Postirony_Introduction.pdf

From: Lukas Hoffmann Postirony The Nonfictional Literature of David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers October 2016, 210 p., 34,99 €, ISBN 978-3-8376-3661-1 What is ›postirony‹? Foremost, it is a response to the ironic zeitgeist. Moreover, it is the key to understanding a specific form of literature. The contemporary reader is familiar with and – unfortunately – used to postmodernism’s ironic, self-reflexive metafiction. Authors like David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers chose a different path: Despite the reign of contemporary irony, they strive to reach the reader on a level beyond, cognitively as well as emotionally – they claim to be sincere and true. Focusing largely on nonfiction by said authors, Lukas Hoffmann explores the means the texts use to achieve something new – namely, a new form of sincerity. Lukas Hoffmann (PhD) is head of studies and teaches narratology at the Academy of Performing Arts BW. His research interests include contemporary literature, narrative ethics, reader-response criticism, and post-theory. For further information: www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-3661-1 © 2016 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Contents Acknowledgements | 8 Introduction | 9 Post-Postmodernism, Postirony, and New Sincerity | 10 Genre Matters | 11 Creative Noniction – Memoir and Autocriticism | 18 New Voices in Contemporary Literature | 21 Dave Eggers – Counter-Cultural Hero and Idealist | 23 David Foster Wallace – Changing the Tone of Contemporary Literature | 25 Jonathan Lethem and Nick Flynn – Postirony’s 2nd Generation | 33 Synopsis | 34 Postirony – Conceptualizing an Idea | 37 Richard Rorty – he Liberal Ironist | 42 Linda Hutcheon – Irony’s Edge | 46 David Foster Wallace – How Irony Spread | 47 Irony – An All-Embracing Attitude | 51 Jedediah Purdy – A Return to Traditional Values | 55 Alex Shakar – he Savage Girl | 57 he Postironic – A Philosophical Stand | 59 Reading the Postironic – Audience, Narrator, and Metalepsis | 65 Audiences – Preliminary houghts | 68 Metalepsis | 69 Audience – Narratee and Narrative Audience | 70 Dave Eggers – Living the Postironic | 89 Meta-Autobiography | 90 Trauma – True Feelings and the Plot | 92 he Nonictional Frame | 95 Struggling With Postmodernism | 100 “I Want to Be Doing Something Beautiful” – Narrating Dave and Narrated Dave | 105 he Narrated Dave | 110 he Narrating Dave and His Audience | 117 Justifying the Narrative | 120 Concluding AHWOSG | 123 David Foster Wallace – Hope and Despair; The Postironic Condition | 127 “Author’s Foreword” – Faking Memoir, Talking Truth | 131 he Audience and the Autobiographical | 135 Subjectivity, Veracity, Sincerity | 139 “Author’s Foreword” Part II – Autocriticism, the Reader, and Postirony | 142 A Supposedly Fun hing I’ll Never Do Again | 148 he Text Within the Text – Critique as Reassurance | 152 he Wallace Style – Footnotes, Asides, and Metaiction | 155 Free Choice vs. Pampered Into Despair | 156 Desperation Cruise | 161 Concluding “Fun hing” | 164 Consider the Lobster | 166 he Audience of the Lobster | 170 Concluding Wallace | 171 A Second Generation Emerges | 175 Nick Flynn – Reenacting Memoir | 175 Jonathan Lethem – Postironic Ecstasy | 185 Conclusion | 191 Identifying the Enemy – Irony’s Reign | 193 he Nonictional Frame | 195 Autobiography – Postironic Idiosyncrasies | 196 Reading Postironic Diferences | 197 Postirony in Autobiography | 198 Postirony in Autocritical Essays | 198 Concluding houghts | 199 Works Cited | 201 What’s engaging and artistically real is, taking it as axiomatic that the present is grotesquely materialistic, how is it that we as human beings still have the capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections, for stuff that doesn’t have a price? And can these capacities be made to thrive? And if so, how, and if not why not? David Foster Wallace 1993 Introduction his book examines the postironic1 movement in contemporary US literature considering mainly two aspects: For one thing, I put my focus on noniction texts rather than ictional narratives. On the other hand, the “efects” these texts have on their audience – also a major concern of the authors chosen – are a core feature of my narratological approach. A number of scholars has dealt with postironic writings,2 but until now only ictional narratives have been put under scrutiny. However, many authors who are labeled postironic in scholarly literature have – besides their otentimes more acknowledged ictional works – published rather great amounts of noniction. In numerous cases these noniction narratives, especially the short essayistic works, are consulted only to highlight the scholarly conclusions about the ictional narratives.3 In contemporary literary criticism there seems to exist a prejudice that dismisses the artistic value of noniction itself, a notion I ind misleading and intend to overcome in my examination of the postironic syndrome. In my opinion, the noniction I examine not only shows artistic value but is also well suited for the particular postironic purposes in itself. Both the neglect in criticism and the idiosyncratic style of postironic writers demand an investigation that (1) highlights the literary sophistication and (2) examines the nonictional peculiarities of these texts. Postirony’s most urgent characteristic is its attempt to communicate with the reader instead of presenting her a passive entertainment. Diferent critics,4 most 1 | The Chapter “Postirony – Conceptualizing an Idea” will explain and discuss the concept of postirony in detail. 2 | Most prominently Lee Konstantinou, whose doctoral dissertation, numerous articles, and a monography approach postirony. Cp. Konstantinou (2009b), (2012), and (2016). 3 | Cp. Boswell (2003). 4 | The works of these critics make general suggestions about genres and are interested in autobiography, a form that is similar to the novel but oftentimes approached differently because of its nonfiction status. 10 Postirony prominently Phillip Lejeune, proposed that diferent contracts between writer and reader exist when iction and noniction are at work. In noniction, the reader expects the communicative act to be truthful and to address the world the reader understands as the real world surrounding herself. While most critics accept this as deinitional for noniction in general, my focus is set on the actual content and message that postironic narratives attempt to convey.5 Post-Postmodernism , Postirony, and n ew s incerity Postirony is only one term in use for the group of writers I investigate in this book, the others being post-postmodernism and new sincerity. However, not one of these labels seems applicable without causing problems. Nicoline Timmer uses the term post-postmodernism in her study Do You Feel It Too?: he Post-Postmodern Syndrome in American Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium. (2010) She describes the authors David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, and Mark Danielewski pushing beyond the means of postmodernism and thereby deining a new movement, namely post-postmodernism. Still, post-postmodernism, similar to postmodernism, is a term far too broad to describe one particular literary movement and therefore not very satisfying. In contrast, literary scholar Lee Konstantinou attempts to use “post-postmodernism” along with “postirony” to describe “writers [who] have sought to create a post-postmodern art that moves beyond or reverses what they take to be postmodernism’s most damaging qualities” (2009b: 10) and speciies that [...] postironists do not replicate the rhetoric of neoconservatives, who often attack postmodernism for baldly political reasons [but] value the legacy and accept the theses of their postmodernist forefathers, even as they recognize serious problems with their patrimony […]. (ibid: 10;12) By this speciication he is scaling down his ield of inquiry from contemporary writers in general to the group that is associated with Eggers’ McSweeney’s Quaterly. hereby, this group can be sharply deined as 5| Obviously fictional narratives also transport meaning. The difference is that although this meaning is – at least in an engaging narrative – also applied by the reader to her own world, the frame of reference is the fictional world. The reader might see similarities to her own world but is aware that it is not really her world which is depicted in the narrative. The consequences for the level of engagement will be examined althrough this book. Introduction [w]riters [who] try to imagine what shape a postironic consciousness, rather than an uncritically earnest or naively nostalgic consciousness, might take. Thus, the declaration of “postirony” often announces the use of ironic and self-consciously experimental means towards sincere or sentimental ends. (ibid: 12) I agree that the announcement of “sincere ends” is central to postironic literature. For some critics, its centrality leads them to label the group “New Sincerity.” New Sincerity, a term chosen for example by Adam Kelly to describe these writers,6 is, in my opinion, the least appropriate term for this group. By skipping the “post” it does not take into account that the postironists are actively struggling with both postmodernism and irony; a new sincerity could easily dismiss all of postmodernism’s heritage and write straightforward realism. Nevertheless, the idea that these writers are “sincere” in their attempt to communicate with the audience is correctly perceived by Kelly and I refer to this idea of the sincere narrative in my close reading chapters. Because I see the active struggle with the ironic environment7 as the key concern of the writers I discuss, I believe the term postironic is the most itting one and will be used in this book. Sometimes statements out of secondary texts use either post-postmodern or new sincerity; if they do so without a diferent implication to the one I have ofered, I will not further comment on these terms. G enre m at ters 8 he common factor of all texts under investigation in this book is their status of creative noniction. Although diferent in form, they are united under this label. I follow diferent scholars – David Shields, Bonnie Rough, among others – who propose that categorizing narratives as noniction has a strong inluence on readers’ reactions to these texts. 