Bequeathing "new sincerity" in the age of the homo digitalis: Confessionalism and authorial self‐consciousness in David Foster Wallace and Bo Burnham

University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain Correspondence Sergio Lopez-Sande. Email: ser[email protected] Abstract The notion of “New Sincerity” has become central to the study of David Foster Wallace's prose over the years. The present article explores how the tonal arrangement that characterises the movement has lived on to influence contemporary art, examining Bo Burnham's popular comedy musicals as a notable example of this influence. Wallace and Burnham's common stance concerning cultural reception is argued to be indissociable from their socio-cultural setting, with the two authors articulating parallel responses to an ongoing, multifaceted process of massification of public opinion, as well as to the consequences to cultural poiesis therein entailed. KEYWORDS 20th century and contemporary, comedy, communication and media studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, literature, media studies, popular culture ARTICLE Bequeathing “new sincerity” in the age of the homo digitalis: Confessionalism and authorial selfconsciousness in David Foster Wallace and Bo Burnham Sergio Lopez-Sande DOI: 10.1111/lic3.12744 Received: 7 June 2023 Revised: 7 August 2023 Accepted: 16 September 2023 1 | INTRODUCTION David Foster Wallace's position as a pioneering figure in the development of a “New Sincerity” in US literature is now well-established. The notion of “New Sincerity,” understood as a movement concerning the tonal arrangement of some late postmodernist fiction, has become a common concept in the examination of contemporary art following its first application to the literary analysis of Wallace's prose by Adam Kelly (2010). As a poietic shift, the This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. © 2023 The Authors. Literature Compass published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Literature Compass. 2024;e12744. https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12744 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/lic3 1 of 11 LOPEZ-SANDE movement is characterised by a wish to reject the perceived emotional emptiness of meta-experimentalism by infusing fiction-writing with some form of purpose derived from—or defined by the embracing of—affect. Wallace himself attested to this desire for a shift in his renowned “E Unibus Pluram” (1993), admitting to his own potential “lack of vision” in finding a way to exploit U.S. fiction's possibilities to allow the “back[ing] away from ironic watching” and the “endors[ing of] single-entendre values” that he held could be central to the following generation's approach to story-telling (192). The interpretation of “New Sincerity” resulting from this shift is polyonymous, as it is similarly echoed in the preceding notion of “Post-Postmodern Discontent” (McLaughlin, 2004), which diagnosed a turn away from “self-conscious wordplay and the violation of narrative conventions” and the embracing of a new middle-ground where postmodernist form might merge with the mimetic aspirations of old (66–67), as well as in Lee Konstantinou's later “Postironic Belief” (2012), which alludes to Wallace's ambition to have his fiction result in the construction of “ethical countertypes” that could weaponize belief—in the possibility of communication, emotional communion, and the like—against the anti-earnest, detached stance of the “incredulous ironist” (85), or in Wilson Kaiser's “proximal irony” (2013), described as “a style of writing that maintains its playful sensibility while also acknowledging an un-distanced emotional involvement with the narrative's characters and events” (31). A prominent quality of Kelly's definition of “New Sincerity” by way of the interpretation of Wallace's work is its focus on how the “anticipation of others' reception of […] their outward behavior begins to take priority for the acting self” (136). The most renowned instance of this anticipation taking place in Wallace's literature is perhaps the short story “Octet,” where “the unfortunate fiction writer” admits to finding himself resourceless before his want to attest to the “urgent, truly urgent” need of passing the “queer nameless ambient […] interhuman sameness” he perceives onto his readers (133). Thus, standing at a creative crossroads, the fictionalised authorial voice in the text resorts to asking the reader directly, entreating her for some feedback on whether the story holds any value in an outburst of earnest worry—and so turning the question into an unexpected, structural meta-intruder working within the story itself. The desire to imbue the text with an explicit wish for interpersonal connection with his readership becomes apparent in Wallace's metafictional exercises. It is, further, one tainted by a profound worry that the wish will not make it to the other end: the narrative voice in “Good Old Neon” is asked into silence by the end of the story, moments after having almost coyly revealed that David Wallace has “emerged from years of literally indescribable war against himself” (181), whereas the authorial insertee in “Octet” confesses to facing a conundrum before his anxiety of reception: “[t]he trick to this solution is that you'd have to be 100% honest,” and yet also admits to the dread that such an approach be “perilously close to [asking the reader] ‘Do you like me? Please like me’” (131). Questions on the likability of