A culture so cynical it reads every virtue as performance — the 2006 restatement of the everything-as-performance…
echoes
From: 'A Frightening Time in America': An Interview with David Foster Wallace (Ostap Karmodi, Radio Svoboda / NYRB)
- Early text: n/a (interview) — endorsing Pelevin's image of pop culture, DFW
says a cynical audience reads a virtuous hero's qualities "as presentations by
someone who's" trying to get something rather than as real virtue; the
post-modern upshot is that "everyone has seen so many performances" that "we
simply assume now that everything is a performance and it's strategic" and
tactical. "It's a very sad situation", he adds, and nations pass "through
periods of great idealism and great cynicism," America and Western Europe now
in the latter. [NYRB text]
- IJ echo: the announced-key crux (irony/cynicism as the water IJ swims in;
p. 694 + E Unibus Pluram) — the culture-wide suspicion of sincerity that the
novel's earnestness sets itself against. DFW is diagnosing the culture, not
reading the book, so this is a preoccupation-echo, not an intent claim about
IJ.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation