Curtis White: There's No Such Thing as Postmodernism

TL;DR

The novelist Curtis White — Wallace's Illinois State University colleague — recounts, in his own written words, the argument that opened their acquaintance: Wallace's contempt for Mark Leyner, whom Wallace had publicly named as everything wrong with postmodern fiction. White's counter-reading is that Wallace protested too much. On White's telling Wallace was "using Leyner as a way of marking his own difference from American postmodernism," a difference he had not actually made, since his early books and Infinite Jest itself belong plainly to the Pynchon/Barth tradition he claimed to be leaving. White diagnoses an “anxiety of influence.” The essay's larger provocation — "there is not now nor was there ever something called postmodernism" — reframes the whole break-with-postmodernism story as a confusion, and it is a first-person, inside-the-department carrier of the reading that Wallace never left the tradition he satirized.

Key claims

• White taught alongside Wallace at Illinois State University, where — White writes — Wallace arrived in 1995, "just a year before the publication of" Infinite Jest. Cite-as-written: White's 1995 conflicts with the biographical record, which dates Wallace's Illinois State appointment to 1993. White had directed the Fiction Collective with Leyner (and Ronald Sukenick and Raymond Federman) in the 1980s. He recalls that his acquaintance with Wallace opened on a fight: "One of the first serious conversations he and I had was about Mark Leyner".
• Wallace had already gone on record, White reports, saying "that Leyner was everything that was wrong with postmodernism: the art of puerile game-playing and yukking it up in a moral vacuum so far as human interests were concerned" — and was annoyed to learn Leyner was White's friend.
• White's central claim about Wallace: "Wallace was using Leyner as a way of marking his own difference from American postmodernism," even though his early work and Jest, White writes, scream “Pynchon! Barth!” It was an “anxiety of influence,” and "attacking Mark was a way for him to deny the association."
• The essay's title thesis: "there is not now nor was there ever something called postmodernism." White's defense of Leyner is that Leyner did not care about the category at all: "And that’s my point, and the point David missed: Mark didn’t care about postmodernism. He never gave it a thought." Leyner, on White's reading, simply worked in the older tradition of literary play running from Rabelais and Sterne through Romanticism.

Themes

Postmodernism and sincerity; irony and play; literary influence and its anxieties; Wallace's self-positioning against his own tradition; reception (a colleague's first-person dissent from Wallace's stated self-account).

Cross-references

• bbc-endnotes-dfw-2011 — the same White, speaking the same never-left-postmodernism reading on the 2011 BBC documentary alongside Charles Harris; this essay is White's written statement of the position he gives there.
• franzen-farther-away-2011 and video-charlie-rose-1996-franzen-leyner — the Franzen/Leyner/Wallace triangle from the other angles; the 1996 Charlie Rose panel is the contemporaneous scene of Wallace's public Leyner critique.
• kelly-dialectic-of-sincerity — the New Sincerity reading White's essay works against: where Kelly reads Wallace's turn from irony as real and definitional, White reads the "turn" as a self-fostered confusion.

Notable passages

• "Even some of the best-known practitioners of postmodern fiction were confused about it, especially David Foster Wallace."
• "Wallace was using Leyner as a way of marking his own difference from American postmodernism" — and "attacking Mark was a way for him to deny the association."
• "there is not now nor was there ever something called postmodernism."
• "And that’s my point, and the point David missed: Mark didn’t care about postmodernism. He never gave it a thought."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Wallace never actually left the postmodern tradition — the break-with-postmodernism story was a self-fostered confusion, and the Leyner attack was anxiety-of-influence denial

• Crux: sincerity-definition
• Stance: complicates
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] White, first-person ISU colleague: "Wallace was using Leyner as a way of marking his own difference from American postmodernism," even though (White writes) his early work and Jest scream “Pynchon! Barth!” — an “anxiety of influence.” [essay body]
  • [secondary] Wallace's on-record charge, as White quotes it — Leyner "was everything that was wrong with postmodernism: the art of puerile game-playing and yukking it up in a moral vacuum so far as human interests were concerned" — is read by White as the denial, not the departure: "attacking Mark was a way for him to deny the association." [essay body]
  • [secondary] Compositional context: Wallace joined ISU (Dalkey Archive's John O'Brien, the Fiction Collective circle) in 1995 on White's dating, "just a year before the publication of" Infinite Jest (cite-as-written: the record has the appointment in 1993, which would place him there through most of the novel's composition) — placing him, on White's reading, inside the innovative tradition at exactly the moment of the novel. [essay body]
• Notes: White complicates from two sides at once. His disagreement with Wallace rests on a defense of Leyner's play as itself ethical (an openness to the energy of play), against Wallace's moral-vacuum charge — so the block is also a dissent on the irony/sincerity question, not only on literary-historical placement. And White's own framing undercuts the tidy opposition: his thesis is that postmodernism never existed as a real thing, so his "Wallace never left postmodernism" is nested inside a claim that the category is incoherent — Leyner, he insists, never cared about it and "never gave it a thought." The complication is that BOTH the leaving and the label may be illusions, not that Wallace stayed inside a stable thing.