the artist are overtly dismissed by Wallace as inherently distasteful, and yet are featured not merely in his discourse on fiction-writing, but also in his fictions. Through his metafictional exercise in “Octet,” Wallace places his fictionalised self at the heart of a paradox of self-consciousness: being honest about one's concern might result in empathy from the reader, but the honest voicing of the concern will remain an ingenious exercise in postmodernist metafictive experimentalism, and as such might be perceived to be a language game, a witticism deployed by an author nurtured by a tradition of disaffection, and thus fail to earn him any form of readerly like. The twist of “New Sincerity,” passed on from Wallace's time and still greatly influencing contemporary US culture, calls attention to how the author is twice detached from the impersonality of a self-aware text that holds no narrative: not only does the text know that it is a text, or that it has an author, but, perhaps most importantly, it knows that its knowing these things about itself responds to a history, that it will be received in a particular way because of this history, and that it can use this knowledge to reach out for—or, as has been contended, manipulate 1—the consciousness of its readers. This paper is set to examine how the deployment of these metafictional devices—resulting in cultural products that align with the notion of “New Sincerity” by trying to convince its reception of the congruence between avowal and actual feeling—conveys a fear of external judgement that is as endemic to some contemporary globalised culture as it was to Wallace's own at the turn of the century. I agree with Jon Baskin, 2023 that “[t]he discourse around sincerity today is quite different” (119), with authors chasing aesthetic effects that cannot be achieved “merely by purity of intention or innocence of heart,” but rather by delving further into “an explicit thematization of the struggle 2 of 11 17414113, 2024, 1-3, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lic3.12744 by Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Wiley Online Library on [22/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License LOPEZ-SANDE to write – and to live – as coextensive with a struggle to moderate their tendencies toward over-intellectualization and self-consciousness” (127). Burnham's work offers some such gestures, but in it, Wallace's aesthetic agenda is still undoubtedly present, as is the same appeal to the author's purity of intention that Baskin describes. It does not merely delve into the author's struggle, much as it does, but focuses just as direly on the work's reception, still showing a degree of overt resentment to readers for their uncontrollability. This will be argued to be partly the case due to live comedy's own generic idiosyncrasies, with the public's opinion becoming a source of immediate concern to the performer, which results in him feeling anxious about his reception. Indeed, Wallace's fiction pioneeringly alluded to one such form of anxiety, and he often placed himself in the position of one such performer. His distress was indissociable from the sociological conditions of his time, with the significant influence of television on the habits of consumers being traceable in his fictions' textual urgency to inspire readerly appreciation. This compulsion seemingly attests to the dread that the author might end up exposed should his narratives fail, writing from the other side of a television-like screen, submitted to the opinion of the masses but unable to retrace his steps as the broadcast continues, and equally helpless before the possibility that he may want to contribute to the conversation in a significant manner. Social media has rekindled writers' interest in “New Sincerity” as a tonal approach to textual production, with some contemporary media showing equal—if not aggravated—anxiety as they self-consciously navigate their authors' awareness that their results will be scrutinised by a diverse array of people, now populating platforms allowing their opinions to be voiced en masse. Bo Burnham's musical comedy provides a significant instance of how the same tonal approach to fiction-writing that helped earn Wallace a position in the history of American letters has remained at the heart of present-day texts. By approaching this expression of Wallace's legacy, this paper aspires to shed light on how some contemporary culture is critically defined by attitudes around reception and personal exposition not much dissimilar to Wallace's; and thus, to bring forth a literary diagnosis of mediatized late-postmodern society as the twenty-first century reaches maturity. 