Productive Failure: Sincerity and Irony in Contemporary North American Literature 9783534406722, 9783534406739

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Felix Haase

Productive Failure Sincerity and Irony in Contemporary North American Literature

Felix Haase

Productive Failure

Felix Haase

Productive Failure Sincerity and Irony in Contemporary North American Literature

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Contents 1 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 8 2 Theorizing Productive Failure���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 17 2.1 The Concept of Sincerity������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 17 2.1.1 Sincerity as a Christian Ideal����������������������������������������������������������������� 17 2.1.2 Sincerity: A Definition���������������������������������������������������������������������������� 19 2.1.3 Sincerity as a Performative Contradiction������������������������������������������� 21 2.2 Navigating Sincerity and Irony in Literature��������������������������������������������������26 2.2.1 Romantic Irony����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 27 2.2.2 Postmodern Irony������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 31 2.2.3 The New Sincerity������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 35 2.3 The Voice of Productive Failure������������������������������������������������������������������������43 2.3.1 Parrhesia����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������43 2.3.2 Autofiction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������46 3 Belief and Sincerity in Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius��������������������������������������������������������51 3.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 51 3.2 “The Consciousness Behind the Text”: The Yearning for Sincerity in AHWOSG��������������������������������������������������������53 3.2.1 Foregrounding the Author��������������������������������������������������������������������� 53 3.2.2 Probing Intention – A Brief Excursion on Wallace���������������������������� 55 3.2.3 The Referential Pact���������������������������������������������������������������������������������63 3.2.4 Solipsism and Parrhesia������������������������������������������������������������������������64 3.3 “The Core is the Core is the Core”: The Limits of Representation in AHWOSG���������������������������������������������������68 3.3.1 AHWOSG as a Postmodern Memoir����������������������������������������������������68 3.3.2 AHWOSG as a Trauma Narrative���������������������������������������������������������� 75 3.4 “A Mistake the Author Could not Refrain from Making”: Productive Failure in AHWOSG���������������������������������������������������������������������79 5

3.4.1 Romantic Irony and Sincerity���������������������������������������������������������������� 79 3.4.2 The Cultivation of Belief ������������������������������������������������������������������������82 3.4.3 Eggers’ Ethical Ideal��������������������������������������������������������������������������������84 3.5 Conclusion������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������86 4 Paradoxical Desires: Romantic Irony and Autofictionality in Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station���������������������������������������������������������������88 4.1 Introduction���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������88 4.2 Adam Gordon as Experiencing-I: Sincerity and Romantic Irony��������������� 91 4.2.1 Adam’s Aesthetics: The “Actual” and the “Virtual”���������������������������92 4.2.2 Adam as a Romantic Ironist������������������������������������������������������������������� 95 4.2.3 “A Wave Breaking On a Rock”: Connecting Sincerity and Romantic Irony������������������������������������������98 4.2.4 Romantic Irony, Sincerity, and Communication������������������������������ 101 4.3 Adam Gordon as Narrating-I: Risk and Autofictionality���������������������������104 4.3.1 The ‘Unreliability Objection’: Can an Unreliable  Narrator Create Sincerity Effects?������������������������������������������������������� 105 4.3.2 LTAS as an Autofictional Novel�����������������������������������������������������������109 4.4 Conclusion���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 116 5 “A Sincere Attempt to Get Somewhere”: Between Authentic and Relational Selfhood in How Should a Person Be?����������������������������������������������� 119 5.1 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 119 5.2 Out with the Old (Sincerity)����������������������������������������������������������������������������122 5.2.1 Sincerity as the Expression of an Unchanging and Unified Self����124 5.2.2 Sincerity as Communication of a Contained Self�����������������������������126 5.2.3 The Perfectible and Commodifiable Self��������������������������������������������128 5.3 In with the New (Sincerity)������������������������������������������������������������������������������130 5.3.1 The Relational Self in Form and Style������������������������������������������������� 133 5.3.2 Parrhesia�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������138 5.4 The Role of Failure��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 143 5.4.1 Romantic Irony��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 143 5.4.2 The Influence of Jewish Culture and Religion����������������������������������� 146 5.5 Conclusion���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 152

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6 Conclusion�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������154 6.1 The Complicated Relationship between Romanticism, Postmodernism and the New Sincerity���������������������������������������������������������� 155 6.2 Formal and Thematic Similarities Shared by Eggers, Lerner and Heti�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 157 6.3 The Case of AHWOSG������������������������������������������������������������������������������������159 6.4 The Case of LTAS��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������160 6.5 The Case of HSAPB�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������163 6.6 Productive Failure: Literature as a Privileged Medium�������������������������������164 6.7 The New Sincerity in a North American Context����������������������������������������166 6.8 Quo vadis, New Sincerity?�������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 167 7 Bibliography�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 170

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1 Introduction Sincerity is a cultural revenant. Even though artists, critics and philosophers rang its death knell again and again, the concept finds a way to resurface. This discursive resilience has to do with the function sincerity fulfills in Western societies. It is a virtue that promises relationships built on trust, connection and community. Because of this, societies often turn to sincerity in times of crisis. At the beginning of the 21st  century, the US was confronted with an unprecedented crisis: the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the ensuing “War on Terror”. In an effort to make meaning of this catastrophe, many cultural commentators turned to sincerity as a social ambrosia (see Gorenstein 29). One oft-cited example of this is American author Roger Rosenblatt, who wrote in TIME magazine that “one good thing could come from this horror: it could spell the end of the age of irony” (n.p.). His implication was that irony had long been used as a protective shield against fear and pain in American culture, which was no longer tenable. In order to face the trauma of the nation’s largest terrorist attack, the character model of the ironist would have to be replaced by something else. The precise nature of this “something else” had been delineated almost ten years before 9/11 in the writings of the American author David Foster Wallace. In his manifesto “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction,” Wallace diagnosed that irony was to blame for the atomization and the solipsism of everyday Americans. Trained by marketing and televisual culture, they refused to hold any belief at all. As a result, they were soul-crushingly alone. The culprit for this development, according to Wallace, was the rise of Postmodern Irony in literature and culture as a whole. While this specific irony had fulfilled its function of tearing down outdated power structures, it had also created a problematic understanding of language. If individuals feel that they cannot use language to connect with others, then they experience absolute isolation. Just like Rosenblatt, Wallace lamented that the “age of irony” created by Postmodernism had damaged every facet of American society. The good news for Wallace was that literature could be the cure to the sickness it had created. Where Postmodern fiction resulted in solipsism, the new kind of 8

1 Introduction

literature Wallace envisioned would re-establish communication, connection, and trust. He had a clear idea of the attitude that could take the place of irony in this new mode of writing: The next real literary rebels in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of ‘anti-rebels’, born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Too sincere. (192)

By closing his influential essay this way, Wallace had created a fateful equation. Irony was seen destructive and therefore harmful to American society. The only cure, then, could be its ostensible opposite: sincerity. If they wanted to help people feel less alone, the literary anti-rebels Wallace had in mind needed to write sincerely. This neat dichotomy of irony and sincerity functioned well as the initiation of a new movement. In interviews, other epitexts, and within their works themselves, many of Wallace’s contemporaries identified with his project. Mostly due to the research of Adam Kelly (2010, 2016), Wallace today is viewed as the founder and spiritus rector of the “New Sincerity”-movement in American literature. Like Wallace’s oeuvre, works of the New Sincerity are characterized by a skepticism towards postmodern irony, an interest in the relationship between author and reader, and a nuanced philosophical inquiry into the conditions and possibilities of sincerity. Even though other scholars extended the “New Sincerity” label to different media (see Rutten 25, Magill 2013: 202–213), it was the realm of literature which Wallace addressed with his manifesto, and there he also found most of his followers. Among the authors who took up his call to re-engage with sincerity at the turn of the millennium were Dave Eggers, Jennifer Egan, George Saunders, Colson Whitehead, Benjamin Kunkel, Dana Spiotta, Michael Chabon and Junot Diaz (see Kelly 2014: n.p.). While most of these authors eventually shifted their focus to different topics, sincerity remains a part of today’s literary discourse. The last ten years saw the publication of numerous autofictional novels that deal overtly with the blurry line between sincerity and irony, reality and fiction, author and character. In their 9

1 Introduction

focus on representation and their troubled entanglement with Postmodernism, they resemble the first wave of the New Sincerity. This has led critics like Johannes Völz to expand the horizon of the movement and to include the authors of these novels, such as Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, Tao Lin and Miranda Juli (see 2016). The crucial question at the heart of the New Sincerity has always been whether literature can move beyond Postmodernism, and how this new literature could operate. It is one of many attempts to answer this question that have surfaced in the beginning of the new millennium. Among its alternatives are Post-postmodernism1, Metamodernism2, Digimodernism3, Performatism4, Neorealism5 and Postirony6. The appeal of the New Sincerity in contrast to these concepts (with the exception of Postirony, with which it is synonymous) is its apparent simplicity. It identifies one key aspect of Postmodernism that is problematic: Postmodern Irony. In order to alleviate the solipsism this kind of irony causes, authors must turn to the opposite of irony, i.e. sincerity. This was the fundamental message of Wallace in “E Unibus Pluram”. Simple answers are often reductive, however – especially when it comes to literature. This is also true for the relation of sincerity and irony in the New Sincerity; however clear-cut Wallace might make it seem. The texts within this movement often feature meta-reflective commentary about their own attempts at sincerity. These passages convey not just doubts about the possibility of sincerity in the first place, but also the realization that sincerity and irony might be entangled. The aim of my project is to analyze the representation of this entanglement. As test cases, I chose three novels that belong to the New Sincerity and probe this entanglement within their own narratives: Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Genius (2000), see Timmer, Nicoline. Do You Feel It Too?: The Post-Modern Syndrome in American Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. 2 see Vermeulen, Timotheus, und Robin van den Akker. “Notes on Metamodernism.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture. 2.1 (2010): 1–14. 3 see Kirby, Alan. Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture. New York: Continuum, 2009. 4 see Eshelman, Raoul. Performatism, Or, the End of Postmodernism. Aurora, CO: Davies Group, 2009. 5 see Versluys, Kristiaan (ed). Neorealism in Contemporary Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992. 6 see Konstantinou, Lee. Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016. 1

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Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), and Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be (2014). While these texts follow the desire for communication and trust that Wallace inscribed into the New Sincerity, they also offer a complicated and often paradoxical account of the relationship between sincerity and irony. Most crucially, they probe the significant overlaps between these two concepts on an aesthetic and an ethical level. In doing so, they deliver a more nuanced picture of the New Sincerity than the appreciation of “single-entendre values” Wallace polemically called for. The overlaps between irony and sincerity are mostly due to the paradoxes within the concept of sincerity itself. The Latin cognate ‘sincerus’ carries denotations of purity and genuineness. It was exactly this connection to purity that elevated ‘sinceritas’ into the upper echelon of virtues during the Reformation. In the theology of Martin Luther and John Calvin, the Christian individual was fundamentally sinful, yet it could ‘cleanse’ itself by openly expressing its emotions and urges to others. This act of expression has been at the core of sincerity as a concept ever since. When we use the word ‘sincerity’, we usually refer to the open communication of inward processes – what we truly feel, think, desire, remember, and so forth. For this reason, Trilling defines sincerity as the “congruence between avowal and actual feeling” (2). Because it promises the absence of dissimulation, it is fundamental for the creation of trust. This notion of “congruence” renders sincerity both fascinating and problematic. On the one hand, it speaks to the desire to fully know ourselves and makes ourselves known to others through language. On the other hand, it saddles sincerity with a number of unresolvable contradictions. The most crucial of these is the “performative contradiction” (Assmann 35) that results from sincerity’s bond to authenticity. If we want to be sincere, we have to find a way to express our “true” self to others  – what we really think and feel. This notion of the authentic self builds the foundation for the ideal of sincerity. Yet, as Assmann and others (see for example Trilling and Funk) have observed, authenticity by definition eludes representation. What we deem authentic in others or ourselves is authentic precisely because we cannot communicate it – it stands outside of social constructs, norms and codes. As such, a reflection about sincerity is always a reflection about language. If language does not have the capacity to capture authentic experience, then the desire of sincerity can never be fulfilled. A “congruence between avowal and actual feeling” cannot be achieved. The only thing that language can deliver is a flawed gesture at that which it cannot represent. 11

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It is here, in this reflection about the capacity of language, where sincerity and irony meet. In the intellectual history of Western Europe and North America, irony was often seen as response to the gap between language and experience. The period of Romanticism specifically followed this understanding of irony. Romantic artists felt an intense desire to capture the totality of experience within their art. Yet, at the same time, they were convinced that their art was finite, limited and static. Total truths about humanity and its place in the universe transcended the boundaries of human understanding. As a result, art and language could only ever be an imperfect gesture at transcendence. Instead of despairing at this fact, however, the Romantics deliberately pursued this imperfect gesture. This mindset has since received the name ‘Romantic Irony’ and it still informs the project of the New Sincerity. Like the Romantics, the authors of the New Sincerity are driven by a desire they know cannot be fulfilled – to communicate their authentic experience to others. Instead of despairing at this awareness, they frame their art as a flawed gesture at communion and connection. This is the overlap between sincerity and irony I intend to explore and analyze throughout this project. My first argument is that the “performative contradiction” I referred to earlier lies at the heart of the New Sincerity. The novels I discuss here  – Eggers’ AHWOSG, Lerner’s LTAS and Heti’s HSAPB  – demonstrate this exceptionally well. They pulsate with an awareness that sincerity is an unreachable ideal. Their autodiegetic narrators remind themselves and their readers that their quest for sincere expression is ultimately doomed to fail. My second argument is that this admission of failure does not result in resignation or apathy. Instead, failure is welcomed, as it produces trust on both a communicative and an ethical level. On a communicative level, Eggers, Heti and Lerner emphasize that they attempt to express authentic experience even though language can never fully represent it. Their texts are necessarily incomplete and fragmented, yet they try to pierce the veil of fiction anyway. After Postmodernism, this is the only way left for authors and readers to connect with each other, and to trust in shared narrative experience. On an ethical level, these authors valorize the transparent disclosure of moral failings. Their texts relentlessly catalogue lies, embarrassing moments and shameful experiences. Through their characters, the authors make themselves vulnerable and show that their narratives involve an actual risk to their reputation, which is again intended to create trust. 12

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My third argument is that this engagement with sincerity and irony has a precedent in literary history and philosophy. The desperate desire to represent that which cannot be represented has its roots in the Romantic Period. Friedrich Schlegel gave it a name that stuck, for better or worse: Romantic Irony. I propose that Romantic Irony can serve as a model for the approach of the New Sincerity. The writings of Schlegel, Fichte and Solger show exactly why the boundary between sincerity and irony is permeable. They can help to understand why neither Wallace nor his antecedents could fulfill his wish for “single-entendre principles” in their own fiction. My research can be grouped among the large corpus of work on post-postmodern literature that has developed over the last two decades. The most important work on the New Sincerity in that period has been done by Adam Kelly and Johannes Völz, and I draw heavily on their findings. Yet my thesis contributes a new concept to the discussion of the New Sincerity: “Productive Failure”. The logic of productive failure can be observed in all the texts I discuss here. In a general sense, they are all meditations on the nature of failure. They also view failure as an essential part of human experience. I already mentioned that this has an ethical aspect. By dwelling on their own shortcomings, these narrators suggest that the acceptance and confession of failures is necessary for the creation of trust. Yet these novels also revolve around failure on a communicative level. According to their own self-characterization, the protagonists (Dave, Sheila and Adam) are pathological liars and manipulators who have never found a way to interact sincerely with other characters. Paradoxically, this history of manipulation functions as a sincerity effect on the narrative level. By openly disclosing their dissimulation to the reader, Dave, Sheila and Adam frame the narrator-reader relationship as a privileged one. Here, they can discuss their shame and embarrassment at their own behavior openly. Yet this framing is always balanced by a skepticism in the capacity of language to communicate authentic experience. Thus, at a foundational level, these narratives revolve around the fear that sincerity is inevitably doomed to fail. If this were true, however, then why write about sincerity and irony in the first place? Why not abandon sincerity as an old-fashioned ideal that is too contradictory to make sense? The answer to that question can be found in the Romantic heritage of the New Sincerity. Like their Romantic predecessors, the authors of the New Sincerity value the desire for transcendence despite of its inaccessibility. 13

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Even though sincerity must necessarily fail, this failure produces a gesture at the representation of authentic experience. It is therefore a “productive failure”. It revolves not so much around the possibility of sincerity, but around the importance of the desire for it. If we feel this desire, then we will try to make ourselves understood despite of all our epistemological doubts. This is the foundation for the communion and the trust these authors, narrators and protagonists so clearly yearn for. It is the logic of productive failure. The three novels I selected as my case studies all deal with this logic in their own way. Chronologically speaking, Dave Eggers’ memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is an outlier. It was published in 2000, at the high point of the first wave of the New Sincerity. In it, Eggers imagines himself as the literary “anti-rebel” that Wallace called for. His narration of the death of his two parents and his troubled adolescence sets the stage for a meditation on the blurry boundary between sincerity and irony. Eggers’ literary debut hit a nerve with both critics and readers and popularized these themes for future generations of writers. Unlike AHWOSG, Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station is not marketed as a memoir, but as a novel. It revolves around the same themes, however. Adam Gordon, the protagonist, is a young American poet who travels to Spain on a scholarship (just as Lerner did in the past). His narrative is not just a reflection about poetry, but also about the capacity of language to capture experience in general. This reflection is also the central element of Sheila Heti’s novel How Should a Person Be?. Sheila, the protagonist of the novel, is a young playwright who narrates her own failure of writing a play. While Lerner’s and Heti’s novels were published in 2011 and 2014, respectively, they read like contemporary reimaginations of Eggers’ debut. All three novels are autofictional, i.e. they simultaneously and paradoxically offer an autobiographical and a fictional pact. This contradictory approach is consistent with the ambivalence inherent to the logic of productive failure. They are also Künstlerromane that revolve around the lives of authors and the social scene they work in. Furthermore, they deal with the process of their own creation, which makes them intensely metafictional. Finally, they all feature a unique narrative situation. There is an overt contrast between the protagonist, who is usually manipulative and egocentric, and the narrator, who transparently discloses these manipulative and egocentric tendencies to the reader. This contrast blurs the line between reliability and unreliability. All of these elements participate in the reflection of productive failure as a literary and philosophical concept. 14

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At the same time, my three case studies highlight different approaches within the New Sincerity. They all understand sincerity as a response to crisis, yet the precise nature of that crisis differs in each case. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius looks to sincerity as a response to a crisis of representation. Eggers, like Wallace, locates this crisis in the workings of Postmodern Irony. His writing not only probes for an alternative, it desires to become that alternative. While Leaving the Atocha Station displays a similar desire at times, it is a much more explicit response to a political crisis. By telling the story of the Madrid Train Bombings of 2004, it reflects on the global implications of the American “War on Terror”. How Should a Person Be?, on the other hand, understands sincerity as the response to a crisis of identity. Torn between the demands of authenticity and post-feminist self-optimization, Sheila yearns for a new mode of relating to herself and to others. In addition to this, the three novels also frame the concept of failure in a different way. For Eggers, writing about failure is very much a means to an end. His memoir portrays its constant oscillation between the desire for connection and postmodern solipsism as a ground clearing. Suspended between these two poles, readers have no other choice but to place trust and blind faith into the sincerity of Dave Eggers. The fact that Eggers writes about his life even though he is torn apart by doubt is meant to function as a powerful sincerity effect. Lerner’s LTAS, by contrast, is largely skeptical about the productivity of his artistic and moral failures. Even though the autodiegetic narrator “Adam” is a thinly veiled alter ego of the author, Lerner constantly reminds readers that there is a considerable distance between his protagonist, his narrator, and himself. While the solipsism and mythomania of Adam are held up as a cautionary tale to readers, LTAS does not really offer a suitable alternative. The text is truly torn between doubt and hope. It is the clearest example for Romantic Irony among the three. Unlike the other two novels, How Should A Person Be? understands failure as a metaphysical concept. Sheila, the protagonist, takes on the character of the schlemiel, an archetype of Jewish folklore. The schlemiel has to come to terms with the fact that failure is an existential part of their life. Similarly, Sheila’s narrative revolves around the acceptance of failure and suffering on personal and creative level. Before I analyze my case studies in detail, I will outline the evolution of sincerity as a philosophical and literary concept. The historical context of sincerity extends not just to its Christian roots, the Reformation and the Puritans, but also to thinkers of the Enlightenment such as Rousseau and Diderot. Afterwards, my 15

1 Introduction

theoretical analysis will turn to irony. Specifically, I trace why Romantic Irony and Postmodern Irony are relevant for my concept of “productive failure”. I will also show how the New Sincerity developed as a literary movement in response to Romantic and Postmodern Irony. There are also important theoretical considerations when it comes to the stylistic choices made by writers of the New Sincerity. In this context, I will explain why parrhesia (a complement to sincerity) helps to understand the narrative perspective of my case studies. I will also show how the autofictional framing of these novels is intimately connected to my notion of “productive failure”. In my close reading of AHWOSG, LTAS and HSAPB, I will then probe their specific entanglement of sincerity and irony. I hope to demonstrate that they all pursue the logic of “productive failure” in a search for connection, communion and trust.

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2 Theorizing Productive Failure 2.1 The Concept of Sincerity 2.1.1 Sincerity as a Christian Ideal Sincerity is the yearning to bridge the gap between our minds and those of others. This yearning has been a part of sincerity’s allure ever since Protestant reformers used it as a rallying cry against the Catholic Church. In order to understand this yearning fully, we have to account for the context around the invention of sincerity in the time of Luther and Calvin. Before sincerity became the defining virtue of the Reformation, Christian scholars and theologians used the ideal of concordia to “describe the proper interplay between self and one’s words and deeds” (Martin 1327). They strove for a harmony between what one believed and said to others. Their ethical justification for concordia was a spiritual one: Since the self was created in the image of God, it was the believer’s duty to discover it and communicate it to others (see Martin 1327). In their revolt against the Catholic Church, Martin Luther and John Calvin replaced the ideal of concordia with the ideal of sinceritas. Etymologically, this concept is derived from the Latin cognate sincerus. Even though there are different explanations for its origin7 sincerus is commonly understood to mean “pure, genuine” (Simpson 508). At first, sincerus was used to certify the purity of material goods. In the time of the Reformation, however, it morphed into a moral ideal in the form of sinceritas. Where concordia had urged Christians to discover the image of God within themselves, Luther and Calvin were convinced that humans were fundamentally different from their creator: “The human person was no longer viewed as in a (potentially) harmonious relation to God,

7

Both Trilling (see 12) and Assmann (see 27) derive the etymological origin of sincerity from sine cera, “without wax”. The OED disputes this claim (see Simpson 508).

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the cosmos, and to him or herself but as an inevitably sinful portion of Creation, whose value in God’s eyes was largely a mystery” (Martin 1329). Sinceritas, then, consisted in laying bare the sinful self for the public to see. Luther especially prioritized the outward expression of emotions. For him, the heart was the central metaphor in this respect. The duty of good Christians was to uncover the passions that moved them. This was an intensely individual endeavor. Each person was characterized “by its own irreducible individuality, its particular desires and affections that set it apart from other persons” (Martin 1333). This understanding of sincerity inscribed the subject and the individual into the cultural discourse of the West. Yet Luther, and to a greater extent Calvin, understood this subject to be fundamentally flawed. In his theology, Calvin built the foundation for much of the Puritan belief that conquered New England in the 16th century and influences American culture to this day (see Bercovitch 2011). He taught his followers that they were corrupted and had been so ever since the fall of man: “‘Self’ for Puritans meant the small, depraved, and rotten core inside each person that longed for all that was seven-sinful and stood in the way of a godly life: vanity, greed, jealousy, sloth and the like” (Magill 2013: 55). The Puritan doctrine of unconditional election meant that God would only save a few of the corrupted sinners. They had no agency in their salvation whatsoever. As a result, Puritan society developed a rigid system of surveillance directed towards the self and others. They longed for signs to show them whether they would eventually be saved or condemned to hell. One of these self-surveillance mechanisms resulted in a new form of writing, the confessional autobiography (see Magill 2013: 55). In it, members of Puritan communities recorded their sins and shortcomings for the public to see. Both in their writings and their sermons, Puritans strove most of all to be sincere. For them, sincerity was the cardinal virtue that enabled all other virtues. Since they perceived themselves as depraved, they needed to purify themselves through sincere interactions with God, themselves, and others (see Bierwirth 46). Whether an individual tended towards sincerity or manipulation was the clearest answer to the two guiding questions of every Puritan: “‘Am I pure?’ and ‘Am I one of the elect?’” (Bierwirth 63). If one lived a life of sincerity, one could hope for salvation in the afterlife. Though the Reformation is largely responsible for the Western understanding of sincerity, it is not the only movement that left an impression on the concept. 18

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Intellectually speaking, the French Enlightenment thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau built a bridge between the Renaissance and Modernity when it comes to sincerity. In his confessional autobiographies, he, too, cemented sincerity as a cardinal virtue. He also intertwined sincerity with authenticity and thus invented a new conception of the relation between self and society (see Williams 172). New to Rousseau’s understanding of sincerity was the inversion of its relation to authenticity. Where modern definitions postulate authenticity as the condition for sincerity, Rousseau instead understood sincerity as the condition for authenticity: “[Rousseau’s project] requires, as we have seen, the authority of self-discovery: the idea that sincere, spontaneous, non-deceitful declaration, the product of his presence to himself, will guarantee a true understanding of his motives” (Williams 178). Sincerity thus reveals the self not only to others, but also to oneself. Only through sincere expression can the “coherent” and “steady” self come into existence (Williams 178). That is why Rousseau understood his writings as nothing else but a complete depiction of his true personality, which would not have been possible without his total will to be sincere. The idea that life writing could express the authentic core of personality is even stronger in Rousseau than it was for the Puritans. It is the foundation for the yearning authors and readers feel to this day. Yet Williams’ account shows that Rousseau felt the pitfalls of this yearning in his own life. Even though he felt he had delivered a perfect account of his self-understanding, others doubted the purity of his intentions or understood it differently than he did. The only explanation for this failure of sincerity in Rousseau’s mind could be that “those who systematically did not understand him were wicked, members of an evil conspiracy” (Williams 180). So, throughout much of his later life, Rousseau felt isolated and rejected from a society he had shown his deepest secrets. He was convinced that his self-inflicted vulnerability was only ever repaid by misunderstanding and injustice. This bitterness derives from an almost fanatical belief in the power of sincerity, and the inevitable disillusionment that ensued.

2.1.2 Sincerity: A Definition In spite of his later fanaticism, Rousseau did inscribe the connection between authenticity and sincerity into the cultural and academic discourse. As an ideal, sincerity still cannot be defined without taking recourse to authenticity. In their 19

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seminal studies on sincerity, both Lionel Trilling and Ernst van Alphen and Mieke Bal attest to this. Their definitions display not only the importance of sincerity in the intellectual history of the West, but also the contradictions that arise from the marriage between sincerity and authenticity. Trilling discusses this connection in his aptly titled essay Authenticity and Sincerity. In it, he defines sincerity as a “congruence between avowal and actual feeling” (2). He thus points right to the core of the ideal that has been an integral part of Western culture for the last four centuries: the yearning for a connection between our interior lives and the language we use to communicate with others. Trilling employs Shakespeare’s Hamlet as an example for this need. In Polonius’ advice to his son Laertes, he sees an encapsulation of the nexus between sincerity and authenticity: “This above all: to thine own self be true / And it doth follow, as the night the day, / thou canst not then be false to any man” (qtd. in Trilling 3). The first part, “to thine own self be true”, presupposes the existence of a core that contains individual thoughts, feelings, values, and experiences. It urges Laertes to strive for a congruence with that self in the way he lives his life. This congruence, in turn, can only be achieved through introspection. Once it is achieved, Laertes can live in concord with himself  – he is authentic. For Polonius, this authentic selfhood is of importance “above all”. He represents the Humanist conviction that each of us is an individual. The value of this individuality derives from the fact that we have an authentic self. Yet the end of Polonius’ assertion draws attention to a byproduct of authenticity: “thou canst not then be false to any man”. Here, Polonius moves from the private matter of authenticity to the public concern of sincerity. Where authenticity is directed inward, “to some place where all movement ends, and begins” (Trilling 13), sincerity is directed outward, to society. Following this logic, an individual can call themselves sincere if they can relate their authentic experiences and thoughts to others. This virtue is essential in building trust: only if others feel that we disclose our interior without dissimulation will they open themselves in return. Yet for Trilling, it is precisely this orientation towards the other that has rendered sincerity obsolete. Where authenticity promises true congruence with the self, sincerity becomes a contradictory ideal: If one is true to one’s own self for the purpose of avoiding falsehood to others, is one being truly true to one’s own self? The moral end in view implies

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2.1 The Concept of Sincerity a public end in view, with all this suggests of the esteem and fair repute that follow upon the correct fulfillment of a public role. (9)

In other words: when we succeed in convincing others of our sincerity, we gain their trust. This incentivizes us to play a role, rather than seeking congruence with who we truly are. Trilling’s accusation shows that the entanglement of sincerity and authenticity is more complicated than it might seem at first. If an individual only draws upon the rhetoric of sincerity out of selfish reasons, then the concept loses the purity and transparency it promises in the first place. The fear that one’s alleged sincerity might just be mere egotism is quite common to the characters of David Foster Wallace, and it frequently appears in the works of Eggers, Lerner and Heti as well. The second definition of sincerity I would like to discuss draws attention to this entanglement as well. According to van Alphen and Bal, sincerity is the “natural enactment of authenticity anchored in, and yielding, truth” (1). Again, they refer to the notion that authentic states must be ‘translated’ to become legible for others, which allows them to have an impression of who we truly are. Van Alphen and Bal readily admit that the phrase “natural enactment of authenticity” sounds paradoxical to modern ears. They also emphasize that sincerity requires a “specific notion of subjectivity” (3), namely one that assumes the existence of an inner self we can communicate to others. Even though this notion of subjectivity “has been severely deconstructed in past decades” (3), sincerity still remains a part of our cultural discourse, often without bearing much scrutiny.

2.1.3 Sincerity as a Performative Contradiction According to Aleida Assmann, the artist who popularized the contradictory nature of sincerity was William Shakespeare. She chooses Hamlet as grounds for her argument, specifically the first scene, in which Hamlet’s mother complains about his long-drawn-out grief. Hamlet’s answer to her accusations quickly veers from justification into a reflection about sincerity and authenticity: ’Tis not alone my inky cloak, cold mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black,

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2 Theorizing Productive Failure Nor windy suspiration of forced breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected haviour of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief That can denote me truly. These indeed ‘seem’, For they are actions that a man might play, But I have that within which passes show, These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (Shakespeare 1.2.77–86)

Hamlet complains that the grief about the death of his father cannot be communicated to others. If sincerity is understood as the ‘natural enactment of authenticity,’ then it logically follows that both authenticity and sincerity can only ever exist as absences. According to Assmann, Hamlet thus radically questions signification itself. Since the real grief within Hamlet ‘passes show,’ all external signifiers such as tears, sighs and a sad mien are disconnected from his authentic experience of emotional loss: “Exterior and interior do not mirror each other, there is no single undoubtable proof for the authenticity of a feeling because all its external manifestations can be enacted and are therefore subject to manipulation and fraud” (Assmann 35, my translation). Authenticity becomes a paradox that cannot be integrated into the symbolic order. On the one hand, Hamlet leaves no doubt that his authentic self exists, as does his deeply felt grief. On the other hand, this authentic self can impossibly be represented in language. Any system of signs would therefore always already be inauthentic, since it “lacks the authenticity of what is truly unspoiled, untouched by mediating cultural codes” (Culler, qtd. in Funk 13). This “gate-keeper paradox” (Funk 13) encapsulates most definitions of authenticity. The concept refers to an essence that eludes mediation and representation. At the same time, it has tempted artists and philosophers into trying to mediate and represent it (see Funk 17). Insofar as sincerity is associated with this notion of authenticity, it necessarily becomes paradoxical. That is why Assman uses the term “performative contradiction” (35) to describe the nexus of sincerity and authenticity. The yearning to communicate immediacy through mediation is paradoxical, which Hamlet makes clear to his mother. Just like Rousseau transported the ideal of sincerity from the Renaissance to modernity, his contemporary and friend Diderot carried the idea of the performative contradiction forward into the Enlightenment. His Paradox of the Actor 22

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revolves around the question whether a speaker should experience the emotion they attempt to evoke. In contrast to the popular opinion of his time, he argues that actors should be emotionally detached from their performance. If actors drew inspiration from their own experience, fatigue would set in after the tenth or hundredth performance, and their impression on the audience would suffer (see 7). According to Diderot, the same holds true for artists in general: “And pray, why should the actor be different from the poet, the painter, the orator, the musician? It is not in the stress of the first burst that characteristic traits come out, it is in the moments of stillness and self-command” (13). For Diderot, art is an endeavor that requires careful planning and contemplation for the ‘characteristic traits’ of genius to manifest themselves. Sincerity would be counterproductive, since he understands it as a spontaneous and uninhibited snapshot of the protean “swarm of bees” that is the self (Williams 190). Art and sincerity become structurally incommensurable. While self-expression must account for continuous change that only ends in death, the artwork, even if it is a performance on a stage, must be finite. In consequence, Diderot’s ‘paradox of acting’ hints at the entanglement of the performative contradiction with the notion of Romantic irony, a concept that will play an important role in the ongoing discussion. Diderot’s tentative skepticism about the stability of the self returned in much darker colors with the advent of Freud’s psychoanalysis at the fin de siècle. Freud proposed a fundamental split between the conscious mind, or ego, and the unconscious, or id. The id harbors repressed drives and urges, which surface symbolically and influence a person’s behavior without their conscious awareness. The institutionalization of Freud’s views eroded sincerity and contributed to its erstwhile end as a moral ideal: Until Freud, sincerity could be defined as saying what one believed. Since Freud, this is no longer a sufficient definition. The difference between what I say and what I believe assumes a new dimension, namely that of my unconscious striving … conscious sincerity means very little within the whole of someone’s personality structure. (Fromm qtd. in Sembera 173)

Regarding the split between conscious and unconscious, Freud’s theory could be understood as a reformulation of the performative contradiction: the authentic self cannot be represented because it is unavailable to consciousness, it is repressed. In 23

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this vein, the structure of the id can only be inferred by the imprint it leaves on the ego. The addition of the superego in Civilization and its Discontents muddied this clear-cut dichotomy. The superego constrains our libidinal forces when we communicate with others, but it does so by inflicting pain and guilt on the ego. The guilt springs from the repressed wishes ingrained in our psychological development, namely to kill the father and bed the mother (see Trilling 152). Because of this, the mind has “at its core a flagrant inauthenticity which it deplores but accepts as essential in the mental structure” (Trilling 154). By introducing the superego, Freud goes even further than Hamlet. Where the performative contradiction addresses the incommensurability of authentic experience and representation, Freud’s theory imagines a psychological mechanism that alienates us from our self and renders authenticity impossible. After the Second World War, a slew of studies rang the death knell for sincerity and its relevance to aesthetic and ethic debates (see Trilling, Peyre, Ball). Their theoretical thrust was still inflected by Humanism, as was their belief in the existence of an essential self. Even Freud was of the opinion that a skilled analyst could reveal the workings of the unconscious to their patient. For the post-structural thinkers that followed them, the distinction between self on the inside and social mask on the outside became untenable. After what is often described as the ‘linguistic turn,’ it became commonplace to assume that the self was constituted by and called into being through language. A differentiation between essential selfhood and the means of representation would thus be impossible, since only the means of representation exist. Where meaning was previously anchored by a divine or authentic self – the ‘place where all movement begins, and ends’ – there was now only the chain of signification and its inherent différance. From a linguistic standpoint, sincerity was a nonsensical construction. Since meaning deferred and disseminated endlessly, every verbal or written utterance could impossibly mean just one thing. There simply could be no congruence between intention and expression (see de Vries 106–7). Even the very notion of self was placed under erasure. Just as Baudrillard’s “hyperreality” masked the absence of the real behind ever more sophisticated technologies of representation, the age-old prevalence of sincerity and authenticity was taken as a mask for the absence of the self. In fact, they became a shorthand for this very absence. Guignon’s redefinition of authenticity in a postmodern world encapsulates this development: 24

2.1 The Concept of Sincerity Postmodern authenticity is the ideal of clear-sightedly and courageously embracing the fact that there is no ‘true self’ to be, of recognizing that where we formerly had sought a true self, there is only an empty space, a gap, or a lack. The postmodern ideal, then, is to be that lack of self with playfulness and ironic amusement. (qtd. in Funk 29)

As the idea of authenticity was turned on its head, sincerity followed suit. If it was discussed at all, then as a matter of performance, not of ontology. The important question was no longer how to be sincere, but how to do sincerity. The introduction to van Alphen and Bal’s study on sincerity gives expression to this pragmatic realignment: “This book’s assumption, that sincerity consists of a performance, implies a special focus on the theatricality of sincerity: its bodily, linguistic and social performances and the success, or felicitousness, of such performances” (3). The shifting relation between sincerity and authenticity gives rise to another contradiction. Before Postmodernism, when the two concepts were still perceived as tightly linked, the performative contradiction rendered both paradoxical. After Postmodernism, which severed the link or at least deemed it obsolete, sincerity seems curiously devoid of meaning. As we have seen, the ideal of sincerity has been assaulted from a variety of different angles since its conception. The performative contradiction holds that authenticity cannot be communicated to others, as it resists representation. Diderot characterized the self as fluid and unstable and was skeptical that language could ever deliver more than a temporary snapshot of it. Freud went even further and questioned our ability of self-discovery in general. Why, then, does our cultural discourse return to this particular moral ideal again and again? One possible answer is that sincerity often emerges as a response to social crises on multiple levels. According to Gorenstein, sincerity promises the generation of trust and community in times of social and political upheaval. She connects the emergence of the New Sincerity movement in the US to both the fallout of the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and the financial crisis of 2007/2008 (see 29). Yet sincerity can also become popular as a reaction against crises of representation. In the case of the New Sincerity, the preoccupation with sincerity is a clear response to the ‘linguistic turn’ I have just described. Besides the epistemological challenges of Postmodernism, the emergence of new media has also hastened a return to sincerity: 25

2 Theorizing Productive Failure Similar to the new media and expanding literary markets of the Renaissance (rise of print-media and theater) and the Romantic period (explosion of periodical literature and the novel), the ‘digital revolution’ of the turn of the millennium fostered a preoccupation with sincerity. (Gorenstein 30)

In the face of these changes, sincerity is often viewed as a possibility to reconnect experience and representation. In the following section, I will discuss how these crises of representation have led to an engagement with sincerity in the realm of literary theory and philosophy.

