The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest: the debut as prehistory

essay

TL;DR

Almost everything Infinite Jest builds at scale, Wallace had already tried in a comic register in his 1987 debut, The Broom of the System: the question of whether language can connect sealed-off selves at all; a government-commissioned wasteland that anticipates the Great Concavity; a dynastic family-firm household shaped like a proto-Incandenza clan; a therapy satire that seeds the professional conversationalist; two miniature previews of the Entertainment's desire-kills logic; and a novel that stops mid-sentence, Wallace's earliest deliberate refusal of closure. This essay traces those through-lines from the secondary record. Two cautions run under all of it: the resemblances are matters of shape and preoccupation, not of plot, and no letter or interview on record ties any Broom passage to the composition of Infinite Jest — the continuity is read off the books, not documented from the workshop floor.

Broom as the pre-1996 blueprint

Broom was written by Wallace as an Amherst undergraduate and published while he was in the Arizona MFA program; the critical genealogy that leads to Infinite Jest treats it as a first exhausting of the concepts Wallace would spend a career refining. The lineage he named for himself — Barth, Barthelme, and Pynchon, the admired forefathers whose shared method he described as taking a single concept and exhausting it — is the method of the debut (history-of-literature-181-david-foster-wallace). The debut is also where the reflex-tics of the mature voice first show: in his own retrospective account Wallace noticed that a single word, "troubled," had recurred by the hundred across the long debut (video-frumkes-1999) — the compulsive verbal self-monitoring that becomes an entire theme in the later work. The 1996 tour tapes give the composition its scale and its temperature: the first draft "was like seven hundred pages long. It was written in like five months," and "writing Broom of the System felt like it was using 97 percent of me, whereas the philosophy thesis was using 50 percent of me" — though the mature Wallace's verdict on the result was severe: the debut "shows some talent, but was in many ways a fuck-off enterprise. It was written very quickly, rewritten sloppily" (lipsky-becoming-yourself).

The useful frame for reading the two novels together is that the same obsessions arrive twice, in two different keys. The biographical criticism catches Wallace himself working in both keys at once: even inside Infinite Jest, the Incandenza/E.T.A. material is still written partly in the debut's pop-playful key — one biographical account's characterization — a survival of the first book's comedy inside the later book's more clinical machinery (harvard-dtmax-wood-dfw). The pattern of this essay, then, is not that Broom predicts Infinite Jest, but that Broom does the same thing first, as farce, and Infinite Jest does it again, as dread.

Wittgenstein and the words-only self

Broom is Wallace's Wittgenstein novel, and its central preoccupation is the one Infinite Jest inherits whole: whether language can connect isolated selves at all. The doctrine is stated on the page as philosophy. Gramma Lenore is a former Cambridge student of a "genius named Wittgenstein" who taught that "everything was words," and she demonstrates meaning-as-use with the title object — a broom is bristles if you sweep with it, handle if you break windows — in the thesis-lecture cadence "Meaning as use. Meaning as use." (broom-of-the-system). The doctrine curdles into crisis in the heroine, Lenore Beadsman, who fears she has "no real existence, except for what she said and did," that "There was nothing pure," and finally that "the living is the telling" — if a life is only the telling of it, "why live at all?" (broom-of-the-system). That is the solipsism dread of Infinite Jest — the self marooned inside its own skull — voiced from the inside a decade early.

The philosophical stakes are exactly the ones Wallace laid out for the later book. In the interview that reads as Infinite Jest's program, Wallace called Wittgenstein's Investigations the greatest argument against solipsism ever made, because language is possible only as a function of the relations between persons (mccaffery-1993-interview); the same interview states the mature aesthetic in one line — "Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being." Nor is the Wittgenstein frame retro-fitted onto the debut from that later program: when Broom's editor Gerry Howard pushed back — above all on the ending — the young Wallace met his "sound editorial suggestions" with "a seventeen-page letter about literary theory" arguing, as Wallace reconstructed it on the 1996 tour, "how the entire book is a conversation between Wittgenstein and Derrida, and presence versus absence" (lipsky-becoming-yourself). The Wittgenstein reading of Broom is the author's own, on record from the book's first editorial argument. The scholarship that runs Wittgenstein through both novels frames the through-line as a single opposition: language as prison versus language as community, the private-language argument as the one available route out of the sealed self, with the collective dimension of meaning as the escape (boswell-understanding-dfw; dfw19-wallace-wittgenstein-religion). Wallace himself dated his eye-opening to the Investigations' view of language (gc-ep033-allard-den-dulk-philosophy). Broom stages the prison end of that opposition as pure comedy — a paralyzed dentist whose one working lip sends signals no one ever sees; a therapist's jargon about how "the membrane must be a strong, clean membrane" between selves; the fat man Bombardini's plan to "fill the universe with Self"; a tree-toad parable whose own gloss names it "the mechanism of nonconnection and alienation" (broom-of-the-system). Infinite Jest inherits the question and drops the farce: the Marathe/Steeply debates over what love is, the professional non-conversation, Hal's articulate sealed interior and his final unintelligibility — the same problem, played straight. This is the spine both books share, worked out in full for the later novel in communication-and-solipsism and language-grammar.

