David Foster Wallace’s Balancing Books: Fictions of Value

ON OCTOBER 19, 1987, “Black Monday,” stock markets around the world crashed. In the United States the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 508 points, a 22.6 percent loss in value, the largest one-day percentage decline in history. Some economists predicted a new Great Depression. A headline in the New York Times on the morning following Black Monday alarmingly read, “Does 1987 Equal 1929?”¹ and the equation of the two eras was a topic debated in the media over the next several weeks. Identifying the definitive causes of the 1987 crash is outside my scope here, but rampant overvaluation of stocks inarguably played a major role. In a thesis likely to catch the eye of a young writer who would later portray resistance to the market-driven logic of using computers to check tax returns a year or two before 1987, many economists also blamed the crash on new trading programs able to make incredibly rapid transactions, leading to automated selloffs as prices fell, without (human) regard for a communal faith in stocks’ value. As Paul Crosthwaite notes, one designer of the programmed trading even feared that the crash would lead the Soviets to initiate attacks on a weakened U.S. and produce nuclear Armageddon.²

Wallace’s continual interest in questioning the fundamental basis of value creation warns me away from suggesting a simple causal narrative in which his work of this period responds straightforwardly to the market crash. He is not that sort of writer; he is led more often by a DeLilloan urge to make work that, while conversant with daily headlines, prophesies the culture’s turns and diagnoses its abiding myths in near-future settings. Still, the economic crises of the late 1980s contribute to the unorthodox view of the early short stories, in Girl with Curious Hair and elsewhere, that I offer in this chapter, expanding on chapter 1’s historical connections to Reagan and anxieties about productive work. I draw anew on the effects Wallace’s economics study had on his fiction, focusing here on his interest in the New Deal and the formation of the U.S. welfare state. The Wallace who studied economic policy and considered law school had, Max says, “inchoate” dreams of a life in politics, built on a childhood vision that he might become an Illinois congressman—a fate he would romance in “Lyndon.”³ Max also describes Wallace, upon returning from medical leave for his senior year of 1984–1985, competing with his best friend Mark Costello, who had graduated the previous spring with “two theses, one a novel, the other a study of the New Deal,” a subject in which Costello had a “boundless interest,” often shared around the dining hall tables at which he and Wallace held court (Max, Every Love Story, 39, 27). Wallace’s own, less conventional study of the New Deal, I argue, continued well after college graduation. As demonstrated by Signifying Rappers, which he and Costello coauthored in alternating chapters in 1989, Wallace conceived of some of his writing in this period as a dialogue with his best friend, who became a lawyer after Amherst (and eventually a federal prosecutor) but would later publish novels as well.⁴ The idea that writing fiction might commingle with more civically engaged (and more “approved”) jobs seems often to have been on Wallace’s mind in his early career.

Economic readings of the early short stories show Wallace reaching back in U.S. history to a decade when the nation relearned the meaning of monetary value and submitted to its profound intertwining with the civic, while also confronting (in an echo of The Broom of the System) the value of work. In the three stories of 1988–1989 I examine in the greatest detail, “Crash of ’69,” “John Billy,” and “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” Wallace drew long arcs between the Depression and later moments in the twentieth century when the American winning streak had met another of its periodic, catastrophic ends—busts for a culture that seemed not so much expectant of constant boom as utterly dependent on it. Viewing Wallace’s early experimentation in the light of the Depression opens up to history fiction that has been largely viewed in terms of its relation to postmodernist predecessors and minimalist contemporaries, whether in Boswell’s claim that Girl remedies the “self-satisfied irony” of writing by “Generation X” or Kasia Boddy’s treatment of the book as a response to MFA workshop culture and popular 1980s styles.⁵

Given Wallace’s much-discussed break with the ironic tradition of postmodernism in “E Unibus Pluram” and the McCaffery interview, what happens if we take as the “origin” or ground of his fictional ethos not the traditional twentieth-century breakpoint of 1945, not the 1960s and 1970s in which so many of his key intertexts emerged, and not the Reaganite 1980s in which he began publishing but, instead, 1929? This was the date that, especially in the period of Girl, provided him with a metaphorics of economic Depression and crashes of value—all evidence of radical contingency—that he could juxtapose with crashes of self-worth and interior states of depression. In calling readers back to the Depression, Wallace could also chasten 1980s opulence and excess. Such is the general context in which I read Wallace’s historically unstable and multivalent economic allegories below. Our understanding of Wallace—not a postmodernist or postpostmodernist but, as Boswell argues, the “nervous leader of some still-unnamed (and perhaps unnamable) third wave of modernism” (Understanding, 1)—benefits from situating his work specifically within the history of the U.S. welfare state and, in Jason Puskar’s words, the “grand narrative[s] of chance collectivity” and “social and material interdependence”⁶ that critics have recently used to renovate political readings of U.S. modernism and naturalism. These histories demonstrate the intertwining of literary imagining and welfare-state achievements such as the Social Security Administration—developments that, in Szalay’s words, “changed profoundly the political valence and cultural instrumentality of existing literary conventions.”⁷ It is precisely these state formations that are under steady attack during Wallace’s career by neoliberal principles, and here I begin an account of Wallace’s engagement with the liberal tradition of social insurance that extends into chapter 5’s analysis of Oblivion and the reactive neoliberal formation of for-profit insurance.

