'Then Out of the Rubble': The Apocalypse in David Foster Wallace's Early Fiction

source

TL;DR

The early-fiction sibling of the archive's existing Fest note (fest-inverted-nuke-ch4): same author, same overarching "Apocalypse Archive" project, same coined concept (anti-eschatology) — but this Studies in the Novel article reads The Broom of the System and "Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way," NOT Infinite Jest. IJ appears three times, always as the endpoint: Wallace's early fiction is "preparing a narratological ground for the emergence of Infinite Jest (1996)," and IJ is where the anti-eschatological "project's fruition can everywhere be seen." So this is a complementary sibling, not a duplicate: it digests exactly the Broom/Westward run-up (the material the IJ note explicitly set aside), and only its genealogical claims and its deep readings of two IJ-precursor devices are IJ-relevant. Fest's argument: Wallace, a self-diagnosed "Nietzschean latecomer," inherits postmodernism's "apocalyptic ambience" (Barth) and, exhausted with that exhaustion, builds an anti-eschatological aesthetic that "omits the most crucial points of narrative information" and "eschews an 'ending.'" Broom stages this between two eschatological poles (Wittgenstein/Lenore Sr. and Derrida/Bombardini) and manufactures the Great Ohio Desert — a wasteland made to be "An Other for Ohio's Self," the direct precursor of experialism and the Great Concavity. "Westward" turns Barth's Funhouse into Steelritter's "last commercial" — a McDonald's reunion so total it manufactures a mass "desire for death" — the germ of IJ's lethal Entertainment. And via Paul de Man, Fest argues Wallace never claimed to transcend irony: the "new sincerity" is "nothing more than a kind of hopeful non-transgressible limit imposed by the very historicity of irony itself" — a direct pressure on how IJ's sincerity project (and "E Unibus Pluram") gets read.

Key claims (IJ-relevant delta only)

The early fiction is IJ's narratological ground. Analyzing Broom and "Westward," Wallace "systematically develops, explores, and then out of the rubble 'gets over' various aspects of American metafiction's 'Armageddon-explosion' in each text, thereby preparing a narratological ground for the emergence of Infinite Jest (1996)." The whole "anti-eschatological project" is a genealogy that culminates in IJ.
Anti-eschatology begins at the origin. "Wallace, even this early in his career, is here committing himself to a kind of aesthetic anti-eschatology, i.e., he often omits the most crucial points of narrative information in the text proper, and almost always eschews an 'ending,' leaving events and how one might read those events ambiguous and open to interpretation." This is the same coined concept the IJ note credits to Fest, sourced here in the early fiction.
The Great Ohio Desert is the manufactured-wasteland precursor. Broom's G.O.D. is a wasteland built to order — "An Other for Ohio's Self" — "ordered like a garden, built and maintained, but ultimately more savage than the landscape that was there in the first place." Fest's "wasteland in the machine" (inverting Leo Marx) prefigures the manufactured internal Other of experialism and the Great Concavity that the IJ note logs.
Post-Cold-War loss of the Other, in the early fiction. "Westward" "presents a culture that was about to lose its Other with the dissolution of the Soviet Union"; lacking a reference point outside itself, US culture "could only turn in on itself, parasitically consuming not only its own cultural products, but its waste and detritus as well." The same waste-as-manufactured-Other engine the IJ note attributes to Gentle's experialism.
Steelritter's "last commercial" is the Entertainment prototype. "Westward" ends toward "the filming of a commercial so grandiose it not only borders on the apocalyptic, but attempts to achieve revelation" — a McDonald's reunion after which "No one will ever leave." "Steelritter's solution to the adman's problem is to manufacture a mass-desire for death"; "Advertising will have finally arrived at the death that's been its object all along." "The last commercial."
Advertising and entertainment collapse into one — a prescience note. Fest reads Steelritter's aporia: "the more effective, aesthetically complex, and subtle the advertising, the more it comes to be indistinguishable from the very televisual entertainment it accompanies." An early-fiction statement of the ad/entertainment fusion IJ's InterLace world satirizes.
No transcendence of irony — the sincerity claim, complicated. Via de Man, Fest insists Wallace "was implicitly aware of the hopelessness of 'transcending' irony": his "famous 'prediction' or desire for a new sincerity was nothing more than a kind of hopeful non-transgressible limit imposed by the very historicity of irony itself." And so "we should not wholly take Wallace at his word in 'E Unibus Pluram.'"