6 | Critics who use the term “New Sincerity” usually refer to Art Spiegelman as the origin for this term: “Both Spiegelman and Melamid take credit for coining the term ‘Neosincerity,’ but everyone agreed that it could also be called post-irony, if it didn’t sound so highfalutin. They also agreed that irony has lost its sting. ‘We got immunized against irony,’ Spiegelman said. ‘It makes you shrug. It’s a new way of making you passive.’” (Elliott) 7 | Cp. my discussion of the postironist idea that contemporary societies are ironic to their core in the chapter “Postirony – Conceptualizing an Idea.” 8 | This expression is taken from Couser (2005). 11 12 Postirony Creative noniction is not a genre in itself, it rather describes an attitude writers have toward their texts. As David Shields, an advocate of creative noniction, declares: The books that most interest me sit on a frontier between genres. On one level, they confront the real world directly; on another level, they mediate and shape the world, as novels do. The writer is there as a palpable presence on the page, brooding over his society, daydreaming it into being, working his own brand of linguistic magic on it. What I want is the real world, with all its hard edges, but the real world fully imagined and fully written, not merely reported. (Shields 2010: 69) his interest in the “real world” connects writers of creative noniction, at the same time, the stylistics of creative noniction are taken from novelistic writing. hereby creative noniction leaves the level of “report” and enters a level of “the real world […] imagined.” his is the distinctive mark to more traditional nonictional accounts. he “frontier between genres” that Shields describes is the imaginative and subjective rendering of “real world” accounts in a creative way. In order to clarify his point, Shields refers to writer and literary scholar Bonnie Rough who claims that [n]onfiction writers imagine. Fiction writers invent. These are fundamentally different acts, performed to different ends. Unlike a fiction reader, whose only task is to imagine, a nonfiction reader is asked to behave more deeply: to imagine, and also to believe. (Rough “Writing Lost Stories” qtd. in Shields 2010: 59 my emphasis) Rough also includes the reader into her argument because the line between iction and creative noniction is indeed blurry when one considers narrative style. he distinction of “imagination” and “invention” that Rough introduces makes, in my opinion, the actual diference for the reader. As long as the reader feels that “facts” are imagined, which means they might not have happened exactly as written down but nevertheless stem from reality, she accepts the claim of noniction. “Invented” parts of a noniction account, however, put her of – to believe becomes impossible – and consequently, these parts are conceived as lies because they do not have a referential value to the real world the reader lives in.9 I am mainly interested in these expectations on the addressee’s side, and my argument follows Rough’s idea by stating that (postironic) noniction is perceived diferently from (postironic) iction. 9 | Invention is part of the fictional realm. A reader of fiction actually expects invention, and fiction without invention is impossible. Introduction In contrast to Shields’ and Rough’s general approach, I use a narratological methodology in order to discuss the text-inherent markers of nonictionality. Shields’ concept of the “ictionalization of the real” makes the writer’s assumed “palpable presence on the page” (Shields 2010: 69) a question of narratology. he writer whom the reader feels present is foremost a narrator and her/his agenda is a narrator’s, which can best be investigated in narratological terms. On the other hand, the reader as an extratextual entity is also hardly graspable; therefore I explore the intratextual narratee and the so-called audience text-functions later in this book. To return to my thoughts about creative noniction, the creative writing department of the University of Verrmont,10 similar to Shields, deines the “frontier between genres” as: Creative nonfiction merges the boundaries between literary art (fiction, poetry) and research nonfiction (statistical, fact-filled, run of the mill journalism). It is writing composed of the real, or of facts, that employs the same literary devices as fiction such as setting, voice/tone, character development, etc. This makes it different (more “creative”) than standard nonfiction writing. (Tutor Tips) Although I look at texts varying from self-relexive literary metaiction (Jonathan Lethem’s “he Ecstasy of Inluence”) to a description of a luxury cruise (David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun hing I’ll Never Do Again”) and also at longer narratives that deine themselves in their titles as memoirs (Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: A Memoir and Nick Flynn’s autobiographical trilogy), they all share a connecting link which is that they are “composed of the real, or of facts” but nevertheless “[employ] the same literary devices as iction.” his part is captioned “genre matters” and above I declared that creative noniction is less of a genre and more of an attitude. For the reader, however, it functions as a genre. Rough’s idea that the reader has to “believe” when reading noniction changes the reader’s attitude towards the text. Whereas in iction unreliability of the narrator and improbability of events is usually accepted by the reader as literary maneuvers (which, when skillfully used, have outstanding importance for a text; i.e. the unreliability of the narrator in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita), the same devices lead to disappointment in literary noniction.11 Although I agree with Shields’ claim that creative noniction uses literary devices to “imagine rather than report” facts, these literary devices are diferently scrutinized and evaluated by readers of noniction compared to readers of iction. 10 | I have randomly chosen the University of Vermont; other creative writing departments use similar definitions. 11 | Cp. my discussion of James Frey below. 13 14 Postirony To further clarify the noniction/iction distinction that is important for the reader’s “belief” in a text, the discussion on autobiography is illuminating.12 he question of whether autobiography/memoir 13 can be considered a genre in itself is most prominently asked in Paul de Man’s “Autobiography as De-Facement.” (1979) herein he states that “[e]mpirically as well as theoretically, autobiography lends itself poorly to generic deinition; each speciic instance seems to be an exception to the norm; the works themselves always seem to shade of into neighboring or even incompatible genres […].” (de Man 2007: 265) De Man’s assumption is convincing when assuming autobiography’s stylistic means. Although Augustine’s Confessions (usually considered to be the irst autobiography) were already written in the year 399, a widespread useage of generic autobiographical modes was only established in the 18th century, occurring simultaneously with the proliferation of the novel. Early novels (i.e. Robinson Crusoe (1719), Tristram Shandy (1759)) used the plotline (confessional novel, bildungsroman, etc.) that is predestined for autobiographical writings and otentimes pretended to be real accounts.14 As Shields states: Early novelists felt the need to foreground their work with a false realistic front. Defoe tried to pass off Journal of a Plague Year as an actual journal. Fielding presented Jonathan Wild as a “real” account. As the novel evolved, it left these techniques behind. (Shields 2010: 13) 12 | That I confine the discussion here to autobiography/memoir is due to the fact of a lack of critical literature concerning creative nonfiction in general. However, the problems and questions discussed here are strongly connected to all forms of literary nonfiction. 13 | Initially the terms memoir and autobiography were used for different writings. Whereas narratives concerned with the whole life of its author were labeled autobiography, narratives that combined a historical event with the corresponding lifespan of its author were called memoirs. Nowadays the terms are equivalents. Smith and Watson ascribe this to practices in the book industry: “Predating the term autobiography, memoir is now the word used by publishing houses to describe various practices and genres of self life writing. […] Both memoir and autobiography are encompassed in the term life writing.” (Smith and Watson 2010: 4 original emphasis) I use both terms as synonyms in this book. Later I also look at the specific form of “autocriticism.” 