the cult of sincerity
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that we should look to understand his moment in the dialectic of sincerity. [
the cult of sincerity is a video starring daniel pettrow, mercer boffey, and jenn dees. a new york hipster sets out on a a quest to create the most sincere t - shirt ever .
his sincerity is unavoidably contaminated from the beginning by the anticipation of the effect it will have upon the other .
made issues of sincerity, authenticity, and irony increasingly crucial as the century advanced .
laughs from underground from jerry lewis to an animated jesus, a look at some other cult obsessions among comedians .
an intellectual and off - beat comedy set in new york, the film' s main character, joseph, starts a
cult of sincerity
to confront the perceived unhappiness, cynicism, and boredom of his generation .
the rocky horror picture show (1975) the granddaddy of cult films — one that encourages reenactments, rice - throwing, and cross - dressing .
tired of the bored, snobby, passionless mindset of the hipster generation? well, so were filmmakers adam browne and brendan choisnet, so much so that they were inspired to create the cult of sincerity. don’t worry, there are no kool - aid drinkers or matching uniforms in this movie. instead, the cult of sincerity is a film that chronicles a twentysomething named joseph in his quest to stop being cynical and start giving back to the world around him .
, van alphen and bal argue that in a post - theory age
the issue of sincerity is no longer one of' being' sincere but of' doing' sincerity
( rs 16). leonard is
doing
sincerity here, yet
, which i argue instantiates a new brand of sincerity in a formal and performative manner. my reading of
but wallace' s overt preoccupation with irony alongside sincerity differentiates him from his forebear and marks his work as a further turn in the dialectic of sincerity. if for trilling, in other words, the key concept that opposed sincerity was authenticity, for wallace it was irony. this shift alters the theoretical foundations and cultural connotations of sincerity, and it is also what makes the novel
it is no coincidence that trilling and wallace both turned to the concept of sincerity to defend their versions of liberalism. for by the time
it is part of my argument that david foster wallace bridges these two positions, combining the cultivation of sincerity as a poetic value with an awareness of the materialistically determined construction of sincerity as a convention. although the sentiments expressed in
e unibus pluram ,
particularly the clarion call for sincerity at its conclusion, make wallace sound like a wannabe wordsworth, his literary fiction is equally close in spirit to byron in its ironic awareness of its own artificiality and inability to attain a pure sincerity. like trilling, wallace praises sincerity while recognizing its difficulty, yet wallace' s notion of sincerity updates trilling' s more nostalgic conception, making sincerity responsive to changes in media technology, to new theories of language, and to contemporary conceptions of truth .
the place where wallace' s highly developed thinking on sincerity could find its most telling manifestation .
still, what makes this movie different from any other is the nature of its release. set to come out april 8, you’ll be able to enjoy the cult of sincerity over and over again via youtube. this will be the first time ever that the video sharing site has teamed up with filmmakers to premier a film .
requires a concomitant rejection of an understanding of sincerity as the pure and uninfluenced emanation of the self. in place of this understanding is the embrace of a range of learned behaviors that connect one to one' s community, and the adoption of a new set of values that can be held sincerely without that sincerity presuming the rejection of communal and institutional influence in order to maintain oneself as authentic and apart .
angela esterhammer ,
the scandal of sincerity: wordsworth, byron, landon ,
in romanticism, sincerity and authenticity, ed. milnes and sinanan, 101 - 19 (104 - 5). [ ↩ ]
takes up the middle section of the article, and it is flanked on one side by an overview of the relationships between sincerity, irony and theory in the period before the publication of the novel, and on the other by an overview of wallace' s influence on the fiction of his generational peers. the article concludes with a consideration of the political consequences of wallace' s revival of sincerity, leading me back full circle to trilling and his mid - century liberal world .
who explore a set of urgent questions about the meaning of life and the task of the human .
quality, not quantity - a story of sincerity ᴴᴰ ┇ # thelittle ┇ by dr. mohannad hakeem ┇ tdr ┇
but the problem of arguing for belief, commitment, and sincerity under a model of language without prior subjects would nonetheless prove a tricky one. one way to put the problem (a problem unanticipated in the work of trilling) is as follows: can one maintain an ideal and practice of sincerity without a grounding notion of expressive subjectivity ?
david foster wallace was very much an artist in this mode, and the themes, forms and contradictions of his fiction mark a new turn in the dialectic of a culture and the dialectic of sincerity .
