IJ study archive

The Great Concavity Ep. 33: Allard den Dulk — Existentialist Engagement in Wallace, Eggers & Foer; sincerity vs. authenticity, AA's seriousness, and corresponding with Wallace (recorded in Austin, ~late 2017)

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TL;DR

The philosopher of Wallace-and-existentialism, recorded in Bucher's Austin home mid-fellowship at the Ransom Center, walking through Existentialist Engagement in Wallace, Eggers and Foer (Bloomsbury 2015) and previewing the intertexts project that becomes his existentialist-canon book. Core payload for the archive: his sincerity-as-coherence (vs. authenticity) framework, the Sartrean account of hyperreflexivity, the argument that IJ's mockery of AA is a designed temptation and AA is meant seriously, the Wittgensteinian account of why Wallace's ethics is realized in the reader, and — unique biographical testimony — his postcard/letter/email correspondence with Wallace while researching the dissertation, including Wallace's specific interest in the Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein angles. ASR transcript: paraphrase only.

Key claims

  • Corresponded with Wallace during the project's formative stage: a letter to his university address drew a postcard within about a month — paraphrased: the project sounded interesting, coupled with a confession of realizing how slight his insight into his own writing was, and an invitation to write more. A fuller project description drew a generous letter engaging specifically with the Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein plans, then a shift to email at Wallace's suggestion [00:57–01:00].
  • Wallace declined an in-person interview with the response nearly every requester got — he'd sweat profusely, get uncomfortable, worry about being quoted out of context; written answers gave him control. Forced to submit a bare question list, den Dulk got elaborate answers that mostly unpacked and picked apart the questions themselves (what a question might mean, and what answering it would set him up to say), hedged with constant disclaimers about whether anything he said bore on his actual writing process [01:00–01:02].
  • A technical glitch cut off sentence fragments in both directions of the email exchange, leaving the correspondence with missing pieces — small truths gone from the conversation, as he puts it; the exchange survives, backed up physically and digitally [01:02–01:03].
  • Interviewed all three subject authors: Eggers at McSweeney's (arrived at the wrong hour, ended up staying most of a day, 3+ hours of conversation largely in the stock basement); Foer by knocking on what turned out to be his Brooklyn home door (Foer jet-lagged from Italy, answered in shorts and socks, insisted on making it happen — lunch two days later, 1.5–2 hours). All three remembered as remarkably generous; the interviews taught him the limits of what an author can say about their own work and strongly steered the project [01:03–01:07].
  • Book architecture: paired chapters in conversation — hyperreflexivity and sincerity (both via Sartre), irony and reality-commitment (both via Kierkegaard) — plus Wittgenstein; Eggers and Foer included deliberately so it isn't a one-author book: the "new sincerity" grouping was hype-driven and underdefined, and he supplies the missing account of what actually ties the works together (Wittgensteinian family resemblances between different language games, not one monolithic framework) [00:25–00:32]. Both he and Bucher came to Wallace through Eggers — the hype worked in both directions [00:27–00:28, 00:32].
  • Current project (the fellowship's object): comparative readings of seminal Wallace texts against the existentialist literary canon — Kafka's Metamorphosis, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, Camus's The Fall (mentioned several times in The Pale King's Fogle chapter), Sartre's Nausea — toward the next book [00:04–00:06].
  • New sincerity in film: the term is even less defined in film studies; his move is to revive André Bazin's realism not as ontological/long-take realism but as film that leaves room for believing reality meaningful; the usual suspects (Kaufman, Wes and P.T. Anderson, Baumbach) extend to von Trier, Haneke, Linklater, the Dardennes [00:06–00:11]. Anomalisa and Boyhood as congenial experiments in awareness + immersion — self-consciousness used to pull the viewer into the narrative rather than push them out (puppet sex that restores discomfort with the spectatorial position, cf. Zadie Smith's essay; actors actually aging); he rejects the "tension/oscillation" vocabulary of the post-postmodernism debate — the conjunction is productive, not unsuccessful [01:08–01:15].
  • Kierkegaard apparatus deployed for Wallace: existence as gift and task (take responsibility for the self behind you, shape the one ahead); irony as the avoidance of choice that empties the self; boredom as what the ironist fears most and as the ethical call — enduring boredom is the continuing confrontation with what you chose (relationships, commitments); the addicts' this-is-boring/I'm-not-simple response to AA is the "aesthetic" response in Kierkegaard's sense [00:35–00:47]. Boredom is already an IJ concern, not just a Pale King one (host framing, guest agreeing) [00:42].
  • Publication trail (for acquisition): the "Good Faith and Sincerity" essay in Gesturing Toward Reality; the boredom essay in Boswell's The Long Thing; the irony article in the special issue of Studies in the Novel; the Sorbonne 2014 conference volume; plans to post author-version PDFs at his site (allarddendulk.nl) [01:27–01:28].
  • Unpublished IJ scenes / juvenilia (closing chat): hosts judge a "director's cut" IJ publication commercially and scholarly unlikely — scholars can already read cut scenes at the Ransom Center; the early unpublished fiction is mostly laugh-seeking juvenilia, e.g. the Enema Bandit story (after Frank Zappa's Illinois enema-bandit song); another early piece named on-air as "the Piano and the Pantechnicon" (ASR, approximate — said to have been officially published) and the minor "Other Math"; den Dulk: publishing them would be squeezing the last drop, though he enjoyed reading them; Bucher: the Ransom Center has never really published Wallace material and arguably has an interest in not doing so [01:22–01:26].
  • Color: the 2014 Sorbonne conference bandana anecdote (den Dulk arriving at the formal dinner wearing the conference-swag DFW bandana) [00:02–00:03]; second-ever GC episode recorded in the same room.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: IJ's AA is a seriously intended way out — the novel's mockery of AA is a designed temptation the reader must decline