14 | “[...] in the West, memoir developed in tandem with the novel, in English, at least, the two genres have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship for some two hundred years. And they remain intertwined. Today memoirs often incorporate invented or enhanced material, and they often use novelistic techniques.” (Couser 2011: 15) Introduction Consequently, the ways autobiography presents itself in are similar to the novel.15 Nevertheless, de Man’s assumption that autobiography is not distinguishable from ictional narratives cannot be applied to the actual reading experience. he reader of autobiography deals with that genre diferently than she does with reading a ictional novel. While it is diicult to measure the “positive” engagement of a reader in a memoir, the public outburst when a hoax is exposed shows that readers feel deceived in a personal manner. As for example Wallace puts it: The feeling of betrayal or infidelity that the reader suffers if it turns out that a piece of ostensible nonfiction has made up stuff in it […] is because the terms of the nonfiction contract have been violated. There are, of course, ways to quote-unquote cheat the reader in fiction, too, but these tend to be more technical, meaning internal to the story’s own formal rules […] the reader tends to feel more aesthetically disappointed than personally dicked over. (Wallace 2011: 73) Truthfulness is the primary and foremost expectation the reader has when engaging with a noniction text. While inconsistencies in a novel are mostly read as literary failures, the reader takes exaggerations, half-truths, and straightforwardly told lies as a personal afront in a memoir. Most contemporary readers are aware that life writing is just as subjective as any other account given by human beings. hat memory might fail, that the past is seen diferently in retrospect, that a narrator’s judgment might be inluenced by personal relations, prejudices, or the cultural background are aspects of life writing which the reader is aware of. However, when she feels cheated by a factual narrative, it loses its face value. his face value, however, is not inherent in the genre or the particular text but in the reader’s expectations: When Frey, […] Wilkomirski, et al. wrote their books, of course they made things up. Who doesn’t? […] I don’t want to defend Frey per se – he’s a terrible writer – but the very nearly pornographic obsession with his and similar cases reveals the degree of nervousness on the topic. The huge loud roar, as it returns again and again, has to do with the culture being embarrassed at how much it wants the frame of reality and, within that frame, great drama. (Shields 2010: 35) 15 | Notable exceptions are lyrical autobiographies William Wordsworth’s The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind; An Autobiographical Poem (1850). 15 16 Postirony he contemporary reader 16 allows forms of ictionalization in creative noniction; dramatization is necessary to fulill the reader’s urge for drama.17 At the same time she feels an “embarrassement” about her own voyeuristic demand. his puts writers in a diicult spot, because it is a ine line between “imagining facts” and thereby overcoming a mere “report” and making up facts. he texts I investigate in this book all explicitly discuss this problem in metaictional asides and comments. hey self-relexively show their awareness of the problem of factual narration. Returning to the question of genre, to label certain texts “creative noniction” [...] is not the end of genre analysis but its starting point. The goal is not to classify works but to clarify them. We can’t fully understand what a particular [...] story is doing without some sense of the operative conventions, which are a function of its genre. Especially in life writing, then, genre is not about mere literary form; it’s about force – what a narrative’s purpose is, what impact it seeks to have on the world. (Couser 2011: 9 original emphasis) Whereas in postironic writings the “narrative’s purpose” is similar in ictional and nonictional narratives, the reader’s familiarity with literary/genre conventions makes this purpose in noniction more obvious and the “impact it seeks to have on the world” more explicit. he perpetual inclusion of generic distinctions is therefore indispensable. Ann Jeferson thinks along similar lines when she assumes that it is necessary to presuppose that there are generic distinctions between novels and autobiographies, even while fiction is being revealed as autobiographical and the autobiographies as fictional, since in this sphere (if not in all others) generic differences need to be respected as an effect of reading, even if they cannot be defined as intrinsic qualities of the texts in question. (1990: 109 my emphasis) As stated above, the “efects of reading” are a core feature of my examinations. herefore, it is important to highlight that I understand postironic creative noniction as highly autobiographical and that “[a]utobiography is [...] considered here 16 | “Reader” in this case refers to an ideal reader. I discuss the roles of audiences, narratees and readers in the chapter “Reading th Postironic – Audience, Narrator, and Metalepsis.” 17 | In the close reading chapters I discuss Jean Baudrillard’s concept of “hyperreality” and the resulting problem to distinguish between “reality” and a form of reality everyone receives from daily television, the internet etc., so-called “hyperreality.” Cp. footnote 51 in the chapter “Dave Eggers – Living the Postironic.” Introduction as referential art, without denying the complexities involved in that referentiality.” (Gudmundsdóttir 2003: 3) Returning to Jeferson’s idea that “[generic distinctions] cannot be deined as intrinsic qualities of the texts in question” I once more take up the idea that the reader feels betrayed by autobiographical hoaxes (cp. “he feeling of betrayal or inidelity that the reader sufers if it turns out that a piece of ostensible noniction has made up stuf in it.” (Wallace 2011: 73)) A number of texts labeled “autobiography” have been exposed as deceptive in the last several years. Most prominent are James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003) and Binjamin Wilkomirski’s holocaust-survivor-tale Bruchstücke: Aus einer Kindheit 1939-1948 (1995). Frey tried to ind a publisher for his book by presenting it as a ictional novel and only pretended to have written a memoir when it wasn’t accepted – ergo he lied knowingly in order to get a publisher (cp. Couser 2011: 17). he uproar when the fraud became known makes Couser conclude, “this distinction [between noniction and iction] is not an academic one. Ignoring it can have signiicant consequences in the real world.” (ibid: 16) In contrast to Frey’s calculating lie, Wilkomirski actually believes to be a holocaust survivor; he is not really lying but rather narrating a psychosis. However, proof is given that his real name is Bruno Dösseker, and that he grew up in Switzerland and had in fact never been a victim of Nazi persecution,18 so the book is without doubt untrue in its referential aim. In the Frey scandal, most probably due to Oprah Winfrey’s involvement, the public outburst was huge. he book had been recommended by Winfrey in her “Book Club” and became a national bestseller. When, only a couple of months later, the website he Smoking Gun published an article entitled “A Million Little Lies: he Man Who Conned Oprah” and showed that Frey (among other false information) had strongly exaggerated and lied about his time spent in jail and in a rehabilitation center, a discussion about truthfulness in the book industry and mass media broke loose. he underlying concept behind appearing on the Oprah Winfrey Show is to truthfully give an account of one’s former sufering and redemption, and the TV-audience thereby becomes engaged witnesses rather than just passive consumers (cp. Gilmore 2010: 663-664). he same sort of engagement can be found in the reading process of a memoir. he reader’s expectation is to read the truth – though she knows that literary memoirs use literary stylistics and that no one can really recall a conversation word by word that had happened years 18 | I will not discuss Wilkomirski’s case any further, for this book Frey’s conscious untruthfulness may be more concisely discussed than the medical implications of Wilkomirski’s account. The fraud was unveiled by Mächler (2000). Furthermore, an anthology shedding light onto the psychological side of the case is Diekmann (2002). 17 18 Postirony before. Nevertheless the reader expects the narrator to tell the truth to the best of his/her knowledge. Credibility is what is expected of noniction. My close readings will otentimes bring up this question again – interestingly, all postironic authors discussed in this book address the inquiry of reliability and veracity themselves in metaictional passages. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson call this employment of autobiographical means in metaictional comments autocriticism. c reative n onfiction – m emoir and autocriticism Memoir has become the central form of the culture: not only the way stories are told, but the way arguments are put forth, products and properties marketed, ideas floated, acts justified, reputations constructed or salvaged. (Yagoda 2009: 7) I have stated that I will examine postironic noniction. Above I generally discussed distinguishing characteristics of noniction and iction. he speciic texts I discuss are – as creative noniction – located at the border between iction and noniction. So far I have not distinguished between the diferent text forms that I will further explore. Dave Eggers and Nick Flynn published memoirs. his might seem strange at irst since traditional memoirs are not written by writers in their twenties. However, as the quote above states, “memoir has become the central form of culture,” and because postironists are occupied with cultural symptoms, the choice to write memoir at a young age does not seem so strange anymore. Since the 1960s a memoir boom can be noticed. Bookstores otentimes present an extra shelf reserved for autobiography, memoir, and biography. hese texts have in common that they are considered referential or factual, in contrast to ictitious narratives that would include the autobiographical novel. Why the sales of autobiographical texts have been increasing within the last decades is diicult to explain. Some scholars believe that the postmodern lack of grand narratives (combined to a death of the subject)19 makes readers anxious for actual accounts of subjectivity. Others believe that a peeping tom mentality, promoted by television’s “reality” concepts, makes contemporary readers eager to get insights into others’ lives.20 But why is the contemporary reader more bound to a so-called factual narrative than to a ictitious one? From its inception the novel’s main goal was to present 19 | A detailed analysis of the concept of the subject in postmodern times can be found in Heartfield (2002). 20 | Cp. Yagoda (2009). Introduction the reader with lifelike characters and track their developments. Insights into an other’s self are the novel’s speciality (cp. classical examples like Robison Crusoe or Tristram Shandy), but for some reason contemporary readers seem unsatisied by these ictional representations. Nevertheless, even though the memoir is oten considered inferior to the novel in stylistic matters,21 contemporary sales show a preference of readers for the memoir.22 homas Couser believes that [...] while memoirs, like novels, traffic in character, plot, conf lict, and suspense, we tend not to respond to these elements in the same way. The reason is that novels and memoirs have different statuses. In one way, characters in memoir are of course authorial creations; we know them only as effects of words on the page. But at the same time, they are representations of real people, who are vulnerable to harm. With memoir, too, we become interested in how characters are formed by real events – or at least how the narrator understands that process [...]. (Couser 2011: 13 my emphasis) Couser highlights the aspect of realness in memoir, which I revisit when discussing claims of authenticity in my close readings later in this book. Also addressing the public interest in autobiographical writings, Gunnthórunn Gudmundsdóttir adds another notable aspect: The reason for this interest in life-writing are many and varied, but one important factor is that autobiography – in its various guises – can capture and address many contemporary concerns, for example the status of the subject [...], and perhaps most importantly questions the individual’s relationship with the past. Autobiographical representation can thereby ref lect some of the main preoccupations of postmodernism. (Gudmundsdóttir 2003: 1) his is of signiicance for postironic autobiography; because these texts not only address the postmodern zeitgeist on a general level but also speciically criticize postmodern irony by intertextually including other postmodern narratives. he autobiographical (resp. nonictional) status lends itself ittingly to this endeavor. 21 | “And yet, pervasive as memoir has become, it is not well understood by the general public. Unlike fiction, which is taught early and often in American classrooms right through university, memoir is still treated with relative neglect, leaving the impression that it needs no explanation.” (Couser 2011: 8) 22 | “Total sales in the categories of Personal Memoirs, Childhood Memoirs, and Parental Memoirs increased more than 400 percent between 2004 and 2008.” (Yagoda 2009: 7) 19 20 Postirony In addition to book-length memoirs, contemporary autobiographical studies explore other forms of autobiographical writings. Smith and Watson, in their detailed study Reading Autobiography: A Guide For Interpreting Life Narratives (2010), dedicate two chapters to recent criticism of autobiography. hey point at theories of performativity, relationality, and positionality in order to explain both contemporary autobiographical narratives and the critical approaches thereto. hese concepts are connected to broader scientiic approaches: performativity mainly to gender studies, relationality and positionality to postcolonial studies. However, Smith and Watson show that all three concepts are useful for a better understanding of contemporary autobiographies.23 Furthermore, they discuss the concept of “Autocritical Practices” (cp. Smith and Watson 2010: 229-231). My chapter discussing Dave Eggers shows that metaictional parts in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius are concerned with questions about the autobiographical act in and for itself. Smith and Watson term acts like this “criticism of life narrative as centrally implicated in its practice” (ibid: 229). Whereas Smith and Watson chose to take their examples for autocriticism from so-called marginal literatures – they describe Native American writer Gerald Vizenor and African American writer Richard Wright – this form of autobiographical narrative is in no way restricted to one class, ethnicity, or gender. Gerhard Richter, for example, describes Walter Benjamin’s essays to “[…] ofer an experience of singularity and transgression in which the history of the self is inseparable from the history of its culture” (Richter 2000: 33). his statement about Benjamin’s work is just as descriptive and characteristic of Wallace’s and Lethem’s essays. hus, the concept of “autocriticism” could be described as essayistic noniction that foremost describes the cultural environment of the narrating I. However, these essays do not stop at depicting the world surrounding the writing subject but (more or less directly) show the interconnection of this subject with its society, thereby committing an autobiographical act. For example, Wallace’s essay “Up, Simba” (concerned with John McCain’s 2000 race for candidacy) blatantly denies objectivity by stating: “[…] it’s just meant to be the truth as one person saw it” (Wallace 2005c: 157). Furthermore, these narratives show their awareness of themselves as autobiographical (and subjective even though they are noniction). herefore, the form of “autocritical” narratives cannot be restricted to a particular content; autocriticism includes travel narratives, literary- and political criticism, journalistic accounts, and descriptions of popular cultural icons and phenomena. By applying the concept of autocriticism to the texts explored in this book, I will highlight their autobiographical aspects and show how audiences are led to an idiosyncratic reading as a result of these autocritical narratives. 23 | Cp. Smith and Watson (2010: 213-234). Introduction n ew voices in contemPorary L iterature Above I already mentioned the writers and texts I am about to investigate in this book. hey are part of what is labeled contemporary literature, which is otentimes merely tagged “postmodern,” a concept that should be and has been questioned because of its generalizing efect.24 he term postmodern is – in its broadness not only used in reference to art but also for various aspects of life – vague and indeinable. However, taking into account the wide usage in (critical) texts that have to be considered in this book, I would propose to refer to it in the sense Mark Currie does: We should dispense with the illusion, from the outset, that words like postmodern can be nailed down, even if that means tolerating an oscillation as severe as this, between a kind of writing and a universal condition […]. (2011: 1) I will neither try to give a close deinition, nor deal with this problem separately; the discussion of postmodern literature and theory instead will be executed by close readings and comparisons of texts that are directly connected to my investigations of contemporary postironic literature. As shown in many explorations of literary movements of the late 20th century, US literature is far too diverse to be simply labeled postmodern. he distinctive programmatic features of the diferent movements would thereby be synchronized, which would easily cover and nullify one of contemporary literature’s most interesting attributes: not to follow one central idea of what contemporary literature is or should be, but to engage in a perpetual (constructive) dispute with literary fashions, ideas, role models, and forebearers. he scope of this book is not the whole body of diferent literary strands that established themselves within the last 60 years (roughly the time-span usually considered as postmodern).25 My main interest lies in narratives labeled post-postmodern, postironic, or new sincerity, written by authors born in the 1960s who started publishing in the 1980s and 1990s, and who are still seen as a young and contemporary generation of writers. Even though many diferent styles and topics were chosen by these writers, I agree with David Foster Wallace, who remarks: “[we] are in my opinion A Generation, conjoined less by chronology […] than by the new and singular environment in and about which we try to write iction.” (Wallace 2012: 41) He continues, “[it] goes a long way toward explaining the violent and conlicting critical reactions New Voices are provoking.” (ibid) hese 24 | Cp. Conte (2002) and Hoffmann (2005) among others. 