author,” of the writing process. In chapter 2, I unravel the unexamined but hugely significant influence of René Descartes on Wallace’s ghost stories, showing that Wallace’s work is not as posthuman as it is supposed to be. In chapter 3, I discuss the dualist metaphors that Wallace consistently uses to describe an individual’s experience of sickness. Focusing on the interior lives of both therapist and patient in Wallace’s work, I show that Wallace’s therapy fictions are a critical response to postmodern anti-psychiatry. Finally, in chapter 4, I reconcile Wallace’s dualist account of material body and essential mind by setting his work against both the history of the philosophy of free will and postmodern paranoid fiction.

If Wallace’s fiction is about what it is to be a human being, this thesis is about the human ‘I’ at the heart of Wallace’s work.

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The Life and Legacy of David Foster Wallace

Concept map.

David Foster Wallace, an acclaimed American author, left an indelible mark on contemporary literature with works like 'Infinite Jest' and 'The Pale King'. His essays and speeches, such as 'This Is Water', delve into American culture and the ethical dimensions of life. Wallace's profound influence continues despite his untimely death in 2008, with his writings still resonating with readers and scholars.

Early Life and Education

Family and upbringing.

David Foster Wallace was raised in a family of academics in Philo, Illinois, where his parents' professions in English and Philosophy influenced his intellectual development

Academic Pursuits

Focus on Writing

Despite showing promise in mathematics and being a competitive junior tennis player, Wallace's academic pursuits at Amherst College led him to focus on writing

Senior Theses

Wallace's senior theses in philosophy and English were published posthumously and formed the basis for his first novel, "The Broom of the System," showcasing his early integration of complex ideas into fiction

Literary Career

Debut novel.

"The Broom of the System," published in 1987, introduced readers to Wallace's unique narrative style and talent for embedding intricate philosophical themes within his storytelling

Most Renowned Work

Complex Structure and Depth

"Infinite Jest," published in 1996, is Wallace's most renowned work, notable for its length, complex structure, and exploration of themes such as addiction, entertainment, and the search for authenticity

Engagement with Profound Human Concerns

The novel's title, a reference to Shakespeare's "Hamlet," reflects Wallace's engagement with profound human concerns and solidifies his status as a pivotal figure in postmodern literature

Unfinished Novel

"The Pale King," published posthumously in 2011, explores themes of boredom, attention, and the search for meaning through the lens of employees at the Internal Revenue Service

Other Contributions

Beyond his novels, Wallace was a masterful essayist, offering incisive critiques of American culture, entertainment, and personal experiences in collections such as "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" and "Consider the Lobster."

Commencement Speech

Core Values

Wallace's Kenyon College commencement speech, "This Is Water," encourages readers to practice empathy, maintain self-awareness, and consciously navigate the complexities of daily life, reflecting his deep engagement with the ethical dimensions of human existence

Published as a Book

The speech was later published as a book, solidifying its impact and reach

Despite his tragic passing, Wallace's influential body of work continues to inspire and challenge readers and writers alike, with his personal papers archived at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin

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Birthplace and date of David Foster Wallace

Born February 21, 1962, in Ithaca, New York.

David Foster Wallace's academic focus at Amherst College

Focused on writing; produced two senior theses in philosophy and English.

David Foster Wallace's first novel origin

First novel 'The Broom of the System' originated from his English senior thesis.

The central character, ______, embarks on a quest for self-discovery and significance via ______.

Lenore Beadsman language

Infinite Jest publication year

Published in 1996

Infinite Jest narrative setting

Set in a near-future North American superstate

Infinite Jest central themes

Explores addiction, entertainment, search for authenticity

______, an incomplete work by ______ ______ ______, was released after his death in ______.

The Pale King David Foster Wallace 2011

The narrative of 'The Pale King' revolves around the lives of ______ ______ ______ workers, delving into the monotony of daily life and the quest for purpose.

Internal Revenue Service

David Foster Wallace's essay prowess

Renowned for essays in various publications; collections critique U.S. culture and personal experiences.

Significance of 'A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again'

Collection of essays offering sharp observations on American society and entertainment industry.

Impact of 'This Is Water'

Commencement speech turned book; emphasizes empathy, self-awareness, and ethical life navigation.

The literary world suffered a loss when ______ ______ ______ died on ______ ______, ______, after a long battle with depression.

David Foster Wallace September 12 2008

______ ______ ______'s writings and personal documents are preserved at the ______ ______ ______ at the ______ ______ ______ at ______.

