Irony and Sincerity

essay

The program: E Unibus Pluram

The irony theme has an unusual property: Wallace published its thesis statement before the novel. e-unibus-pluram (1993, drafted while IJ was being written) argues that TV absorbed postmodern fiction's weapons — self-reference, irony, ridicule of earnestness — and turned them into armor: a medium that mocks itself cannot be mocked, and institutionalized irony forecloses sincerity in advance. Irony "tyrannizes" because it is "singularly unuseful" for building anything. The essay ends with the prophecy IJ then tries to fulfill: the "next real literary 'rebels'" will be "anti-rebels" with "the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles," willing to risk "the yawn, the rolled eyes... accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity."

The argument was in Wallace's mouth as well as on the page in these years: on a 1995 BBC interview tape, recorded the year before the novel appeared, he casts irony as the carapace of a generation whose real fears are triteness, sentimentality, and mawkishness — where an earlier generation feared giving offense — a shield against seeming naive that, after thirty years as the culture's default mode of discourse, has ceased to be palliative (paraphrased from audio; bbc-endnotes-dfw-2011).

The fiction-as-cure aesthetic

mccaffery-1993-interview (same RCF issue) supplies the positive program the essay only gestures at. Fiction's purpose: "Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being"; its mechanism is anti-loneliness — imaginative identification with a character's pain means "we become less alone inside." Irony's trajectory is named there too: "gone from liberating to enslaving... the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage" (Lewis Hyde's line, which fiction-advocate-what-happened-pt2 quotes in fuller form: "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage") — the cage as clinical depression and anhedonia is anatomized in depression-anhedonia. The interview also contains the cost clause the cure demands of the writer: "to be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader." mcmorrow-ma-thesis traces the genealogy: Wallace's quarrel with Barth in "Westward" used metafiction to detonate metafiction — the archer who never fires — and "out of the rubble, he creates Infinite Jest," quarantining the residual metafiction in the endnotes. Wallace's own account, on the Lipsky tour tapes, gives the quarrel its cost in the first person: "Westward" was "simultaneously absolutely homicidal and a fawning homage" to Barth, and "I really felt like I’d killed this huge part of myself doing it" (lipsky-becoming-yourself). (That rehearsal, and the 1989 collection's staging of irony-as-armor in My Appearance, is traced in full in gwch-ij; the essay-to-novel execution of the anti-rebel program claim-by-claim in eup-connections.) silverblatt-bookworm-1996 has the mid-career restatement: the point of art has "something to do with loneliness and something to do with setting up a conversation between human beings." And at decade's end Wallace was still planting the flag on the unfashionable side of the old moral-fiction fight: pressed by an LA Weekly interviewer dismissive of John Gardner, he answered "I buy more of Gardners premise than a lot of other people do" (the archived text lost its apostrophes; quoted as captured) — fiction owing readers something more than performance, said plainly in 1999 (laweekly-weissman-1999; the exchange's sides are easy to garble — the "morality trip" sneer in that interview is the interviewer's, not Wallace's).

Inside the novel, the proof-text is AA: the cliché pedagogy (boswell-understanding-dfw: sincerity practiced as discipline, irony-proof platitudes; miller-1996-salon-interview: banal truths "nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can't") — see addiction-and-recovery. this-is-water is the late performance of the same move without fictional armor: endorsing platitudes while naming them platitudes. And the speech was less a late development than a late publication: on the Lipsky tapes of March 1996 — nine years before Kenyon — its core vocabulary is already in Wallace's mouth, the terror named as "the dawning realization that nothing’s enough, you know? That no pleasure is enough, that no achievement is enough", and the relief located where the speech would locate it: "To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend" (lipsky-becoming-yourself).