2 | BO BURNHAM'S WORN-OUT STAGE: INHERITING “NEW SINCERITY” IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA The deployment of postmodernist metafiction to approach a form of sincerity that counter-discursively challenges earlier self-reflexive prose has become one of the most recognisable characteristics of Wallace's literary project. Indeed, this is so much the case that his influence in contemporary culture appears at its most traceable when some echo of this apprehension toward reception takes the stage. Reminiscent of how Wallace has been argued to have developed his authorial voice through an anxiety of influence, springing from his looking back at the postmodernist patriarchs before him, 2 some contemporary writing shows comparable forms of indebtment to Wallace. Bo Burnham's musical comedy is a salient example of this. His stand-up specials, which often feature tonal shifts towards earnest dramatism, provide an academically underexamined example of how Wallace's influence has lived on beyond written prose, and seen significant pop success at that. The self-consciousness Wallace conveyed via the spoken fear of cultural reception is, too, an omnipresent theme in Burnham's comedy, and the connection between the two is far from an innuendo underlying the latter's production, but overtly acknowledged by Burnham himself, who claimed to think of “Forever Overhead,” a short story by Wallace, as “one of [… his] favorite pieces of writing ever” in a tweet referencing the tenth anniversary of Wallace's death (@boburnham). The connection between Burnham and Wallace should come as no surprise, provided the striking similarity of their experiences of turn-of-the-century US culture. This analogous outlook on creation goes beyond their being white men of upper-middle class backgrounds in the changing, digital societies of the late postmodern age, and can be attested to in the discourses on mainstream media that they each articulated. Despite the evident similarities in their backgrounds, their respective takes on their racial privilege are significantly different, with Burnham being more vocal about his position within social systems than Wallace ever was. In “Make Happy” (00:07:08), for instance, Burnham overtly jokes about the inconsequence of the hardships he has been made to face in society as a 3 of 11 17414113, 2024, 1-3, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lic3.12744 by Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Wiley Online Library on [22/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License LOPEZ-SANDE straight white man. Halfway through “Inside,” he sings about “times […] changing” and accountability coming for the “perfectly lawful,” but “not very thoughtful” things he did as a “sheltered kid” who “wrote offensive shit” and then said it (00:38:03–00:38:49). Wallace, on his part, has been criticised for never addressing any such privilege, neglecting the racialised experience of the US almost entirely, as well as for only giving it any proper consideration in its intersection with class struggle while simultaneously failing to address the way in which capitalism and race are inherently connected (see Saylor, 2023). Despite their belonging to different generations and the subsequent changes in their relationship to new cultural forms that naturally ensue, with Wallace's “E Unibus Pluram” being haunted by the influence of television and Burnham speaking from a post-social media standpoint, their remarks on fiction-writing share an acute concern with the omnipresence of critical disconnection at the end of reception. Both Wallace's and Burnham's stances on the mainstream media of their time are articulated against what they perceive to be the defining pathos of their age: a form of chronic unawareness, characterised by many readers' tendency to consume culture passively, without truly connecting with their humanity through the arts. Further, they share a sense of hopelessness both in terms of tone and content, by being agitated to the point where they might be read as desperate, and by denouncing contemporary media's appropriation of postmodern form to immunise itself against any criticism from those who fear its disaffected, uniformizing influence. “[T]elevision has become immune to charges that it lacks any meaningful connection to the world outside it,” writes Wallace. “It's not that charges of nonconnection have become untrue. It's that any such connection has become otiose” (“E Unibus Pluram” 160). By virtue of the passivity of its reception—and without television necessarily forwarding “diabolic designs”—its “Audience-conditioning” capacities, paired with the impossibility to successfully criticize it, turn it into a rapacious influence on popular culture, argues Wallace (173–174). Burnham's position in this regard is not quite that of a consumer charging hopelessly charging against a television that has learned to deflect his every complain. Instead, his discourse is articulated from within, since he is one of the many contributors to the digital—and often televised—repositories of content of the contemporary Internet. His work not only resists television's inability to be criticised, but also contemporary media's persuasive ability to turn people into self-enclosed creators. As stated by Byung-Chul Han, “[i]n all the imaginary spaces of virtuality, the narcissistic ego encounters itself first and foremost [… and] the function of ‘friends’ is primarily to heighten narcissism by granting attention, as consumers, to the ego exhibited as a commodity” (43). The digital self, it follows, is consumed by a want for earnest connection, but has been taught to look for it via the purchase and sale of ego-performances. Whereas unawareness in Wallace comes from the voyeuristic call to inaction of self-conscious, turn-of-the-century century television, Burnham denounces an unawareness that, perhaps paradoxically, keeps individuals active in their productive chain of constant performances, which they have been taught to project into the world from a very young age—or, one might point out, the time of Wallace's writing. Burnham's comedy show Make Happy (2015) features a monologue where he defends that his whole project is “about performing,” and that it has a generation sick with an “arrogance [that] is taught or […] was cultivated” as