Free Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D. T. Max Page A

author so much as the transcriber. He told Washington that during one three-hour session he had written twenty-four pages. He was so excited that when he wasn’t writing he would go to the gym and do sit-ups until he puked.
    Word of his gargantuan project got out—most undergraduate English theses were fifty pages—and stoked his celebrity. He wasn’t above usinghis renown as a buffer for his long-standing insecurity. After one classmate beat him at tennis, Wallace invited him back to his library cubicle. “I’m writing this five-hundred-page-novel,” he bragged, and showed him his transcript for good measure.
    The premise of the novel that became
The Broom of the System
began, he would later tell his editor, with a chance comment from a girlfriend. She had told him that she would rather be a character in a novel than a real person. “I got to wondering just what the difference was,” Wallace wrote. In addition, he had been mulling over the hoary literary advice given by Lelchuk: “Show, don’t tell.” What did that mean, really, since all writing was telling? But if words were pictures of the things they represented, wasn’t all writing also by definition showing? This last was an extension of the thinking of Ludwig Wittgenstein (“Uncle Ludwig”), whose explorations of the relationship between language and reality were becoming more and more interesting to Wallace. His enthusiasm for technical philosophy was declining, and Wittgenstein was filling the gap. The Viennese philosopher had written two very different treatises on language. In one, as a young man, he wrote that language mirrors reality, that the concept of an abstract thought is meaningless—words correspond to reality in the same way that a photograph corresponds to the thing photographed. The concomitant of this idea, in Wittgenstein’s idiosyncratic vision, is that you can with certainty know nothing outside of yourself. This identification—“the loss of the whole external world,” as Wallace put it to a later interviewer—frightened him but also intrigued him deeply. He considered the opening statement of the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
, in which Wittgenstein laid out this thesis, one of the two “most beautiful opening lines in Western Lit”: “The world is everything that is the case.” 11 Language—and by extension thought—only had dominion over things of which we can have direct sensual knowledge. The
Tractatus
’s preface begins, “This book will perhaps be understood only by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it—or similar thoughts.” If the
Tractatus
wasn’t calling out for him, nothing was.
    But he also knew that Wittgenstein had gone on to reverse his earlythinking and come later to the idea that language was communal, a Ponzi scheme based on shared acceptance; language, in Wittgenstein’s later appraisal, was like a game. This point of view also spoke to Wallace, with its invitation to unleash his sense of humor and verbal playfulness. Later, Wallace would make the issues Wittgenstein raised in him seem trite and funny. To an interviewer he would describe
Broom
as banal, a covert autobiography, “the sensitive tale of a sensitive young WASP who’s just had this midlife crisis that’s moved him from coldly cerebral analytic math to a coldly cerebral take on fiction…which also shifted his existential dread from a fear that he was just a 98.6°F calculating machine to a fear that he was nothing but a linguistic construct.” But at the time the implications of Wittgenstein’s theories were very alive for him. After all, late Wittgenstein was Wallace well; early Wittgenstein, the author depressed.
    Wallace’s fictional manuscript and the philosophy thesis were also of a piece: both asked whether language depicted the world or in some deeper way defined it and even altered it. Does our understanding of what we experience derive from objective reality or from cognitive