Anticipating an encyclopedic novel that would find states of loneliness and depression reflected in a nation’s appetite for an empty popular culture, many of Wallace’s early stories construct elaborate economic metaphors to connect individuals’ statements about feeling worthless to issues of American poverty and the acts of communal repair that might serve to remedy both—the Depression linked to depression, the New Deal connected to the small-scale “living transaction” through which he defined the salutary exchange with his readers. The 1930s are for Wallace, if in a far more muted form, what 1945 was to Pynchon in the signal text of postmodernism, Gravity’s Rainbow: that is, the moment of historical apocalypse that needed to be traversed and retraversed in the fictional imagination. Wallace’s contentious relationship to postmodernism thus finds reflection in his choice of devaluation and Depression, elements of the modernist era, as his key moment of twentieth-century crisis. In the following sections, I trace Wallace’s narratives from the crash of 1929 to varying forms of redress in his figurations of New Deal ritual, social insurance, and 1960s rhetoric of a Great Society. In the chapter’s conclusion, with a historicized Wallace in place, I demonstrate his merger of impoverishment with abiding philosophical questions, returning to “Westward” for models of value not from the 1930s but the ancient world.

“Crash of ’69” is the surreal tale of a man who is, like his father, “always wrong” in predicting successful stocks—and thus supremely valuable to financial firms, who do the exact opposite.⁸ The original title was “Crash of ’62,” the year of Wallace’s birth.⁹ Despite the specificity of these titles, no 1960s stock market crash is described. The ostensible historical subject is another type of value crisis: the removal of the U.S. dollar from the gold standard and the establishment of fiat currency, dramatized in conversations between what appears to be the Federal Reserve Chairman, called “Father” throughout, and a range of advisors, including his daughter. “Crash” initiates Wallace’s contention that financial value and the irrational—if not the psychotic—are aligned, as dramatized here by a wheelchair-bound Fed Chairman who, presiding from something more like a heavenly realm than the Treasury, suffers the effects of a stroke or dementia. In Wallace’s philosophical allegory, he is the dead God of Nietzsche’s Gay Science, no longer handing out Platonic forms—or a God on life support, “late in Term” (4). One line jokes, “new Nietzsche: God is Dyslexic” (7).¹⁰ Metaphysics here is not presumed dead but fighting to stay alive, in line with Wallace’s drive to stage rather than resolve philosophical conflicts in his fiction.¹¹ More specifically, “Crash” undoes the hegemony of the rational mind on questions of value by accounting for Father and Karrier’s conditions with a “strange phrenological jut” on the back of the heads of both (4); Karrier has a corresponding “dent in [his]forehead,” home of the frontal cortex and analytical logic, as if he has “been creamed with a shovel” (7). Intuition, instinct, and the senses may be all he has left, but the culture utterly distorts them.

“Crash” registers the impact of Wallace’s economics study on his understanding of the poststructuralist language crisis of the mid-century. The “correct” date for this story might be 1971, when Nixon ended the Bretton Woods agreement (in place since 1944) and removed the U.S. dollar from the gold standard. But also in play are the 1930s, since the Fed Chairman conjures the wheelchair-bound FDR, whose monetary policy fought the Depression by temporarily removing the U.S. dollar from the gold standard. Given suspicions during Reagan’s second term that he was suffering from memory lapses, Father could also refer to him (though Reagan’s Alzheimer’s disease would only be confirmed after he left office and Wallace’s story was already published).¹² “This year is what year?”, a question about Karrier’s time on the job, applies to the whole story, for Wallace mounts a pastiche of many moments—crises of money juxtaposed with crises in meaning and the valuation of self (8). Karrier’s father may or may not have committed suicide in 1929 (8), and his son, also seen attempting suicide, inherits the stock-picking ability and the genetics of depression that being “always wrong” suggests: he both is a “carrier” of the disease and feels empty, like caries or a cavity. The title “Crash of ’62” identified a depressive’s autobiography in which being born is an irreparable crash. But “Crash of ’69,” the final title, suggests the theme is the crash of balance itself—note that the 6 and 9, unhinged from reference to a year, denote yin and yang, one’s head chasing the other’s tail. Wallace thus projects 1929 forward and expands it into a general crash of the American psyche and language.¹³

