1

COME TO WORK

CAPITALIST FANTASIES AND THE QUEST FOR BALANCE IN THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM

So here I am at like twenty-one and I don’t know what to do. Do I go into math logic, which I’m good at and pretty much guaranteed an approved career in? Or do I try to keep on with this writing thing, this artiste thing? The idea of being a “writer” repelled me, mostly because of all the foppish aesthetes I knew at school who went around in berets stroking their chins calling themselves writers. I have a terror of seeming like those guys, still. Even today, when people I don’t know ask me what I do for a living, I usually tell them I’m “in English” or I “work freelance.” I don’t seem to be able to call myself a writer.

—DAVID FOSTER WALLACE (WITH LARRY MCCAFFERY), “AN EXPANDED INTERVIEW WITH DAVID FOSTER WALLACE”

Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.

—WITTGENSTEIN, PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS

AS HE became a writer at Amherst and Arizona, Wallace thought deeply about work—the work of writers and readers, the work of the artist as a job or vocation, the kinds of “living” American economics granted approval or deemed pretentious. In my first epigraph, rarely quoted lines from a much-quoted interview, Wallace suggests: I might have been something else, and that thought of career paths not taken will hover over his many future depictions of work environments. In the Weberian and Protestant terms his thinking hearkens back to, Wallace was a young person worried about his “calling”; in less auspicious terms, he may have been explaining to himself the working-class signifiers of his dress—bandana, “untied work boots”—when his experience of labor, particularly any menial sort, was largely a theoretical issue.¹ Whatever the origin of the values in these comments (Midwestern? Emersonian? an Oedipal impulse to step into his philosopher-father’s territory, even while seeking to be “approved”?), they show a young author meditating on class image, aesthetic value, and writing as a job, as value-earning pursuit. In one sense, Wallace was unsure about whether “artist” could be a job at all: a young woman “wanted to write made-up stories for a living” in his first published story. “I didn’t know that could be done,” the narrator replies.² On a deeper level, though, Wallace seems determined in his fiction to mirror Wittgenstein’s claim (in my second epigraph) that language “works” by being examined in context, not abstractly, not on “holiday.” Yet Wallace is also keen to build from ideas of the writer at work a cultural critique more urgent and morally effective than an allegory of language could be.

While The Pale King undoubtedly surprised many by depicting workers examining endless tax returns, Wallace took interest from the very beginning in work, especially the mental kind, and the way difficulty and tediousness were defined against easy consumerist pleasures. Elsewhere in the McCaffery interview, Wallace describes his reader also in terms of work—a fellow laborer, co-creating with him. At issue is an act of painful balance and ratiocination. Wallace claims that TV and popular film are

lucrative precisely because [they] recognize[] that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas “serious” art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort.

(CW 22)

These would be commonplace late-twentieth-century ideas about the aesthetic and commercial—essentially reasserting Clement Greenberg’s infamous division of avant-garde from kitsch—but for the intricate mechanism of balance Wallace places at their center. The adult world he frequently invoked was a realm of tradeoffs asking people to calibrate personal balance scales; fiction could be good training for that, as suggested by this image of reality’s delicate 51/49 ratio. Challenging the reader made Wallace calibrate a scale of his own: “There has to be an accessible payoff for the reader if I don’t want [her] to throw the book at the wall” (CW 33). Whereas mass media promise a ludicrous contract to a passive audience, Wallace’s fiction offers the reader-as-worker a different system of value and return. The under lying image, though, remains one of a fair economic deal: the “avant-garde pitfall,” for advanced versions of the foppish aesthetes, was to “forget about making yourself accessible” (LI 10).

In the implicitly feckless, beret-wearing “artiste” and the hard-working reader dedicated to communication, Wallace also happens to describe the two central figures of The Broom of the System, the bad writer and the woman he wants not just to love but own, even consume: Rick Vigorous and Lenore Beadsman. Following these two and several others on their postcollege trajectories in a near-future world, Broom is a multithread bildungsroman that contemplates Wallace’s postcollege career possibilities and, more broadly, prophesies what may become of American work and value in the late 1980s and beyond—all while also suggesting which modes of language use correspond to the philosophy of hard work and which to modes of capitalist domination.

In this chapter I read Broom as a thorough interrogation of work, its frequent lack in a grotesque U.S. capitalism, and elements of work’s “payoff,” value and value creation, that will structure Wallace’s approach to American culture over the next twenty-plus years. Possessing a protagonist slyly named for a unit of work, Broom is itself named after an instrument of humble, domestic labor and a term from physics naming a domain, the system, the only way to raise the energy value of which is work. Another suggestion of the title is that an older, more primitive tool (the broom) exists within those technologies and schemas (the system) to which humans have largely ceded labor and production. A broom also appears in Lenore’s great-grandmother’s illustration of a Wittgensteinian claim about linguistic meaning being equivalent to an object’s function (or, in the terms I have established, the work it does [B 149–150]), and Wallace revealed that the full title—not referred to directly in the novel—comes from his mother’s name for roughage, that food that cleans out one’s system by aiding waste removal (CW 12; see also Concarnadine’s repeated “roughage” [B 362–371]). These basic definitions of work and action—grounded in the body’s cycles of sustenance, in science, in pragmatist views of meaning, and on the floor—guide my consideration of Lenore’s battle with a capitalism run amok in a novel centered on commodified baby food, symbol of the fateful overwriting of use value by exchange value and humans’ earliest indoctrination into consumerist satisfaction. Broom’s fundamental questions are how humans create value, confer it on themselves and others (often via fetishization), and consume it and convert it into energy. Wallace pursues these themes through Lenore, who—a model of work, linguistic clarity, and balance, as well as someone who has chosen a low-wage job in communication—strives to return language from the holiday of philosophical obscurity on which Wittgenstein says it can go. As a character who worries her “actions and volitions are not under her control,” who feels “as if she had no real existence” (B 66), she also provides Wallace’s first model of the quest for ontology and weight, where the refrain “I EXIST” becomes intertwined with an implied ending: “…BECAUSE I WORK.”

Wallace recognizes in work and the resistance to it a political problem wider than Amherst social types or the writer-reader relationship within an entertainment-driven culture. Published in the spring of 1987, Broom arrived at a moment of great anxiety over transformations in the U.S. economy and the fate of the vaunted American work ethic. Fears over competition for global economic dominance often clustered around both factory automation and the stereotypical image of superior and selfless Japanese workers, who appeared to be outstripping American laborers, in an era said to mark the end of U.S. manufacturing. Over the past ten years, the New York Times read in May 1987, the “service economy has fallen from grace as Americans have come to equate it with the decline of manufacturing, lower wages…a shrinking middle class, and low-skill, low-tech economic activity like hamburger flipping.”³ Wallace, the prizewinning student of economics at Amherst (though not, like Andy Lang, a major), incorporates analysis of this field alongside all of Broom’s allusions to his philosophy studies.⁴ Broom depicts a United States where industry has met a limit (such that a company named “Industrial Desert Design” creates desert landscapes feeding a perverse tourism [B 54]). Characters refashion the human appetites that drive a service economy rather than admit to limits on consumption-based profit—hence the novel’s interest in the biotechnology of food and an entrepreneur in that field who seeks to fill a personal void by eating everything in sight. This novel builds from shifts in American work and production a vision of a social order that, placing all its faith in consumption, does not produce much of value any more. Broom thus offers a bracingly Rabelaisian account of a postmodern capitalism that, enduring a crisis of accumulation in the 1970s, sought the flexible modes of a financialized economy that reshaped space and time, according to David Harvey.⁵

But Wallace also attends to forces that compensated for the anxiety over these trends in value: the mythologization of American work and the Protestant work ethic that Reagan offered the populace, even as, in realistic terms, he was promoting illusions of “welfare queens” and solidifying a neoliberal assault on worker protections and trade unions. By compensatory mythologization I mean passages such as the following, from Reagan’s first inaugural, with its quasi-biblical overtones of workers “cast” out into “misery.”

Idle industries have cast workers into unemployment, causing human misery and personal indignity. Those who do work are denied a fair return for their labor by a tax system which penalizes successful achievement and keeps us from maintaining full productivity…. Putting America back to work means putting all Americans back to work…. All must share in the productive work of this “new beginning” and all must share in the bounty of a revived economy.⁶

Years before Johnny Gentle is born, Broom, partly in the voice of Reverend Sykes, satirizes aspects of Reagan’s rhetoric. Knowing, though, from Max’s revelations, that Wallace voted for Reagan twice and (in 1992) supported Ross Perot, we should view the Wallace of this period as a writer with a complicated relationship to such conservative traditions and to the broader issue of presidential speech.⁷ Working out a response to neoliberalism in the years it was first solidifying, Wallace seems to have invested, at bottom, in the possibility of meaningful language arising from politicians and American traditions. Broom’s parodies are his awkward, youthful attempt to liberate an authentic moral force from overwrought political rhetoric and implicitly argue for a tempered acceptance of the enduring power of cultural formations like the Protestant work ethic. Such are the seeds of his forceful turn toward the political thirteen years later in “Up, Simba,” about another Republican for whom he has a complicated respect, John McCain.

Wallace’s career emerges during a period when Jameson is defining post-modernity in (post-)Marxist terms as, in part, the “‘effacement of the traces of production’ from the object itself,” in favor of reification and consumers’ ability “not to remember the work” embodied in their many purchases.⁸ Wallace, though, portrays work under a different kind of erasure in Broom, where many of the key references are not to Marx but to the source for his definitions of labor and human development, Hegel, whose Phenomenology of Spirit is travestied in a central scene by the allegorically one-legged and ungrounded LaVache Beadsman. As we will see, his college exchanges of tutoring for drugs lie in lived contradiction of the Hegelian ideas about work he purports to explicate. To McCaffery, six years after publication, Wallace said of Broom’s experimentation that, “sufficiently hidden under the sex-change and…allusions, I got to write my sensitive little self-obsessed bildungsroman” (CW 41). Broom is indeed, as Patrick O’Donnell puts it, “an irresolute bildungsroman.”⁹ But Wallace does not so much produce an instance of the bildungsroman as record the subversion of those guiding assumptions about culture and personal cultivation that had made the form central in the era of and after Hegel. Wallace goes back to the form’s philosophical roots and points to what shackles such a category in the mediated, abstracting moment in which he writes.

“Lenore, come to work, where I am,” Rick says in what passes for an invocation of his muse as the 1990 plot begins (B 32). But while Rick’s overture may come from upstairs in the Bombardini Building, Rick is not truly at work at all. In a book with countless misdirected communications and the suspect calls of Reagan, Rick, and a drugged cockatiel (“Go forth and do the work directed,” Mrs. Tissaw thinks she hears God say through the quasi-Pentecostal Vlad the Impaler [B 174]), Wallace seeks to show us via parody something positive, a viable 1980s version of what Weber famously identified in Protestant theology:

The exhortation of the apostle to “make one’s own calling sure” was interpreted as a duty to strive for the subjective certainty of one’s election and justification in daily struggle. Instead of humble sinners, to whom Luther promised grace if they entrusted themselves to God in penitent faith, those self-assured “saints” were bred who were embodied in the steely Puritan merchants of that heroic age of capitalism and are occasionally found right up to the present day. And, on the other hand, tireless labor in a calling was urged as the best possible means of attaining this self-assurance. This and this alone would drive away religious doubt and give assurance of one’s state of grace.¹⁰

Pynchon had taken from this and other parts of Weber a cynical reading of the United States’ Puritan legacy that focused on the unearned election of those “self-assured ‘saints’” who, taking material success for divine approval, built over centuries a secular infrastructure predicated on damning the preterite, the “‘second Sheep.’”¹¹ Wallace had consumed Gravity’s Rainbow over eight days in 1983 (Max, Every Love Story, 34) and, as McHale demonstrates, echoed it in his sentences and plots for the next twenty-five years.¹² But, still feeling his way toward a systematic critique of postmodernism in Broom, Wallace wants to preserve the grounding value of American work within his literary world. This is a story I continue unfolding in subsequent chapters (especially chapter 3) assessing the fates of Wallace’s workers and their relationship to value.

In the following sections I lay out the prevailing ideology and ethos of consumer capitalism in Broom before discussing Rick’s feeble resistance to such forces and Lenore’s protracted struggle against a workless social order. Lenore is led on a quest to restore balance and justice that grows particularly vivid in contrast to the wasteful work of her brother LaVache, a text-driven philosopher of the sort Wallace eschews. Lenore’s varied career leads into my climactic consideration of various other attempts to accrue value, including a final contrast between the profane religious solicitations of Sykes and Lenore’s answering image of a miraculous lottery win that Wallace identifies with the communicative power of the novel itself—and with the choice to gamble on the contingencies of art over the “approved” paths to economic value he foresaw in academia and other pursuits. For many narratives to come Wallace will be returning to the lottery and similar images of the chance that necessarily characterizes true choice and communication.

GREENHOUSE EFFECTS

Broom portrays capitalists in a phase of mania in which, reaching a crisis in the accumulation of money and goods, they deny entropic forces and desperately hoard heat energy and calories, those building blocks of organic order, in systems so small they include the human body. Bombardini’s “Project Total Yang” (or “Tiny Yin”), his effort to “grow to infinite size,” is the clearest example of this paradoxical accumulation by consumption, dependent on (in addition to cannibalism) ignoring the limits of the body as storage space and the inevitable processing of waste—all while erasing yin-yang balance (B 91). Growth and cultivation in Broom are, as they will be in Infinite Jest, matters of complete impatience with gradualism. Stonecipheco owns a nursing home that (in a nod to the “hothouse” images of Pynchon’s V.)¹³ offers a “greenhouse heat” in which residents “languish[]” (it is also run by a Bloemker—a false bloom? [B 29]). The company’s language drug is called an “Infant Accelerant” (B 153); rather than promote growth it feeds a flame destructive to the children themselves, and the drug’s use of “cattle-endocrine derivative” (B 149) suggests, via the etymological links between cattle and capital, the making of humans themselves into pliable capital.¹⁴ Excess heat and light are everywhere the sign of capitalism and its concentrations of wealth: Bloemker, agent of Stonecipheco, “level[s]” at Lenore (like a gun) an evil eye that “glow[s] gold” with refracted sunlight (B 35). Clarice, the one Beadsman child to do the expected and take the family money, converts it into ownership of a line of tanning salons, one of which, in a running gag, badly burns the appropriately named Misty Schwartz (B 268). Lenore, since her name means “light” or “bright,” cannot help but take such forces personally. Her great-grandmother—in a foreshadowing of her apparent attempt to control the drug, despite her Wittgensteinian authority about language—is unable to allow for an entropic balance of molecules inside and outside her: she requires rooms be kept at 98.6 F. All these monetary and personal enterprises recapitulate the logic of capitalism reaching a dead end in the Great Ohio Desert, the space toward which the younger Lenore is railroaded by a culture that is in effect trying to burn her.