David Foster Wallace Harry Ransom Center University of Texas Austin

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David Foster Wallace: A Literary Force in Contemporary American Fiction

The Emergence of a Distinctive Voice with "The Broom of the System"

"infinite jest": a landmark in postmodern literature, posthumous reflections in "the pale king", insightful critiques in wallace's nonfiction works, the enduring impact of david foster wallace's work.

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Depth of Frame: “Capture” in the Works of David Foster Wallace

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Author Interviews

The writer who was the voice of a generation.

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story

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When writer David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008 at the age of 46, U.S. literature lost one of its most influential living writers.

The definitive account of Wallace's life and what led to his suicide was published in the New Yorker in March of the following year.

Now D.T. Max, who wrote that article, has written a new a biography of Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story . It's a deeply researched look into the life and work of a writer who was called the voice of his generation. Max spoke to Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered .

Interview Highlights

On how David Foster Wallace changed American literature:

A number of things go into that. Obviously, just the pure pleasure of his most important books. Reading Infinite Jest is certainly — [it] contains more pleasure, more agony, more of American life at the turn of the millennium. I think the second thing is simply that he influenced so many people. Writers from Dave Eggers to Chad Harbach — you just can see that he left disciples. I think also something very interesting happened, which is that the Web came along. And the Web lends itself very well to the kind of writer that David really had pioneered, that had nothing to do with the Web — and so now you go on the Web and you feel like you're reading 10,000 imitators of David Foster Wallace. There's nobody else who's changed American prose to that extent, that I can think of, in generations. I almost think about someone like Mark Twain.

On Wallace's early life, fraught with anxiety:

I think, actually, this was probably even a surprise to his family, because he was good at hiding these things. He traces his first anxieties back to being 8 or 9. He speaks about a morbid fear of mosquitoes and buzzing. By the time he's in high school, David is really, I think — he's anxious all the time. There are days when he can't get up and go to school. [At a college interview at Oberlin], he was so anxious that basically as soon as the interview was over, he threw up — and kept throwing up. Shortly after that, he goes to Amherst, where his father went. In those days, at Amherst, if you were the son of an alum and they liked you, they would admit you at the interview. So he was admitted at the interview, and then his response was, 'If I go to Amherst, do I never have to do another college interview?' And his father said, 'Yes'. And he said, 'sold.'

How Wallace was drawn to fiction in college:

He very much assumed that he would follow in his father's footsteps as a philosophy professor. He went through his first two years, and he turned out to have a knack for sort of mathematical philosophy, mathematical logic. But David had a breakdown in college. So he goes home — and this is a boy who wrote some in high school, but he wasn't a writer in any sense of it — and really pretty quickly he begins to turn out extraordinarily good fiction. So much so, that by the time he is a senior [back at] Amherst — and he's only been writing for about a year and a half — he begins a thesis in fiction. He does a double thesis, one in fiction, one in philosophy — but his fiction becomes The Broom Of The System , his first, I think, incredibly brilliant novel. One of the cool things about David is that you can really sense that in learning how to write what he was really doing was reverse-engineering other writers. He was looking at how Thomas Pynchon wrote, he was looking at how Don DeLillo wrote. He was breaking their sentences apart and seeing if he could write them.

On Wallace's post-graduate struggle with addiction to drugs and alcohol:

D.T. Max is a staff writer at The New Yorker . Flash Rosenberg/Penguin Group hide caption

D.T. Max is a staff writer at The New Yorker .

He always referred to himself as an addict. He becomes deeply involved in 12-step programs. And his life changes. He wouldn't have made it even to his mid-30s, I would think, had he not found the strength to get away from his addictions. Now his primary addiction was marijuana — it was not drinking. And in a lot of ways, one of the things about David that's so interesting is that his life — the accidents of his life — really gave him the key to his writing. In a lot of ways, the 12-step program is what taught David how to write Infinite Jest or where the book should go — that it should be more than just a pretty piece of fiction.

Why, 2008, Wallace discontinued longtime use of an anti-depressant, which led to his suicide:

Physically, the anti-depressant he was on, Nardil, is hard to metabolize. And it was kind of an outdated anti-depressant. He was also just miserable that he couldn't get his novel — The Pale King , the book that was just published last year — because David works on it for a decade — but the writing wasn't coming. And he thought that the Nardil was perhaps interfering with his ability to write well, because it made things seem a little distant, made his own relationship to reality a little less keyed-up. And he wondered if he could just get rid of the Nardil, well, that would help his writing. And then the third reason, which is something I discovered in working on the book, is that, you know, having been a member of this 12-step program — there's a whole group of people within 12-step programs who think you should be completely drug-free. No alcohol. No marijuana. No prescription anti-depressants. So, poor David, who always wants to be the best student in the class, wanted to be the best possible 12-step program participant. And so, he thought, well, I'll just get off it. And once you're off one of these drugs, it can be very, very hard to stabilize yourself again. And he just wasn't able to.