The manufactured wasteland: the Great Ohio Desert becomes the Great Concavity

Broom's clearest single anticipation of Infinite Jest is a piece of geography. The novel's Ohio has gone soft — "one big suburb and industrial park and mall" — so its governor commissions, from a Dallas firm that builds deserts to order, a hundred-mile black-sand wasteland: "A place without malls. An Other for Ohio's Self" (broom-of-the-system). A region-scale wasteland willed into being by a coalition of the state and industry, to serve as a soft consumer polity's constitutive Other, is the device-class of the Great Concavity. The debut even supplies the manufacturer's aesthetic — deserts built to be "small, solid, tasteful, and sinister" — and the engineered purpose is negation itself: "Nobody ever finds anybody in a place like that," which is precisely the concept behind the thing (broom-of-the-system).

The scholarship makes the link explicitly, and it is the one place the archive finds a critic naming the debut as the later book's source. In a reading of Wallace's ecologies, the Great Concavity is "the dark sequel to Broom's G.O.D." — but the same reading stresses how contained and distant the later novel keeps its apocalypse, delivered almost entirely through Mario's puppet film rather than narrated directly (dfw-in-context-cambridge-2022). The honest disanalogy matters and is stated in the primary record itself: the Great Ohio Desert is a contrast-wasteland a state wants for aesthetic and existential reasons; the Concavity is a toxic waste-sink a state offloads. The prefigured object is the manufactured region as a polity's Other — the shape of the thing, not its poison (broom-of-the-system). The later novel's territory, and the O.N.A.N. politics that produce the Concavity, are the theme's own; Broom supplies only the device.

Family as institution: the Beadsman dynasty as proto-Incandenza

The household at the center of Broom is strikingly Infinite Jest-shaped even though its contents differ entirely — baby food and words where the Incandenzas have optics and tennis. The Beadsmans are a patriarch-founded family firm (Stonecipheco Baby Foods) that owns the family's whole world; the children are "constantly" given "specially developed standardized tests" to decide "on whom the mantle of corporate power would someday devolve," and are sealed in an "impregnable" nursery (broom-of-the-system). A dominating verbal elder presides; the siblings are each damaged along a different axis; domestic life is staged as literal family theater. The single sharpest anticipation is the child-template: Vance Vigorous, the athletic prodigy "pithed" by professionals into "perfect chalk drawings" — the gifted child processed into numbness, a figure the later novel splits across Orin and Hal (broom-of-the-system).

The resemblance is a shape rather than a map: the tested-and-isolated children, the family-as-corporation, the verbal-dominant elder, the theatricalized home all recur at E.T.A. and among the Incandenzas, but nothing in the debut is a blueprint for a particular later scene. The full working-out of the Incandenza household as a Hamlet-shaped institution belongs to family-hamlet; Broom is where Wallace first assembles the parts.

Purchased talk and the seeds of the Entertainment

Two of Infinite Jest's machines have miniature Broom prototypes. The first is the professional conversationalist and the grief therapist — paid listeners whose jargon manages rather than meets the client. Broom runs this as recurring verbatim "rap session" chapters in which the therapist Dr. Jay's breakthrough-sniffing patter does all the talking, and it sharpens the satire with a twist the later novel keeps implicit: Jay's textual authority is fabricated on demand ("there can be a Blentner if you want there to be"), his sessions secretly transcribed and scripted from outside, and his method is to erase himself into the client — "Forget I'm here altogether. Pretend I'm you." (broom-of-the-system).