With the G.O.D., Wallace has Reagan’s rhetoric in mind, building on the desert setting of DeLillo’s End Zone and perhaps the absurdist president stories of Donald Barthelme (a major inspiration to the early Wallace [CW 62]). In a perverse, tone-setting call to work, we read a transcript of Ohio’s Governor Raymond Zusatz’s order to create the desert on June 21, 1972, a date chosen to evoke Watergate (the untranscribed eighteen and a half minutes of conversation between Nixon and H. R. Haldeman occurred on June 20, 1972) (B 53). But the more important reference is to another American governor of 1972, in a state with real desert. Reagan invoked the founding Puritans in many campaign and presidential speeches, especially the image of the “City Upon a Hill” from John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” given onboard the Arbella en route to Plymouth.¹⁵ Concluding his 1989 farewell address, Reagan schmaltzily depicted the colonizing Winthrop sailing “on what today we’d call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.”¹⁶ In White Noise, writing of a “College-on-the-hill” (note the deflating effect of the definite article), DeLillo skewered Reagan in the black-robed Jack Gladney’s vision of a religious “assembly” of station wagons laden with consumer goods.¹⁷ Wallace funnels such representations of American mythology toward the issue of work. Thus Zusatz, in spite of continuing prosperity, distills the grave misunderstanding of labor throughout Broom, saying, “Too much development. People are getting complacent. They’re forgetting the way this state was historically hewn out of the wilderness” (B 53), an obvious reference to the Puritans’ 1630 errand into the wilderness. “There’s no more hewing,” Zusatz concludes (B 53)—hence the need to create “a wasteland,” to “remind us what we hewed out of” (B 54).

In this mythological Ohio, Wallace begins with the residents’ departure from the Shaker Heights Nursing Home to suggest the potential for return to the culture of work, artisanship, and spiritual wholeness that the Protestant Shakers embody (Shakers are also known for cleanliness, another virtue turned into distorting obsession in Broom).¹⁸ Rather than the Shakers’ prayerful relationship to God, the community has a relationship to a hellscape called G.O.D. Language itself has absconded with these virtues: Lenore Sr. plus “twenty-five other people” missing from the Home makes an alphabetical twenty-six (B 99). But as with almost everything in Broom’s atmosphere of linguistic attenuation, the Shaker Heights name is merely superficial, the Protestant work ethic it calls up a joke: the real Shaker Heights has that name because the town was laid out in 1912 on land formerly owned by a local Shaker church congregation.

Wallace recasts part of that land history in his invented locale of East Corinth, another Cleveland suburb, built in the 1960s by Lenore’s grandfather, Stonecipher II, who has made a mockery of the social body of the community by laying out the town in the shape of Jayne Mansfield. Wallace sets up here a joking Wittgensteinian allegory of language awareness in which many “crawled and drove and walked over the form of Jayne Mansfield, shaking their fists” at lascivious airline pilots flying low and blinking their lights (B 46). As Wallace summarizes a claim in the Philosophical Investigations (advice the looming Bombardini and the roof-jumping Vance Vigorous would do well to follow), “the fundamental problem of language is, quote, ‘I don’t know my way about.’ If I were separate from language, if I could somehow detach from it and climb up and look down on it, get the lay of the land so to speak, I could study it ‘objectively,’…know its operations and boundaries” (CW 45). Given all the ways Broom shows the sublimation of work into pleasure seeking by men who control women, it is telling that the layout renders Mansfield’s breasts (a giant bust, in multiple senses?) as “a huge swollen development of factories and industrial parks”—a perverse image, in the context of a baby-food conspiracy, of both work and human sustenance gone wrong (B 45).

There is no actual East Corinth, Ohio (a Corinth, Ohio, does exist, but it is more than sixty miles east of Cleveland, nowhere near Shaker Heights). In inventing this locale for his moral project Wallace invokes another spiritual reference point, the ancient Corinthians to whom Paul’s epistles were addressed, including lines that will remain important to Wallace up through Chris Fogle: in the well-known King James Version, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face” (1 Cor. 13:11–12). Broom travesties Paul’s wisdom when Vlad, the bird that speaks words without knowing their meaning, is seen talking while “staring dumbly at himself in his cloudy mirror” (a glass, darkly) and embodying the narcissism that rules this fictional world (B 97).

In the context established by the G.O.D. and extremes of heat, East Corinth, Ohio, is also another coded place name, a pun from which environmental and economic studies of Wallace ought to begin, as well as a sign of Wallace’s attempt to reconcile his seemingly disparate areas of undergraduate focus. E.C. connotes “Ec,” a common abbreviation for economics in school settings, while E.C.O. signifies eco-, the common root of economics and ecology and derived from the ancient Greek oikos, or household, home and hearth. Economy and ecology are clearly under siege in this novel, and through the otherwise entirely superfluous subplot involving Stonecipheco’s testing of the infant language drug and use of a pesticide on the Greek island of Corfu, Wallace suggests many parallels: East Corinth and Corfu, both Greek names, are sites at which the ancient etymological origins of economic value and ecological care have been forgotten. As with the axiological, Heidegger’s calls back to the foundational questions of the ancient Greeks may be offering Wallace a cue: as Caputo summarizes, the “revolution the young Heidegger wanted to start” was “to think the ousia of [Aristotle’s] Metaphysics back down into factical life, into ousia taken as oikos, everyday household life, house and hearth.”¹⁹ There is a reason Lenore now lives in a building (formerly Misty’s home too) with “inoperative fireplaces” (B 94). Depicting brooms that underlie systems, households undone (the Langs’, the Vigorouses’, and, most horrifically, the Beadsmans’), and the abandonment of the hearth’s steady, localized glow for a capitalism of rapacious burning, this novel suggests an economic atavism is called for in postmodernity. Instead, though, signification itself is given over to insidious capitalist forms of value production and alleged guarantee.

