But in their defense it should be said that the philosophical significance of these tales is not really that the selves involved are purer than the rest of us in their stupidity, coarseness, and blindness. It’s that they have sought-even momentarily-relationships that look outward, away from self. When the young man in “Signifying Nothing” finally reconnects with his father, it is at the birthday of his sister, in his family’s “special restaurant,” and the ice is broken not by anguished discussion or a sudden moment of personal insight but by a lame family joke shared by all. Which brings us finally to Wittgenstein’s second option, the way out of solipsism into communality:

And so he trashed everything he’d been lauded for in the “Tractatus” and wrote the “Investigations,” which is the single most comprehensive and beautiful argument against solipsism that’s ever been made. Wittgenstein argues that for language even to be possible, it must always be a function of relationships between persons (that’s why he spends so much time arguing against the possibility of a “private language”). [My italics]

The moralist in Wallace-that part of him that wanted not only to describe the wound but to heal it-invested much in this idea. He was always trying to place “relationships between persons” as the light at the end of his narrative dark tunnels; he took special care to re-create and respect the (often simple) language shared by people who feel some connection with each other. (“Get the fuck outta here” is the sentence that occasions the rapprochement in “Signifying Nothing.”) “In the day-to-day trenches of adult existence,” Wallace once claimed, “banal platitudes can have a life-or-death i mportance.” [83] Among his many gifts was this knack for truly animating platitudes, in much the same way that moral philosophers through the ages have animated abstract moral ideas through “dialogues” or narrative examples.

“Some things are best left unsaid.”

“Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.”

“You only want what you can’t have.”

What else are those three stories but complex enactments of platitudes we would otherwise ignore?

Still, there is something not quite convincing in their optimism. They seem to me to offer more of a willed solution than an instinctive or deeply felt one. This isn’t a bad thing: it contributes to their compelling ambivalence. And it’s an ambivalence that finds a mirror in Wallace’s own doubts w/r/t the optimism any of us should draw from Wittgenstein’s “second option”:

So he makes language dependent on human community, but unfortunately we’re still stuck with the idea that there is this world of referents out there that we can never really join or know because we’re stuck in here, in language, even if we’re at least all in here together. This eliminated solipsism, but not the horror. Because we’re still stuck. The “Investigation” ’s line is that the fundamental problem of language is, quote, “I don’t know my way about.” If I were separate from language, if I could somehow detach from it and climb up and look down on it, get the lay of the land so to speak, I could study it “objectively,” take it apart, deconstruct it, know its opera-tions and boundaries and deficiencies. But that’s not how things are. I’m “in” it. We’re “in” language. Wittgenstein’s not Heidegger. It’s not that language “is” us, but we’re still “in” it, inescapably, the same way we’re in like Kant’s space-time. Wittgenstein’s conclusions seem completely sound to me, always have. And if there’s one thing that consistently bugs me writing-wise, it’s that I don’t feel I really “do” know my way around inside language-I never seem to get the kind of clarity and concision I want.

One way, though, of knowing your “way about” would be to focus on the specialized islands of language within the system, and when Wallace does this he achieves the clarity and concision he wanted. It’s a little perverse, in fact, how profoundly he was attracted, as a fiction writer, to exactly those forms of linguistic specialization he philosophically abhorred. Stories that attend to the language of computers, the language of therapists, the language of carpet salesman, the language of corporate life, the language of academics-Wallace truly dazzles when he lands on a discourse and masters all its permutations. [84] In “Datum Centurio,” a six-page marvel of linguistic fantasy, we meet with Leckie & Webster’s Connotationally Gender-Specific Lexicon of Contemporary Usage, which, if we pay close attention to the small type of the fake copyright page, we gather to be a futuristic dictionary from the year 2096. It is a dictionary that comes with “11.2gb of Contextual, Etymological, Historical, Usage and Gender-Specific Connotational notes,” which is “Hot Text Keyed” and available on DVD (this last being the one detail that makes me smile in the wrong way, and think fondly of 1993). There is even the suggestion of a plug-in one plugs into one’s body (“Available Also with Lavish Illustrative Support in All 5 Major Sense-Media”). Wallace has opened this dictionary for us at the Ds. We are defining the word date, in its romantic sense:

date³ (dat) n. {20C English, from Middle English, from Old French, from Medieval Latin data, feminine past participle of dare, to give.}

1.Informal. (see also soft date) a. Consequent to the successful application for a License to Parent (KEY at PROCREATIVITY; at BREED/(v); at PARENT/ (v); at OFFSPRING, SOFT), the process of voluntarily submitting one’s nucleotide configurations and other Procreativity Designators to an agency empowered by law to identify an optimal female neuroge netic complement for the purposes of Procreative Genital Interface.

This being quite different from a “hard date,” which involves the use of a Virtual Female Sensory Array (slang term: “telediddler”) for the purposes of Simulated Genital Interface. The fun Wallace has with all this is the fun of a man who loved words and adored dictionaries, those sacred sites where his beloved words could be kept pristine and each given their deserved attention. As it was with Borges, a dictionary was, for Wallace, a universe: every etymological root, every usage note, every obsolete meaning was of interest to him. And for good reason: if you believe that what we are able to say marks the limit of what we are able to think and be, the dictionary is our most important human document. The usage note he invents for the word date in the year 2096 is a case in point:

date31.a USAGE/CONTEXTUAL NOTE: “You are too old by far to be the type of man who checks his replicase levels before breakfast and has high-baud macros for places like Fruitful Union P.G.I Coding or SoftSci Deoxyribonucleic Intercode Systems in his Mo.Sys deck, and yet here you are, parking the heads on your VFSA telediddler and checking your replicase levels and padding your gen-resume like a randy freshman, preparing for what appears to all the world like an attempt at a soft date.” (McInerney et seq {via OmniLit TRF Matrix}2068).

A Polaroid of a society-a miniaturized sci-fi novel! To enjoy it, though, you have to unpack it, and to do this most readers will need their own OED and a medical dictionary. Here goes: You’re too old to be checking your supply of the enzymes-that-catalyze-the-synthesis-of-ribonucleic-molecules (which molecules carry instructions from your DNA which in turn control the synthesis of your proteins); way too old to have, in your possession, high data-per-second programming instructions for such imaginary futuristic genetic reproduction companies as “Fruitful Union” and “SoftSci” sitting there in your “desktop” (or whatever interface they’re using in 2068), and yet still you’re leaving your virtual sex toy alone and instead checking that you’re in tip top genetic condition and padding out your “genetic résumé” as if you were about to go and try and have actual procreative sex with someone! (And can we assume that in the future “J. McInerney” has become a fictional brand-et seq; “and what follows”-made possible by a frightening omnivorous literary computer program that takes literary styles and reproduces them long after the authors are in their graves?)