25 | “The prefix post- identifies postmodernism as chronologically subsequent to modernism [...], thereby placing it in the second half of the twentieth century [...].” (McHale 2005: 456) 21 22 Postirony “violent and conlicting reactions” are due to the (difering) extremes addressed in the works of this Generation. he irst writers of the group, which Wallace coins the “conspicuously young,” were Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney, whose debut novels Less han Zero (1985) and Bright Lights, Big City (1984) put them on the literary map almost overnight. While popular media in the 1980s called them the “literary brat pack,” recent criticism refers to them as the “blank generation.”26 Both labels refer to those writers’ descriptions of and debates about 1980s materialism, consumerism, and the decline of non-materialist values – most oten expressed in traditional coming of age stories. Ater having peaked in the late 1980s, the “blank generation” was followed by another literary movement, the so-called “generation x.” Whereas Ellis and McInerney depicted a hollow, MTV-like world of parties, drugs and (violent) sexuality, writers like Douglass Coupland (whose novel Generation X exemplarily stands for the whole movement) and ilmmaker Richard Linklater describe a different, changed environment. he end of the Cold War and the disappearance of the nuclear threat let these artists with a diferent emptiness than their predecessors. Although still being preoccupied with an emptiness and aimlessness similar to the 1980’s writers, they no longer ind satisfaction in descriptions of drug abuse, orgies, acts of violence, and frantic consumerism. hese so-called “slackers”27 are no longer successful brokers (like Patrick Bateman in Ellis’ American Psycho) nor rich heirs who live a life without ever having to brood about the material basis of life (like the protagonists in McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City); they mostly hold jobs in the media and computer industry and spend their leisure time trying to be everything but petty bourgeois. his fear of being labeled bourgeois can be described as the only urge this group actually feels; their lack of motivation in all other aspects of life earned them the derogative description of being couch potatoes. While the “blank generation” and “generation x” were the most dominant literary fashions among the “conspicuously young” (at least when it comes to media coverage and sales), writers with a diferent agenda started to publish in the late 1980s as well. One of these authors, David Foster Wallace, whose debut, Broom of the System, was published in 1986 and whose inluence – chiely with his 1996 novel Ininite Jest – on a so far unnamed generation of US writers (among them are Nick Flynn, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Lethem, and arguably Jonathan Franzen) is immense. As 26 | Particularly in relation to postironic writers, the name “blank generation” is justifiable, cp. Annesley (1998). Whereas postironic writers usually try to overcome the consumer culture’s void, most members of the “blank generation” seem to merely describe the cultural situation without an urge to overcome it. Cp. the discussion of Ellis’ American Psycho in McCaffery (1993). 27 | The term refers to the 1991 movie Slacker by Richard Linklater. Introduction Marshall Boswell claims: “Since Ininite Jest, a whole new group of emerging young writers has copied the elusive Wallace ‘tone’ […]. he most visible and successful writer of this group is the young essayist Dave Eggers […].” (Qtd. in Hamilton 2010: 19) I agree with Boswell and will introduce the authors under investigation in this introduction. To begin with, a clariication of the nonictional status of these texts is necessary. In the following I analyze Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) and Nick Flynn’s three-volume-works, narratives aptly labeled memoir or autobiography. Furthermore, I examine diferent essays by David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Lethem, which are at irst sight disparate from Eggers’ and Flynn’s books. My close readings will demonstrate that beneath their formal and supericial varieties, these essays also include strong autobiographical features28 and reveal postironic features similar to those found in the more formal memoirs of Flynn and Eggers. dave e GGers – counter -cuLturaL H ero and i deaList Dave Eggers has to be seen as one of the leading igures in this “group of emerging young writers.” He exempliies Wallace’s idea of an author who shows [...] a willingness to disclose [himself], open [himself] up in spiritual and emotional ways that risk making [him] look banal or melodramatic or naive or unhip or sappy, and to ask the reader really to feel something. (McCaffery 1993: 148-149) A recently published book-length analysis of Eggers’ role in contemporary literature (both as a writer and a publisher), entitled One Man Zeitgeist, accurately describes the role of Eggers in the literary scene: a publicly acknowledged literary igure who inluences the mainstream but nevertheless embodies a counterculture that criticizes everything that might be mainstream. Although he started to be part of the literary environment by publishing the literary journal McSweeney’s, he had his real breakthrough when he published his debut, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius29 in 2000. Caroline Hamilton sees one of the reasons for its success in Eggers’s attempt to [distinguish] himself from the majority of first-time authors by courting publicity while also mocking it. His career and the success of his memoir were both 28 | I therefore label them “autocriticism.” This term is borrowed from autobiographical scholars Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. 29 | In the following abreviated as AHWOSG. 23 24 Postirony built on his willingness to acknowledge his desire to be a visible and representative part of literary culture in the United States. (Hamilton 2010: 3) Eggers incorporated the countercultural ideals of seeing and comprehending art as a means of connecting to people, while pretending to stand above monetary interests. However, Hamilton is right in stating that [t]he figure of the romantic artist standing aloof from the machinations of the culture industry has enduring appeal but it is of course illusory: the marginality of literature in mainstream culture is one key reason it generates public attention; disinterest in the market is an author’s selling point. (ibid: 21) Eggers seems well aware of this “selling point.” His attitude toward being a “real” artist (prominently stated in McSweeney’s as well as in AHWOSG) falls in line with Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of cultural capital: “[...] by placing emphasis on creative integrity and appreciation for art that goes beyond monetary value the artist makes the market appear irrelevant; what matters is cultural capital.” (Qtd. in Hamilton 2010: 21) Eggers is otentimes criticized for merely feigning “the romantic artist.” Hamilton points out that [g]iven these successes, it may come as a surprise to learn that Eggers’s also holds the mantle for being one of the most disliked of contemporary American authors [...]