LANGUAGE UNDER CONTRACT

Rick embodies the novel’s central perversions of work and pleasure into consumptive, often misogynistic fantasies. There is little truly vigorous about this Vigorous, whose name echoes Zusatz’s ludicrous, empty hewing. Rick’s firm’s name, Frequent and Vigorous, is a low joke about his sex life (neither frequent nor vigorous) but also a sign of the mockery Americans have made of any storied work ethic: The Frequent Review, supposedly a quarterly, never seems actually to publish or even to receive any outside submissions. Rick, presumably the self-obsessed creator of the stories he tells Lenore, emblematizes the dissoluteness of a leisure economy and the inability of American writers to do more than reflect the narcissistic tendencies of their consumerist environment (an idea that will structure Wallace’s manifestos to come, “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young” and “E Unibus Pluram”). Monroe Frequent, whom Rick suspects has bankrolled the magazine, made his fortune by inventing the leisure suit (like the beret, a one-time accouterment of cool, but now ridiculous) and is “a corporate entity interested in [the journal’s] failure for tax purposes,” foreshadowing the “passive-loss” tax-avoidance schemes of The Pale King (B 57; PK 13). The point seems clear: a literature that does the bidding of a leisure and consumerist economy will be reduced merely to embodying its principles. Rick, who makes money by writing ad copy about their pesticide, later comes under contract to Stonecipheco in the direct manipulation of Lenore, a first instance of the trope of contractualized language that I return to in subsequent chapters.

An interest in contracts, vehicles of an alleged balance, grows naturally from Wallace’s instinctual focus on capitalism’s distortive and privational forms of value and reciprocity. An objective illustration of Lenore’s “loss of individual efficacy of will,” the contract trope is also gendered: in Broom, juxtaposed with commodified females are the men who exert control through contracts (B 65). The father of the gymnast Kopek Spasova, only eight, has signed for her a “mammoth promotional and endorsement contract” with Gerber’s (B 127). Reflecting him, Stonecipher controls his daughter by signing Rick to a contract that entails “withholding of information” from her (B 168). The young Wallace’s vilification of family/ corporate contracts and their oppression of women in particular can also be heavy-handed, as when Stonecipher makes his imprisoned wife, Patrice, play endless rounds of contract bridge, a pointed conjunction of misogynist manipulation, games, and contracts (B 264–266).

“For language even to be possible,” Wallace remarks in admiration of Wittgenstein’s transformed conclusions in the Philosophical Investigations, “it must always be a function of relationships between persons,” “dependent on human community” (CW 44). But with all its contract tropes Broom seems to be working from Wittgenstein’s more specific claim about agreement in a dialogical moment in the Investigations: “‘So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?’—It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.”²⁰ Contract writers in Broom, much like masters of games and their rules throughout Wallace’s corpus, symbolize the recurrent effort, capitalism inspired and otherwise, to override language’s foundational agreement, its “form of life,” with second-order rules—and thus claim a control over language’s operation. Wallace’s thinking was almost always about immanence—whether he was examining late-capitalist attempts at total pleasure environments (cruise ships, virtual reality) or telling the joke about fish and water.²¹ Language is the fundamental immanence—“not a tool but an environment,” as Wallace puts it elsewhere (SFT 140)—and as a consequence, as Wittgenstein showed, language is unexplainable through any metalanguage. Humans may disagree about particular meanings, but they “agree in the language they use”—they have always already signed on to the biggest contract of all, but one that can never be pointed to. In this philosophical context there is more than sophomoric humor in Lenore’s opening refusal to sign her name on the dotted line of Lang and Biff’s posteriors and subordinate herself to male bodies (B 18).

Corresponding with masculinist contract writing is the treatment of language itself as a consumable, a commodity, or a currency one can hoard. Wallace pointedly makes the major capitalist figures in the novel, Stone-cipher and Bombardini, the speakers of the longest monologues, anticipating the Hideous Men but identifying hideousness with capitalist relationships to value accumulation. Sykes, who makes his money in the one-way discourse of TV, is another important monologist, as is Rick, teller of multi page stories with few breaks for Lenore’s responses. Bombardini suggests language is powered by food or is food itself, in a travesty of biblical wisdom about not living on bread alone: “What a delicious series of thoughts,” he says, announcing his eat-everything plan (B 82). Page to page in this dialogue-and phone-call-laden book, the long speeches substantiate the common drive somehow to own language or, paradoxically, consume it, even as it necessarily exits one’s mouth.

“SEE, SHE WEIGHS ABOUT ONE POUND”

Lenore is the figure who mightily resists the novel’s prevailing destinies of work, value, justice, and language use. Possessing shades of the impossibly pure heroines of nineteenth-century fiction, she is the shining exception to the pervasive acquisitiveness, and in the novel’s hermeneutic depths, various males’ attraction to her is explained by her representation of a value far different from the gross capitalist kind and by her moral and metaphysical grounding. Rick’s R.V. initials, used often by Lang and somehow erased from their remembered spot on a bathroom door (B 232), translate to random variable in mathematical parlance, whereas Lenore often has the qualities of a constant. Marshall Boswell points out how Lenore’s L.S.B. initials nearly invert Andrew Sealander Lang’s A.S.L. and make him “A” to her “B,” but more important to Wallace’s symbolism is Lenore’s L.B.²² The initials signify the Latin libra, for balance, abbreviated in everyday discourse as the lb. of weight and the £ of the British pound (an identification underscored by Lenore’s minor reflection, Kopek—the Russian penny, in effect a mere fraction of her powerful father Ruble). Another significant association for Lenore, from the moral realm, is the blind justice of myth and symbol, the female figure holding the balance scales that dates back to ancient representations of Justitia, Isis, and Themis.²³ Through Lenore Wallace juxtaposes varying meanings of value as individuals interact with and embody it: value in the sense of standard measure (here, weight); value in the monetary sense; and values in the moral sense, the weighing of courses of action in “real love” (B 183), the judgment that Rick calls, in a story about a “weights and measures expert” and scale constructor (B 190), “the power to discriminate and decide whom and on the basis of what criteria to love” (B 183). Glimpsed in Lenore is a first major example of Wallace’s interest in common values: weights and measures, standard units, all the fundamental (and unpostmodern) social agreements that need not be contractualized and cannot be solipsistically determined.

Lenore’s identification with the balance scale underscores her role as the moral center of Broom. In Bombardini’s weighty and oppressive love for her, Wallace also allegorizes a criticism he makes of peers who offer “fiction preoccupied with norm as value instead of value’s servant” (BF 61; italics mine). Norms have no necessary moral force; achieving that requires, for Wallace, choosing. As he tries to impose himself everywhere, this Norm—whose obese body was becoming increasingly normative in the United States when Broom was published—threatens to crush the L.B. of (potentially) objective value, just as he hopes to crush the Weight Watchers scale “under a weight of food. The springs would jut out. Jut” (B 82).

An even more basic meaning of pound, though—from which the unit of weight derives—is the English measure of work: in physics (that is, everywhere, in every action), the foot-pound, abbreviated ft-lb, equals the energy transferred (or work performed) in exerting a force of one pound over a distance of one foot. A 120-pound person standing up and lifting her weight from a seated position, displacing her mass by two feet, has done about 240 foot-pounds of work (more, though, since the human body is an inefficient system). This foot-pound is a means by which Wallace can both get us to consider Lenore’s rising and lifting and undermine capitalism’s general disassociation of monetary value from the actions of persons who earn it: at root, there is no way to do real work and thus produce real value or energy, Wallace’s onomastics imply, without pulling one’s weight.