here, it appears, is an act of pure sincerity, trilling' s
congruence between avowal and actual feeling
( sa 2), the showing of one' s inside on one' s outside. sincerity exposes the self by asking for a response from the other
henri peyre, literature and sincerity (new haven: yale university press, 1963); patricia m. ball ,
sincerity: the rise and fall of a critical term ,
modern language review 59 (1964): 1 - 11; david perkins, wordsworth and the poetry of sincerity (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1964); donald davie ,
on sincerity: from wordsworth to ginsburg ,
encounter (oct 1968): 61 - 65, and
sincerity and poetry
( 1965), in speaking of writing: selected hopwood lectures, ed. nicholas delbanco, (ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press, 1990): 209 - 17; herbert read, the cult of sincerity (london: faber & faber, 1968); patricia meyer spacks ,
in search of sincerity ,
college english 29 (1968): 591 - 602; leon guilhamet, the sincere ideal: studies in eigtheenth - century english literature (montreal: mcgill - queen' s university press, 1974). [ ↩ ]
in the case of wallace, it is better to call his conception of sincerity paradoxical and dialectical all at once. this is a possibility trilling himself permitted to the artist in one of the most memorable passages in
that makes the notion suspect to the new anti - social temperament. trilling, drawing most directly on the critique of sincerity as bad faith found in the work of jean - paul sartre, puts the problem as follows :
the buddhafield was full of them. allen never says how he was first invited to live on a new age commune somewhere on the outskirts of california, but it’s immediately clear why the place appealed to him. founded on basic principles of clean living, paid work, and hours of voluntary pro bono service for fellow devotees (and local quadriplegics), this unthreatening idyll was designed to seduce the dreamy and dispossessed. as one of the film’s talking heads remembers thinking at the time: “if this was a cult, at least it was a really good cult. ”
of course, gaddis and trilling were far from alone among intellectuals and writers of their time in drawing attention to the cultural importance of sincerity and authenticity in the postwar united states. the questions that gaddis was probing in
the dialectic of sincerity is an important topic in its own right, but it is also significant in offering a window onto broader cultural themes. the concern with sincerity that differently shapes both trilling' s and wallace' s work points to an overriding concern in both writers with the fragmentation of american social and institutional life in the last third of the twentieth century
in employing literature as the primary ground for his historical exploration of sincerity, trilling' s study was likewise part of a stream of similar work in this period on both sides of the atlantic. beginning around 1963, critics including patricia ball, donald davie, david perkins, henri peyre, herbert read, and patricia meyer spacks wrote on the connection between sincerity and literary aesthetics; following the publication of
an intellectual and off - beat comedy set in new york, the films main character, joseph, starts a
cult of sincerity
to confront the perceived unhappiness, cynicism, and boredom of his generation. he wants to find something to believe in, something simple enough to put on a t - shirt. reminiscent of don quixote, joseph sets off to find the most genuine thing you could ever say to someone .
at the end of “emotional technologies, ” an essay about s & m that shifts between first - person and third - person narratives of her own life, kraus calls it “naïve” to assume that “speaking in the first person necessarily connotes any kind of truth, sincerity. ” kraus questions the sincerity of the first - person—the flip - side of her search for authentic feeling inside performance. s & m is performative, but kraus finds sincerity in it; first - person _ feels _ more sincere but is no less a show .
this film really made me think and i' m sure it will change my life for the better. at least i hope so. although i am not usually a fan of contemporary movies because so few of them are worthwhile ,
cult
is an exception. and, don' t be turned off by the inclusion of the word
cult
in the title. this is in no way a wierd or creepy film. it makes serious points in a very entertaining way. it is worth your time. g - cool
the first wave of
sincerity studies
in the 1960s and 1970s focused on wordsworth and recognized him, against an eighteenth - century background, as the first poet to cultivate sincerity as a poetic value. a recent, second wave, which is much more likely to adopt byron as its model, interprets sincerity as a code or convention, thereby historicizing romanticism as a movement defined by its materialistically determined construction of its own values. 24
in a review - essay that serves as an important addendum to sincerity and authenticity, peter berger places trilling' s ideas in a wider sociological context, and in doing so comments directly on the institutional meaning of the shift to authenticity :
the transition from sincerity to authenticity is the ideational correlate of the modernization of institutions. the progressive sharpening of the tension between self and society implied by the transition points directly to a progressive crisis in the institutions of modernity .
peter l. berger ,
' sincerity' and' authenticity' in modern society ,
the public interest 31 (1973): 81 - 90 (84 - 85). this helps us to see why wallace' s reconstruction of sincerity is simultaneously a renewal of institutional life, and why one depends upon the other. [ ↩ ]
( 1961). sociologists such as david riesman, c. wright mills, erving goffman and william whyte explored notions of sincerity, authenticity, and performance in theorizing the lives of the increasingly bureaucratized middle class of the mid - century era .