. It is difficult to pinpoint precisely what provokes these reactions, but the answer lies in part in the fact that, as many critics have observed, Eggers’s work betrays an unusual, passive-aggressive dislike for his public. (ibid: 5) his “dislike for his public” that makes him disliked by many readers (and critics) is, paradoxically, what makes him “Dave Eggers: Teen Idol” (ibid: 53) for a counter-cultural group of readers, who “[...] aligned themselves with what might be termed an Eggers-advocated lifestyle which they believed marked them out as a distinct and unique breed of cultural producers and consumers” (ibid). In his roles as publisher and writer, Eggers is aware of the market’s mechanisms and he uses them in order to construct an image of himself that “sells” while simultaneously he never appears to “sell out.” His devoted readers and fans never forget to mention that he uses part of his proits for a non-proit endeavor that provides free-tutoring to high school students who come from economically weak backgrounds. For his supporters, this is proof of his authenticity, his belief in higher values apart from the mere making-money. Introduction Dave Eggers is, to pick up Hamilton’s phrase again, a “One Man Zeitgeist” whose reputation might even be more important to “a whole new group of emerging young writers” than his actual literary output.30 david f oster waLLace – c HanGinG contemPorary L iterature tHe tone of Wallace, similar to the aforementioned Ellis, McInerney, and Coupland, is concerned with the anxieties, despair, all-embracing materialism and consumerism that is characteristic of contemporary US society; however, in contrast to his contemporaries, his protagonists either try to get an insight into “what it is to be a fucking human being” (McCafery 1993: 131) or at least scrutinize their role of being mere passive consumers. In contrast to Eggers’ extroverted way of trying to change the image of the contemporary artist, Wallace tries to redeine and thereby give new meaning to “postmodern” literature purely by means of literary style. Wallace selected two key concepts he judges as (1) typical for postmodern times and art and (2) oppressive for a progressive contemporary literature: irony and metaiction.31 Both irony as an ideology32 and metaiction as its corresponding literary technique are perpetually present in his books. A full explanation as to why he uses what he condemns would be too lengthy for this introduction, but in my chapter “Postirony – Conceptualizing an Idea” I will ofer a detailed discussion.33 hus, to briely conclude this aspect at this point, I refer to Lee Konstantinou who asserts that 30 | I will ask this question again in the close reading of AHWOSG and will elaborate that his work is inf luential and of importance too. 31 | I am aware that the term “metafiction” is not accurate for metatextual comments in nonfiction. Since the nonfiction I discuss is creative nonfiction and uses literary styles, I nevertheless think that “metafiction,” being the term in use in literary studies, better describes the meta-comments I discuss than fabricated terms like “meta-nonfiction” or “meta-fact” could. 32 | Irony is a speech act on the one hand, but also a worldview. Irony is seen as an oppressive ideology not only by Wallace. As early as in romanticism, Søren Kierkegaard made this claim. Cp. my discussion on pages 59-61. Linda Hutcheon states in the introduction to her important study concerning irony that: “Many have written of the shift over time from seeing irony as a limited classical rhetorical trope to treating it as a vision of life.” (Hutcheon 1995: 2) 33 | Cp. my discussion of Wallace’s essay “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky” on pages 61-64. 25 26 Postirony [...] we must understand the literary efforts of David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers, and the stakes behind a project of discovering or inventing a viable postironic ethos. Both authors sought, in related ways, to use techniques historically associated with metafiction (1) to generate forms of affect that theory held to be impossible and (2) to relink private and public life [...] via an ethos of postironic belief. (2009b: 127) his postironic ethos is what distinguishes the writers under examination in this book from their contemporary “conspiciously young” counterparts. Wallace – Exhausted Literature, Metafiction and Irony Zadie Smith labeled Wallace one of the authors “who came of age under postmodernity” (Smith 2007: 4). Smith thought about how this afected writers of her generation and relected upon ways for these writers to distinguish themselves from (traditional) postmodernism. She states that for many contemporary novelists “[…] aesthetic choices very oten have an ethical dimension” and continues “[…] you see style as a personal necessity, as the only possible expression of a particular human consciousness” (ibid my emphasis).34 he expression of this “human consciousness” is, for these writers, their urge to communicate with the reader and do so in a sincere way. Many critics believe that this particular style established itself foremost in Wallace’s texts, and only ater Wallace created it was copied by other writers. As stated above, scholarly works concerned with Wallace emphasize that his writings are somehow new and cannot merely be seen as a continuation of postmodern traditions. Boswell’s claim that “[Wallace is] the foremost writer of a remarkable generation of ambitious new novelists” (qtd. in Hamilton 2010: 17 my emphasis) has to be further scrutinized. What is exactly “new” about Wallace and his peers? Just like his postmodern predecessors, many of whom he explicitly calls inluential,35 he writes highly complex texts. His novel Ininite Jest is not only 1079 pages thick but also includes hundreds of footnotes, an enormous number for a ictional text. Wallace’s consistent use of metaiction as a means against irony’s hegemony leads his narrators (and protagonists) to desperate thoughts about their own humanity and makes them criticize the society surrounding them. hey thereby debunk wrong hipness, which denies real feelings and therefore prevents an es34 | Wallace’s own ideas about the role of aesthetics for literature are discussed in the chapter “The Postironic – A Philosophical Stand.” 35 | “[Most critics] failed to invoke such figures as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gaddis, all of whom Wallace himself has acknowledged as formative inf luences.” (Hamilton 2010: 21-22) Introduction cape out of the solipsist cage.36 Wallace tries to overcome the dead-end into which contemporary literature had maneuvered itself as he identiies it in his 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram.”37 Tim Jacobs describes Wallace “[…] as a reader’s writer – not an avant-gardist, theorist, or hipster show-of – probably because he was himself a lonely reader, abundantly self-conscious and inwardly bent” (2008). “A reader’s writer,” however, does not mean a writer who produces literature easy to digest. In Wallace’s (and the other postironist writers’) case, “a reader’s writer” is interested in producing a narrative that makes the reader wonder about herself and her life in contemporary society. “A reader’s writer” wants to startle the reader by emphasizing that “[…] the present is grotesquely materialistic [but] we as human beings still have the capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections, for stuf that doesn’t have a price […].” (McCafery 1993: 132) his leads to the question of how literature can connect to the reader on an emotional level that actually leads the reader to question her own attitude towards her environment. How is it possible to (1) keep literary developments of the 20th century in mind,38 but (2) avoid the hollowness Wallace ascribes to the works of (among others) Bret Easton Ellis and Mark Leyner?39 he elaborate examinations on Eggers and Wallace, and the briefer looks at Nick Flynn and Jonathan Lethem later in this book, will give answers to these questions. In his stories, novels, and essays, Wallace’s awareness of literary fashions of the past as well as the present run as rampant as his criticism of the same. He includes philosophical ideas (mostly Wittgenstein’s theory of language), is familiar with contemporary literary theory (in particular Jacques Derrida), and never fails to include other literary texts of the 20th century.40 Wallace is well aware of his literary surroundings and especially the development of US literature in the decades since WW2. His engagement with this heritage leaves him to state that 36 | Most postironic narrators and protagonists appear to be caged in solipsism and try to overcome this state of being. 37 | I discuss this essay in the chapter “Postirony – Conceptualizing an Idea.” 38 | Not only Wallace but for example also the afore mentioned writer David Shields find it inevitable to apply a self-concious way of writing: “I find it very nearly impossible to read a contemporary novel that presents itself unself-consciously as a novel, since it’s not clear to me how such a book could convey what it feels like to be alive right now.” (Shields 2010: 68) 39 | “[…] Image-Fiction is paradoxically trying to restore what’s taken for ‘real’ to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of f lat sights.” (Wallace 1997a: 22) 40 | Most prominently his intertextual parody of John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” in “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” the concluding piece of the story collection Girl with Curious Hair. 27 28 Postirony [i]rony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. [...] Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff ’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules for art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the [sic] irony diagnosis are revealed and diagnosed, then what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. (McCaffery 1993: 147 original emphasis) It is important to note that Wallace does not criticize these writers for what they have brought to literature; he explicitly states that it has been more than necessary for members of post WW2 US society to learn about the hypocrisy they lived in.41 he way John Barth, homas Pynchon, or Wiliam Gaddis (among others) used irony to undermine and criticize what American culture had become liberated the American (intellectual) mind. However, Wallace describes a shit in the use of these “illusion-debunking” tools; what had been introduced in serious art to criticize mainstream society’s hypocrisy was adopted by the mainstream almost simultaneously.42 he mainstream is foremostly connected to television’s rise in popularity. Starting in the 1970s, television became the ultimate entertainment for the masses, and television all too soon started using self-mocking irony and meta-comments. his insight is of profound importance for Wallace’s understanding of contemporary literature. If a iction writer wants to be more than a mere entertainer – and Wallace wants his art to be more than entertainment – she/he needs to express something beyond televisions scope:43 “I just think that iction that isn’t exploring what it means to be human today isn’t good art.” (ibid: 131) he artist has to ind ways to challenge the reader. his means to call her attention to the idea that “what’s engaging and artistically real is, taking it as axiomatic that the present is 41 | And in my close reading chapters it will become apparent that Eggers, Flynn, and Lethem also struggle with the postmodern heritage but always refer to their 1960s predecessors with appreciation. 