Just glancing at its pages reveals “Crash” as an heir of Joyce’s “Circe”: all-capital headings announce the “speaker” of each section, and a witch-like woman seduces a callow young man. More than Joyce, though, Wallace’s model is David Lynch. Wallace credited seeing Blue Velvet in 1986 while at Arizona with granting him an “epiphanic experience” about his artistic mission.¹⁴ “Crash,” which archival notes indicate Wallace drafted in Arizona, pays homage to Lynch’s influence by naming the Fed Chairman’s daughter, in a final heading, “Miss M. Lynch” (11).¹⁵ Like Dorothy Vallens in Blue Velvet, this woman proves the sexual aggressor with the naïf Karrier (analogous to Jeffrey Beaumont). In context, Miss Lynch seems to refer to the financier Edmund Lynch, one half of Merrill-Lynch, the employer of Karrier’s father (5). But seeing Karrier’s lover as a “daughter” of David Lynch instead makes the film director one more instance of surrealist innovation in a story that mentions, in two historical fabrications of October 1929, René Magritte and the inkblots of Hermann Rorschach: “The air hung with plummeting well-dressed forms. It was a seminal day. Magritte painted the plummeting forms. A Rorschach conceptualized the Rorschach test from his little analyst’s office overlooking the sidewalk” (8). Lynch’s “entirely new and original” surrealism liberated Wallace, he told Charlie Rose in 1997, from anxiety about “follow[ing] in a certain…tradition” of the avant-garde, and in “Crash” Wallace constructs his own “seminal” artistic history by bending surrealist benchmarks to a domain he knows well, financial value, all to expose an overvalued stock market as the scene of collective hallucination and dementia.

Let me expand on the valuing of Karrier’s “always wrong” language, through which Wallace retunes his association of Lenore with analytical logic’s two-valued system of truth and focuses his governing link between monetary and linguistic exchange. The crash the story evokes is the destruction of meaningful opposition itself: every Karrier “yes” becomes a “no” and vice versa. In the paradox thus pursued, financial value arises in the story at the expense of the truth value of Karrier’s words. Wallace, proposing truth value as an axiomatic distinction within any logical system, plays upon common notation for the (computer-like) logical positivist, in which true statements are represented with a 1, false ones with a 0.¹⁶ “Crash” underscores this distinction in how meaning and money are “numbered” when the elder Karrier in the 1920s claims the new company East-man Kodak has “not even a fraction of a chance. Meaning a bare zero for potential growth” (4). His “no” has tremendous value in the market, as his employer buys up the stock, but his truth and “meaning” are converted into “a bare zero” or falsehood. Money’s value and language’s truth value prove wholly incompatible.

Such inversions also expose the subordination, within systems devoted to generating exchange value, of the body, use value, and the felt satisfactions connecting the two. In a return to the distorted hunger of Bombardini, the country, embodied by Karrier, has lost the sense that taste and appetite govern consumer desire. After Karrier predicts a winning horse by saying “I feel in my chest, bowels the absence of even one slim snowball’s chance” for it (3), Diggs, his agent, offers him a glass of champagne, asking, “How’s this for a year”—a question about alcohol’s quality notorious for raising debates between consumers’ instincts and the specialist’s knowledge of market value. “A terrible year,” Karrier answers. “Bluck.” “Good enough,” says Diggs, treating the judgment of Karrier’s taste buds in the same way he treats his abstract judgments of money systems (4). “Crash” thus aligns the impoverished senses that some depressives experience (deficits in taste and smell, for instance) with a large-scale insensitivity to the real ground of value. In such a context, the standard of good fiction for Wallace necessarily would become, in an interview refrain he would develop throughout the mid-1990s, an appeal to a physicalized intellectual sense, that keynote of his divergence from a more cerebral postmodernism: great artists have “their own vision, their own way of fracturing reality,” and “if it’s authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.”¹⁷

Wallace’s unique and aggressive stance on irony and sincerity is being birthed here as well. By inverting the truth value of all of Karrier’s statements and making the opposite of each sincere statement the word to bank on, Wallace finds one of his first dramatic windows into the pervasiveness of irony, which is always “based on an implicit ‘I don’t really mean what I’m saying,’” a lie that does not assume the stance of a lie (SFT 67). In his interactions with his father’s old colleagues, even Karrier’s familial affections face a black hole of ironic neutralization: “He was the worst, your old man, the former retired market analysts will say to me, in admiration, no rancor” (“Crash of ’69,” 4). These market men demonstrate the ironic distance from one’s words that “E Unibus Pluram” also locates in the 1960s. In fact, reading “Crash” as Wallace’s preparation for that manifesto helps illuminate a point it makes only elliptically, through the interpretation of TV’s cynical ads: that irony’s pervasiveness and the profit motive are aligned. And the title “Crash of ’69,” in this context, evokes a dead end toward which the postmodern cultural formations of that decade were headed.