van alphen and bal ,
introduction
to the rhetoric of sincerity, 1 - 16 (16). hereafter cited as parenthetically in the text as rs. [ ↩ ]
in support of trilling' s claim about the emergence of a moral discourse of sincerity in the sixteenth century, see john martin ,
inventing sincerity, refashioning prudence: the discovery of the individual in renaissance europe ,
american historical review 102 (1997): 1304 - 42; and jane taylor ,
' why do you tear me from myself?': torture, truth, and the arts of the counter - reformation ,
in the rhetoric of sincerity, ed. ernst van alphen, mieke bal and carel smith (stanford, ca: stanford university press, 2009), 19 - 43. [ ↩ ]
in some respects, “ holy hell ” is unlike any other movie ever made. its access, its span, and the sheer eccentricity of its chief subject seem to place it in the rarefied territory of inimitable one - offs like “grey gardens” or “titicut follies. ” and yet, the extremely conventional means by which allen and his collaborators have distilled this footage into a coherent 100 - minute narrative underscores the strange contradiction at the heart of this seemingly singular film: every cult is different, but every cult is the same. allen’s story is so wild that you can’t believe it actually happened. so why does it feel so familiar ?
the faculty of' taste' has re - established itself at the centre of the experience of art
( sa 98). [
. at the outset of the book, based on his charles eliot norton lectures at harvard, trilling defines sincerity as
a congruence between avowal and actual feeling
and traces its emergence in
the moral life of europe
to the early modern period .
of ensuring truth to others. trilling goes on to claim that this consequentialist conception of sincerity would become
a salient, perhaps a definitive, characteristic of western culture for some four hundred years
( sa 6) .
lionel trilling, sincerity and authenticity (oxford: oxford university press, 1972), 2. hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as sa. [ ↩ ]
but the cultural turn away from sincerity and toward authenticity that trilling describes can be understood in retrospect as a last - ditch attempt to react in the world of private relations to a public tide that could not be stemmed. by the time
adam kelly is a lecturer in american literature at the university of york, uk. he is the author of american fiction in transition: observer - hero narrative, the 1990s, and postmodernism (bloomsbury, 2013) and is currently at work on a book about the aesthetics and politics of sincerity in contemporary american fiction .
the room has even infiltrated the halls of cinematic academia. ”it is one of the most important films of the past decade, ” says ross morin, an assistant professor of film studies at st. cloud state university in minnesota. ”it exposes the fabricated nature of hollywood. the room is the citizen kane of bad movies. ”
madeleine' s hopes, reminiscent of the early illusions of many a young heroine of nineteenth - century fiction, but also recalling, in the presumed opposition between sincerity and strategy, the complexities of infinite jest, are soon dashed when leonard responds
with a look not of love but of annoyance
( mp 65). as early as the next page, however, the couple have made up spectacularly, and madeleine again acts impulsively during a moment of high passion :
was published in 1996, the awareness was complete, for wallace and his generation of writers, that the fight to preserve personal authenticity had proven impossible, so much did advertising and consumerism proliferate in the daily private lives of americans. what remains possible, in wallace' s fiction, is the reconstruction of new forms of sincerity, with the artwork as a model of interpersonal connection, and what he called
the democratic spirit
as a goal of political life .
meanwhile, the cult of the room grows. increasingly, the laemmle sunset 5 shows the movie on two screens, due to demand. fans have begun to re - create scenes and post them on youtube. wiseau is mulling the possibility of turning the film into a broadway musical and would like to dub it in french and spanish for a possible european theatrical release. he also, ambitiously, wants to screen the room at the staples center, which has a seating capacity of 20, 000. ”we live in america. so everything is possible! ” he says .
the tomatometer score — based on the opinions of hundreds of film and television critics — is a trusted measurement of critical recommendation for millions of fans. it represents the percentage of professional critic reviews that are positive for a given film or television show .
but by the twentieth century it had gone into sharp decline, superseded by the ideal of authenticity, which conceives truth to the self as an end and not simply as a means. the goal of authenticity is self - examination rather than other - directed communication; authenticity is therefore not about playing a role, and it is precisely the public orientation underlying sincerity
the sound of music (1965) the l. a. hills are alive with the sound of you - know - what at the hollywood bowl’s sing - along .
the aristocrats for years, comedians have amused themselves seeing who can tell the filthiest version of this joke, which was commemorated in the 2005 doc of the same name .
but all of this positive energy has to orbit around something, or someone, and this particular cult of personality centers on a vaguely foreign spiritual guru who evinces all the sincerity of a monorail salesman. named michel, but more frequently referred to as “the teacher, ” this guy doesn’t look like the gatekeeper to enlightenment so much as he does the steroidal lovechild of bronson pinchot and joan rivers. hairless, rippled, and often seen wearing nothing besides a spandex speedo and a pair of ray - ban sunglasses, michel radiates positive energy as he leads his blissed out flock through guided meditations or bastardized hindu rituals. “wherever you are is where happiness is, ” he tells them, the thinly disguised subtext being that his followers won’t find happiness anywhere else. it isn’t long before the ranks of buddhafield members begin to swell as noticeably as the bulge in michel’s bathing suit .