New Sincerity and its codifications

boswell-understanding-dfw codified the standard reading: Wallace as the central "third wave" figure who moves through postmodern irony rather than back from it, using postmodern techniques to recover sincerity and community. nichols-dialogizing-postmodern-carnival is an early Bakhtinian variant (carnival re-functioned from exhausted spectacle to genuinely dialogic renewal). Adam Kelly's "New Sincerity" essay (2010) became the brand name — though kelly-new-sincerity-reply insists the theory was never simply sincerity-over-irony: it names a generational aesthetic response to the challenge that Derridean "general writing" and advertising culture posed to expressive subjectivity, and Kelly now historicizes it under "neoliberalism" rather than "postmodernism."

Two Kelly primaries are now on disk, so the brand name no longer has to be cited through the reply. kelly-death-of-the-author (2010, IJAS Online) is the field-history companion: it maps how the essay-interview nexus became the "inescapable point of departure" for reading Wallace, and locates the ethics where the whole sincerity debate keeps landing — in the reader's investigation. kelly-dialectic-of-sincerity (2014, Post45) is the fullest statement of the reading itself: IJ "instantiates a new brand of sincerity in a formal and performative manner," with sincerity framed through Trilling against authenticity rather than against irony alone, and Boston AA's storytelling form — Identifying not Comparing, testimony without self-authentication — doing the novel's sincerity work formally. (A dating precision worth carrying: Kelly's lineage runs from a 2009 Liverpool conference paper through the 2014 Post45 essay to a 2015 "The New Sincerity" chapter, so the customary "(2010)" tag names one landing of an argument that matured across six years, not a single origin point.) fiction-advocate-what-happened-pt2 is the strongest informal statement: IJ both manifests and dramatizes the post-ironic fiction EUP called for — Hal's unintelligible new voice, Pemulis as Leyner-the-antichrist, "an entertainment that would get us talking again."

The other principal theorist of the turn, Lee Konstantinou — whose "No Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironic Belief" (2012) coined postirony as the alternative brand name — reaches the same third-wave positioning from a different axis entirely in his 2013 boundary 2 essay: Wallace inherits the encyclopedic ambition of Pynchon and DeLillo but makes "a clear break in Wallace’s fiction" from their internationalism, standing still inside a media-formed American imagination rather than ranging over the globe — and, in Konstantinou's reading, dismissing the globe-trotting alternative of a contemporary like Vollmann as bohemian tourism, a species of the same countercultural irony the sincerity turn writes against (konstantinou-world-of-dfw-boundary2-2013). That the two namers of the movement — Kelly from sincerity, Konstantinou from worldliness — both arrive at Wallace as the hinge figure is itself a datum about how settled the third-wave frame had become by the mid-2010s.

The reading also has a life outside the academy. A Salon retrospective — quoted approvingly in a 2022 online discussion of Wallace's legacy — credits IJ with having "sounded the first notes of a quest for an irony-free sincerity that has become a ruling style of David’s generation and the ones that followed" ([hn-threads-2026-07-10]). And the archive's read-along record holds a civilian codification: an Infinite Cast panel, openly skeptical of the academic label, arrives at the verdict that IJ is irony-flavored but not ironic — funny and dark in ways that need irony's register while staying heart-on-sleeve and earnest — with Wallace cast as the anti-irony Jeremiah of the whole sincerity turn (paraphrased from audio; ic-part45). The flavored-versus-being distinction does much of the work Kelly's theory does, arrived at from the text alone.

The backlash and the reply

white-guys-new-sincerity (2017) is the most prominent academic attack on this whole edifice — and the edifice under attack is now citable first-hand (the two Kelly primaries above), so the exchange can be read with both sides on disk. Its claims: Kelly's framework tames Derrida into cultural elitism (the Derridean general-writing / grammar substrate is language-grammar); the sincere, self-determining subject position IJ constructs is reserved for white men, whose anhedonic crisis is universalized while black and female characters are "affectable" bodies; the AA scenes' affective payoff depends on this asymmetry. Closing verdict: "a sincerity that cancels critique, and a human that remains a white guy." kelly-new-sincerity-reply responds that the authors conflate his theory with Wallace's own EUP-era rhetoric ("postmodern affectlessness" appears nowhere in his work) and situates the attack within the broader post-2011 "Wallace backlash," while granting that race and gender are serious questions better approached through history, genre, and archive. Read together they are the clearest snapshot of second-wave Wallace studies arguing with its founding paradigm.