2.2 Navigating Sincerity and Irony in Literature The idea of sincerity rests on a contradiction. It aims to short-circuit the gap between what we think or feel and what we express. Yet, crucially, ‘what we think or feel’ has often been understood to be the core of a true, authentic self. This authentic self is valued precisely because it resists any attempt at representation or communication. This, in turn, makes it unavailable for the ideal of sincere communication. Aleida Assmann has termed this the “performative contradiction,” and its reverberations can be observed in the content and the aesthetics of the novels I discuss. Eggers, Lerner and Heti share an awareness that the ideal of sincerity is unachievable. The narrators of their novels know that their attempts to be sincere must fail. The fact that they nonetheless pursue this ideal makes their art possible in the first place. Consequently, their engagement with sincerity is more nuanced and complicated than a simple call for a return to old-fashioned virtues. Instead, they probe a liminal space between sincerity and irony. This liminality has been a part of the literature of the New Sincerity from the beginning. In his tongue-in-cheek manifesto for the movement, radio host Jesse Thorn described it as “irony and sincerity combined, like Voltron” (n.p.). One a more serious note, Eve claims that the literature of the New Sincerity “is never just a case of sincerity or irony, and the two can co-exist” (36). Similarly, I understand my body of primary texts as the continuation of a discussion about sincerity, irony and subjectivity that has been active since the 18th century. Both the statements and the works of Eggers, Lerner and Heti show that they see their project as a 26

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reaction to the concepts of Romantic Irony, Postmodern Irony, and their philosophical and aesthetic implications. In this section, I will explain what makes these concepts so important for the novels I look at, and how they are connected to the New Sincerity as a whole.

2.2.1 Romantic Irony Romantic Irony developed as “both a philosophical conception of the universe and an artistic program in the 18th century in Germany” (Mellor 4). Its main proponents were the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger, Ludwig Tieck and Novalis (see Comstock 47). These artists, intellectuals and philosophers faced an existential problem. The art of the Romantics was always characterized by a longing for the absolute. Novalis, for example, claims that to romanticize is to “give a higher meaning to the ordinary, a mysterious nature to the everyday, the value of the unknown to the known, and the appearance of the infinite to the finite” (qtd. in de Mul 7). These were the ideals that governed Romanticism: the mysterious, the unknown, the infinite. Yet in their pursuit of these ideals, the Romantics encountered an unsolvable problem that Mellor traces back to Friedrich Schiller: “This attempt fills him [Schiller] with a longing for a perfect knowledge of reality and a direct experience of the infinite. But this longing must forever remain frustrated, since Schiller followed Kant in denying to the human mind an accurate apprehension of the noumenal world” (28–29). In the context of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, the noumenon is an object that exceeds rational understanding and cannot be experienced by the senses. Similarly, Schiller argues that the human mind is simply unable to grasp that which the Romantic desires: the mysterious, the unknown, and the infinite. This is due to the fact that human beings and their cultures are transitory and finite themselves. As a result, the desire to transcend their own condition is doomed to fail. This, in turn, has implications for the Romantic understanding of art. Even though Romantic artists always hoped to capture the totality of the universe in their creation, the end result was inevitably static and limited. For this reason, Colebrook contextualizes Romantic art as a “process of the Fall of creative life into inert objectivity” (49). The crushing realization that art and language could 27

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never represent absolute truth and beauty resulted in a “crisis of consciousness” (de Mul 9). Romantic irony developed as a response to this crisis. Rather than giving in to resignation, melancholic nostalgia or apathy, the Romantics of the Jenaer circle (the Schlegels, Tieck, Novalis, among others) pursued an ironic idealism. They aspired towards an absolute they knew could not be represented: “[By] treating with irony the unachievable desire that is characteristic of human involvement in the world, the Romantic can cherish that desire without falling prey to the despair that is attached to it” (de Mul 10). Because the Romantics understood the desire for transcendence as essential to human existence, they had to invest irony with the utmost importance. It was the only way to pursue a dream that could never become reality. As a result, irony became a “style of existence rather than a rhetorical figure” (Colebrook 52). In the following paragraphs, I will analyze not just the details of this style of existence, but also its repercussions for Romantic art. The first key characteristic of Romantic Irony is the awareness of temporality. Since human lives are finite, all of their creations can only ever be incomplete renderings of their infinite universe. For this reason, the critic and author Friedrich Schlegel implored artists to view their work as but an illusion of the reality they seek to represent. He was convinced that art should pulsate with this awareness, that all artists should constantly oscillate between creating elaborate illusions and then tearing them down. Schlegel calls this the alternation between “self-creation and self-destruction” (1967: 172, my translation). In practical terms, then, artists had to “constantly mirror themselves, their desires and beliefs, and even as they mirror them, reflect critically upon them” (Mellor 15). Schlegel himself called for a “permanent parabasis” (1963: 85, my translation) in order to achieve this. By this, he meant metafictional passages that draw attention to the composed nature of the work. Yet the operations of Romantic Irony in a text are not limited to metafictional address. They also include contradictory themes or voices that are balanced in a work without being brought to a synthesis (see Mellor 18). The last part is particularly important, because Schlegel thought of this oscillation between creation and destruction as eternal. For him, Romantic Irony was a movement without rest, a constant search that could only end in a utopian future. The examples I provided in the last paragraph touch on not only the provisional, but also the liminal nature of Romantic Irony. When Schlegel defines irony as constant oscillation, he is propagating an existence between opposite poles. He 28

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states that Romantic poetics can “am meisten zwischen dem Dargestellten und dem Darstellenden, frei von allem realen und idealen Interesse auf den Flügeln der poetischen Reflexion in der Mitte Schweben, diese Reflexion immer wieder potenzieren und wie in einer endlosen Reihe von Spiegeln vervielfachen” (1967: 182). Schlegel employs metaphors of oscillation, reflection and liminality. He imagines Romantic irony as an endless movement between a thing and its reflection. In his own writing, this manifests itself as representation and the reflection of representation, the self and the reflection of the self, fiction and the reflection of fictionality. Because the movement between these poles is eternal, Schlegel frames Romantic irony as utopian liminality – an endless in-between state. Schlegel and his contemporaries were indebted to the Idealist philosopher Fichte for this image. He located transcendence in the moment of consciousness becoming conscious of itself. Thus, self-reflection became the true object of philosophy: “The intellect, as Fichte understood it, ‘looks at itself’ in philosophizing and thereby comprehends all that which it contains” (Behler 57). What Fichte understood as a real possibility, Romantic irony delays into a utopian future. In the fragments of Schlegel, transcendence is aspired to, but never reached through the rhythm of self-creation and self-destruction (see Behler 58). One aspect of Romantic irony that has been mentioned in passing but not in detail is Parousia. In Christian theology, Parousia refers to the coming of Jesus Christ, i.e. the manifestation of the divine spirit in the mortal world. In reference to Romantic philosophy, Parousia describes the entry of the absolute and infinite into the finite artwork. It is the site of the “crisis of consciousness” mentioned by de Mul: the desire for the absolute, paired with knowledge of its elusiveness. The one thinker – other than Schlegel – who popularized this tension as a key part of Romantic irony was the aesthetic philosopher K.  W.  F. Solger. He attempted to connect the notion of Parousia to a theory of art (see Ophälders 27–29). Solger considered art to be the one site where divine ideas could manifest themselves. The idea – the object of Romantic desire – vanished as soon as it entered the finite piece of art, however. This destruction of the idea was a cause for “infinite sadness” (Solger 387). By dint of its infinite nature, Solger’s idea could only be represented in art ex negativo. And yet, even though art could only express the absence of the divine, it was in this very moment of transition between infinite truth and finite representation that the idea could be intuited more clearly than 29

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anywhere else. Solger explains this process as one of simultaneous creation and destruction, and its method as irony (see 387). Solger’s understanding of irony differs from that of Schlegel, however. The late Schlegel valorized an irony that could “run wild” (1967: 369, my translation), subvert social norms and raze differences between stable oppositions such as true and false or good and bad. By contrast, Solger castigates “fake irony” that merely attempts to prove “dass es keine Tugend, keine Wahrheit, nichts Edles und Reines gäbe, ja dass der Mensch, je hoffnungsvoller er nach diesem Höherem strebt, nur desto tiefer in den Schmutz der Sinnlichkeit und Gemeinheit hinabstürze” (388). The Romantic irony he has in mind conveys the ideal by tracing its transition into finite systems of signification. For Solger, it logically follows that the artwork itself is only a means to an end. What a poem or novel actually contains is not nearly as important as its gesture at an infinite idea. He employs the image of the shell to make this point: “Daher erscheint das Kunstwerk als etwas, um das es eigentlich nicht zu tun ist, als die Hülle eines inneren Geheimnisses, als die Erscheinung eines Wesens” (Solger qtd. Ophälders 93). Solger postulates that art must necessarily fail to capture the absolute, yet this failure is productive. Through the negative power of art, it gestures at that which it cannot represent. If we understand sincerity with Assmann as a “performative contradiction”, it becomes clear that it describes the same mechanism as Romantic Irony. Both posit the existence of an essence that transcends representation. Both posit that language and art can never quite capture this essence. Yet both symbolize the yearning to capture this essence all the same. This similarity between the two ideals is the reason why many Romantic thinkers no longer differentiated between irony and sincerity: As a suggestive way of being, then, irony in German Romanticism shifts its meaning from that of a rhetorical strategy to that of a strategy of being, such that irony became the only true and, most importantly, authentic, style of existence. To be ironic was, paradoxically, to be sincere. And to be sincere was to be moral, authentic, trustworthy – characteristics that many Romantics from throughout Europe and America saw as threatened by the encroachment of industrialization and science upon the mystery of human being. (Magill 2006: 55)

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At the same time, this conflation of sincerity and irony robbed sincerity of its power as a moral virtue. In my discussion of Parousia, it has become clear that Solger viewed art as the only medium capable of even approaching divine ideas. Many Romantics shared this sentiment. Because of this, art was also the only aspect of human culture where the concepts of irony and sincerity mattered: “Indem Aufrichtigkeit vollends in die Kunst und Literatur auswandert, entledigt sie sich einerseits ihres Mantels der Tugend und verweist andererseits in ihrer neuen künstlerischen Form weiterhin hartnäckig auf diesen Verlust” (Bierwirth 85). This is the sense of melancholy that Solger alluded to in his discussion of Romantic Irony. If sincerity can only ever manifest itself in art ex negativo, then the yearning for a “congruence of avowal and actual feeling” in everyday conversation must forever remain an illusion.

2.2.2 Postmodern Irony The New Sincerity is often framed as a direct response to Postmodernism and, specifically, the concept of postmodern irony. In this section, I entertain a set of theoretical questions that revolve around this concept: What, exactly, is the difference between Romantic Irony and Postmodern Irony? How did Postmodern Irony inflect the concept of sincerity? Lastly, why and how did the New Sincerity react so strongly against it? The term ‘Postmodernism’ refers to a nexus of theories and aesthetics that rose during a ‘linguistic turn’ in cultural and literary studies. This linguistic turn holds that subjects and societies are constructed by language, and that language is a system of multiple simultaneous meanings that are indeterminable. Because of this vagueness at the heart of language, postmodern thinkers and artists valued irony just as much as the Romantics did: If there is nothing other than signification, with no subjects who signify or world to be signified, then we would be left with a world of ‘saying’, without any possibility of underlying truth or ultimate sense. Such a world would be radically ironic, for no speech act could be legitimated, justified or grounded. To describe postmodernity as a society of the simulacra, where copies and repetitions have no original, where systems have no centre and where

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2 Theorizing Productive Failure images have no prior model of substance imaged, is to see the postmodern present as finally having liberated itself from the constraining myths of an ultimate real. (Colebrook 153–154)

This postmodern vision is radically ironic because there is no longer any meaningful distinction between what we want to say or write and what we actually say or write. As the boundary between internal self and external utterance breaks down, the only thing is the free play of the signifier. As a consequence of this paradigm shift, sincerity became an obsolete and nonsensical term. If language becomes the real protagonist of postmodern literature, as Völz claims, the foundation for the ideal of sincerity crumbles away (see 2016: 150). Without the notion of subjectivity, sincerity loses its meaning. Rutten makes a similar observation when she argues that for Butler, Derrida, Foucault and Barthes, the “social demand to be true to oneself is unethical: if the language we use is culturally constructed rather than neutral, attempts to give an account of oneself are by default partial and failed” (69). Viewed through the theoretical lens of post-structuralism, sincerity must indeed fail. That is why the term lost its descriptive power during Postmodernism. Yet how is Postmodern Irony related to Romantic Irony when it comes to the role of sincerity? To recall, during Romanticism, sincerity changed from a moral ideal to an aesthetic principle. There were, in fact, so many similarities between this version of sincerity and Romantic Irony that the boundary between the two began to blur. By contrast, Postmodern Irony resulted in an environment that was hostile to sincerity and relished in deconstructing the concept. It is puzzling, then, that there is no shortage of critics who claim that Romantic Irony and Postmodern Irony are essentially the same concept. Consider for example Magill, who in his study of Romantic Irony claims that: “Schlegel held the equivalent of some postmodern, post-colonial notions that remain present with us today as commonly accepted assumptions: truth as relative, nature and reality as always changing, reality is contradictory and complex – incomprehensible, un-totalizable – aptly, fragmentary” (2006: 61). This overlap between Schlegel’s theories and postmodern ideas is largely due to the importance of irony among both the Romantics and postmodernists. This is also the main reason why Schlegel was popular among many members of the Yale School of Deconstruction. One of the most prominent members of this group, Paul de Man, saw in Schlegel a precursor 32

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of his own ideas, and in Schlegel’s writings on irony a foundation for the theory of deconstruction: “It [Romantic Irony] dissolves in the narrowing spiral of a linguistic sign that becomes more and more remote from its meaning, and it can find no escape from this spiral” (222). By framing Schlegelian irony in these terms, de Man basically conflates it with Postmodern Irony, a move he was not alone in making (see Comstock 448). While it is true that there are similarities between the two, it would be reductive to regard them as the same concept. There a few key differences between Romantic Irony and Postmodern Irony, which are often overlooked. The first difference is neatly summarized by Quendler: As regards the different functional uses of Romantic Irony and postmodernist metafiction, the potentialization of the stake correlates with a radicalization that can be described as the functional shift of critical meta-reflexivity from expressing a dialectical movement towards the absolute to negating the same. (159)

Quendler posits that both the Romantics and the Postmodernists use the same textual strategy: critical meta-reflexivity. Their goal, however, is completely different. Where Romantic Irony gestures at the absolute through the dialectical movement of self-creation and self-destruction, Postmodern Irony means to negate the mere existence of absolutes. Derrida’s theory of différance achieves this negation by conceiving of language as an infinite chain of signifiers in which meaning is constantly deferred and delayed. In this version of language, the search for a transcendental signifier that grounds meaning in an extra-linguistic reality is futile. The project of Schlegel was opposed to this, as Comstock attests: “For Schlegel, the sublime, the infinite play of the universe, is not something one understands but participates in, a complex experience dramatized through irony, which doesn’t ‘say’ truth but allows for it” (464). Romantic Irony was a desire for language to transcend itself, to ‘allow’ for a truth that exceeded human experience. This hope for transcendence was the reason why the Romantics valued art above all else, and it is the main difference between Romantic and Postmodern Irony. Diverging strands of philosophical implications flow from this fundamental difference. When it comes to the attitude we have toward the world, Romantic and Postmodern Irony result in vastly different expectations. To the extreme 33

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conclusions of Postmodern Irony, de Mul ascribes “a passive-nihilistic or even fatalistic attitude” (23). This mirrors the charge of Wallace that Postmodern Irony usually ends in solipsism and apathy. When every utterance undoes itself, and every surface is but a mirror reflected in other mirrors, there is little room left for agency. By contrast, Romantic Irony was envisioned from the beginning as a cure to the apathy that arises from critical reflection. Even though the yearning for transcendence is impossible to fulfill, it is valued by Romantics not just as “constitutive for human existence” but also important for survival (de Mul 24). In a similar vein, Mellor asserts that deconstruction performs only “one half of the romantic ironic operation, that of skeptical analysis and determination of the limits of human language and consciousness” (5). The other half, according to Mellor, is an “enthusiasm for the power of human creativity to gesture at the pattern of life itself” (ibd.). For this very reason, it is likely that Romantic Irony will remain a popular model for intellectuals and artists after the dominance of Postmodern Irony in the latter half of the 20th century. In his analysis of Schlegel, de Man himself notes that irony drove both Schlegel and Kierkegaard into the arms of faith later in their lives (see 223). His implication is that the only way out of the epistemological quandaries raised by an ironic perspective on language is a belief beyond any rationality. Similarly, Ihab Hassan speculates that the aftermath of Postmodernism might result in a “postmodern spiritual attitude” (312). The way he describes this attitude brings us back to the beginning of this section: […] spirit pervades a variety of secular experiences, from dreams, creative intuitions in art or science, and a sense of the sublime, to extraordinary, visionary states, including the gift of seeing the eternal in the temporal, to apprehension of primal relations in the universe. (ibd.)

What Hassan describes here is a mirror image of Novalis’ account of how to romanticize. It checks off the hallmarks of Romantic ideals: the value of creativity and intuition, the sublime, the mystical, the infinite in the finite, the transcendental harmony of the universe. Hassan’s vision of culture and art beyond Postmodernism is, in fact, a romantic one. According to him, it demands “faith and empathy and trust precisely because it rests on Nothingness, the nothingness within all our representations” (313). This last sentence might as well have been a summary of the literature of the New Sincerity. Faith, empathy and trust are the 34

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most important values in the New Sincerity overall. They promise a connection between readers and authors in the face of the “nothingness” of the performative contradiction. In the next section, I will explain in detail how the New Sincerity developed as a response to Postmodern Irony, and how Romantic ideals can help us in understanding its project.

2.2.3 The New Sincerity 2.2.3.1 The New Sincerity in Popular Culture I have mentioned before that sincerity often becomes central to cultural debates in times of fundamental crises. The US was faced with a major political crisis at the beginning of this millennium in the form of 9/11 and the so-called “War on Terror”. In an effort to revitalize patriotism and community, many cultural commentators called for a return to sincerity in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center (see Gorenstein 29). This call for sincerity was often accompanied by a demonization of irony (see Rosenblatt). In many texts on the matter of sincerity in the last decades, sincerity and irony have been depicted as opposite poles of the moral compass. Where sincerity is conducive to the formation of trust and community and therefore “good”, irony is associated with nihilism, arrogance, cowardice and is therefore “bad”. This reductive view of irony has its roots in the cultural assessment of Postmodern Irony, which, to recall, is a very specific philosophical conception. This binary opposition between sincerity as ethically good and irony as ethically bad found its perhaps most popular expression in Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction”. In it, Wallace analyzes how irony has pervaded both mass media and American society as a whole in the 1980s and 90s. His argument is that irony was useful as a tool for rebellion among postmodern artists, but that it has debilitating effects as a cultural ethos. According to Wallace, television trains its viewers to become ironists, until “the most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others’ ridicule by betraying passé expressions of value, emotion or vulnerability. Other people become judges; the crime is naïveté” (181). This paints irony as a pact with the 35

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devil. On one hand, the reliance on irony grants invulnerability from criticism and embarrassment. On the other hand, it leads to inescapable solipsism and loneliness. For this reason, Wallace envisioned a utopian literature of the future that would abolish irony and cure the isolation and anxiety of its readers with sincerity (see 192–193). In the decades that followed Wallace’s call to action, many authors and critics took up his cause. Echoing Rosenblatt and Wallace, Wampole imagined “How to live without Irony” in her article in the New York Times. Her argument that irony “signals a deep aversion to risk” is a reformulation of Wallace’s critique (n.p.). Much like him, she sees irony as the root cause for the “emptiness and existential malaise” she detects in American society (ibd.). The alternative to these destabilizing tendencies is envisioned by Fitzgerald in his article “Sincerity, not Irony, is our Age’s Ethos”. He claims that a broad cultural movement has taken hold over the last few years in America, a movement he calls the New Sincerity. It has taken the negative consequences of Postmodern Irony to heart and instead champions seriousness and belief: “All across the pop-cultural spectrum, the emphasis on sincerity and authenticity that has arisen has made it cool to care about spirituality, family, neighbors, the environment, and the country” (n.p.) Where irony makes it cool not to care about anything, so Fitzgerald’s argues, sincerity creates an attitude of commitment that allows people to live together and trust each other. This reinforcement of sincerity, then, is the core of the New Sincerity movement. In reflections about the New Sincerity, this binary opposition of sincerity and irony returns over and over. Yet how, exactly, can sincerity manifest itself in a text? As Völz asserts, speech acts are not just sincere because they are declared as such. They need to be “enacted aesthetically” in order to be legible to the audience (see 2015: 147). When it comes to the various media that are subsumed under the label of the New Sincerity, this enactment often takes the form of an emphasis on simplicity. In order to understand the role of simplicity as a sincerity effect, we can turn to Whitman’s opening of Leaves of Grass: The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters is simplicity. [The greatest poet] swears to his art, I will not be meddlesome, I will not have in my writing any elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains. I will have nothing hang in the way not the richest curtains. (448–449)

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For Whitman, poetic language clearly has a double nature. If it is characterized by simplicity, then it is the ‘glory of expression’, yet if it is marked by ‘elegance or effect or originality’, then it shrouds the poet’s authentic experience and produces insincerity. In this tradition of thought, simplicity is shorthand for a distrust in the means of representation themselves. Every ‘excess’ of language, be it flowery diction or stylistic extravagance, is seen as a remove from a mimetic correspondence with reality. Aesthetic refinement gives rise to the suspicion of insincerity. The response is often a recourse to plain speech and the projection of stripped-down amateurism. The yearning for simplicity has a tradition that dates back to classical antiquity, when “a distrust of artifice was a recurrent feature of ancient literary criticism” (Rudd 148). While the connection between simplicity and morality did not necessarily interest the Greeks and Romans (see Rudd 149), it led to heated public debates during the quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns in the 17th century. The Moderns were a loose association of scientists and philosophers who argued fiercely for an enlightened Humanism. The historian of the Royal Society in London, Thomas Sprat, numbered himself among them, and delivered an inflammatory speech against the evils of ornate language. Arguing that “eloquence ought to be banished out of all civilized societies” (Sprat 1) because it clouds the mind and corrupts virtue, Sprat favors instead a “primitive purity” and “mathematical plainness” (Sprat 2). His manifesto closes with the fantasy of a return to a prelapsarian moment, before linguistic excess banished man from the realm of sincere and true communication. In his research on sarcasm, the linguist John Haiman outlined the persistence of these views in American popular culture and politics. The desire for a plain style, “stripped of cultural baggage” and “metacrap” (Haiman 118), goes hand in hand with anti-intellectualism and the cinematic construction of a taciturn, rugged masculinity represented by the likes of Eastwood, Brando and Schwarzenegger (see Haiman 106). Presidents such as Bush and Reagan (and, one might presently add, Trump) avail themselves of the “home-spun persona” that is identified with “down-to-earth plain speaking” (Bennett 200). The art of the New Sincerity has made extensive use of the aesthetic of simplicity to produce sincerity effects. The “New Childishness,” a style popularized by Tao Lin and Mira Gonzalez, seeks to create intimacy through “simple syntactical constructions” and a “childlike diction” (Moore 15). Another example are the 37

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folk musicians commonly associated with the New Weird America subgenre like Sufjan Stevens, Bon Iver or Devendra Banhart, whose “attractiveness is based, in part, on the desire for music that is stripped down and honest” and who follow the axiom “pure voice + instrument = sincerity” (Magill 203). Lars von Trier’s “Dogme 95” movement can be understood as a cinematic manifestation of this trend. Conceived in Denmark, Dogme 95 held its followers to a half-ironic, half-serious “vow of chastity” that included, among others, the commandments to film only on location, utilize no optical work or filters, film only with handheld cameras and forego special lighting (see von Trier). Von Trier characterized the purpose of his manifesto as a revitalization of “genuineness / sincerity” (Christensen n.p.). It was, in effect, the injection of documentary techniques into fictional filmmaking that recalled movements like the cinema vérité and its goal to capture a “pre-filmic reality” on film (Schulte-Eversum 79). What all these examples have in common is their desire to establish a sincere relation to their audience in spite of the trappings of representation that, in the words of Whitman, hang between them like the richest curtains. Their solution is to scale back ornament and refinement so that language becomes transparent, a veil that no longer distorts or shrouds. As a broad cultural movement, the New Sincerity relies on simplicity and seriousness as stylistic markers for a seemingly sincere ethos. This ethos is contrasted with irony and its purportedly destructive effects. Where irony shields the subject from risk, sincerity makes it vulnerable and thus clears the ground for the establishment of trust and community. This preoccupation with simplicity, seriousness and sincerity can be observed in film, music, the visual arts, theater, even politics and marketing.8

2.2.3.2 The New Sincerity in Literature While the literary works I analyze in this study at times make use of similar mechanisms, they go far beyond a reductive call to abandon irony for sincerity. Instead, they offer a nuanced engagement with Postmodernism and its implications. They also entangle sincerity and irony both on an aesthetic and a philosophical level. 8



For an exhaustive list of New Sincerity media and critical commentary, see Rutten 25, Gorenstein 1–2, Magill 2013: 202–213.

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Where the New Sincerity can at times take the form of a demonization of irony, the literary works associated with it transcend this binary opposition. I will nevertheless use ‘New Sincerity’ as a term to describe this period, because its benefits (connotations of shame, risk, and vulnerability as opposed to Post-postmodernism) outweigh its reductive and possibly misleading implications. The literature of the New Sincerity inherits its complex engagement with irony generally and Postmodern Irony in particular form the works of its progenitor, David Foster Wallace. In “E Unibus Pluram”, Wallace delivered a polemical manifesto against the negative aspects of an ironical stance towards life. He was especially critical of postmodern attempts to deconstruct the notion of subjectivity (see Baskin 5). For him, the function of literature was to establish an affective connection between the author and the reader. In the creation of the author, readers could discover feelings and thoughts they shared, and thus feel less alone and alienated. This was only possible, however, if readers believed that the text was written by an actual person, and, conversely, if authors aimed their text at an actual person. Both sides of literary communication thus required the notion of subjectivity outside of language. Since this subjectivity cannot be understood with linguistic means, people had to simply believe in its existence. Kostantinou identifies this belief as central to the works of Wallace, Eggers, and their contemporaries. He contrasts it with the ethos of the ironist, and thus labels their literature as “post-ironic” (174). Yet even though Wallace took a clear stance against irony and critics like Konstantinou and Baskin note his desire to “break out of the postmodern labyrinth” (Baskin 12), his work was never completely devoid of irony. In fact, Wallace recognized the need to work out of a postmodern paradigm if his voice was to be heard (see Baskins 7). That is why his works share quite a few similarities with postmodern literature: they overtly problematize their own fictionality, constantly question and deconstruct the values they convey and probe the limits of representation. Yet the point of these strategies was not, in the words of Konstantinou, to “furnish the reader with a higher-order irony or a deeper critical knowingness” (193). Instead, Wallace wanted to demonstrate that the infinite regression of ironic questioning led into a dead end. It did nothing to alleviate the solipsism and loneliness he felt, and suspected his readers felt as well. The operation of Postmodern Irony in his texts was meant to clear the ground for the possibility to believe in his sincerity: that he, as an actual person, wanted to represent his own experience of the world and thus help his readers (see Konstantinou 193). 39

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For Wallace, literature has a curative function. It does not stop short at problematizing the debilitating effects of Postmodern Irony. It is also in itself a cure to them. Where “cultural palliatives” like “drugs, sports, entertainment, therapy” no longer work for his characters, the process of writing and reading promises to alleviate pain, anxiety and loneliness (Baskin 14). In her analysis of the works of Wallace, Eggers and Danielewski, Timmer identifies the same desire to create empathy “between characters, between narrators and characters, between narrators or characters and narratee, between fictional figures and the flesh and blood ‘real’ reader” (361). In addition, she observes several patterns that characterize the literature of that generation, notably the importance of “sharing”, a “desire for some form of community”, a “willingness to belief ”, the engagement with solipsism, and an attempt to transcend irony without abandoning it completely (see 359–361). Decades after Wallace and Eggers began writing, these patterns can still be observed in the literature associated with the New Sincerity. For the sake of precision, I will detail two literary strategies that contribute to the sense of community, belief and empathy. The first strategy, which appears in all the novels analyzed in this study, is the metafictional discussion of the author’s intention while writing. Kelly explains this strategy in regard to Wallace by employing the metaphor of the gift. In the works of Derrida, the gift is described as a double bind. The act of gift giving is structured simultaneously by conditionality and unconditionality. A gift is conditional because the giver receives something in return – the gratitude of the receiver, the expectation of receiving a gift in return, or a simply a boost of self-esteem after an act of kindness. At the same time, a gift is also an unconditional gesture of love towards the other. Kelly extends this paradoxical simultaneity to sincerity, and argues that it characterizes Wallace’s fiction as a whole (see Kelly 139). Wallace’s narrators are inextricably torn between wanting to show their sincerity and suspecting that this will come across as just another attempt at manipulation. What is more, they lose themselves in paranoid spirals of suspicion as they constantly question their own motives and how they might be perceived by the reader (see Kelly 2010: 136). The only way out of these infinite loops is to submit to the reader’s decision whether or not to trust the narrator. Wallace’s fiction thus forces and invites the ethical judgment of the reader (see Kelly 145). Only this can create the foundation for the belief and the trust his writing is geared towards. 40

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The second major strategy has been described by Völz as “the evocation of shame with literary means” (2015: 213). One manifestation of this can be found in the works of Lerner, Heti and Knausgaard. Völz labels it “self-deprecation and self-loathing” (2015: 217). The narrators in these novels obsessively catalogue their own weaknesses and embarrassments to show that they are willing to disclose the totality of their experience. This is meant not only to evoke shame at their own behavior, but also to again force an ethical judgment on the part of the reader. Authors like Miranda July evoke shame in a different way. July lets shameful moments play out in the interactions between characters, so that previously hidden aspects of their personality become visible (see Völz 2015: 218). When readers vicariously experience this shame, they become aware not only of their “ontological interdependence” on others, but also of the “intersubjective vulnerability” in a social network (2016: 154, my translation). These texts thus aim to transcend the mere ‘shock value’ often utilized by confessional memoirs with an eye on the market. Instead, they seek to promote a feeling of community. If we accept that shameful moments happen to all of us, we become more kind not just to ourselves, but also to others. We are also more likely to believe in the sincerity of an author if they share their own shame and embarrassment (see Völz 2016: 154). Roughly following the prevalence of these two strategies (metafictional questioning, evocation of shame) we can thus identify two waves of literary works associated with the New Sincerity. According to Kelly, the first wave encompasses Wallace, Eggers, Jennifer Egan, George Saunders, Colson Whitehead, Benjamin Kunkel, Dana Spiotta, Michael Chabon and Junot Diaz (see 2014: n.p.). The second wave encompasses Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, Miranda July, Tao Lin, Marie Calloway and Mira Gonzalez (see Völz 2015, Hugendick). While the connection between these authors is more akin to family resemblances in the Wittgensteinian sense, I argue that they all share a complicated negotiation of sincerity and irony. In the next section, I will describe how this negotiation is linked to Romantic Irony and Postmodern Irony. Sincerity has always been fraught with contradiction and aporia. This is due mainly to its connection with authenticity, which eludes the very representation sincerity demands and desires. The paradoxical nature of sincerity became even more pronounced during Postmodernism. The notion of Postmodern Irony rests on a theory of language that makes it impossible for anybody to say what they mean. As meaning is constantly deferred and deflected, sincerity becomes an 41

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obsolete ideal. Moreover, the subject itself is constituted by language and thus becomes unknowable to itself and others. The literature of New Sincerity is largely an attempt to come to terms with these ideas. In the process of doing so, it has essentially adopted a stance of Romantic Irony. For writers like Eggers, Lerner and Heti, it is imaginable that a subject outside of language can exist, that its authentic experience can never be fully communicated to others. Yet in the vein of Romantics like Schlegel and Solger, they craft literary works that gesture at authentic experience in spite of this impossibility. Where the Romantics undertook a futile pursuit of the absolute, these writers pursue an ideal of sincerity which they know must fail. I am by no means the first reader of the New Sincerity to observe this parallel. Adam Kelly points out the Romantic heritage of Wallace’s writing when he observes that it is “equally close in spirit to Byron in its ironic awareness of its own artificiality and inability to attain a pure sincerity”, further noting that “Wallace praises sincerity while recognizing its difficulty” (2014 n.p.). In the following chapters, I will show that this “ironic awareness” is a pattern not just in Wallace, but also in Eggers, Lerner and Heti. They all explore that “kernel of usefulness that promises the possibility of moments of communication in spite of ontological and epistemological uncertainty” (Huber 49). What they practice through this method is, in fact, Romantic Irony. Even though they know sincerity must fail, they probingly search for it all the same, in the hope of a connection that transcends language. In their own definition of the contemporary cultural period, Vermeulen and van den Akker have observed this return of (and to) Romantic Irony. They choose the term ‘Metamodernism’ to describe the time after Postmodernism. They also identify ‘neoromanticism’ as an aspect of this period. In their words, the “metamodern art work  … redirects the modern piece by drawing attention to what it cannot represent in its language, what it cannot signify in its own terms (that what is often called the sublime, the uncanny, the ethereal, the mysterious, and so forth)” (10). Where Postmodernism deconstructs this metaphysical presence, Neoromanticism instead gestures at it in an oscillation of presence and absence (see 10). For them, this is a “re-signification” of Romanticism and its ideas (12). While they identify this return to Romanticism mainly in the visual and performance arts, my work shows that it is fruitful to extend their observations to literature as well.

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It is precisely this “drawing attention to what [art] cannot represent in language” which I have chosen to call productive failure. Insofar as these works document the breakdown of their own signification, they emphasize the failure of their project to be sincere. Yet this inevitable failure is not a cause for desperation. Instead, its pursuit is the only way in which readers and authors can communicate. The novel becomes an imperfect gesture at the authentic self. This gesture is valuable in itself because it is an attempt at communication. Without it, there would be only silence, solipsism, and apathy. This is the reason why the authors I discuss here often style their work as a sacrifice. They write in the face of failure because otherwise, communication, as well as the curative benefits of literature, would cease. What is more, the authentic self can be intuited ex negativo. By being finite, static and subject to vagueness, the novel gestures at that which it is not. That is why these literary works constantly insist on the actual person behind the text. There, the subject, the authentic self, exists outside of language. The process of gesturing at it in spite of the impossibility of representation is Romantic Irony, and the outcome of the process is a productive failure.

2.3 The Voice of Productive Failure 2.3.1 Parrhesia There is a specific rhetorical strategy used in the novels of Eggers, Heti and Lerner, one that also surfaces in much of New Sincerity literature. This strategy has its roots in the ancient Greek model of parrhesia and in order to explain how it works, I will trace the history and the uses of this term. According to Foucault, the etymological origin of parrhesia goes back to the Greek word parrhesiazesthai, which can be translated to ‘say everything’ (see 1996: 10, my translation). It was used to describe someone who did not hide anything and “disclosed his heart and his meaning fully to others through his speech” (1996: 10, my translation). Foucault thus opposes parrhesia to rhetoric and, in a move that resembles the stance of Wallace and Eggers, he also opposes it to irony (see Lorenz 8). There are some specific characteristics to parrhesia that make it useful as a model for this study

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in lieu of just using sincerity, however. Foucault summarizes the connotations of parrhesia as follows: To summarize the foregoing, parrhesia is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to the truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain type of relationship to himself or other people through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people) and a specific relationship to moral law through freedom and duty. (2001: 19)

The first topic Foucault mentions here is the special relationship of the parrhesiastes to the truth. In the democracies of Ancient Greece, parrhesia was used as a signifier for the absence of pretense in public debates. It shares this emphasis on purity (both in a moral and a rhetorical sense) with sincerity (see Markovits 69). Both promise a transparency that transcends the manipulative influence of rhetorical flourish. When a speaker uses parrhesia, they also make a truth claim. Like sincerity, parrhesia holds the promise that the speaker will proclaim what they truly believe (see Markovits 71). Foucault’s second topic covers something barely mentioned in the context of sincerity. There is a necessary condition for parrhesia to occur: the speaker must risk something, and they must do so willingly. Only when the speaker undertakes this risk can they make a claim to truth and convince the audience of the sincerity of their intentions. In Ancient Greece, this risk often consisted in bodily harm or death, but it also included the loss of popularity, the rise of a scandal, or ostracism. This risk is essential to parrhesia – without it, the audience lacks the proof they need to believe in the ethos of the speaker (see Foucault 1996: 14–15). Markovits notes this specific condition as the main difference between the concepts of parrhesia and sincerity (see 68).9 The last two topics mentioned by Foucault are interconnected. The first refers to the special relationship of the speaker to themselves and others through parrhesia, the second to the ethical implications of the concept. The first idea resembles

9



She also notes, however, that parrhesia devolved into a standard trope of public discourse over time – not unlike sincerity. To be taken seriously, speakers were forced to invoke parrhesia, which paradoxically emptied it of its moral content (see 74).

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something we have encountered before in our discussion of the New Sincerity. Völz observes that the evocation of shame creates both a mutual vulnerability and an “ontological interdependence” (2016: 154). In this vein, both the sharing of embarrassing moments and the self-ridicule of the author / narrator opens them up to the judgment of the reader. It also signals the sincerity of their intentions, because why else would they risk this (probably negative) judgment if not for a sincere attempt to represent their experiences? This strategy takes on ethical importance, as it is necessary for the creation of trust and, therefore, community. This the “duty” and the “moral law” that Foucault mentions in his definition of parrhesia. We also find this idea in the ethical philosophy of Levinas, who is one of the few thinkers to connect sincerity, risk, and ethics. In Otherwise Than Being, he develops the idea that the self only exists in relation to the Other, and that it must surrender itself to the Other in order to live a good life. Because of this, sincerity is the most important virtue for Levinas, as it is directed towards others from the beginning (see Pickett 175). Similar to the concept of productive failure, Levinasian sincerity rests on the mere gesture of communication and connection: The ethics of sincerity is, at its heart, not an ethics of accurate self-description but an ethics of openness to, and responsibility for, the other. However common it may be, the sheer fact of speaking, one person to another, serves as a remarkable tableau of responsibility. (Pickett 198)

Because of its insistence on openness and risk, Levinas’ conception of sincerity shares many similarities with parrhesia. It envisions the act of saying as one of exposure and self-giving, so much so that the sincere subject makes “a gift of its own skin” for the Other (Levinas qtd. in Pickett 202). This metaphor returns at the end of Eggers’ novel AHWOSG when Dave, the protagonist, fantasizes about flaying himself and sacrificing himself for the reader. In the logic of Levinas and parrhesia, this sacrifice is necessary for a community of responsible subjects to function. Parrhesia thus has a valuable function as a concept next to sincerity when it comes to the novels I discuss in this study. It adds certain aspects not usually included in the conception of sincerity: the notion of risk, as well as the ethical importance of openness towards others. Similarly, the narrators of AHWOSG, LTAS and HSAPB ridicule and criticize themselves relentlessly in an effort to create trust 45

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through the expectation of risk. This behavior is portrayed as necessary for any kind of interpersonal connection, as it gestures at a mutual bond of vulnerability.