. of one particular sentence, martin writes ,
in the first part, in his stress on' a concord and harmony of the heart and the tongue,' calvin' s ideas were consonant with those of medieval writers. but the second part of the passage, in its emphasis on the ideal of speech as' a lively image of the inward affection,' presents a profoundly new ideal, rooted in the new renaissance emphasis on the expressive subjectivity of the individual
( 1332). [
constitutes, at least in some significant moments, a more sophisticated attempt to merge the conventions of realism with some of the complex concerns with sincerity articulated in wallace' s fiction. in order to show this, i will focus on a five - page segment of the novel (65 - 69): this segment concludes the opening movement narrated from the point of view of madeleine hanna (the novel' s isabel archer), and then switches to narrating the consciousness of its other main viewpoint character, mitchell grammaticus (its caspar goodwood). madeleine' s love affair with leonard is entering its first moment of crisis, and as she feels leonard pull away from her emotionally she acts out of desperation, calling in unexpectedly on him late one night in his biology lab .
madeleine had the crazy hope ,
the narrator tells us ,
that this expression of weakness might in fact be strength. it was a brilliant strategy because it lacked all strategy. it involved no games, only sincerity. seeing such sincerity, how could leonard fail to respond ?
is that the world outside institutions is inhospitable to the contemporary individual. responding to the question of what makes the aa program different to institutional brainwashing, don gately thinks to himself that
the program might be more like deprogramming than actual washing, considering the psychic job the disease' s spider has done on all of them
( ij 369). a minor character, bruce green, agrees :
if boston aa is a cult that like brainwashes you, he guesses he' d got himself to the point where his brain needed a good brisk washing
( ij 562) .
late - night showings of cult films such as the rocky horror picture show and the big lebowski are known for their rowdy and strange behavior too. but people who go to see rocky horror and lebowski think those films are good. tonight’s movie, an obscure, five - year - old drama called the room, holds a different place in the hearts of those present at west hollywood’s laemmle sunset 5. ”it’s absolutely terrible, ” says chris bonk, a talent - agency assistant who has seen the film more than 15 times. ”the script is not the best. the acting is certainly not the best. the music is horrible. ”
spent 22 years making his first feature, but he didn’t have any idea he was working on it until it was nearly in the can. a failed film student who was indoctrinated into a bizarre cult and served as its de facto cameraman for the two decades that followed, allen emerged from the grip of his sociopathic guru with enough washed - out digital footage of pseudo - spiritual groupthink to cut together a shot - for - shot documentary remake of “the master. ” what he ultimately made from it is far less interesting .
it is this final claim, that the protagonist' s consciousness and the realist framing blunt any experimental side to the novel, which i want to press upon here. if on the level of the plot it certainly seems plausible to read the collapse of leonard bankhead as an allegory for the dismissal of wallace' s literary project, on the level of the novel' s language
oxford university press is a department of the university of oxford. it furthers the university' s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide
( new york: faber & faber, 2013). in his epilogue, rodgers dates the end of the age of fracture
will allen circa 1985 was pretty much the ideal target for a cult. a flower child who was born a generation too late, allen came of age during the rise of the yuppies, and was forced to retreat to the far margins of society in order to find likeminded people. iced out of his family environment by a homophobic mother and left adrift after graduating from film school with no promise of a showbiz career, he’s the kind of guy who believes that there simply has to be a higher purpose for his life. narrating the home video footage that opens the film, allen blankly intones things like “i’ve always wanted to know why i’m here” and “i went to my great - grandmother’s open casket when i was four, and became fascinated by the concept of life and death. ”
these epithets recall in turn trilling' s own remarks on the unlikelihood of any revival of sincerity in the culture he observed around him :
the word itself has lost most of its former high dignity. when we hear it, we are conscious of an anachronism which touches it with quaintness. if we speak it, we are likely to do so with either discomfort or irony
( sa 6) .
the day the clown cried in the ’90s, comedian patton oswalt held readings of this infamously terrible holocaust drama, until one of the producers sent a cease - and - desist order .