A different, non-political objection comes from irony-narcissism-affect-woodend: the whole "x over irony" paradigm (sincerity, empathy, community triumphing) has reached a stalemate and misreads the book. Wallace's target is irony's narcissistic uses; the characters are caught between isolation and engulfment and only ever mitigate it. Where White Guys says the sincerity reading is politically suspect, Woodend says it is textually unearned — the novel never delivers the redemptive synthesis. entertainment-addiction-tartu, by contrast, sides explicitly with the majority view (against Mary K. Holland's "narcissistic loop" critique) that Wallace successfully breaks out of the irony he depicts — so the field genuinely splits three ways: renewal achieved (Boswell, Tartu, Moats), renewal structurally withheld (Woodend), renewal ideologically compromised (Jackson/Nicholson-Roberts).

There is also a fourth, form-first objection, and it is the rare one aimed at the prose itself: redinger-diagnosing-dfw argues that the novel's sentences, forced simultaneously to distance and to amuse, often read as "falsely ironic" — so the book stays "structurally susceptible to being read ironically," takeable as "one big joke played on us all" (the latter formulations via Goerlandt). Her exhibits are the tonally double passages the sincerity readings must pass through: Mario's birth, Kevin Bain's projectile weeping. She reports her own first-read suspicion that the book was "untrustworthy, laughing at me" — and measures the failure against Wallace's own McCaffery standard, that art should "ask the reader to really feel something." A dissent on execution, not on the program.

A fifth complication comes from the biographical record rather than the criticism. In a 2011 BBC radio documentary, the two colleagues most responsible for hiring Wallace at Illinois State testify that the break with postmodernism at the center of the standard story never really happened (paraphrased from audio; bbc-endnotes-dfw-2011). Curtis White recalls that Wallace was hired into — and wanted — one of the most postmodern-friendly contexts in America (Normal, Illinois was home to Dalkey Archive and the Unit for Contemporary Literature), that his public claims of movement away from the postmodern toward something more human were a confusion Wallace himself fostered, and that his Normal colleagues simply laughed at the statements. White has since put his half of the case in his own written prose: in a 2018 essay he argues that Wallace's early work and even Jest scream “Pynchon! Barth!”, that what Wallace had was “anxiety of influence”, and that the famous attack on Mark Leyner "was a way for him to deny the association" (lithub-curtis-white-no-postmodernism). Charles Harris, the department head who hired him, grants that the self-referentiality changed character — psychologized into the workings of a consciousness trying to rid itself of itself — and reads Wallace as a writer who wanted Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, knew the history of fiction had closed that door, and engineered a both-ways synthesis (technically beyond the postmodernists while satisfying the traditional hunger for values) rather than a departure. This is witness testimony, not textual argument — White's half now in print, Harris's still recollection from the broadcast — and Harris's both-ways synthesis half-converges with Boswell's through-not-back reading even as White's account presses directly on the break-with-postmodernism premise that the sincerity readings often take as given.