2.3.2 Autofiction AHWOSG, LTAS and HSAPB are all marketed as fictional novels in a paratextual and an epitextual context. Even though two of the narrators (Dave and Sheila) share a first name with the author of the book, neither text claims to be an autobiography. If the concept of parrhesia with its emphasis on risk is to be applied, it makes sense to consider an objection here: How can fictional characters risk something? Does the concept of parrhesia and / or sincerity even make sense when it is applied to fictional characters? One way of answering to this objection is to utilize the concept of voice. Readers can ascribe an idiosyncratic voice to characters if the text suggests that they have ethical convictions (see Altes 2008: 117). This ethos is made up of “values, preferences, and affective, cognitive and social habits” that are expressed in the text (2008: 117). More to the point, however, voice can also establish a connection between fictional characters and their authors. Writers like Eggers, Lerner and Heti make a conscious effort to interweave their literary creations with their own extra-textual existence. They blur the line between fiction and reality. This quality of voice, which Völz describes as a “meshing of character and author,” ultimately allows for the truth claim of parrhesia. In regard to LTAS for example, there is a sense of risk and vulnerability not just because Adam is a complex character with a nuanced psychology, but because he is intimately connected with Ben Lerner himself. In LTAS, autobiographical elements are interwoven with metafictional passages and signals. Even though Adam resembles Ben Lerner in many ways, the novel never affords certainty to the reader that the two (or rather, three) are meant to be identified. This confusing, liminal situation is shared by the other novels I discuss in my dissertation. They belong to a discursive tradition that has its roots in 1970s France. This tradition is called ‘autofiction.’ Autofictional life writing is a response to the argument between structuralism and post-structuralism. Structuralists like Philippe Lejeune attempted to create universal categorizations and definitions of life writing. According to Lejeune, autobiographical life writing is defined by a speech act. The essential condition of 46

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this “autobiographical pact,” as he calls it, is the identity of the names of the author, the narrator, and the protagonist. This contract between author and reader created the expectation that the autobiography would contain a sincere representation of the author’s life. This expectation, labeled by Lejeune as the “referential pact,” followed directly from the autobiographical pact. By identifying themselves with their texts, authors promise to “tell the truth and nothing but the truth” about their own lives (Lejeune 40, my translation). This, then is the fundamental characteristic of autobiographies. They are underwritten by the intention of the author to provide their own, truthful perspective of their experience. The other party of the contract, the reader, is in a position to judge the fulfillment of the contract. The post-structural critic Paul de Man delivered a scathing critique of Lejeune’s approach. The metaphor of the contract is just another way to impose closure on the text, to assume “transcendental authority” (923). For de Man, there can be no referential pact when there is no truth that transcends linguistic structures. As a result, autobiography does not reveal “reliable self-knowledge” – instead, it demonstrates “in a striking way the impossibility of closure and of totalization” (922). De Man’s radical conclusion is that all texts are autobiographical, as all share a claim to authorship. Since language, like the self it constitutes, is fragmented, de-centered and protean, no autobiography can make the promise of truth. The concept of autofiction developed as a response to the fundamental contradiction between de Man and Lejeune. The first writer to intentionally use the term for his own work was Serge Doubrovsky. He searched for a way to combine his thirst for self-knowledge with the awareness that a completely truthful account of the self was impossible. In the tradition of Western thought, he located his project between Rousseau’s claim for transparency and post-structural skepticism towards subjectivity and authorship (see Ott and Weiser 10). The result was his novel Fils, a text Doubrovsky describes as a literary “monster” that “simultaneously and thus paradoxically offered the autobiographical and the fictional pact” (119, my translation). His reason for fathering such a Frankenstein was a revelation brought about by Marx, Freud and Nietzsche: the self is but a fiction, complex and paradoxical, filled with inconsistencies. In a “sincere” attempt to capture this self, he adopted a fragmentary, non-linear style of writing that often reflected its own fictionality (see 120–121). For Doubrovsky, this autofictional style served two main functions. One of them was his need to elevate everyday life into an art form. According to him, 47

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autobiography is both in style and aspiration the domain of big names and personalities – the Goethes, the Rousseaus, the Augustinuses (see Ott and Weiser 7). The mundane reality of an everyday person like himself could only rival their allure if it was manipulated through the designs of fiction. Even failure and disappointment could become respectable in this fashion (see 119). In short: Doubrovsky saw in autofiction a way to literary stardom, a desire which he openly admits. Autofiction also fulfilled a therapeutic function. By rearranging and altering his experiences, Doubrovsky managed to “soothe his suffering” (124, my translation). Writing becomes a method that allows him to confront the formlessness and drabness of existence. He follows an existential urge to reshape daily experiences into an autofictional form, which consists of language games, chronological rearrangement and linguistic appropriation. Doubrovsky soon had company after the initial success of his novels. Autofiction became popular in France. The common denominator of all autofictional novels proved to be what Doubrovksy had claimed in the beginning: the combination of two speech acts, the autobiographical pact and the fictional pact. I have already provided a summary of Lejeune’s definition of the autobiographical pact. The fictional pact, as described by Zipfel, is an agreement between author and reader to adopt the attitude of make-believe (see 289). Readers approach the text as if it really happened, while simultaneously being aware that it did not. Key for this suspension of disbelief is the use of reality effects that establish a coherent fictional world. Autofiction brings both of these contradictory pacts into play. One outcome of their combination can be the breakdown of the reality  / fiction binary. Autofictional texts question the clear distinction between referential claims and make-believe that I have delineated above. They propose, instead, that our perception of the world is a complex combination of both. Doubrovsky’s thoughts about the self reflect this approach. Autofiction can, however, also have a different effect. Zipfel argues that autofitional texts force readers to constantly alternate between the two pacts. This oscillation brings about not a sublimation of their difference, but a keen awareness that there are two different pacts, yet that no single one is sufficient to interpret the text (see 306). Aside from this fundamental epistemological problem, autofictional texts share a variety of different functions. One of them, according to Zipfel, is the reflection about the nature of memory. In this respect, autofictions are more radical than autobiographies. Where the latter focus on the unreliability of memory and its 48

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inherent gaps, the former often portray memories as inventions or fabrications of the author (see 306). Closely tied to this topic is a rejection of self-discovery in favor of self-invention. In many autofictional texts, there is no authentic self that precedes the text. Instead, the self is portrayed as a fiction that comes into being during the narration (see 307). This is partly due to the fact that autofictions often convey skepticism towards the humanist aim of autobiographical writing. Rather than providing the coherent and meaningful narration of a life story, they often consist in a fragmented account of a protean self. Another function shared by autofictions is the idea of exemplification. According to Zipfel, autofictions work against the tendency to conceive of life writing as an individual project. Instead, life stories are invested with symbolic meaning that transcends the fate of a single person. This “complex attitude towards reception” is achieved through the combination of the two pacts. One specific example delivered by Völz and Zipfel is the use of indefinite pronouns. Völz mentions that Miranda July uses them in almost all of her works because she “specializes in the art of impersonal affect. In a sense, the impersonality of shame allows her to recover sincerity after Postmodernism’s critique of the subject” (2008: 219). This argument suggests that autofictions seldom just deal with the identification of a single person. Instead, they deal with processes of identification in general. The culmination of all the aspects I mentioned so far is the desire of autofictional writing to blur the line between the work and the life of an author. Autofictions are a complex invitation to connect art and life, fiction and reality (see Zipfel 310–311). If the self is perceived as a protean nexus of fictional narratives, then the written text becomes a temporary snapshot of the self. As a medium of self-expression, it bridges the gap between the experiences of the author and the collection of signifiers that stand in for them. This aspect of autofiction is the most pronounced deviation from the postmodern context within which it originated. Sturgeon states as much when he argues that Lerner, Kraus, Heti and Knausgaard – all associated with the New Sincerity – have written autofictional Künstlerromane with a specific twist: “the story of the maturation of the artist or the creation of the work of fiction is tantamount to the unfurling of the soul on the page” (n.p.). In this context, the autofictional novel is more than an attempted representation of the authentic self. It becomes a temporary snapshot of the fictions that comprise the self. This also turns autofiction into a fitting narrative vehicle for the idea of productive failure. It carries within the desire for sincere self-expression, the yearning for 49

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the communication of authentic experience. Yet this desire is always balanced by a multilayered skepticism rooted in the ideas of postmodern theory. Every attempt to narrate the self is always already fictional, the result of the processes of selection, sequencing and emplotment. Beneath this lies the even more profound suspicion that there is no authentic self, that the self only comes into being while it is narrated, that there is no outside-text, as Derrida put it. The autofictional narrative situation of these novels is therefore another attempt at “communication in spite of ontological and epistemological uncertainty” (see Huber 10). In the ethical logic of the New Sincerity, the mere existence of this attempt is remarkable and powerful.

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3 Belief and Sincerity in Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius 3.1 Introduction When Dave Eggers’ memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius10 was published in 2000, it seemed to fit right into the genre of self-aware, postmodern biofiction that was en vogue. Suffused with playfulness and metafictionality, the text seemed more like a deconstruction of the biographical project than a celebration. Eggers’ use of lengthy prefaces and appendices, diagrams, footnotes and collages had become recognizable as distinctly postmodern. What contributed to this was both the appearance and the topic of the book. AHWOSG contains lengthy peritexts that comment on its creation, the intention behind it, and even the reception it is likely to receive. One of these peritexts is the preface and acknowledgments section in front of the actual text11. The other is an appendix titled Mistakes We Knew We Were Making12 that Eggers decided to include in later editions. The memoir itself begins with the deaths of Eggers’ mother and father in short succession. Both die from cancer and leave their four children suddenly orphaned. At the age of 21, Dave drops out of university to raise his 8-year-old brother Toph. The first half of the book depicts the death of Eggers’ mother in all its corporeal horror. It gradually becomes clear that the text revolves around the trauma of witnessing sickness and death as a child. The traumatic experiences of Eggers and his siblings form an inexpressible, unrepresentable core to the memoir. As such, they provide a constant reminder of From here on abbreviated as AHWOSG. The whole section has no page numbers. 12 From here on abbreviated as MWKWWM. 10 11

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not only the limits of language, but also the problematic mimetic aspirations of biographical writing. And yet, in the reception process of Eggers’ memoir, it becomes clear that to many critics, it is more than just another postmodern metacommentary. Like his contemporary David Foster Wallace, Eggers is today often associated with the New Sincerity or Post-Irony. Both Wallace and Eggers present sincerity as an antidote to postmodern irony, cynicism and solipsism. As Lee Konstantinou argues, AHWOSG was the springboard for Eggers’ project to cultivate belief in his own “goodness and sincerity” (215). He used the success of his debut to found a number of literary institutions, among them the publishing house McSweeney’s and the literary magazine The Believer. He has published four works of Non-Fiction and nine novels since AHWOSG. No other literary work of Eggers has received such an ambivalent reception, however. His debut memoir has been described as postmodern, psychoanalytic, sincere, ironic, cynical, deconstructive, reconstructive, and more. In this chapter, I want to argue that these critical approaches do not necessarily exclude each other. Eggers’ text is characterized both by a yearning for sincerity and a fear that there can be no escape to the hyperreality and the solipsism of postmodernity. Since the memoir conveys a self-awareness that authenticity cannot be transmitted by language, it can be seen as fundamentally ironic. Yet again, this is a specific kind of irony. Eggers’ insistence to write about his experience despite of his doubts fits into my model of Romantic Irony. In the end, his yearning for connection, communion and trust is so urgent that it triumphs over his skepticism. He writes the memoir anyway. AHWOSG depicts the intensity of this struggle in order to convince Eggers’ readers to believe in his sincerity. As a result, the memoir frames Eggers as ethical role model for a postmodern age. In this chapter, I will focus first on Eggers’ yearning for authenticity and sincerity. Afterwards, I will explain how the memoir deals with the limits of representation. My final section will combine these paradoxical strands and describe how Eggers’ ‘failure’ to write an authentic memoir results in its strongest sincerity effect.

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3.2 The Yearning for Sincerity in AHWOSG

3.2 “The Consciousness Behind the Text”: The Yearning for Sincerity in AHWOSG 3.2.1 Foregrounding the Author The texts of Eggers and Wallace handle the anticipation of reception in a peculiar fashion. Consider this quote by Zadie Smith: “What [Wallace] is really asking is for you to have faith in something that he cannot possibly ever determine in language: the agenda of the consciousness behind the text” (290). Before there can be a belief in the sincerity of a writer, there has to be an acknowledgment that the writer is, in fact, a human being, and not a ‘function’ or an ‘instance’. There must be a conviction that the text has an origin in a consciousness not unlike our own. In this section, I will analyze different methods employed in AHWOSG to foreground “Dave Eggers” as both author and person. The first method to achieve this is, naturally, the disclosure of private and potentially embarrassing information about Eggers’ body, his habits and his social network. On the copyright page, Eggers informs readers not only about his weight and height, but also about the size of hands (small), his allergies (none) and his sexual orientation on the Kinsey scale. His friends and family are recognizable not only by their (at times) real names, but also through the display of their phone numbers. Eggers admits that in later editions, he changed both the names and phone numbers. He even lists the number of times his friends were actually called (see 2001: 9–10). According to himself, this change was necessary because he “lost his taste for blood and carnage” (2001: 12). In a carefully fashioned performance of humility (which will be a topic later), Eggers notes that neither he nor his friends expected the book to become a success. Eventually, the artistic project of total disclosure had to give way to privacy concerns. Eggers’ transparency even extends to his own salary, as he lists his expenses and the income generated by the novel. All of these disclosures contribute to the creation of “Dave Eggers” as an almost corporeal existence, substitutable with the material book. Repeatedly, Eggers’ invites his readers to get in touch with him. In MWKWWM, he describes how he sought for communion with others when he was a cartoonist. He left cartoons in his open car and people could just come and take them, signing their names in the process. This story, like his other appeals to readers, 53

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is meant to flesh out his ethos as a sincere partner in literary communication. Eggers states: “It is fun to reasonably risk what you can risk – like your car, or your reputation, on the trust of people you know only through something ephemeral shared” (2001: 12). The same spirit characterizes his memoir. Eggers offers to send readers a “fictional version” (emphasis mine) of the book if they send their copy to him, in which he changes all the names (“This can be about you! You and your pals!” (Acknowledgments n.p.). He also offers 5$ to the first 200 readers who “write with proof that they have read and absorbed the many lessons herein” (ibid.). The mocking tone notwithstanding, it becomes clear that Eggers wants to initiate a discussion about the interaction between creators of books and their readers. Through the disclosure of personal information, Eggers signals that he still enjoys to “risk what you can reasonably risk” and that he is willing to depend on the trust of his readers. Why else would he reassure them that “he [Eggers] is like you” (Acknowledgments n.p.); that he has sex without condoms and falls asleep when he is drunk afterwards? Why else would he talk about his masturbatory habits (“about once a day, usually in the shower” (ibid.))? Eggers makes it explicit that privacy, for him, is not personal property, but merely a hindrance to the creation of community: “Have it. Take it from me. Do with it what you will. Make it useful. This is like making electricity from dirt; it is almost too good to be believed, that we can make beauty from this stuff” (2000: 216). Eggers undersigns this access into his biographical and psychological privacy with his own name. Lejeune has argued that this is significant, as the identity of Dave the author, Dave the narrator and Dave the protagonist creates an autobiographical and referential pact. Through these pacts, Eggers takes ownership and responsibility for his experiences and their narrative rendering. Yet besides this obvious connection between Dave Eggers and “Dave”, there is also a considerable distance. Throughout the novel, Eggers leaves no doubt that this is his – mostly – negative verdict on his adolescent self. Dave’s narrative emphasizes just how selfish, neurotic, narcissistic, pathetic and megalomaniac Eggers was in his youth. There is an implicit contrast between the artist as a young man and the wiser, older author who looks back and casts judgment. Eggers himself writes as much: There is, intrinsic to the process of the memoir, the resulting destruction of one’s former self. Writing about those years, and being as cruel to who

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3.2 The Yearning for Sincerity in AHWOSG I was as I could be, implicitly means that you are killing that person […] Overall you are saying: This was me then, and I can look at that person, from the distance I now have, and throw water balloons on his stupid fat head. (2001: 20)

The implicit judgment – and, in fact, self-loathing – that accompanies the ethical work of the reader gestures at the consciousness behind the text. It offers up the realization that “Dave” may not be identical to Eggers, but that he offers a chance at intimating Eggers’ presence in the text.

3.2.2 Probing Intention – A Brief Excursion on Wallace Eggers’ insistence on his physical and ethical presence in the novel is complemented by the almost obsessive probing of his own intention in writing it. The term itself – intention – has become hotly contested in critical discourse as of late. Eggers eagerly latches onto the debate in a quest to recover the traditional role of the author. The decline of sincerity and authenticity coincided with a growing skepticism towards the figure of the author and their intentions for the work of art. Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “intentional fallacy” paved the way for the agenda of New Criticism13, which in turn inspired Iser’s aesthetics of reception14. During the high period of post-structuralism, Barthes and Foucault provided the most radical formulation of author-centered skepticism. Foucault degraded the author to a mere “function” which readers and critics fall back on to close off a text’s potential interpretations15. Quite similarly, Barthes saw the author as a personification of what was in fact an autonomous system of writing, the “écriture”. He wanted to replace the author and his non-accessible intention with the instance of the reader, who could gather the polysemous branches of language16. In the wake of Barthes and see Wimsatt, W. K., and M. C. Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy.” The Sewanee Review 54.3 (1946): 468–488. 14 see Iser, Wolfgang. Der Implizite Leser: Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett. Mü nchen: W. Fink, 1972. 15 see Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” The Art of Art History. (1998): 299–314. 16 see Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana, 1977: 142–148. 13

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Foucault, the author and his biographical intertext largely vanished from critical discourse: “[…]  authorial disappearance has been accepted by structuralist and poststructuralist critics almost as an article of faith” (Burke 17). The search for authorial intention was associated with restriction and denial (see Irwin xii). Against the backdrop of this critical tradition, it makes sense that Eggers chose to label his text a “memoir”. If one were to recover notions such as “author” and “intention”, there would have to be a biographical aspect to one’s writing. For Eggers’ ethical project of a literary community to succeed, he needs the aesthetic of sincerity. Without the acceptance of authorial intention, sincerity cannot exist. His mission is clear – to reclaim sincerity by way of reclaiming intention, and in so doing, to fill the gap left by Barthes and Foucault. This mission statement is not original to Eggers, however. It makes sense to read his work in the context of an author that reacted explicitly and passionately against the purported “Death of the Author”. This figure was David Foster Wallace. In a way, all of Wallace’s writing was geared towards creating sincerity effects. For him, it was the function of literature to bring about moments of interpersonal connection. The solipsism which he diagnosed as a malady of postmodern life could only be alleviated by learning how to eschew irony for sincerity. Yet the process of expressing authentic selfhood on the part of the author was anything but easy and joyful. Wallace’s writing was an often twisted and tortured account of introspection that revolved around his own intentions in writing fiction. Probably the best example for this his short story “Octet”. This text spelled out the exact role of intention in the creation of sincerity effects, and it is highly useful in understanding Eggers’ approach in AHWOSG. “Octet” consists of four vignettes and a longer fifth metafictional passage that examines the conception of the text and the intention behind it. All of these passages are called “Pop Quiz,” because, as the narrator tells us, they are meant to “interrogate” readers. The goal of this interrogation is for the narrator to find out whether readers feel the same way about human relationships as he or she does. What ties the Pop Quizzes together, in the words of the narrator, is a universal truth about being human: […] an ambient sameness in different kinds of human relationships, some nameless but inescapable ‘price’ that all human beings are faced with having to pay at some point if they ever truly want to ‘be with’ another person

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3.2 The Yearning for Sincerity in AHWOSG instead of just using that person somehow […] a weird and nameless but somehow unavoidable ‘price’ that can actually sometimes equal death itself, or at least usually equals your giving up something (either a person or a thing or a precious long-held feeling or some certain idea of yourself and your own virtue / worth / identity) whose loss will feel like a kind of death. (133)

This passage all but encapsulates Wallace’s and Eggers’ project. I have already mentioned that Eggers saw AHWOSG and its relentless attack on Dave’s weaknesses as a way to “kill” his former self and his youthful delusions of grandeur. The blueprint for this kind of sincerity effect is sketched by Wallace in this passage. It is not just the protagonists of the Pop Quizzes who must decide whether or not they want to pay the ‘price’. In the ninth and last Pop Quiz, the narrator makes it clear that he or she is paying a price, too, to establish a connection with the reader. The nature of this price is twofold. On the one hand, it consists in the metafictional appeal to the reader and the question whether “she feels it, too” (133). The narrator is terrified of becoming the hollow, ironic trickster they want to abolish. They are caught in a permanent cycle of doubt about the intentions and outcomes of their metafictional strategy, a doubt they suspect can never be resolved: “None of that was very clearly put and might well ought to get cut. It may be that none of this real-narrative-honesty vs. sham-narrative-honesty can even be talked about up front” (125). The ‘price’ for the narrator of “Octet” is the entrapment in a permanent double bind, as they want to make their intentions transparent, which simultaneously makes them seem manipulative and disingenuous. On the other hand, the ‘price’ is the abandonment of “your own virtue / worth / identity”, as it was earlier expressed. The neurotic self-questioning of the author exposes them to the disgust of the reader, but also to the loss of artistic agency that might have been an illusion to begin with: Rather it’s going to make you look fundamentally lost and confused and frightened and unsure about whether to trust even your most fundamental intuitions about urgency and sameness and whether other people deep inside experience things in anything like the same way you do […] more like a reader, in other words, down here quivering in the mud of the trench with the rest of us, instead of a Writer […] (136)

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In this way, Wallace can recover the author and their intention without simply ignoring Barthes and Foucault. The consciousness behind the text must be palpable for the reader, but its presence is a restless tangle of double binds and self-doubts. Quite in line with Barthes’ argument, it is only the reader who can make a moral judgment about the intentions of the author. Only the reader can answer the question “Do you feel it, too?” and decide whether the cost of Wallace’s navel-gazing is worth it, in the end. Wallace purposefully created a situation in which the agency of the reader was the only escape from aporia. The final lines of the story acknowledge this: “So decide” (136). In this respect, Eggers follows Wallace. His writing is an attempt to make his intentions as transparent as possible, as well as his doubts about his intentions, as well as his doubts about his doubts about his intentions, etc. In the end, the only instance with the power of true moral judgment is the reader. The two choices which Eggers offers are outlined by Kelly in his writing on Wallace: A gift, for example, is structured by a paradoxical relation between, on the one hand, calculation, conditionality, and a self-conscious awareness of impurity – the gift as exchange, as a means of getting something in return, even if what one gets is only a moment of self-approval – and, on the other hand, the incalculable, the unconditional, a relation to the other that goes beyond all forms of cognition, manipulation, narcissism and self-promotion. (139)

Wallace and Eggers explore this double bind to move the judgment of their intention outside of the text and into the realm of the textual Other, the reader. In AHWOSG, Dave often emphasizes the conditional and calculated aspects of his intentions behind writing a memoir. The prime example for this is the title of the book. Readers, Dave surmises, are sure to become “confused by the creeping feeling one gets that the author is dead serious in his feeling that the title is an accurate description of the content, intent and quality of the book” (Acknowledgments n.p.). What then, could the intent behind a title like A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius be? In positive terms, we could characterize the author as confident; in negative terms, we could label him arrogant, boisterous and narcissistic. A narcissistic memoir would not be interested in forging a true connection with its readers, or in paying a ‘price’. On the contrary, it would be bent on 58

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portraying its object as genius and emotionally moving as he considers himself to be. The title thus at least raises the possibility of narcissism and self-obsession on the part of Eggers. The same is true for the footnote that jokingly asks readers if they are reading the book in the library, and goes even further: “Come to think of it, you may be reading this far, far in the future – it’s probably being taught in all the schools! Do tell: What is it like in the future? Is everyone wearing robes? Are the cars rounder or less round?” (Acknowledgments n.p.). The questions at the end make it clear that the narrator is joking, yet in doing so, he also betrays his awareness of literary fame and artistic reputation. In what is arguably the central passage of the book, Dave goes much further to prove this point. Shortly after his friend John has attempted suicide and is having his stomach pumped in the hospital, Dave waits in the lobby to see him. While his friend suffers, Dave watches Conan on television and laughs about what he considers to be the “funniest fucking thing” (269). Reactions to this scene can range from disgust at Dave’s callousness to empathy for his attempts at repressing pain. Instead of focusing on John’s plight, Dave begins to think about how to tell his story: “I start wishing I had a pen, some paper. Details of all this will be good. Or no, people have done stuff about suicides before. But I could twist it somehow, include random things […] That’s a good detail, the laughing while your friend is having his stomach pumped. People have done that, too” (269). Dave’s metafictional awareness of his mediated experience becomes more and more absurd. He constantly frames his experience as literature, as texts to be written. Even when his friend’s life hangs in the balance, Dave thinks about the “great material” (270) this will provide and how he can feel “experientially superior to others one’s age” (ibid.) for having lived through it. Before he actually leaves the hospital to get a pen, Dave stops himself and writes: “But getting [the pen] would be crass” (ibid.). These bursts of metafictional self-awareness and meta-meta self-awareness (i.e. the reflection of his self-reflection in the eyes of others, and specifically, readers) demonstrate the paradoxical combination of the conditional and the unconditional in Eggers’ fiction. On one hand, we experience Dave as an egomaniac who is obsessed with his art and his status as a genius. On the other hand, Dave demonstrates that he is aware of just this fact. The disclosure of his callousness is intentional, a tool to create a trustworthy ethos. It is the “price” he is willing to pay to avoid “one of those things where the narrator, having grown up media-saturated, 59

3 Belief and Sincerity in Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

can’t live through anything without it having echoes of similar experiences in television, movies, books, blah blah” (269). The probing of his own intention is as close as he can come to the expression of authentic self-hood. Dave adds more layers to this motif when he and John have another metafictional conversation about John’s role in the book. John accuses Dave of being “a cannibal or something. Don’t you see how this is just flesh-eating? You’re […] making lampshades from human sk-” (424). John goes on to protest that he does not want to be “fuel” or “food” for Dave and denigrates Dave’s metaphors for writing, which include “devour”, “blood” and “revenge”. The imagery implies that Dave needs writing to survive, much in the same way Doubrovsky does in “Nah am Text”. The autobiographical transformation of his experiences allows Dave to make his life meaningful, yet it also turns his everyday experiences into extraordinary representations worthy of fame. What is more, Dave longs to possess the experiences of those around him. Through writing, he greedily appropriates them and gains control over them. This relation is not completely one-sided, however, at least not in the eyes of Dave. He tells John that he (John) “will always need someone to bleed on. You’re incomplete” (425). In the same way he relies on the transformation of his own experiences, Dave suspects that his friends thrive off the attention his writing generates. Life writing is also an outlet for Dave’s rage and anger. John mentions this when he talks about “revenge”, yet in the appendix, Eggers himself makes this cathartic element explicit: In a few cases, where I had originally lashed out at real people in backhanded ways, and used their real names in doing so, I have removed or softened these parts, because in the last year I’ve also, almost completely, lost my taste for blood. (2001: 12)

To sum up: the ‘conditional’ aspect of the memoir, as described by Dave and Eggers, is a near-narcissistic belief in the importance of his own life, a desperate yearning for artistic success, the urge to sacrifice the private lives of others, to transform them into meaningful art and to control them, as well as the need for an outlet for rage, anger and revenge, which has the capacity to hurt others. In the clever turn of the New Sincerity, these insights into Eggers’ intentions are meant to make readers trust him not less, but more. The fact that Eggers is 60

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transparent about his calculation and manipulation becomes a guarantee for his sincerity. This is especially effective since Eggers, like Wallace, balances these conditional motivations with unconditional ones. He often frames AHWOSG as a service to the small-but-growing counterculture to the hermeneutics of suspicion. The copyright page of the appendix encapsulates what Konstantinou calls the “small batch ethos” (195) of Eggers’ enterprise: The author wishes to reserve the right to use spaces likes this, and to work within them, for no other reason than it entertains him and a small coterie of readers. It does not mean that anything ironic is happening. It does not mean that someone is being pomo or meta or cute. (2001: copyright page)

In a similar vein, Eggers often cultivates a humble surprise at the success of his memoir. An example is his disclosure that many of his friends wanted to remove their personal information from the text after it became a best-seller – nobody believed it would sell more than a few copies. This version of Eggers as a humble young author surprised at unexpected success conflicts with the delusions of grandeur mentioned earlier. In fact, the two contrasting versions are meant to reinforce each other. Like all of us, Eggers harbors dreams of greatness and acclaim, yet he openly shares them. This open disclosure asks for a new kind of reader, one that could very well be called post-critical. Konstantinou summarizes this when he observes that “Eggers’ paratexts construct a similar image of the mean or snarky reader – identified at times with the incredulous 0.1  % of his readers, at other times with his former Might-era self  – against whom he writes and against whom he demands his readers identify themselves” (201). Ultimately, all of Eggers’ projects (Believer Magazine, McSweeney’s, and his novels) are characterized by the intention of creating this new community of readers. The reader that Eggers desires has turned their back on a hostile approach to literature. They do not want to deconstruct, denigrate or criticize. What they desire is a literary reflection of their own emotions and thoughts, a medium that allows them to emerge from the troubles of skepticism into the comforting clarity of trust and belief. This intention behind AHWOSG is framed by Eggers as unconditional. It is, in fact, a gift he is making to readers who yearn for a valorization of transcendence. He underlines the importance of such a community 61

3 Belief and Sincerity in Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

when he identifies one of the book’s themes as “the search for support, a sense of community if you will, in one’s peers, in those one’s age, after one looks around and realizes that all others, all those older, are either dead or perhaps should be” (Acknowledgments n.p.). The text thus becomes the foundation for a generational community, a group of people with similar experiences (dissatisfaction with mediated experience, irony, cynicism, and solipsism), with a naked longing for connection, who can find themselves in the portrayal of Dave and feel less alone. Dave’s metaphor for this idea is the “lattice”, a “connective tissue” between like-minded people, who support each other instead of tearing each other down. A reader interested in being a part of the lattice would not scan Eggers’ text for ruptures, indeterminacies and inaccuracies, and instead empathize with his youthful weaknesses. Dave makes it very clear, in the end of the novel, that this communal impulse is not just selfless, but almost a martyrdom: What the fuck does it take to show you motherfuckers, what does it fucking take, what do you want how much do you want because I am willing and I’ll stand before you and I’ll raise my arms and give you my chest and throat and wait, and I’ve been so old for so long, for you, for you, I want it fast and right through me – Oh do it, do it you motherfuckers, do it do it you fuckers finally, finally, finally. (2000: 437, emphasis mine)

Again, Dave uses the terminology that John criticized in an earlier passage: the author is willing to be the sacrifice, to give up his body and his self, to be torn apart. Only this time the language of consumption is not selfish (compare “making lampshades from human skin”) but utterly selfless. This demonstrates the paradoxical combination of conditional and unconditional motivation, as well as Dave’s awareness of their presence. The only resolution to their undecidable contradiction can be the reader, just as Wallace envisioned. Yet, as Eggers makes clear throughout his project of becoming a “human institution”, he wants to create a very special kind of reader for whom the decision is very much predetermined. This reader, who is the antithesis to the “mean and snarky” reader of Postmodernism, must take both the conditional and unconditional motivations laid bare by Eggers as proof for his trustworthiness and believe in his sincerity. 62

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3.2.3 The Referential Pact Even though AHWOSG is labelled a memoir, it shares many autofictional characteristics with Lerner’s and Heti’s novels. Characters openly discuss their fictionality with the narrator at several points, and the book openly dissects the weaknesses of the autobiographical pact. Yet even though readers are forced to oscillate between fictional and autobiographical levels, Eggers often attempts to predetermine their final judgment. At many points, he tries to define, and ultimately offer, a referential pact to the reader. In Lejeune’s terminology, the referential pact between author and reader guarantees that the narrated events did actually happen and were actually experienced by the author. Eggers talks about this in no uncertain terms, as he often differentiates between the fictional elements necessary to make a memoir work, and what really happened. The invocation of the referential pact first Occurs on the copyright page, where Eggers uses the disclaimer to assure readers that AHWOSG is a “work of fiction only in that in many cases the author could not remember the exact words said by certain people, and exact descriptions of certain things, so had to fill in the gaps as best he could. Otherwise, all characters and incidents and dialogue are real […] All event described herein actually happened” (copyright page, emphasis mine). An author cannot be more explicit in offering a referential pact. In so doing, Eggers strengthens the autobiographical pact, yet he also opens himself up to warranted doubts. What, for example, about Toph admonishing Dave that his narration of their time together is “not entirely believable” (see 114)? Did this metafictional discussion of how to narrate time actually happen? In the acknowledgments section, Eggers answers this objection in passing: The dialogue, though all essentially true – except that which is obviously not true, as when people break out of their narrative time-space-continuum to cloyingly talk about the book itself – has been written from memory and reflects both the author’s memory’s limitations and his imagination’s nudgings. (n.p.)

Passages like this display why Eggers’ narrative voice is often understood to be ironic. The assertion that there is a strong referential pact is completely undermined 63

3 Belief and Sincerity in Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

by his admission of metafictional address. More problematic still, many of these metafictional passages emphasize that all autobiographical writing is necessarily fictional. To further reassure his readers that a healthy skepticism towards autobiography can be combined with a love for sincerity, he outlines exactly where in the book he changed and fictionalized otherwise “real” events and characters. The intention behind this is to foreclose any autofictional moment of oscillation on the part of the reader. In MWKWWM, Eggers discloses that he wanted to go even further and pen a “corrective appendix” to “illuminate the many factual and temporal fudgings necessary to keep this, or really any work of nonfiction from dragging around in arcana and endless explanations” (2001: 5). Taken together, Eggers’ urge to protect and specify the referential pact suggest a worrying deficit of trust. Even though he demands quite a bit of trust from the reader, he does not reciprocate. In his textual realm, the reader is not free to decide between the contradictory pacts – he or she needs the guidance of the author to arrive at the correct conclusion.

3.2.4 Solipsism and Parrhesia In a similar fashion, Eggers seeks to control the reception of his novel. In fact, “Dave” and Eggers both insert themselves into the role of the reader and catalogue the branching avenues of interpretation. In the acknowledgments, Eggers provides an “Incomplete Guide to Symbols and Metaphors” that informs readers about the imagery of the metaphor. As it turns out, more than half of the symbols he mentions stand in for either his parents or mortality. In a similarly absurd manner, Eggers includes a list of the novel’s themes. They run alphabetically from A to U and anticipate many possible interpretations of the text. At all points in these sections, Eggers lets readers know that, whatever they might think of his text, he has already entertained the same thought. In a decidedly tragicomic turn, Eggers even preempts the reader’s judgment of his own know-it-all self-awareness: Further, [the author] is fully cognizant, way ahead of you, in terms of knowing about and fully admitting the gimmickry inherent in all of this, and will preempt your claim of the book’s irrelevance due to said gimmick-

64

3.2 The Yearning for Sincerity in AHWOSG ry by saying that gimmickry is simply a device, a defense, to obscure the black, blinding, murderous rage and sorrow at the core of this whole story […] (n.p.)

This is the first time that Eggers offers trauma as an alternative explanation to his metafictional voice, which will be discussed in Section 3 of this chapter. What is of relevance here is that Eggers perceives the process of writing through the eyes of his readers. He even feels the urge to inform them that he is aware of the absurdity of the situation. In passages like this, AHWOSG is hardly to differentiate from dyed-in-the-wool postmodern novels. Eggers discloses that his discourse has a subtext, a meaning that runs counter to what readers find on the page. This gap between what is said and what is meant is commonly called irony. Yet in another attempt to retrospectively adjust his text’s reception, Eggers lets loose a diatribe against irony of any kind. In “Irony and its Malcontents”, Eggers makes it clear from the start that “there is almost no irony, whatsoever, within the covers of this book” (2001: 33). Again, the cautious wording leaves the door open for skeptics (contrast “almost” with “whatsoever”) that even this claim might be suffused with irony. Yet as the manifesto continues, Eggers convincingly expresses his hate of irony. All the passages about the referential pact which subvert themselves are declared irony-free zones: “prefaces are not ironic”, “notations are not ironic”, “appendices are not ironic”, “Having characters break out of character is not ironic” (ibid.). Eggers passionate defense comes from the same place of moral anguish that Wallace explored. Following this line of argument, irony turns people into jaded solipsists, who are unable to accept their vulnerability and to open up to others. It is no accident that, right after excoriating irony, Eggers reveals the true intent behind his writing as bridging the gap between himself and others. Yet what Wallace also understood was that only the reader could judge a work as sincere and bring about the antidote to postmodern irony. Altes argues in a similar fashion. According to her, authors can create sincerity or irony effects, which serve as signals to the reader, yet their ultimate interpretation is a matter of the reader’s ethos and their subjective assessment. As such it is possible (and, indeed, sensible) to understand Eggers’ obsession with control as both a “longing for sincerity, and the ironic reflection on this longing” (Altes 125). This ambivalence seems to be an outcome of his narrative strategy – an outcome Eggers’ nevertheless has a hard time accepting in MWKWWM. 65

3 Belief and Sincerity in Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Even though Eggers struggles with the word “beginning with i and ending in y” (2001: 33), irony is useful to his project. It demonstrates exactly the fundamental solipsism that Wallace diagnosed as a major problem of Postmodernism. Eggers’ almost neurotic habit of anticipating what readers think has been analyzed by Kelly before: DFW’s fiction, in contrast, asks what happens when the anticipation of other’s 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. Former divisions between self and other morph into conflicts within the self, and a recursive and paranoid cycle of endless anticipation begins. (136)

Both Wallace’s and Eggers’ writing is characterized by the fear of never being able to escape this cycle. In a way, it is their way to wrestle with the intellectual heritage of Postmodernism and its implications. In his own metafictional way, Eggers’ acknowledges the dangers of this solipsism again and again. Dave never stops worrying about the constant mediation and anticipation that haunts his thoughts. During the interview with MTV, he explicitly points out that solipsism defines his age: And thus, there is a lot of talking about it all – surely the cultural output of this time will reflect that – there’ll be a lot of talking, whole movies full of talking, talking about talking, ruminating about talking about wondering, about our place, our wants, our obligations  – the blathering of the belle époque, you know. Environmentally reinforced solipsism. (2000: 202)

The underlying principle of postmodern irony  – différance  – states that meaning is endlessly deferred through a procession of signifiers. We can never truly mean what we say, which turns every act of communication into a fundamentally ironic one. Our utterances attempt to compensate this deficit, which is ultimately futile. This, then, is all that Dave receives from himself and others: reflections of reflections. The acknowledgment section performs this solipsism both formally and through its content. It is an assemblage of mise-en-abymes, escalating spirals of self-aware doubt and anticipation. If language cannot transport meaning, then 66

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both Eggers and Dave are shut into their own minds, forced to have an unceasing discussion with themselves. Wallace’s move to escape from this double bind was to posit an extra-textual instance  – the reader  – and to start addressing them directly. Wallace believed that there could be an eventual relief to incessant self-doubt. It lies in allowing and encouraging the reader to judge the sincerity of the text. This was not only true for literature: the only way out of solipsism, in all of life, was to find a language that could transport emotional meaning again. The most important strategy to achieve this rhetorically was – and still is – parrhesia. By demonstrating that he was “lost and confused and frightened and unsure”, Wallace exposed his vulnerability and hoped it would create the foundation for trust. Eggers expresses exactly the same intention, not only behind his performance of solipsism, but also behind the literary “killing” of Dave his memoir revolves around. He seeks to: […] not [shrink] from the admission of such manipulations of his pain for profit, because the admission of such motivations, at least in his opinion, immediately absolves him of responsibility for such manipulation’s implications or consequences, because being aware of and open about one’s motives at least means one is not lying, and no one, except an electorate, likes a liar. We all like full disclosure, particularly if it includes the admission of ones’ 1) mortality and 2) propensity to fail (related, but not the same). (Acknowledgments n.p.)

