The New Sincerity, As Actually Written

essay

The slogan

The most-cited idea in Wallace criticism is routinely cited for something it did not say. Ask what "the New Sincerity" means and the answer comes back as a slogan: Wallace was the writer who chose sincerity over irony, who broke with postmodernism to write with feeling again, who taught a jaded generation that it was permitted to mean what it said. The slogan is useful, it is roughly true in spirit, and it is not what the essay that gave it its name actually argues.

The name belongs to Adam Kelly. His "David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction" appeared in 2010, in the first academic anthology on Wallace, and it became the brand under which a whole reading travels (hering-consider-dfw-critical-essays). But the brand outran the argument. For years this archive, like most readers who came to Kelly through his respondents rather than through the 2010 text itself, carried the shorthand version: New Sincerity meant sincerity over irony. It is a telling flattening, because it is the exact reduction Kelly would later have to disown in print. Pressed by his sharpest critics, he answered that the theory was never, properly stated, anything so simple as sincerity-over-irony (kelly-new-sincerity-reply). What it was instead is stranger, more demanding, and considerably more interesting for anyone actually trying to read Infinite Jest.

What 2010 actually says

Kelly's essay does not begin with a preference. It begins with a problem in the history of a word. Following Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), he defines sincerity as "a congruence of avowal and actual feeling" and places it in a long decline: superseded first by modernist authenticity, then by the irony of postmodernism (Kelly, pp. 132-135). The question is what could possibly revive it, and Kelly's answer is not that Wallace turned the irony off. It is that Wallace wrote fiction structured by the writer's anticipation of how the reader will receive it. The essay's load-bearing sentence is a redefinition of the self, not a call to earnestness: Wallace's fiction "asks what happens when the anticipation of others' reception of one's outward behavior begins to take priority for the acting self, so that inner states lose their originating causal status and instead become effects of that anticipatory logic" (Kelly, p. 136).

The engine of the reading is not Wittgenstein but Derrida, and Kelly says so outright: although Wallace is usually aligned with the Philosophical Investigations, "what connects him to Derrida" is the operative frame here (Kelly, p. 136). He even enlists Wallace crediting Derrida with having "successfully debunked the idea that speech is language's primary instantiation" (Kelly, p. 137). The Derridean move is the gift. A true gift is destroyed the moment it is calculated or named, yet it can never be fully separated from calculation, and Kelly argues that sincerity has exactly this shape: "sincerity has the same structure as the gift: it can always be taken for manipulation, and this risk is fundamental" (Kelly, p. 140). From this he draws, from the novel itself, a distinction: sincerity must involve intent but can carry no motive. His exhibits are the novel's own: the film that empties its viewers' eyes of intent, Orin's seductions as sincerity with a motive, the AA Crocodiles' fear of sincerity with an ulterior motive.

The consequence is the part the slogan cannot hold. If sincerity is undecidable from manipulation as a matter of structure, then it can never be proved, only attested. It cannot be described, only answered. Madame Psychosis's radio voice resists positive description and registers only through Mario's uncynical response to it; the closing "So decide" of Wallace's story "Octet" can be answered by no one but the actual reader. Undecidability here is not a bug in the reading, a hedge Kelly hopes to resolve; it is the reading. Even the writer, he grants, will never know whether true sincerity was attained, and neither will the reader. Kelly is careful in ways the slogan is not: in a footnote he flags that "New Sincerity" was used earlier by Jim Collins (1993) for a different, authenticity-seeking film genre he explicitly distinguishes from his own, and he notes, unsettlingly, that AA's un-figure-out-able secrecy has a "structural similarity to Fascism" (Kelly, pp. 136, 143). This is a poetics of undecidable sincerity, not a manifesto for feeling more.

The propagation

The responses that carried Kelly's name did not so much argue with the 2010 essay as smooth it into something citable. Two prior codifications set the terms. The standard one is Marshall Boswell's, whose Understanding David Foster Wallace made Wallace "a nervous member of some still unnamed (and perhaps unnamable) third wave of modernism," a writer who moves through postmodern irony rather than back from it, using self-reflexive technique to recover sincerity and community (boswell-understanding-dfw). Boswell's proof-text is AA, whose irony-proof cliches model the single-entendre speech Wallace called for. As Boswell puts it, their banality is not a defect but the point: "Their vapidity, however, is the source of their truth." Boswell is not wrong, and the third-wave frame is the one the whole debate orbits. But it fixes the reading as a program the novel carries out, recovery accomplished, where Kelly's 2010 essay had described a structure the novel cannot escape.