Complications the primary sources themselves supply

Wallace knew the trap was recursive. The Bookworm interview names the danger of being "co-opted by the very principles of commercialism and... 'like me, like me, like me,' that the book is partly about," and lipsky-becoming-yourself catches him living the double bind in real time — wanting to be liked while distrusting wanting to be liked. The anti-irony program was never a claim to have escaped.
gc-ep021-clare-hayes-brady splits the difference on Holland's narcissism charge: the narcissism in Wallace is infantile — an almost incoherent drive to communicate beyond the self's boundaries, offering rather than demand — where a true solipsist would have no reason to speak at all; writing a book this size is narcissistic, but as gift (Kelly's transactional-gift sense). Her companion complication cuts the other way: the nonfiction persona is "charmingly disingenuous" — Wallace abrogates expertise he plainly possesses ("hardcore theory weenies," "these magazine people") as a shortcut to empathy with the reader, a spurious us-and-them alignment that, once noticed, is impossible to unnotice. Sincerity performed can shade into sincerity staged. (audio, paraphrase only.)
The read-along communities apply the anti-irony program inside the novel. An Infinite Cast session reads JOI's lethal Entertainment as a joke that got made — under the hosts' standing thesis that there is no such thing as doing something ironically, because you are still doing it, the irony collapses into the act: Wallace's own critique turned on Wallace's fictional auteur (paraphrased from audio; ic-part118). An IJ Book Club panel does the same with Orin — irony as a shield against the sentimental and the judgmental, with Mario, who loves Ennet House because people there say God without getting uncomfortable, as the exact counterpole — while keeping live the possibility that Orin's broadcast-television answer was partly sincere (paraphrased from audio; ijbc-ep24).
EUP itself predicts its own reception: the anti-rebels "would be outdated... before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed... Maybe that'll be the point." The Reddit thread's reading of Hal (general online discussion) — an honest communicator who looks insane to a world consumed by irony — applies this prophecy inside the novel; see communication-and-solipsism.

Sources

e-unibus-pluram — the thesis statement: TV's metabolized irony, the anti-rebels prophecy.
konstantinou-world-of-dfw-boundary2-2013 — the postirony theorist's world-literature route to the same third-wave position: the inherit-but-break reading of the Pynchon/DeLillo lineage; Vollmann's travel as bohemian tourism.
mccaffery-1993-interview — fiction-as-cure aesthetic; irony as the prisoner's song; the Barth patricide.
miller-1996-salon-interview — the cliché engine; banal truth vs. pomo arch.
silverblatt-bookworm-1996 — art as conversation against loneliness; the "like me" co-optation risk.
this-is-water — single-entendre values performed straight, a decade later.
boswell-understanding-dfw — the "third wave" codification the debate orbits.
kelly-new-sincerity-reply — New Sincerity restated; neoliberal reframing; reply to the backlash.
redinger-diagnosing-dfw — the form-first dissent: the prose as "falsely ironic," the book structurally susceptible to ironic reading; execution questioned, program granted.
laweekly-weissman-1999 — the 1999 Gardner defense in Wallace's own voice ("I buy more of Gardners premise…," as captured); attribution care: the "morality trip" dismissal is the interviewer's.
white-guys-new-sincerity — the race/gender critique of the sincerity reading.
irony-narcissism-affect-woodend — the "x over irony" stalemate diagnosis; mitigation not transcendence.
mcmorrow-ma-thesis — Westward-to-IJ genealogy; endnotes as quarantined metafiction; an anti-rebel story written to spec.
nichols-dialogizing-postmodern-carnival — early renewal reading in Bakhtinian terms.
entertainment-addiction-tartu — pro-sincerity verdict against the Holland critique.
fiction-advocate-what-happened-pt2 — IJ as EUP manifested and dramatized.
lipsky-becoming-yourself — the double bind performed live on tour; the This Is Water vocabulary on tape in March 1996; the Barth patricide in the first person.
general online discussion — sincerity-read-as-madness applied to Hal.
gc-ep021-clare-hayes-brady — infantile narcissism vs. solipsism; the disingenuous nonfiction persona.
[hn-threads-2026-07-10] — the Salon "irony-free sincerity... ruling style" line as lay reception of the New Sincerity reading.
ic-part45 — paraphrased from audio; the civilian verdict: irony-flavored but not ironic; Wallace as anti-irony Jeremiah.
ic-part118 — paraphrased from audio; the no-ironic-doing thesis applied to JOI's Entertainment: the joke that got made.
ijbc-ep24 — paraphrased from audio; Orin's irony-as-shield with Mario as the counterpole; the partly-sincere counter-thread kept open.
bbc-endnotes-dfw-2011 — paraphrased from audio; the 1995 tape's irony-as-carapace restatement in speech; the White/Harris hiring-witness case that the break with postmodernism never happened.
lithub-curtis-white-no-postmodernism — White's half of that case in his own written prose (2018): the Pynchon/Barth charge, the anxiety-of-influence framing, the Leyner attack as denial of association.