Taken at face value, Eggers’ statement frames AHWOSG as an old-fashioned confession. By sharing his mistakes, and even his desire to profit from sharing, Eggers relieves his conscience and gains the trust of his readers. The value of depicting himself as a manipulative, self-obsessed and, indeed, solipsistic artist is easy to see: it is an act of parrhesia that rhetorically guarantees his sincerity, much as it did for Wallace. In this way, Eggers makes “electricity from dirt” (216). Yet, after carefully reading the statement again, one cannot avoid the impression that Eggers pokes fun at this whole idea. He seems too self-aware not to notice that the “mere admission” hardly absolves from all blame immediately. In fact, this passage encapsulates what Altes has called the simultaneous “longing for sincerity and the ironic reflection of this longing”. This simultaneity permeates all aspects 67

3 Belief and Sincerity in Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

of AHWOSG I have discussed so far, from the probing of intention, to the anticipation of reception and the discussion of the text’s creation. Until now, I have largely focused on the longing for sincerity and authenticity. In the next section, I will take another look at its “ironic reflection”.

3.3 “The Core is the Core is the Core”: The Limits of Representation in AHWOSG 3.3.1 AHWOSG as a Postmodern Memoir Due to Adam Kelly’s research, AHWOSG is today often associated with the New Sincerity or Post-Postmodernism. Similar studies, such as those by Funk (2015) and Den Dulk (2014) have argued that Eggers’ work is an attempt to move beyond the aesthetics of Postmodernism. Yet this growing consensus did not always exist. In early reviews, it was commonplace to describe the memoir as a “postmodern collage” or “pomo gimmickry” (Kakutani, n.p.). The Routledge Introduction to American Postmodernism claims that “all the technical experimentation that might be expected in any postmodern novel – carefully looped […] digressive flashbacks, interior scenes and direct authorial commentary” (111) exists in Eggers’ writing. The Historical Dictionary of Postmodern Literature and Theater begins its entry of Eggers by stating that AHWOSG is his most significant contribution to Postmodernism (see 157). In MWKWWM, Eggers reacts to these charges with incredulity, at times even outrage. He argues either that the gimmickry is there for pure entertainment or he hints at a communicative and communal function á la Wallace. Any charge of postmodern self-reflexivity or irony is rejected outright. Yet it is natural that critics would make these assumptions. Over the course of the novel, “Dave” becomes increasingly hard to disentangle from Eggers. And it is Dave who constantly dissects and laments the era of mediacy and hyperreality he lives in. Even though he often criticizes this era, he is very much immersed in it, as it determines his possibilities for self-expression. Symptomatic for this is Dave’s time in Might-magazine, a period that occupies the latter half of the novel. During his career as nascent publisher, Dave 68

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depicts himself as a reflected and refracted self, saturated with irony and cynicism. Dave and his friends have no deeply held convictions or values; all they care about is the pretense of detached coolness: “Of course we, and our magazine, can’t let on that we’re part of this scene, or any scene. We begin to perfect a balance between being close to where things are happening, knowing the people involved and the patterns, while keeping our distance …” (172). In an effort to draw the attention of MTV’s The Real World, Dave and Might-magazine transform into something even more nihilistic: “We begin a pattern of almost immediate opinion-reversal and self-devouring. Whatever the prevailing thinking, especially our own, we contradict it, reflexively” (240). The implicit diagnosis for this sickness of detached indifference is an overdose of televisual culture. Similar to Wallace in “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction”, Dave feels as if television’s reflection of life, with all its emphasis on performativity and simulation, has replaced his actual existence. His life experience has become hyperreal, as all of it is geared at mediacy: […] all the while choosing our words carefully, needing to sound both articulate and casual, of our demographic, loose but smart, energetic but not eager, because, of course, we are also young people pretending to be young people, putting across an image of ourselves as representatives, for now and posterity, of how youth were at this juncture, how we acted when we were pretending not to act while pretending to be ourselves. (245)

This mise-en-abyme of performative gestures is mirrored by AHWOSG’s metanarrative passages. There is a clear connection between the novel’s self-reflexive discourse and Dave’s own condition. Both are characterized by a fundamental skepticism towards the concept of an authentic self that can be disclosed, revealed, or confessed. In her analysis of the novel, Timmer argues convincingly that mass media saturation erases any belief in an authentic self on part of Dave and his friends. In her words, they are “caught up in a mirroring process in which a sense of what it would be like to actually ‘be themselves’ is lost, or probably was never there to being with. … they have projected themselves as fictional figures, imagining how they ‘would fit into this or that band, or TV show or movie, and how we would look doing it’, 69

3 Belief and Sincerity in Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

as Dave said” (199). The absence of a Cartesian fixture combined with a simultaneous projection into media result in confusion and doubt. Like a television viewer, Dave watches and judges himself. This leads to regressive loops of doubt about what he should want, how he should behave, and how he should interact with others. A fitting representative of his generation, Dave is caught up in self-obsessed solipsism (see Timmer 200). This is precisely why Eggers is so adamant about his rejection of Postmodernism. The solipsistic version of Dave is someone Eggers has professed to destroy through the writing of his memoir (see Konstantinou 196). The Dave Eggers of The Believer and McSweeney’s wants to foster an alliance between authors and readers. His project is the creation of therapeutic literature that promotes trust and belief. It is the very opposite of the “Dave” that “can play it both ways, all ways” (AHWOSG 245). And yet, in the eyes of many influential critics, AHWOSG expresses the same hyperreal attitude that Might-Dave symbolizes. More than that, the text conveys self-awareness about the absence of authenticity, which turns it into a quintessentially postmodern text. Ansgar Nünning, for example, characterizes AHWOSG as a “fictional metaautobiography” (197). According to him, texts that fall into this category engage with the project of biography itself. Biographical writing seeks to create the impression that life and writing can be joined. Fictional metaautobiographies, by contrast, attempt to show “that there will always be an ineluctable and insurmountable difference between a life and a book” (197). Consequently, Nünning refers to AHWOSG as a “novel” throughout, even though both the book’s paratext and Eggers himself refer to it as a “memoir”. Nünning understands this as a gesture at generic self-reflexivity. In his mind, the text employs fiction to question the paradigm of auto / biography itself. The most serious charge against this discourse is that it presupposes the possibility of sincerity. It is founded on the assumption that real events and mental states can be transported across the textual realm without losing their authenticity. In this respect, Nünning is very clear about the epistemological stance of Eggers’ text: Despite the fact, then, that the term biography suggests that the biographer creates a nexus between a past life and writing, postmodernist self-reflexive biofictions remind the reader that the gulf between the real past and discourse, between life as it is experienced and as it appears in the form of biography, is, in the end, unbridgeable. (208)

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Bran Nicol goes even farther than that. He argues that AHWOSG undermines the gesture of confession and therefore questions the authenticity of Dave’s response to the deaths of his parents. The various metanarrative levels and ironies work “as an inbuilt deconstruction of [Eggers’] memoir itself, and by extension the confessional genre as a whole” (106). According to Nicol, the combination of irony and seriousness exposes the ideology behind the idea of confession. This ideology postulates that there is a fixed subject that can reveal itself in a faithful fashion. By contrast, Eggers’ book destroys not only its subject (Dave) but unravels the notion of subjectivity as a whole. The only thing that remains is the process of writing, which seeks to draw attention to itself (see Nicol 108). What the discourse of confession intends to make visible is shown to be a mirage through the “ironic power of language” (ibid.). Considered in isolation, the self-reflexive passages of AHWOSG certainly seem to convey the inaccessibility of authenticity. Even though the narrator of the acknowledgments wants us to “Pretend it’s Fiction” (n.p.) if the memoir’s insistence of referentiality becomes too jarring, the text frequently reminds us of its fictionality all on its own. This usually happens when Eggers lets his characters break the suspension of disbelief and start to address their own fictional construction. The first time this happens in the novel is when Toph criticizes the chronology of the narrative he is embedded in: I mean, it was almost as if it was too much to happen in one day, as if a number of days had been spliced together to quickly paint a picture of an entire period of time, to create a whole-seeming idea of how we are living, without having to stoop (or risk) to actually pacing the story out. (114)

Toph and Dave begin to argue about this, with Dave complaining that “to adequately relate even five  minutes of internal thought-making would take forever – it’s maddening” (115). These passages make it clear that Eggers has no interest in writing a traditional confessional memoir with real “characters and incidents and dialogue”. His text must reflect the quandary of his time: that there is an unbridgeable gap between experience and representation, and that everybody is still obsessed with the latter. For this reason, the text constantly points to its own limitations, as well as to the workings of selection, emplotment and revision that prop up each character like a puppet on strings. 71

3 Belief and Sincerity in Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Interestingly enough, these passages seem to demonstrate exactly the kind of protective irony that Wallace criticized. As Eggers explicitly stated in the acknowledgment section, he believes that disclosing his attempts to manipulate readers absolves him from responsibility for his actions. In regard to the passage with Toph, it might shield him from criticism directed at his art, which (we are led to believe) he feels deeply self-conscious about. Consider for example this passage from the interview with MTV: So tell me something: This isn’t really a transcript of the interview, is it? No. It’s not much like the actual interview at all, is it? Not that much, no. This is a device, this interview style. Manufactured and fake. It is. It’s a good device, though. Kind of a catchall for a bunch of anecdotes that would be too awkward to force together otherwise. Yes. (197)

Taken in isolation, this passage is no different from the “postmodern gimmickry” employed by a, say, Barthelme, or Barth. Not only does it puncture the reality effect of the transcript form, it also implies that every single part of the narrative is a “device” deployed to create a certain effect. This preempts the charge of manipulation and makes Eggers invulnerable from accusations of bad faith. This metafictional move has been criticized by Wallace to be a mere screen behind which the author can hide and, ultimately, vanish. The same strategy is observable when John, Dave’s friend who has been hospitalized after a suicide attempt, complains about his role in the book. After he pulls tubes and electrodes from his body and leaves the hospital bed, he lets Dave know that “I’m not going to be a fucking anecdote in your stupid book” (272). After Dave informs him that he (Dave) changed his name to John, the same name as Dave’s father, John replies: “Jesus! So I’m your dad, too. Fuck man, this is just too much. You are such a freak!” (273) This passage beautifully demonstrates the ambiguity of metafiction in the memoir. On one hand, metafiction foregrounds the role of fictionalization in re-telling Eggers’ life story. On the other hand, it delivers a self-characterization of Dave that stands quite outside the unsolvable reality / 72

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fiction conundrum. The scene informs us that Dave is so obsessed with control over his narrative that all other characters are practically ventriloquized versions of himself. They only speak and act according to Dave’s script. In another jolt of self-awareness, Dave conveys his guilt about this obsession by “letting” John break out of character and address the problem directly. This only reinforces the degree of textual manipulation Dave expects readers to feel. Again, the memoir loops into a spiral of guilt and self-obsession that endlessly turns downward. Metafictionality is not the only strategy employed by Eggers to probe the mediacy of his text. He often relishes in the formal playfulness that is typical for postmodern literature. The acknowledgment section, for example, features a chart of themes and motifs, which, in the hypothetical complete version, “maps out the entire book” (n.p.). Again, this formal joke signals Eggers’ desire to wrest control from the fuzziness and duplicity of language. A full graph of the novel promises mathematical objectivity and clarity; it forecloses any unwanted interpretations. Yet Eggers is aware that this must remain an illusion, as he ends each branch of the actual chart with “etc.” (n.p.). A few pages later, Eggers ends the section with the picture of a stapler. The stapler as a tool evokes an image of an actual human being that binds pages together. This is emblematic for the constitution of this memoir. It foregrounds Eggers’ role in collecting, selecting and combining the narratives within the covers. On one hand, this underlines the value of the text as an intimate, personal expression. On the other hand, it undermines the referential pact, since we understand that all of Eggers’ experiences have been – necessarily – fictionalized. Yet where does one locate this subject named Dave Eggers in the narrative? Postmodernism was, after all, famed for the replacement of subjectivity with a host of decentralized fragments. These remain inscrutable not only to the other, but also to each and every “self”. In the fake MTV interview, Dave positions himself to the issue of subjectivity: These things, details, stories, whatever, are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs for anyone to see. What does he care where it is, who sees it, this snake, and his skin? He leaves it where he molts. Hours, days or months later, we come across a snake’s long-shed skin and we know something of the snake, we know that it’s of this approximate girth and that approximate length, but we know very little else. Do we know where the

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This passage addresses both conceptions of self and matters of sincerity and authenticity. If Eggers’ self is the snake, then his attempts of communication and signification are the metaphorical skin. This skin gives information about past versions of the snake, yet what the snake is ‘really’ like, i.e. its authentic self, must always remain elusive. As soon as these aspects of the self are externalized as representations, they lose their connection to the origin. Consequently, the ‘real’ Dave Eggers cannot be found within the covers of this book. He can, in fact, never be found, because all of his expressions and writings are just temporary snapshots of a constantly evolving self (that could be wearing fur this very moment). “Dave” is just a skin that Eggers has shed a long time ago. The text draws attention to the paradoxical idea behind sincerity – to represent that which cannot be represented. There is another passage that signals Eggers’ awareness of this paradox to the reader. After John’s suicide attempt, Dave has a highly metafictional moment of reflection about the way he wants to tell stories. After he lists all of the problems of the hyperreal world he feels trapped in, he summarizes: “So there is first the experience, the friend and the threatened suicide, then there are echoes from these things having been done before, then the awareness of echoes, the anger at the presence of echoes, then the acceptance, embracing of presence of echoes – as enrichment […]” (270). Dave acknowledges the intertextual nexus his writing enters into from the moment of its inception. His own, authentic experience becomes just one voice in an infinite series of ‘echoes’ that envelop all representation. Yet this admission is not a capitulation. Dave does not plan to revel in the multitude of voices until he is drowned out, submerged and scattered. Instead, he vows to “be aware of the dangers of self-consciousness, but at the same time, I’ll be plowing through the fog of all these echoes, plowing through the mixed metaphors, noise, and will try to show the core, which is still there, as a core, and is valid, despite the fog. The core is the core is the core. There is always the core, that can’t be articulated. Only caricatured” (217). This encapsulates both Dave’s acceptance of the inevitable gap between reality and representation and his desire to bridge it all the same. Even though his writing is but a caricature, he must still 74

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strive to perfect it because the core of experience is “valid” – it exists, has importance and must be shared.

3.3.2 AHWOSG as a Trauma Narrative So far, I have focused on the critical discourse that has framed Eggers’ concept of the “core” as authentic experience. Some critics argue, however, that the nature of these experiences adds more nuance to both the “core” and the narrative as a whole. What Eggers writes about, after all, are the horrifying deaths of his parents from cancer, the suicide attempts of his friend, as well as the rage, grief and guilt of Dave. The memoir revolves around more than its own genre or matters of representation. It can be understood as a text that circles around Dave’s trauma and his attempts to process his traumatic memories. In the Acknowledgments, Eggers is straightforward about the role that trauma plays in the discursive formation of his text: “… the gimmickry is simply a device, a defense, to obscure the black, blinding, murderous rage and sorrow at the core of this whole story, which is both too black and blinding to look at – avert … your … eyes!” (n.p.) By using the familiar metaphor of the “core”, as well as the adjectives “black” and “blinding”, Eggers frames his text as a narrative process of working through trauma. Traumatic memories are psychological wounds that rupture the symbolic order. When they are triggered, they can resurface as a flashback, yet they cannot be accessed consciously. In order to heal, those afflicted with trauma have to reintegrate these memories into their consciousness. One method that has proven to be successful is the creation of narratives, which can eventually lead to a sense of agency (see Holdenried 425). Texts that attempt to represent this working through often mirror the psychological effects of trauma in their own idiosyncratic fashion17. In this way, trauma’s warped chronology is expressed through a disruption of linear and sequential narrative . Moreover, there is often a motif that pervades the text and hints at the repetitive nature of flashbacks. Trauma narratives also often feature metafictional For a detailed account of literary trauma studies, see Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004; and LaCapra, Dominick. Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016.

17

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reflections about the limits of language, which recalls the debilitating effect of trauma on the symbolic order (see Balaev 362–365, Campos-Herrero 15). In her essay “Memoir as a Pain-Relief Device”, Elise Miller argues that AHWOSG displays all of these characteristics. In her opinion, the text is a “psychoanalytic commentary on the challenges of writing a memoir about catastrophic loss and trauma” (983). She makes the case that Eggers’ choice of imagery during his narration of the death of his parents prefigures their traumatic impact. The death of his mother from cancer is depicted as an event that shatters the fixed boundaries of Dave’s world (see 994). That is also why Dave stops short of actually narrating the moment of death in the beginning of the novel. His mother’s passing is omitted and replaced by a fantastical image: “I take [my brother’s] hand and we go through the window and fly up and over quickly sketched trees and then to California” (45). The rest of the memoir revolves around what happens to Dave and Toph in California, yet their traumatic past haunts them constantly. Only near the end of AHWOSG does Dave finally manage to access the memory of this mother’s death. Miller sees this non-linear narration of events as an attempt to grapple with the impossible task of writing about trauma: “What he is experiencing feels more like a dream, and this derealization frequently disrupts the chronology of the narrative” (994). Yet even when Eggers writes about Might, MTV’s The Real World and life with his brother, references to death, sickness, and especially cancer occur again and again. What all of these references have in common is that they emphasize how sudden Dave’s parents died, and that he had neither the time to prepare nor the capacity to accept that they are gone. When he is interviewed by MTV, for example, he recaptures a dream he had of his father. In the dream, Dave remembers, “it occurs to me that he could very well be alive still, that his death made so little sense in the first place, was so sudden and illogically timed that […] it could simply be another deception” (226). When he receives the remains of his mother and puts them in the car, he muses: “The box which is not my mother cannot go in the trunk because she would be livid if I put her in the trunk. She would fucking kill me” (382). Even near the very end of the memoir, during a game of Frisbee with Toph, Dave has to think about his mother’s death and projects his difficulty of coming to terms onto her: “She could not fucking believe this was actually happening … She was not ready, not even close, was not resolved, resigned, was not ready  –” (432). The core of Dave’s trauma is so inscrutable because it confronts him with a 76

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paradox. He feels the urge to make sense of his parents’ passing, yet their deaths were so sudden that they feel utterly senseless to him. Larson argues that exactly this inability to make meaning of traumatic memory motivates the metafictional self-awareness of AHWOSG: “Metanarrating may be the only way a memoir can get written if the memoir’s self-awakened subject is how do I write one” (95). Whenever Dave cannot bear the paradoxical core of his memories, he stops telling his story and instead reflects on problems of representation, memory and identity. He does so not only within the text, but also through his formal playfulness. The aforementioned stapler takes on a different meaning in this context. It can be understood as a symbol for Eggers desire to narrate his suffering, to make sense of it (see Miller 992). Similarly, the dialogic structure of the conversation between “Brother” and “Mother” as well as the musical notation (see 103) signal the inability of language to express Dave’s desperation about the absence of his mother and the effects that keep haunting him. Still, Dave leaves no doubt that writing has a therapeutic function for him. In the metafictional conversation with Toph, Dave has his little brother speak about Dave’s first reaction to the death of their mother: So you’re going to stay up tonight, most of the night, like every night, staring at your screen – remember when you were a senior in college? You were in that creative writing class, and you were writing about these deaths, not two months afterwards […] You have been determined since then to get this down, to take that terrible winter and write with it what you hope will be some heartbreaking thing. (119)

Toph’s words depict Dave again as an extremely ambivalent character. In the spirit of self-ridicule, one could read this passage as the admission of Dave that he wants to exploit the death of his parents either to make great art or simply to achieve literary fame. Yet, as Miller argues, writing could also be understood as a way to keep going, to keep living, in order to tell a story in the future (see 1000). Last but not least, it is of course the process of building a narrative in itself that helps Dave with the working through. That is why he obsessively returns to it. Even though it has a therapeutic function, writing is depicted as an ambiguous practice by Eggers again and again. He often suspects it to be a diversion, a self-defense mechanism that protects both him and his readers from the intensity of his 77

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suffering. He mentions this explicitly in themes C and E (Acknowledgments, n.p.) which I have quoted before. This idea is also palpable in the whole structure of the peritexts. In their digressiveness, they recall Tristram Shandy’s propensity to postpone uncomfortable parts of his life story. Dave’s deeply seated fear of death and his obsession with control feed into each other, as the latter is meant to be a protection against the former. Yet there is also a defiant sense of hope in the therapeutic powers of writing. According to Miller, the whole structure of AHWOSG mirrors the process of working through: Dave tells the story of his mother’s death, only to stop short before it happens and escapes into fantasy and metafictional stalling. He returns to this scene at the end of the memoir, after he has told his story, after he has literally and figuratively let go of his mother. The messy process of spreading her ashes signals acceptance and Dave is finally able to speak about her final moments, about their terrible impact on him. If we follow Miller’s argument, the novel could end here. Yet curiously enough, the acceptance does not make Dave feel any better. After he throws away the ashes, he reflects about what he is doing: I knew I would do it, and I know this, I know what I am doing now, that I am doing something both beautiful and gruesome because I am destroying its beauty by knowing that it might be beautiful […] knowing that I will very soon be documenting it, that in my pocket is a tape recorder brought for just that purpose […] I am a monster. My poor mother. She would do this without the thinking, without the thinking about the thinking –” (400).

In this passage, Dave lets the discourses of trauma and authenticity overlap. Not only can he never truly represent his life experience, he can also never truly experience the working through in narrative. The constant sense of mediation destroys the authenticity of the moment and makes a real letting-go impossible. Even in this intensely personal moment, Dave is terrified of being unable to escape his postmodern solipsism (“the thinking about the thinking”). As Hoffmann writes: “In an environment that experiences trauma even in television’s daily soaps and afternoon talk-shows, this narrator feels that an unmediated narrative in a traditional realist form is impossible” (95). In the end, the most heartbreaking aspect of Eggers’ memoir may not be suffering and the trauma itself, but Dave’s fear that he must forever relive them in a guilt-ridden maze of reflections and refractions. 78

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If even the theme of trauma is infected by hyperreal solipsism, what hope for resolution is there in Eggers’ writing? Is AHWOSG truly a mere “postmodern memoir” that posits the nature of trauma as an inescapable state of mind? In her closing words, Miller manages to point to a possible escape strategy: Eggers does decide that he has something to tell us: writing is palliative, but it is also torturous, lonely, guilt-inducing, unreal, confusing, even masochistic […] He performs mourning, loss and overcoming trauma as if they are occurring in the present tense – an illusion, of course, but one promoted by his running commentary on the nature of memoir writing, which both creates the appearance of writing as never-really-finished and helps to contain its creator in the process. (Miller 1006)

Like its narrator and its creator, AHWOSG is unapologetically and self-consciously ambiguous. It draws attention to the “illusion” it seeks to create, which all life writing necessarily seeks to create. Yet despite of this, it “contains its creator” in the form of an absolute urge to share, to make public, to disclose. Eggers must share his suffering, yet he also feels obliged to discuss the problems of writing and sharing narratives – his own in particular, but also stories in general. In the following section, I will spell this strategy out in more detail. Even though the book revolves around that which cannot be represented (authenticity, trauma), it is not ultimately a postmodern memoir. It uses this awareness as the foundation for an ethical ideal.

3.4 “A Mistake the Author Could not Refrain from Making”: Productive Failure in AHWOSG 3.4.1 Romantic Irony and Sincerity AHWOSG oscillates between two discursive positions. On the one hand, there is an intense yearning for sincerity. Dave wants to write about real events, real people and real experiences. He wants to document his life story in order to communicate it to others. This exchange of experiences promises the community that Dave 79

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so desires, a community of peers who trust each other and, through their shared suffering, relieve their burden. Consequently, Dave creates numerous sincerity effects. He strengthens the referential pact and repeatedly emphasizes his ownership of the events, emotions and memories he narrates. Through the books peritexts (MWKWWM, Acknowledgments), Eggers gives insight into his intentions, as well as the process of creating the memoir. While both Dave and Eggers often come off as manipulative and controlling in this endeavor, their disclosure of personal weakness works as another effect of sincerity. The relentless assault of Dave on his own character functions as a moment of parrhesia and authenticates his narrative. On the other hand, AHWOSG is pervaded by the fear of inescapable solipsism. This solipsism is caused by the realization that language cannot transmit authentic experience. As a result, there is an unbridgeable gap between Dave’s perspective on the world and what he can relate to others. This remove often becomes hyperreal as Dave questions the mere existence of authentic selves and experiences. His life is saturated by mediated images and reflections that corrupt and, eventually, replace authenticity. Dave is caught in an infinite loop of anticipating these reflections and doubting his anticipation of these reflections. Since language cannot establish true connection, there is no way to externalize and escape this loop. Instead of sincerity, Dave fears, there is just infinite solipsism. This doubt about representation suffuses the whole text. It reads at times like a deconstruction of many things at once: biographical writing, the gesture of confession, the lust for total disclosure. Yet this doubt is also fueled by the intrusion of Dave’s traumatic past. The only cure to its debilitating effects seems to be narrative, yet even this working through becomes complicated by mediation (“I am destroying its beauty by knowing that it might be beautiful”). For Dave, everything is always already mediated, which makes the existence of authenticity and sincerity impossible. Is Eggers memoir just a text that revels in contradiction, then? Partly, it is, but by employing the model of Romantic Irony, I suggest that this contradiction can be integrated meaningfully into Eggers’ ethical project. First of all, the imagery and philosophy of AHWOSG is congruent with Romantic Irony. Dave is aware that the core of experience cannot be represented. Instead of giving in to silence or despair (in the guise of solipsism), he attempts to represent it all the same. Even though his text is but a “caricature”, it hints at the core, which for Eggers can refer to either authenticity or trauma. In all its ambiguity and oscillation, his writing is a tribute 80

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to what Schlegel called the succession of “self-creation and self-destruction”. Consider Wolfgang Funk’s thoughts on AHWOSG, which draw attention to exactly the same utopian dream of transcendence that characterizes Schlegel’s writing: […] it is precisely the indeterminate condition beyond any system of representation that charges experience with authenticity, an authenticity which cannot be depicted but only ever hinted at through the aesthetic form of paradox. […] Only because all the ploys invoked to bridge the gap between experience and representation are actually doomed to fail […] can they invoke imitations of the material immediacy of the very experience they so unsuccessfully try to re-enact. Eggers’ use of paratexts can be read as an attempt to short-circuit the relationship between the various facets of the autobiographical self, between fiction and reality, between experience and representation. (131)

What is especially pertinent about Funk’s observations is the motif of transcendence through failure. For Eggers, failure is never a final destination. It is the beginning of the very process of creation and communication. His decision to embrace failure again harks back to Romantic Irony. That which the subject of Romanticism desires (the infinite idea) can never be captured in finite systems of signification. The embrace of this paradoxical desire, however, makes the artist capable of composing fragmented probes that hint at the infinite. In the same way, Eggers’ writing embraces its own paradoxicality to hint at that which it cannot represent. Its imperfection is part of Eggers’ ethos, which becomes clear when he writes: “The book was seen by its author as a stupid risk, and an ugly thing, and a betrayal, and overall, as a mistake he would regret for the rest of his life but a mistake which nevertheless he could not refrain from making, and, worse, as a mistake he would encourage everyone to make” (2001: 35). In passing, Eggers delivers a deconstruction of the binary opposite failure / success. The two always contain each other and implicate each other. That entails, of course, that without failure, there can be no success. If everyone should intentionally make mistakes, can they still be seen as mistakes? If art intentionally fails at representing authenticity, is it still a failure? Or does this transform art into something that can transcend itself? The underlying project of Eggers’ novel is thus a deliberate and self-aware juxtaposition of two incommensurable things: a yearning for the communication of 81

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authenticity, and a fundamental skepticism towards language and biography. Both seem to exist at the same time, as the memoir oscillates between them. Yet their oscillation is not what AHWOSG focuses on. Instead, Eggers weighs the scales. His yearning is so strong that it must be expressed, even though it is doomed to fail. In the end, the yearning must triumph. This becomes especially clear in Eggers’ explanation of why he encourages everyone to make mistakes: Because if you do it right and go straight toward them, you, like me, will write to them and will look straight into their eyes while writing, will look straight into their fucking eyes […] but even so wrote a book that was really a letter to them, a messy fucking letter you could barely keep a grip on, but a letter you meant, and a letter you sometimes wish you had not mailed, but a letter you are happy made it from you to them. (2001: 35)

The memoir demonstrates how intensely Eggers burns with the desire to externalize his experiences. His letter is “messy” because it must account for different shades of skepticism, but ultimately, this messiness just demonstrates the strength of his resolve. This is the Romantic aspect of Eggers’ irony. Where the Romantics yearned for the representation of the infinite, Eggers yearns for the representation of authenticity. Even though he constantly emphasizes the futility of this project, it is the yearning itself he wants to communicate. This yearning for the transcendence of spirit or language was the hallmark of Romantic thought, and it resurfaces in Eggers’ troubled account of postmodern life. While Eggers can never capture the “core” of experience in his art, he can transmit his desperate desire to his readers through the flawed gesture of writing.

3.4.2 The Cultivation of Belief In her interpretation of AHWOSG, Altes develops a dichotomy of readings that resembles the one I have pursued: “The first reading takes literature as a form of communication and as a representation of human emotions […] The second, ironical reading takes this representation and the whole language of ‘sincere’ self-presentation as an echo, an ironic mention of […] discourses that are pervasive in contemporary media and art” (126). She closes her argument by stating that, “in the 82

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reading experience, both may exist at the same time” (ibid.). While I agree with Altes’ premise, I want to make the case that even the second, ironical reading can be seen as a sincerity effect. I have mentioned before that the apparent ambiguity of the memoir forces an ethical decision on the part of the reader. The endless self-doubt of Dave (am I a helplessly ironic solipsist or a sincere artist?) can only be resolved by the reader, who must ultimately decide based on faith. There is no rational, argumentative way to disentangle sincerity and irony in the memoir. That is why Kelly has written in regard to the New Sincerity: “… the endpoint to the infinite jest of consciousness can only be the reader’s choice whether or not to place trust and Blind Faith” (145). It is noteworthy, then, that the New Sincerity of Eggers and Romantic Irony differ from Postmodern Irony in the same respect. While all three question the boundaries of language, New Sincerity and Romantic Irony nevertheless value the belief in ideas that transcend language. According to them, a life without faith and belief would be hollow. That is why Romantic Irony functions so well to explain literary developments after Postmodernism. By employing the paradox of “postmodern realism”, Ihab Hassan comes to the same conclusion: “fiduciary realism – a postmodern realism, if any  – demands faith and empathy and trust precisely because it rests on Nothingness, the nothingness within all our representations, the final authority of the void” (313). This should clarify why, both in the paratexts and the memoir, Eggers does not intend to offer a truly free decision, does not intend to offer two readings at the same time. For him, it is important that readers have faith in his yearning for sincerity even though the text practically consumes itself with ironic doubt. Their decision cannot be based on textual interpretation, but on an ethical interest in community, communion and empathy. According to Konstantinou, this “cultivation of belief” (215) goes far beyond AHWOSG and spreads to all of Eggers’ literary institutions, such as McSweeney’s and The Believer. They profit from the development of Egger’s ethos, which is marked by “goodness and sincerity” (ibid.). Within the bounds of the memoir, the “cultivation of belief” is expressed most explicitly in the ending. Describing a game of Frisbee with Toph, Dave suddenly shifts into a violent, expletive-laden appeal to his readers: “What the fuck does it take to show you motherfuckers, what does it take what do you want how much do you want because I am willing and I’ll stand before you and I’ll raise my arms and give you my chest and throat and wait …” (437). In what reads like the passion 83

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of a “secular, Generation X Christ” (Kostantinou, 197), Eggers brings his language of religious sacrifice to a culmination. He has killed his old self so that readers can believe. He has paid the unnamable ‘price’ for sincerity to re-emerge from the depths of skepticism. The memoir’s ambiguity thus becomes the strongest sincerity effect. We are meant to understand that Eggers’ drive to be sincere is so urgent that he pursues it despite of the fact that it is doomed to fail. The alternative to sincerity – unmitigated solipsism – is so terrifying that readers must find a way to believe and to trust. This is also why I think that AHWOSG is less cynical in its promotion of Eggers than Konstantinou claims. If Eggers succeeds and manages to cultivate belief, then literature becomes an escape from the spirals of guilt and doubt. It affords readers with access to the “consciousness behind the text” and helps them to feel less isolated in their mental echo chambers. Like Wallace, Eggers has a therapeutic function for literature in mind. By creating a paradox that can only be resolved by trust and belief, he gives readers the opportunity to touch something external to themselves, however fleeting and elusive it may be. His imagery during the memoir’s ending makes it clear that this conversion is not quite unlike a religious experience. Just like religious leaders, Eggers has a moral lesson to teach.

3.4.3 Eggers’ Ethical Ideal In the memoir’s central passage, Dave makes a case that belief is essential: So I could be aware of the dangers of the self-consciousness, but at the same time, I’ll be plowing through the fog of all these echoes, plowing through mixed metaphors, noise, and will try to show the core, which is still there, as a core, and is valid, despite the fog. The core is the core is the core. There is always the core, that can’t be articulated. Only caricatured. (217)

The passage’s imagery draws attention to itself. The “mixed metaphors” Dave wants to plow through raise their heads in the previous subclause (“the fog of all these echoes”). In a way, Dave’s writing wants to plow through itself, its own inaccuracy, its own indeterminacy. In order to get to the core of experience, his language must transcend its own limits, as well as its mediacy. This transcendence is 84

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a utopian dream, as the core “can’t be articulated. Only caricatured”. Even though he is aware of this fact, Dave keeps working on his caricature. The core is “valid”, it must be shown, disclosed, shared, expressed, and narrated. AHWOSG is an attempt to convert readers into believers. The text postulates the imperative to believe that Dave does indeed “try to show the core”, despite his doubts. This is an ethical imperative: Dave’s project is portrayed to be fundamental to his vision of community, trust and even bare survival. Dave’s character is torn between the same ambiguous poles as his whole narrative. On the one hand, he rages within a solipsistic cage of his own making. On the other hand, he yearns for connection, support and togetherness. This yearning is most clearly expressed by his metaphor of the lattice, which Dave uses near the end of the book to express his oscillation: “There is nowhere I stop and you begin. I am exhausted. I stand before you millions, 47 million, 54, 32, whatever, you know what I mean, you people … And where is my lattice? I am not sure you are my lattice. Sometimes I know you are there and other times you are not there …” (436). Because of the nature of language and literature, there can never be certainty for Dave. His narrative is a probing, a search for community. The only way to edge ever closer Is the disclosure of his own experiences, especially those that are shameful or painful. It is this disclosure that, through the rhetorical effect of parrhesia, creates trust. Trust, in turn, is necessary to form the utopian “lattice” that Dave dreams of. Only this dream of community promises an escape from the solipsistic isolation of Dave’s mediated youth. This, then, is one ethical ‘lesson’ of AHWOSG. It feels better to share, to trust, to risk, and to be connected, than to be alone and safe behind a protective shield. Only through the constant acceptance of failure can this community come into being, one utterance, one gesture, one text at a time. It is noteworthy, in this respect, that Dave’s utopian dream has found an approximation in the networked world of the internet. The underlying ideology of social networks is largely congruent with Dave’s ethos: the glorification of sharing and disclosure, the deconstruction of privacy, the promise of a better world through ultimate connectivity. Yet the digital realm remains just as ambiguous as the discursive approach of AHWOSG. Concerns with civil liberties notwithstanding, the internet has led to a simultaneous atomization and connection of individuals. Even though we spend a lot of time in contact with others, we nevertheless remain isolated behind screens, displays, and monitors. The threat of solipsism that 85

3 Belief and Sincerity in Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

pervades AHWOSG remains persistent in a networked world, just as its promise of a utopian lattice has proved to be prophetic. Communion is not the only ethical aspect of Dave’s caricature, however. In my discussion of the memoir as a trauma narrative, it has become clear that writing has helped Dave to survive the aftermath of his parents’ deaths. His working through cannot transcend the mediacy of language, yet literature still helps him to heal. The disclosure of his pain and suffering forces Dave to tell a story, which in itself manages to give his life meaning again. The failure of his attempt to accurately represent his traumatic memories results in a caricature that ultimately saves him. From an ethical perspective, belief is therefore good because it leads to community, trust and healing. Just like Wallace, however, Eggers repeatedly points out the risk involved in this philosophy. Both rhetorically and ethically, his move can only work with an exposure to ridicule and scorn. As Eggers mentions in MWKWWM: “When I was done, I was ashamed, because I had written what I saw as a much too revealing and maudlin thing, overflowing with blood and sentiment and a simple bare longing for people who are gone. The book was seen by its author as a stupid risk …” (2001: 35). Both the shame and the risk are catalysts for Eggers’ cultivation of belief. They are part of his utopian community. Only if we expose our shame can we find a way out of loneliness and isolation.

3.5 Conclusion In a specific way, the relation between David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers can be likened to the one between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Just as Whitman is often seen as the practical and literary embodiment of Emerson’s “American Scholar”, Eggers can be seen as the embodiment of Wallace’s sincere “anti-rebel”. I have often taken recourse to Wallace’s writing in this chapter, because he created the intellectual foundation for Eggers. Both circle around the fear of solipsism, both seek relief in the judgment of the reader, both utilize parrhesia to create sincerity effects. What they also have in common is an explicit dislike of irony. They postulate a rather simplistic dichotomy between irony and sincerity, where the former is responsible for the atomization of society and the latter the only hope for its reconstruction. 86

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Eggers takes Wallace’s ideas and probes them thoroughly in his memoir. A surprising result of this probing is that AHWOSG is characterized by a deeply ironic attitude, no matter what Eggers says about this subject. I have identified this as Romantic Irony. It results from the awareness that one’s desire cannot be fulfilled, yet must still be pursued. This makes the memoir seem schizophrenic at times – as if it were written by a Yale School Deconstructionist and a Christian Preacher at the same time. This is due to the oscillation between “self-creation and self-destruction” I have mentioned before. Dave’s yearning for sincerity is often tempered by his awareness that he lives in a hyperreal world, in which neither authenticity nor its transmission to others has a place. In these moments of Romantic Irony, the memoir becomes a template for future writers like Lerner and Heti. They, too, are caught in the same liminal space between desire and frustration. They, too, embrace the failure of their aspirations and try to make it as transparent as possible. They, too, hope to engender belief on the part of the reader by exposing their shame and suffering. Eggers can therefore be said to have popularized Wallace’s rhetorical and ethical thoughts about sincerity. He never deviates too far from his contemporary, but asks the same questions obsessively and thoroughly. In AHWOSG, he has created a host of ideas that persists in the writing of contemporary writers of autofiction. Still, there is one important difference between Eggers and Lerner (and also Heti, to a degree). Where Lerner sees art as a unique medium of oscillation, Eggers never truly rests amidst the poles of self-creation and self-destruction. The strongest sincerity effect of his memoir is, after all, the representation of his struggle with doubt. He triumphs over that struggle, writes AHWOSG, and metaphorically kills his former, skeptical self. The imperative to believe in Dave Eggers, despite of all the skepticism, entails that readers are not truly free to judge, not truly free to choose. It seems as if Eggers envisioned his memoir not as a confession, but as a conversion. This differentiates him from the two authors I will go on to write about.

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4 Paradoxical Desires: Romantic Irony and Autofictionality in Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station 4.1 Introduction When asked about the connection between his first two novels Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 in 2015, Ben Lerner answered: It’s willfully confusing, but I think it’s more that the narrator of 10:04 is the author of Leaving the Atocha Station – but then it’s unclear how much the author of Leaving the Atocha Station was the narrator within it, so there are all these different kinds of divisions of fictional levels. (see Smith, n.p.)