its target. The most poignant manifestation of this arrogance, he goes on, is the appearance of social media, which Burnham defines as “the market's answer to a generation that demanded to perform,” and to do so constantly, but a response that has become “[…] prison; it's horrific, it is performer and audience melted together” (00:47:51-00:48:04). Social media's immunity, contrary to television's, does not come from its having assimilated postmodern form to the extent that it can successfully deflect criticism by means of mockery or self-deprecation, but rather by the public's learned necessity to be a part of its circus-like stage. This suspicious attitude toward the public's mass response to social media is equally present in Burnham's offstage discourse. “We used to colonize land,” he affirms in an interview on teenage self-esteem following the release of his film Eighth Grade (2018). “We colonized the entire Earth; there was no other place for businesses and capitalism to expand into, and then they realized: human attention. They are now trying to colonize every minute of your life” (“Self Esteem in the Age of Social Media,” 42:14–42:31). The influence of capitalism on time expenditure would thus put subjectivity in a vulnerable position, for it would chain it to a compulsive need to consume performances and be consumed, too, as a “performance of self.” The shift from passivity to activity in the digital space, however, is not perceived to be a liberating one. The resulting increase in individual agency is not experienced as one that also increases well-being. “We're hyperconnected and we're lonely,” writes 4 of 11 17414113, 2024, 1-3, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lic3.12744 by Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Wiley Online Library on [22/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License LOPEZ-SANDE Burnham, exposing what he regards to be the defining paradox of our mediatised, networked lives, and one against which it is difficult to show any resistance. “We're overstimulated and we're numb” (“Self Esteem in the Age of Social Media,” 07:55-07:58). The passive oglers of old, sitting before the screen of television and its peculiar mirror of American culture, become in Burnham equally blinded by culture's disaffection, but now constitute an army of individuals wanting to take an imaginary centre stage. Late postmodern subjects are no longer objectified into passivity, but demand to be actors. The post-social media environment of Burnham's is dissimilar to Wallace's primarily because of a pivotal shift from a culture of mass consumption to one of mass production. Lev Manovich argued as early as in 2009 that the new web spaces, unlike those that rose to prominence in the 1990s, were not quite devised for merely publishing, but for creating and communicating (320). The subjects populating these spaces, however, do so while remaining under the influence of the self-conscious, ironizing tendencies that television had deployed to guarantee its immunity to criticism. The task at hand for the fiction writer in the face of these distinct forms of immunity becomes, as Wallace himself claimed, to write stories that would find “a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it” (“Conversations” 26). This same romanticisation of the purpose of culture haunts Burnham's work: “I want to […] give a potential version of a roadmap to younger people” (“Happy Sad Confused,” 47:48-47:58). Facing the potential vacuity of all such statements, or perhaps in the face of culture's perceived failure to remedy the world's problems at the superstructural level, his 2021 pandemic-influenced special Inside features a mocking piece on his own aspirations—which, again, echo Wallace's—to give his reception “something worth having.” In “Comedy,” Burnham ridicules fiction writers' ambition to aid people as they face “real-life problems,” while simultaneously admitting to his own wish to “help to leave this world better than [… he] found it” in the face of the fear that “comedy won't help” (00:08:34-00:08:43). Wallace and Burnham's responses to this urgency to give, founded on their need to find value in their writing, follow a similar structure in the former's “Octet” and the latter's specials Make Happy and Inside. First, they introduce a cultural product that seemingly complies with the generic idiosyncrasy of its form: “Octet” plays out as an experimental short composition comprising a series of fictional “belletristic pieces,” Make Happy opens up as a regular stand-up special, and Inside is framed in similarly transparent ways by means of its overt allusion to the need for a new means of doing comedy in the maelstrom of a global pandemic. Once their dialogue with expectation is thus established, both Wallace and Burnham disrupt the tonal flow of their respective creations to introduce their own voices into the equation, drawing attention to the same two concerns: (a) the nature of their own creative processes as they face the difficulties the fictions pose upon coming into being, and (b) their own affective insecurities concerning the potential “success” of their pieces—aimed at, again, communicating something worth their readers' while. “Possible-ending-song-that-is-not-finished-yet test,” opens Burnham's “Goodbye.” Following several meta-exercises spawning the entirety of Inside, the authorial consciousnesses comes in before the ending piece—who will again be reacted to in another meta-exercise at the close—to specifically draw attention to its having been created; a product of time-investment on the part of its author. “You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer,” reads “Octet” as Wallace breaches the fourth wall to similarly point at the conditions of creation binding his tale, and how these conditions are tainted by a sense of uncertainty. This author, painted by Wallace in an epithetical, confessional second-person, is clueless as to how to get his pieces to succeed at enlightening readers: “You are attempting a cycle of very short belletristic pieces […]. How exactly the cycle's short pieces are supposed to work is hard to describe” (123). Wallace's “Octet” gives thematic centrality to the issue of authorship. The authors' earnestly presented struggles draw in the empathy of readers by merging character focalization and the author's aesthetic play, which have been argued to become indistinguishable in much “New Sincerity” fiction (see Voelz, 2016, p. 220). This is accentuated even further in live comedy due to the already frail distinction between comedian and stage persona, which intensifies Burnham's vulnerability before the perceived threat of his reception. Thus, Burnham's comedy features almost identical replicas of Wallace's themes and tonal propensions, when not increased versions of them. Wallace's self-deprecation in “Octet,” where his insertee admits that “[n]one of that was very clearly put and might well ought to get cut” (125, fn. 2), or that his entire piece might “make [… him] look like a self-consciously inbent schmuck, or like 5 of 11 17414113, 2024, 1-3, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lic3.12744 by Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Wiley Online Library on [22/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License LOPEZ-SANDE just another manipulative pseudopomo Bullshit Artist who's trying to salvage a fiasco by dropping back to a metadimension and commenting on the fiasco itself” (135), is mirrored in Burnham. Here, however, it becomes an overt plea that readers observe the artist's untrustworthiness, instead of being speculative and introspective: “I am an artist, please don't revere me/I am an artist, please don't respect me” (“Art Is Dead” (02:04–02:09). The fear that an author may be misread into unlikability becomes, onstage, a declaration, with Burnham outlining the readerly responses he is not aiming for with his writing. Indeed, this may be argued to spring from the different types of media each was creating, with literature allowing a distance and a deferral from readerly opinion that live comedy would not afford Burnham. The discrepancy between one and the other might also be tentatively connected with the shift in the public perception of creators over the last 2 decades, with so-called “influencer culture” inadvertently inviting Burnham to articulate a discourse “against” his own influence—an influence that, as contended Marjorie Garber, is “often a part of the artwork itself [… i]n these days of mash-ups, avatars, transformers, and surgical makeovers” (759). Parallelisms can also be traced between Wallace's tendency to have his fiction focus on the darkest dimensions of subjectivity while fearing that any such thoughts be associated with him, and Burnham's own ambiguous relationship with the idea of being seen. In “The Nature of the Fun,” Wallace contended that “writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers everywhere share and respond to, feel” (1998). These shades of subjectivity that one may wish to keep private define the turn to sincerity of many of Burnham's songs. In “Can't Handle This,” for instance, the shift away from vacuous playfulness and comedy for comedy's own sake takes place when Burnham's own mental distress enters the narration as he explicitly addresses his audience: “[…] come and watch the skinny kid/With a steadily declining mental health/And laugh as he attempts to give you what he cannot give himself” (“Make Happy” 00:54:49–00:55:00). This expression of “New Sincerity” in Burnham shares with Wallace a desire to “expose” his reception, bringing about empathy through a feeling of shame. “Although self-deprecation describes moments in which someone becomes an object of derision to himself, shame is produced by the presence of another,” writes Johannes Voelz in his discussion of “New Sincerity” and literary hospitality. “Rather than accusingly pointing at myself, I feel shame because in the presence of another, a displeasing aspect of myself suddenly comes into view that wasn't visible before” (217–218). Both self-deprecation and shame play a significant role in Wallace and Burnham's appeal to sincerity. Further, they both fuse these two dimensions in their work, earnestly exposing the difficulties before them while also pointing at the reader directly, evincing their passivity before the author's struggle as they are, narratively, made a part of it. This considered, one may argue that empathy is invited through an appeal to the readers' wish for redemption, as they, however inadvertently, are shamed by their curiosity, their enjoyment, and their inaction before the struggling other—whom, through his use of metafiction to insert a narrative replica of himself into an otherwise banal text, is felt to be the real author at the other end. 3 | “SINCERELY” RESENTING RECEPTION: SOME REMARKS ON WALLACE AND BURNHAM'S TURN TO THE CONFESSIONAL The line connecting Wallace and his legacy to Burnham's writing is accentuated by the idiosyncrasies of