42 | The chapter “Postirony – Conceptualizing an Idea” will further discuss this. 43 | It is important to note that Wallace does not demonize entertaining arts (neither in literature nor cinema and television), however, he is aware and points at the distinction between “most kinds of ‘low’ art – which just means art whose primary aim is to make money […]” (McCaffery 1993: 127) and “[r]eally good work [that] comes out of a willingness to disclose yourself, open yourself up in spiritual and emotional ways that risk making you look banal or melodramatic or naïve or unhip or sappy, and to ask the reader really to feel something.” (ibid: 148-149) Introduction grotesquely materialistic, how is it that we as human beings still have the capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections, for stuf that doesn’t have a price?” (ibid: 132)44 If irony and metaiction have become commodities, consumed through soap operas and commercials on an average of six hours a day,45 serious iction has to ind new ways (to produce the “generalization of sufering”) and can no longer rely on outdated mechanisms. Wallace is not demonizing television, but tries to show how it engulfs formerly progressive ideas. He wants contemporary literature to take a new step and move forward. Despite television’s hegemony in everyday life, serious writers can still “dramatize the fact that we still are human beings” (ibid). herefore, Wallace’s criticism of irony and metaiction, at irst glance, seems somehow hypocritical in itself because many of his own works include long metaictional passages and bear an ironic tone that can hardly be ignored. his is the case most bluntly in “Westward the Course of the Empire Takes its Way,” the concluding novella of his story collection Girl With Curious Hair. his re-evaluation of literary means to achieve something contrary to their original meaning is the revolutionary aspect of postironic writings. he programmatic claim of this story is already inscribed in its title, as Boswell notes, […] the title clearly suggests, [that] the work seeks to chart, if not to arrive at, a new direction for narrative art, one that will move fiction past John Barth’s literature of exhaustion and the new realism of the 1980s. (Qtd. in Hamilton 2010: 102) It is worthy to keep in mind Boswell’s conception that “Westward” not only deals (in a metaictional way) with texts like Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” and “he Literature of Exhaustion” but is a criticism of 1980s literature as well. It is important to elaborate the idea that “Westward” is actually a clear break with “high postmodernism” and that Wallace’s implication of Barth’s motifs and styles is consciously used to “chart, if not to arrive at, a new direction for narrative art.” 44 | Interestingly Wallace uses the word “engaging” in this interview, a term that is important for my analysis of the postironic narrator whom I position in the tradition of the “engaging narrator” as proposed by Robyn Warhol (discussed in the chapter “Reading the Postironic”). 45 | “Statisticians report that television is watched over six hours a day in the average American household.” (Wallace 1997a: 22) 29 30 Postirony Moving “Westward” – Postironic Beginnings While the title is a irst hint to the story’s purpose, the subsequent quotations, preceding the narrative, stand for further ideas the story elaborates upon. he irst quote reads: “As we are solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.” his statement by Anthony Burgess leads directly to Wallace’s idea of a solipsistic society (most prominently depicted in Ininite Jest) and how his literary pieces work in a diferent direction. he second quote: “For whom is the funhouse fun?” which is from Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” (advanced later by the narrator by asking: “But for whom, the proles grouse, is the Funhouse a house?” (Wallace 2003: 239 original emphasis) leads to Wallace’s criticism of conventional metaiction. he narrator (in a metaictional comment) states that “[…] metaiction is untrue […]” (ibid: 332) and that unlike his teachers from a previous generation, he wants to […] write something that stabs you [the reader] in the heart. That pierces you, makes you think you’re going to die. The stuff would probably use metafiction as a bright smiling disguise, a harmless f loppy-shoed costume, because metafiction is safe to read, familiar as syndication; and no victim is as delicious as the one who smiles in relief at your familiar approach. (ibid: 333) Nicoline Timmer reads this as the narrator’s failure to overcome what he criticizes: Apparently this narrator is still ‘locked into’ […] the kind of practice he is criticizing; the ‘intrusion’ after all has all the appearance of being metatextual; not to mention the considerable amount of text that the narrator uses in commenting on metafiction. (2010: 104) At irst sight this reading seems convincing, however, remembering Konstantinous’ above stated idea that Wallace uses “techniques historically associated with metaiction (1) to generate forms of afect that theory held to be impossible and (2) to relink private and public life [...] via an ethos of postironic belief” (2009b: 127) hints at another reading. he narrator’s inclusion of a means he suggests to be outdated and conscious comment on that paradox – “[t]he stuf would probably use metaiction as a bright smiling disguise” – can also be seen as an attempt of redeining metaictionality in order to “generate forms of afect” (ibid.). he narrator denounces the sell-out of formerly rebellious ideas by ridiculing the foremost metaictional story, namely “Lost in the Funhouse,” by parodying its stylistics and, on a plot level, by describing the obviously capitalist idea of a franchise called Fun- Introduction house46 that will draw people by pretending to be countercultural when it is actually merely an institution with the sole intention to make money.47 “Westward” proposes that the sharpest tools postmodernist writers employed to criticize society become themselves part of this materialist environment. he Funhouse opening takes place at “[…] the scheduled Reunion of everyone who has ever been in a McDonald’s commercial” (Wallace 2003: 235). Scaling back his criticism to a more personal level, the narrator, to make clear what he thinks of his literary surroundings, also makes fun of one of his creative writing classmates, “[…] she actually went around calling herself a postmodernist. No matter where you are, you Don’t Do his.” (ibid: 234 original emphasis) he story is an attempt to disclose metaiction’s elapsed ability to alienate and therefore highlight the possibility “to generate forms of afect” (Konstantinou 2009b: 127). his, in Wallace’s opinion, is a necessary step to achieve a literature that is true again and “[...] stabs [the reader] in the heart” (2003: 332). By using long metaictional asides (that mostly discuss their own metaictionality) “Westward” tries to unveil contemporary literature’s struggle. Traditional metaiction’s idea that the reader has to be reminded of reading a ictional account and that no convincing true realism can be established are, in the narrator’s opinion, superluous. hese conventions are no longer necessary, no longer useful; even he Simpsons and Saturday Night Live bring up these sorts of metaiction. hus contemporary art should leave this approach behind and ind new ways of communicating with the reader (in the sense of showing him a generalization of sufering). he narrator, by including self-referential metaiction, implies that this does not change the way the story is read; the narrator assumes that the contemporary reader is no longer agitated, she is aware of the ictionality of the text and understands that a story can never depict reality. he reader does not need to be and should not be “deceived” by realism; instead, postironic narratives want to “stab” the reader’s heart, something traditional realism cannot achieve in “postmodern” times.48 he “forms of afect” 46 | Ambrose (a John Barth alter ego) who, in “Westward,” is the author of “Lost in the Funhouse” sold the name to an advertisement company which then uses the “postmodern” meaning given to the story to introduce a nationwide franchise of “alternative clubs” named “Funhouse.” The narrator broods about this and states “Ok true, Funhouse 1, like all the foreseen and planned national chain of Funhouse franchises, is, in reality, just a discotheque.” (Wallace 2003: 259) 47 | In “Postirony – Conceptualizing an Idea” I show that the inclusion of what one criticizes makes sense and I have a closer look at Wallace’s essay “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky” in which this idea is explicitly stated by Wallace. 