Lenore is also that ideal mental worker Wallace described in his thoughts on reading his challenging literature; he would pursue the fantasy of this potent worker/reader up through his portrayal of superpowers of total concentration in The Pale King. Thus when a procrastinating Rick intones, “Lenore, come to work,” it is an admission that the book’s main writer figure is useless without this woman who, as she listens to his stories throughout, becomes an image of the reader (B 32). Rick first notices her “reading, her legs crossed ankle on knee” (B 61) in Dr. Jay’s office, and later, at the switchboard, “She…looked back down at her book” (B 69). But as we keep track of speakers in a book so heavy with unattributed lines of dialogue, especially at the (often jarring in media res) beginnings of scenes, we readers also recognize ourselves in her work of sorting phone calls.

“Why on earth did she work as a telephone operator?” Rick asks upon meeting Lenore. Holding back the story of her family trauma, Lenore answers that she “obviously needed money to buy food” (B 65). This answer, in features certainly connected to its clarity, is a baseline equation of use value and labor as a precapitalist, pre-surplus-value fulfillment of direct needs, a sharp contrast with the prevalent attempts to make language (and its infant acquisition) an object of consumption and profit. Why on earth does Lenore work, indeed, since Rick’s questioning is really about the conditions Lenore exemplifies that tether the human body, mind, and principles to processes of struggle, entropy, and solid identity—all of which Wallace illustrates via connection to the earth and awareness of one’s embodied weight, however indirectly these are gained through attention to narratives.

In this axiological novel, Lenore’s communicative work is also fundamentally connected to a philosophy of attention to ground—long before it is revealed that Lenore Sr., in an act that seems sacrificial, has somehow made herself part of the underground telephone network beneath East Corinth. Wallace would begin his review of Markson in “The Empty Plenum” by quoting Cavell on the distinctiveness of Wittgenstein’s view of language: “what other philosopher has found the antidote to illusion in the particular and repeated humility of remembering and tracking the uses of humble words, looking philosophically as it were beneath our feet rather than over our heads?” (BF 73).²⁴ Lenore is at heart this Cavellian-Wittgensteinian philosopher of what lies “beneath our feet.” In what seems merely a funny first line she notes, “Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman,” whose calluses and “cracking and peeling” nail polish suggest “decay” (B 3). There is a biblical seriousness here: Mindy is the “Metal” goddess of this novel, and her feet of clay—to use the codification of the image into cliché—draw on the imperial statue with toes of iron and clay in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream²⁵ and Shelley’s echo of same in “Ozymandias” (a poem Fogle’s father will mordantly quote in The Pale King [172]). To be aware of the central Wallace trope of memento mori is not to take up Yorick’s skull, necessarily, but to be first of all an observer of feet, those body parts that wade through the dust we become. Lenore, “a long-legged girl with feet larger than average,” comments later on Sykes’s cowboy boots (B 59); “footwear, again,” complains Rick, who would certainly benefit from examining grounds (for more than just the Jayne Mans-field outline of East Corinth) (B 283). Lance Olsen calls Broom “Termite Art,” after Manny Farber’s term for works that eat their own boundaries, but Broom is of the termites too in looking groundward and underground.²⁶

Through such motifs Wallace begins constructing a code for the progress and insights of his characters within often static plots that deny them traditional action in favor of contemplation of where they stand and what their foundations are. In the opening scene Lenore uses the spiked heel of her pump as a weapon against the hulking aggressor Biff Diggerence, who bangs on the wall with his head, that abstracting extremity with which Wallace seeks to put feet into dialogue. When she escapes the dorm, it is as though Lenore comes into a fullness of embodiment, again from the bottom up: after running away “in bare feet,” outside “she enjoys a brief nosebleed” (B 21). This rather inexplicable image only makes sense as an amalgam of the moral injury she has suffered, the countervailing joy (“she enjoys…”) of self-definition and ontology, and a sign that the narrative to come will show her dealing fundamentally with altitude, with the abnormal air pressure and removal from one’s level that nosebleeds (a “persistent…problem” for Lenore [B 67]) can point to. When she is removed from the ground during the flight of chapter 12, it is as though she loses a measure of ontology: rather implausibly she sleeps as Rick tells Lang the traumatic story of her childhood, among the many narratives in which she finds herself lacking “control,” equated often here with the ability to tell one’s own story (B 66).

Lenore’s quest for balance and ground coalesces around her association with the truth-finding techniques of analytical philosophy, the school of thought in which Wallace seeks a continuing viability rather than too readily ceding ground to the more fashionable deconstruction of the novel’s era. Rick calls Lenore’s “uniform of white cotton dress and black Converse high-top sneakers…an unanalyzable and troubling constant”—a description rife with puns from mathematical proofs (B 58). With qualities of uniformity, by acting as a “constant,” Lenore is “unanalyzable,” meaning that her part of any equation is not subject to dissection or transformation by the proof finder’s pen. The Converse sneakers, her platform in a sense, evoke solid standing and symmetrical reversals: the converse of a statement, obtained by reversing its two parts (for the implication P → Q, the converse is Q → P), is a tool in balancing equations and establishing a statement’s truth value (also in disentangling antinomies, which Lenore frequently explains).

While Wallace contends throughout with different relationships to language and communication, Lenore represents the alignment of clarity in speech with the moral force of truth. Indeed, her constant white dress is a kind of sacred vestment, in a novel concerned with false priests and the possibility of secular work becoming vocational. While the names seem merely corny, Wallace has a serious purpose in naming Judith Prietht (read: Judas Priest with a lisp) and the ineffectual communications repairman Peter Abbott. The Stonecipheco minion Neil Obstat Jr., meanwhile, is named for the phrase of papal censorship, nihil obstat (“nothing hinders”), in a corollary to legalistic control over language. By contrast, confronting the jargon-riddled discourse of Bloemker, Lenore says, “I don’t think I understand what you’re saying” and presses him for precise meanings (B 32). She also has instincts for restoring a sacred sense of balance, asking Bloemker about the allegorically named neighbor (“in the next room”) Mrs. Yingst, who represents one half of the yin-yang symbol, Lenore Sr. the other: “She and Lenore are like this,” Lenore says, her fingers obviously intertwined in illustration (B 33).²⁷