The second prototype is the Entertainment's own logic — perfect passive pleasure that consumes the self — which Broom builds twice without any media object to house it. A wasting-away character believes he is a game-show contestant for "the most desirable prize imaginable," won only by not wanting it, the audience restrained behind electrified mesh: "To receive totally desirable prize by not desiring prize I did not receive prize" — desire as the lethal mechanism, with Marathe's ascetic counter-rule already built in. A televangelist strand states the same economy as theology: to be fed by the screen is to be consumed by it, "to be satisfied is to be used" (broom-of-the-system). This is the television critique of "E Unibus Pluram" arriving in fiction years before the essay (e-unibus-pluram-ij-connections), and it is the mechanism the later novel would give a cartridge and a body count. Wallace had already stated the diagnosis in plain prose: television supplies "the facsimile of a relationship without the work of a real relationship," an anesthesia the addict cannot switch off (mccaffery-1993-interview). The device-bearing version is the property of entertainment-and-the-self; Broom has the desire-shape without the object.

The withheld ending: the first designed hole

Broom ends by refusing to end. Its final sentence stops mid-clause — "'You can trust me,' R. V. says, watching her hand. 'I'm a man of my" — the word "word" withheld, so the reader's reflex has to supply it and close the hole the book will not (broom-of-the-system). Nor does the central quest resolve: the vanished matriarch is never found, and the green book she teases the heroine with is never seen or explained again. This is Wallace's earliest published undecidable-by-design ending, and it is the same design principle the later novel raises to structural scale — the missing year between its last page and its first, the deliberate gaps whose completion by the reader is arguably a misreading, on the logic that closure would make the book itself an Entertainment. The state of that debate for Infinite Jest is the-ending; Broom is where the refusal of closure is first tried on, at the sentence level, as a joke that is also a thesis.

The author's own later verdict on that first hole is on record, and it cuts both ways. Defending the ending to Howard, the seventeen-page letter argued the withheld word as theory made form — "word and referent are united in absence, which means Derrida" is how Wallace reconstructed the argument on the 1996 tour — while Howard "didn’t want the book to end there" and kept telling him "Kid, you’ve got no idea." The 1996 Wallace sides with his editor against his younger self: the letter was "a brilliant little theoretical document, unfortunately it resulted in a shitty and dissatisfying ending"; the close was "way too clever. It was all about the head"; "I was arrogant, and missed a chance to make that book better" (lipsky-becoming-yourself). That disavowal — spoken mid-tour for a novel with a designed non-ending of its own — sharpens the through-line rather than breaking it: on the author's own account, the distance between the two books is the distance between a hole argued from theory and a hole built for the reader.

The agent's chair corroborates the editor-side record, from the memorial stage. Bonnie Nadell — who "with the wisdom of a twenty-five-year-old" tried to convince Wallace "to wrap up the story in a traditional fashion before I sent it out to publishers" — recalled at the 2008 Skirball memorial that "The Broom of the System ends without the last word and doesn't really have a final scene," and that Wallace "proceeded to explain to me, using Wittgensteinian philosophy, why it was written like that and needed to remain just as it was"; Gerry Howard, she added, had "the same conversation" months later, and "The book was published as David wanted." (fivedials-memorial). The debut's designed hole is thus attested by both of the people who tried and failed to close it, agent and editor — and defended by its author from the same Wittgenstein program the seventeen-page theory letter ran on.