Finally, the deepest subject of “Crash” is the question of how the mind values not money but the entirety of creation (or “All That”), the domain in which, Wallace often asserts, we must resist the temptation of a nihilism reinforced by a depressed perspective. “It’s great” is Karrier’s refrain, his remark in his first and last speeches and a masking of his depression (3, 12). The line distorts God’s response at the end of each day’s work in the Bible’s creation story: “God saw that it was good.”¹⁸ Karrier says instead, “It’s great”: in “great” rather than (sufficient, full-stop) “good” is the leading edge of enumeration and comparative valuation, the mental world of greater-than and less-than (and, ultimately, the pitfalls of utilitarianism). Yes, it’s great, this voice says, but might another product be greater? In this way Wallace expands the problem of use value and taste Karrier encountered: pursuing exchange value, especially as financial instruments grow more “advanced,” almost inevitably leaves the body and feelings behind. On the personal level, “It’s great” is the voice of a depressive denying his condition, but allowed to dictate the entire nation’s conception of value, the forces of “It’s great” are what produce the mania of pricing and stock-market crashes and widespread unhappiness. Wallace is preparing for Infinite Jest, where depression and a consumer culture of limitless, greater-and-greater choices will prove mutually reinforcing and utterly disastrous.

In the formally challenging “John Billy,” Wallace creates a communal ritual—a choral “mythopoeum” and rain dance of sorts—that serves as a poetic embodiment of the New Deal, the social policy of renewed commonwealth that arose out of the Depression’s devaluation (GCH 136). Wallace finds here a set of parallels between personal and national “cures” that he will continue reconfiguring into his examination of the neoliberal diminishment of the New Deal in The Pale King, itself a narrative of middle-American ritual. “John Billy” is an axiological narrative portraying the subject’s metaphysical search for ground through the nation’s literal ungrounding during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. While the setting is the 1970s, the Dust Bowl has not really ended: in Minogue, Oklahoma, since the Dust Bowl blew his farm away and he “angled some job out of F. Delano R.’s WPA,” the character “Simple Ranger,” a “damaged” man, has worked “as a watcher for major or calamitous dust” (GCH 121). He turns out, in the Odyssey-like ending, to be the much younger central character himself, Chuck Nunn Junior, returned in disguise to hear his own myth of trauma and rage told—the 1930s again connected to Wallace’s generation.¹⁹ Nunn’s name is a compact Heideggerian allegory: Heidegger writes in Being and Time that Dasein is “thrown” into existence; “thrownness [Geworfenheit]” is “meant to suggest the facticity of its being delivered over [Uberantwortung].”²⁰ Ejected from a car in another crash that reads as a birth, Wallace’s character is “chucked” or thrown into a state of nothingness (“Nunn” as “none”), all of which depends on merely being born into existence, of being “Junior.” Wallace also finds a source here for his recurrent trope of the ecological collapses, increasingly self-imposed, that punctuate capitalist economy: Dust Bowl displacements will be the unlikely historical referent for the “dust that forms a uremic-hued cloud” visible for miles around the returning herd of feral hamsters—images of hyper consumptive Americans—after “Experialist migration” in Infinite Jest (IJ 93).

Both “John Billy” and (as we will see) “Westward,” deftly philosophical narratives, begin from thesis sentences about value or hypotheses the stories are designed to test. The first paragraph of “John Billy” calls Chuck a “good luck bad luck man, who everything that hit him stuck and got valuable” (GCH 121). Contingency (luck) is again at issue, and note the dropping of “to” after “stuck”: the words describe an elusive incorporation, with “stuck” connoting not surface adhesion (i.e., stuck to him) but the breaking of skin. This undoing of body and ego fortifications seems necessary to creating value; moreover, the valuable is not something accrued by the imperial individual (also to be indicted in the title of “Westward”). Throughout, developing further Lenore’s critique of Rick, Wallace’s quasi-Oklahoman dialect turns “got” from a word of agential acquisition to one of submission to external forces: in the final vision of community, for instance, “on that one fine dark day a pentecost’s throw from Ascension, we all of us got levitationally aloft” (GCH 146; italics mine). As a more nuanced version of the satiric Sykes scenes of Broom, “John Billy,” with a group levitation and a recitation of Nunn’s myth, seeks to provide a ritual for the restoration of ground and fertility.

In making value begin in being “stuck,” Wallace incorporates near the ritual ending, as the rains arrive, a paradoxical vision of vitality: “The land commenced to look wounded” (GCH 145). Having begun as the story of a single man of no value, “Nunn,” “John Billy” grants its ritual ensemble not only a share of the commonwealth of story and language but “an everything of flora, sheep, soil, light, elements”—the world remade by the collective, agreed-upon perception undergirding language, in Wittgenstein’s terms (GCH 147). A breakdown in such agreement on the color of “everything” will be Wallace’s object in the grim flash-fiction of a couple’s dissolution, “Everything Is Green.” In “John Billy,” though, the newly fertile scene, in a conjunction of (healthful) wound and signs of monetary value, is marked by “coins of water bright and clean” that look “like open cancres in the red light of the low hurt red sun” (GCH 145). In these coins a new sort of value has been established, not just of nature but of the abidingly wounded state of the human psyche. In a narrative of car crashes and invasive metal, such liquid “coins” are a welcome respite, even if their redemption is tempered with pain. The distrust of monetary value in “Crash” becomes, then, an attempt, rampant in Wallace, to remint metal and paper currency in nature’s terms.

