๐๐ท ๐ฃ๐ฑ๐ฎ ๐๐๐ฑ๐ช๐พ๐ผ๐ฝ๐ฒ๐ท๐ฐ ๐๐ป๐ฒ๐ท๐ฐ๐ฎ ๐ธ๐ฏ ๐๐ช๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ญ ๐๐ธ๐ผ๐ฝ๐ฎ๐ป ๐ฆ๐ช๐ต๐ต๐ช๐ฌ๐ฎ
๐ฏ๐ฝ๐ ๐ฟ๐พ๐๐๐๐ถ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ป ๐ธ๐๐ฝ๐ถ๐๐๐๐พ๐๐: ๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐พ๐๐ฝ๐๐น; ๐ธ๐๐ฝ๐ถ๐๐๐๐๐น ๐น๐๐๐๐ฝ๐๐
Wallace; Exhaustion; Cringe
Writing of the novelโs unique narrative adaptability, Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin observes that it is โthe sole genre that continues to develop.โย He praises its flexibility, as well as its omnivorous capacity for parody.ย The novel โsqueezes out some genres, and incorporates them into its peculiar structure, reformulating and re-accentuating themโ into entirely new aesthetic objects.ย John Barth similarly heralds the novel as a โpolyglot condominiumโ that can house a broad scope of competing discursive styles.ย Barth and Bakhtin both take cyclical views of aesthetic movements: art develops as a reactive series of avant-gardes which displace a status quo, become a newly entrenched status quo, only be themselves displaced by yet another new avant-garde.ย In โThe Literature of Exhaustion,โ Barth questions โhow an artist may paradoxically turn the felt ultimacies of our time and material and means for his workโ toward the transcendence of โwhat had appeared to be his refutation.โย
Twelve years later, in โThe Literature of Replenishment,โ Barth explores how his generation, the successors not only to Joyce and Kafka, but also to Joyce and Kafkaโs successors, such as Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Louis Borges, sought to push through a period of exhaustion through fiction that was โmore and more about itself and its processes, less and less about objective reality and life in the world,โโ a process that he believes to be a โpallid, last ditch decadence.โย Such extreme reflexivity, as championed by critics such as Robert Alter and Ihab Hassan, was an inevitable dead-end; it was a self-condemning assent to a period of literary exhaustion.ย Rather, Barth finds a โproper program for postmodernismโ in a synthesis of modernist and โpre-modernistโ sensibilities.ย The path forward was โneither a mere extension of the modernist program [โฆ] nor on the contrary a wholesale subversion or repudiation of either modernismโ or what calls premodernism, but a writing practice that works oneโs โmodernist forebears under oneโs belt, but not on [oneโs] back.โย Barthโs exhaustion/replenishment cycle is a Bakhtinian process of โnovelizationโ that plays nineteenth century realism against modernist innovation to allow conventions from both periods to โsound in new ways.โ
Barthโs analysis of the cycle of exhaustion and replenishment was one of description rather than prescription; his essays did not put an end to the cycle itself, nor did they seek to do so.ย By the 1990โs, Barthโs postmodern strategies to replenish an exhausted modernism themselves became exhausted.ย For writers who succeeded not just Beckett, not just Borges, but also Barth himself, the ironic, reflexive, and recursive hallmarks of metafiction led neither to innovation, nor to resolution, but to a straightjacketing sense of stasis.
In an interview with Larry McCaffery, David Foster Wallace targets Barth and other members of his periodic cohort as โpatriarchs for parricide.โย Building on a previous essay urging writers to reject โself-consciousness and hip fatigueโ in favor of a return to conventional emphasis on emotion, authenticity, and sincerity, Wallace tells McCaffery that before it can be about itself, fiction must be โabout what it means to be a fucking human being.โย Jonathan Franzen similarly took issue with postmodernismโs divorce from lived experience and also dismissed the difficulty associated with writers like William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon as elite obscurantism.ย Instead, Franzen sets forth a โcontract modelโ for fiction that approache reading and writing as a means to โsustain a sense of connectedness,โ and โto resist existential lonelinessโ through a language of โpleasure and trust.โย Wallace and Franzen both traffic in an โagenda of post-postmodernism,โ which, according to Robert McNamara, does not โseek to reify the cynicism, the disconnect, the atomized privacy of our own societyโ but instead engages โthe language-based nature of its operations to make us [โฆ] newly aware of the reality that has been made for us and to remind us that other realities are possible.โย Adam Kelly characterizes Wallaceโs call for a wave of โanti-rebels who are willing to riskโ accusations of โsentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without lawโ as a key marker of the New Sincerity movement (a term that has been extended to include Franzen along with Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith, and Michael Chabon) that filled Barthโs replenishing role when his own postmodern era reached its own terminal point of exhaustion.ย