comedy, with both writers recurrently turning to the unexpected to “shock” their readers and make their experience enjoyable. Despite Wallace's intention to have Infinite Jest read as “a book that was sad,” as he told Mark Caro (Chicago Tribune), his magnum opus was widely perceived to feature a deeply comedic tone. This fed into one of Wallace's voiced fears: disconnection from his readership. Following the book's release, he admitted to being somewhat displeased by the radical difference in their—i.e. his readers' and his own—outlooks on the novel, and later wrote to his editor Michael Pietsch that “[e]verybody thought that book was funny,” which, he conceded, “was of course nice, but also kind of frustrating” (Max 255). The distance between mass readership and Wallace in what concerns tonal reception appears to have worked both ways, with Wallace's essay “Laughing with Kafka” featuring an account of how his students would fail to find the humorous component to Kafka's texts: “For me, a signal frustration in trying to read Kafka with college students is that it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny” (23). 6 of 11 17414113, 2024, 1-3, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lic3.12744 by Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Wiley Online Library on [22/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License LOPEZ-SANDE The comedic in Infinite Jest is the result of Wallace's constant interplay with the unexpected—or, at times, even the absurd. Passages from the novel read as jokes because of their utter betrayal of readerly anticipation. They might even be taxonomized as jokes because of their rhetoric structure, as they generally fall into Salvatore Attardo's pragmatic analysis of humorous texts (20). This is so because of their resorting to what Salvatore, following Victor Raskin's earlier work in Semantic Mechanisms of Humour (1985), labels “Script Opposition:” the inner logic explaining the funniness is based on their call to superstructural opposites. That is to say that the texts' humorous nature is founded on their diegetic conflation of binaries (the actual vs. the non-actual, the normal vs. the abnormal, the possible vs. the impossible). Infinite Jest's opening scene, appearing at the beginning despite its being the last event in the novel's chronology, features Hal Incadenza collapsing before a board of examiners. The collusion of normality and abnormality runs throughout the passage, climaxing when his perfectly uttered sentences feature in the narration, but are met with perplexity and disgust as the examiners perceive him to be uttering prelapsarian sounds. “I am not what you see and hear,” Hal tries to reply as he is taken away, completely disconnected from his reception (13). As the excerpt closes on this note, the reader is met with an abnormal turn on a standardised, everyday situation, and one that is left unresolved, frozen on a moment of tension. The same conflation of normal and abnormal can be traced to the level of the sentence—functionally instituting a joke—at various moments in the narration. “The Admissions staff is looking at standardized test scores from you,” reports a member of the board in remarkably uneventful fashion before serenely pronouncing the results “subnormal” (6). The same turn on readerly expectation, conflating normal and abnormal, takes place as the character of Madame Psychosis twists a Biblical reference at the open of her radio show. We may read: And as pinkie meets palm, she says what she’s said for three years of midnights, an opening bit that Mario Incandenza, the least cynical person in the history of Enfield MA, across the river, listening faithfully, finds, for all its black cynicism, terribly compelling: Her silhouette leans and says “And Lo, for the Earth was empty of form, and void”. “And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep”. “And We said”: “Look at that fucker Dance.” (184) The labelling of passages such as this one as comedic is not limited to the diegetic, thematic interplay of binaries, but can be maintained, too, to be structural. Jokes, argues Hannah Gadsby in her renowned Nanette (2018), revolve around the interaction of a setup and a punchline (00:29:55-00:30:10). Central to the purpose of her special, which could itself be easily argued to exemplify yet again a turn to a “New Sincerity” in contemporary pop culture, is the idea that jokes' twofold structure allows no resolution. Unlike narrative, which favours a tripartite arrangement, Gadsby argues that comedy freezes its reception in its second half, twisting expectation to result in tension diffusion, and releasing both author and reader from the responsibility to affectively navigate the nature of the told (00:39:46-00:40:12). Infinite Jest's peculiar structure, which Wallace revealed in an interview to have been inspired by the non-linear mathematical set known as the Sierpiński gasket, was potentially designed to echo Jean-Luc Godard's contention—traced to various moments in the latter's career—that a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. However, when read from beginning to end, the novel's comedic component may be seen to be a result of its sections' apparent open-endedness. Thus, it evokes Gadsby's anatomy of the joke more than it does Godard's claim on de-structuration, causing Wallace's postmodernist use of form in Infinite Jest to be perceived as funny. The above passage, drawing on an explicit reference to Genesis, “corrupts” a sequence that works