IJ study archive

Dialectic of Sincerity: Lionel Trilling and David Foster Wallace

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TL;DR

The scholarly cornerstone of the "New Sincerity" reading of Infinite Jest, in its mature print form. Kelly stages Wallace as the second term in a "dialectic of sincerity" whose first term is Lionel Trilling's 1972 Sincerity and Authenticity: where Trilling opposed sincerity to authenticity, Wallace opposes it to irony, and that shift is what makes the novel — not the "E Unibus Pluram" essay — the true home of Wallace's thinking. Kelly's central claim is that Infinite Jest "instantiates a new brand of sincerity in a formal and performative manner": the Alcoholics Anonymous strand shows sincerity relocated from private interiority into communal, formulaic, institutional performance (following AA's clichés and getting on your knees to pray even to "Nothingness"), and the Ennet House "you will acquire many exotic new facts" prologue turns that sincerity on the reader. The essay closes by tracing Wallace's influence on a generation (Eggers, Egan, Saunders, Eugenides's The Marriage Plot, whose Leonard Bankhead is built from Wallace) and by reading his politics as a dialectical reimagining of Trilling's liberalism. The single most useful academic account of how sincerity works in the book, and a rare piece that reads the AA material as a formal-aesthetic method rather than a plot device.

Key claims

  • The dialectic of sincerity. Trilling and Wallace mark "two moments in what I call the dialectic of sincerity". Trilling (drawing on Sartre) opposed sincerity (truth to others, "a congruence between avowal and actual feeling") to authenticity (truth to the self as an end). Wallace's opposing term is different: "If for Trilling... the key concept that opposed sincerity was authenticity, for Wallace it was irony." Both writers respond to the fragmentation of American life (the "age of fracture" / "the unwinding" era-framings Kelly cites) with a wish to rebuild communal bonds.
  • Why the novel, not the essay. Kelly deliberately centers Infinite Jest rather than "E Unibus Pluram," arguing the novel "instantiates a new brand of sincerity in a formal and performative manner" that the manifesto essay cannot, because the novel has a "more complex relationship to ironic statement" than the essay does. (In a long footnote he separates himself from Boswell, Holland, and Konstantinou, who on his read still treat irony/sincerity as a matter of authorial intent and language as a tool rather than an environment.)
  • Institutional sincerity in AA. The recovery stories in the novel are "basically alike, and like your own" (IJ 345); AA mandates the cliché ("Don't Compare, Identify"). Drawing on van Alphen and Bal's The Rhetoric of Sincerity, Kelly reads this as a sincerity in which "performance overrules expression" and which is rethought "outside of its bond with subjectivity". Success means "finding a way to speak sincerely using a formula that possesses no originality as an emanation from the self."
  • Prayer to Nothingness / act before belief. The apotheosis is the AA instruction to pray to a Higher Power even when, as with Gately, all he feels when "he tries to understand something to really sincerely pray to" is "Nothingness" (IJ 444). Pat's counsel — "it didn't matter at this point what he thought or believed or even said. All that mattered was what he did" (IJ 466) — makes belief secondary to ritual action, a democracy "held together by actions rather than words."
  • Freedom as submission to limits. In the technocapitalist near-future, classic liberal freedom has "morphed into a libertarianism that leaves individuals isolated"; "True freedom, Wallace seems to suggest, is now to be found in recognizing limits and submitting oneself to boundaries" (Kant analogy), a reading Kelly anchors to Schtitt's tennis philosophy (IJ 81-84) and to Gately/Bruce Green's acceptance of AA as "deprogramming".
  • The reader is interpellated. The Ennet House prologue ("If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstances of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA's state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts", IJ 200) addresses "you", the reader, in a liturgical litany that oscillates undecidably between speech and writing; "novelization of these Wordsworthian sentiments" wraps them in a Byronic irony that both embraces and holds off their triteness. This is how the novel makes the reader participate in the sincerity it depicts.
  • Wallace read Trilling (archival). Wallace never names Trilling in print, but on the flyleaf of his copy of the fourth volume of Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky biography (Ransom Center) he wrote, in a list marked "Classic Dost", the note "Sincerity & Authenticity / or 'Authenticity & Sincerity' / Lionel Trilling." Kelly also links the most-quoted Wallace line — "Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being" — to the humanist criticism Trilling wrote.
  • Sincerity after Wallace (influence). Kelly traces Wallace's model through Eggers, Jennifer Egan (Look at Me), George Saunders, Colson Whitehead, Kunkel, Spiotta, Chabon, and Díaz, and above all Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot, whose Leonard Bankhead is built from the real Wallace (Kelly adds that Bankhead's initials match Lenore Beadsman of The Broom of the System). He reads the Madeleine /Leonard/Mitchell love triangle — Barthes's "I love you" scene, Mitchell's Jesus Prayer — as "doing" sincerity in the post-theory sense.
  • Political sincerity / Dostoevsky. Infinite Jest is modeled on The Brothers Karamazov; Kelly reads Wallace's dialogic, Bakhtinian handling of ideas ("neither confirming the idea nor merging it with his own expressed ideology") and his "Democratic Spirit" as a dialectical reimagining of Trilling's liberalism, against the salesman/leader and "public interest"/"what interests the public" collapses Wallace diagnoses in his late essays.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Infinite Jest's AA recovery strand instantiates a new, institutional brand of sincerity — one in which performance overrules expression, so that sincerity is a communal/formulaic practice, not the emanation of a private authentic self