On the title Every Love Story is a Ghost Story:

Shortly after I began the book, I started to come into possession of letters that David had written to other people. But David didn't keep any letters, so all I have is David's letters out. And I noticed, again and again, in different places, he would put in the phrase, 'every love story is a ghost story.' It starts when he's a graduate student in the mid-'80s. The phrase appears in The Pale King . The title probably came to him through reading some correspondence of the novelist Christina Stead. But why did that phrase stick in his head for so long? It seems to me that it captures so perfectly what he always felt was the futility, the difficulty, of not just writing about people, but actually being with people. He had a great deal of trouble in his relationships and a great deal of trouble understanding relationships. And then, of course, I also felt like that was really the reader's relationship with David. It wasn't really just a reference to his suicide, but obviously contained a big aspect of the fact that he was gone now, and whatever love readers felt for him was now going to be a love for an absence. For a ghost.

Related NPR Stories

Books we like, the magic of david foster wallace's unfinished 'king', a not-so-brief interview with david foster wallace.

• David Foster Wallace

Writing Program

David Foster Wallace and the Ethics of Writing

“If words are all we have as world and god we must treat them with care and rigor: we must worship.”—David Foster Wallace

This interdisciplinary symposium, organized by Gallatin professors Gregory Erickson and Scott Korb , brings together scholars, authors, students, and actors to explore the ethical and moral side of writing through the work of David Foster Wallace. Comprising five events, diverse in format and approach, the symposium will engage topics including Wallace and religion, Wallace and race, and the ethics of biographical writing. The final event will be an excerpt from director Daniel Fish’s acclaimed theater piece based on audio recordings of Wallace, to be performed by Mary Rasmussen and Jenny Seastone. Participants include Maria Bustillos, Samuel Cohen ( The Legacy of David Foster Wallac e, Paul Elie (Reinventing Bach ), D.T. Max (Every Love Story is A Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace ), David Lipsky ( Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace ), Matthew Sitman, and Kevin Timpe ( Free Will ).

This event is hosted by New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and the Gallatin Writing Program, with co-sponsorship from NYU’s Creative Writing Program.

Schedule of Events 3:00 - 3:45 Student reading of Wallace passages 4:00 - 4:45 Wallace and Religion | a round table                     With Paul Elie, Gregory Erickson, and Kevin Timpe. Matthew Sitman moderates 5:00 - 5:45 Two short talks                     Maria Bustillos presents “Since Man First Crept From The Primeval Slurry”                     Samuel Cohen presents “The Whiteness of David Foster Wallace” 6:00 - 6:45 The Ethics of Biography | a panel discussion                     With David Lipsky and D.T. Max. Scott Korb moderates 7:00 - 7:45 An excerpt from A (radically condensed and expanded) SUPPOSEDLY FUN                     THING I'LL NEVER DO AGAIN                     Based on works from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Brief                     Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace                     Conceived and Directed by Daniel Fish                     Produced with the permission of the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust                     Performed by Mary Rasmussen and Jenny Seastone, Assistant Director                     Alexandra Kuechler-Caffall

Book sales courtesy of Books on Call. Authors will be available for signing.

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1 David Foster Wallace and the Fallacies of “Fatalism”

• Published: April 2015
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This chapter presents David Foster Wallace's argument against John Turk Saunders' criticism of fatalism in Richard Taylor's essay “The Problem of Future Contingencies.” The essay was a carefully argued defense of Aristotle's view that assertions concerning future contingent events are neither true nor false, in which Taylor stated that fatalists do not concern themselves of the future, which is deemed uncontrollable. Saunders criticized this argument, saying that a person has the power to do something for the future. Despite being a critic of fatalism himself, Wallace claimed that Saunders' argument did not really succeed in refuting the notion of fatalist intuition. Even though Saunders' claim points out that Taylor's argument has implications that oppose people's intuitions about the world and about language, fatalists have their own intuition about the world.

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Where were you when the first plane hit the World Trade Center? David Foster Wallace—the experimental novelist who grew up in Illinois; who wrote Infinite Jest , which established him as the most influential author of his generation ; and who committed suicide in 2008 at the age of 46—was in the shower of his Bloomington-Normal home, listening to a Bears postmortem on WSCR.