in storylike fashion to instead provide a vignette. This twist, however, working as the opening to a fiction within Infinite Jest, succeeds in earning its known reception's attention and care, with Mario Incandenza being described as the enthralled, illuminated reader Wallace overtly 7 of 11 17414113, 2024, 1-3, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lic3.12744 by Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Wiley Online Library on [22/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License LOPEZ-SANDE wished for himself as Madame Psychosis seemingly-endless call upon the marginalised kindles his devoted fanatism (189). The reference to Madame Psychosis' “black cynicism” is also far from arbitrary, as Wallace himself feared being associated with the vacuity of first-generation postmodernism, and lamented that “what's been passed down from the postmodern heyday is sarcasm, cynicism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct, and a terrible penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness instead of an ambition not just to diagnose and ridicule but to redeem” (“Conversation” 49). In light of this, Mario Incandenza finding her speech “terribly compelling” turns him into an idealisation of Wallace's readership, and simultaneously sets an example, depicting a character who has understood the sincere nature of the cultural product before him and has connected with the person at the other end; and done so, further, despite the formal obtuseness of Madame Psychosis' intervention. Mario has found, in short, something “worth having” in the narrative before him—and, moved by its sincerity, exercises his fanatical listening to understand a voice that is “sparely modulated and strangely empty […,] low-depth familiar […] the way certain childhood smells will strike you as familiar” (189). The most remarkable common ground between Wallace and Burnham lies in their approach to this “illumination” of their reception. This connective epiphany is recurrently sought via person-to-person understanding, with self-consciousness being the pathway they most often resort to in their attempts to call upon readerly empathy. Such a call is featured in their writing as a counterpoint to the comic exploitation of absurdity, and, as previously hinted at, heavily relies on exercises bordering on—or overtly taking the form of—meta-confessions. Both authors earnestly confess to being tormented by the uncertainty of whether their texts will succeed. This anxiety becomes a driving force in their literary expressions, fundamentally shaping their approach to creative honesty. This, one should also note, is hardly dissociable from their being men in a culture that is still largely defined by the patriarchal imperative that male vulnerability is demeaning, and thus to be kept from public view, since it is partly because of this very imperative that the turn to earnest metafiction in their discourses is met with affective commotion. The voicing of male psychic pain despite the existing taboo, factoring in the perception of their fearlessness before the possibility of structural judgement, contributes to their pieces' drawing of readerly sympathy. Or, what is the same: their discomfort, placed in a frenzy of banality and comedic experimentation, is regarded as graver not only because of the discomfort's context, but also because of its voicer. The tonal shift toward sincerity, in this regard, springs from a form of confessionalism. It stands as the product of a fictionalised authorial voice who speaks in allegedly honest terms about what troubles him amid a diegetic chaos of his own making. This earnestness, however, is twice removed from its reception: first, by virtue of the impossibility that readers “reply,” give back to the text and its author—should one believe the confession to speak of him—and thus answer Wallace's “do you feel it to?” (“Octet” 131) or fill in Burnham's “parting questionnaire” (“Make Happy” 00:57:27-00:57:29); and second, because of the impossibility to subtract fictionalisation from the product, and thus to distinguish David Foster Wallace and Bo Burnham, creators, from the surrogates doing the telling within their fictions. The effort on the authors' end, however, is in both cases directed at the idea of reaching out, and hence asks for an answer that is, functionally, impossible. This happens at the literal level, as shown in the excerpts above, but also metaphorically. Burnham's “All Eyes on Me” is built on one such metaphor. The song, which explores the feeling of catastrophist anxiety resulting from the idea of performing before others, submitting one's exposed sense of subjectivity to their judgement, opens with—and repeatedly goes back to—a close-up of Burnham's face where he stares into the camera, as though figuratively asking his reception to empathise with the sense of fatalism he is singing about. “Are you having nervous?