Points of friction

Shape versus documentation. Everything above is a resemblance of preoccupation, not an attested genealogy. No letter, interview, or draft on record ties any Broom passage to the writing of Infinite Jest; the continuities rest on concept-identity alone (broom-of-the-system). The 1996 tour tapes thicken the author-side record about the debut — the Howard letter, the disowned ending — without supplying that missing workshop-floor tie to the later book. A future interview- or archive-based source could strengthen or weaken any single through-line, and the strongest claims here — the manufactured wasteland and the withheld ending — are exactly the two a skeptic would test first.
Comic key versus clinical key. The debut's register is farce where the later novel's is dread. This is not a minor stylistic footnote: it is why Broom's Bombardini eats the world for comedy while Infinite Jest's addicts starve for real, and why the same anhedonia material that carries clinical weight later is, in the debut, a single stray instance (the "pithed" prodigy) in a book whose subject is appetite, not affect-death (broom-of-the-system). Reading the continuity too smoothly flattens the difference the two keys are doing.
Continuity versus containment. The critics split on how close to hold the two books. One tradition — Boswell's especially — reads Infinite Jest as the mature fulfillment of the debut's Wittgensteinian program, language-as-prison resolved toward language-as-community, with the same withheld convergence forcing the reader to do the connective work the characters cannot (boswell-understanding-dfw). The ecological reading pulls the other way, stressing how contained and distant the later novel keeps the very material it inherits from Broom, refusing to narrate it directly (dfw-in-context-cambridge-2022). Both can be true; the friction is over emphasis.
The Pynchon question. The debut's reception frames a genealogy problem that bears on reading it forward into Infinite Jest at all. The New York Times reviewed Broom as a rip-off of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 — a book Wallace said he had not yet read, which "got all pissed" and pushed him toward it (wiley-minnesota-daily-1997) — and Pynchon sits among the "admired forefathers" whose concept-exhausting method the debut adopts (history-of-literature-181-david-foster-wallace). So a share of what looks like Broom-to-Infinite Jest continuity is really Wallace working a postmodern inheritance he was still absorbing when he wrote the first book — a caution against reading every debut motif as a private seed of the later one. The biographical criticism keeps returning to the debut as the touchstone for the whole career, including the sibling early fiction (gc-ep046-marshall-boswell; burn-conversations-with-dfw; girl-with-curious-hair), which makes disentangling private obsession from inherited method a live interpretive problem rather than a settled one.

Sources

broom-of-the-system — the primary record for the debut: the Wittgenstein/words-only-self spine, the Great Ohio Desert, the Beadsman dynasty, Dr. Jay and purchased talk, the game-show/screen-communion entertainment logic, and the mid-sentence ending, all with page-marked quotation from the text.
fivedials-memorial — Bonnie Nadell's 2008 memorial testimony: Broom's missing final scene was deliberate, defended by Wallace on Wittgensteinian grounds against both agent and editor; "The book was published as David wanted."
mccaffery-1993-interview — Wallace mid-composition of Infinite Jest: the Investigations as the argument against solipsism; fiction "about what it is to be a fucking human being"; TV as the facsimile-relationship anesthetic.
lipsky-becoming-yourself — the 1996 tour tapes on the debut: seven hundred pages in five months, the "fuck-off enterprise" verdict, the seventeen-page Wittgenstein/Derrida letter to Gerry Howard, and the author's own disavowal of the mid-sentence ending ("way too clever").
dfw19-wallace-wittgenstein-religion — paraphrased from audio; Wallace's own gloss of the private-language argument (meaning imposed from outside subjectivity by the community) as the route out of Broom's solipsism.
gc-ep033-allard-den-dulk-philosophy — paraphrased from audio; Wallace's stated eye-opening by the Investigations' view of language.
boswell-understanding-dfw — the language-as-prison-vs-community Wittgenstein frame across the corpus; Infinite Jest's withheld convergence as the reader's assigned work.
dfw-in-context-cambridge-2022 — the ecological reading naming the Great Concavity "the dark sequel to Broom's G.O.D.," with the containment caveat.
harvard-dtmax-wood-dfw — the biography's observation that the E.T.A. half of Infinite Jest survives in the debut's "pop-playful mode."
history-of-literature-181-david-foster-wallace — the debut's composition (Amherst undergrad) and the Barth/Barthelme/Pynchon lineage of concept-exhaustion.
video-frumkes-1999 — Wallace on the debut's verbal tics ("troubled" a hundred times in a 500-page book).
wiley-minnesota-daily-1997 — the NYT review calling the debut a "rip-off" of Lot 49, and Wallace's reaction; the Pynchon-inheritance problem.
gc-ep046-marshall-boswell — paraphrased from audio; the debut as the recurring touchstone in the Wallace-influence criticism.
burn-conversations-with-dfw — the Broom-era interviews (writing as illicit/secret activity; the title's origin) placing the debut in Wallace's early self-account.
e-unibus-pluram-ij-connections — the television critique the debut's screen-communion and game-show strands anticipate in fiction.
girl-with-curious-hair — the sibling pre-1996 fiction; corroborates the communication-solipsism and geographic-cure preoccupations Broom carries.