Wallace, who didn’t own a TV, ended up at the house of Mrs. Thompson—”one of the world’s cooler seventy-four-year-olds,” as he put it an essay about that day for Rolling Stone . Most readers remark on Wallace’s page-long sentences, his rococo vocabulary, his infamous footnotes, but his best work has always depended on its smaller, more intimate details. And in writing about that morning with Mrs. Thompson and some ladies from the church they both attended, he gets the details exactly right: the way the living room was decorated with knit samplers and a mallard wall clock; the way the small-town newspaper proceeded to trip all over itself (the next day’s headline: “ISU PROFESSOR: B-N NOT A LIKELY TARGET”); the way the women, whose sense of New York came entirely from TV, didn’t realize how far south the Financial District was until Wallace stepped in and calmed down the one whose grandniece was interning in the Time-Life Building.

It all adds up to a terrific, tangible picture of what 9/11 felt like in a place like Bloomington-Normal. And yet, reading it today, one can’t help but wonder: Why on earth was David Foster Wallace living and showering in central Illinois? The state has nurtured more than its share of great authors, from Ernest Hemingway to Richard Wright, but then they move away. There’s something surprising about a writer like Wallace (and let’s finish filling in his trophy case: a MacArthur “genius” grant; short stories in every magazine you can think of; and The Pale King , a posthumous novel and one of three finalists for this year’s Pulitzer ) living anywhere other than New York.

So how did growing up in the midwest shape Wallace’s work? And what about his decision to return to it? He wrote superbly about the region, with his essay on Mrs. Thompson being a perfect example. But what if there’s more to it than that?

With the publication of D. T. Max’s Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story , the first full biography of Wallace, we can start to answer such questions. In 2009, Max wrote a very good profile of the author for the New Yorker , and his book makes it even clearer that, from the beginning, Wallace struggled with his mental health—that he was always the smartest kid in the room, and also the most troubled.

Max also makes clear that superficially, at least, Wallace’s childhood resembled that of many midwesterners. Though he was born in New York, his parents soon moved to Urbana-Champaign when his father landed a job in the philosophy department at the University of Illinois. His mother would eventually become an English professor at Parkland College, and the Wallaces ran the kind of liberal, laissez-faire household you’d expect from two academics in the 60s. They limited the TV time of David and his sister to two hours per day and one “rough” show per week ( The Wild Wild West , usually). When he disagreed with his parents, they encouraged him to write intrafamily memos.

But Wallace also went to White Sox games, read Tolkien and the Hardy Boys, played sports. While in middle school, he took some tennis lessons at the park and became a very competitive player. The tennis kids would carpool all over Illinois for tournaments, and he fell hard for the state’s topography—for the way the corn, as he put it in one of his many riffs on the beauty of flat farmland, “starts just past the breakdown lanes and goes right to the sky’s hem.”

By the time he enrolled in high school, Wallace was smoking prodigious amounts of pot. It made tennis and any other high-level cardio impossible, but at least it calmed him down. He had begun suffering from occasional anxiety attacks and a near-constant sense of self-loathing. “Feet too thin and narrow,” he wrote in one early note dug up by Max. “Thighs squnch out repulsively.”

One day, around the same time, Wallace asked his father what he did for work. The professor handed his son some Plato, and they began to work through it. “I had never had an undergraduate student who caught on so quickly,” his father would later say. “This was this first time I realized what a phenomenal mind David had.”

It’s no surprise, then, that when Wallace got to Amherst, his father’s alma mater, he won more awards and prizes than any student in the college’s nearly 200-year history. Max’s account of Wallace the student provides some of his book’s best passages. Far from home, the young polymath began to stand out, studying with his dad’s former profs and even writing a senior thesis on philosophy. But he also discovered fiction. Max tells one story about a friend tossing Wallace a copy of Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern satire The Crying of Lot 49 —”like Bob Dylan finding Woody Guthrie,” in the words of Mark Costello, another student and one of Wallace’s two best friends. Wallace ended up writing a second senior thesis, a novel called The Great Ohio Desert , working the whole time with a picture of Pynchon pinned up on the wall.

The writing went so rapturously that Wallace told Costello, “I can’t feel my ass in the chair.” But his time at Amherst also included much despair. Wallace dropped out for a full semester not once but twice, and in the summer after graduation, in 1985, another breakdown sent him to a psychiatric unit. By this point, he had been diagnosed with clinical depression—the “festering pus-swollen c[h]ancre at the center of my brain,” as he put it to one friend—and prescribed an antidepressant known as Nardil.