this is one of the central questions framed throughout the writing of david foster wallace, a major late - century inheritor of this postmodern age of irony and theory. wallace, who attended amherst college and the university of arizona in the early - to - mid 1980s, a period when theory was at its zenith of influence in the us academy, argued as early as his first published essay for the relevance of continental philosophy and literary theory
society requires of us that we present ourselves as being sincere, and the most efficacious way of satisfying this demand is to see to it that we really are sincere, that we actually are what we want our community to know we are. in short, we play the role of being ourselves, we sincerely act the part of the sincere person, with the result that a judgement may be passed upon our sincerity that it is not authentic. (sa 10 - 11 )
sincerity became for wallace, as it had been for trilling, one name for a new, or renewed, literary and cultural practice. and while wallace never mentions trilling' s name in his published work, his awareness of
in the recognitions, this is, essentially, esmé' s judgment on otto' s declaration of love: he may indeed be as sincere as he says he is, but his sincerity is not authentic, and is no replacement for the honesty with oneself that authenticity names. authenticity suggests, in trilling' s summary ,
a more strenuous moral experience than' sincerity' does, a more exigent conception of the self and of what being true to it consists in, a wider reference to the universe and man' s place in it, and a less acceptant and genial view of the social circumstances of life
( sa 11). and gaddis' s novel could not be less genial in its treatment of mid - century american society and those who inhabit it, making constant analogies between forgeries in the art world and the forgery of the self that is everywhere prevalent in the world of social relations as gaddis sees it .
that he viewed as being under threat by the authenticity - obsessed radical movements of the 1960s .
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leslie jamison is the author of “ the gin closet, ” “ the empathy exams, ” and “ the recovering: intoxication and its aftermath. ”
all these novelists found the roots of their critique in kafka, and that critique was taken up independently in the work of althusser and foucault, before going on to characterize large swathes of literary theory, most notably the new historicism. but the negative representation of the institution across this body of work has recently received a corrective, with a significant strand of contemporary thinking acknowledging the power of interpellation by institutions while attempting to give a more balanced and even positive account of institutional life. perhaps the most prominent example of this trend in american literary studies is mark mcgurl' s
no longer was it possible to confront the self head - on in the old ways, without recognition of the way this confrontation is mediated not only by language and genre, but also by institution and community. this downplaying of individualism in favor of community and institutionality makes it far from irrelevant, then, that wallace' s art does not produce a religio - anarchist politics in line with dostoevsky' s. wallace associated anarchism with the ironic attitude of the postmodernist generation, and instead defended a form of democratic liberalism in line with his commitment to a new and complex form of sincerity .
was published in 1972, the coherent public sphere that the concept of sincerity invokes and undergirds was under attack not only from the radical movements trilling inveighs against, but also from the bureaucratic and corporate culture that sociologists such as david riesman and c. wright mills describe in their work. what mills termed
a sacrifice of selfhood on a personality market
was already revealing itself, in the postwar context, as a great threat not only to liberalism but to the very structure of american democracy .
well, how does any cult happen? power is power, and it always works the same way. the tools may change, but the process of twisting vulnerabilities into blind devotion is always the same. a figures tells his disciples that they are not simple creatures, and then he heels them into being his dogs. there’s no doubt that this was a soul - scorching experience for those who survived it, but on screen it plays like cults - by - numbers (an impression that’s cemented by the film’s linear progression and chintzy score) .
see in particular the closing chapter of sincerity and authenticity ,
the authentic unconscious .
for an important recent defense of trilling' s liberal approach to literature against reflex radical positions, see amanda anderson ,
the liberal aesthetic ,
in theory after' theory,' ed. jane elliott and derek attridge (london: routledge, 2011), 249 - 61. [ ↩ ]
this is not to say that for trilling the self is necessarily whole: he takes freud' s conception of the unconscious very seriously as a challenge to the notion that the authentic self is autonomous and undivided. but one only has to compare the version of freud presented by trilling, wherein the truth of the self is primarily psychological, with the revisionist versions presented by lacan or derrida, who emphasize the role of language, to see the distance between trilling and theory. [ ↩ ]
and the words
i love you
spoken during passionate lovemaking represent the apotheosis of this appeal to the responsive other. hence the
sense of peril
that
edges
madeleine' s hoarse voice. but leonard' s response demonstrates that there is another kind of peril at stake here, one that cuts deeper by questioning whether madeleine can mean what she says at all, and whether the simplicity that madeleine assumes lies at the heart of sincerity in fact dissimulates a more basic complexity. rather than respond in kind, leonard stays silent and reaches for the book madeleine has in her bag. it is
but what makes infinite jest the novel it is, rather than simply a representational drama of contemporary ideas about sincerity, is that the reader is made to participate in this process too. the first recounting of aa meetings in the text is prefigured by an opening five - page section in the narrator' s own voice, which begins as follows :
if, by the virtue of charity or the circumstances of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a substance - recovery halfway facility like enfield ma' s state - funded ennet house, you will acquire many exotic new facts
( ij 200). among these facts are the following :
( new york: columbia university press, 1957), and joseph frank' s series of biographies on dostoevsky, passim. on the first title page of his copy of
on the inside of the second flyleaf in dostoevsky: the miraculous years, 1865 - 1871, the fourth volume of joseph frank' s biography of the russian writer (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1995), wallace writes :
sincerity & authenticity / or' authenticity & sincerity' / lionel trilling .