/Are you having fun?,” asks Burnham as he makes his call upon readerly attention explicit: “Look in my eye” (“Inside” 01:13:05-01:13:22). This urgent call for confirmation of the author's success is not directed at whether the reader has processed the information before her, but rather at the emotional component to this reception. It is, much as it happens in Wallace's “Octet,” the intricate, insecure expression of an anxious want to be liked. This desperation to be seen and liked, paired with the explicit declaration that both Wallace and Burnham are aware of the fact that the verbalisation of any such desire does not change its nature as a childish impulse, is recurrent in the latter's career. In an exercise of metacommentary featured halfway through Inside, Burnham reacts to a piece of his own making and confesses, 8 of 11 17414113, 2024, 1-3, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lic3.12744 by Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Wiley Online Library on [22/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License LOPEZ-SANDE as the reactions to reactions start to pile up, to his “being a little pretentious,” a stance resulting from his “pretty unlikable […,] desperate need to be seen as intelligent” (“Inside” 00:27:54-00:28:12). As the reactions continue to pile up and Burnham begins to put forth reactions of reactions, he labels his previous confession a “defence mechanism,” springing from the belief that criticism levelled against him will be deflected if he proves to be self-conscious of his own self-stated unlikability. However, moments before shutting down the loop, he mumbles: “Self-awareness does not absolve anybody of anything.” (00:28:40-00:29:00) This, indeed, puts forth yet another paradox of self-conscious meta-earnestness: if self-awareness is deployed as a defence mechanism aimed at shielding authorial consciousnesses from outer criticism, and that defence mechanism—on which the authors' call to readerly empathy is often founded—becomes the target of its own self-aware impulse, then how is a fiction founded on structural contradiction and the disregard of its own technique to sincerely ask for its readers' like and understanding? Wallace faced the same paradox in his discussions on fiction writing, as he too claimed to fear his own need for readerly approval. This fear led him to self-consciously criticise his own expression of the need itself, as, he acknowledged, the fear threatened to result in him resenting his audience for holding the power over whether his fictions would ever feel successful. He delved deeper into this concern in a 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery, where he conceded that if the artist is excessively dependent on simply being liked, so that her true end isn’t in the work but in a certain audience’s good opinion, she is going to develop a terrific hostility to that audience, simply because she has given all her power away to them. It’s the familiar love-hate syndrome of seduction: “I don’t really care what it is I say, I care only that you like it. But since your opinion is the sole arbiter of my success and worth, you have tremendous power over me, and I fear you and hate you for it.” […] I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader. (“Conversations” 25) The same binary, defining their shared fear of reception, appears as Burnham's special Make Happy nears its close: “The truth is my biggest problem's you,” confesses Burnham to his audience. “I wanna please you/But I wanna stay true to myself/I wanna give you the night out that you deserve/But I wanna say what I think/And not care what you think about it” (00:54:02-00:54:16). In “Art Is Dead,” featured in the earlier collection of comedy songs Words Words Words (2010), Burnham's stage persona reflects on the source of this need, admitting to being “self-centred” and “self-obsessed,” but deeming these flaws the result of “a little attention attractor” growing up to see his need for external validation systemically rewarded (00:43-00:58). This want to be liked by their reception could even be argued to be direr in Burnham's case because of live comedy's own teleology: its finality is that of creating joy in its audience, and, lest the fun interfere with the audience's ethos, it is often the case that a successful comedian earns his reception's like. “Look at them, they're just staring at me,” points out an affected Burnham halfway through his singing (“Make Happy” 00:54:46-00:54:49). Indeed, his metafictional closing of the show is all too aware of the alignment of appreciation and comedic success in his context, and aims his self-doubt accordingly: “I hope that you had gut trembling or something resembling fun” (00:57:06-00:57:11). The same verbalisation of this concern with reception is featured halfway through Inside, with Burnham metafictionally breaching the fourth-wall to present his listeners with a list of questions on his project: “How are you feeling?/Do you like the show?/Are you tired of it? […] Are you finding it boring?/Too fast? Too slow?” (00:49:38-00:49:55). The list is recurrently interrupted by a musical hook where Burnham confesses to not wanting to know if his special has succeeded to draw “good” attention and “like” from his reception (00:50:30-00:50:32). Succeeding is articulated as a teleology of such importance that it emotionally defines both authors' call to empathy. Their “sincerity” is deployed as a self-dismantling shield, programmed to self-destruct should it be met with hostility. What these texts share, ultimately, is a verbalised anxiety that the authorial consciousness behind them will be met with a reception, or even a form of feedback, beyond their control. The turn to earnestness in Wallace injected an affected, human subject into the metafictional exercise, moving the history of metafiction forward and away from 9 of 11 17414113, 2024, 1-3, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lic3.12744 by Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Wiley Online Library on [22/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License