The patterns Wallace established at Amherst would haunt him the rest of his life: binges of incredible productivity followed by deep sloughs of sadness (and by nasty addictions to drugs, alcohol, and sex). He would win a fellowship to the University of Arizona’s creative-writing program, then publish The Broom of the System , a revision of The Great Ohio Desert , before even finishing. But a breakdown would follow, with Wallace trying to kill himself via overdose in 1988. He would line up a second book, a collection of short stories titled Girl With Curious Hair , then head off to Harvard’s PhD program in philosophy. But a breakdown would follow, with Wallace ending up in Boston’s McLean Hospital.

After a few years of this, Wallace found himself with little desire to read fiction, much less to write it. When Pynchon’s Vineland came out in 1990, he had to slog. “I get the strong sense he’s spent 20 years smoking pot and watching TV,” Wallace wrote to Jonathan Franzen in a typically witty letter, “though I tend to get paranoid about this point, for obvious reasons.”

And yet the conditions for Wallace to write Infinite Jest were slowly locking into place. First, and most important, he got sober by spending six months at a Boston halfway house. He also became obsessed with David Lynch’s Blue Velvet , a film that showed him the importance of pairing realistic details with experimental art. (Max dispatches the film in a sentence, one of several times he glosses over Wallace’s aesthetic debts—even though, in this case, Wallace would later write a 65-page essay about the filmmaker.) He also met people like Franzen, who became his other best friend, and the memoirist Mary Karr, with whom he pursued a spectacularly messy relationship. Both pushed him to move past Pynchonian cleverness, to write about something sincere—something real.

By 1991, Wallace was working feverishly on his second novel. He settled on some familiar settings (a tennis academy, a halfway house) and some new themes. Where Broom of the System was a novel primarily aware of and amused by its own novelness, Infinite Jest confronted the universal: addiction, the cultural obsession with irony, and the way that, in the end, the pursuit of pleasure could only stoke the need for more pleasure.

Wallace had completed most of his first draft by 1993, though he would need months more to revise—and to cut huge sections from what would still be a 1,000-page book. That same year, he moved back to the midwest, taking a teaching job at Illinois State University in Bloomington-Normal. It offered Wallace another layer of stability—of order—and he adopted a couple dogs, bought a house on Rural Route 2, and joined a local group for recovering substance abusers.

Max shows how warmly this group welcomed Wallace, with one member hanging him a stocking on the mantel at Christmas and another (the son of Mrs. Thompson) building some bookshelves in his new home. Wallace, who loved chewing tobacco and consuming cheeseburgers at Denny’s, fit right in—almost. The only problem came from his trademark look: a bandanna pulling back long, stringy hair. “Here, it spells affiliation with Harley clubs,” he told David Lipsky, a reporter from Rolling Stone . “And I just don’t need that shit, you know? It’s hard enough to get a cab as it is.”

There were plenty of reporters once Infinite Jest hit. Wallace liked to call New York “Sauron’s great red eye,” and its gaze (and its gushing reviews) fell directly on him in the spring of 1996. Journalists flew into Chicago, then drove two hours down I-55 to interview him. He was the first Bloomington-Normal resident in a long time—maybe ever, locals told him—to appear in both Newsweek and Time . During one of his ISU classes, a student teasingly asked, “Done being famous yet?” Wallace blushed: “Two more minutes.”

The fame lasted a bit longer than that. Through that year and the next, which saw the release of a book of essays called A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again , Wallace was probably the most envied author in America. But he kept living in Illinois—and working with his students. He read their papers three times, marking each pass with a different color pen, and hosted classes at his home, in a messy living room where every hard edge had been chewed by his dogs. “My best kids are farm-kids,” he wrote to Playboy ‘s fiction editor, “who didn’t even know that they liked to read until I persuaded them they did.”

Wallace clearly influenced the farm kids. But how did the farm kids influence him? To consider this question, we might move past Max’s biography to a theory of Jonathan Franzen’s. Franzen grew up in a suburb of Saint Louis, and an interviewer once asked him about his own relationship to the midwest. He replied that it had offered him “a prolongation of innocence.” “Something about not having had a clue when other people the same age were already getting a clue,” he continued, “produces both a sense of optimism and a kind of reactive curdled cynicism. You become more worldly in response to not having been worldly enough.”