  • Crux: aa-narrative-form
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The recovery stories are mandated to be generic: "All the speakers' stories of decline and fall and surrender... are basically alike, and like your own" (IJ 345); AA's motto is "Don't Compare, Identify". [sec. Infinite Jest and Institutional Sincerity]
    • [secondary] van Alphen and Bal's frame, applied to the novel: a sincerity for which "performance overrules expression," rethought "outside of its bond with subjectivity" (RS 16, 5). [sec. Institutional Sincerity]
    • [text] The prayer ritual: Gately is told to keep praying even when he feels only "Nothingness" (IJ 444), and "All that mattered was what he did" (Pat, IJ 466) — belief follows action, not the reverse. [sec. Institutional Sincerity]
    • [text] Bruce Green's agreement with Gately about "deprogramming" is flagged in the novel as unoriginal ("not an original view... exactly what big blockheaded Don Gately repeats about once a diem", IJ 562), yet his sincerity is not thereby in question — genre and repetition take precedence over spontaneous formulation. [n30]
  • Notes: This is the fullest scholarly statement that the AA form (identify-not-compare, formula over origination, act-before-belief) IS the novel's own model of sincerity — the sincerity/irony sibling of the aa-narrative-form reading argued in the Daverman and addiction scholarship. Kelly explicitly distances himself from Mary Holland's psychoanalytic-narcissism critique of the AA model and from Elizabeth Freudenthal's "anti-interiority", arguing both under-read the social/institutional supports; both in-source counterweights are recorded (Notes on Holland n27, Freudenthal n33). The undecidability Kelly grants — "It remains undecidable to what extent the generic frame... emanates from... traumatic experience, and to what extent that frame... are handed down by AA; Wallace offers support to both positions" — is itself part of the reading, not a hedge against it.