However, the New Sincerityโs pivot from irony was not itself immune to Barthโs cyclical movement; it was simply another swing of the aesthetic pendulum from exhaustion to replenishment, that, yet again, exhausted itself. Wallaceโs own practice, especially in his later work, already shows the limits of the anti-rebellion that he set forth in the McCaffery interview and the โUnibusโ essay.ย Though Lee Konstantinou sees the โpostironic yearning to decuple the academic and cultural association between metafictional form and ironic knowingness,โ Wallace himself cannot sustain such a decoupling.ย โOctet,โ a short story that Iain Williams sees as โconcerned with interrogating the possibility of a writer achieving empathy or community with readers,โ employs the same hallmark techniques that he attacked in his earlier criticism.ย Williams argues that this may be an attempt to foreground the obstacles that a writer faces in convincing readers that there is โa living human holding the pencil, not some abstract personaโ communicating directly to readers, Wallaceโs contemporary, Zadie Smith, points out that readersโ willingness to accept the ironic subversion of irony ultimately boils down to a matter of faith.ย Smith writes that Wallaceโs โurgency, his sincerity, his apparent desperation to โconnect with readers in a genuine way โ are things you either believe in or you donโt.โย
Edward Jackson and Joel Nicholson-Roberts similarly claim that โbecause of languageโs performativity, sincerity cannot finally live in representation.โย Readers must decide for themselves whether or not they choose to trust Wallace or his characters.ย Because this is a trust that runs on the subjective emotional rapport Wallace, his narrators, and his characters build with readers, it is a trust in sincerity that must remain indeterminate, and thus, at an unbridgeable ironic remove.ย The postmodern critique of โthe depth model of human subjectivity and representation itselfโ renders judgment of at textโs sincerity an โaffective injunctionโ on the part of the reader.ย Further, Wallace relies heavily in what Susan Feagin calls โmeta-responsesโ provoked by feelings one has about oneโs feelings and affective orientation.ย Meta-responses, as subjective feelings about subjective feelings, are ineluctably self-aware, and, they ineluctably produce ironic distance from unmediated experience.ย
An anonymous guest article on Monica Belevanโs Covidian Aesthetics blog attempts to sort through the challenges that self-conscious meta-responses pose to sincere representation as they proliferate toward a vertiginous hall of mirrors in online discourse by building a theoretical scaffolding for the contemporary aesthetic category of the cringe.ย Cringe is marked by โan undignified display of high awkwardness that can often generate an intense feeling of second-hand embarrassment โ or even shame โ in having witnessed it.โย To elicit a cringe response is not to act without self-awareness.ย Rather, it is to act in a way aspires and fails to achieve adequate self-consciousness.ย
Cringe stems from miscalculated meta-response; it grows from an incongruity between subjective projection and objective reception.ย The negative response to cringiness is a similarly embarrassed aversion to failed contrivances to the negative response Sianne Ngai attributes to gimmicks, which both work too hard and work too little:ย cringe is too self-aware; cringe is not self-aware enough.ย It produces a parallax between two incompatible ironic disengagements: that of the meta-responsive subject, and that of the observerโs embarrassed awareness of the subjectโs failed self-awareness.ย This cognitive disconnect leaves โonlookers in a state of immobilizing aesthetic confusion that circumvents any attempt to make rational judgment.ย For readers a generation removed from the rise of the New Sincerity movement, writers such as Wallace, who attempt to short-circuit their audienceโs emotional orientation by cataloguing anticipatory meta-response, are damned to failure by masking their sincerity behind a mask of โdazzle camouflage.โ
Belevanโs guest author likens the cringe to the kitsch, invoking Thorstein Botz-Bornsteinโs definition of the term which focuses on its โsentimentality, banality, superfluousness, and tritenessโ โ adjectives that not only call to mind not only Wallaceโs literary anti-rebels, but also his celebrations of 12-step program truisms and bumper sticker aphorisms as โbanal platitudesโ insights durable enough to bear the ironyโs slings and arrows that, โin the day to day trenches of adult existence,โ have โa life or death importance.โย By attempting to launder the kitsch, Wallace masks a moralizing coercion in โcute or self-consciously harmless aesthetics, expressions of mildness or benevolence or appeals to the greater good.ย His rehabilitation of kitschy slogans and conviction in the profound truth of โgrand clichรฉโ is a knowing, warts and all embrace of the kitsch.ย However, despite his knowing winks and nods, Wallace proliferating meta-responses, intended to work as assurance against doubt, introduce and preserve ironic distance from his kitschy proverbs.ย Filtered through meta-response, sincerity becomes a matter of noumenal transcendence.ย It is not a matter of reason, but a matter of faith.ย And, Wallaceโs pleas for faith in the face of crushing doubt, to a cynical audience conscious of the New Sincerityโs shortcomings, can only be cringe.
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