the reference comes in a list marked
classic dost
( presumably classic criticism on dostoevsky), alongside references to fellow new york intellectuals irving howe and philip rahv. of these figures, only rahv is mentioned in the main text of frank' s book, which suggests either that wallace had already read the works he names by trilling, howe and rahv, or that his research for his village voice review of the frank biographies (a review reprinted as
joseph frank' s dostoevsky
in david foster wallace, consider the lobster [ london: abacus, 2005 ], 255 - 74) led him to these names and texts. for more on wallace' s relationship to dostoevsky, see section v below. [ ↩ ]
as we shall see, however, by the mid - 1970s the landscape had changed. theory had arrived in the us academy, and literary scholars began making themselves busy deconstructing the humanist conceptions of the self and literary expression that underlay the work of virtually all the mid - century critics, sociologists and writers i have just named .
might be apt for describing the era of dostoevsky or the european romantics, these terms had become thorny and problematic for those born in the postmodern age .
alongside a wish to reconstitute social and communal bonds in the wake of that fragmentation .
indeed, the novelization of these wordsworthian sentiments means that they are protected by an ironic (and byronic) awareness of their fictional status. their potential triteness is thus simultaneously embraced and held at a distance. at the heart of a work of seemingly avant - garde fiction thus sits an unillusioned acknowledgement of formula, alongside a barely repressed hope or belief that such formula need not entirely negate the expression of something genuine and real. 34 this makes infinite jest truly a novel for our times. how else, for example, can we imagine squaring our weary cynicism regarding the mediated quality of political sound bite culture with our yearning for something sincere to be expressed by our leaders nonetheless? how else can we negotiate between our knowledge that all mediated performance is artificial and our need to judge and make decisions regardless? wallace' s novel employs complexity and impurity in the service of his text' s sincerity, paradoxically mobilizing the contaminations of the fictional to access the true .
by the late - century american writer david foster wallace. in what follows, i present trilling and wallace as exemplifying two moments in what i call the dialectic of sincerity; i argue that by tracking the historical movement from one writer to the other we can observe a shift in the cultural meaning of this concept. while i take as my premise that trilling and wallace can be understood to share a tradition, the tradition of american literary and intellectual history, it is not a negligible fact that one was primarily a critic and the other a novelist. partly for this reason, i place at the center of my argument not wallace' s widely read manifesto essay of 1993 ,
e unibus pluram: television and u. s. fiction ,
but his 1996 novel
the pilot episode of amazon' s the marvelous mrs. maisel is now on youtube by chris compendio december 20, 2017
the present essay was substantially completed while i was a postdoctoral fellow at harvard university. i would like to acknowledge the feedback offered by members of the harvard american literature colloquium, and the ideas and enthusiasm of the students in my seminar on david foster wallace and his generation. i am also grateful for postdoctoral funding received from the irish research council, and for the ransom center fellowship i received to undertake work at the wallace archives at the university of texas - austin .
( new york: new york review of books editions, 2008), x, xi. this
liberation
of taste from politics is something trilling himself recognized in the same footnote of
by 1993, when he published the highly influential
e unibus pluram ,
wallace had homed in on irony as the central problem of the age. now he argued that the political edge that irony had retained for an earlier set of american writers
parataxis is a strange literary form, born at the beginning of the middle ages … flashing back and sideways, holding back the outcome of events, these tellers fracture old familiar and heroic tales into contradictory, multiple perspectives. it becomes impossible to move the story forward without returning to the past, and so the past both predicates the future and withholds it .
,
she reads the following words :
the figure refers not to the declaration of love, to the avowal, but to the repeated utterance of the love cry. [... ] once the first avowal has been made,' i love you' has no meaning whatever ...
( mp 67). this is a theory of language entirely other to the one that undergirds madeleine' s (and trilling' s) understanding of sincerity, and it implies that language can betray the self rather than enable its expression. language, in other words, is
not a tool but an environment ,
an environment within which, as wittgenstein puts it in a line wallace quotes in interview ,
i don' t know my way about .