This willful confusion of fictional levels has always been a hallmark of Lerner’s style. In a way, the entirety of his oeuvre refers back to him, to Lerner, and to his reflection about the nexus between language and lived experience. He started his career as a poet and published three anthologies: The Lichtenberg figures (2004), Angle of Yaw (2006) and Mean Free Path (2010). After his debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station in 2011, he published two other novels, 10:04 in 2014 and The Topeka School in 2019. The connection between them is exactly as complex as Lerner makes them seem in the abovementioned quote. The narrator and protagonist of LTAS is Adam Gordon, who is a young poet on a scholarship in Spain. Gordon shares many similarities with Lerner – he grew up in Topeka, he writes poems about the pure potentiality of language, and he is a huge fan of John Ashbery’s poetry. Yet unlike Eggers’ debut, Lerner does not market this book as a memoir. He does, however, make it seem as though “Ben”  – the narrator of his next novel 88

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10:04 – is also the author of LTAS. In 10:04, Ben comments on the narrator of the first novel he published: And because his narrator was characterized above all by his anxiety regarding the disconnect between his internal experience and his social self-presentation, the more intensely the author worried about distinguishing himself from the narrator the more he felt he had become him. (66)

This hall of fictional mirrors becomes even more elaborate through the fact that Adam Gordon returns as the narrator of The Topeka School, where he becomes even more indistinguishable from Ben Lerner, the author. The seemingly stable instances of author, narrator and protagonist threaten to collapse. The common denominator of these novels, then, is an experimentation with the boundary between fiction and reality. Like the works of Eggers and Heti, Lerner’s novels are intensely autofictional. They revolve around the question to what extent authentic experience can be communicated to others – not just within an artistic medium, but in everyday conversation as well. In the context of productive failure, Leaving the Atocha Station is ideally suited as a case study. The reason for this is the fact that Lerner treats his own desire for sincerity with the utmost irony. Adam Gordon is portrayed as an artist who yearns for the representation of authenticity in art, yet constantly lies to his friends and lovers. What is more, he is convinced that his own artistic medium – poetry – will always fall short of his own idealist demands. This constant oscillation between desire and frustration is codified in Adam’s favorite concepts: the “actual” and the “virtual”. While he yearns for the actual immediacy of experience, language only ever offers virtual potential. This dichotomy is a recurring motif in the novel. Consider, for example, the brief intrusion of Spanish lyricism near the end of Adam’s narrative: “Bajo el agua  / siguen las palabras” (179). This is noteworthy, first of all, because it is an allusion to poetry, and LTAS is largely a reflection about poetic language and the interplay between a mother tongue and foreign tongues. Yet the specific poem this alludes to – “The First Lagoon” by Frederico García Llorca – is itself concerned with the relationship between the “actual” and the “virtual”:

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4 Romantic Irony and Autofictionality in Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station Bajo el agua siguen las palabras Sobre el agua una luna redonda se baña dando envidia a la otra ¡tan alta! En la orilla Un niño, ve las lunas y dice: ¡Noche; toca los platillos! Under the water the words continue Above the water a round moon bathes itself filling with envy the other up there! At the shore a child sees the moons and says: Night, play the cymbals! (my translation)

The child in the poem sees the real moon and its alluring reflection and desires to turn them into art. Similarly, Lerner’s work entangles and plays with seemingly distinct oppositions: reality and fiction, sincerity and irony, poetry and prose. Leaving the Atocha Station is an ode to this love of liminality. Like all novels I discuss in this dissertation, it is motivated by the desire we label sincerity: to represent the authentic self in language and to communicate it to others. Yet Adam’s narrative pulsates with the awareness that this desire cannot be fulfilled. This is partly due to the limits of language and partly due to the insight that the self only comes into being while it is narrated. Adam deals with this awareness by giving up the ideal of sincerity. He lies, manipulates and deceives others. As a result, he suffers from anxiety and depression. That is why I understand Adam’s 90

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narrative as a cautionary tale. It demonstrates the pitfalls of giving up sincerity. Lerner makes the case that the desire of sincerity must be pursued, even though it can never be fulfilled (“under the water / the words continue”, my emphasis). In this paradoxical wish, I see parallels to Romantic irony. In LTAS, Lerner searches for a middle ground not just between fact and fiction, but also between sincerity and irony. He turns their paradoxical combination into art, not unlike a child who makes music out of reflected light and its reflection. The first section of this chapter will begin by discussing Adam’s aesthetics of the “actual” and the “virtual”. These concepts structure his whole narrative and are intimately connected with the novel’s reflection about irony and sincerity. I make the case that the actual and the virtual are, in fact, expressions of Romantic Irony. This becomes especially clear in Adam’s allusions to the poetry of John Ashbery, which I analyze in detail. The novel differentiates between Adam’s thoughts about art and his interactions with other characters, however. My discussion of this contrast between the “narrating I” and the “experiencing I” closes the first section. The second section deals with the novel’s autofictional narrative situation. It is split into two parts. The first part discusses the connection between narrative reliability and sincerity. Specifically, I ask how we can speak of sincerity effects in a narrative such as LTAS that fulfills many criteria for what is commonly called “unreliable narration”. The second part of the section shows how autofictionality manifests itself in LTAS, and argues that it is an expression of productive failure.

4.2 Adam Gordon as Experiencing-I: Sincerity and Romantic Irony In Lerner’s first novel, Adam Gordon, a young American poet, recounts his stay abroad in Spain. Having won a prestigious scholarship, Adam is ostensibly in Spain to research the dictatorship of Franco and to gather material for a long poem. Adam never gets around to either of these, nor does he begin to write the poem. Instead, he spends his time in museums, in parks and on parties. What Adam calls his “research” (7) involves drugs, sex, reflections about art and the occasional creation of a short poem. He seems to be aware of the rift between his aspirations and his actual work, as he often describes himself as a “fraud.” He does so not only 91

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because he views himself as a fake poet, but also because he is a pathological liar. Almost all of his interactions with others involve deceptions and manipulations. Some of his lies are white, others dark and shocking. As the plot develops, it becomes obvious that this behavior takes a psychological toll on Adam. He suffers from anxiety attacks, sleeplessness and depression. He also begins to suspect that he might be a drug addict. Both as a narrator and a protagonist, Adam attempts to justify his propensity for lies and the resulting psychological problems. Consider the following passage, which can be taken as programmatic for Adam’s self-understanding: But my research has taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where “poem” is understood as a failure of language to be equal to the possibility it figures; only then could my fraudulence be a project and not merely a pathology; only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic, as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance problem, felicitous phrase, the origin of which lay not in my desire to evade reality, but in my desire to have a chemical excuse for reality’s unavailability. (164)

Adam does entertain the idea that his fraudulence and addiction could be aspects of mental illness. Then again, his use of the empirical term “research” and the repeated insistence on “only then” suggest that he would rather believe in a different explanation. According to his argument, he lies and takes drugs because of aesthetic and philosophical reasons. He frames his fraudulence as a “project” that demonstrates both the failure of language and the unavailability of reality. He puns that both reality and language have a “substance problem.” The ambiguity introduced by this phrase is, to my mind, central to the novel. Are Adam’s lies tied to his poetic project, or is that just another lie he tells himself? Before I answer this question, I want to spell out what this project actually is, and how it is represented in the novel.

4.2.1 Adam’s Aesthetics: The “Actual” and the “Virtual” A sizeable part of LTAS revolves around Adam’s reflections about art and poetry. Because his aesthetic views guide his interactions with other characters, it is 92

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fruitful to analyze them in detail. The totality of Adam’s thoughts about this topic can be summarized by two binary opposites: the “actual” and the “virtual.” For Adam, actual artworks are only remarkable in their failure to evoke deeply felt emotion. The humanist tradition has conditioned Adam to feel a “profound experience of art” (8), i.e. a life-changing surge of feeling, a revelation. When confronted with actual works of art, however, he only feels “a distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity” (9). As a result, texts and images become empty placeholders, ghostly sites where meaning should reside but only absence is found. For Adam, poetry is the medium that make this absence felt most sharply: “Poetry actively repelled my attention, it was opaque and thingly and refused to absorb me; its articles and conjunctions and prepositions failed to dissolve into a feeling and a speed; you could fall into the spaces between the words as you tried to link them up” (20). This opaqueness invests poems with a “negative power” (20). Paradoxically, Adam is drawn to poems precisely because they frustrate his search for meaning and reflect his attention back towards himself. The actual content of the poem is, at best, of secondary importance. The poem becomes a screen on which readers can project “their own desperate belief in the possibility of poetic experience” (38). Poetry possesses this negative power because of the limitations of language. In Adam’s experience, language is usually alien, recalcitrant and incongruent. When he speaks of an “incommensurability of language and experience” (65), it becomes clear that he views the two as fundamentally separate. For him, experience is authentic: it cannot be represented or communicated through language. This is the primary reason for his devaluation of actual poems. At the same time, he yearns for the transcendence of a “profound experience.” It is a yearning that must necessarily be frustrated. The limitations of the actual text manifest themselves to Adam not just while reading poetry, but also while reading prose. He often points out that prose is only valuable because it allows the reader to attend to the passage of time. Where poetry obstructs flow, prose offers the illusion of meaning that unfolds over time (see for example 19–20, 89). Yet prose, like poetry, cannot bridge the chasm between language and experience. For Adam, the sense of directionality in prose is unlike actual life. It cannot capture the uneventful and directionless states that make up most of his time in Spain (see 64). Yet prose is also unfit to represent the uniqueness of brief, intense moments, as the universal structure of language robs them of 93

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their individuality. The actual text – either as poem or prose – is therefore inevitably disconnected from the experiences Adam desires them to transport. Even though Adam uses mostly negative terms to describe literature, he spends his life pursuing it in various forms. This apparent contradiction can be explained by the concept of the “virtual” that completes Adam’s aesthetic theory. As a poet, Adam is convinced that poems cannot bring about real change in the world. He imagines the “actual” world as the mass graves during Franco’s reign, genocide, and the destruction of the planet. In such a world, poems cannot “make things happen” (44). And yet, Adam writes that he would kill himself if poetry did not exist. That is because even actual poems convey “virtual possibilities” (44). By dint of what they are not – transcendental, absolute, impactful, meaningful – poems gesture at an alternative to the actual that does not yet exist. This is the constructive aspect of their negative power. Their failure to signify points toward a far-off future where signification is possible. As such, the imperfect, actual poem is always accompanied by a perfect possibility behind the veil of the virtual. In his own poetry, Adam wants to demonstrate awareness of this split between the actual and the virtual. His style aspires towards the latter: “[My] poems in their randomness and disorder were in some important sense unformed, less poems than a pile of materials out of which poems could be built; they were pure potentiality, awaiting articulation” (39). Adam pursues a pre-climactic state in his art, a moment before shapeless things fall into rigid categories. He intends his poems to be provisional, always caught in the process of gesturing at the possibility of meaning. It is important to note, however, that at certain points in the narrative, the dichotomy between actual and virtual, absence and presence, seems to collapse. One of these moments occurs during the public reading of one of Adam’s poems. Before the reading, Adam expected a mere confrontation with the failure of the actual poem. He even writes that the distinction between good and bad poetry is nonsensical, as both are mere reflective surfaces for the audience. And yet, when Arturo reads the Spanish translation, Adam realizes that “something in the arrangement of the lines, not the words themselves or what they denoted, indicated a ghostly presence behind the Spanish, and that presence was my own, or maybe it was my absence” (41). In describing this ghostly presence, Adam’s prose uses exactly the same words and structure as his poem (see 41). The boundary between poetry and prose blurs in this passage, as does the one between presence and absence. While he hears his own poem recited by someone else in a foreign language, Adam has a revelatory 94

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moment. It seems as if language could almost begin to convey his authentic self, the “constellation that I was” (41). Adam never completely gives himself up to this transcendence, however. His narrative is a constant oscillation between feelings of absence and presence. He likens the poem to a room in which he has never been, yet from which he also recently just left. He writes that the palpable presence does not reside in the words of the poem, yet uses the exact language of the poem to describe its experience. This rapid oscillation (in the time of reading) between presence and absence makes for a ghostly effect, as the two overlap and shade into each other. Adam notes a similarly liminal experience in his reading of Ashbery’s poetry18. According to Adam, the poems of the famous postmodern artist convey the illusion of sequence, logic and coherence, while actually being completely devoid of them. In doing so, they offer a screen to attend to experience itself. Adam frames this meta-experience in paradoxical terms: “And when you read about your reading in the time of your reading, mediacy is experienced immediately” (91). The experience of mediated immediacy recalls the ghostly overlap of presence and absence Adam felt during the poetry reading. Like Adam’s own poetry, Ashbery’s poems create a liminality that allows for “a strange kind of presence. But it is a presence that keeps the virtual possibilities of poetry intact because the true poem remains beyond you, inscribed on the far side of the mirror: “You have it but you don’t have it / You miss it, it misses you / you miss each other” (91). Again, the actual poem is presented as a mere reflective surface. It gestures at the true artwork hidden behind the veil. The text on the page must necessarily fail in transcending its own medium – language – yet its failure makes transcendence palpable. That is why Adam attributes poetry with a strictly negative power, and allies his own project with that of Ashbery.

4.2.2 Adam as a Romantic Ironist Even though the ghostly presence implied by poetry keeps eluding him at the point of inflection, Adam pursues it passionately. He continues to write and read poetry Ashbery’s work is of crucial importance for the novel. Not only is Ashbery Adam’s favorite poet, there are also frequent allusions to his poem scattered throughout the narrative. The most recognizable is probably the novel’s title, which is also the title of a poem by Ashbery. I will return at a later point to the significance of both Ben Lerner’s and Adam Gordon’s love of Ashbery.

18

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despite the constant frustration. In the novel, this juxtaposition of the desire for presence and the awareness of its inevitability creates a strong sense of irony. The fact that Adam continues to create art in spite of his frustration makes it clear that we are dealing with a specific kind of irony: Romantic Irony. In this chapter, I will analyze the overlaps between this historical model of irony and Adam’s view on aesthetics. One reason for doing this is conceptual. Identifying Adam’s irony as Romantic Irony helps to explain why irony and sincerity appear alongside each other not only in Lerner’s oeuvre, but also in the New Sincerity as a whole. What is more, the association with the Romantics puts the New Sincerity movement into a historical perspective. Its questions are not completely original – they have, in fact, been a staple of Western culture for centuries. The first aspect of Romantic Irony that characterizes Adam’s aesthetics is temporality. Friedrich Schlegel portrayed the Romantic artwork as a constant alternation between “self-creation and self-destruction” (1967: 172, my translation). The Romantic artist created elaborate representations of the real only to tear them down eventually by drawing attention to their mediation. Because of this, art was always caught in the process of becoming. Its fragmentary and meta-reflexive nature denied any idea of closure. In Schlegel’s vision, the rhythm of self-creation and self-destruction was eternal. Adam’s poetry shares this awareness of temporality. It is always on the verge of making a statement, of betraying a presence, yet never crosses the final threshold. Adam also extends this topic to his narrative. For him, the interactions with his Spanish friends offer a similar experience. Even though he has a hard time understanding them, he frames their conversations like exercises in the joys of ambiguity. One example is his fireside talk with Isabel: “She paused for a long moment and then began to speak; something about a home, but whether she meant a household or a literal structure, I couldn’t tell […] I formed several possible stories out of her speech, formed them at once, so it was less like I failed to understand than that I understood in chords, understood in a plurality of worlds” (14). Similar passages occur throughout the novel. They show that Adam seldom settles on a single meaning. Instead, he likes to “dwell among possible referents” (14). Both his art and his interactions with others have a provisional, inconclusive strain. This motif is closely allied with another aspect of Romantic Irony, namely liminality. Schlegel referred to this when he wrote about the “wings of poetic reflection” that allowed Romantic art to hover between the poles of the real and its 96

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representation (see 1967: 182, my translation). For Schlegel, this suspension promised transcendence. Building on the work of Fichte, he followed the ideal that eternal reflection led to a higher understanding of the infinite. To observe the importance of liminality and reflection for Adam, we need only return to his thoughts about his and Ashbery’s poetry. In those passages, actual poems are portrayed as mere reflective screens that offer the experience of experience. The “true poem” is always located out of reach, safely ensconced in the realm of virtual possibility. In his most revelatory moments, Adams feels a ghostly simultaneity of presence and absence, as he is suspended indefinitely between both of them. It is safe to argue that Adam’s aesthetics shares many similarities with that of Schlegel. In the second part of this chapter, I will also discuss the importance of liminality for the discourse of the novel as a whole. The last, and most important aspect of Romantic Irony we find in LTAS is the notion of parousia. Solger interpreted parousia as the transition of the infinite idea into the finite work of art. For him, this transition resulted in melancholy, since the infinite idea vanishes once it enters its representation. However, the artwork is the only medium that can gesture at the idea ex negativo. This turns art into the key for transcendence. Because it is finite, static and subjective, art allows us to intuit that which is not (i.e., the idea) by comparison. For Solger, the actual content of art does not matter nearly as much this gesture at the infinite idea: “Daher erscheint das Kunstwerk als etwas, um das es eigentlich nicht zu tun ist, als die Hülle eines inneren Geheimnisses, als die Erscheinung eines Wesens” (Solger qtd. Ophälders 93). In this understanding of Romantic Irony, the piece of art is but a ghostly shell that promises absolute understanding while perpetually withholding it. There are meaningful parallels between Solger’s theory and Adam’s own aesthetic philosophy. What is Adam’s actual poem, painting, or novel but a shell that exists to attend to the experience of experience, to ghostly presence? What is the virtual potential of art but transcendence ex negativo? The value of poems for Adam lies in their gesture at a presence. What he intuits in his own poems is the presence of his authentic self, yet the presence is merely the haunting of a ghost, an absence, as if the poem were a room he had never been to but also just left. Both Adam and Solger postulate that art must necessarily fail to capture the absolute, yet this failure is productive. Through the negative power of art, it gestures at that which it cannot represent. 97

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4.2.3 “A Wave Breaking On a Rock”: Connecting Sincerity and Romantic Irony LTAS probes the terrain where sincerity and Romantic Irony overlap. Sincerity, as Assmann claims, is a performative contradiction. It aims at the expression of an authentic self that, by its very nature, cannot be represented in language. Romantic irony, on the other hand, is the pursuit of the desire for infinite truth despite of the knowledge that this desire cannot be fulfilled. In the character of Adam (and, as I will go on to argue, in LTAS as a whole), both of these paradoxes meet. Adam pursues the representation of his authentic self in art despite of the awareness that his desire will be frustrated. He does so because art, for him, possesses negative power – it can gesture at the authentic self through the absence of authenticity. LTAS often expresses this paradoxical idea through allusions to poetry, because for Adam, poetry allows for the most intense experience of this paradox. Specifically, Adam’s narrative revolves around the poetry of John Ashbery. In a kind of anxiety of influence, Adam suspects that most of his thoughts regarding art and language have already been anticipated by Ashbery. The American poet is not just referenced in the title of the novel (which is the same as one of Ashbery’s poems), he is also the aim of many of Adam’s references. Ashbery’s oeuvre and Adam’s aesthetics do, in fact, display many similarities. Ashbery has been labeled a “postromantic” poet (DeJong 2). This refers in concrete terms to his attitude towards transcendence: The freedom Ashbery craves is the touch of the transcendent, that which makes the self feel autonomous and bold. Of course, he never possesses this freedom in the present, but he is always recalling it with an ambivalent nostalgia. (Quinney 136)

Adam identifies with this longing for a transcendence that will always elude him. For both poets, art becomes a process of chasing this ghostly presence. The most vivid manifestation of this presence / absence is an allusion to Ashbery that is embedded in a vision of complete communion that overcomes Adam after smoking a joint: Now I realized Teresa wasn’t speaking but was humming and playing with my hair but still I heard: To embrace the tragic interchangeability of nouns

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4.2 Adam Gordon as Experiencing-I: Sincerity and Romantic Irony and smile inscrutably or to find a way of touching down, albeit momentarily, and be made visible by swirling condensation and debris and to know that one pole of experience is always caught up in the other but to know this finally in your body, cone of heat unfurling. To take everything personally until your personality dissolves and you can move without transition from apartment to protest or distribute yourself among a shift ing configuration of bodies, saying yes to everything, affirming nothing, your own body “giving up / its shape in a gesture that expresses that shape”. (146)

In terms of style, the boundary between Adam’s prose and his poetry blurs at this point. The sentences become vague and associative. Instead of spelling out their meaning, they seem to gesture. It is fitting, then, that the collapse of boundaries is the common motif of this passage. Adam’s prose seems to be motivated by fluid, liminal movement, as poles of experience, bodies and personalities become one. The drug-induced fantasy of absolute communion climaxes with an allusion to Ashbery’s long poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” While the allusion itself covers only two lines of the poem (“giving up / its shape in a gesture that expresses that shape”), it activates a whole intertextual and semantic network. “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” is arguably Ashbery’s most famous poem; he won the Pulitzer Prize for his eponymous anthology it in 1975. The poem itself is largely an intertextual reference to the painting “Self-Portrait in a Convex-Mirror”, which the Italian Renaissance painter Parmigianino drew in 1524. The painting draws attention to the optical distortion of Parmigianino in a curved mirror (see Fig. 1).

Fig� 1: Parmigianino� Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror (1524)� 99

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While the self-portraits of Parmigianino’s contemporaries were an attempt to display mastery in reflecting actual life, “Self-Portrait in a Convex-Mirror” subverts any claim to realism. Parmigianino made a statement by drawing a distorted reflection of himself. In doing so, he emphasized the effect of perspective and, accordingly, the subjectivity of artistic representation: “But Parmigianino sees reality  – specifically, his own reality, as he is this painting’s subject  – as chaotic, shifting, distorted and, as Vasari says of this painting, ‘bizarre’” (Jones, n.p.). In his poem, Ashbery seizes on this topic and uses the painting as a canvas for his contemplation about the limits of language in general. In his reading of the poem, Dimakopoulou identifies the same nostalgia for transcendence that I mentioned earlier: The poem is a “self-portrait” infused by the “nostalgia for the unattainable”, to use Lyotard’s words. A nostalgia which is also intended to remind us that Parmigianino’s distortions may be offering a glimpse of the authenticity of a lost moment; the moment in which the self simultaneously recognises itself in the mirror image while realising that “the present” is no longer there. (15)

This “lost moment” characterizes the passage that Adam alludes to. The persona of the poem talks about “forms” that “retain a strong measure of ideal beauty” within the painting (Ashbery 252).19 It goes on to invest these forms with a double meaning, similar to the one mentioned by Dimakopoulou. They both constitute the dream of perfect self-representation in art and create an awareness that the dream is but a dream – a fantasy never to be realized. It claims that “we realize this only at a point where they lapse / like a wave breaking on a rock, giving up / Its shape in a gesture that expresses that shape” (Ashbery 252). This is the image Adam refers to in his narration: a protean, fluid movement of water that is suddenly arrested. In this moment of arrest, the wave gives up its shape (fluid movement) in a gesture (sudden lapse) that expresses the shape ex negativo. By its lack of movement and change, the breaking of the wave conveys what defines

19

Ashbery quotes art critic Sidney Freedberg here, who wrote about the works of Parmigianino (see Freedberg, Sydney J. Parmigianino: His Works in Painting. Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 1976).

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the wave in the first place. Ashbery uses this as a metaphor not only for Parmigianino’s project, but for all self-portraits. The moment the protean and fluid self is portrayed in a static, finite piece of art, it gives up its shape. Its true form (read: its authentic form) can only be hinted at through negation. This is essentially a reformulation of Solger’s Parousia, aimed at the practice of self-representation in art. In his fantasy of communion, Adam uses this image of transcendence through negation not for the self, but for his body: “… your own body ‘giving up / its shape in a gesture that expresses that shape.’” This adds a new meaning to the reference: the true experience of corporeal existence becomes palpable only by leaving it behind. Yet even though Adam alters the meaning, the quote still opens up a broader implication. It appears in a passage that deals with the collapse of boundaries and blurs the lines between poetry and prose. It therefore suggests that Adam’s views and reflections about poetry – which are characterized by Romantic irony – are be important for the way the novel is narrated and interpreted. Ashbery’s metaphor encapsulates Adam’s ironic approach to art. Through its focus on the self, it also delivers another connection between sincerity and Romantic irony, as both are concerned with the unfulfillable desire to represent the absolute. Where sincerity aims at expressing the authentic self, Romantic irony aspires toward representing infinite (and, for most Romantics, divine) truth.

4.2.4 Romantic Irony, Sincerity, and Communication The actual and the virtual, as Adam understands them, are cornerstones of his ironic understanding of art. Yet Adam does not restrict their use to the realm of aesthetics. He often extends these terms to conversations with other people. This does not mean that he practices Romantic irony when he talks to others, however. A fusion of sincerity and Romantic irony, as I have outlined above, would entail a gesture at an authentic self despite the knowledge that the authentic self cannot be represented in language. This is not what Adam does. He uses irony to protect himself from scorn and rejection. Even though he refers to the actual and virtual to justify his frequent lies and deceptions, he does not value the gesture in the way that sincerity and Romantic irony require. I believe that this juxtaposition is deliberate. It shows that Adam’s behavior as a protagonist differs completely from the communicative situation of the novel. His portrayal can be understood as a cautionary tale. In the following paragraphs, I focus on Adam’s behavior as 101

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a protagonist. The communicative situation of the novel will be the topic of the second section in this chapter. In his conversations with Isabel and Teresa, the two women he alternately woos, Adam often mentions the actual and the virtual. When he interacts with them, Adam attempts to compose a façade of detached brilliance. This performance crumbles when he visits Toledo with Isabel. The two have an argument about Franco. Isabel wonders why Adam, an American, would rather deal with foreign history instead of probing the injustices of his own country. He struggles for an answer. In retrospect, Adam ruminates: What disturbed me as we walked was that our exchange, despite my best efforts, and perhaps for the first time, had involved much more of the actual than the virtual. I’d said, as usual, nothing of substance, but the nothing I’d said just languished between us… [Our] relationship depended largely on my never becoming fluent, on my having an excuse to speak in enigmatic fragments or koans… I wondered […] how long I could remain in Madrid without crossing whatever invisible threshold of proficiency would render me devoid of interest. (51)

In this passage, Adam uses actual and virtual as markers of identification. If Isabel were to find out who the actual Adam really is – if he were to betray himself in conversation – she would no longer be interested in him. Adam seems to have a clear idea of what this actual self is like: boring, vacuous, vain, narcissistic, and desperate for attention. He is afraid that others might glimpse even an inkling of what he perceives as his real personality. This actual self is transparent only to him. That is why he hinds behind “enigmatic fragments and koans.” These cryptic utterances suggest depth were, Adam is convinced, none is to be found. The virtual is no longer authenticity manifested through negation, but insincerity. As a narrator, Adam frames his intention as insincere because he discloses his intention to mislead others. He deliberately hides from others. Another conversation with Teresa provides a variation on this theme. Of interest is once more the use of actual and virtual in Adam’s narration: […] I found myself avoiding her eyes, because when I looked at or into them, I believed I saw she saw right through me. Or I saw her see herself

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4.2 Adam Gordon as Experiencing-I: Sincerity and Romantic Irony reflected in my eyes, saw that she knew, or was coming to know, that what interest I held for her, all of it, was virtual, that my appeal for her had little to do with my actual writing or speech, and while she was happy to let me believe she believed in my profundity, on some level she was aware that she was merely encountering herself. (84)

In Adam’s narrative, terms of aesthetics and identification blend into each other. He becomes a poem that is being scrutinized and analyzed by Teresa. His thoughts about Ashbery are repeated here: Teresa’s attention is reflected back at herself, since Adam is but a mirror, a reflective screen. Hidden behind his performance, on the other side of the mirror, is the “true” Adam. Yet this virtual possibility is no longer something Adam celebrates. It makes him anxious (see 84). He is afraid that Teresa has found out the truth about his “actual writing or speech” and comes to know his fragmentary answers as deflections and platitudes. This is the main difference between Adam’s aesthetics and his interaction with others. In the realm of poetry, he welcomes the failure of signification as productive. More than that, he is open about the inevitability of this failure. In his conversation with others, however, Adam is scared that anybody might find out about his true self. Contrary to the Romantic ironist, who would perceive any self-knowledge as preliminary and provisional, Adam has a clear and usually negative image of his actual self. To hide it, he “cultivates misunderstanding” (Dames n.p.): he lies, deflects and misleads intentionally. As a result, he never makes an attempt to be sincere, to gesture at his authentic self. He shies away from failure because he never commits to even a provisional version of his interiority. Adam’s anxiety and depression are rooted in this avoidance of productive failure. That is what I mean when I say that Adam’s narrative is a cautionary tale. The almost didactic urge behind this theme complements Völz’ theory on shame in the New Sincerity, which I mention in the theory chapter. As a quick reminder: Völz argues that the staging of shame in New Sincerity novels creates a sincerity effect. The characters expose their vulnerability and create a bond with the reader, who is able to feel their embarrassment by proxy. This insight can be added to, since shame fulfills yet another function in the novel. The moral lesson of LTAS is that Adam suffers because he does not even attempt to be sincere. Whenever his carefully composed performance is questioned or shows a gap, Adam reports intense sensations of anxiety and embarrassment. 103

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After the passage about Teresa I quoted above, she says that the reason for Adam’s lies about his mother are that he is homesick and craves attention. Adam responds by angrily lying even more. As a result, he starts to feel guilty (see 86). A similar pattern happens during the academic conference Adam is invited to. Instead of attempting to share his thoughts about poetry, he recycles prepared sentences and embarrasses himself (see 117). The novel does not charge these moments with moral normativity by happenstance. Adam’s behavior as a protagonist is constructed as a counterpoint to his behavior as a narrator. Where Adam is unable to gesture at his authentic self as the experiencing-I, both his narrative and the novel as a whole venture in a different direction. They are attempts to be sincere despite being aware of inevitable failure. In the next section of this chapter, I follow this argument by discussing the narrative situation of LTAS from a variety of angles.

4.3 Adam Gordon as Narrating-I: Risk and Autofictionality In the last section, I painted a picture of Adam as a character with a compulsion to lie and mislead. His wish to protect himself is only one reason for his behavior. He also attempts to anticipate the reaction of others and tries to manipulate their impression of him. His lies are a matter of power and control, both about his private self and his public self. At this point, it is necessary to distinguish between Adam’s role as a protagonist (experiencing-I) and as the autodiegetic narrator of his story (narrating-I). Where the former is portrayed as a mythomaniac (by himself, no less), the latter provides a painstaking account of his deceptions. The following passage, describing the aftermath of a fist fight, exemplifies this juxtaposition: It wasn’t a powerful blow, but I figured I should let it lay me out […] I could taste the blood from my mildly cut lip and I bit hard to deepen the cut so that I would appear more injured and therefore solicit sufficient sympathy to offset the damage my smiling had done. As I covered my face in my hands and writhed as though in pain, I was careful to spread the blood around. (13)

There is a contrast here between the action Adam narrates and his style of narration. He describes how he manipulates his physical reactions to appear more 104

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vulnerable. This is noteworthy because the body is often understood as a site of authenticity (see van Alphen and Bal 1), yet it becomes just another tool in Adam’s performance. At the same time, Adam narrates the action in a detailed, matterof-fact manner. He discloses the motivation behind his deception to the reader. By sharing this ethically questionable behavior, Adam as narrating-I makes himself vulnerable in a way that would have been foreign to Adam as experiencing-I. The relationship of the narrator to the reader is therefore entirely different than the one between the characters. For this reason, Völz interprets the narrative situation in LTAS and other, similar New Sincerity novels as a sincerity effect. By way of an “open, honest and transparent form of exchange,” the novel as a medium is prioritized as a site of sincerity. Völz states: “Dabei geht es jedoch nicht um die Kommunikation der literarischen Figuren untereinander – ihnen ist es ja unmöglich geworden, diese Form der Privatheit zu leben – sondern vielmehr um den literarischen Sprechakt zwischen Autor und Leser” (147). In regard to LTAS, the contrast between Adam’s past actions and his unsparing narration becomes a speech act. It signals the reader that the narrator is sharing his or her mistakes, and that the relationship between them is built on trust. The narrative situation creates the effect of sincerity.

4.3.1 The ‘Unreliability Objection’: Can an Unreliable Narrator Create Sincerity Effects? While I will eventually arrive at the same conclusion as Völz, the situation is more complicated than he makes it seem. Before a case can be made for the enactment of sincerity, one must first consider a reasonable objection. For matters of clarity, I shall call it the unreliability objection. It reads like this: if Adam does indeed characterize himself as a compulsive liar, why should any reader trust his narrative account of his past actions? Lerner himself draws attention to this conundrum when the narrator of 10:04, Ben, wonders if he has turned into the “unreliable narrator of my first novel” (2015: 148). The label of unreliability seems to contradict Völz’ talk of openness, honesty and sincerity. It implies that Adam’s narrative cannot be trusted precisely because it focuses so much on acts of manipulation and deception. In the following paragraphs, I give serious consideration to the unreliability objection by examining the nexus of reliability and sincerity. 105

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In a nutshell, the unreliability objection I raised in the last paragraph claims that an unreliable narrator cannot create sincerity effects. This is only correct if reliability and sincerity are viewed as synonymous. There is a considerable difference between the two terms, however, one that Vera Nünning demonstrates in her nuanced discussion of narrative unreliability. According to her, reliability denotes a consistency between words and actions (see 7). It touches both on the factuality of an account and on the tendency of speakers to actually do what they say. Sincerity, on the other hand, concerns the connection between external expression and internal mental states (see 7). Sincerity and reliability are therefore two different characteristics that create trust, a concept Nünning defines as “a psychological state comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behavior of another” (7). Both sincerity and reliability can build up these positive expectations, yet this does not mean that both are necessary conditions for trust, nor that they are mutually exclusive. It follows that a narrator could simultaneously be considered unreliable and sincere. An example would be a schizophrenic narrator whose perspective on the world is colored by paranoid delusions. Their narrative might well be an attempt of sincerely representing their subjective perspective, yet they would not be considered reliable, nor trustworthy. As Nünning points out, however, this strict demarcation between reliability and sincerity has not been taken to heart by many scholars (see 7). Margolin’s definition of narrative reliability in the same volume is a case in point: “… for a reliable or trustworthy narrator it would be the abiding intention  … to make sure that one’s assertions express what one actually believes” (33). In this definition, trust, reliability and sincerity collapse into each other. They become different words for the same thing. This is a common tendency in literary studies. Since Wayne C. Booth introduced the concept as a critical term in 1960, “unreliable narration” is often more concerned with the concept of trust in general than with reliability in particular. This has led to diffuse sense of vagueness surrounding the term. The most important issue with the idea of “unreliable narration” is that it presupposes the default of “reliable narration.” Many studies of narrative unreliability tacitly imply that the unreliable narrator deviates from the norm of the reliable narrator. In short, narrators are assumed to be reliable until proven guilty. Yet, as Ansgar Nünning demonstrates, this self-evident default rests on specific premises that are “a curious amalgam of a realist epistemology and a mimetic view 106

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of literature” (41). In other words: if we assume that narrators are almost always reliable, we must necessarily rely on another set of assumptions. This set includes, among others, the assumption that individuals behave rationally, that they can attain objective self-knowledge, that they can recount past events truthfully, that literary texts can reflect reality through the medium of language, etc. (see A. Nünning 41). Once these assumptions are questioned, the binary opposition of reliable and unreliable narration becomes untenable. Incidentally, the whole philosophical and aesthetic project of Postmodernism attempted to counter these assumptions. That is why, in its wake, critics can be convinced that “unreliability” is just another descriptive label for the way humans perceive the world, and “reliability” is nothing but an “outrageous fiction” (Koebner 38). Even if one accepts the terminological murkiness inherent in the concept, the unreliability objection is still in trouble. In order to prove this, it is Booth’s theory we must now turn to. Booth calls a narrator “reliable when he speaks for acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not” (158). The implied author, in turn, is an anthropomorphized image for the norms and values that structure the text (see Nünning 2013: 46). If a narrator’s account deviates from these inscribed norms and values, they become unreliable, i.e. untrustworthy. Determining the reliability is therefore a matter of rhetorical analysis. First, the reader must parse the text for hints at the implied author. Then, they must match the ethos of the narrator to those of the implied author. Accordingly, a correct analysis of narrative reliability hinges on the ability of the reader to trace the implied author. In the wake of Booth’s seminal contribution to narratology, many critics have questioned his move to ground unreliability in the concept of the implied author. Even Booth himself later admitted that his terminology was “hopelessly inadequate” to tackle the important question of narrative reliability (qtd. in A. Nünning 30). In his criticism of Booth, Nünning attempts to replace the concept of the implied author with a cognitive approach to the reliability / unreliability conundrum. For Nünning, the main problem with the implied author is the implicit assumption of text-immanent values and norms that become legible through rhetorical analysis alone. He argues that, instead of consulting an implied author, readers compare the narrator’s ethos to their own values and norms: “Whether a narrator is called unreliable or not [depends on] the distance that separates the narrator’s view of the world from the reader’s and critic’s world model and standards of 107

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normalcy, which are themselves, of course, open to challenge” (41). The last part of this quote underlines how subjective the question of reliability becomes in Nünning’s theory. While readers and critics must still identify “plausible interpretive options,” (Altes 2013: 69), their decision is ultimately governed by the cultural and subjective contexts that frame their reading. There is no universal characteristic within the text that determines the trustworthiness of a narrator. As a result of this contingency, codes for trustworthiness and untrustworthiness are a matter of cultural fashion. Seemingly “stable” narrative signifiers that once signaled unreliability can now be understood as sincerity effects (see Altes 2008: 119). Examples that showcase this interpretive shift are, according to Altes, “an accumulation of remarks relating to the self as well as linguistic signals denoting expressiveness and subjectivity;” “syntactic signals denoting the narrator’s high level of emotional involvement, including exclamations, ellipses, repetitions, etc.;” and “explicit, self-referential metanarrative discussions of the narrator’s believability” (2008: 119).20 These signals “might just as well be interpreted as stressing a narrator’s or a speaker’s sincerity” (Altes 2008: 119). All of these elements surface in LTAS. They are doubtlessly the reason for Ben’s assessment in 10:04 that the narrator of his first novel – i.e., Adam – is unreliable. Yet, if we follow the argument of Altes and Völz, then this judgement is not necessarily the only valid one. It is inextricably bound up with the reverse: that the narrators of New Sincerity texts prioritize their communication with the reader over those with their fellow fictional characters. They create an aesthetic that renders the contrast between their actions and their storytelling as a speech act promising honesty and openness. This “aesthetic of shame,” as Völz calls it (2015: 213), turns untrustworthy narrators (in the framework of Booth) into trustworthy ones. By sharing shameful moments, the narrators make themselves vulnerable. They expose themselves willingly to the judgment of the reader. Völz’s observation is not entirely new. It has a precursor in ancient Greece – the rhetorical concept of parrhesia. I have already touched on this subject in my theory chapter. A brief reminder: parrhesia was an ethical ideal among orators. Only those willing to risk their safety or social status by criticizing powerful institutions

20

Altes cites this list from Olson, who copies it from Nünning. Olson remarks that it is paradoxical that Nünning supplies a list of markers for unreliability in the first place, since it counters his own argument (see Olson 98).