In its quasi-tall-tale idiom, “John Billy” depends on a sense that the vaunted western frontier, once a source of expanding American value, met yet another limit when the dust rose, driving the characters toward new forms of communal personhood. Working the same vein, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” refers to Bishop Berkeley’s famous phrase but more pointedly to the Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze mural, at the U.S. House of Representatives, that applies the phrase to a scene of eager pioneers enacting Manifest Destiny. This is the mythos of an eternally expansive economy that Wallace mocks by stalling his young characters at the Collision airport. While westward may lie the course of capitalist expansion, eastward is where Wallace turns in finding the ancient sources he continues to juxtapose with modern economies. In addition to the Zen influence on the story’s archery imagery, there is classical mythology: Mark, a competitive archer possessing a “monstrous radiance,” is the sun and archer god Apollo (GCH 233). But in this story his arrow is mainly a prop, and his “surgeon shirts” are a light parody of his inability to be a god of medicine and healing (Apollo’s other identity) (GCH 236). Taking a cue from DeLillo’s accenting of Joyce’s legacy, Wallace takes great interest in the “survival” of mythological forms, and Mark Nechtr (named for the food of the gods) is his attempt to see how an Apollo fares in postmodern conditions, much like Lenore was Justitia placed in 1990.²¹

But despite these appeals to myth, Wallace proves no Eliotic modernist in “Westward,” which thoroughly rejects Eliot’s view of a sterile modernity. In this unerringly allegorical story, Mark and D.L.’s dyspeptic traveling companion Tom Sternberg represents Thomas Stearns Eliot and a bad-digestion-based reading of wasteland sensibilities, which overlook an extant plenitude and become aligned with nihilism. Sternberg’s is a backed-up system (perhaps in need of the broom of roughage?), and Wallace undermines his grim vision, consonant with Eliot’s, in favor of a hopeful vision of art-driven abundance. Just as “John Billy” brought rain to a dry land, “Westward” seems to agree with Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog, who indicts in Eliot and others “the Wasteland outlook, the cheap mental stimulants of Alienation.”²² As a consequence, Mark’s development (like Karrier’s in relation to valuing the creation) depends on countering the advertising mogul J. D. Steelritter’s nihilistic claim that in the “verdant” landscape of Illinois lies “nothing to hold your eye, you have to pan back and forth, like a big No, your eyes so relaxed and without object they almost roll” (GCH 242, 244). With “pan” suggesting a camera’s gaze, J.D. embodies what Wallace calls “passive spectation,” the opposite of a reader’s hard, open-minded work (CW 33).²³

Wallace writes his response to Eliot’s wasteland sensibility not through myth or allegory but, unexpectedly, Social Security—or rather, by creating a vision in which welfare-state formations are symbolized by versions of the Fisher King. An idiosyncratic, insurance-like structure calling back to the New Deal plays a crucial role in “Westward,” which enshrines the grandparental generation of the 1930s—and becomes, not coincidentally, a story of social insurance—through the invented town of Collision, ostensibly named after its founding event, a car crash that kills a local farmer named Kroc. Collision is also common American shorthand for car insurance, importantly the kind that pays out when one injures another. But in Wallace’s contortion of the idea, the grief-stricken, wealthy woman driving the car (revealed to be the eventual Mrs. Steelritter, mother of J.D.) instinctively offers Kroc’s family, with “no litigation,” a “settlement way beyond legal” as recompense. The pun on “settlement” and Collision’s name suggest that the community both arises out of trauma and is inseparable from the social buffering that legal/insurance settlements represent (GCH 258, 259). Insurance is thus, for Wallace, community itself: this community is collision and the shared risk of getting struck or stuck, a political expansion of Wallace’s idea that “an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering” and that readers, by realizing their own pain is shared, grow “less alone” (CW 22).

Out of guilt, Mrs. Steelritter remains fixed to the spot in her car, and in a foreshadowing of the attention to fulfilling promises that Mark learns in the larger story, “her vow” to remain stationary, “plus strength of character, yielded certain implications,” with “yield” figuring here as a verb of (agricultural) gain (GCH 258). The town’s entire economy grows around this woman, who functions as a central marketplace and bank in the story’s rendition of community being rebuilt within the Depression: stationary, she “wanted things, and would exchange money for the things” (GCH 258). Infusing what are essentially gifts into a system in which monetary exchange has utterly failed, Mrs. Steelritter is a Buddha-like god of stillness and the payment of ongoing karmic debt, or perhaps she is Cain, the Bible’s first killer, who comes to be a founder of cities.