13 (1993): 127 - 50 (148). much has already been written on wallace' s relationship to irony, but critics have tended to follow certain gestures wallace makes in
e unibus pluram
and in the interview with mccaffery which suggest that a writer can choose whether to make language a tool of irony or a tool of sincerity, as if the difference involved were simply one of intent. for instance, marshall boswell argues that in wallace' s fiction ,
hip irony is itself ironized in such a way that the opposite of hip irony
speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a god .
in one of the earliest and most thorough criticisms of the aa model as the ideal solution to addiction in infinite jest, mary holland offers an exemplum of this institutional critique in her psychoanalytic emphasis on the trope of narcissism. narcissism is made institutional in the aa program because the addict is asked
blindly to submit his or her will to the universal experience of the program. when the program asks its members to' identify' with each other, it is requiring them to empathize with this standard story that each member tells, with their own story, with themselves. in this way, the aa and na programs ultimately ask not that members reach out to empathize with strangers but that they recognize their own place in this infinitely repeating sameness, the recursivity of addiction .
holland ,
' the art' s heart' s purpose,'
233. on holland' s account, it is not so much that the self is prevented from locating an outside to the institution, but that the institution supports the notion that there is no outside to the self. as will be clear from my reading in this section, i view holland' s emphasis on narcissism as serving to reinforce critically, via psychoanalysis, the very norms of expressive subjectivity that infinite jest questions in its revised account of what constitutes sincerity. [ ↩ ]
when kept separate, these two styles of irony each allow space for the notion of an expressive subject, whether a socratic subject who questions accepted conventions or a romantic subject that raises itself creatively above the finite everyday. when threaded together in the work of derrida and others, however, these styles of irony would seem to make a prior expressive subjectivity impossible. anxiety over the political dimensions of this position on language and subjectivity spurred critics of derrida' s work in the 1980s and encouraged derrida himself to foreground questions of ethics and politics in his later texts .
tommy wiseau insists that he ”really doesn’t know” how the film fared at the box office on its initial release. however, one industry source states that the combined gross from the two - week run at two theaters — the laemmle fallbrook and fairfax — was just $ 1, 900. michael rousselet, a young screenwriter who seems to be patient zero of the film’s cult, says he first caught the movie at an ”absolutely empty” theater. ”it was like our own private mystery science theater, ” he says. ”i was calling friends during the end and saying, ‘you have to come to this movie. ’ we saw it four times in three days, and on the last day i had over 100 people there. ” soon, screenings of the room were thick with both laughter and cutlery. ”the spoon thing probably started during the fourth screening with my friends, ” says rousselet. ”i was like, why is there a spoon in the picture frame? every time it came up, i’d scream ‘spoon! ’ so we brought spoons. ”
an image in a government briefing book helped a state department official see “the forest for the trees” in the west bank—and then was shared with the president .
for an analysis of the marathe - steeply conversational strand of the novel in which this larger political shift is debated most directly, see adam kelly ,
development through dialogue: david foster wallace and the novel of ideas ,
studies in the novel 44. 3 (2012): 267 - 83. [ ↩ ]
that wallace' s new sincerity works in paradoxical, complex, and even contradictory ways can be said to increase rather than diminish his importance for our time. writing of trilling, louis menand notes that
his characteristic sentences turn in on themselves; they can sometimes seem self - negating ,
but that
[ t ] he cast of the mind that produced these sentences is not paradoxical; it is dialectical .
neither of these assumptions about selfhood and language would emerge unscathed from the age of theory' s hegemony, nor could irony continue to be conceived in older, stable forms. in her astute study of the theory and history of irony, claire colebrook suggests that
[ i ] rony may well be tied up with the long history of western subjectivism: the idea that behind language, actions, difference and communication there is a ground or subject
this brings us back full circle, of course, to trilling. the final claim of the present article is that the politics that emerge from wallace' s fiction might be said to embody a sophisticated dialectical reimagining of trilling' s brand of liberalism, what anthony hutchison has referred to as trilling' s commitment to
ideas in modulation .
stupid. just badly done. the ideas are good but every part of the execution made it worthless. hope someone takes the idea and completely rewrites the script with nuanced characters and hires some real actors otherwise it’s great
has been a source of debate in scholarship on his work, but most critics generally agree with blackmur' s description of the politics as
non - social ,
those of a man
whose way of dealing with life rested on the fundamental belief that a true rebirth, a great conversion, can come only after a great sin .