While Franzen’s theory ignores a big part of the midwest—the part that struggles with addiction, with broken families, with poverty, the part that becomes cynical earlier, and in a much different way—it can help us understand the region’s influence on Wallace. In fact, it can help us understand his essay on Mrs. Thompson. Near the end of that piece, he writes that “what these Bloomington ladies are, or start to seem to me, is innocent.” Wallace doesn’t argue that everyone in Bloomington is innocent and sweet. (Indeed, he mocks one of the ladies’ sons, a late-20s loafer who doesn’t remove his Slipknot hat inside.) But he does contrast their sincerity with his cynical urge to note the day’s many ironies, even in the middle of something as terrible as 9/11. And one of the things he finds terrible is “knowing, deep in my heart, that whatever America the men in those planes hated so much was far more my America . . . than it was these ladies’.”

Wallace returns to this binary again and again in his work. (“I don’t know how keen these sullen farmers’ sense of irony is,” he writes in an essay about the Illinois State Fair, “but mine’s been honed East-Coast keen.”) But Franzen’s theory of midwestern experience has three steps: innocence, then backlash, then a blending of the two. And this last step explains much about Wallace. He seemed less alienated from pop culture than many writers; at ISU, he assigned his students Kafka’s short stories and Stephen King’s Carrie , and he enjoyed both without irony.

That same diversity informed his personal life. Wallace went to a big public high school and interacted with students from all sorts of backgrounds in a way the son of two professors in a larger city might not have. And at Amherst, at Arizona, and on his return to Illinois, he deliberately re-created this mix. One of his neighbors in Bloomington-Normal worked at a lumberyard; another repaired Xerox machines. Wallace even engaged with the midwest Franzen ignores—especially through his recovery group, which drew most of its members from the working class. “You’re special,” he wrote to another author in 1999, six years after settling in Bloomington-Normal. “But so’s the guy across the table who’s raising two kids sober and rebuilding a ’73 Mustang. It’s a magical thing with 4,000,000,000 forms. It kind of takes your breath away.”

Of course, the midwest isn’t the only place one can learn these things. But it’s where Wallace learned them. Max realizes this on some level, and in his book he offers a few pieties about how Wallace grew up surrounded by “midwestern virtues of normality, kindness, and community.” Yet it’s not clear that a single one of those virtues took: Wallace was mostly a loner, he was certainly a creep (his relationships with women make Brief Interviews With Hideous Men , his second collection of short stories, seem almost autobiographical), and nothing about him seemed normal. The midwest influenced him on a more abstract level, in his philosophical and artistic orientation toward the larger world. Max might have explored these ideas. Instead, he chooses to alternate between dismissing and sentimentalizing the midwest—two gestures that, in the end, amount to the same thing.

Max’s treatment of the midwest hints at a larger problem with his book. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story fails to bring much subtlety to its issues of interpretation—not just Wallace and the midwest, but Wallace and religion and Wallace and literary history. It also fails to tell a story of its own. Most biographies begin with a key moment or idea before flashing back to the beginning and later revisiting that turning point. Even Max’s New Yorker profile centers on Wallace’s struggle to follow up Infinite Jest . But his book starts at Wallace’s birth and simply plods along. It rarely pauses to explain what unifies Wallace’s life or why we should care, and the result sometimes reads like a book-length Wikipedia entry.

This seems all the more strange since Wallace’s life offers such a compelling story. During the marketing of Infinite Jest , he explained to Rolling Stone ‘s Lipsky that “there’s good self-consciousness. And then there’s this toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.” Everything in Wallace’s life, surely in part because of his mental illness, came in both a good version and a raped-by-psychic-Bedouins version. This dynamic—with its mix of love and hate, ambivalence and conviction—could make his day-to-day existence excruciating. Then again, it also animated his best work. With Wallace, there was always another side.

The Pale King was, in many ways, his attempt to tell the other side of Infinite Jest . Where his second novel had diagnosed a set of problems, his third would offer a cure: boredom. Or not boredom, exactly, so much as the idea that embracing boredom might force us take control of our own attentions and energies. The goal was “being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to,” he argued in a commencement speech at Kenyon College. “Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”

It was a rich and difficult idea, and Max shows how much Wallace struggled with it. He first had to write about boredom without being boring, and for him that meant creating a motley team of IRS agents based in Peoria. But Wallace found it easier to focus on other work—another book of short stories ( Oblivion ), another book of essays ( Consider the Lobster )—and on his personal life.