In portraying Mrs. Steelritter turning life in a car (the fate of many in the Depression) into the founding of a town, Wallace is again romancing subjects he studied in college. “Itinerant Depressed poor, but with things, and entrepreneurial drive, flocked to” the crash site to build “shanties” around the woman (GCH 258). Providing money at a time of disaster, Mrs. Steelritter points to many aspects of Roosevelt’s New Deal that allowed community economies to become functional again, including the old-age insurance scheme of Social Security and deposit insurance for banks. By calling this tent city a “nouveaux-bourgeois Rooseveltville” (a twist on the “Hooverville” name that satirized a previous president), Wallace suggests that not just emergency measures but the prosperous American middle class grew robustly out of Roosevelt’s New Deal (GCH 258). Other echoes of Depression economics abound: the dead farmer represents the collapse of agriculture, and the efflorescence of agricultural “yield” with the farmer lying in the fields gestures toward not just a revamped Eliot but the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation, created in 1938 to mitigate the effects of farming disasters. The Steelritters’ rose farming, begun from J.D.’s father’s journeys by bicycle as (pun intended) an “itinerant peddler” of flowers, not only captures the story’s spirit of Ludditism and economic atavism but recalls the reduction of many to flower selling and movement between towns for work during the Depression (GCH 258). These 1930s forms of value lie in contrast to the shakiness of the financial capital and loans that dominate the present, aspects of the credit economy I explore further in this chapter’s conclusion.

In a move typical of the postmodernists such as Pynchon he was still prone to imitate, Wallace spatializes history and has the 1930s past survive materially in the present: in the ending breakdown scene, J.D. tells his son, DeHaven, to ask for help at three of the old “shanties,” which have inexplicably survived (inhabited?) into the 1980s (GCH 344). Likewise, the dead farmer of Collision’s founding is reincarnated as a gigantic farmer who attempts (in another evocation of Depression transactions) to pay for his car rental with a handful of grain. “What’s happened to the big old farmer who’s unable to trade a whole season’s sweat and effort, in the tradition that made the U.S.A…. possible and great, for a lousy three weeks of flashy transport?” Wallace writes in further economic nostalgia and adoration of an American work ethic (GCH 268). As in “Crash of ’69,” history proves repetitive: this farmer also gestures toward the crisis of farm devaluation in Reagan’s America. The car is “for the farmer’s eldest son’s potential wedding to a loan officer’s daughter,” sign of the move from farm-based valuation to an economy of money and usury (GCH 268). The farmer in effect “wins” the westward march of progress, though, appearing in a final scene, carless but driving his tractor past DeHaven’s stalled vehicle. While he never proves any sort of socialist or utopianist, Wallace finds much that his contemporary world has left behind in the insurance and other collective supports grounded in the New Deal, here given various magical renderings.

The ironies are succinctly summarized when Wallace, again drawing on his economics studies, shows superabundant “corn” being converted into “coin” and thus rendered worthless (astonishing given how much McDonald’s food depends on the crop, from high-fructose corn syrup to hamburgers made from corn-fed animals). Collision-area farmland is “so fertile it’s worthless” because of mismanaged government subsidies, as Magda explains, providing another 1980s economics lesson: they see “so much corn that it’s literally worthless, oodles…of bushels of Supply that intersect the market’s super…elastic Demand curve down near the base, where Supply equals oodles and Price equals the sort of coin you don’t even bother to bend over to pick up” (GCH 299–300). Thus does the economy of Price and exchange value, abstracted from earthly abundance, come into alignment with J.D.’s nihilistic “big No,” also directed at the corn.

J.D.’s economy is hamburger flipping times “billions and billions”: total service, total consumption, end and death oriented, a prototype for the promise of limitless pleasures in Infinite Jest (GCH 252). J.D.’s vision, like Bombardini’s, foregoes production in favor of massive, orgiastic consumption remaking the limits of human appetite. The ad man seeks to be a modern-day Dionysus (antagonist to Mark’s ordering Apollo), planning a “general orgiastic Walpurgisrevel” saturated with McDonald’s food (GCH 266). After the attendees’ deaths, J.D. will “retire to the intersection where everything started. At peace in the roaring crowd’s center. Maybe have a long-needed nap, stretched out on the intersected road” (GCH 310–311). J.D. thus envisions himself as another Fisher King for this dead-end narrative, laying false claim to a regenerative cycle: “in Death, [advertising]will of course become Life” (GCH 310). Where his Depression-era mother unconsciously created a bonded community out of her accident, J.D.’s manufactured Reunion, while also dependent on his largesse, reads as a fascistic inversion of his birthright. The Reunion is a contemporary Triumph of the Will, a spectacle with a “gemmed altar” under gigantic “twin arches of plated gold” (GCH 310).²⁴

Before turning to other elements of the search for enduring value in “Westward,” let me expose one other aspect of Girl’s view of welfare-state politics—and of its connection of 1930s values to Wallace’s lifetime—by examining “Lyndon,” a rare opportunity to scrutinize Wallace in terms of race, gender, and sexual identity.²⁵ One of Wallace’s oblique political histories and an homage to Barthelme’s “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning,” “Lyndon” is subliminally about the extension of FDR’s New Deal in LBJ’s vision of a Great Society—in Medicare and other state stands against poverty and health crises. Filled with political apathy in the opening scene of his hiring, the protagonist David Boyd has a conversion proleptic of Chris Fogle’s and agrees to take on Johnson’s “Same Day Directive” (GCH 83), which requires answering all constituent mail the day it arrives—an echo of Lenore’s information sorting and a precursor of the Sisyphean task of human tax examination.