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were deemed trustworthy. Parrhesia was therefore seen as a way to establish a culture of accountability. Over time, parrhesia turned into a rhetorical trope itself: “In fact, speakers often cited the fact that they were speaking at all as evidence that they spoke with parrhesia – why else would they take the risk?” (Markovits 68)21 The same authorization strategy happens in LTAS and other works of the New Sincerity (for example in Heti, July, Eggers, Calloway). Signals that were previously understood as markers for unreliability acquire another interpretive option. These narratives ask the implicit rhetorical question: Why would I talk about my shame, my mistakes, my vulnerability, if I did not have the intention of being sincere? We now return full circle to the beginning of this section. Parrhesia marks the difference between Adam as an untrustworthy protagonist and Adam as a potentially trustworthy narrator. Where the protagonist piles lie upon lie to mask what he perceives as his real, despicable personality, the narrator does the opposite. He discards the protective veil of the virtual and relinquishes control about the reaction of the reader. This rhetorical strategy does not make Adam’s narrative sincere per se. It does, however, carry the potential of creating a sincerity effect for readers that respond to his signals. They have the possibility of interpreting LTAS as an actual attempt to represent lived experiences, memories, feelings. As a narrator, Adam actually risks something.

4.3.2 LTAS as an Autofictional Novel Serge Doubrovsky, the author of the first explicitly autofictional novel, called it a literary “monster” that “simultaneously and thus paradoxically offered the autobiographical and the fictional pact” (119, my translation). For Doubrovsky, the aim of this approach was both aesthetic and curative. He wanted to use his life as the material for his art, but he also yearned for a way to process his experiences in a narrative form. In the decades after his novel Fils was published, autofictions became an increasingly popular medium. For Zipfel, the element that unites them is their yearning for a connection between art and life, fiction and reality

21

Markovits also explicitly points out that what we understand as sincerity shares many parallels with parrhesia.

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(see 310–311). The autofictional novel becomes a temporary snapshot of the fictions that comprise the self. Following Zipfel’s theories, I think it makes sense to categorize LTAS as an autofictional novel. The text confuses readerly expectations by combining biographical elements with fictional and metafictional signals. More crucially, however, it explicitly and implicitly reflects on self-invention and the distinction between life and art. This places Lerner into the discursive tradition of Doubrovsky and other French autofictionalists. In the following section, I want to flesh out this claim. I will also connect it to the topic of Romantic irony. I have previously mentioned the concept of voice, specifically its creation by meshing the author as a real person with the narrator of a story. Adam does possess such a voice, which creates a sincerity effect through parrhesia. The novel achieves this meshing by disclosing biographical elements of Adam’s life that are shared by Ben Lerner. To start with, both Adam and Ben are poets. Both spent their childhood in Topeka, Kansas, and went to university in Providence, Rhode Island. Both travel to Madrid on a scholarship – Lerner did so as a Fulbright Scholar in 2003. They also both have a friend named Cyrus. Adam’s Cyrus has a chat conversation with him in LTAS. Ben’s Cyrus is the poet Cyrus Console, whom he has known since his teenage days in Topeka. There not just biographical connections between the man and the character, however. Adam’s works are often exact allusions to Lerner’s oeuvre. There is, for example, the poem Adam finds in Teresa’s apartment. He claims to have written it in Providence about Topeka (see 127). The poem was, in fact, published in Ben Lerner’s chapbook The Lichtenberg Figures, his first volume of poetry. Yet Ben and Adam do not just share poems, they also share ideas. In the passage on Ashbery I quoted earlier, Adam writes about the curious combination of absence and presence he feels while reading Ashbery’s poems. These observations are taken almost word for word from an article Lerner published on Ashbery. Adam writes: “… you read about your reading in the time of your reading” (91). Ben writes: “Ashbery makes us read about our reading in real time” (206). Adam writes: “His poems refer to how reference evanesces” (91). Ben writes: “We then read the poem as referring to the evanescence of reference as it evanesces” (206). These passages demonstrate the entanglement of Ben’s and Adam’s views on Ashbery. This entanglement is crucial in creating the recognizable voice of Adam. 110

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Ben and Adam also share their views on poetry in general. Adam differentiates between the actual poem and the virtual possibilities it figures. The actual poem is finite, incomplete, and can only gesture at the infinite presence Adam yearns for in poetry. In his essay “The Hatred of Poetry”, Ben Lerner explains the genesis of this idea. He states that Allen Grossman’s work on the bitterness of the poetic principle inspired him to think about the actual and the virtual. His explanation of the principle mirrors Adam’s thoughts: The poem is always a record of failure. There is an “undecidable conflict” between the poet’s desire to sing an alternative world and, as Grossman puts it, the “resistance to alternative making inherent inherent in the materials of which any world must be composed.” Grossman develops his notion of a “virtual poem” – the abstract potential of the medium – and opposes it to the “actual poem” which necessarily betrays that impulse when it joins the world of representation. (9)

This passage is beginning of an ode to Grossman’s idea. Lerner makes it very clear that he believes Grossman is right. He identifies with these views, just as Adam does. This entails that both Adam and Ben are Romantic ironists, at least when it comes to aesthetics. The dichotomy of the actual and the virtual reads like a reformulation of Schlegel’s and Solger’s ideas. The reader is therefore invited not just to associate Adam Gordon with Ben Lerner, but also to extend their philosophical similarities to the intention behind the novel. If LTAS is read as a work displaying Romantic irony, one can make specific inferences about sincerity and authenticity that I hinted at earlier and will spell out later. At any rate, the large amount of these connections stages the invitation to enter into an autobiographical pact. Lerner playfully alludes to the entanglement with his character in his short story “The Golden Vanity”. Narrated in the third person, the story is about an author who has written a successful debut novel and has to deal with the fallout. When the narrator meets a librarian, his first words sound eerily like Adam Gordon: “I wanted to wave to you when you came in but I had this coffee in my hands and I was afraid I’d spill it and then I was afraid that by failing to wave I appeared unpleasant and then I felt myself scowling at appearing

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4 Romantic Irony and Autofictionality in Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station unpleasant and then realized I must seem really unpleasant and so had already made a disastrous impression.” She laughed as though this were indeed winning and said: “You sound like your novel.” (2014: 62)

This, in fact, is a common theme throughout the story. The unnamed author fears that people mistake him for his character, fears that he will – or worse, has – become his character. Lerner complicates the relation between reality and fiction even more when he includes “The Golden Vanity” diegetically into his novel 10:04, whose narrator Ben claims to have written it. This is a conscious effort to dissolve the boundaries between Lerner’s persona as an author, the narrator of his novels and the autodiegetic protagonists. This is done by various textual clues, biographical details, intertextual nodes and allusions that appear to offer an autobiographical pact. And yet, this offer is never wholeheartedly extended. It is, in fact, complemented by admissions of make-believe. The most visible marker of fictionality is of course the name of the protagonist, Adam Gordon. In contrast to other autofictions that belong to the New Sincerity, Lerner does not employ his own name to establish identity between himself and the narrator. This contradicts any aspirations to a referential pact. The novel’s paratext compounds this. The first page of LTAS explicitly labels it a “novel”, offering a fictional pact. In the epitext, Lerner often guides expectations into a similar direction. He states that “there’s a version of myself in 10:04 and LTAS, although everybody else tends to be made up” (Smith n.p.). This admission at once promises referentiality (“a version of myself”) and hedges any such claim (“version”, “made up”). This complicates any clear distinction between autobiography and fiction. In another interview, Lerner explicitly alludes to the complex net of similarities between himself and his narrators: “I think it’s more that the narrator of 10:04 is the author of LTAS – but then it’s unclear how much the author of LTAS was the narrator within it, so there all these kinds of divisions of fictional levels” (Smith n.p.). The effect of this play with expectations for most readers will probably be a suspension of the clear categories they use to structure their experience. Lerner’s contribution to the epitext prepares them for an autofictional reading of his novels that does away with the opposition of truth and make-believe. It is fitting, then, that the autobiographical elements of LTAS are balanced by metanarrative passages that deal with the gap between lived experiences and 112

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linguistic representation. When Adam reflects on the act of narrating, this disconnect becomes obvious. He mentions that his time in Spain falls into two categories: directionless, passive stretches of time and intense, incisive moments. Narrative form cannot represent either of them truthfully. The long stretches of inactivity would be “falsified by any way of talking or writing or thinking that emphasized sharply localized occurrence in time” (64). The brief bursts, however, were “equally impossible to represent because the ease with which they could be represented entered and canceled the experience” (64). This separation of language and experience is a clear signal to readers that they have no access to Adam’s authentic experience. Presumably because of this fact, Adam vows to “never write a novel” (65). The existence of LTAS makes clear that he broke this vow and willingly accepted the “falsification” of narrative. The disconnect between language and experience is not only discussed explicitly. It surfaces as recurring motif throughout the novel. Adam repeatedly draws attention to the fictionality of his narrative when he mentions, “I didn’t think these things, but I might have” (67), or “This is what I felt, if it wasn’t what I thought” (64), or “I less thought than felt these things on my skin” (164). These interjections point to Adam’s artistic license in writing about his life. They also contrast literary representations of thought processes with actual thoughts and feelings. It should be noted again, however, that the awareness of this contrast does not mute Adam. His narrative is an attempt to recreate his perception of the world despite the awareness of its shortcomings. Through intertextual allusions, Adam also includes political commentary into his thoughts about narrative. In one of the most openly theoretical passages of the novel, Adam writes: “… that I was a fraud had never been in question – who wasn’t? Who wasn’t squatting in one of the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you want to call it, lying every time she said “I”; who wasn’t a bit player in a looped infomercial for the damaged life?” (101) According to Adam, he is fraudulent because he pretends to have an authentic self. In fact, his identification is predetermined by the logic of capitalism. He alludes to Adorno when he mentions the “damaged life”, a phrase that appears in the subtitle of Minima Moralia. This reference is interesting from a number of perspectives. Firstly, it provides more background to Adam’s thoughts on subjectivity. Adorno followed Lukasc (whom Adam also references) in identifying “reification” (Verdinglichung) as the major characteristic of late capitalism. The 113

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relation between human beings becomes reduced to the logic of objects and their use value. Under capitalism, individuals come to perceive themselves and others as goods that can be bought, sold, produced, repaired and discarded. This reification pervades all spheres of life, even art. The allusion offers an explanation for Adam’s behavior in LTAS. He attempts to market himself by pretending to be a genius. Yet there is a metafictional aspect involved as well. If Adorno is correct, then LTAS is also a marketing ploy designed to exploit the appeal of sincerity and disclosure. Both identification and life writing are always necessarily caught up in this logic of commodification. The most famous phrase in Minima Moralia is, after all, “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen” (43). This was not meant to express resignation, but to call for a complete rejection of capitalism and its ideology. Even though Adam openly discusses the inevitable reification of the self, he is unable to extricate himself from it. This insight is expressed by the ending of Lerner’s poem from the Lichtenberg figures, which Adam passes of as his own: “I have never been here / Understand? / You have never seen me” (128). These gestures at the unavailability of authentic representation could end in resignation. Yet, as I have repeatedly remarked, LTAS is not a mere deconstruction of the autobiographical project in the tradition of de Man. Instead, it is an invitation to connect the work and life of Ben Lerner despite of all the epistemological and narrative pitfalls. Adam’s allusion to Llorca’s poem “The First Lagoon,” which I quoted in the introduction, pronounces this intention quite clearly. The real moon and its reflection become two halves of a musical instrument, played with childlike naïveté. This desire to transcend the boundary between reality and its reflection comes to the fore in passages that entangle the concepts of the novel, poetry, personality and experience. I have mentioned before how Adam at times compares his personality to a poem. I have also pointed out the overlap between poetry and prose in LTAS, both in terms of style and content. Yet the keenest sense of this entanglement is the recurring motif of the “project” and its “phases”. Ostensibly, Adam’s project in Spain is the creation of a long poem on the dictatorship of Franco. Yet whenever he mentions the research he conducts, it has nothing to do with poetry or Spain. Instead, it revolves around everyday life, drugs, friends and love interests: “The first phase of my research involved waking up weekday mornings … and rolling a spliff while I waited for the coffee” (7); “… now that it seemed neither Isabel nor Theresa had the inclination even to feign serious investment, I felt not only rejected, but 114

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as though many months of research had evaporated” (101); “I woke up in the fifth phase of my project as if in response to a loud noise” (117). The continued use of “project,” “phase” and “research” becomes a running joke throughout the novel. It demonstrates that Adam does everything but working on the poem that is his reason for being in Spain. Yet every mundane detail – from the rolling of a joint to sleeping to having conversations – is somehow connected to his “project.” This invests the mysterious project with symbolic meaning. In a metafictional turn, the “project” becomes the very narrative that constitutes LTAS. Adam’s “research” provides the raw material for this narrative in form of lived experiences. In this way, the novel discusses, in part, its own process of creation. Lerner is not alone in using this framework. Both in Heti’s and Kraus’s novels, there is a similar gradual transformation from a fictional piece of art (Chris’s letters, Sheila’s play) into the novel that originally framed their production. In the case of LTAS, this results in a metaphorical conflation of Adam’s self, his poetry and his narrative. Just as the poetic project is no longer distinguishable from the autodiegetic narrative, the self is described in poetic and narrative terms. The novel, in Sturgeon’s terms, becomes the self of the artist (n.p.). As always, this desire is balanced by skepticism. The “actual” novel can only gesture at a virtual possibility that remains hidden behind mirrors. Just like a poem, the novel and the self are little more than “a tissue of contradictions that fails to be equal to the possibilities it figures” (164). Still, Adam keeps writing. The odd nature of his project betrays the desire to connect life and art even though an actual connection seems impossible. The use of photographs in the novel has the same function. Throughout the text, there are five images with subtitles that refer in some way to the narrative. All subtitles are quotes from the novel and all photographs portray a piece of art or an object that was at one point mentioned in the text. Despite their close connection to the narrative, the photographs introduce a moment of confusion in the time of reading. Consider, for example, the first photograph. It appears after Adam’s experiences in the Prado and shows a part of van der Weyden’s “Descent from the Cross”. Both Adam and the mysterious man he writes about looked at this picture. The subtitle reads, “I thought of the great artist for a while” (11). Both the image and the subtitle complicate the interpretive process. Who, exactly, is the great artist? The man who cries in the museum? Van der Weyde? Or Christ (supposing that the “I” from the subtitle refers to the mourner in the painting)? 115

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The situation is complicated even more by the fact that the subtitle is a quote from Adam’s narrative on page 113, when he is in a hotel room with Isabel. Not only is the photograph / subtitle pairing therefore polysemous, it also warps the novel’s chronology. For exactly this reason, the images take on a mimetic effect. If the novel is seen as the unfolding of Adam’s self, then these images function as an expression of its associative and malleable structure. The prolepsis affords an almost modernist sense of stream of consciousness – the simultaneous presence of past, present and future. Lerner invests them with a different kind of meaning: What I really like about having two characters, or a character looking at an image in a novel, in the time of the narrative, is that the reader and the character are looking at the image together. It’s a fiction, but the time of narrative and the time of the narrated touch briefly, and that to me is a really important moment of possibility; producing that correspondence. I think it lends a charge to the rest of the work. (Temple n.p.)

It is noteworthy that Lerner uses the word “possibility” here, as if to underline the connection between himself and Adam. The image creates the possibility for a bridge between the fictional domain of the narrator and the reader. He expresses the desire of the novel to transcend itself and to entangle the seemingly binary categories of fact and fiction. In this section, I have argued that the autofictional narrative situation of LTAS expresses this desire. While it is true that a simplistic referential pact is questioned, the novel does not promote postmodern playfulness. It balances the awareness that authenticity is unavailable with the aspiration to sincere communication. Adam, much like Lerner, is the child that turns the real moon and its reflection into music.

4.4 Conclusion In the first section, I argued that Adam’s understanding of art shared many similarities with Romantic irony. For Adam, the actual work of art can only gesture at virtual possibilities. Because of this, he prioritizes the virtual potential over the 116

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actual text, which is incomplete, finite and preliminary. Adam seemingly extends this Romantic irony to his interactions with other characters. To deflect attention from what he perceives as his actual, boring, needy self, he constructs a façade by lying and deceiving others. He is constantly plagued by fear and anxiety because he dreads the moment when Teresa and Isabel find out who he ‘really’ is. Even though he uses the vocabulary of the “actual” and the “virtual”, he does not behave like a Romantic ironist. Romantic irony does not manifest itself in simple lies. It refers to the aspiration towards an unachievable ideal. As an experiencing-I, Adam never makes a serious attempt to communicate his thoughts, emotions and memories – he never attempts to be sincere. The relationship between the narrating-I and his implied readership is notably different. In his retrospective, autodiegetic narrative, Adam relentlessly catalogues his lies and manipulations. This rhetorical strategy creates a sincerity effect through parrhesia: Adam seems trustworthy because he risks something. It makes sense to talk about risk and vulnerability in a self-proclaimed novel, because Adam’s voice is intimately connected to Ben Lerner. Like Doubrovsky’s prototypical autofictions, LTAS simultaneously and paradoxically offers a referential and a fictional pact. It connects the biographies, works and opinions of Adam and Ben Lerner. At the same time, it conditions readers to interpret the novel as a fictional narrative. There are also metafictional passages that question the possibility of representing lived experience in a narrative form. Is it possible to connect Romantic irony, sincerity and autofictionality into a coherent aesthetic project? Or is LTAS merely a heap of broken images? In the past subsections, I laid the groundwork to answer this question. LTAS is an enactment of Romantic irony. Through the novel, Ben Lerner gestures at his authentic self while also showing that his self can only be communicated in the form of a fictional narrative. LTAS is pervaded by the awareness of this necessity. Adam often comments on the distance between language and experience, the actual and the virtual. At the same time, he is driven by a keen desire for the presence that keeps eluding him. That is why he pursues poetry despite of its frustrating opaqueness. I therefore understand LTAS as a productive failure. Lerner is aware that the ideal of sincerity must fail, yet its failure produces the beginnings of a communication with his readers. Why would any author pursue the philosophy of productive failure, however? One reason that I have already commented on is its therapeutic function. The 117

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desire for a literature that benefits human flourishing has been a defining characteristic both for New Sincerity authors like David Foster Wallace and for autofictionalists like Doubrovsky. LTAS pulsates with the same endeavor. Adam’s fear, anxiety and shame result from the avoidance of productive failure. He uses the distance between language and experience as justification for his lies. LTAS offers the moral lesson that to avoid Adam’s shame, one must at least attempt to be sincere, even though sincerity is an unachievable ideal. The story of Adam is a cautionary tale with ethical implications. By writing the novel, Lerner points to a way out of Adam’s neurotic self-obsession – not just for himself, but for his readers as well. This turns the novel into an act of hospitality as imagined by Völz. By making himself vulnerable, Adam – and, by extension Lerner – offers insight into the therapeutic benefits of productive failure. Should the paradoxes of sincerity drive individuals into silence or mythomania, then they would experience the suffering Adam catalogues in the novel. Every attempt to gesture at the self is, by contrast, a step into the right direction. There is another reason for the pursuit of productive failure that originates in Romanticism. Both in “The Hatred of Poetry” and LTAS, Lerner and Adam spend a lot of time writing about their frustration with poetry. Yet both unequivocally state that they could not live in a world without it. Even though they are convinced that poetry can at best gesture at the infinite, they value it for its potential. This pursuit of the ideal in the face of doubt seems to be deeply ingrained in Western intellectual history. It was especially prevalent among Romantic thinkers like Schlegel, Solger and Novalis. It is observable now in Lerner, Eggers and Heti. This suggests that the desire for the absolute is a universal characteristic not just for artists, but for all of us.

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5 “A Sincere Attempt to Get Somewhere”: Between Authentic and Relational Selfhood in How Should a Person Be? 5.1 Introduction When critics attempt to make sense of recent developments around the New Sincerity, they often discuss Sheila Heti’s novel How Should a Person Be? in parallel to Ben Lerner’s debut Leaving the Atocha Station (for examples see Völz 2015, Sturgeon, Lorentzen). The main reason for this connection is that both novels share an autofictional narrative setup. Like Lerner’s debut, Heti’s second novel is an autofictional Künstlerroman. It straddles the boundary between autobiography and fiction as it follows the playwright Sheila and her artist friends through their bohemian lives in Toronto. The two texts also share a central metanarrative conceit. Sheila is supposed to write a play for a feminist theater company in Toronto, yet she experiences writer’s block and never manages to finish it. Similar to Adam Gordon’s failure to write a poem about the Spanish Civil War in LTAS, Sheila’s failure leads to the creation of the novel. The fledgling play transforms and eventually turns into the text readers hold in their hands. Both works also contain many explicit and implicit reflections on the twin ideals of sincerity and authenticity. Like LTAS, HSAPB employs parrhesia to establish an affective connection between readers and the narrator. Sheila not only mentions her desire of creating sincere art, she also discloses many shameful and embarrassing experiences to emphasize the risk inherent in her narrative. At the same time, she demonstrates an awareness that this gesture can never lead to a true connection, as sincerity and authenticity are both unreachable and contradictory. 119

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Both novels turned into literary success stories and share many stylistic similarities. Their initial reception, however, could not have been more different. Lerner’s debut novel was almost universally praised by critics for its artfulness and poetic sensibility. Like Lerner, Heti was a relative newcomer to the literary scene when she finished writing HSAPB. She had published a short story collection (The Middle Stories, 2001) and a novella (Ticknor, 2005) before she began the process of publishing HSAPB in 2010. The book was rejected by a number of publishers, including her own (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). It only garnered interest after n+1 published several excerpts (see Bloom 186). After Henry Holt decided to publish it in 2012, some critics noted that Heti’s novel was received less favorably than those of fellow male authors such as Lerner, Knausgard and Lin. One prominent example for this trend was the critic James Wood, who criticized the autobiographical elements of HSAPB while not even mentioning the autobiographical aspects of LTAS in his review of Lerner’s novel (see Bloom 187). In their essays about the critical reception of Heti’s novel, both Bloom and Sykes argue that sexism plays a role in the different receptions of Lerner and Heti. Among some reviews of female writers, there seems to be a “tendency to overemphasize the confessional elements  … while downplaying similar qualities in writing by men” (Bloom 187). This tendency often leads to accusations of “oversharing”, which Sykes defines as a “shorthand for a kind of narcissism and moral decay widely associated with social media” (156). As a result, female authors are often accused of navel-gazing and self-indulgence when they write about personal experiences. This creates an environment in which Lerner can be seen as the spearhead of a new avant-garde, while Heti’s work is labelled as shallow and childish (see Bloom 190). Fellow author Chris Kraus agrees with this assessment in her review of HSAPB: How Should a Person Be?’s deft, picaresque construction, which lightly-but-devastatingly parodies the mores of Toronto’s art scene, has more in common with Don Quixote than with Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls or the fatuous blogs and social media it will, due to its use of constructed reality, inevitably be compared with. (n.p.)

The argument of Sykes, Bloom and Kraus is that the critical reception of life writing is, to a certain extent, gendered. While male authors are expected to write 120

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‘serious’ literature even when it has confessional aspects, female authors are at times belittled or accused of scandalization for the same narrative choices. In my reading of Heti’s novel, I would like to add new facets to the observations of Bloom and Sykes. While Lerner and Heti both reflect on the same issues that motivated Eggers in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, they take their literary projects into different directions. Where Lerner focuses on his frustration with language and art, Heti’s work is a critique of both the authentic self and the imperative of self-optimization in post-feminist discourses. Accordingly, HSAPB is a probing search for a new model of selfhood. This model, which Sheila outlines in her narrative, is a self that stands in relation to the Other. This relational self replaces the authentic self as the object of sincerity. Sheila’s aims at representing her exchanges with her friends, their everyday communication, their struggles and their mutual vulnerability. She comes to realize that her self resides not in a mystical realm deep within, but in the linguistic connection between herself and the Other. This means that the focus of HSAPB is on mundane, ephemeral conversation – not the poetic nuance we find in Lerner’s novel. This might contribute to the different receptions these two texts have received in circles that traditionally value high culture. The other difference between Heti’s and Lerner’s novels I want to touch on is the role of failure. While Lerner’s work mostly deals with artistic failure, HSAPB employs narratives of Judaism and Jewish culture to portray failure as an existential reality. Sheila stylizes herself as an ancient Jewish trickster figure, the schlemiel. The schlemiel is a unique combination of suffering and hope that Wisse calls the “archetypal Jew” (4). Sheila reprises that role in her narrative. She fails at almost everything, yet in the end, she manages to convert her failures into a piece of art. There is also an overlap between the ideas of the schlemiel and the relational self. Because she needs the Other to find out how to be, she must venture the risk of trust even though she knows that this makes her vulnerable and leads to suffering. Though they bear thematic overlaps, the allusions to Jewish culture and the mundane conversations create a collage that is jarring at times. This may have contributed to the poor initial reception of HSAPB as well. Still, the early failure of the novel could not have been more consistent with the values represented by the schlemiel. In this chapter, I will first focus on Heti’s critique of two contradictory challenges: the imperative to be authentic, and the imperative to optimize the self. 121

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I will then explain how Sheila’s narrative charts an alternative model of being, the relational self. In the last section, I will analyze how the motif of failure is treated within HSAPB, both from the perspective of Romantic Irony and from the perspective of Judaism and Jewish culture.

5.2 Out with the Old (Sincerity) At first glance, Heti’s novel shares man similarities with those of Eggers and Lerner. Like A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Leaving the Atocha Station, How Should a Person Be? Is an autofictional text. Its protagonist, Sheila, shares many biographical details with Heti. Their friends share the same names and biographical information. The novel even includes e-mail exchanges between Sheila and Margaux – Heti’s real-life friend, the painter Margaux Williamson. Yet both the process of emplotment and the pastiche of form and styles leave no doubt that Heti rejects a straightforward autobiographical pact. This is reinforced by the subtitle of the novel’s first edition, which hails it as a “novel from life” (see Robinson n.p.). Like AHWOSG and LTAS the novel is also intensely metafictional. Sheila frames her narrative as a record of her writing a play for a feminist theater company. Gradually, readers come to realize that the play turns into the novel itself. Sheila discovers that the only meaningful subject for her art are the relationships and experiences she shares with her friends. Thus, the text not only reflects the process of writing, but of artistic creation (and the creation of an artistic persona) in general. This matters specifically because all of Sheila’s friends are artists as well. Heti’s novel takes place in the same milieu as those of Eggers and Lerner – the realm of white, self-reflexive intellectuals, searching for ways to express themselves in a postmodern world. It is a Künstlerroman. As the title of the novel announces, How Should a Person Be? revolves around questions of being and authenticity. Just like Lerner and Eggers, however, Heti is mainly concerned with the expression and representation of authentic experience. This discourse about sincerity reveals many parallels not just between these three writers, but the ever-present David Foster Wallace as well. Heti’s text is characterized by the suspicion that the authentic self might merely be a simulacrum in a world of hyperreal simulation. In turn, Sheila often ponders on the difficulty of figuring out what to feel and what to desire. Her marriage 122

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ceremony is a good example for this motif. Before her own wedding, Sheila observes another bride crying during the recital of her vows. The moment happens while the minister says “for richer and for poorer,” which strikes Sheila as a “pretty vain, stupid and materialistic part to get choked up on” (23). Yet during her own wedding, she cries at exactly the same point, prompting her to wonder about the possibility of authentic experience. This yearning for a foundation of individuality in a world that cannot offer it seems directly lifted from Eggers and Wallace. The choice of words eerily resembles Dave’s self-flagellation during the spreading of his mother’s ashes: “My voice cracked with the same emotion that had cracked her voice, but I felt none of it. It was a copy, a possession, canned. The bride inhabited me at the exact moment I should have been most present” (23). Throughout the text, Sheila chases this ever-elusive presence of the authentic self. Directly related to this discussion of authenticity is Sheila’s constant anticipation of the impression others have of her. Like Adam Gordon, Sheila often provides insight in her efforts to manipulate her own behavior in a quest for approval: “I wanted all those liars on my side … I hoped my smiling would convince them all of my good-naturedness” (34). In this passage, Sheila betrays her conviction that all people are “liars,” just as she is. Everybody cultivates a split between their internal selves and external appearance until the latter superimposes the former. We have encountered this idea before in Lerner’s and Wallace’s treatment of fraudulence. Both created characters that suspected themselves to be frauds. In their texts, the line between fraudulence as a moral failing and fraudulence as an existential fact is always blurry. Like Adam, Sheila believes that the ugliness of her own personality turns her into a fraud. She even dreams about a utopian past in which trust between all was built on ignorance about the nature of the “true” self: “I always imagined a golden age … before they knew my ugliness. Then I felt irrevocably uneasy once it had been revealed, when there could be no more appealing to their total trust and admiration, to that early, easy innocence” (132). As a consequence, Sheila is caught in a loop of manipulation and self-criticism. In her role as a narrator, she openly discloses the ‘ugly’ parts of her personality that she is unwilling to lay bare to the other characters. An excerpt from one of Margaux’s e-mails could function as a summary for the project of Heti’s novel, as well as its congruence with the male authors I have discussed: “Maybe we can be honest and transparent and give away nothing” (286). The language of possession here strongly parallels the snakeskin passage in AHWOSG: “What am I giving you? I am giving you nothing” (Eggers 214). 123

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These statements allude to the liminal space of privacy in these works. There is a yearning for honesty, transparency and confession. At the same time, none of these writers dares to pretend that authentic experience could unproblematically be shared with others. As a result, they care more about the creation of an affective response, rather than actual disclosure of private information. HSAPB is not so much about the dirty details of Sheila’s life as it is about making an attempt to represent experience. Accordingly, it should not come as a surprise that Heti’s novel has been compared with the works of Wallace in this regard: Wallace himself suggested it was all a matter of trust. ‘It’s like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art’s heart’s purpose’, he said, ‘the agenda of the consciousness behind the text.’ On every page of HSAPB, that agenda  – to make you ask questions, to keep your mind whirring on the whole question of being – is palpable. (Dean n.p.)

This comparison makes sense, given all the topical and formal similarities I have listed. Yet any perception of Heti as just another entry in the long list Wallace’s epigones would be reductive. Heti adds a new perspective to this literary discussion by letting Sheila develop a new assessment of authenticity and sincerity over the course of her narrative. In the beginning of HSAPB, Sheila largely shares the desire of Adam and Dave for authentic experience and selfhood, a desire they know must be frustrated. Yet along the way, Sheila discovers that this desire is rooted in the patriarchal and neoliberal structure of her society. Authenticity turns out to be a gendered ideal that prioritizes an unchanging, unified and contained personality. At the same time, Sheila feels a constant pressure to perfect and commodify her personality. The text ultimately rejects these paradoxical pressures. In this section, I will outline her criticism of authenticity, which functions as the basis for an outdated understanding of sincerity.

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5.2.1 Sincerity as the Expression of an Unchanging and Unified Self Even though Sheila is aware that the novel’s titular question is unanswerable, she attempts to answer it anyway. Yet when she does, her language is not one of ethics (should) but rather of desire (want). Sheila wants to be a celebrity, she wants “for no one to be interested in taking my picture, for they’d all carry around in their heads an image of me that was unchanging, startling, and magnetic” (3). As Frangipane notes, Sheila “wants an identity assigned from the outside which will tell her who she is. She is looking for a wholeness that contemporary life does not and cannot offer her” (33). This yearning for a stable and unified sense of self marks all of Sheila’s initial narrative. Her idolization of celebrity is telling, because it is always the Other – the public, her friends – who can cause this blissful state of stability. When it comes to writing her own play, Sheila exclaims in exasperation that “my life keeps changing” (66). Her unruly, protean self does not measure up to the ideal and, in consequence, cannot be accurately represented in art. By comparison, Sheila suspects the fulfillment of her desire for an unchanging self to reside in men. This is what motivates her to get married in the first place. The romantic connection to a man is supposed to change not only the flaws of her personality, but the “flightiness, confusion and selfishness, which I despised, and which ever revealed my lack unity inside” (22). Her role models for this interior unity are always men. Her friend Ryan, for example, summarizes the ideal of the unchanging, self-reliant self in an almost cartoonish way: “If you think his opinion is going to shake me from my axis, you’re wrong! My axis is solid and stable and straight, and I have always spun around it – always – not around his opinion, or yours” (143). The tritone of “solid”, “stable” and “straight” underlines Sheila’s parody of a stereotypically male ideal of authenticity. Such a self is always grounded and independent from social norms and restrictions. The character that best exemplifies this ideal is Uri, the hairdresser. From the onset of her time in his salon, Sheila describes the stratified norms and expectations with regard to gender that surround her. Uri is described as a “tall and impressive man” with “strength” and “vitality” while his wife is “feminine” and has “lovely curves” and a “girlish quality” (52). Sheila conforms immediately and takes care to “dress nicely” and “move elegantly” (53). The most admirable quality of Uri to Sheila and his wife is his consistency. In her quest for models of being, Sheila 125

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begins to emulate this consistency: “I wanted nothing so much as for someone to say of me: She is the most consistent person you have ever met. Even at home, she never changes!” (55). Over time, however, Sheila’s narrative develops an ironic distance towards this yearning. The ideal of the unified, unchanging self as represented by Uri is shown to originate in a patriarchal society. It is both projected by men and conforms to stereotypical ideas of how men should be. The underlying personality traits it endorses – strength, stability, and self-reliance – do little to alleviate Sheila’s suffering, nor do they satisfy her search for answers.

5.2.2 Sincerity as Communication of a Contained Self The ideal of the authentic self for Sheila encompasses not only consistency and unity, but also isolation and independence. Through her self-characterization, Sheila makes clear that she thinks these are things she lacks. The biggest obstacle in the path to them, according to Sheila, is her “endless capacity for empathy” (228). To experience the world “in my own way” (228), this empathy must be extinguished. Sheila often portrays herself as deeply interested in the opinion of others. Many chapter headings of her narrative are formulated as questions. Likewise, Sheila’s interactions with others often consist in her asking questions. Her narrative does not portray this as a positive character trait. Instead, she interprets it as vacuousness: “Other people knew how to think, I thought, had opinions on things, a point of view. I did not” (97). Throughout the novel, she keeps telling herself that this empty space within must be filled by an independent, wholly self-contained and authentic self. This independence, in turn, would allow her to feel a measure of agency she otherwise lacks: “I could finally make up my own mind. I would have to decide how to be” (46). Her hope is also that this absolute authenticity would allow her to finally get rid of the ugly parts of her personality – the need for approval, the simulation, the manipulation, the vulnerability. She uses the metaphor of the cocoon to hint at the beautiful personality that would emerge after finally finding authenticity: “It’s time to stop asking questions of other people. It is time to just go into a cocoon and spin your soul” (5). Not accidentally, the ideal she outlines in these passages again conforms to stereotypical expectations of male behavior in a patriarchal society: independence, self-reliance and the need for isolation. 126

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Sheila also finds an aesthetic reason for her pursuit of this ideal. Throughout the novel, she records her conversations with her best friend Margaux. These eventually come to replace the play she was supposed to be writing. When Margaux learns of this, she feels betrayed and the two have an argument. Sheila thinks that the reason for this is a lack of original thoughts within herself, and that she had to fill this gap with those of Margaux: Instead of sitting down and writing the play with my words – using my imagination, pulling up the words from the solitude and privacy of my soul – I had used her words, stolen what was hers. I had plagiarized her being and mixed it up with the ugliness that was mine. (179)

This is a recurring fear of Sheila  – that her own flaws and imperfections could somehow infect others and make them flawed by extension. The only cure for this contagion is a radical retreat into the “solitude” and “privacy” of her own, authentic self. Only then can her art truly reflect the horrible parts of her personality. Yet again, ideas of ownership and possession surface. Sheila’s use of ‘plagiarized’ implies that it is possible to own one’s self, and that this originality is more desirable than being a copy. Moreover, the possession of an authentic self forestalls the suffering and vacuousness that Sheila fears. She thus strives for an ideal of authenticity that is not only consistent and unified, but also self-contained. Yet even this is inherently paradoxical, as Sheila often encounters men who quite explicitly tell her how to be. When she tells the story of one of her ex-boyfriends, she relates how he imagined a horrible future for her after the broke up. This dystopian account keeps haunting her because “I was sure he could see my insides, as he was the first man who loved me” (25). The belief in her ugly personality can be traced not only to this narrative, but also to Sheila’s lover Israel. Through his demeaning behavior, he demonstrates that Sheila is little more than an object without agency to him. In an interview, Heti clarifies that Israel is, in fact, a telling name, because “it’s also part of her fantasy of wanting other people to tell her how to be – she thinks Israel is going to be this promised land and it turns out to be a place of real destruction and pain” (Hoggard, n.p.). Destruction and pain repeatedly characterize Sheila’s relationships with men. That is why she soon abandons the “fantasy” that they could absolve her from responsibility for the fashioning of her own identity. Whenever men attempt to tell her how to behave or how to feel, 127

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Sheila resorts to the laconic phrase “He’s just another man who wants to teach me something,” which confirms the value of isolating the self from others – especially men.

5.2.3 The Perfectible and Commodifiable Self Near the beginning of the novel, Sheila mentions a theme that surfaces again and again: “For so many years I have written soul like this: sould. I make no other consistent typo. A girl I met in France once said: Cheer up! Maybe it doesn’t actually mean you’ve sold your soul-… but rather that you never had a soul to sell” (5). Once again, this draws attention to Sheila’s fear of being an empty vessel without an authentic self. Yet her constant attempts to find a consistent and contained self contradict the first part of the quote. The portmanteau of “sould” implies that the self has to be curated and fashioned directly in response to the demand of others. This reification of the self “introduces the role of economic individualism and late capitalism as an influential force on the uncertain state of Heti’s identity” (Jenkins 114). As soon as Sheila begins to understand her personality as an essence that can and must be commodified, she is caught in endless loops of self-optimization and self-criticism. One could easily formulate this in the vocabulary of Adam Gordon: her ‘actual’ self is ugly and undesirable; the ‘virtual’ self she strives for is beautiful and perfect. In this paradoxical contrast between the pressure of the patriarchal ideal of authenticity and the urge to self-optimize, Sheila necessarily must experience frustration. Heti’s portrayal of this self-optimization is a direct critique not just of social power structures, but also of a reactionary backlash to feminism: Sheila’s unwillingness to be ‘naked’ constitutes a symptom of the internalized drive for beauty and perfection in all areas of her life that is itself symptomatic of the feminine masquerade induced by postfeminist and neoliberal narratives of self-optimization. (Spiers 126–127)

Both Spiers and Jenkins argue that HSAPB criticizes post-feminism through the development of Sheila. They understand post-feminism as a countermovement to feminism, which claims that the goals of feminism have been reached, and that women should no longer feel any restrictions in how they organize their lives. 128

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Angela McRobbie summarizes this when she talks about the role of marriage and the life as a housewife in Bridget Jones: Feminism has intervened to constrain these kinds of conventional desires. It is then, a relief to escape this censorious politics and freely enjoy that which has been disapproved of. Thus feminism is invoked in order that it is relegated to the past. (262)

In a nutshell, then, post-feminism argues that women today are utterly free to do what they want. This includes the hope for heteronormative relationships as salvation, as well as the pursuit of beauty and perfection (which ultimately gives rise to objectification). The novel contains numerous examples for this ideology. Sheila often equates her hunger for aesthetic perfection with her desire to be beautiful and good in life (13). She also makes it clear that she judges herself through the eyes of others when she refers to herself as an “ideal” or “idol” (see 144). Similar to McRobbie’s claim, this kind of self-optimization often involves the appreciation of men: “I knew the only way to repair this badness was devotion in love – the promise of my love to a man. Commitment looked so beautiful to me, like everything I wanted to be: consistent, wise, loving and true” (22). Yet the novel seldom features these passages without critically reflecting them. One function of the religious imagery employed frequently by Sheila is to disclose the flaws inherent in her behavior. Her references to the Book of Exodus establish a parallel between the Jewish Diaspora in the desert and Sheila’s own lost generation: “It is cheating to treat oneself as an object, or as an image to tend to, or as an icon. It was true four thousand years ago when our ancestors wandered the desert, and it’s as true today when the icon is ourselves” (183). Just like the older generation of Israelites had to perish on their voyage because “they were not ready for the responsibilities of freedom”, Sheila’s generation is barred from fulfillment. The unending pursuit of perfection and beauty has corrupted it too thoroughly. This corruption extends itself mutatis mutandis to Sheila’s art. When Sheila exclaims to Margaux that “if I want my life to be a work of art, then if I make a bad work of art, it tarnishes my life”, she perpetuates the same logic of self-optimization. This pursuit of the “beauty of life” dooms her art and her life simultaneously 129

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because it makes her afraid to fail (73). This is the drawback of an ideology of freedom that is anything but free: “This sense of self-erasure characterizes the post-feminist movement … where the classification of ‘successful’ is restricted to the normative, the contained, and the self-policing” (Jenkins 116). It is no wonder then that Heti frames her novel as a probing search for an alternative to the patriarchal ideal of authenticity on one side and the post-feminist dictum of self-optimization on the other. Sheila’s constant frustration in HSAPB is rooted in her constant oscillation between these two contradictory ideals. To her, it is obvious that settling on one specific answer to the novel’s titular question is impossible: “And yet there are so many ways of being better, and these ways contradict each other!” (6). As a result, Sheila is constantly torn between pursuing a nebulously defined ideal of beauty and pursuing absolute introspection. Jenkins labels this as “identity anxiety,” a sickness she defines as the “result of the pressure to be everything, and one thing, to both conform to feminine roles, while exceeding them” (105). In damning this idolization of the self, Sheila eventually comes to reject the paradoxical pressures of authenticity and post-feminism. The trenchant question for this chapter then becomes how an author can create sincerity effects without referring somehow, somewhere, to an authentic self that grounds communication, even as it remains outside of language.