Theories & evidence

THEORY: "Westward"'s Steelritter commercial — a McDonald's "last commercial" that manufactures a mass desire for death — is the fictional prototype of Infinite Jest's lethal Entertainment, and the story is Wallace's earliest staging of the anti-Entertainment counter-aesthetic

Crux: commercial-that-consumes (advances — the device side, the Entertainment prototype); westward-anti-entertainment (advances — the counter-aesthetic staged inside the fiction)
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [text] The novella's direction is "toward the filming of a commercial so grandiose it not only borders on the apocalyptic, but attempts to achieve revelation" — a reunion of everyone ever in a McDonald's commercial, after which (Steelritter): "No one will ever leave the rose farm's Reunion."
- [text] The commercial's telos is death-as-fulfillment: "Steelritter's solution to the adman's problem is to manufacture a mass-desire for death"; "the pursuit of capital/advertising's goal must be the production of a desire for death"; "Advertising will have finally arrived at the death that's been its object all along." Fest's gloss: "The last commercial."
- [secondary] The Barth genetics: "Westward" "unabashedly takes John Barth's 1967 story, 'Lost in the Funhouse,' as a model, reference, and polemical object"; the reimagined Funhouse "threatens what it is built for" — the story-as-house that upsets its own reader.
Notes: This is Fest's fullest primary reading of the material the archive already registers as commercial-that-consumes (Steelritter's last-commercial as Entertainment prototype) and westward-anti-entertainment (the Funhouse-that-wounds counter-aesthetic). It converges with the archive's existing carriers (the Lipsky author-side account; Esposito's Infinite Summer read-along) and adds a peer-reviewed academic reading centered on the desire-for-death mechanism — an early sibling of the IJ note's Entertainment-as-annihilation frame.

THEORY: The Great Ohio Desert in The Broom of the System is the manufactured-wasteland precursor to Infinite Jest's experialism and the Great Concavity — a wasteland built to order as "An Other" for a culture that has lost its external Other

Crux: manufactured-wasteland (advances — the slug that absorbs the great-ohio-desert and great-concavity coins)
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [text] The G.O.D. is willed into being as a needed Other: the Ohio governor's "We need a wasteland….a desert. A point of savage reference…An Other for Ohio's Self" (Fest quoting Broom 54).
- [text] It is a made, tended wasteland — "ordered like a garden, built and maintained, but ultimately more savage than the landscape that was there in the first place"; Fest's inversion of Leo Marx: "her wasteland in the machine."
- [secondary] The post-Cold-War engine driving it: "Westward" shows a culture "about to lose its Other with the dissolution of the Soviet Union," which "could only turn in on itself, parasitically consuming not only its own cultural products, but its waste and detritus as well."
Notes: The theory record's manufactured-wasteland entry already logs Fest's Broom-G.O.D.→Concavity link (Gentle's need for an Other "[l]ike the need for the GOD in The Broom of the System"). This SDN article is the primary source of that link — the full G.O.D. reading the registry only gestured at. Confirms, does not add a new position.

CONNECTION: Wallace's "anti-eschatology" is not an IJ-only stance but an origin-level aesthetic — begun in the early fiction (omitted narrative climaxes, eschewed endings) and reaching its "fruition" in Infinite Jest

Crux: anti-eschatology (advances — Fest's coined oeuvre-arc concept, sourced here in the early fiction)
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [text] The coinage, at the origin: "Wallace, even this early in his career, is here committing himself to a kind of aesthetic anti-eschatology, i.e., he often omits the most crucial points of narrative information in the text proper, and almost always eschews an 'ending.'"
- [text] The genealogy to IJ: Wallace "systematically develops, explores, and then out of the rubble 'gets over'…metafiction's 'Armageddon-explosion'…thereby preparing a narratological ground for the emergence of Infinite Jest (1996)"; "This project's fruition can everywhere be seen in Infinite Jest, a work… everywhere engaged in proposing alternatives to the reifying dominance of apocalyptic discourse."
- [author] The program's stated aim, from McCaffery (which Fest's title quotes): "I wanted to get the Armageddon-explosion…over with, and then out of the rubble reaffirm the idea of art being a living transaction between humans."
Notes: The IJ note's anti-eschatology registry entry is credited to fest-inverted-nuke-ch4 as a single academic carrier keyed to IJ's Gately half. This SDN article is a second, earlier Fest publication that develops the same coined concept for Broom/Westward and explicitly names IJ as its fruition — the early-fiction root of the same oeuvre-arc claim, not a rival.