But by placing Lenore under such constant pressure, even to the point of possible death, Wallace also demonstrates the limits of the mathematical precision in language that the tradition of logical positivism had promised him. In 1996, recalling (and regretting) his defense of its absent ending “word,” Wallace said of Broom that “the entire book is a conversation between Wittgenstein and Derrida, and presence versus absence.”²⁸ This “conversation” is the metaphilosophical means by which Broom earns a place alongside the many Menippean satires by Barth, Coover, and Pynchon that Wallace read as a young man.²⁹ Lenore, if we take her as a metadescription of language, is the Tractatus-era Wittgenstein side in this conversation: she is associated with constant, empirical data like the pound, the world of fact (yet, as I have been suggesting, by placing a “fact” in moral conflicts Wallace begins to undo the fact/value distinction). As for the other side, switching the double letters in Biff Diggerence yields Big Difference, the “serious” meaning of which is on the order of that of Judith Prietht. For what if we hear the French accent in Difference and connect it to Derrida’s central idea? The years from 1981 to 1990 were certainly big years on college campuses for différance.³⁰ A sign of which side has the edge in the Wittgenstein/ Derrida debate, especially morally speaking, comes in Biff’s acts of signification: drunk and blocking the way, he “whomps” his forehead repeatedly on the door—what Derrida’s style and nonpragmatic view of language may lead to (B 19)? LaVache, much farther down a path of philosophical gamesmanship and moral bankruptcy in 1990, defies Wittgenstein by arranging a private language, tellingly around the communications system his sister attempts to help repair: he claims he does not have a phone because he calls his phone a “lymph node” (B 214). And LaVache and friends (most of them with no philosophical knowledge at all) are new vehicles for body-denying, deconstructive headaches, modeled on Biff: “This legendary guy a few years back started this tradition where, instead of getting sick, we pound our heads against the wall” (B 217).

Lenore’s shoe-based battle with Biff thus allegorizes her role in the conflict with Derrida-inspired understandings of language, many of which are produced by Rick’s perception of her. For example, in Rick’s fantasizing narration—suffused with poststructuralist suggestions about linguistic constructedness—Lenore is reduced to letters and even mere punctuation: lying asleep, Lenore, “defined by the swell of a breast and the curve of a hip” like the outline of Mansfield, “is an S,” before becoming “a question mark, a comma, a parenthesis,” and finally, legs spread, “a V” (one of Broom’s many references to Pynchon’s Stencilized lady) (B 235). Recounting their first date, Rick keeps Lenore at the distance of reported speech (there are no quotation marks here), and in another equation of legs with ontology, Rick “sweep[s] the area under the table,” “insanely curious about where her legs were” (B 65–66). Portrayed as a writing effect in such scenes, Lenore spends the text trying to lay claim to the legs and feet that bear her weight and thus, in Wallace’s metaphilosophical game, the reality of her existence, an ontological status deconstructive readers would deny her.

If she is a figure of balance, though, why can Lenore not simply recognize her identity as the LB constant and take on both the ontological certainty and moral authority that would imply? Consider a rhyming scene to her outing with Rick, a moment in the Gilligan’s Island bar in which she encounters a literally weightless version of herself, the blow-up doll “date,” named Brenda, of Bloemker, a sexual fetishist like Rick (B 144). Brenda is an image of the hyperthin commodified female, Kopek, made newly grotesque. The little girl LaVache enchants with his leg on the Amherst hill is also named Brenda (B 242), a sign that he will join the novel’s other males in manipulating Lenore (B 243). During the discussion with Bloemker, as Brenda floats upward, Lenore—again the text’s grounded clarifier—questions him before exclaiming, “This isn’t even a person…See, she weighs about one pound” (B 144). Lenore herself is “one pound” in a different sense, but Wallace uses the mirroring moment to reinforce her own weightiness and groundedness, through a “reading” of an-other. She is, in Cavell’s terms, doing the work of being born a second time herself through the negative recognition that Brenda “isn’t even a person.” The Bloemker scene calls for embracing knowledge of oneself not as a constant (that seems always to be the outsider’s view) but as a contingent variable. What other reason can there be for Bloemker’s meandering monologue here about the Midwest, in which he asks, “How to begin to come to some understanding of one’s place in a system…a world that is itself stripped of any static, understandable character by the fact that it changes radically, all the time?” (B 143). Lenore thus embodies a principle of reading and writing as the fluctuating displacement and peripheralization of personal experience (both a writer’s and a reader’s) in text, a method Wallace will employ, and continually transform, on into Oblivion and The Pale King.

LEGS TO SUPPORT

With one Beadsman child clarified, let me attend to the family resemblances. Wallace, still mastering the Dostoevskyan structure he will use in Infinite Jest, seems not to have the space, or perhaps the capacity, to take two of the siblings seriously: we get cardboard portraits of Clarice and John as two extremes. Clarice has taken the approved path of merging the familial and corporate by marrying a Stonecipheco vice president; John, a math genius, refuses not only the family money (like Lenore and LaVache) but sustenance altogether—he is another weightless figure to contrast with Lenore, who characteristically finds a balanced middle path. “Cipher” can mean a number in general or zero in particular; thus Stonecipher, the father’s name, reads as a person frozen at zero—a nihilist, for whom patriarchal tradition (symbolized by statues of “Stonecipher Beadsmans I, II, and III” [B 38]) is the means of increasing “value” and accumulating wealth. Lenore, among Stonecipher’s children, is the only one who takes on the “job” of “mak[ing] up” moral values in the face of a bankrupt 1980s inheritance that I discussed in the introduction.

The first third of Broom establishes the distances between Lenore’s value system and those of her father and suitors, but at Amherst, by way of LaVache, Wallace explores abuses of the Protestant work ethic and the philosophical bases on which work becomes grounds for true (moral) development. Lenore and LaVache, their names soundalikes, may be bonded by rejection of their family, but they diverge strongly on the question of work. LaVache is a hard intellectual worker, but always in the service of his drug habit, rather than Lenore’s self-reliance and balance. When the siblings meet, Lenore revises Rick’s question about the logic behind her low-paying job, after seeing LaVache’s fraudulent tutoring in action.

“You don’t work, here, do you?”

LaVache smiled at her. “That was just work, what I did. I do lots of work.”

“He literally does the work of like forty or fifty guys, and even more girls,” said Heat. “He does all our work, the big lug.”

“What about your own work?” Lenore said to LaVache.

“What can I tell you? I’ve got a leg to support, after all.”

(B 216)

“I’ve got a leg to support”: “me” is tragically missing from the end of LaVache’s statement, which speaks instead to enslaved self-diminution. Drug addiction has literalized for LaVache a state of legless floating; through his perversion of work and “support,” he has resigned himself to a radical lack in his relationship to ground and weight. When Lenore pesters him, he reduces himself to an object and embraces the logic of fetishism running throughout Broom: his leg is his “thing.” “You have to have a thing here” (B 239). The name LaVache, his middle name and mother’s maiden name, means “cow,” marking him as subhuman and (given the species’ legendary stomach storage) as one on a quest to accumulate (an ironic form of grass ends up stored in his prosthesis).