5.3 In with the New (Sincerity) In his review of HSAPB, James Wood identifies the truly valuable characteristic of the novel as the sort of spiraling skepticism made famous by David Foster Wallace: Heti seems to mistrust her own mockery, too, and this produces only more earnestness, more self-questioning  – but now of a disgusted, self-hating nature. This talented writer may well have identified a central dialectic of twenty-first-century post-modern being. (n.p.)

The dialectic that Wood praised as a revelation is a path well-traveled within the New Sincerity. Wallace coined it, Eggers popularized it, and authors like Lerner and Heti developed it further. 130

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Yet even this praise turns out to be backhanded rather quickly, as Wood accuses Heti of evading this “solitary note” and instead wasting time with her “gang of friends” amid “vaguely intelligent conversation” (n.p.). Heti herself makes it clear that the rejection of solitary introspection in favor of a communal perspective is a conscious artistic choice: “The creative process was far more public – I showed it to Margaux and many of my friends, all the way along. I was thinking of open source software and writing a book that had more of that open-source ethos” (see Hoggard n.p.). The inclusion of other voices is reflected in Sheila’s development over the course of the novel. The paradoxical pressures of authenticity and self-optimization have one thing in common: they require an absolute focus on the self as the essence of the individual. Sheila’s narrative is meant to be an expression of this self – the answer to the novel’s titular question. Yet Sheila increasingly rejects this obsession in favor of an open-source ethos. Her narrative becomes less a catalogue of the one true self and more a picture of her relation to other voices. The turning point for this shift in perspective is Sheila’s discovery of the tape recorder. It is no accident that she couches her purchase of the machine into the language of desire (“certain objects want you as much as you want them”, 56) and romantic love (“I felt like I was with a new lover – one that would burrow into my deepest recesses, seek out the empty places inside me, and create a warm home for me there”, 57). Sheila is terrified of that absence, that emptiness, in the place where her unique and authentic self should reside. The tape recorder becomes a promise to fill this gap, not by delivering the wise, good and true personality she pursues in the romantic attachment to men, but by replacing it with something different. This different entity announces itself right after Sheila’s discovery of the tape recorder. The ensuing chapter “Sheila wants to quit” breaks with the prose narrative of the novel. It takes on the form of a stage play instead, complete with stage directions, scene introductions, character names and dialogue. In a metanarrative twist, the play that Sheila was supposed to finish begins to usurp the novel. The conversation between Sheila and Margaux about the play becomes the play, which in turn becomes the novel – all thanks to the tape recorder, which allows for the recording and transcription of Sheila’s social exchanges. The novel’s form signals this new development before Sheila demonstrates any awareness of it. In the conversation with Margaux, she still complains about the problems of her play’s fictional framework and believes that she will never finish it. Yet in the following conversation with her psychoanalyst Sheila talks about 131

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the development of the document we read simultaneously: “Life feels like it’s with Margaux – talking – which is an equally sincere attempt to get somewhere, just as sincere as writing a play” (82). At this point, Sheila clearly draws attention to her new approach. The goal of her narrative is still to capture and represent life, i.e. her authentic experience of being in the world. Yet this experience cannot be approached through introspection. Instead, it resides in her relation to the Other – in this case, Margaux, as she is Sheila’s only female friend. The enactment of sincerity thus takes on the form of a play, of a dialogue between friends. Mixed with her characteristic self-doubt, Sheila announces her awareness of this fact as the novel progresses: I now saw that hanging out with Margaux and talking to Margaux and sharing a studio with Margaux was not enough to make me a genius in the world. It would help me to lead the people or make me the sort of person I should be. It would not help me finish my play, or solve any of my problems. Yes it would. It would solve all of them. (94)

On a pragmatic level, Sheila’s focus on relational selfhood solves her writer’s block. She uses the recording of her conversations with Margaux to write the play. Where the tape recorder became her figurative lover, the new play becomes Sheila’s child: “Printing it out and reading it over, a feeling of pride bloomed in me like spring, like something new was being born” (158). This creative act is not unproblematic, however, as Margaux later finds out about the play and feels betrayed. Eventually, she approves and urges Sheila to finish the play with both their words, feelings and memories (see 262). The novel therefore charts Sheila’s development from a frustrated artist torn by paradoxical pressures into a writer who manages to represent her self in relation to the Other. It is not incorrect to say of Heti’s novel that it prefers “vaguely intelligent conversation” with her “gang” to solitary introspection. This is more than an evasive tactic, however. For Heti, the object of sincerity is not the isolated authentic self, but the network of language between selves in relation to one another. She expresses this both through the novel’s form and Sheila’s development. In addition to that, Sheila frequently emphasizes the importance of the fact that Margaux and her are both women who relate to each other. As Bloom notes, Heti’s novel employs both the tactics of the feminist confession and the Künstlerroman. 132

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Where the latter deals with the “artist’s individual process of maturation”, the former “delineates the specific problems and experiences that bind women together” (179). The two go hand in hand, as Sheila and Margaux bond because they share an obsession with art and their roles as artists. Still, for Sheila, this close connection to another woman is both new and initially unsettling. Men, she writes, have a “veil over their eyes when they looked at me, which was a kind of protection” (32). Her perspective here is heteronormative: because she is romantically interested in men and they in her, there is a clear intentionality behind their mutual bond. The potential for love and sex blinds men to Sheila’s inherent ugliness. This is not the case for her relationships with women. Sheila suspects that women perceive her flaws right away, which makes a close connection impossible: “A woman can’t find rest or take up home in the heart of another woman – not permanently. It’s just not a safe to land” (33). Yet the recognition that women can, indeed, bond, is the spark for Sheila’s artistic maturation and personal development. As a result, the representation of her bond with Margaux becomes the project of her narrative. While Sheila does not believe that she has anything important to say about women when a feminist theater company approaches her (see 41), her narrative focuses more and more on her friendship with Margaux. Her portrayal of relational selfhood therefore has a feminist impulse: the friendship with another female artist gives her a voice, agency, and creativity. It teaches her the value of openness to the Other. While all the modes being connected to men are rejected, the being that develops in her exchange with Margaux preserves and remains in focus until the end of the novel. HSAPB underlines both the value of relational selfhood and the value of female friendship. In the following sections, I will analyze closely how the novel’s form and imagery contributes to this project.

5.3.1 The Relational Self in Form and Style HSAPB mirrors Sheila’s development by transitioning from a confessional novel to a more open and playful pastiche of documents, e-mails and recordings. Heti’s play with the generic conventions of life writing is an implicit critique of the traditional confession popularized by Augustine and Rousseau. Their project was, 133

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after all, the representation of the authentic self in a unified narrative. To be sure, Heti is aware that selection and composition on her part counteract the ideal of the “open-source ethos.” Yet her experiment signals a shift away from the focus on isolated and introspective experience on to the multiplicity of expressions and perspectives we find in a community. The scholarly debate about the formal playfulness of the novel usually takes on two diverging forms. One argument is summarized by Johannes Völz, who reads the intertexts in HSAPB as “autofictional reality effects” (2015: 212). Because Heti names her characters after real life individuals, their documented exchange lends the novel a multimedia aspect: As a result, referentiality has the effect of tearing open the seams that usually delimit fictional worlds: if the book is coextensive with life, then one can learn more about the world of HSAPB by finding out about Margaux Williamson online. Reading Heti’s book and googling her characters thus become integrated, continuous activities. (Völz 2015: 215)

Völz closes his argument by stating that these strategies can merely create the effect of reality, never actual immediacy. In this vein, Heti grounds her description of life in a seemingly real environment that can be verified externally. It seems as if Völz – in so many words – describes the referential pact that Lejeune saw as a key component of autobiographical writing. The e-mails and recordings thus have the function of recovering a referential dimension that life writing seems to have lost after Postmodernism. In her contrasting opinion, Dinnen notes that the formal shifts of the text attest “not to some fake documentarian impulse, but rather to processes of mediated self-construction in general” (86). Sheila understands over time that her self comes into being during her exchanges with others, not when she is alone and introspective. That is why the novel takes great care to recreate the mundane and ephemeral parts of communication. It “invokes common communication rather than literary exceptionalism” (86). This may be one of the reasons why critics such as James Wood, who expect this kind of exceptionalism, complain about the “sloppy formlessness” of Heti’s prose (n.p.). Yet these complaints obscure the project of Sheila’s narrative. Actual conversation, as spontaneous and meandering as it often can be, is the object of sincerity for her. She needs this exchange with the Other to 134

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find and express herself: “In Heti’s novel, the e-mails and scripts are conversation. Conversation is the social. Sheila wants her work to be social, she wants it to be this, the conversation” (91). The formal choice of suddenly shifting from prose to stage play aims at similar effects. This shift, as I have mentioned before, can be observed both in the structure of the dialogues and in the fact that the novel is not only subdivided into chapters, but also into acts. Sheila’s narrative thus explicitly invokes the space of the theater, as well as all its cultural and aesthetic connotations. The theater is, after all, a space in which actors perform roles, simulate emotions and manipulate the audience. This performativity is often understood as antithetical to the purity of sincerity. When HSAPB first morphs into a play on p. 58, it underlines the importance of performance and role-playing in everyday conversation. That is why Dinnen observes: “No longer is the novel only narrated to us, it is also performing voices; this is marked by Margaux’s comments and by the fact that characters now speak independently of Sheila’s voice” (90). I argue that this emphasis on performance marks an early stage of Sheila’s development in her interaction with others. In the beginning of Sheila’s relationship to Margaux, she is convinced that she can never free herself from the habit of adjusting her behavior to the expectations of others. She only does and says what will cause others to like and admire her. The initial stage of her friendship with Margaux attests to this. As we have seen before, Sheila immediately begins to reflect on male and female friendships, and that women cannot be fooled as easily into thinking that Sheila is a good person (32–33). Immediately afterwards, Sheila recollects how she attempted to impress and manipulate her fellow “liars” in typing school (34). This is how she pictures her future – continually caught up in the performance of perfection and beauty, surround by people who do the same, while all act as if they were sincere (see 34). Her urge to shield her supposedly ugly self from criticism and ridicule becomes apparent in the first recording with Margaux. Sheila is scared to admit that she is a bad writer, which is the cause for her writer’s block. Instead, she uses Otto Rank’s ideas about creativity as an excuse: Otto Rank says that one day, there will be no art, only artists – so the work of art is renounced! And I agree! I’m renouncing this play because it’s not in service of my life. But if the primary thing was the work, I’d spend all of my time on the play. But you know what? This does not serve my life! (71)

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Later, during her conversations with her analyst, it becomes clear that Sheila cannot continue the play because she fears failure. Yet this is something she cannot admit to Margaux. Instead, she develops a philosophical justification that equates art with life, which is meant to make her seem more confident and in control. As the novel continues, Sheila distances herself further and further from this anticipatory behavior. The main reason for this change is Margaux, who becomes a sort of role model for Sheila. The difference between the two is best expressed in one of their exchanges during the trip to Miami: Sheila: I’m so happy with how we were making everyone jealous with how happy we were in the pool! Margaux: What? That’s crazy! In my mind, we were making ourselves happy. I had no idea anyone was looking at us (112)

While Sheila is gearing her performance solely to impress others, Margaux is both more relaxed and more accepting of her own vulnerability. That fact that others might judge her for the ‘ugly’ parts of her personality is not as painful to her. She even sees value in ugliness. This becomes clear during the ugly painting competition, which Margaux approaches more relaxed than Sholem. When she presents her painting, Margaux says that everything she likes is “ugly-beautiful” (291). Sheila, too, gradually comes to adopt this perspective. Her exchange with Margaux causes her to abandon the anticipatory element of her performance and instead to embrace her weakness and her failures. This culminates in a revelatory moment with Israel. After she falls asleep near his genitals and reverses the power-differential between them, Sheila has an almost religious experience: What I had done that night – it felt like the first choice I had ever made not in the hopes of being admired. I had not done it to please him. It was not to win someone’s regard. Then, from inside, came a real happiness, a clarity and an opening up, like I was floating upward to the heavens. (273)

Sheila’s relationship with Margaux teaches her that her connection with others is not unilateral. Instead, it is marked by mutual vulnerability. Ugliness, weakness and failure are not just Sheila’s domain, but an existential reality for those around 136

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her. The allusion to the space of the theater is a metanarrative technique to underline this development. Performance is no longer just understood as manipulation, but as an engagement of the Other that incorporates disclosure and trust. This relational model of self-fashioning is further emphasized by the interrogative structure of the novel. Sheila constantly asks question to herself, to other characters, but also to the reader. The text already initiates this inquisitive dialogue on the cover of the book, which poses a question to its readers: “How Should a Person Be?” That dialogue is continued in the chapter headings, which ask similarly expansive questions: “What is Cheating?” (Act 3, Chapter 9); “What is Destiny?” (Act 3, Chapter 10); “What is Empathy?” (Act 3, Chapter 15); “What is Love?” (Act 3, Chapter 16). The universal nature of these question predetermines that the novel will not provide an answer. Instead, they demonstrate how Sheila approaches the world. Both her narrative and her interactions with other people are guided by these open-ended questions, which are themselves always more directed at the Other than at herself. Instead of introspection, she hopes to find guidance in conversation and exchange. A good example for this is her transcribed conversation with Solomon (207–224), in which almost all of her lines are questions or invitations for Solomon to develop his thoughts. Sheila is aware of her own tendency to ask questions. She suspects that she lacks an authentic self, which gives rise to this tendency. Where others have unshakable opinions, she is filled merely by emptiness. Again, it is Margaux, who offers her a different perspective: ‘But I feel like other people are seeing and perceiving and synthesizing and I’m – I’m not doing any of that!’ ‘You’re doing something, boy, let me tell you. I think mainly people have opinions on, Well, what do you think about abortions? Everybody we hang out with is pretty competent at vaguely intelligent party talk, but you say things that help me think better, you know?’ (98)

Margaux sees Sheila as a Socratic interrogator who helps others to reflect their own convictions by asking questions. This is, in many ways, the foundation of their friendship. Margaux and Sheila gradually come to realize that they need each other to process their emotions and to develop ideas about the world and themselves. The interrogative form that structures much of the novel expresses this idea. 137

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One passage in HSAPB deals with this topic explicitly, yet goes far beyond mere questions or conversations. I am talking about “Interlude for Fucking”, which consists of an associative account of Sheila’s destructive relationship with Israel. In it, Sheila variously addresses Israel and other women. She probes the depths of her own objectification and recalls the often violent nature of her sexual relationship with Israel. Strikingly, Sheila in this passage seems to invite objectification and violence: “What is there to think about when your brains could so easily be smashed against the headboard, in which case there’s no way to think of anything?” (122). Rather than understanding this passage as merely ironic or deliberately shocking, I read it as an effort to merge Sheila’s perspective with that of Israel. Again, Sheila’s writing is motivated by a question: What might drive both her and Israel to engage in this degradation and objectification? She makes this explicit when she mentions the death drive: [The death drive] is weary of self-containment, the continuation of its purpose, the channeling of the energies of the self. It wants to step into the oblivion of someone else, and its heart races at annihilation. … Cliffs are the friend of the death drive, particularly cliffs into another person. It wants a mutual plummeting into the center, one into the other, like a sixty-nine. (124)

In these lines, the Other becomes the site of the obliteration of the self. This speaks to Sheila’s fear that she has an “endless capacity for empathy” (228) and therefore no Cartesian point from which to judge the world. If she adopts the perspective of others, she loses herself in them, a vanishing she almost seems to desire in her lines about Israel. Both the interrogative structure of the novel and its emphasis on conversation probe for a middle way between this extreme – the dissolution of the self in the Other – and the other extreme – the isolated, authentic self. The tentative destination of this search is a more relational concept of selfhood that acknowledges mutual vulnerability.

5.3.2 Parrhesia AHWOSG, LTAS and HSAPB all revolve around the representation of experience and the literary act of communication. Thus, they share a distinctly metanarrative 138

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approach. Yet in one respect, Heti’s novel stands apart from the other two. Its main focus is not restricted to the tenuous connection between writer and reader – it also emphasizes the connection shared between Sheila and her friends. Through the depiction of their relationship, the text conveys a relational sense of selfhood, as the self comes into being only in relation to the Other. In another gesture at the unreachable ideal of sincerity, Heti frames her work as an attempt to represent this relation, this bond. Even though HSAPB distances itself from the timeworn ideal of the authentic self, it shares with the novels of Eggers and Lerner the central rhetorical strategy of parrhesia. Parrhesia is a rhetorical strategy related to truth telling that originated in Ancient Greece. Foucault defines it as a “verbal activity” (2001: 19) that sets the speaker in special relation to truth through their use of risk and self-criticism. By willingly risking their life or social standing, those who employ parrhesia convince their listeners of the seriousness of their intentions. Speakers invoke this risk in order to criticize either themselves or the society they live in. Parrhesia thus involves a similar claim to moral purity and truth as sincerity. It does, however, emphasize risk as the central element of this truth claim. This strategy was rediscovered by the authors of the New Sincerity. They employ it to prove that their yearning for sincere communication is neither fake nor commercially motivated. Heti goes to great lengths to demonstrate that there is a considerable risk involved in telling this story, not only for Sheila, the narrator, but also for herself, the author. In a similar discursive twist to the novels we have encountered before, HSAPB blurs the line between Sheila and Heti. It is an autofictional work, rooted in Heti’s own biography, yet explicitly fictionalized through addition, rearrangement and alteration. Both narrator and author share a social network, a job, and a home, yet never fully acknowledge a referential connection. The reason for this blurring of boundaries is the same as it was for Eggers and Lerner: it allows for the admission of central postmodern tenets (all life writing is always already fictionalized) while emphasizing the risk and vulnerability of the author. It is therefore not surprising that HSAPB is a testament to Sheila’s failures and embarrassments. The acceptance of these is framed as the most important lesson Sheila learns throughout the narrative: But if my fate is truly my fate, then trying to escape it by doing whatever I can to make my life resemble some more beautiful thing will only lead me

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Sheila is certain that her fate will be “terrible,” which is partly due to her Jewish culture and religion (the topic of the next section) and due in part to the perceived ugliness of her own personality. Her decision to embrace this existential ugliness and doom is depicted as a personal victory. Paradoxically, Sheila can only claim agency in her life if she accepts that it will be a life of suffering. This personal revelation extends itself to her relationship with others. Her conscious decision to be open towards the Other invites vulnerability, shame and betrayal. Suffering is therefore portrayed as a fundamental aspect of all human relationships. To represent herself in relation to others, Sheila must thus capture this suffering in her art. She gestures at sincerity through parrhesia. Her disclosure of ugliness, betrayal and suffering makes Sheila just as vulnerable to Margaux as Heti is vulnerable to the reader. In the form of the puer aeternus, HSAPB contains a metanarrative reflection on the impact of parrhesia. Sheila learns of the puer during her session with her psychoanalyst Ann.22 In response to Sheila’s claim that she will not finish the play because “life doesn’t feel like it’s in my stupid play” (82), Ann explains that Sheila merely wants to avoid inevitable suffering. This is the modus operandi of the “eternal child”  – to perpetually withdraw when things get serious and hard, to avoid life out of a fear of failure. In the end, they are left with empty fantasies and sadness: “In their quest for a life without suffering, failure, or doubt, that is what they achieve: a life empty of all those things that make a human life meaningful” (84). This statement can be reversed, of course: what makes life meaningful are suffering, failure and doubt. Since we are currently reading this in the narrative that Sheila’s play morphed into, we are meant to understand that she accepted

22

This refers to Ann Yeoman, an actual psychologist who wrote a book about the archetype of the eternal boy modeled after Peter Pan. She published the book, called Now or Neverland in 1998, and it covers the same fundamental concepts she explains to Sheila in HSAPB.

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this lesson and did, actually, embrace suffering and failure to create art. Thus, the lesson of the puer aeternus becomes ingrained into the discursive structure of the novel itself. It also manifests itself in Sheila’s development, who shifts from a pursuit of beauty and perfection to the quest of cataloguing suffering. This is the essence of her friendship with Margaux – beauty and ugliness, success and failure, happiness and suffering, inextricably interwoven. The suffering between characters in HSAPB usually arises from collapsing boundaries. When Sheila and Margaux develop a closer friendship, they find it hard to square their connection with their need for privacy and individuality. They first notice this when they both buy the same dress. Margaux complains, and Sheila is “hurt and shocked” (116). Margaux later explains that the two need “boundaries  … Barriers. We need them. They let you love someone. Otherwise you might kill them” (133). This mirrors Sheila’s own thoughts about the death drive. Friendship becomes a tenuous balance between sharing and privacy, one that is impossible to uphold forever. This conflict reaches its climax when Margaux discovers that Sheila has turned their transcribed conservations into her play. Sheila uses the image of exhibitionism to describe this moment. She is reminded of her high school boyfriend, who showed her his penis and how she burst into “tears of shock” (173). When she urges Margaux to read her transcription, Sheila suddenly turns into the exhibitionist herself, writing that she “couldn’t imagine she would feel any way but as impressed by its power and beauty as I was” (173). Instead, Margaux feels both betrayed and disillusioned by the way Sheila portrayed her. Sheila’s metaphor equates this with sexual harassment: a total violation of agency and dignity, an abuse of power. In this moment, she realizes the mutual vulnerability and the capacity for suffering inherent to their friendship: “I had come too close and hurt her – killed whatever in Margaux made art, whatever allowed her to tell herself that it was alright to be a painter in the face of all her doubts” (179). The result of this breach of trust for Sheila are intense feelings of shame (“shame covered my face and hands” (180); “The heat of my shame was the heat of my body” (245)) and anger (“I wanted to shoot myself in the face with a gun” (243)). In this description of her suffering, Sheila emphasizes not only her relation with the Other, but also that she is an embodied self, a product of physical sensations and emotions. Her connection to Margaux – in this case her shame and suffering – manifests itself in her body. Vulnerability becomes a connective tissue that extends through relationships and bodies. 141

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In interviews, Heti has clarified that is not just the case for Sheila, but also for herself: “I understand why people write fiction now. A lot of complications can arise. Fiction is a way for writers to preserve their friendships and their romances” (Hoggard n.p.). Her formulation positions fiction as a protective shield that can cover the network of vulnerability. Her artistic project, in contrast, removes that shield, with implications for her social network. This move has an aesthetic function, one that has surfaced quite frequently so far. After Postmodernism, risk is often understood as the only thing that can allow for the creation of sincerity effects. The promise of truth through risk  – that is parrhesia. For Sheila specifically, this means that she must risk exposing her ugliness to represent her relational bond to others. She points this out when she states that “Margaux had made a sacrifice for me, in letting herself be taped, while I had made no sacrifice for her. I had done nothing scary or of risk to myself for Margaux’s sake” (261). Sheila begins to wonder what she could do, and settles on one solution: asking Margaux. Margaux tells Sheila that this risk, this sacrifice, could only be to finish the play, to be creative. Thus, in another metanarrative moment, the text signals to the reader that it (the text) is the risk that allows for trust and connection to come into being. It is a sacrifice made not only to Margaux, but to the readers as well. There is also an ethical aspect to Heti’s and Sheila’s display of vulnerability. The suffering that human relationships inevitably entail is necessary to have relationships in the first place. If people – like the puer aeternus – avoid suffering at all costs, then they will remain alone and isolated. When Sheila cannot decide about leaving Uri’s salon, she formulates this ethics as follows: The point of life was not to avoid suffering – … every choice involved suffering – and that in choosing to leave the salon, I was choosing one kind of suffering, while choosing to stay would involve another, whereas going back and forth, as I was doing now was the worst suffering of all, as it was an attempt to avoid life, which would leave me finally with nothing. (254)

Like Eggers before, Heti’s novel is didactical in its approach to the ethics of suffering. It provides readers with a clear lesson to learn through the model of the puer aeternus and Sheila’s own behavior. Just as it is the purpose of art to record 142

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personal suffering and failure, it is the obligation of every person to accept them as existential realities of life. In this way, HSAPB connects aesthetics and ethics in the imperative to expose and accept suffering and vulnerability.

5.4 The Role of Failure 5.4.1 Romantic Irony While HSAPB never answers its titular question outright, it does provide guidance on where the answer might be found: in the connection with the Other, in the network of mutual vulnerability. Yet even though the aim of the novel is the representation of this network, it also presupposes its own failure in doing so. Failure, after all, is one of the main themes of HSAPB. In his critique of the novel, James Wood observes: “On the one hand, there is the timeless seriousness of the question, and on the other hand, there is the hapless, incoherent present-day chaos of the reply, which takes a whole messy book to fail to answer” (21). This failure is ingrained not only structurally, but also on a formal level. Sheila sets out to write a play, after all. Even though the narrative morphs into a play at times, the final published text is anything but: “Sheila, likewise, fails to produce a coherent and potentially remunerative piece of writing for the feminist theater company, instead generating the ‘messy book’ the reader is implied to be holding in their hands” (Bloom 185). Every interaction with the text thus reminds readers of Sheila’s failure and invites them to reflect on this concept both on a personal and an aesthetic level. In this section, I discuss how the text’s engagement with failure is connected to the larger debate about sincerity. The first part of this discussion addresses Romantic Irony, while the second part covers Heti’s place in the larger cultural context of Jewish culture and, specifically, humor. Like the protagonists in the novels of Eggers and Lerner, Sheila is both aware of and open about the impossibility of capturing the self in language. It is, in fact, Margaux that first raises this subject when she complains to Sheila that “you there with that tape recorder just looks like my own death” (60). To recall, Solger used a similar formulation – that the idea perishes once it enters into the finite realm of language. Recording, transcribing and narrating the self kills its protean nature 143

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by fixing it. Sheila acknowledges the perpetual change of the self when she talks about the sublime and the ocean: “The sea moved forward and back with all these possibilities, all of them true. Yet it didn’t grow tired with itself the way I did. Why not?” (230) There is a clear connection here between the vast and eternally changing sea and the self. Her weariness has to do with the fact that her art can never fully represent these simultaneous possibilities. This is not just due to a failure of language, but to the inability of the human mind to grasp its own existence. Sheila asks her husband about the human predilection for stories and the tendency “to make up stories that had such an arbitrary resemblance to our actual living” (279). After her husband offers the idea that narratives protect humans from the awareness of their own insignificance, Sheila lands on a different answer: “‘Or maybe’, I said, ‘the truth is so diffuse that our minds cannot even hold on to it’” (279). In this moment, the narrative suggests that it is always already doomed to fail at representing the “truth” of experience. Such a ‘truth’, Sheila argues, transcends finite human understanding. She essentially agrees with the Romantics in this respect. This congruence of thought manifests itself also in the concept of the relational self, which Sheila explains a few pages later: “… for all of our fears and all of our certainty, the bonds that unite us will remain a secret from us, always” (281). When Sheila strives to represent these bonds in her art, failure is a necessity. This awareness is characteristic for all the works I discuss here. Yet like them, HSAPB also portrays failure as a chance. This idea resembles Solger, who argued that the work of art could only gesture at infinite ideas ex negativo. In this gesture, the infinite was more palpable than anywhere else. HSAPB conveys exactly the same idea through one of its central metaphors, which we first encounter in Margaux’s thoughts about her art project: I don’t know what it’s going to look like in the end, but I have faith that at the center of the film there’ll be like, this invisible castle, and each of the scenes will be like throwing sand on the castle. Wherever the sand touches, those different parts of the castle light up. At the end you’ll have a sense of the entire castle. But you never actually see the entire castle. (266)

What Margaux explains here is Romantic Irony: the paradoxical process of outlining a structure that must necessarily remain invisible. For Romantics like Schlegel 144

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and Solger, this structure was the infinite and the absolute. They theorized that all artists yearn for representations of these divine categories, yet must eventually realize that their art is only finite and limited. For Solger specifically, art was the transition of the divine idea into the finite result of human creation. In this process of transition, the divine idea vanishes. All art is therefore a testament to that which it cannot represent, an ultimately melancholy fact. Yet despite this melancholy, Solger, like Margaux, valued art for its ability to gesture at the infinite. Even though “you never actually see the entire castle”, the artwork affords you a “sense” of it all the same. The act of “throwing sand” is the finite gesture at the infinite ex negativo. The artistic pursuit of this gesture was the essence of Romantic Irony for Solger. Like Dave with the “core”, and Adam with the “actual” and “virtual”, Sheila adopts this metaphor of the invisible castle as the central motif of her narrative: […]  I started throwing the trash and the shit, and the castle began to emerge. I’d never before wanted to uncover all the molecules of shit that were such a part of my deepest being which, once released, would smell forever of the shit that I was […] But I threw the shit and the trash and the sand […] And I began to light up my soul with scenes. (277)

For Sheila, the “part of her deepest being” becomes the castle, and she gestures at it by “throwing the trash and the shit”. This refers not just to her own shameful secrets and mistakes, but also to the suffering she causes herself and others. Even though the castle must remain invisible, the literary representation of her failures point at it ex negativo. Failure, suffering and the risk of vulnerability become the domain of art for Sheila. Yet again, HSAPB contains a reflection on its own approach in Misha’s statement about the ugly painting competition: “Margaux understands freedom to be the freedom to take risks, the freedom to do something bad or to appear foolish” (19). Misha and Sheila both agree with Margaux in this respect. What Sheila values as an ‘infinite idea’ – the “bonds that unite us” – can never be represented. Yet her art can gesture at them, as long as it remains free to take risks. In this way, the metaphysical approach of Schlegel and Solger has been converted into personal and relational practice by Sheila and her friends.

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5.4.2 The Influence of Jewish Culture and Religion A recurring motif of HSAPB is the Jewish Diaspora in the Book of Exodus. Again and again, Sheila constructs a parallel between her own generation and the Israelites that were exiled from Egypt and wandered the desert in search of a new home. After her falling out with Margaux, without context, Sheila offers them up as a contrastive element: It took forty years for the Israelites to get from Egypt to the banks of Jordan, a journey that should have taken days. It was no accident. That generation had to die. They could not enter the promised land. A generation born into slavery is not ready for the responsibilities of freedom. (247)

The last sentence of Sheila’s quote is rather cryptic in reference to herself and her own generation. What kind of slavery is keeping Sheila out of the promised land? And what kind of freedom is she meant to experience there? The answer to the first question can be found in the chapter titled “What is cheating?”. In response to the question, Sheila answers: “It is cheating to treat oneself as an object, or as an image to tend to, or as an icon. It was true four thousand years ago when our ancestors wandered the desert, and it’s as true today when the icon is ourselves” (183). What Sheila refers to here is idolatry – worshipping an object or image instead of worshipping God, who cannot be represented. In Judaism, idolatry is considered to be sinful. It is prohibited by the third commandment that Moses passes down from God to the Israelites: “Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image … thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them” (Exodus 20:4–6, KJV). While Sheila’s biblical ancestors worshipped a golden calf and were punished by Moses (in the book of Exodus), Sheila and her contemporaries worship the perfectible self. In her narrative, Sheila criticizes this fact as both narcissistic and solipsistic. In contrast to Moses, Sheila does not believe she has an alternative to offer. Heti says as much when she talks about the comparison between the two: “‘How should a person be?’ is the question Moses answers for the Jews with the 10 commandments. If Sheila could give the answer, she’d be like Moses. But she has to accept that she’s not” (Hoggard 5). The only thing she can do is point out her generation’s mistaken belief in fulfillment through self-optimization. The promised land is 146

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thus moved to a perpetually distant, utopian future. In that inaccessible promised land, people have fully accepted the importance of risk and vulnerability. In the present, there is no way of avoiding self-obsession and solipsism. Accordingly, failure becomes an inevitable part of life. Still, Sheila has hope for a future generation that will find new ways of interacting with each other. This hope explains the metaphysical orientation of her narrative. She frequently refers to “divine love” (17), “destiny” (47) and “fate” (60) and alludes to a plan that transcends human understanding. This metaphysical existence symbolizes hope in a life pervaded by constant failure, according to Heti: While nature and science mean order, they don’t also mean hope. God somehow represents both order and hope – I suppose the hope that the order has meaning; it’s not just a structure, but a structure for a reason, which even if it’s withheld from us still exists. (McKinney 10)

This comment emphasizes the Romantic element of HSAPB  – the longing for a universal, infinite truth, coupled with the realization that it must remain inaccessible. Thus, the metaphor of the promised land is just as melancholic as the idea of Romantic Irony. Sheila’s Israel can never be reached, yet she must believe that it exists, somewhere, somewhen. The aforementioned allusions to Judaism also serve to characterize Sheila herself. She finds many parallels between herself and the biblical stories she is immersed in. This is especially true for Moses. Because she perceives him as deeply flawed, Sheila prefers him as a role model to Jesus: “I don’t need to be great like the leader of the Christian people. I can be a bumbling murderous coward like the King of the Jews” (188). For Sheila, Moses symbolizes the central challenge of her own life: the struggle with – and eventually the acceptance of – one’s own failures and shortcomings. This challenge is not just individually important, but foundational for the Jewish people as a whole. Sheila establishes this connection through the story of Jacob. One of her friends tells her that Jacob wrestles with an Angel is her favorite painting because it reminds her that “we probably need to suffer in order to … well, in order to break the spells” (194). The painting depicts the biblical story of Jacob, who wrestles for a whole night with an angel sent by God. After the angel cripples him, he is blessed and given a new name – “Israel” – which is translated either as “he 147

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who struggles with God” or “God struggles” (van Groningen n.p.). Jacob’s struggle has become an important metaphor in Judaism. It emphasizes the inevitability of confrontation and vulnerability as designed by God. According to this story, God wants his people to struggle and suffer in life. Sheila connects this both to her personal struggles and the plight of her own people in a text she returns to again and again: the play her boyfriend wrote about her after their break-up. In it, he imagines the worst possible ending to Sheila’s life: In the final scene, I kneeled in a dumpster – a used-up whore, toothless, with a pussy as sour as sour milk – weakly giving a Nazi a blow job … then [he] turned around, and, using his hand, cruelly stuck my nose in his hairy ass and shat. The end. (25)

This story points to the horrors of the Shoa and turns them into something personally degrading for Sheila. The Nazi, as the symbol for the torture of her people, becomes the only person Sheila thinks can love her, and even he only uses her as a sexual object and worse. Through her own reflections, it becomes clear that she thinks she deserves this fate. In the end of the novel, she comes to accept it as an inevitable fact of life: “If someone has to wind up, at the end of their life, kneeling in a dumpster before a Nazi, it might as well be me. Why not? Aren’t I human?” (274) Sheila thus interweaves the stories of Moses, Jacob and the Shoa with her personal life. A central part of them all is struggle, suffering, and vulnerability. She makes the case that these experiences have always been a part of Jewish culture, and that her life is but a single extension of this generational narrative. When Heti talks about the role of Judaism and Jewish culture in her work, she takes care to underline the importance of failure: Also, there is the humor, and there is a neurotic quality to my books, which is typical of North American Jewish writing and comedy. The circling, the self-doubt, the self as a clown of failed intentions, the recognition of the failure of the intellect to solve anything […] all that is also there. (McKinney 10)

By referring to these motifs, Heti ties her project to an archetype as old as Jewish culture itself: the schlemiel. This type has left a lasting imprint on the “North 148

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American Jewish writing and comedy” that Heti references. In his discussion of Woody Allen, Hirsch underlines the influence of the schlemiel on a cultural scale: “The central link among the major works in this literary and comedic tradition is the concept of the schlemiel as a hero. Woody’s persona may well be the most popular version of a comic type whose personality traits are deeply embedded in Jewish culture” (qtd. in Kinne 221). Woody Allen may be the most recognizable schlemiel today, because he developed an idiosyncratic spin on the character. In his films, characters face a world that existentially dooms them to failure. They manage to remain hopeful and constructive in the face of this all the same (see Kinne 234). Yet even though it has remained vivid in cultural memory, Allen’s work is just one of the many references to the archetype of the schlemiel. First allusions to the character can be traced to stories of the Old Testament (see Wisse 4). His integration into the mainstream of Jewish culture began in the Middle Ages, however, as a “typical prankster and wit” (Wisse 4). From there, the schlemiel disseminates into Jewish folklore and literature. One of the most popular figures in folk tales is Motke Habad, who is described as a “mock-pathetic hero” failing at everything he attempts (Pinsker 11). Similar characters were developed in the realm of literature, for example in Adalbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemiehl in 1813 (see Wisse 4) and in the works of Mendele Mocher Sforim and Sholom Aleichem (see Pinsker 14). What all schlemiels have in common is their archetypical characteristic: they are weak, vulnerable and prone to failure (see Wisse x). Their bad luck is not just situational, but existential. They inhabit a world that inevitably dooms them to fail, and to entangle others in their failure. This is also the difference between the schlemiel and his frequent companion, the schlimazl: “The schlemiel is the active disseminator of bad luck, the schlimazl is the passive victim  … The schlemiel’s misfortune is this character. It is not accidental, but essential” (Wisse 14). Because of this, the character types of the schlemiel and the schlimazl are tied together. Where the schlimazl is mostly a target of ridicule in the tradition of slapstick humor, the schlemiel has to come to terms with his active role in the failures of his life. This often adds a level of self-mockery to the schlemiel (see Pinsker 5). In this aspect lies the ambivalent power of the schlemiel as the “archetypal Jew” (Wisse 4). It symbolizes both the central conundrum of Jewish history and the divergent responses to it: 149

5. Between Authentic and Relational Selfhood in How Should a Person Be? For the reformers who sought ways of strengthening and improving Jewish life and laws, the schlemiel embodied those negative qualities of weakness that had to be ridiculed to overcome. Conversely, to the degree that Jews looked upon their disabilities as external afflictions … they used the schlemiel as a model of endurance, his innocence as a shield against corruption, his absolute defenselessness the only guaranteed defense against the brutalizing power of might. (Wisse 5)

The trickster figure of the schlemiel combines both of these functions  – to transcend weakness through ridicule, and to protect oneself by being transparent about one’s shortcomings and failures. In both cases, the schlemiel is a promise of hope – the hope for self-improvement, and the hope for endurance. This capacity for “laughter through tears” is often named not just as philosophy of the schlemiel, but as the central theme of Jewish humor as a whole (see Pinsker 13). After this brief overview, it is worth re-reading the qualities that Heti attributes to her own writing: the “neurotic quality”, the “self-doubt”, the “self as a clown of failed intentions”, the “failure of the intellect”. All of these fit perfectly into the archetype of the schlemiel, not just the modern version developed by Woody Allen, but also the folk figure that spans centuries and transcends national cultures. In fact, there are so many overlaps between Sheila and the schlemiel that literary scholar Menachem Feuer (a teacher of Jewish Studies at Waterloo University) has devoted several articles on his blog “Schlemiel Theory” to discussing HSAPB. He makes the case that Sheila’s obsession with failure turns her into a modern-day, female reinterpretation of the schlemiel. The single line that encompasses this aspiration, according to Feuer, is a statement by Sheila’s friend Misha: “The only thing I ever understood is to make the big mistakes” (20). This sounds exactly like something Dave would say in AHWOSG. Like Dave, Sheila understands the concept of failure as the initiator of her art. That is why Feuer likens the Toronto of Heti’s novel to a Chelm that is populated by artist-schlemiels who grapple with the existential nature of failure. Their artistic project, Feuer argues, is to make failure beautiful (“The Postmodern Chelm” n.p.). The underlying logic goes as follows: since schlemiels regard failure as an inevitable part of life, any art is always already doomed to fail. Any beauty inherent in art must therefore contain failure. 150

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The same logic governs the novel’s approach to sincerity. If the goal of Sheila’s art is, in fact, sincere expression (which she states on p. 82), then this, too, is doomed to fail. As David Foster Wallace proclaimed decades earlier, openness and honesty can be viewed as just another attempt at manipulation. The same is true for the schlemiel’s strategy of defense through defenselessness. Sheila’s rhetoric of full disclosure can be viewed not only as an acknowledgment of mutual vulnerability, but also as a ploy to convince readers of her pure intentions. This paradox inherent to sincerity can never be circumvented. The novel’s twist is, of course, that the schlemiel knows this. The central message of Sheila as schlemiel would be this: art, trust and sincerity are valuable despite of the eventual failure and frustration they result in. The alternative to failure would be the life of the puer aeternus, who never achieves anything and thus never fails (see the discussion of this concept on p. 85). This certainty of failure creates an absurd situation that is marked by a very specific humor. Feuer describes it as “broken laughter” (“The Postmodern Chelm” n.p.). It is not dissimilar to the “laughter through tears” we find in Pinsker’s statement about the essence of Jewish comedy. The same duality of inevitable failure and hope surfaces in the novel’s treatment of trust. Sheila is caught in a permanent oscillation between isolation and vulnerability. Her friendship with Margaux demonstrates that she eventually accepts the vulnerability inherent to interpersonal relationships. According to Feuer, this decision for hope and against safety in isolation is another facet of schlemiel philosophy: “Although trust is the basis for religion and society, the virtue of the schlemiel is to show us the other, more existential side of trust wherein the one who trusts often fails. For Heti, trust is a risk, but one that must be ventured” (“The Schlemiel’s Trust Issues” n.p.). The necessity for trust despite of the risk it entails is grounded in the relation to the Other. Sheila probes and searches for an alternative to the constricting ideal of the authentic self throughout the novel, and she eventually finds it in a relational model of selfhood. The self and the Other are inextricably intertwined, and the only way to live in relation to others is to accept mutual vulnerability in the creation of trust. Feuer argues that this relational model of selfhood is derived from Levinas’ ethics of Otherness. It is also another component of the schlemiel archetype Heti adapts in her novel. Since the schlemiel is both keenly aware of and open about their own vulnerability, they know about their reliance on others. What is more, the “series of questions, tests and life possibilities” that HSAPB offers can ultimately not be mastered by Sheila alone (Feuer, 151

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“The Other is my Teacher” n.p.). She needs others to approach them, and therefore, she needs to venture the risk of trust. The manifestation of the schlemiel archetype in Heti’s novel is not self-contained. It adds another layer to the metanarrative aspect of Sheila’s tale. Just as the type of the schlemiel conveys the idea that failure is an existential reality for human beings, HSAPB is a text that discusses its own failures of representation. Sheila’s play remains unfinished; she finds no conclusive answers to her questions; she cannot penetrate the mystery being; her representation of the relational self remains a one-sided gesture at an “invisible castle”. Yet the schlemiel symbolizes a stubborn will to carry on despite of suffering and failure. For Heti, this will is motivated by the yearning for an inaccessible deity that promises both order and hope. Her narrative represents the futile attempt to create meaning from experience. Thus, it portrays itself as an act of creation in spite of failure. The alternative to such a flawed art would be solipsism, silence, and eventually, death. My previous discussion of Lerner and Eggers has encountered the same logic. In Heti’s novel specifically, the archetype of the schlemiel clothes the familiar idea of Romantic Irony into Jewish narratives of hope and survival.

