𝓞𝓷 𝓣𝓱𝓮 𝓔𝔁𝓱𝓪𝓾𝓼𝓽𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓒𝓻𝓲𝓷𝓰𝓮 𝓸𝓯 𝓓𝓪𝓿𝓲𝓭 𝓕𝓸𝓼𝓽𝓮𝓻 𝓦𝓪𝓵𝓵𝓪𝓬𝓮

𝒯𝒽𝑒 𝐿𝒾𝓉𝑒𝓇𝒶𝓉𝓊𝓇𝑒 𝑜𝒻 𝐸𝓍𝒽𝒶𝓊𝓈𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃: 𝑅𝑒𝓅𝓁𝑒𝓃𝒾𝓈𝒽𝑒𝒹; 𝐸𝓍𝒽𝒶𝓊𝓈𝓉𝑒𝒹 𝐹𝓊𝓇𝓉𝒽𝑒𝓇

Wallace; Exhaustion; Cringe

Writing of the novel’s unique narrative adaptability, Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin observes that it is “the sole genre that continues to develop.”  He praises its flexibility, as well as its omnivorous capacity for parody.  The novel “squeezes out some genres, and incorporates them into its peculiar structure, reformulating and re-accentuating them” into entirely new aesthetic objects.  John Barth similarly heralds the novel as a “polyglot condominium” that can house a broad scope of competing discursive styles.  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.  In “The Literature of Exhaustion,” Barth questions “how an artist may paradoxically turn the felt ultimacies of our time and material and means for his work” toward the transcendence of “what had appeared to be his refutation.” 

Twelve years later, in “The Literature of Replenishment,” Barth explores how his generation, the successors not only to Joyce and Kafka, but also to Joyce and Kafka’s successors, such as Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Louis Borges, sought to push through a period of exhaustion through fiction that was “more and more about itself and its processes, less and less about objective reality and life in the world,”— a process that he believes to be a “pallid, last ditch decadence.”  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.  Rather, Barth finds a “proper program for postmodernism” in a synthesis of modernist and “pre-modernist” sensibilities.  The path forward was “neither a mere extension of the modernist program […] nor on the contrary a wholesale subversion or repudiation of either modernism” or what calls premodernism, but a writing practice that works one’s “modernist forebears under one’s belt, but not on [one’s] back.”  Barth’s exhaustion/replenishment cycle is a Bakhtinian process of “novelization” that plays nineteenth century realism against modernist innovation to allow conventions from both periods to “sound in new ways.”

Barth’s 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.  By the 1990’s, Barth’s postmodern strategies to replenish an exhausted modernism themselves became exhausted.  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 “patriarchs for parricide.”  Building on a previous essay urging writers to reject “self-consciousness and hip fatigue” 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 “about what it means to be a fucking human being.”  Jonathan Franzen similarly took issue with postmodernism’s divorce from lived experience and also dismissed the difficulty associated with writers like William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon as elite obscurantism.  Instead, Franzen sets forth a “contract model” for fiction that approache reading and writing as a means to “sustain a sense of connectedness,” and “to resist existential loneliness” through a language of “pleasure and trust.”  Wallace and Franzen both traffic in an “agenda of post-postmodernism,” which, according to Robert McNamara, does not “seek to reify the cynicism, the disconnect, the atomized privacy of our own society” but instead engages “the language-based nature of its operations to make us […] newly aware of the reality that has been made for us and to remind us that other realities are possible.”  Adam Kelly characterizes Wallace’s call for a wave of “anti-rebels who are willing to risk” accusations of “sentimentality, 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 law” 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 Barth’s replenishing role when his own postmodern era reached its own terminal point of exhaustion. 

However, the New Sincerity’s pivot from irony was not itself immune to Barth’s cyclical movement; it was simply another swing of the aesthetic pendulum from exhaustion to replenishment, that, yet again, exhausted itself. Wallace’s 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 “Unibus” essay.  Though Lee Konstantinou sees the “postironic yearning to decuple the academic and cultural association between metafictional form and ironic knowingness,” Wallace himself cannot sustain such a decoupling.  “Octet,” a short story that Iain Williams sees as “concerned with interrogating the possibility of a writer achieving empathy or community with readers,” employs the same hallmark techniques that he attacked in his earlier criticism.  Williams argues that this may be an attempt to foreground the obstacles that a writer faces in convincing readers that there is “a living human holding the pencil, not some abstract persona” communicating directly to readers, Wallace’s contemporary, Zadie Smith, points out that readers’ willingness to accept the ironic subversion of irony ultimately boils down to a matter of faith.  Smith writes that Wallace’s “urgency, his sincerity, his apparent desperation to ‘connect with readers in a genuine way – are things you either believe in or you don’t.” 

Edward Jackson and Joel Nicholson-Roberts similarly claim that “because of language’s performativity, sincerity cannot finally live in representation.”  Readers must decide for themselves whether or not they choose to trust Wallace or his characters.  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.  The postmodern critique of “the depth model of human subjectivity and representation itself” renders judgment of at text’s sincerity an “affective injunction” on the part of the reader.  Further, Wallace relies heavily in what Susan Feagin calls “meta-responses” provoked by feelings one has about one’s feelings and affective orientation.  Meta-responses, as subjective feelings about subjective feelings, are ineluctably self-aware, and, they ineluctably produce ironic distance from unmediated experience. 

An anonymous guest article on Monica Belevan’s 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.  Cringe is marked by “an undignified display of high awkwardness that can often generate an intense feeling of second-hand embarrassment – or even shame – in having witnessed it.”  To elicit a cringe response is not to act without self-awareness.  Rather, it is to act in a way aspires and fails to achieve adequate self-consciousness. 

Cringe stems from miscalculated meta-response; it grows from an incongruity between subjective projection and objective reception.  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:  cringe is too self-aware; cringe is not self-aware enough.  It produces a parallax between two incompatible ironic disengagements: that of the meta-responsive subject, and that of the observer’s embarrassed awareness of the subject’s failed self-awareness.  This cognitive disconnect leaves “onlookers in a state of immobilizing aesthetic confusion that circumvents any attempt to make rational judgment.  For readers a generation removed from the rise of the New Sincerity movement, writers such as Wallace, who attempt to short-circuit their audience’s emotional orientation by cataloguing anticipatory meta-response, are damned to failure by masking their sincerity behind a mask of “dazzle camouflage.”

Belevan’s guest author likens the cringe to the kitsch, invoking Thorstein Botz-Bornstein’s definition of the term which focuses on its “sentimentality, banality, superfluousness, and triteness” – adjectives that not only call to mind not only Wallace’s literary anti-rebels, but also his celebrations of 12-step program truisms and bumper sticker aphorisms as “banal platitudes” insights durable enough to bear the irony’s slings and arrows that, “in the day to day trenches of adult existence,” have “a life or death importance.”  By attempting to launder the kitsch, Wallace masks a moralizing coercion in “cute or self-consciously harmless aesthetics, expressions of mildness or benevolence or appeals to the greater good.  His rehabilitation of kitschy slogans and conviction in the profound truth of “grand cliché” is a knowing, warts and all embrace of the kitsch.  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.  Filtered through meta-response, sincerity becomes a matter of noumenal transcendence.  It is not a matter of reason, but a matter of faith.  And, Wallace’s pleas for faith in the face of crushing doubt, to a cynical audience conscious of the New Sincerity’s shortcomings, can only be cringe.