By way of wrapping thing up, it may be useful to ask why the title, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way.” Typically, the thing that springs to mind, if anything does, is a painting, a 33¼ × 43⅜ inch mural in the United States Capitol Building, painted by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze in 1861, which (rather ham-handedly) symbolizes American Manifest Destiny. But my guess is Wallace was more interested in the place Leutze got the name for his painting: the final stanza of a poem by the 18^th century philosopher George Berkeley. It reads:

Westward the course of empire takes its way;   

The first four acts already past,

A fifth shall close the drama with the day;  

Time’s noblest offspring is the last.

The poem, entitled “Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America,” laments the exhausted decadence of old Europe, which “breeds in her decay,” and heralds a rebirth of noble thinking and artistic innovation—“another golden age”—in the New World. At the time of writing, Berkeley was trying to establish a college in Bermuda. The resonances for Wallace’s literary project are fairly obvious: something has been exhausted, decayed, devolved into decadence. The “muse” is “barren.” We need a new fertile ground on which to reaffirm truth and virtue and art. What’s interesting about all this is that Berkeley was the principle proponent of philosophical immaterialism, or subjective idealism, the metaphysical doctrine that things only exist insofar as we perceive them. For the immaterialist, familiar objects are only ever ideas in the minds of perceivers. Which is to say, the title of Wallace’s bold literary manifesto for a new kind of literature that transcends postmodern recursivity—the worst symptom of which is solipsistic isolation—was taken from a poem by the 18^th century’s most famous solipsist philosopher. Esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived, is Berkeley’s famous rejoinder to Descartes.

All of this is perhaps an indication that Westward, to paraphrase Wallace, is too infatuated with its own “crafted cleverness” to be the new kind of fiction Wallace hopes to shepherd into the world. Westward is its own kind of funhouse, full of reflective surfaces that betray what they pretend to reveal. Ultimately, the figure we are left with in Westward is not a metaphorical funhouse, but a literal one. JD convinces Dr. Ambrose, who is Wallace’s stand-in for Barth, to “franchise his art into a third dimension,” a chain of funhouse discotheques, marketed by JD Steelritter Advertising.