48 | This complex thought, that postmodern styles that became mainstream can no longer touch the reader on an emotional level but that a return to traditional realism (that surely touched readers in pre-television societies) 31 32 Postirony Wallace wants the reader to experience cannot be conveyed by an “uncritically earnest or naively nostalgic consciousness” (Konstantinou 2009b: 12). he 19th century reader obviously does not exist anymore; there is a search for new ways to activate the reader’s feelings. Timmer, also conscious of metaiction’s role in contemporary literature, therefore asks: The pressing question that hovers somewhere between the lines in “Westward” […] is: what exactly could be the use of all this playing around with narrative structures for which postmodern literature is renown; is it just ‘fun’ for fun’s sake, and devoid of any humanness? (Timmer 2010: 106) hat is, in a boiled down way, what the narrator in “Westward” advocates. “his playing around with narrative structures” is (or rather has become since the 1970s) exactly what Timmer insinuates. he narrator of Westward believes that metaiction became “‘fun’ for fun’s sake,” and is therefore outdated and no longer a valuable tool for activating the reader’s emotions. As Wallace stated elsewhere: [...] there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, […] half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still are human beings, now. (McCaffery 1993: 132) “Westward” tries to achieve this by remodeling metaiction and irony in ways that “see style as a personal necessity, as the only possible expression of a particular human consciousness” (Smith 2007: 4). In the chapter “Reading the Postironic” I will discuss diferent narratological tools to demonstrate what is at stake in postironic narratives and show that the weaknesses of a story like “Westward” (as depicted by Timmer) can become strengths when a narrative is noniction instead of iction. will be understood as banal and outdated leads the postironists to their particular style. The chapter “Postirony – Conceptualizing an Idea” will shed further light on this postironic inclusion of both realism and postmodern stylistics. In order to prevent misunderstandings, postironists do not claim that realism is unable to emotionally engage. In Wallace’s words: “[...] not because there hasn’t been great U.S. Realist fiction that’ll be read and enjoyed forever, but because the big R’s form has now been absorbed and suborned by commercial entertainment. The classical Realist form is soothing, familiar and anesthetic; it drops us right into spectation. It doesn’t set up the sort of expectations serious 1990s fiction ought to be setting up in readers.” (McCaffery 1993: 138) Introduction J onatHan L etHem and n ick fLynn – Postirony ’s 2 nd G eneration he main emphasis of my discussion is put on Eggers’ and Wallace’s work. hey are, in my opinion, the spearheads of the movement and therefore require the most detailed examinations. However, many critics dealing with the postironic conine themselves to the two authors, an aspect that underrates how widespread postirony is in contemporary literature. Due to the obliviousness and/or oversight of other postironic authors by many critics, my last chapter addresses Jonathan Lethem and Nick Flynn as authors who are inluenced by Wallace and Eggers and who form an ensuing postironic group.49 Since they are not elaborately discussed but rather introduced in order to show the postironic development, I also present them only briely here. Jonathan Lethem is best known for his novels Motherless Brooklyn (1999) and he Fortress of Solitude (2003). Interestingly, in his more recent novel, Chronic City (2009), many critics seem to recognize David Foster Wallace as the real world model for the main protagonist. Toon Staes also describes this assumption (which is also made about the main protagonist of Jefrey Eugenides’ he Marriage Plot (2011) as notable because: Both Lethem and Eugenides have acknowledged and denied on various occasions that they have based key plot elements in their novels on Wallace, but perhaps more telling than the ambiguity of their answers to questions about Wallace’s presence in these books is the simple fact that such questions were even asked. (2012: 409) I agree with Staes that it is telling to see Wallace in these characters: it shows the iconic status Wallace has achieved in literary circles. he inluence of Wallace is hard to deny in both authors. Lethem’s he Ecstasy of Inluence is an essay collection that combines literary criticism with an autobiographical narrative. In its form it is comparable to Wallace’s autocriticism. My discussion will show that Lethem’s approach is postironic in its attempt to communicate with the reader. I will highlight how his mix of criticism and autobiographical facts establishes a form of engagement on the reader’s side typical for postironic noniction. 49 | To call two writers a group seems overstated, the actual group of second generation postironists includes more writers but since they have only published fiction so far, they will not be addressed in this dissertation. However, if one wants to follow the postironic development as a whole, I recommend reading: Ferris (2007), Kunkel (2005), Lerner (2014), and Lin (2013). 33 34 Postirony In contrast to Lethem, Wallace, and Eggers, Nick Flynn is best known for his noniction work. Flynn published three memoirs so far, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), he Ticking is the Bomb (2010), and he Reenactments (2013). While all of them are great examples of postironic autobiographical writings, I will not concentrate on one particular book and discuss it in detail but rather take key passages out of all three memoirs to explain Flynn’s postironic approach. Most interestingly, however, is his third memoir, he Reenactments, which is a meta-autobiography concerned with the making of a Hollywood movie out of his irst memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City.50 In their metaictional form, Flynn’s books can be compared to Eggers’ AHWOSG. In Flynn’s books the occupation with the act of writing the memoir almost overshadows the actual memoir. Even though Flynn is the least experimental writer in terms of style, my reading will show how Flynn’s narrator puts the reader at the center of the narrative, always aiming at a sincere communication. synoPsis Some brief comments on the structure of this book. At irst, I return to the above introduced idea of postirony. Because this concept is at the core of my approach, a more elaborate investigation of the term is necessary, and both its historical development as well as its difering contemporary depictions will be discussed. Besides Wallace’s ideas, which will be further observed, I review Søren Kierkegaard’s, Richard Rorty’s, and Linda Hutcheon’s inluence on postironic thought. hey can be named the triumvirate of irony-critics and it is important to look at their publications on irony to understand the role this concept plays in contemporary society. Furthermore, I briely touch upon Jedediah Purdy’s For Common hings and Alex Shakar’s he Savage Girl, two contemporary irony-critics who ofer important and interesting thoughts about contemporary irony but who are not exactly postironists and therefore are not examined separately in my close reading chapters. Following this overview, I clarify and explore narratological aspects that are important for the later close readings. James Phelan’s ideas about a rhetorical narratology that investigates ethical aspects of writer-reader communication function as the precondition for understanding the particular communication that appears in postironic noniction. His conclusions will be illuminated by adding Gerald Prince’s concept of the narratee and Peter J. Rabinowitz’s ideas of diferent audience functions. Both theorists are important for the understanding of the engaging narrator, an approach by Robyn Warhol that claims that speciic narrators use speciic narrations in order to emotionally engage the reader. 50 | The movie, Being Flynn, was released in 2012, starring Robert de Niro as Flynn’s father and Paul Dano as Nick Flynn. Introduction hese inquiries are preconditions for the close readings that follow. At irst I examine Dave Eggers’ AHWOSG, followed by David Wallace’s he Pale King (not the entire novel but the autocritical chapter “Author’s Foreword”), his travel report “A Supposedly Fun hing I’ll Never Do Again,” and his essay “Consider the Lobster.” Finally, I give an overview of two more postironic writers, Nick Flynn and Jonathan Lethem. In the end, I hope to have convincingly argued that postironic literature, especially in its noniction form, addresses its reader in a particular way intended to establish some form of sincere communication and by using an engaging narrator, at best, transports an intradiegetic feeling into the reader’s extratextual world. hat is, moving beyond existing realms in literature and establishing nothing less than a new real world movement. 35