And his personal life had achieved a new stability. In 2002 he left Illinois for California and a prestigious job at Pomona College. He was unsure about leaving the midwest—”What kind of zip code starts with ‘9’?” he quipped to Don DeLillo—but fell quickly for California. One of his first visitors was Karen Green, an artist who’d once made a series of images based on his fiction, and he fell quickly for her, as well. Wallace wrote Green a series of letters—he labeled them Grim Letter I, Grim Letter II, and so on—outlining his psychiatric past and his history with women. They began dating, and in 2004 Wallace wrote to Franzen (they’d switched to e-mail by this point) that he was “more and more sure KG and I will get married. Now it’s a matter of getting her to be more and more sure.” It didn’t take much, because at the end of that year they were wed at Urbana’s courthouse.

But while these years were Wallace’s happiest as a person, they were his most frustrating as an artist. During the marketing of Infinite Jest , his publisher had sent out postcards announcing it a “masterpiece.” “‘Masterpiece’?” an annoyed Wallace had replied. “I’m 33 years old; I don’t have a ‘masterpiece.'” As he entered his 40s, and as he continued to grapple with The Pale King , Wallace began wondering if he would ever top his previous novel. He also wondered if the Nardil, which he was still taking, was holding him back, and Wallace’s inner dialectic guaranteed that here his motives were far from pure. “The person who would go off the medications that were possibly keeping him alive was not the person he liked,” Green tells Max, in one of his book’s most revealing quotations. “He didn’t want to care about the writing as much as he did.”

In 2007 Wallace and Green decided he should wean himself off Nardil, a process they knew would be brutal. And it was. “I’m not all right,” Wallace told his sister on the phone. “I’m trying to be, but I’m not.” His doctors tried several new medicines, tried Nardil again, tried 12 rounds of electroconvulsive therapy. But by the summer of 2008, Wallace was shutting down. He made at least one unsuccessful suicide attempt, and on the night of September 12, after Green had left for work, he wrote her a two-page letter, then went into his office and neatly stacked some pages from The Pale King . Then he walked out to the patio and hanged himself.

Wallace’s influence always loomed larger than his book sales, something you could see in the tributes and eulogies that poured out after his death. One came from Joshua Ferris, a terrific young novelist who wrote about the time he interviewed Wallace, just before the publication of Infinite Jest . Ferris was still a college student, someone who loved Wallace’s books and badly wanted to become a writer himself. So when he met Wallace in the small office he shared with another ISU professor, Ferris asked him why he still lived in Illinois—why he hadn’t moved to New York like everyone else. In Ferris’s essay, Wallace gives a short reply: “I love the midwest.” But Ferris is also an Illinois author—he grew up in Danville and now lives in New York—and I suspected there might be more to the story. So I e-mailed him to ask.

“It was an interesting exchange and not one that redounds much to my credit,” Ferris wrote back. “As a 21- or 22-year-old kid I thought whenever you’re on the map, the first thing you do is move to NYC. So I asked him why he lived in Normal and sort of disparaged the Midwest.” Wallace handled the question graciously, Ferris said, explaining that he liked midwestern people and that he got more work done there than in New York.

It was a simple answer, but it left an impression on Ferris: “I have the distinct memory of feeling, not rebuked exactly, but as if, for the first time in my life, someone I respected gave dignity to something I customarily dismissed,” he wrote. “He made me see the place differently.”

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David Foster Wallace and the Challenge of Fatalism

Recently I had occasion to consult major reference works to compare their accounts of fatalism. What I found was disappointing.

The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy , edited by Simon Blackburn, contains the following entry for “fatalism”:

“The doctrine that what will be will be, or that human action has no influence on events. ‘Either a bullet has my number on it or it does not; if it does, then there is no point taking precautions for it will kill me anyhow; if it does not then there is no point taking precautions for it is not going to kill me; hence either way there is no point taking precautions.’ The dilemma ignores the highly likely possibility that whether the bullet has your number on it depends on whether you take precautions. Fatalism is wrongly confused with determinism, which by itself carries no implications that human action is ineffectual.”

The first definition offered is a tautology, “what will be will be”; if that thesis is fatalism, then the doctrine is true but uninteresting. The second definition, “human action has no influence on events,” is clearly false, because, for example, obtaining a divorce logically requires getting married. Examples like that of the bullet were known in antiquity as the “idle argument,” and the appropriate reply, given by the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus, is that taking precautions may save you, and, if so, then they were fated to do so. Hence such examples provide no refutation of fatalism. Furthermore, the difference between fatalism and determinism is not that fatalism claims human action is ineffectual but that fatalism makes no reference to causation. Moreover, some determinists affirm free will, but all fatalists deny it.

