Here's what might be considered the nut of the essay:
By depicting various figures attempting to argue their way out of fraudulence, Wallace brings his readers to what might be a depressing realization: “true authenticity” can always be forged. His writing has value, specifically for us, because it actualizes and confirms our suspicion that, across the categories of American culture—in social life, television, politics, art and criticism—our obsession with fraudulence and authenticity has acquired the configuration of neurosis. The more fervently we demand authentic expression, the less capable we are of identifying it. We can no longer agree on standards, or whether we should have standards. Postmodernism has not succeeded in eradicating the distinction between what is real and what is fake, but it may have deprived us of any vocabulary for speaking meaningfully about that distinction. Irony, satire and ridicule, masked as coping mechanisms, become the ongoing symptoms and restatements of our condition. Wallace draws a line from the Frankfurt School to the metafictionists to The Simpsons to The Daily Show. He drives us to acknowledge the AA maxim that not just our worst, but also our “Best Thinking” got us here, where we are free to say anything but what we mean.
I also thought this was an interesting remark, especially since I'm preparing to read Tolstoy's Anna Karenina this summer:
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This last bit is very interesting to me:
"Wallace was often accused of fashionable postmodern pretension, which inverts his potential vulnerability. Critics could more accurately fault Wallace for the kind of reactionary dogmatism associated with the late Tolstoy, whose turn to folk Christianity had a similar structure and motivation as Wallace’s valorization of AA."
It's interesting in part because it describes my own surprise in coming to DFW's work expecting superficial literary fashion and finding not only deep compassion but also a willingness to engage questions of faith and meaning—a surprise similar to what I found upon first reading Saunders. It's sad to see such engagement labeled a "fault" or dismissed as "reactionary dogmatism"—though I haven't read enough of him to say that he never tips too far in that direction. I do know that Wallace was well aware of the problem. I thought he articulated it well in his essay on Dostoyevsky (in my mind a more dogmatic writer than Tolstoy), where he envies the Russian his freedom and confidence to take on the big philosophical questions of existence but without, it seems to me, regretting post-modernism and contemporary skepticism. I get the sense that he thought of post-modernism as a given condition from which to write—dangerous to give oneself to it completely and dangerous to pretend it had never happened. What he was after was not something reactionary so much as a synthesis through which we could all move forward. Maybe that's why he could be accused of being both a slave to the latest fashion and a reactionary ideologue? Maybe that's why, when I read the best of his work, I get excited about the writing—as if more were possible than I had imagined. (Which, come to think of it, is how I feel when I read Tolstoy.)
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