The rival vocabulary is Lee Konstantinou's, and it is a rival, not a synonym. In "No Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironic Belief" he reaches the same third-wave position from a different axis, calling what Wallace wanted "an ethos of postironic belief" and arguing that postirony "is the better term for Wallace's project" (cohen-konstantinou-legacy-of-dfw). The move is explicitly against the meta-ironic readings, Boswell's among them, that would return Wallace to another turn of irony's self-negation: postirony decouples metafictional form from ironic knowingness, so that a nonnaive reader can be a noncynic. For Konstantinou "creating postironic belief was the goal of literary communication," and his exhibit is Gately, who prays without belief and gets through the day clean. That the two namers of the turn arrive at Wallace from opposite doors, Kelly from sincerity, Konstantinou from belief, is one reason the slogan blurs: it collapses two distinct arguments into a single mood.

The most prominent attack does not target the mood at all. Edward Jackson and Joel Nicholson-Roberts's "White Guys: Questioning Infinite Jest's New Sincerity" goes after the canon the term built and the subject it quietly assumes (white-guys-new-sincerity). Their charge is that Kelly's framework tames Derrida's undecidability into a cultural elitism that applies only to privileged literary texts, and that it reinstates a sovereign, calculating decision-maker behind sincere utterance, a subject position the novel reserves for white men. The AA scenes earn their affective payoff, they argue, by universalizing a white male anhedonic crisis while positioning black and female characters as merely instrumental bodies. The verdict is a sentence built to sting: Infinite Jest's New Sincerity "restores a white male liberal humanist subject as the locus for representative experience," so that what the reading delivers is "a sincerity that cancels critique, and a human that remains a white guy." Whatever one makes of the case, it is a critique of the reading's politics and its canon, not a claim that Kelly misdescribed how a sentence works.

Kelly revising Kelly

Here the dating matters, and getting it wrong is easy. The single most-quoted piece of "the New Sincerity" reading, that AA's communal cliches are the novel's own formal method of sincerity, is not in the 2010 essay. It is the argument of a later one. Kelly's 2014 "Dialectic of Sincerity: Lionel Trilling and David Foster Wallace" is where AA moves to the center (kelly-dialectic-of-sincerity). There he argues that the novel, not the "E Unibus Pluram" manifesto, "instantiates a new brand of sincerity in a formal and performative manner," and he sharpens the Trilling genealogy into a pivot: "If for Trilling... the key concept that opposed sincerity was authenticity, for Wallace it was irony." Drawing on van Alphen and Bal, he reads the recovery stories as a sincerity in which "performance overrules expression," where success means "finding a way to speak sincerely using a formula that possesses no originality as an emanation from the self." In 2010, AA had been secondary, entering mainly through the secrecy and "Blind Faith" passages, with Madame Psychosis, "So decide," and the intent/motive pair holding the center. The AA-as-method framing everyone attributes to Kelly's New Sincerity is 2014's development, and reading it back into the 2010 text is precisely the small, subtle error a reading acquires when it knows a thinker through his sequels. It is worth marking, because it is the whole shape of the trouble in miniature: even the careful reader hears the later argument inside the earlier one.

What did not change is as important. The undecidability held. Even in the mature 2014 statement Kelly insists that "It remains undecidable to what extent the generic frame... emanates from... traumatic experience, and to what extent that frame... [is] handed down by AA," and treats that as part of the reading, not a weakness in it. And in his 2017 reply to the White Guys critique he restated the theory while conceding ground on exactly the terms where the critique was strongest. He granted that race and gender in Wallace are serious questions, better pursued through history, genre, and archive than through the theory of race he thought his critics misapplied. He held the line that New Sincerity was never sincerity-over-irony, insisting instead that it "primarily names an aesthetic response by a generation of novelists to the challenge to older forms of expressive subjectivity." And he moved the whole frame's historical ground, arguing that the term that now best "encompasses all of" the contexts he means is not postmodernism but "neoliberalism." The reading Kelly defends in 2017 is recognizably the undecidable, Derridean one of 2010, historicized further and politicized under pressure, and it is not the slogan that travels under its name.

What hangs on it for Infinite Jest

None of this would matter much if undecidable-sincerity and chosen-sincerity produced the same reading of the book. They do not. Take the Ennet House AA material, the scenes everyone points to. On the chosen-sincerity account, the White Flag rooms simply prescribe sincerity over irony and the novel endorses the prescription: the truth "has to be the truth unslanted, unfortified. And maximally unironic. An ironist in a Boston AA meeting is a witch in church" (scene 076, p. 369). Read that way, the passage is a rule and Gately learns to follow it. But read through the 2010 essay it stages the very problem it seems to solve. What the ravaged old-timers fear is not irony as such but its structural twin: "Sincerity with an ulterior motive is something these tough ravaged people know and fear" (scene 076, p. 369). They fear the undecidable case, the sincerity that cannot be told from performance, which is Kelly's gift-structure sitting right there on the page. The room does not resolve the undecidability. It lives in dread of it, and a speaker's truth goes over only when the crowd answers it, attests to it, exactly as Kelly says sincerity can only be attested and never proved.