LaVache is also, not by coincidence, a bad philosopher, a bad educator, and, in a trope Wallace will return to, a propagator of error. The inside philosophical joke of the Amherst scenes lies in LaVache’s misreading of Hegelian work and the interaction of economic value and metaphysical value. In limited space, and since, as LaVache says, “Clear presentation is not Hegel’s strength” (B 239), let me rely on Sean Sayers’s cogent summary of work in Phenomenology of Spirit:

Work is a mode of…practical being-for-self and a means by which it develops. Work involves a break with the animal, immediate, natural relationship to nature. In work, the object is not immediately consumed and annihilated. Gratification is deferred. The object is preserved, worked upon, formed and transformed. And, in this way, a distinctively human relationship to nature is established…. By working on the world, by shaping and forming it, human beings become separated from the natural world and established as self-conscious subjects, as beings-for-self, over against an objective world.³¹

In the “being-for-self” that work “develops,” Sayers cites Hegel’s all-important category of Fursichsein—the state Wallace ironically refers to by naming the Amherst economics professor “Fursich” (B 215). Fursich’s student Clint Wood, a tall, staid, and clueless fellow who comes to LaVache for help, plays on both Clint Eastwood and the human as undeveloped object, as automaton (echoing LaVache’s status as mere animal). LaVache’s advice for the first Fursich quiz is incredibly simple, a sign that Wood has done none of the work in the young term: “All you need to remember for Fursich is, when the interest rate goes up, the price of any bond issued goes down” (B 215). Read as part of the philosophical allegory Wallace will continue mounting, Fursich’s economics class actually concerns the value of the subject: if being-for-self is the goal, a low bond price points to the state of bondage out of which Hegel’s subject struggles by way of work—an idea amplified with LaVache’s next customer, Nervous Roy Keller.

LaVache looks forward to exploiting Keller economically all semester through a one-on-one tutorial on Hegel with a professor named Huffman (a name suggesting the breath of Spirit, but about to be reduced to puff’s of marijuana smoke?) (B 221). N.R.K., Keller’s initials, together sound like “anarchy,” and the order that philosophy might bring to this nervous boy should allow him to grow up, or somehow rise (keller is German for basement). But LaVache leads Keller astray: repeating Huffman’s first assignment back to him on the phone, LaVache says, “Obliteration of Nature by Spirit?” and consults the text for the right pages (B 222). But the relevant section of the Phenomenology actually concerns “Observation of Nature”—quite a slip!³² LaVache may be attentive to philosophical texts in a way that makes for correct page citations and good grades; later he will refer to an exact page number of the Investigations with Lenore, who has left her college books in boxes and is instead living out philosophical questions. But LaVache is not one who weds philosophical insight to living a moral life: ironically, one of his tutorials is on the Bible as “moral fiction, useful…as a guide for making decisions about how to live” (B 217–218). He has technical knowledge, but it does not become embodied—a state indexed in his identification with wood, object, and the animal.

Obliterating nature, rather than observing it, is what Zusatz’s G.O.D. has done to Ohio (and what Reconfiguration will do in Infinite Jest). “This is so fucking American, man,” Wallace says in an analysis of minimalism and metafiction; “either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it” (CW 45). This denial of moderation could be applied very broadly to the American structures Broom illuminates, including an economy bereft of oikos and the scorched-earth conversion of the natural landscape into a so-called G.O.D. These are the consequences when subjects forego a program of steady work and growth in favor of an annihilating, totalizing romanticism.

HOW TO WIN THE LOTTERY

But how else to produce, accumulate, and relate to value in Broom? In the remainder of this chapter I array the pathways to value creation evoked in the novel’s later parts, beginning with Hart Lee Sykes, a broad parody of 1980s televangelists, thoroughly lacking the “heart” and “soul” (psyche /Sykes) his name suggests. The call to work that Wallace represents to Broom’s reader receives its climactic distortion in the money grubbing of the minister (also named for a Dickensian thief), who mirrors the call of Zusatz for a parodic “hewing” and offers the novel’s final trace of Reagan. Sykes says, “I stand before you tonight” (though he is, tellingly, “standing” at a televisual distance) “to say that a partner is a worker,” one who recognizes the need to unite with others “in the service of” Jesus (B 458), himself “a worker” and “partner” (B 459). But Sykes is merely stuffing work into a corporatist idiom, as so many others have. By asking for this infusion of cash from the corporation-like “Partners With God,” Sykes speaks a perverse version of the Protestant work ethic: “If all us partners work together, in the Lord’s soil, our desires are automatically spiritually transformed into Jesus’s desires, too” (B 461). Seeking a cynically pragmatic logic in spirituality, Sykes wants to reconcile God and mammon and dictate terms to Jesus. According to Sykes, one can simultaneously be a hyperconsumerist and a transcendent Christian; he perverts the otherness of divinity to identify it entirely with the acquisitive self, tellingly rendered here in the technological language of the “automatic.” Indeed, he promises viewers the “100 percent pleasure” Wallace finds endemic to entertainment, prophesying “the satisfaction of your every need. The fulfillment of your every wish” (B 461). Saying come to work by merely calling in, Sykes thus offers as great a distortion of the path to God as the waste land of the G.O.D. does. These late-twentieth-century forms of civic and religious authority also hold nightmare versions of the Puritans’ founding hope to be a new Israel, to be brought out of the desert and into a promised land called America.

A profane minister calls forth, on the other side of the screen, a profane “Metal” goddess, the text’s final echo of Pynchon’s devilish clockwork goddess, V. In the concluding scenes, completing his allegory of a workless society, Wallace fuses Sykes’s hand with that of Mindy, who has been, from foot criticism to tensions over Lang, a rival to Lenore. In addition to receiving money from her father, Rex (a worshiper of artificially fertilized lawn rather than actual ground), Mindy earns her value as the recorded voice in cars and grocery-store checkouts, another of the text’s examples of fetishization and its replacement of human labor as the source of a product’s value. As Marx writes in defining the commodity fetish in Capital, products are “abounding in metaphysical subtleties”; in his famous description of a table as commodity, it “evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas.”³³ Mindy’s work as this metaphysical voice within objects contrasts with Lenore’s efforts to fix the phone lines that technologize the human voice for (potential) two-way communication. In Broom’s revision of Lolita (allusions to which Boswell notes [Understanding, 42]), Wallace treats the adolescent Mindy, object of Rick’s leering gaze, as a woodland creature, strongly associated with the baptismal wash of the lawn sprinkler (B 210). When Rick finally becomes her lover in the novel’s final scene, though, Mindy is an electrified goddess for the age, her luminousness coming from the TV as she “kneel[s]” before it to “touch” Sykes: “Cold light comes out from between her fingers on the screen.” Later, Rick sees a “flickering hand, dead and cold”—Sykes’s. “It covers everything”: technologized agency pervades all (B 466). The deeper reference, though, is to a negation of Keats’s “This living hand,” that Wallace standard for artistic (i.e., nontelevisual) connection. Lenore, whose apparent death in the phone tunnels Mindy is not even interested in hearing Rick narrate, has failed in her quest to become the measure of (moral) value.

Elsewhere, though, Lenore rebels against both Metalmanhood and Sykes’s late-capitalist “Christian” charity by seeking out alternate forms of economic value that point to other kinds of donation and other foundations of moral value. First, in yet more sly Wallace onomastics, there is the meaning in Beadsman, notably not used by the nihilistic Stonecipher in naming his corporation. Here Wallace evokes the bedesmen, religious figures in medieval Scotland who solicited donations on the promise of praying for their benefactors (compare Sykes’s appeal).³⁴ The themes of giving and asceticism are underdeveloped here, considering all Wallace will do with them in the future. But Lenore does challenge Rick’s notion that gift exchange is just an occasion for reciprocity and even further demands: foreshadowing his turn to the sadomasochism of handcuffs, Rick once asked to be allowed to tie her up for Christmas, but she gave him a beret instead. As they argue about Vlad, another of his presents, Lenore sees Rick’s disturbance of true gift structures, while he is stuck on an “emotional dash legal deep sense” of “technical[]” ownership (of Vlad and her) (B 283). Critiquing possessiveness, Lenore asks, “Why do you perceive everything in terms of having and losing?” (B 197).