r. p. blackmur ,
in the birdcage: notes on the possessed of dostoevsky ,
the actress and director both love the genre, but as they told indiewire, they also knew it needed to be retrofitted to tell the true story of catherine weldon and sitting bull .
buy or rent on amazon urltoken. the tale of a new york hipster who sets out on a quest to create the most sincere t - shirt ever and in the process, jumpstart the lackluster generation to which he belongs. urltoken
wiseau followed up the room with 2004’s homeless in america, a loose but rather moving documentary about the plight of los angeles street dwellers. ”i wanted to show people that this exists, ” he says, with such sincerity that you want to hug him. ”because i myself did not know. my god! ” wiseau is currently ”very, very busy” working on a number of future projects, including a sitcom called the neighbors, the pilot for which he has already shot. and his fame among comedians has started to pay dividends. wiseau recently filmed a sketch for the next season of tim and eric awesome show, great job! ”he kind of took over the set, ” recalls star wareheim. ”he would yell, ‘rolling! sound! speed! action! ’ you could tell he had this feeling that he was a master of cinema. ”
lane and schoenbrun discuss how her interest in morgellons disease patients (“the pain of others”) and his exploration of the slenderman myth (“a self - induced hallucination”) led them to make archival films from youtubes .
many histories of the rise (and fall) of theory are now available. exemplary instances are nicholas birns, theory after theory: an intellectual history of literary theory from 1950 to the early 21st century (new york: broadview press, 2010); and françois cusset, french theory: how foucault, derrida, deleuze, & co. transformed the intellectual life of the united states, trans. jeff fort (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2008). [ ↩ ]
on freedom' s adherence to the liberal conventions of the realist novel and the problems this causes for its critique of overpopulation, see margaret hunt gram ,
freedom' s limits: jonathan franzen, the realist novel, and the problem of growth .
american literary history 26. 2 (2014): 295 - 316. on the corrections as a post - postmodern novel that deconstructs liberal selfhood, see stephen j. burn, jonathan franzen at the end of postmodernism (london: continuum, 2008), 88 - 128. [ ↩ ]
( columbia, sc: university press of south carolina, 2003), 17. for mary holland, the question is likewise one of authorial intent, where the opponent is ambivalence and narcissistic addiction: don gately in
to the 2001 attacks on the world trade center. packer defines the unwinding in more generational terms :
if you were born around 1960 or afterward, you spent your adult life in the vertigo of this unwinding
( 3). [
holding vulnerability “at some remove” in the face of those determined to read any act of self - disclosure as narcissistic or self - pitying. but as a reader, kraus makes me confront my own hunger for autobiographical access; it makes me aware of how much i crave a sense of the true story beneath her written narratives, even as i respect the ways they refuse to deliver any kind of one - to - one correspondence between lived and constructed experience .
the mexican border, across the former soviet bloc. “summer of hate” starts at a desolate motel in baja; large chunks of “aliens & anorexia” take place at the berlin film festival; much of “torpor” involves journeying across romania in search of an orphan. in “i love dick, ” kraus describes the intense porousness of a schizophrenic mind—“the world gets creamy like a library”—and the world of her writing is creamy, too: her narratives bleed and echo, texts wink at one another across their separate spines. s & m scenes from “video green, ” her 2004 collection of essays about the l. a. art scene, pop up in her fictional narratives: ice cubes in wicker baskets, obediently downcast eyes. in “i love dick, ” she compliments dick on writing a book called “aliens & anorexia”: _ _ “that’s one of the most incredible things i’ve read in years. ”
the cult of sincerity is an independent film about hipster culture and postmodernist irony set in williamsburg in brooklyn , new york . it was released in its entirety on youtube on april 8 , 2008 , making it the first time that youtube had partnered with filmmakers for a film premiere . the film was later released as a digital download , with some of the proceeds going to the charity fount of mercy . the filmmakers collaborated with amie street , a digital music site for indie musicians , to help pay for the production . 
the cult of sincerity is an independent film about hipster culture and postmodernist irony set in williamsburg in brooklyn, new york. it was released in its entirety on youtube on april 8, 2008, making it the first time that youtube had partnered with filmmakers for a film premiere. the film was later released as a digital download, with some of the proceeds going to the charity fount of mercy. the filmmakers collaborated with amie street, a digital music site for indie musicians, to help pay for the production.
the cult of sincerity is an independent film about hipster culture and postmodernist irony set in williamsburg in brooklyn, new york. it was released in its entirety on youtube on april 8, 2008, making it the first time that youtube had partnered with filmmakers for a film premiere. the film was later released as a digital download, with some of the proceeds going to the charity fount of mercy. the filmmakers collaborated with amie street, a digital music site for indie musicians, to help pay for the production.