THEORY: Infinite Jest revives sincerity in a specifically post-ironic form — sincerity defined by communal coherence and formal artifice rather than authentic interiority; irony (not authenticity) is the term it works against

  • Crux: sincerity-definition
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] The dialectical thesis: "If for Trilling... the key concept that opposed sincerity was authenticity, for Wallace it was irony." Trilling's sincerity = "a congruence between avowal and actual feeling" (SA 2). [sec. Sincerity, Irony, and Theory]
    • [inference] Wallace's problem, unanticipated by Trilling: "Can one maintain an ideal and practice of sincerity without a grounding notion of expressive subjectivity?" — answered formally by the novel, where "literary language and irony are more clearly environments rather than tools". [sec. Sincerity, Irony, and Theory; n20]
    • [author] The EUP anti-rebels passage, quoted by Kelly as Wallace anticipating the jibes ("Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic.") — read as the difficulty Wallace shares with Trilling, not a simple manifesto. [sec. Sincerity, Irony, and Theory]
  • Notes: The coherence-not-authenticity account of sincerity (sincerity-definition) also argued in the Hayes-Brady / den Dulk / Boswell programs. Kelly's added precision is the Trilling genealogy and the "performance overrules expression" mechanism. Counterweight in-source: Kelly concedes Wallace's fiction is "equally close in spirit to Byron in its ironic awareness of its own artificiality and inability to attain a pure sincerity" — the sincerity is avowedly impure and paradoxical, "paradoxical and dialectical all at once."

THEORY: The novel makes the reader participate in its sincerity — the Ennet House prologue interpellates "you," so the ethics of the reading are enacted on the reader rather than merely represented

  • Crux: reader-realization
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The prologue addresses the reader directly: "you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility... you will acquire many exotic new facts" (IJ 200); ""You," here, are none other than the reader, the person being appealed to (or interpellated by) the novel's narrator, in an unusually direct manner." [sec. Institutional Sincerity]
    • [inference] The liturgical, undecidably spoken/written litany (the Charlton Heston aside; the "his/her/its list of things s/he/it's interested in re you" that "is impossible to say out loud as printed on the page") mobilizes "the contaminations of the fictional to access the true." [sec. Institutional Sincerity]
  • Notes: Continuous with the reader-realization reading (the ethics land in the reader) carried elsewhere in the archive. Kelly's version reaches it specifically through interpellation theory and the liturgy/catechism genre. No in-source denial raised; the essay treats this as the thing that "makes Infinite Jest the novel it is, rather than simply a representational drama of contemporary ideas about sincerity".

Themes

Irony and sincerity (the master theme — the dialectic of sincerity, sincerity vs. irony, the New Sincerity); addiction and recovery (AA as the site of institutional sincerity; prayer, surrender, the cliché); communication and solipsism (sincerity as "an indispensable affective... process between subjects"); freedom and discipline (freedom as submission to limits; Schtitt; Kant); the reader-writer relation (interpellation, the "you" of the Ennet House prologue); influence and literary history (Trilling, Gaddis, Dostoevsky, Bakhtin; the post-postmodern generation); politics and liberalism (the Democratic Spirit; salesman vs. leader; Trilling's liberal imagination).

Cross-references

Notable passages

Verbatim from the essay (Kelly's own prose unless marked; this raw uses straight quotes and apostrophes, preserved).

  • The thesis: Infinite Jest "instantiates a new brand of sincerity in a formal and performative manner."
  • The pivot: "If for Trilling... the key concept that opposed sincerity was authenticity, for Wallace it was irony."
  • The mechanism (via van Alphen and Bal): "performance overrules expression".
  • The AA formula: "finding a way to speak sincerely using a formula that possesses no originality as an emanation from the self."
  • Freedom: "True freedom, Wallace seems to suggest, is now to be found in recognizing limits and submitting oneself to boundaries".
  • The archival note (Wallace on Trilling): "Sincerity & Authenticity / or 'Authenticity & Sincerity' / Lionel Trilling."
  • On the reader: the Ennet House prologue's "you will acquire many exotic new facts" (IJ 200), of which: ""You," here, are none other than the reader, the person being appealed to (or interpellated by) the novel's narrator, in an unusually direct manner."
  • The Trilling epigraph Kelly closes on: "A culture is not a flow, not even a confluence, the form of its existence is struggle, or at least debate — it is nothing if not a dialectic."

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