Reading and riding the post-scientific wave: the shorter fiction of David Foster Wallace.

The influential swing toward meaning and away from sense is as discernible on the wilder shores of contemporary American fiction as it is in the shored up wilds of that contemporary fiction that is America. Its consequence has bean a much anticipated but little heralded turning away not only from mytholepsy and the sort of Spenglerian Untergangbang that became the hallmark of postmodernism's first generation, the Pynchon-Coover-Barth axis of the sixties and seventies, but also from the later capitalizing on empty signifiers that became the stock in trade of the movement's second generation, the minimalists, in the eighties. Now, well into the nineties, a third generation has sprung up whose quiet revolution in the realm of fictional technique has scrapped deadpan irony in favor of passive-aggressive role modeling in conceptual plasticene (note Mark Leyner's My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist); loss of affect in favor of affectation, suitably randomized, of loss (viz. Kathy Acker's Empire of the Senseless); and density of texture in favor of density matrices whose historical decompressions of the indigenous reenergize the master-slave dialectic in wholly new and de-Hegelianized ways (for example, William T. Vollmann's cycle of novels-in-progress on the loss-leader role assigned American Indian culture in the discounting of America). Consider, for example, the most recent work of David Foster Wallace, a true third generationist and author - so far - of a novel, The Broom of the System (1987), structured around the prinzip of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) that all fassion of atomic facts begins and ends at ground zero-degree; a collection of fictional pieces both long and short, titled Girl with Curious Hair (1989); a book on African-American street music done in collaboration with Mark Costello, Signifying Rappers (1990); and some as-yet uncollected stories, including the different and really quite remarkable "Order and Flux in Northampton," published in Bradford Morrow's Conjunctions in its tenth anniversary issue in 1991 (no. 17, pp. 91-118).

This essay will focus on several samples of Wallace's recent fiction from Girl with Curious Hair and pay particular attention to "Order and Flux in Northampton" because it so thoroughly exemplifies qualities found in the newest writing in what I choose to call the post-scientific mode. I propose to illustrate the differences between Wallace and his postmodernist predecessors by examining the epistemology masquerading as indeterminacy physics that so often undergirds the master topoi of classic first-generation metafictional works, as well as its transfigurations in certain third-generation, on-the-way-to-becoming-classic post-metafictional, or post-scientific, texts. Now, post-scientific fiction, as I see it, counters such specious epistemologizing by altering not only how the game of fiction is played but its nature and rationale as well. If the postmodernists of the sixties and seventies were content to smoke out the mirrors secreted in civilization's high-toned myths, the fact could not be ignored that those myths were from the start intent on blurring the distinction between the innocence of loss and the loss of innocence, whether they were a solution dreamed up by Scheherazade to keep a knife from her throat, or a problem dreamed up for Achilles, Ulysses, or Aeneas to keep him from reflecting too long or too hard on how holding the mirror up to self-reflection can leave any masterpiece open to having its bones jumped someday by a Barthelme or a Barth. These and other writers sought to veil with multiple ironies (or to infinitize ad ironiam) Bedeutung's undignified retreat from Sinn all across the spectrum of twentieth-century culture, believing that, under a barrage of superhip gags and snickers, readers would be at a loss to say whether what they were being treated to was an extravaganza piped into a lounge pretending to be The Big Room or a small satyric revue in a big room pretending to be The Lounge.

Wallace, Leyner, or Vollmann, however, divest their fiction of the games multiple ironists play by outering the hidden schematics with which the guidance systems of stories had hitherto been programmed and scrupulously reinscribing them in an idiom not unlike a blueprint's with its filigree of specs but somehow charged with a capability to render character and nuance, as postmodemist coolness seldom was, with a topologist's love of contour and tactility (though the spirit of place is often "being there-ed" at the cost of there's being). Their stories also display a lay(er)ing on of topos-less narrative by a method that musical formalists from Ezra Pound to Pierre Boulez have designted pli selon pli or "fold over fold." Rather than folding in with the basic elements of his story grand narratives (ostensibilized as vast cryptogrammta done up in the style of modernism's - and postmodernism's - great mythophiliacs from Joyce to Gaddis) like ingredients in a batter, Wallace instead contrives something intriguingly different. He folds over layers of text until they intercalate each other's strata, thus simulating a version of hyperspace utterly removed from either the discontinuities of Burroughs's montage linguistics or the Einsteinian cut-ups of Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. These layers act as software for what might be called the Wallace story's programmatic control center or Wittgensteinian database of "atomic facts" by which "everything that is the case" is subtended. Initially, finally: it makes no difference - in that philosopher's Stonehenge of the obvious, the Tractatus, time is as epochal or bracketable in the Husserlian sense as it would be in any spreadsheet universe where only insistencies, duly numbered, ever reach printout. This re-envisioning of fiction as the endlessly reconstitutable core reactor by which reality is broken down into its various unifying fields and not nucleated conscriptively into gross metastases of metaphor and metonymy - engrossing though they might be - as the original groundbreaking works of a Pynchon or a Coover now seem to third-generational eyes to have been.

For this and ower reasons (contingent upon Wallace's newer even more engaging "gridworking" and "netlocking in" of facts) it has become necessary to devote to the as yet uncollected "Order and Flux in Northampton" the amount of commentary space usually accorded more easily accessed works, such as, in his case, his 1989 collection Girl with Curious Hair. Though several of the stories from that collection - "Girl" and "John Billy" particularly - screw the potential for weaving in hypertext beyond the first-order permutables that have long been the stock-in-trade of Coover and other older postmodemists to an even further sticking point, "Order and Flux" highlights a recent tropism still very much in progress in both his approach to narration and the crafting of sentences that if not directly attributable to Wittgentein (as were many sentences in Broom), are certainly of the sort he would have relished getting deep inside of. Thus, some of the stories in Girl, and especially the longer ones like "Little Expressionless Animals," "Lyndon," and the novella-length "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," hark back to what now seems a more retrograde stage of Wallace's transition from a writer obsessed with the decline of post-modernism to one heralding the advent of an auspicious shift toward the post-scientific in fiction, as is discernible in "Order and Flux." It is hardly accidental that Wallace closed out Girl with Curious Hair with "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," a story that launched into orbit a satellite of Barth's 1968 medley of metafictional duties, Lost in the Funhouse, and most notably its title piece, in the form of a sendup-cum-homage that is nearly six times as long as its source text. Indeed, Wallace closes a magic circle of first-generation postmodernism by recalcifying - with Lettermaniacal irreverence - the now quaint manner of Barth's 1968 - isme, with its "For whom is the Funhouse fun?" sedimentation of ironies into a petrifactualism that goes the poet Auden one better in praising the limestone he himself has quarried for the occasion. This effect is further enhanced by having D. L., the story's ingenue, present her copy of Lost in the Funhouse for autographing to its parergonic auteur, Professor Ambrose, in whose writing workshop she labors, in an arch reprise of metafiction's "the way we were," to give birth to herself as a postmodernist.

Though along the way Girl and "Order and Flux" might re-Cooverize a descanted pricksong or two. Wallaces more mature work no longer under-studies the Rubik's cubism of pieces like "Quenby and Ola, Swede and Carl." On the contrary, in stories like "Say Never," "John Billy," ...