5.5 Conclusion Sincerity and authenticity are gendered ideals. They were conceived by men (Luther, Calvin, Rousseau, Sartre, Kierkegaard, just to name a few), inscribed by patriarchal institutions (mainly the Church), and reinscribed by male authors. My analysis of their genealogy and their discursive development attests to this. HSAPB is a reaction to this reality. It is characterized by the same yearning for connection and trust as LTAS and AHWOSG, yet it does not stop at the realization that sincerity is paradoxical and elusive. Through the development of Sheila, it questions whether the authentic self is a goal worth aspiring to. From the men in her life, Sheila learns how true authenticity should look like: one should be unchanging in one’s convictions, consistent, yet also self-reliant, contained from the influence of others. The only way to reach this inner unity is introspection and isolation. Yet this almost meditative ideal is often complicated by the contradictory pressure to conform to social norms and to perfect the self as commodity. In a 152

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supposedly post-feminist world, women do not need to struggle for their emancipation anymore. Equality has already become a reality. They are allowed to indulge in vices that were ‘prohibited’ before: heteronormative marriage, beauty, sexualization, and objectification. For a good part of the novel, Sheila, too, is caught up in this logic. She chases a perfect version of herself that is beautiful in appearance, committed to her husband, and good at oral sex. Neither authenticity nor self-optimization are deemed as particularly satisfying answers to the novel’s titular question, however. Sheila rejects them in favor of a relational model of selfhood. Her identity quite simply is her relation to her friends, their conversations and experiences. Sheila perceives them as a forum in which she can discuss the questions of life. This is especially true for her friendship with Margaux. Margaux and Sheila realize that they need each other in order to be creative, as their connection makes it possible for Sheila to tell her story in the first place. This relationship is also fraught with shame and pain, however. The importance of a female friendship to Sheila is a double-edged sword – it empowers her, but it also makes her intensely vulnerable. As Margaux and Sheila betray and hurt each other, it becomes clear that this vulnerability is mutual. It is the cost for intimate human connection. In HSAPB, the relational self thus entails shame, embarrassment, and suffering. In a familiar rhetorical twist, the narrative recording of these experiences becomes a gesture at connection not only between Sheila and Margaux, but also between Heti and her readers. When it comes to the implications of this suffering, Heti goes much further than Lerner and Eggers did in their novels. By alluding to the Old Testament and the Jewish archetype of the Schlemiel, Heti depicts failure and suffering as existential realities of life. Her book reflects this not only in the metanarrative conceit of the failed play, but also in the multiple smaller stories it tells (for example the story of the puer aeternus or the bad painting competition). It is therefore inevitable that the novel’s attempt at sincerity would eventually fail, just as it did in LTAS and AHWOSG. Yet the particular challenge of the schlemiel is to find a silver lining in all of their failures, to be able to continue despite the bad luck. For Sheila, this hope is the “invisible castle” – the idea that her work can be an incomplete gesture at that which cannot be represented in language. Despite all of the differences between their works, this hope unites Heti, Lerner and Eggers and connects them to the Romantics of a much older generation. 153

6 Conclusion When I began my research into the New Sincerity in 2016, the most pressing question for me and many of my colleagues was how to conceptualize the period after Postmodernism. Throughout my undergraduate and graduate studies, I was confronted at every turn with the critical legacy of thinkers like Derrida, Foucault and Barthes. Their radical philosophies turn many conventional wisdoms and self-evident truths of prior literary studies on their head. In their theories, the ‘author’ was conceived as but a function, a principle with the sole use of imposing restrictions on the free play of the text. The reader became empowered, yet again only as an instance that could gather a multitude of different interpretations. I learned to understand authors and readers as critical concepts, since the whole notion of the subject was but one more assemblage of signifiers, characterized by différance. On one hand, this way of thinking was empowering for literary studies. For one, it took the authority out of the hands of a few powerful critics and turned literary studies in a more open and egalitarian discipline. It also entailed that the mechanisms of textual interpretation could be extended to every aspect of life. Language surrounds us, constitutes us, and opens us up to infinite possibilities of meaning. On the other hand, this focus on textuality and language leaves little room for the discussion of the affective aspects of reading. The view of the self as a de-centered, fragmented and disseminated entity is hard to square with my own experience while reading. I very much feel like a coherent person with attitudes and emotions toward the narrators and characters I encounter in literature. This cautious skepticism towards the ideas of Poststructuralism and Postmodernism has been taken up by many scholars in recent years. It sparked not only new schools of writing, but with them also new forms of literary criticism. Yet even though there was a growing consensus that the high period of Postmodernism had drawn to a close, it was difficult to find a name or even defining characteristics for that new movement. This was not for a lack of contenders. I have mentioned many suggestions before: Post-Postmodernism, Performatism, Digimodernism, Metamodernism – the list is long. Yet when I first heard of the New Sincerity, the concept stood out for its 154

6.1 Romanticism, Postmodernism and the New Sincerity

apparent simplicity. There was a clear narrative espoused not just by early members of the movement, but also by critics and their interpretations: irony is destructive and morally wrong; Postmodernism erred in favoring it as a response to the epistemological quandaries raised by its own theories. Artists therefore had to return to the opposite of irony, i.e. sincerity. They must avoid irony whenever possible and find an aesthetic that creates an environment in which trust and communion can grow. By making these claims, the proponents of the New Sincerity opposed one of the central tenets of Postmodernism: the deconstruction of the subject. This deconstruction was largely responsible for Barthes’ famous proclamation of the “Death of the Author”. The authors I chose as examples for the New Sincerity (Eggers, Heti and Lerner) do not want to be seen as disembodied instances of textual agency. Instead, they desire not only to participate in the act of literary communication, but also in the reception process of their own texts. Thus, they attempt to recover the notion of the extra-textual subject. Their texts insist on this by constantly saying: “I exist as a real person, and I am talking to you”. This clearly defined project could not have been more different from the literature I had grown used to, and it seemed to offer a concrete answer to what might come beyond Postmodernism.

6.1 The Complicated Relationship between Romanticism, Postmodernism and the New Sincerity Yet, as I became more familiar with theoretical conceptions of sincerity and New Sincerity literature, I discovered that this project was anything but simple. Distinctions between the New Sincerity and what came before blurred more and more. One difficulty lies in the concept of sincerity itself. Sincerity is a moral ideal that developed in the West over the course of five centuries and has deep ties to the concept of authenticity. This is the first difficulty: the connection to authenticity renders sincerity paradoxical. If the aim of sincerity is a representation of authentic mental states to others, it is always already doomed to fail. This is because authenticity by definition eludes representation. In keeping with this contradiction, 155

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sincerity can also be understood as merely a set of rhetorical strategies. In this context, sincerity can be performed so that others perceive the speaker as transparent and trustworthy. These two understandings – sincerity either as a moral ideal or a rhetorical strategy – showcase why sincerity is such a slippery concept. The first entails that sincerity must always remain a yearning that can impossibly be fulfilled. The second empties it of its moral value and makes it hardly suitable as an ethically superior alternative to irony. Every author who turned to sincerity as either a moral ideal or a rhetorical strategy to find new ways of expression after Postmodernism had to account for these complications. One of the first was David Foster Wallace, yet many other authors, such as Jennifer Egan, George Saunders, Dave Eggers and later Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, or Miranda July followed in his footsteps. Their art is characterized by a yearning for all the qualities promised by sincerity: trust, connection, the sharing of experiences, and most of all, the communication between the author and the reader. Yet this yearning is always balanced with a sense of skepticism, a suspicion that language cannot fulfill these promises, that sincerity is built on an illusion. The texts written by these authors convey fundamental doubts about the very ability to break free from Postmodernism and to recover a sense of extra-textual subjectivity. During my research, I learned that this ambivalent oscillation between yearning and skepticism is not unique to the literature of the New Sincerity. Rather, it is a continuation of a cultural conversation that has been active for centuries. The clearest precursor for this engagement with sincerity and irony is the period of Romanticism. Many Romantic artists faced similar contradictions and harbored similar desires in their works as those today. They strove for a total vision of universal harmony which transcended language, yet also knew that their art could impossibly capture it. This problem surfaces again and again in the cultural history of the West: artists seek for ways to transcend the limits of their medium, only to realize that this transcendence is impossible. They learn that art cannot escape the boundaries of finitude, of contingency, of subjectivity. Yet the Romantics found an idiosyncratic solution to this problem, one that the New Sincerity rediscovered: Romantic Irony. The Romantics deliberately created art which pulsates with the awareness that it is finite, contingent and subjective, yet seeks transcendence anyway. These paradoxical aims could only manifest themselves in the same work through irony and meta-reflexivity. 156

6.2 Formal and Thematic Similarities Shared by Eggers, Lerner and Heti

Even though the labels of Romantic Irony and New Sincerity seem to contradict each other, they display remarkable parallels. In a turn of complication, however, the same can be said for Romantic Irony and Postmodern Irony. All of these take part in a discourse around the limits and possibilities of language, with each period foregrounding a different aspect of that discourse. Romantic Irony is grounded in the desire to transcend man’s mundane and finite existence and to aspire towards a divine spirit that suffuses the universe and all of nature. It serves as a cure to the frustration that inevitably arises when art fails to achieve this transcendence. Instead of representing the infinite directly, the Romantic work of art gestures at it ex negativo, through the fragmented nature of its own finitude. Postmodern Irony, by contrast, focuses only on the unavailability of metaphysical experience. It is a response to the absence of a transcendental signifier that could ground meaning. Even though language structures all of human experience, we can impossibly mean what we say, nor fully grasp what we intend to mean in the first place. After this period of skepticism, the New Sincerity returned to a Romantic sensibility. It again conceives of art as a medium that can gesture at that which lies beyond language. Where Romantic Irony pursued the infinite and the divine, the New Sincerity is characterized by a yearning for authentic experience and the self beyond the text. It portrays literature as a bridge between author and reader that transfers emotions and experiences from one person to another.

6.2 Formal and Thematic Similarities Shared by Eggers, Lerner and Heti Authors like Eggers, Heti and Lerner do not just discard the Postmodern hermeneutics of skepticism, however. They still grapple with fundamental doubts about the possibilities of language. Their texts all share certain formal characteristics that express both the yearning and the skepticism attached to sincerity. That similarity is the reason why I group them together in this study. What sets them apart from many other writers of the New Sincerity movement is their preference for an autofictional style of life writing. While the protagonists share the names of the authors (in the case of Eggers and Heti) and much of their biographical information, they are also clearly fictional creations and interact with mostly fictional 157

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characters. This liminal style is an expression of both the yearning for sincerity and an admission that all life writing is inevitably a product of selection and emplotment. The autofictional style of these novels goes hand in hand with a self-reflexive metafictionality that was also a characteristic component of Romantic Irony. These texts problematize not only their own process of creation, but also the doubts of their narrators about the very possibility of being sincere. Like their authors, these narrators are torn between the desire for connection and their doubts about the capacity of language to establish it. Their openness about this ambivalence can be interpreted either as an attempt at transparency or as a potentially manipulative rhetorical strategy. This ambivalence also characterizes the discussion of reliability in these novels. In their role as protagonists, Dave, Adam and Sheila find it impossible to be sincere. They frequently lie to other characters and are aware of their own manipulative tendencies. Their goal at all times is to create the façade of a loveable person, whereas they are convinced that their actual self is flawed and ugly. In their role as autodiegetic narrators, however, they lay bare the extent of this dissimulation to the reader. In the tradition of Wallace’s writing, they are aware that even this apparent transparency might be just another attempt at manipulation. Within this tangle of contradictions, these novels entertain the question: What if? What if the relation between narrator and reader is actually a privileged one? What if this was not just an additional layer of fraudulence, but actual openness about their embarrassing secrets? What if this was a gesture, an attempt to relate to the reader in the medium of the novel what cannot be expressed in everyday conversation? Answering these questions is a matter of trust, and of belief. This is very much the point of the New Sincerity. It creates textual situations which allow readers to exercise their capacity to trust and to believe. To achieve this, Eggers, Heti and Lerner frequently employ parrhesia to complement their discussion of sincerity. The reader is meant to invest trust and belief precisely because the narrator shares something that makes them vulnerable. Moreover, because these authors identify so closely with their creations, they make themselves and their social network vulnerable, too. This risk underwrites their yearning for sincerity and functions as a counterweight to the Postmodern spirals of doubt and suspicion. 158

6.3 The Case of AHWOSG

6.3 The Case of AHWOSG The similarities between my three test cases are startling, and they are the reason why they belong to the New Sincerity movement. Yet their specific form of grappling with the limits of language varies greatly. These differences showcase the philosophical and aesthetic arguments within the New Sincerity. My first example for this was A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. When Dave Eggers published his debut in 2000, he was heavily influenced by the works of David Foster Wallace23. Judging from his own statements, Eggers envisioned himself as one of the literary ”anti-rebels” that Wallace called for in ”E Unibus Pluram”. He remained adamant that his work was neither “pomo or meta or cute” (2001: copyright page) and consistently railed against irony. Instead, he expressed a desire for connection with his readers and depicted himself as the spearhead of a generational movement. In AHWOSG, however, Eggers writing displays an oscillation between sincerity and irony that stands in stark contrast to his strong assertions. The memoir is pervaded by a deep fear that the solipsism and hyperrealism of a Postmodern age may be inescapable. This fear is emphasized by Eggers’ penchant for stylistic playfulness. The text constantly draws attention to its own mediation and the increasingly blurry line between reality and fiction. From Wallace, Eggers lifts an almost neurotic obsession with his own intentions while writing. His narrator, Dave, displays an intense hunger for communion and closeness, not only with other characters, but also with the reader. Yet every attempt he makes to open himself up to this communion is accompanied by lengthy spirals of doubt about his project. He fears that deep down he just wants to exploit his own experiences for fame and money, just as much as he fears that others might get this impression. While this struggle with his own intentions is reminiscent of Wallace’s torn narrators, Eggers adds several layers to this trope. These turned out to be a template for future writers like Lerner and Heti. Most importantly, he explicitly leaves the fictional realm by labelling his story as a “memoir” and naming its narrator “Dave”. Dave shares many foundational experiences with Eggers. The most important of them is the death of his parents from cancer when Dave was a teenager. In the wake 23

Eggers even wrote the introduction to the 2006 edition of Wallace’s magnum opus Infinite Jest.

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of this loss, Dave had to raise his younger brother Christopher. The memoir starts with a dense account of the deaths and then abandons this topic completely, giving credence to the theory that they form a traumatic core to Dave’s experience. His narrative would then function as a process of ‘working through’ the trauma. Dave frequently alludes to the fact that the passing of his parents is something he can neither represent in language nor understand rationally. Even though his memoir is an attempt to heal this traumatic rupture, the text ends with Dave being disgusted at himself for exploiting his mother’s suffering for artistic and materialistic ends. This signals a pattern which surfaces again and again in the three novels discussed here. AHWOSG is a relentless attack on Eggers’ younger self. It is a retrospective of an adult who portrays his youth as pretentious, vain, narcissistic, selfish, angry and megalomaniacal. This “self-loathing” and “self-ridicule” (Völz 2015: 217) is an integral part of the literature of the New Sincerity. Since Eggers’ work preceded those of the second wave of writers, it is fair to say that he popularized it. Over the course of his narration, Dave characterizes both his fear of solipsism and his fierce self-criticism as sincerity effects. Readers are meant to understand that his memoir is a gesture at connection and communion. Dave makes this gesture despite of all his doubts and despite of the risk he exposes himself and his friends to. As the title A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius already suggests, Dave’s narrative is framed as a monumental struggle with himself that he shares with us and for us. Yet, as is customary for the New Sincerity, these gestures at the “consciousness behind the text” are always accompanied by doubt and skepticism. Dave summarizes this in the central passage of the memoir: “The core is the core is the core. There is always the core, that can’t be articulated. Only caricatured” (217). As deeply as Dave may desire it, he cannot articulate the authentic core of his experience. His work is but a caricature, a “stupid risk, and an ugly thing, and a betrayal, and overall, … a mistake” (2001: 35). In all its flawed textuality, it can only gesture at the total disclosure Dave yearns for. Yet this gesture, this productive failure, is contextualized as valuable in and of itself.

6.4 The Case of LTAS At first glance, there are not many similarities between Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Where Eggers 160

6.4 The Case of LTAS

marketed his debut as a memoir and based it explicitly on his biography, Lerner’s debut is labelled as a novel and features a fictional protagonist named Adam Gordon. There is nothing traumatic about Adam’s life, nor is he faced with the hardships that Dave experiences while raising his younger brother. Adam lives a life of privilege. He is a young American poet on a scholarship in Spain and spends most of his days getting high, going to parties with his Spanish friends, or visiting art exhibitions in Madrid. Most of his narrative revolves around his problematic relationship with poetry. His language reflects this by being dense and ornate – a stark contrast to the passionate and often vulgar rants of Dave. Yet in their philosophical approach and the way they are narrated, LTAS and AHWOSG share many commonalities. For one, Ben Lerner and Adam Gordon are intimately related in their experiences and the art they admire and create. Both are poets, both traveled to Spain on a scholarship, both were raised in Topeka, both are fans of Ashbery, both have a friend and fellow poet named Cyrus Console, and both have written identical poems. LTAS is, yet again, a work of autofiction. The fictional distance from Lerner’s life does justice to the fact that all life writing is necessarily fictional. At the same time, the voices of Adam and Ben are entangled. By writing about himself with the characteristic self-loathing of the New Sincerity, Adam shares a sense of vulnerability and risk with Ben. Adam displays himself to the reader as a fraud and a pathological liar. All of his interactions with other characters are geared towards making himself look cool, confident, indifferent and brilliant. At the same time, he perceives himself as a needy, anxious and unproductive wreck. The huge gap between his self-image and his outward projection makes him loathe himself even more, a downward spiral that seems lifted directly from Dostoevsky. The novel thus sets up a stark contrast between the relation of Adam to the other characters and the relation of Adam to the reader. While he constantly conceals his “actual” self from his friends and lovers in an effort to make himself look good, he discloses his lies and the resulting shame to the readers of his narrative. This confessional mode makes Adam vulnerable and functions as a sincerity effect. Lerner’s novel features frequent meta-reflexive contemplation about its own genesis. Adam paints the novel as a result of his procrastination. Rather than writing the epic poem the foundation expects from him, he writes about the process of not writing the poem. The result of this turns out the be LTAS. This conceit surfaces in AHWOSG and HSAPB as well. Dave frames his memoir as a response to a trauma 161

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he cannot represent in language; Sheila is supposed to write a play but instead narrates why she cannot finish the play. By choosing this framework, these authors paint failure as a crucial element of their own creations. Where Dave, Adam and Sheila fail to produce the artwork they had originally planned, their narration of this failure paradoxically results in a different work of art. This motif of productive failure blurs the boundary between failure and success. It also demonstrates the importance of transparency and communication about one’s shortcomings. On a broader, more philosophical level, these novels are concerned with the failure of language to fulfill the lofty artistic aspirations of their authors. In the case of LTAS, this manifests itself in Adam’s troubled relationship to poetry. As he insists time and again, poetry is only interesting for him because it has a negative power. Where Adam arrives at the poem with a yearning for transcendence and infinite truth, he finds only obscurity and frustration. Poems hardly mean anything for Adam. They are just linguistic screens which promise a truth they can never represent. Yet, paradoxically, this sense of frustration makes them valuable and addictive to him. The fact that poems are obscure and finite makes him intuit everything they are not through negation. This is their negative power. He summarizes this by alluding to a metaphor of Ashbery’s poetry: “like a wave breaking on a rock / giving up its shape in a gesture that expresses that shape” (Ashbery 252). The moment the wave breaks on a rock, it gives up its shape. It is no longer fluid and moving, but arrested and dispersed. In this moment of dissolution, the shape of the wave becomes palpable through negation. We know that the wave was rolling and moving because it broke on the rock. This is how Adam views poetry, and by extension all art: as a wave, breaking on a rock. Within this metaphor, his own narrative becomes a flawed attempt at representation. It gestures at his authentic self through negation. In its yearning for that which it cannot achieve, LTAS is thus a fitting example for Romantic Irony. Like Eggers, Lerner connects pragmatic ethical implications to these abstract thoughts. This manifests itself most clearly in the contrast between Adam as a narrator and Adam as a protagonist. In his interactions with other characters, he does everything to avoid showing his ‘true personality’. Adam catalogues the psychological side effects of this performance in his narrative. He becomes anxious, tense and irritable. As a result, he resorts to cannabis and psychotropic drugs to calm himself down. As a narrator, Adam behaves differently. Instead of concealing 162

6.5 The Case of HSAPB

it, he embraces his shame and relates the minutiae of his embarrassments to the reader. The whole novel is thus framed as a gesture at Adam’s authentic self, which he undertakes despite of his doubts in the possibilities of language and art. If one is unwilling to make this gesture, LTAS suggests, one invites the same anxiety and rage experienced by Adam, who can only deal with his emotions by numbing himself. Even though sincerity may be an unachievable ideal, striving for it is important. This importance extends not just to one’s psychological well-being, but also to the possibility to connect with others.

6.5 The Case of HSAPB How Should a Person Be is also an autofictional text, it also employs parrhesia, and it also straddles the boundary between sincerity and irony in a probing exploration of the limits of language. Yet Heti’s debut adds several new layers to this discussion. The most important of them is her focus on gender. Sheila, the novel’s protagonist, is confronted with an ideal of authenticity that turns out to be structured by stereotypical expectations of male behavior. The authentic self she pursues is independent from others, contained and unchanging. Her role models for this kind of identity are always men, whom she attempts to imitate. The novel contrasts this with a different model of being that also exerts pressure on Sheila. She repeatedly writes about her urge to be perfect and beautiful. She wants to project the image of the ‘ideal’ woman to others. This constant pressure to self-optimize especially when it comes to beauty is a critique of post-feminist norms. It is also a stark contrast to the ideal of authenticity that seems so enticing to Sheila. She is torn between these two contradictory expectations and her narrative is an attempt to find a way beyond this dilemma. As her narrative unfolds, Sheila realizes that her self comes into being during her conversations with others – it is relational. This turns the novel into an attempt to represent who she is by documenting her interactions with others. To Sheila, this insight is fulfilling, especially when contrasted to the anxiety she feels in her pursuit of both authenticity and self-optimization. It is also important to her that her best friend is a woman. The novel revolves around her conversations with Margaux (the painter Margaux Williamson in real life) and suggests that they liberate Sheila both artistically and personally. Yet, as is customary to the New Sincerity, 163

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her friendship is also a site of suffering, shame and betrayal. HSAPB frames Sheila’s realization that this suffering is inevitable as a major development. Only when she realizes that all relationships include pain and suffering can she form lasting bonds with other people. The novel goes even further by connecting this insight to Jewish religious and cultural metaphors. Sheila takes on the role of the schlemiel, a character from Jewish folklore with a history that spans centuries. The schlemiel is afflicted with existential bad luck and fails at everything they attempt. However, they also manage to find hope and perseverance in the face of their plight. Just like the schlemiel, Sheila has to accept that failure is an inevitable part of life and art. She also has to accept that trust involves risk, and that her connection to others involves mutual vulnerability. By interweaving allusions to the Old Testament with references to the history of the Jewish people, Heti makes the case that this embrace of failure and suffering is not just her personal tale, but a broader, cultural narrative. The narrative of accepting failure extends to the aesthetic dimension of Romantic Irony, as well. HSAPB is a reflection on its own failures of representation. Sheila cannot offer a complete picture of her relational self, since her narrative is always restricted to her own perspective. She also cannot establish a truly sincere connection to her readers because of the performative contradiction. Yet, as Margaux’ metaphor of the “invisible castle” (Heti 266) suggests, the novel is a flawed gesture at that which transcends language. As an artist, Sheila has to accept the limits of her medium in order to be creative at all. This idea is best expressed by the metafictional framework of HSAPB: Sheila’s failure to write a play turns into a novel that discusses this very failure. In this way, the text revolves around the acceptance of failure, risk and vulnerability on both an aesthetic and an interpersonal level.

6.6 Productive Failure: Literature as a Privileged Medium While the differences between AHWOSG, HSAPB and LTAS showcase the diversity of the New Sincerity, at their core, they are propelled by the same idea. They all depict literature as a privileged medium when it comes to sincerity, as it can do justice to the concept’s inherent paradoxes. This is mirrored in their own contradictory approach: each novel is an attempt at communication, connection and 164

6.6 Productive Failure: Literature as a Privileged Medium

communion, yet they are also a reflection on the flawed nature of that attempt. To express this, they utilize the same formal strategies. First among them is their autofictionality, which emphasizes both the potential and the limits of the project of life writing. This is coupled with the curious contrast between a protagonist who lies constantly and a narrator who catalogues every detail of their fraudulence. Furthermore, these autodiegetic narrators often have moments of metanarrative reflection They wonder how readers will interpret their intentions behind telling their story. The fact that they call into question their own sincerity can either work as a sincerity effect itself, or as another expression of their manipulative tendencies. Everyday, mundane conversation cannot include these convoluted turns and counter-turns. When we interact with others, we cannot attach an asterisk to every utterance that clarifies the limits of representation. We cannot constantly emphasize our yearning for interpersonal connection. This duality of sincerity is made explicit in the works of Eggers, Lerner and Heti. They champion the novel as a site for such deliberations. When it comes to the ethical aspect of sincerity, however, these works contain a clear didactic message about the way we should communicate with each other. Dave, Adam and Sheila all have feelings of anxiety and loneliness because they are unable to reach out to others. This inability is rooted both in the fear of inevitable solipsism and the fear that others would abandon them if they made themselves vulnerable. Where they cannot reach out to other characters, however, they do reach out to the reader. This gesture makes it clear that they are willing to confront their fears and undertake an attempt at communion even though it is flawed. This is depicted as the only antidote to the anxiety and isolation they feel in regard to other characters. In this liminal pursuit of communion, Eggers, Heti and Lerner are steeped both in Postmodern and Romantic discourses. While they often identify themselves in reaction to Postmodern ideas like the “Death of the Author” or hyperreality, much of their writing is devoted to a serious discussion of them. Even when they are critical of these ideas, they reproduce the skepticism that motivated their inception in the first place. In its most negative form, this skepticism results in the fear of solipsism, defined by the belief that language cannot help us to understand ourselves, nor makes us understood to others. Yet this skepticism is always balanced by the Romantic belief that there is something that transcends language, and that the yearning for this presence is quintessentially human. In their most Romantic 165

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moments, these authors depict language as a way to gesture at this presence, even though it cannot represent it. What defines them as members of the New Sincerity, however, is how they understand the nature of this presence. Their writing is directed towards the self, as much as it is directed towards communicating the self to others. The yearning for transcendence here is a yearning for disclosure, and through it, connection and trust. This yearning is the central element of the New Sincerity.

6.7 The New Sincerity in a North American Context This core belief is not restricted to authors of the United States and Canada. Yet my three test cases all highlight a specific regional inflection that helps explain why the New Sincerity was so influential in North America. The first piece to this puzzle is Gorenstein’s argument that the cultural currency of sincerity increases in times of crisis. The crises that Eggers, Lerner and Heti respond to differ from each other, however. Eggers published AHWOSG in 2000, one year before 9/11 and the ‘War on Terror’. Even though the hostile discourse around irony became more intense in the US after 9/11, it had already found its proponents in David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers. Like Wallace, Eggers saw irony as a destructive force that had become pervasive through mass media and threatened to atomize American society. His writing is a reaction to the cultural theories that had become popular in American Academia throughout the latter half of the 20th century. He understood the crisis of representation they portended as a social crisis. Accordingly, he envisioned sincerity with its yearning for trust and connection as an antidote. The title of Ben Lerner’s LTAS already suggests a clear orientation to a political crisis. It is a reference to the Madrid Train Bombings of 2004 (one target was the Atocha Station) which Adam Gordon witnesses from a distance. In their wake, one character directly challenges Adam to question the imperialism of the US that led to the ‘War on Terror’. His role as an American in a foreign country hit hard by terrorism constantly confronts him with the political legacy of his home country. Yet LTAS is also a reference to a poem by John Ashbery of the same name. Over the course of the novel, Lerner establishes an implicit connection between the terrorist 166

6.8 Quo vadis, New Sincerity?

attacks and the role of poetry and art in general. After all, both Adam Gordon and Lerner admire Ashbery because his poetry creates the illusion of meaning while all it really offers in the end is obscurity and frustration. Adam desperately wants poetry to make sense of the atrocities he is confronted with: the bombings, the accounts of Franco’s dictatorship, the results of climate change, etc. Eventually, however, art inevitably fails to meet this expectation. Still, Adam and Lerner continue to write despite of this frustration. Faced with a new sense of risk and vulnerability in the wake of the ‘War on Terror’, they look for sincerity in a medium that cannot offer it. For Sheila, the protagonist of Sheila Heti’s HSAPB, sincerity is the refuge from a crisis of identity. In her endeavor to find out how to be, Sheila pursues an ideal of authenticity that conforms to male gender norms. Being authentic entails a life of introspection, of isolation, of consistency and independence. Paradoxically, however, Sheila finds herself often pulled in a different direction, one that follows post-feminist discourses of beauty and self-optimization. She only resolves this crisis when she finds out that her self is relational. Yet even this revelation does not alter her growing awareness that she cannot represent her experiences in her art. As a consequence, Sheila turns to a figure with a long history in Jewish culture: the schlemiel. Specifically, she becomes a schlemiel in the tradition of North American artists such as Woody Allen and Bernard Malamud. In their works, failure is an existential fact of human life, and the challenge for each individual is to find hope despite of this fact. Similarly, in HSAPB, Sheila learns to accept her failures, both on an artistic and personal level. This manifestation of the schlemiel archetype is a counter-narrative to the American Dream. Where the American Dream valorizes success as the only aspirational goal, the schlemiel’s lifelong task is to accept their life of failure.

6.8 Quo vadis, New Sincerity? My final question at the end of this project concerns the future of the New Sincerity. Just as they served for an exploration of the movement’s goals, the works of Eggers, Lerner and Heti are a benchmark for its development. While the novels at the beginning of their career neatly fit into the categories I developed here, the rest of their oeuvre branches out into different themes and ideas. 167

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After Dave Eggers published AHWOSG, he went on to create two more books of life writing: What is the What (2006) and Zeitoun (2009). Both differ greatly from his memoir. What is the What is the ‘autobiography’ of the Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng, yet it was written by Dave Eggers, who calls it a “fictionalized autobiography” (“A Conversation”: n.p.). Zeitoun is the biographical account of a shop owner who experiences the fallout of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Where both of these novels at least share the concern of AHWOSG with the narration of lived experience, they – together with the numerous other fictional novels Eggers wrote – only display a tenuous connection to the New Sincerity, if any. The cases of Ben Lerner and Sheila Heti are different. After LTAS, Ben Lerner went on to write two more novels, 10:04 (2014) and The Topeka School (2019). The first features a protagonist called Ben, who is an even clearer autofictional likeness of the author, and the second novel returns to Adam Gordon and his adolescence in Kansas. There are clear formal and thematic similarities between these texts, not the least of which is the autofictional narrative situation and the enduring concern with authenticity and fraudulence. Sheila Heti also published two more texts after HSAPB. The first, The Chairs Are Where The People Go (2011) is an account of her conversations with her friend Misha, who also makes an appearance in HSAPB. The second, Motherhood (2018), is an autofictional dive into Heti’s decision to become an artist rather than a mother. None of the projects I mentioned features a reflection on sincerity and irony of the intensity that characterized AHWOSG, LTAS and HSAPB. This suggests that the New Sincerity was a short-lived movement that had run its course after a mere two decades. If we understand Wallace’s conception of a curative literature as the central idea of the New Sincerity, we could even make the argument that the New Sincerity ended much earlier, in the beginning of the new millennium. Yet I would argue that Eggers, Lerner and Heti were, for a time at least, spiritual successors of Wallace, and that even some of their latest works are motivated by his spirit. Even though they no longer explicitly revolve around sincerity, What is the What, Zeitoun, 10:04, The Topeka School, The Chairs Are Where the People Go and Motherhood are part of a common endeavor. They ponder the possibility of recovering an extra-textual subjectivity. This, to recall, was part of Wallace’s project. He wanted to record the “consciousness behind the text” (McCaffery n.p.). Like their predecessors, these texts insist on the existence of a real, flesh-and-blood person that communicates their experiences to a real, flesh-and-blood reader. The 168

6.8 Quo vadis, New Sincerity?

difference between AHWOSG / LTAS / HSAPB and later works is that this insistence was much more explicit and central to the text as a whole. At the beginning of their careers, these authors were steeped in theory and had a bone to pick with the tenets of Postmodernism, especially the “Death of the Author”. This appetite for confrontation abated as they grew older, which allowed them to pursue different artistic avenues while still being concerned with their role as artists and authors. By the time I am writing this conclusion in 2021, I am certain that the New Sincerity is a matter of literary history. If we define the aesthetic of the New Sincerity as autofiction that combines meta-reflexivity with parrhesia to probe the interstices of sincerity and irony, then we are faced with an absence of such texts in the recent years. I have also shown, however, that there is a common question that traveled from Romanticism through Postmodernism all the way to the New Sincerity: Can we express that which transcends language in language? How could this expression manifest itself? If it is not possible, where does this leave our understanding of literature as an art form? For all of the contingencies of the New Sincerity, these questions seem to be – virtually – timeless.

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Felix Haase studied English and American Studies as well as Political Science at the FSU Jena. He worked there as a research associate until 2021 and has since earned his PhD.

 

www.wbg-wissenverbindet.de ISBN 978-3-534-40672-2

Felix Haase Productive Failure

When David Foster Wallace suggested sincerity as a cure to a society atomized by Postmodern irony, he founded a new cultural movement: the New Sincerity. This book analyzes the New Sincerity from a variety of literary and historical perspectives. It traces not only the Romantic and Postmodern heritage of the movement, but also takes a close look at its central authors, such as Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, and Dave Eggers. Their works are connected by the logic of “productive failure”, a concept that blends sincerity and irony in a revolutionary fashion.

Felix Haase

Productive Failure Sincerity and Irony in Contemporary North American Literature