Finally, there is the lottery to consider—like the gift, a symbol of an unbalanced ledger as well as an image of the contingent, communal value that Wallace will continue placing in characters’ purses and wallets as he builds a vision of money’s displacement. Unable to pay the high price Gerber’s charges her for Kopek’s performance, Lenore drops her purse, and “bright” “lottery tickets spilled out and went everywhere” (B 386). Sheepishly she tells Lang that she and Candy play often and “have all these systems, using our birthdays” (B 396), implicit challenges to the homogenized “system” that looms over the novel in the title. She insists there is more logic than luck to it: they started playing in college, and Lenore, a philosophy major, “hit on this sort of syllogism, ostensibly proving we’d win” (B 396). While LaVache disproved it, Lenore has maintained the practice. A condescending Lang asserts capitalist sense and value: “I personally majored in ec-o-nomics” (B 396). Lenore, fighting off one more act of male chauvinism, notes that though her father wanted her to major in it (read: Lang and economics echo the law of the father, in psychoanalytic terms), she only ever took one class. She then describes her burnout, similar to Wallace’s own, with logicians of language, who “play their games with words, instead of numbers, and so things are even harder.” But “by the end of school I didn’t like it much any more” (B 397). Thus despite three male voices—Stonecipher, LaVache, Lang—all insisting on the stupidity of seeking value in the lottery, Lenore goes on gambling, guaranteed returns be damned. Like the axiological figures discussed in the introduction, she finds herself attracted to the “bright” tickets’ glow, their contingent promise of value, their disturbance of the logic of “having and losing.” Wallace, who understood the astronomical odds perfectly well, may have himself been a lottery player: “I would have loved to have gotten nominated for the National Book Award” for Infinite Jest, he says in 1997. “I would also love to win the Illinois State Lottery” (CW 81).

Considered as an ending response to the many games in Broom involving dire falls (Chutes and Ladders) and outright sadism (LaVache’s “Hi, Bob”), the open-ended, state-run lottery is a salutary vision: in losing week after week, Lenore is actually paying into a civic fund that is not unlike taxes, a fund of commonwealth that the young Wallace tentatively steps toward here. Many U.S. lotteries have historically been legally set up to support states’ public-education systems, another sign of Lenore’s involvement with learning (though increasingly such claims about state lotteries are truthless advertising). Given the role played by chance in the bleeding of switchboard calls (some of her lottery tickets are stored in “one of the white switchboard cabinets” [B 447]), communication itself becomes a lottery of connections, a secular miracle. And by playing a game without the likelihood of “winning” it, without rationalizing it, or without delimiting each of its rules in the way that, say, a chess player does, Lenore honors tricky aspects of rule following and play in language games. As Dale Jacquette explains, drawing on Wittgenstein’s many comparisons of chess and language games, with the latter “we must share in at least some of the relevant form of life in order to determine the point and purpose of the game, in order to distinguish its essential from its inessential rules.”³⁵ Recall here the way contracts in Broom also expose the distance between imposed rules and the “essential” “form of life.” Rick echoes the point thematically and performatively when, making multiple, semivague attempts at fashioning his metaphor of understanding, he says of the figure on whom he heaps so much language, “Lenore has the quality of a sort of game about her…. Lenore soundlessly invites one to play a game consisting of involved attempts to find out the game’s own rules. How about that. The rules of the game are Lenore, and to play is to be played” (B 72). If the lottery is the uninstrumentalized “game” figuring language that Broom ultimately settles on, it is important that Lenore’s dreams of winning remain unfulfilled and even irrational—for actually winning might connote that she is an owner of language or a controller of its contingencies. Language is, in actuality, commonwealth, the property of all, like the proceeds from lottery-ticket purchases (minus the winnings) ideally conceived.

The lottery, always a loss for Lenore, expands Broom’s references to Frank Norris’s McTeague, where Trina’s lottery winnings lead to her murder.³⁶ But more importantly, through the lottery Wallace partially resolves his anxiety over an “approved career” and the “artiste thing” in the McCaffery interview. For the real metafictive subject in the discussion of college majors—to bring this chapter full circle—is the calling Wallace did heed, over Lenore’s philosophy and Lang’s economics. Speaking to his college alumni magazine in 1999 (and reflecting on his Amherst creative writing project?), Wallace reinforces his association of artistic success with the lottery and suggests that his first book points to the gamble of trying to become a writer: he knows “way too many fine and serious writers who haven’t been able to get anything published to be able to regard the whole process as anything much more than a lottery” (LI 61). Thus among the many metafictional meanings of Lenore’s switchboard, lottery tickets, and poverty is Wallace’s commitment to art that will only “pay” if it has the good fortune to make a connection with an audience. In the purse and cabinet of tickets also lie replies to other vessels of value and bearers of weight in the text, so many of them signs of desperation: LaVache’s hollow leg in which he stores his drugs, Bombardini’s massive stomach. In his essay on Kafka, Wallace would indict an idiom that convinces American college students “that a self is something you just have,” when the truth is that “the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle”—much like LB’s efforts to establish her existence, which are inextricable from the physical exertion that comes attached to her name and identity (CL 64). In its critique of romantic possessiveness, its many images of entropic seepage, and its insistence that there are no guarantees in the accrual of value, Broom begins Wallace’s career-long critique of the self as an externalized object of possession or purchase.

Not long after publishing Broom, Wallace in 1988 would write “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” which notes, “Nothing has changed about why writers who don’t do it for the money write: it’s art, and art is meaning, and meaning is power: power…to order chaos, to transform void into floor and debt into treasure” (BF 68). In this chapter I have detailed the many reasons Wallace, in eschewing money as motivation for his life’s work, would pair a magical production of economic value (“debt into treasure”) with a magical production of stable grounding (“void into floor”), an alliance that will persist throughout his balancing books. Debt and treasure also contrast with the puns Wallace layers into the essay’s title: “Futures” suggests an artistic stock market in which writing careers are somehow advanced financial instruments, and “Conspicuously” evokes Thorstein Veblen’s famous phrase “conspicuous consumption,” which involves competitive spending and body-deforming display that have little connection to the actual satisfaction of human needs or to the resolve of Lenore (daughter of the leisure class) to work simply to buy food.

A lifetime supply of fast food will be the payment for appearing as a child in a McDonald’s commercial in “Westward,” Wallace’s next long work on value and a meditation on a new generation of writers contending with art’s entry into the marketplace. I turn to it in the next chapter, placing it alongside important but overlooked stories about the great American moment of economic contingency, the 1929 stock-market crash and Great Depression.