Boyd, a closeted gay man, works through the suicide of a male lover, a disastrous marriage to a woman, and a long-term relationship with a Haitian immigrant named René Duverger, who suffers from what Max identifies as a historically very early case of AIDS (Every Love Story, 84). The story is about not only the acceptance of Boyd by Lyndon but a bond of familial love, vivified by the ending’s surprise connection between Johnson and Duverger. In Duverger’s name I hear “diverge” or “divergent”—that is, in this multiple minority, a black, gay, working-class immigrant with a disease that will be stigmatized (when not totally ignored) for years to come by mainstream American society and government, Wallace renders a symbol of the new social movements of the 1960s pressing for awareness and change. In a sign of just how strongly he believes in the power of a state’s compassion and in affective politics generally, Wallace ends “Lyndon” with the president and Duverger embracing in the White House bedroom. Might they in fact, in this story’s rewriting of history, be lovers, unbeknownst to Boyd? The story leaves things highly ambiguous. Both extremely ill, the white man and the black man lie together among the policy notes Boyd fears he has lost—rhetoric of a Great Society and civil-rights legislation given flesh.

The tragedy of these imminent deaths keeps this from being any sort of utopian view of the nation, but we should still sense beneath the surface an idealism about Washington’s intimate reach as well as a trust in Lyndon’s patriarchal benevolence. With the identity of a “boy” who grows up emphasized in alter-ego David Boyd (read: David, boy-ed), Wallace mediates a childhood imagining of presidential virtues that may have fed his own ambitions to run someday for Congress: Johnson was, after all, Wallace’s “first” president, from age one to age six, no doubt familiar from TV. Here he gets remade. Calling upon Johnson also allows Wallace to criticize the work of a postmodern ironist: Robert Coover’s scurrilous The Public Burning, which Wallace refers to in “E Unibus Pluram,” citing the scene “in which Eisenhower buggers Nixon on-air” (SFT 45).²⁶ Where Coover’s “repulsive political farces exploded hypocrisy” in line with the ironist agenda, “Lyndon” is Wallace’s effort to build something new and palliative from the 1960s, doing specific recuperative work in Coover’s wake by giving Johnson a homoerotic experience that also projects a compassionate U.S. welfare state, an extension of the vision of “Westward” (SFT 66). The eloquent Lyndon—while subjected by the country to the fate of an Oedipus, the story implies—is one of Wallace’s potent antidotes to the “buffoonish” fathers, “ineffectual spokesm[e]n for hollow authority,” endemic to that more powerful force of the 1960s, TV (SFT 62, 61).

Foreshadowing such tendencies, in the story’s second paragraph, this narrator offers another of Wallace’s (hypo)theses about value: “We in the writing program—shit, even the kids over at E.C.T. Divinity—could love only what we valued” (GCH 234). “Only” is a word of exclusion and rarity that “Westward” works with repeatedly in relation to solipsism (see Mark’s delusion “that he’s the only person in the world who feels like the only person in the world” [GCH 305]). “Only” is also a powerful tool for the modal logician, and it is easily misplaced syntactically. As Max notes, Wallace was fond of a classroom grammar lesson on the word’s ambiguities that made sport of the major differences between “I fed only the dog,” “Only I fed the dog,” and “I only fed the dog!” (Every Love Story, 271). In the line from “Westward,” the set of the loved is contained in the larger set of the valued—value must come first, this line claims. From the digression on E.C.T. Divinity emanates the hubris of such a position, reminiscent of the creation of the G.O.D. in Broom, for the narrator implies that, just as Joseph’s biblical moral values are outmoded, not even the absolute love of agape (what the Divinity students examine) can escape his earthly valuations. Readers naturally expect that this first-person narrator’s identity will emerge more fully—but it never does because Wallace is really addressing the coproduction of meaning between writer and reader in this “we”: the reader is in the idiosyncratic “writing program” of this text, and its ultimate objective is for reader and writer (“we”) to discern a relationship between loving and valuing, without giving into the logical-positivist view of emotional, non-empirical values as (to quote LeMahieu again) “senseless or nonsense.”²⁷

Surprisingly, Mark McGurl mentions “Westward” only once (very briefly, in an endnote) in his highly regarded examination of postwar creative writing, The Program Era.²⁸ But the exclusion makes sense: Wallace is working through philosophical positions here more than he is meditating directly on his MFA experience at Arizona. The novella’s narrator emerges not so much from the university as social institution, the “program” in McGurl’s sense, as from a “program” in the computer’s sense—mathematical mindsets and logical positivism.²⁹ Likewise, identifying Barth’s Johns Hopkins as “East Chesapeake Tradeschool” is not just a jab at an elite creative-writing program but Wallace’s idealistic suggestion that fiction writing is artisanal “produc[tion]” (GCH 233) and, more importantly, trade, the exchange of an alternative form of economic value—his “living transaction” made ascendant again.³⁰

The narrator’s perspective changes dramatically over the course of “Westward,” turning quite dramatically from fascism to Buddhism: judging Mark’s good looks on the first page, the narrator foreshadows J.D.’s fascist spectacle by expressing nostalgia for an “ancient Aryan order” (GCH 233). By the last page, though, the real drama of transformed perception in the story having been his own, the narrator rejects commodity terms, exposing J.D.’s treasured market spin as the wheel of samsaric desire and referring to a third eye: “See this thing. See inside what spins without purchase. Close your eye. Absolutely no salesmen will call. Relax…. I want nothing from you” (GCH 373).