  • Crux: aa-seriousness
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The novel supplies enough anti-AA hedging (fun made of AA and its people) for a skeptic to dismiss it — and that, he argues, is the point: it tempts the ironic-age reader to dismiss it as no serious alternative, reproducing the addicts' own move. [00:38–00:39]
    • [text] The anhedonia passage and Hal's rootedness in romantic Weltschmerz (ASR garbles the word) as the novel's positive case that choice is necessary and AA is to be taken seriously. [00:37–00:38]
    • [secondary] Kierkegaard's aesthetic-vs-ethical distinction: the addicts' ironizing of AA's boring simplicity (the scoff that such simplicity is beneath one's formidable intelligence) is the aesthetic response; boredom carries the ethical summons toward selfhood. [00:44–00:47]
    • [text] Bucher (endorsing): no reader denies the AA sections are among the best in the book — you can't hold that and also call them unserious. [00:41]
    • [author] Bucher (endorsing): AA was, by Wallace's own admission, what saved his life; post-suicide the AA storyline reads as a dispatch from the far side, not didacticism. [00:39–00:41]
  • Notes: Framed against the criticism that IJ paints a dystopia without offering a way out; den Dulk grants some find Gately or Mario too-simple portrayals of virtue and answers via the reader-realization theory below.

THEORY: Wallace's ethical project is realized in the reader while reading, not settled inside the fiction

  • Crux: reader-realization
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] Even if Mario is unconvincing or Gately too simple a portrait of sincerity (he thinks neither), the substance lands in what the text causes in the reader — the questions it forces about the characters, their world, and one's own. [00:38–00:39]
    • [secondary] The later Wittgenstein as model: the Investigations cannot be paraphrased, only experienced in conversation with its questions — Wallace's fiction works the same way; there is no single narrative content to extract. [00:50–00:52]
    • [secondary] Robert Solomon on Camus's The Fall, extended to "Good Old Neon": the diagnostic readerly strategy (find what's wrong with Clamence/Neal) is the trap; the story's ethical call is realized when the reader resists it. [01:19–01:21]
  • Notes: The episode's connective thesis — it underwrites the AA block above and the Wittgenstein block below; he flags it as also driving the new intertexts project.