The entry for “fatalism” in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy , New Edition, edited by Ted Honderich, is no more helpful:

“The belief, not to be confused with causal determinism, that deliberation and action are pointless because the future will be the same no matter what we do. According to the famous ‘idle argument’ of antiquity, ‘If it is fated for you to recover from this illness, you will recover whether you call in a doctor or not; similarly, if it is fated for you not to recover from this illness, you will not recover whether you call in a doctor or not; and either your recovery or non-recovery is fated; therefore there is no point in calling in a doctor.’ Thus all actions and choices are ‘idle’ because they cannot affect the future. Determinists reject fatalism on the grounds that it may be determined that we can be cured only by calling the doctor.”

Here fatalism is identified with the “idle argument,” as though that piece of reasoning is itself the fatalistic position. In fact, the “idle argument” is a supposed refutation of fatalism, easily answered with the response of Chrysippus that, for example, whether your call a doctor is as fated as whether you recover.

The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy , Third Edition, edited by Robert Audi, offers no entry on “fatalism” but refers readers to an article titled “free will problem.” There the term “fatalism” is not mentioned, but the detailed discussion of free will and determinism includes the following two sentences:  “Logical versions of determinism declare each future event to be determined by what is already true, specifically by the truth that it will occur then. Certain theological variants accept the predestination of all circumstances and events by a divine being who knows in advance that they will obtain.”

The term “logical determinism” suggests that fatalism is a form of determinism, which it is not. Furthermore, while divine foreknowledge can raise speculation about human freedom, fatalism does not rest on theism.

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy , edited by Edward Craig, adds to the confusion. Its entry states:

“‘Fatalism’ is sometimes used to mean the acceptance of determinism, along with a readiness to accept the consequence that there is no such thing as human freedom. The word is also often used in connection with a theological question: whether God’s supposed foreknowledge means that the future is already fixed. But it is sometimes explained very differently, as the view that human choice and action have no influence on future events, which will be as they will be whatever we think or do. On the face of it this is barely coherent, and invites the assessment that fatalism is simply an expression of resigned acceptance.”

Here fatalism is first conflated with determinism, next misleadingly associated with a belief in God’s foreknowledge, then equated with the tautology that what will be will be, and finally supposedly refuted by the “idle argument.” The brief accompanying article begins by asserting that “Taken as meaning exactly what it says, the dictum that human choice and action have no influence on future events is absurd.” Here is an example of the fallacy of ignoratio elenchi, arguing against a claim not in dispute.

Fortunately, the proper understanding of fatalism can be found in the Encyclopedia of Ethics , Second Edition, edited by Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker. There the extended entry “fate and fatalism” authored by John Martin Fischer begins:  “Fatalism can be understood as the doctrine that it is a logical or conceptual truth that agents are never free to do other than what they actually do.”

Note the following key points in Fischer’s definition. First, fatalism is not a form of determinism. Second, fatalism does not presume theism. Third, fatalism denies free will on the basis of conceptual considerations. Fourth, fatalism does not affirm or imply that human actions have no influence on future events.

The key question, of course, is whether fatalism, appropriately understood, can be supported by a philosophically sophisticated argument. The most celebrated contemporary attempt was authored in 1962 by Richard Taylor, whose accessible article “Fatalism” in The Philosophical Review generated heated discussion in a host of leading journals. More than two decades later, a detailed contribution to the controversy was offered in a senior thesis at Amherst College submitted by the soon-to-be-celebrated writer David Foster Wallace. It was reprinted along with highlights of the original philosophical debate in Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will , published by Columbia University Press in 2011 and co-edited by Professor Maureen Eckert of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and myself.

In sum, fatalism is not a tautology, a theological tenet, or a preposterous claim about the ineffectiveness of human action. Rather it is a challenging thesis denying free will on the basis of conceptual considerations and requiring for its assessment a careful exploration of issues regarding time, logic, and freedom.

• Steven M. Cahn

Steven M. Cahn is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The most recent books he has authored are Religion Within Reason (Columbia University Press, 2017); Teaching Philosophy: A Guide (Routledge, 2018); Inside Academia: Professors, Politics, and Policies (Rutgers University Press, 2019); The Road Traveled and Other Essays (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2019); Philosophical Adventures (Broadview Press, 2019); A Philosopher’s Journey: Essays from Six Decades ( Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2020), and Navigating Academic Life (Routledge, 2021).

• David Foster Wallace
• determinism
• Editor: David V. Johnson
• idle argument
• John Martin Fischer
• logical determinism
• responsibility

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