My Appearance (\"Late Night\")

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TL;DR

Wallace's short story "My Appearance" — his first fiction in a national commercial magazine, run by Playboy in 1988 under the editor-imposed title "Late Night," and later collected in Girl with Curious Hair under Wallace's own title. A 40-year-old television actress, Susan, is coached by her husband Rudy and an NBC executive to "appear" ironic and self-deprecating for a David Letterman appearance, because on an "anti show" that "feeds on ridiculousness," "Sincerity is out" and "The joke is now on people who're sincere." It is the earliest and most concentrated seed of the irony-versus-sincerity, television-and-self machinery that becomes E Unibus Pluram (1993) and Infinite Jest (1996): a self manufactured to be seen, made "true" only "by watching," set against a woman's insistence that she "wasn't acting."

Key claims

The premise. Susan narrates from after the fact: "I am a woman who appeared in public on Late Night with David Letterman on March 22, 1989." Her husband Rudy frames her fame as protection — she is a woman "Whose heart's heart is invisible to the world and unapproachably hidden."
The coaching. Rudy and Dick, an NBC vice-president, drill Susan for days on how to "handle and be handled by Letterman." Their doctrine: Letterman "loved to savage female guests"; the danger is not meanness but ridicule — "meanness is not the issue. The issue is ridiculousness." The survival move is to beat him to it: "If you know in advance that you're going to be made to look ridiculous, then you're one step ahead of the game, because then you can make yourself look ridiculous, instead of letting him do it to you."
Sincerity is obsolete. "Sincerity is out," Dick says. "The joke is now on people who're sincere." Rudy adds the refinement: "Or who are sincere-seeming, who think they're sincere." Trying to seem witty or sincere is "the cardinal sin on Late Night." The instruction is to "appear the way Letterman appears on Letterman": deadpan, as if you "knew from birth that everything is" clichéd and empty and absurd, "and that's just where the fun is."
The anti-show. Dick likens Late Night and Saturday Night Live to a new form: the cheap sets that flaunt their cheapness, the mugging for the cameras — "they're anti shows." Susan asks whether she is to be "a sort of antiguest."
The earplug. During the taping Susan wears a hidden earplug and takes live direction from Rudy — the technology "originally developed to allow sportscasters to take direction... without ever having to stop talking." The self on camera is literally remote-operated. She is told to project not sincerity but "being not-sincere" — a distinction Dick insists is real.
What Susan finds. On air she decides Letterman is "a basically sincere man" and has fun; off it she maintains, against her husband, "I wasn't acting, with David Letterman," and "He was fun, Rudy. I had fun." Her line "I am a woman with no illusions, David" earns an earplugged order never to say the word illusions.
The metaphysics of being seen. The drive-home argument turns on whether a self exists behind the appearance. Rudy: "What put him on television in 1989 for you to see is that he can't be seen. That's what the whole thing's about, now. That no one is really the way they have to be seen." And when Susan presses: "Doesn't matter what I think. That's what the show is about. They make it true. By watching him." Susan turns it back: "If no one is really the way we see them, that would include me," and "And you." The story ends on her asking Rudy "just what way he thought he and I really were, then. / Which turned out to be the mistake."
The title pun. Playboy's fiction editor Alice Turner records objecting to Wallace's title; "he thought the title worked on two levels" — the televised appearance and the surface a person presents.

Theories & evidence

CONNECTION: "Sincerity is out. The joke is now on people who're sincere" — the tyranny of irony over sincerity, eight years before the novel

Crux: irony-vs-recovery
Early text: On the "anti show," "Sincerity is out" and "The joke is now on people who're sincere" — "Or who are sincere-seeming, who think they're sincere"; to seem sincere is "the cardinal sin on Late Night." [middle section] The only safe posture is to "appear the way Letterman appears on Letterman".
IJ echo: The novel's diagnosis of irony as an inescapable cultural default that makes sincerity unspeakable — the condition E.T.A.'s coaches and the AA program both set themselves against (the White Flag's un-ironic cliché discipline, scene 074), and the hollowness it produces in Hal.
Weight: prefiguration
Notes: A 1988 fiction that states, in dialogue, the thesis Wallace argues discursively in E Unibus Pluram (1993) and dramatizes across Infinite Jest — the earliest appearance of this axis in Wallace's own fiction. The story itself endorses no side; Susan's un-ironic fun is left unresolved.

CONNECTION: a self manufactured to be seen, made "true" only by being watched — appearance vs. being, and the figurant

Crux: figurant-design
Early text: "What put him on television in 1989 for you to see is that he can't be seen... That no one is really the way they have to be seen"; and "Doesn't matter what I think. That's what the show is about. They make it true. By watching him." Susan's counter: "If no one is really the way we see them, that would include me". [closing section] The husband corrects "be" to "appear" throughout ("both sharp and relaxed").
IJ echo: Hal's interior self that no longer reaches his watched surface (scene 001), and his meditation on the figurant — the televisual background figure who exists only to be seen (scene 162); the novel's preoccupation with selves constituted by, and dissolved into, being watched.
Weight: prefiguration
Notes: The appearance/being split is literalized by the story's earplug (a remote-operated on-camera self) — an oeuvre-level antecedent of the novel's watched-self designs.

CONNECTION: television as the medium that dissolves the sincere self — the anti-show and the entertainment critique

Crux: none
Early text: Late Night and S.N.L. are "anti shows" whose sets flaunt their own cheapness and whose humor "feeds on ridiculousness"; the guest must become "a sort of antiguest." [middle section]
IJ echo: The novel's television-and-entertainment critique — the culture of watching that the Entertainment weaponizes, and the self-consciousness the medium breeds; continuous with the E Unibus Pluram argument.
Weight: shared-preoccupation
Notes: A television-culture continuity, not a plot crux, linking the early fiction to the novel's entertainment critique.

Themes

Irony vs. sincerity (the "anti show" where sincerity is the cardinal sin); appearance vs. being (the title's two levels; the self made real only by being watched); television and self-consciousness (the earplug, the remote-operated guest); performance and identity (the actress who insists she "wasn't acting").

Cross-references

girl-with-curious-hair — reads the collected 1989 text of this story. The two printings differ: the narrator is Susan here and Edilyn there; "Sincerity is out" is voiced by NBC's Dick here and by Ron there; and key lines are reworded (this printing's "What put him on television in 1989 for you to see is that he can't be seen" reads "What put him there, here and now, for you to see, is that he can't be seen" in the collection). The quotes in this note follow the Playboy printing.
dfw-laughing-with-kafka — the 1998 essay whose reverent, "heroically sane" Kafka humor is the counter to exactly this irony-as-default; the two texts bracket a decade of Wallace's thinking on sincerity.
dfw-fx-porn — the television/film critique's cinema side; together they are the entertainment-and-watching material the novel's Entertainment literalizes.

Notable passages

"I am a woman who appeared in public on Late Night with David Letterman on March 22, 1989."
"The joke is now on people who're sincere." / "Or who are sincere-seeming, who think they're sincere."
"What put him on television in 1989 for you to see is that he can't be seen."
"Doesn't matter what I think. That's what the show is about. They make it true. By watching him."
"If no one is really the way we see them, that would include me".
"I wasn't acting, with David Letterman".