Hal is the same case from the inside. His terror is usually described as a fear of being a fraud, and the novel gives it as a fear that being genuine and being pathetic cannot be distinguished. What "passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment," he theorizes, "is really some kind of fear of being really human," since to be human is "probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic" (scene 135, p. 694). Hal has caught "that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive" (scene 135, p. 694), and he cannot get outside it. On the chosen reading, his cure is available: drop the armor, mean it. On the undecidable reading, there is no such exit, because Hal cannot tell his own sincerity from a performance of it, any more than the AA room can vouch for its speakers without answering them. The problem is not that Hal chose irony. It is that sincerity, for him, has become unprovable, even to himself.

The one figure who escapes the bind escapes it by making no calculation at all. Marshall Boswell calls Mario "the one truly human figure in the novel," and the very words Hal uses in horror, the sentimental and goo-prone and pathetic, are what Boswell says Mario embodies without embarrassment. Mario is the limit case, sincerity that needs no attestation because it anticipates no reception. And yet even Mario is not quite self-sufficient in Kelly's terms, since it is other characters' uncynical response that registers him, the same uncynical hearing Madame Psychosis's voice requires. The novel keeps its one unfraudulent human inside the same economy as everyone else: sincerity completed by a listener, not proved by a speaker.

There is a last complication worth carrying, because it presses on the premise the slogan rests on. The slogan assumes there was a break from postmodernism to narrate. Curtis White, who taught alongside Wallace at Illinois State, disputes that there was. On White's telling, "Wallace was using Leyner as a way of marking his own difference from American postmodernism," a difference White thinks he never actually made, since the early books and Jest belong plainly to the tradition Wallace claimed to be leaving (lithub-curtis-white-no-postmodernism). Take White seriously and the slogan is not merely a simplification of Kelly; it is a simplification of a break that may not have happened. Which is the argument for getting the reading right at its true weight. Chosen-sincerity hands you a program the novel either passes or fails, a turn it either made or faked. Undecidable-sincerity hands you a condition, one the reader is implicated in and can only answer, never settle. That is the operation the book keeps asking of its reader: not to prove the sincerity in front of you, which cannot be done, but to decide whether to answer it.

Sources

hering-consider-dfw-critical-essays — the 2010 original, firsthand: Kelly's "David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction" (Consider David Foster Wallace, pp. 131-146). The Trilling "congruence of avowal and actual feeling" genealogy; the anticipation-of-reception redefinition (p. 135); Derrida's gift as the engine (p. 139); Derrida-not-Wittgenstein (p. 136); intent-but-not-motive drawn from IJ; attestation via Madame Psychosis and "Octet"; the Jim Collins footnote; the "structural similarity to Fascism" flag.
kelly-dialectic-of-sincerity — the 2014 mature statement, where AA becomes the novel's formal sincerity method ("instantiates a new brand of sincerity in a formal and performative manner"; "performance overrules expression"; the Trilling-to-Wallace pivot from authenticity to irony); the register correction binds here.
kelly-new-sincerity-reply — the 2017 reply: not sincerity-over-irony; New Sincerity as a generational aesthetic response to a challenge to expressive subjectivity; the reframing from postmodernism to "neoliberalism."
boswell-understanding-dfw — the third-wave codification the debate orbits; AA cliches as post-ironic single-entendre speech, their vapidity "the source of their truth"; Mario as "the one truly human figure in the novel."
cohen-konstantinou-legacy-of-dfw — Konstantinou's "No Bull": postirony as the rival vocabulary, "the better term for Wallace's project," reached from belief rather than sincerity-structure and set explicitly against the meta-ironic readings.
white-guys-new-sincerity — the race/gender critique of the reading and its canon: the sincere subject reserved for white men; "a sincerity that cancels critique, and a human that remains a white guy."
plank-fact-of-the-cage — adopts the Boswell/Kelly placement as settled, glossing irony as "learning to love the cage" (contextual, on how far downstream the reading has hardened).
lithub-curtis-white-no-postmodernism — the inside-the-department dissent that even the break the slogan assumes may never have happened.