This movement westward epitomizes a paradigmatic shift from corruption into authenticity; indeed, the story that immediately precedes "Westward" in Girl with Curious Hair, "Everything Is Green," embodies precisely this kind of pastoralist minimalism, predicated on an ethic of purification and regeneration: "Everything is green she says.
"Everything Is Green." Girl with Curious Hair 227-30.
"Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way." Girl with Curious Hair 231-373.
This is the double bind staring down all serious artists, especially those of the post-postmodern era, and it's been prime among Wallace's interests since his first collection, 1989's
Girl with Curious Hair (also see the Summer 1993 and Spring 1996 issues of this journal).
Written after the favorable cult reception of his first two efforts - the Pynchonesque novel The Broom of the System and the arch, virtuosic collection of short stories
Girl with Curious Hair - but before he embarked on the three-year marathon that resulted in Infinite Jest, "E Unibus Pluram" is the lament of a precocious talent at the crossroads.
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.
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.
As suggested earlier, in at least some of the stories that make up Girl with Curious Hair he is into quite different things than either the permutations of influence or multiple mises en abime played on the mind's eye by a shattered- mirror.