THEORY: Wallace never claimed to transcend irony — via Paul de Man, "new sincerity" is a non-transgressible limit imposed by irony's own historicity; do not take Wallace at his word in "E Unibus Pluram"

Crux: sincerity-definition (complicates); eup-connection (complicates — IJ read as EUP's execution)
Stance: complicates
Evidence:
- [text] "Wallace was implicitly aware of the hopelessness of 'transcending' irony…His famous 'prediction' or desire for a new sincerity was nothing more than a kind of hopeful non-transgressible limit imposed by the very historicity of irony itself."
- [text] The EUP caution: mobilizing de Man's theory of irony ("one is simply never saying what one means"), Fest concludes "we should not wholly take Wallace at his word in 'E Unibus Pluram.'"
- [secondary] The frame: "Westward" should be read "not as accomplishing, then at least as pointing toward a relationship to irony that is anti-eschatological, that acknowledges irony's fundamental 'temporality that is not organic.'"
Notes: A dissent from the "Wallace-leaves-irony-for-sincerity" reading the archive holds under sincerity-definition / eup-connection (IJ as the execution of EUP's anti-rebel program). Fest does not deny the sincerity aim; he reframes it as a limit irony imposes rather than a threshold Wallace crosses. Route as a complicating mention on the early-fiction side; the IJ-scoped execution claim is untouched.

Themes

Apocalypse and its absence (Barth's "apocalyptic ambience"; "exhaustion with exhaustion"; the "Nietzschean latecomer"); anti-eschatology as origin-level aesthetic (omitted climaxes, eschewed endings); accumulation-as-apocalypse (Bombardini's "eating to infinite largeness"; "an eschaton can be reached through accumulation"; text "dangerously accumulating"); the manufactured wasteland (the G.O.D. as "An Other for Ohio's Self"; post-Cold-War loss of the external Other; parasitic self-consumption of waste and detritus); the commercial that consumes (Steelritter's "last commercial"; advertising's manufactured "desire for death"; ad/entertainment indistinguishability); irony and sincerity (de Man; no transcendence of irony; "new sincerity" as a non-transgressible limit; don't take Wallace at his word in EUP); Wittgenstein and Derrida as Broom's eschatological poles (the erased final "word"; the semiotic square).

Cross-references

fest-inverted-nuke-ch4 — the IJ sibling and the primary Fest note; this article is its early-fiction companion (same "Apocalypse Archive" project, same anti-eschatology concept, non-overlapping primary texts).
The commercial-that-consumes / westward-anti-entertainment carriers (Lipsky's author-side "suicide note"/"homicidal homage" account; Esposito's 2009 Infinite Summer read-along) — Fest is the peer-reviewed academic reading of the same Steelritter/Funhouse material.
The manufactured-wasteland cluster — the G.O.D.→Concavity/experialism continuity, of which this is the primary source.
The eup-connection / sincerity-definition lane — Fest's de Man argument is a named academic dissent from the leaves-irony-for-sincerity placement.
Scene relevance is oeuvre-genealogical, not scene-anchored: this article names no IJ scenes (it discusses Broom and "Westward" only).

Notable passages

Verbatim from the published article (curly typography preserved).

thereby preparing a narratological ground for the emergence of Infinite Jest (1996).

Wallace, even this early in his career, is here committing himself to a kind of aesthetic anti-eschatology, i.e., he often omits the most crucial points of narrative information in the text proper, and almost always eschews an "ending."

We need a wasteland….a desert. A point of savage reference for the good people of Ohio. A place to fear and love. A blasted region….An Other for Ohio's Self. (Fest quoting Broom 54)

Steelritter's solution to the adman's problem is to manufacture a mass-desire for death.

His famous "prediction" or desire for a new sincerity was nothing more than a kind of hopeful non-transgressible limit imposed by the very historicity of irony itself.

This project's fruition can everywhere be seen in Infinite Jest.