THEORY: Wallace's sincerity is coherence and stability of a self formed toward others — not authenticity's honest expression of an inner true self

  • Crux: sincerity-definition
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] The self-becoming literature: for ~200 years the dominant Western virtue has been authenticity (a core self defended from corrupting outside influence); even the postmodernist self-as-masks critique is an authenticity move (the unmasking insight itself claimed as more authentic). [00:12–00:14]
    • [inference] Sincerity, properly used, presupposes no inner essence: it is the attempt to make one's expressions, promises, ambitions and actions cohere over time — active self-shaping with responsibility to the world and others; authenticity is about me, sincerity about how I relate. [00:14–00:17]
    • [text] Octet's sincerity as "beyond defenseless"/unarmed: the self depends on others — forming a self requires surrendering to the other to have it acknowledged (a Cavellian term, ASR "Covellian"). [00:16–00:18]
    • [text] Gately's AA work read as exactly this attempted construction of a coherent self. [00:16]
  • Notes: Positioned explicitly against critics who equate the sincerity label with naivete; the underdefinition of "new sincerity" (in literature and worse in film) is his stated motivation.

THEORY: Wallace's hyperreflexivity is Sartre's consciousness turned in on itself — consciousness objectifying itself as a thing

  • Crux: hyperreflexivity-sartre
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] Sartre's degrees of consciousness (pre-reflective being-with-the-world → reflective, where the ego arises → self-reflective, where consciousness thematizes itself): at the third level consciousness forgets its objects — world and other people — and treats itself on the model of stones and objects, misrepresenting what mental life is. [00:21–00:24]
    • [inference] Wallace as a superb cataloguer of everything that goes wrong from this objectification of one's own mental states; the hyperreflexivity chapter and the sincerity chapter each talk to Sartre, which is why the problem and the cure pair. [00:24]
  • Notes: Delivered as the book's chapter-one apparatus; hosts connect it on-air to Synecdoche, New York (den Dulk defers, film seen too long ago).

THEORY: The later Wittgenstein lets Wallace sidestep the Derridean words-fail-to-mean problem — and his fiction works by the Investigations' method

  • Crux: wittgenstein-frame
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [author] Wallace's many declarations of conviction by Wittgenstein, and (Broom aside) his stated eye-opening by the Investigations' view of language. [00:47–00:48, 00:51]
    • [secondary] The Tractatus→Investigations arc: meaning as use within a language community rather than reference to objects or inner thoughts; words are not even attempting the connection Derrida says they fail at, so the postmodern crisis dissolves as irrelevant. [00:49–00:55]
    • [inference] Wallace's critique/rewriting of Barth-style metafiction is modeled on exactly this problem — metafiction's exposure of fiction's illusory reference generalized to all language is the picture Wittgenstein dismantles. [00:53–00:54]
    • [secondary] Wittgenstein on literature as the language-situation that explicitly raises how words mean — hence fiction as the natural site of Wallace's philosophical project. [00:55–00:56]
  • Notes: He connects this to reader-realization: reading Wallace is being in conversation with the text the way reading the Investigations is being in conversation with Wittgenstein.

THEORY: "Good Old Neon" reads with Camus's The Fall — nothing is "wrong" with Neal; fraudulence is the confrontation with absurdity, and the reader must break the diagnostic spiral

  • Crux: gon-the-fall
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Structural parallel: both stories build to an end-reveal that the narrator has been manipulating the addressee (Clamence's interlocutor; GON's closing turn to "David Wallace"). [01:18–01:19]
    • [secondary] Robert Solomon on The Fall: resist the readerly hunt for Clamence's core problem — extended by den Dulk to Neal: once all truth is felt as contingent, all truths feel fraudulent, so the fraudulence needs no pathology to explain it. [01:19–01:20]
    • [text] GON's ending ("not another word") as the cutting-off of the self-accusation spiral — Neal's and David Wallace's — with the mode of attention it demands realized in the reader. [01:20–01:21]
    • [text] The Fall is named several times in The Pale King's Fogle chapter, anchoring Camus in the corpus. [00:05]
  • Notes: Preview of the intertexts book's Camus chapter; not an IJ crux, recorded because the fraudulence/hyperreflexivity mechanism is the same one he applies to Hal and the AA addicts.

Themes

Irony-and-sincerity (the episode's spine: sincerity-as-coherence, irony as choice-avoidance, new sincerity's definition problem in print and film); addiction-and-recovery (AA's seriousness, boredom, the cliché problem); communication-and-solipsism (hyperreflexivity, Octet's unarmed address, the self formed toward others); entertainment-and-the-self (film realism, awareness+immersion, spectatorship).

Cross-references

Advances