Mark tries eventually to depart from the precepts of value-as-scarcity, the iron law of the commodity system, into the transcendent interpersonal value of the gift. Hyde emphasizes repeatedly that the gift must move: “the gift keeps going”; “a gift that cannot move loses its gift properties”; “The gift not only moves, it moves in a circle,” returning increase to its originator, who then passes that increase on again.³¹ But Wallace registers the absence of such increase in “Westward” by making a gift of seemingly limitless value the basis on which characters remain stalled. “Mark’s Dad,” as a wedding gift, gives his son and D.L. “a Visa card with no limit, in the Dad’s name, to help establish credit,” but Avis (a name representing a failed flight from the self, into a westward frontier) requires that the card be in the renter’s name (GCH 238). For Wallace, his 1980s generation may have inherited plenty of spending power from their parents, but again, in the realm of moral values, the children have been left with “an inheritance of absolutely nothing,” with useless credit. Thus in parallel with Mrs. Steelritter’s “beyond legal” indebtedness to the Krocs, “Westward” places “credit,” a term of finance, in the plane of human relationships. The pedantic D.L., confronting the Avis agent, gets the point across: “‘Though the credit is unlimited,’ [D.L.] says slowly, ‘it’s not ours, you’re saying. It’s unlimited, but it’s not about responsibility, and so in some deep car-rental-agency sense” (and, Wallace suggests, deep moral-philosophical “agency” sense) “isn’t really credit at all?” (GCH 274). As with the farmer’s grain evoking the Depression’s devaluation of currency, Wallace ingeniously strips money away, laying bare the question of honoring not the credit card but the credibility of the persons themselves.³² In this context, we should regard Mark himself as living currency: his name plays on the German mark (famous for 1920s hyperinflation), and his climactic realizations center on ideas about the “self’s coin” (GCH 369), seemingly the medium honored in the “living transaction” of Wallace’s fiction.

“Honor” becomes perhaps the most important word in “Westward” and a site at which Wallace begins constructing the famous calls to “quaint, naïve, anachronistic” sincerity that have structured his reception (SFT 81). Honor, kin of honesty, has clear connections to the issue of sincerity. Wallace is sketching an early draft of “E Unibus Pluram” (particularly its stirring final paragraph) when he has those identified with postmodern writing in “Westward” confront the seeming outdatedness of honor: D.L., refusing to eat the fried rose petals, feels “old fashioned…She does like the word virtue. Honor is even a noun to her, sometimes” (GCH 320); Ambrose, discussing Mark’s story of Dave with the workshop, calls it “charmingly unfashionable to hear honor actually used as a noun, today” (GCH 360). Today, whether in 1989 or 2017, when we more commonly use “honor” as a verb of financial transactions (we honor legal tender, honor a debt), we draw forward into modernity aspects of the economy of “honor price” or “face” in seventh-century Ireland that Graeber reviews in his history of debt, a book that shares with Wallace a drive to strip away our assumptions about what precisely money transacts between humans. Graeber writes of the medieval Celts paying for injuries in terms of “honor price”: “One’s honor was the esteem one had in the eyes of others, one’s honesty, integrity, and character, but also one’s power, in the sense of the ability to protect oneself [and family] from…degradation.”³³ The attention in “Westward” to the origins of the transactable in personal moral integrity draws on an idealized version of this history: a person’s esteem emerges from the face-to-face interactions Wallace so often valorizes, liberating them from the quantifying, commodifying terms with which the narrator wants initially to judge Mark’s “value.” No bank card can be honored when this type of credit-ability—this credibility, this truthfulness or sincerity—is at issue.

The violent history of slavery and degradation in which Graeber locates honor economies also survives into modernity in criminality: honor among thieves and mobsters, often subject to a cruel enforcement when it is breached. Wallace turns to this meaning in the noirish murder story Mark writes of Dave, which turns on the latter’s decision whether to “rat” on a fellow prisoner (GCH 367). By not doing so (and thus, in one of this story’s many paradoxes, nobly telling a lie), Dave defines that alternative, person-centered currency—resistant to market fluctuations—that lies at the core of the symbolism in “Westward”: “The fact that he does not rat: this is his self’s coin, value constant against every curve’s wave-like surge. Dave covets, values, hoards, and will not spend his honor. He’ll not trade, not for anything the cosmic Monty’s got stashed behind any silver curtain” (GCH 369–370).