David Foster Wallace's Forgotten Genre

The New Sincerity of the nineties

In this world of semblance, we are contented with personating happiness; to feel it, is an art beyond us.

-Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (1771)

In addition to waking up hungover four days a week, my semester abroad at the University of Edinburgh introduced me to Scottish literature. My class was taught by a Scot who never failed to show up without wearing a dandruff-dusted leather jacket. For a few weeks in October, we studied who I decided at the time was the biggest whiner of all literary genres ever: author and lawyer Henry Mackenzie (1745 - 1841). Mackenzie’s 1771 novel, The Man of Feeling, is often cited as the inspiration for the next century’s Romanticism. But it was less about the majesty of the natural world and more about men crying.

Mackenzie wrote The Man of Feeling when satire, not sentimentalism, was making the rounds. Voltaire’s Candide (1759), a tale about why optimism is stupid, had shown contemporary society that making fun of feelings was superior to feeling them. Mackenzie faced rejections from the publishing world until he took on a fake name. Who, publishers wondered, would ever want to read about some whiny man?

Apparently everyone. On publication, The Man of Feeling became an instant bestseller. Even at a time when satire was all the rage, the book’s plot was popular: the protagonist, an orphan named Harley, cries a lot because he isn’t afraid to feel his feelings in front of the world. He meets people and cries some more. Then, as far as I remember, the book ends and the reader leaves Harley locked away forever between pages, still in tears.

At twenty, I thought this was the stupidest thing ever. I cackled each time Harley wept his way through a new situation with some clumsy archetype like a beggar who isn’t so bad, a prostitute with a heart of gold, and a philosopher who criticizes everything.

A man who felt things, I had thought with a sneer. What a loser.

Feeling feelings without irony can be tricky for nineties kids. Reading Mackenzie at twenty, I was the perfect age to be a Romantic. But I was a millennial. Like Gen X before us and, apparently, Mackenzie’s peers in the 1700s, millennials came of age in a culture that believed being ironic, not sentimental, was cool.

As journalist Chuck Klosterman explains, the young adults of the nineties had a “disinterest in conventional success.” Trying too hard was dumb. Any habit, behavior, belief, or aspiration that mattered to mainstream society was the enemy.

Defying society in the nineties was easy: you just had to be ironic about everything instead of feeling anything. Why try to care? As Voltaire had shown in Candide centuries ago, to be optimistic is to be delusional and to be ironic is to be an intellectual.

Candide marks an era of satire that gave way to Romanticism with the help of Henry Mackenzie. Here’s the big question: when do the nineties kids start getting Romantic about life again? When does Gen Z usher in a new age of Romance? Has it already happened? Is it all a cycle?

Let’s find out.

The High Age of Irony

Thanks in part to a handful of heroin addicts in the Pacific Northwest, a sudden flood of ready-to-consume rebellions washed through nineties culture. The rebellion of the nineties focused on disconnecting from anything that seemed too popular. From grunge and prog rock and nu metal and pop punk and Eminem, nineties kids purchased identities in slickly packaged plastic products of disassociation.

As Klosterman notes in The Nineties, the High Age of Irony started when things started smelling like teen spirit. Nirvana’s 1991 album Nevermind exploded like a star into the culture’s consciousness and showed that irony - or at least artistic apathy - was in demand.

Beck’s 1993 “Loser,” explores this peak irony with the bilingual refrain:

Soy un perdedor
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me?
(Double-barrel buckshot)
Soy un perdedor
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me?

What started as irony evolved to nihilism in the course of the decade. How else could we explain a quarter million people yelling “What if I should die?” into the void.

The hard part about irony is that, eventually, it gets into your bones and turns to apathy. At the end of the nineties, many nineties kids forgot the fun of irony and started to get angry about a world that didn’t care about them. The world seemed not to care about them, because everything had gone ironic.

Like Henry Mackenzie centuries before him, David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) saw this plague of irony spreading in the nineties and worried about what was next. That’s how he became the leading figure of a forgotten genre of art that tried to make feeling stuff cool again: New Sincerity. Infinite Jest (1996) is considered to be a Bible of sorts for the movement. As one critic explains:

Infinite Jest is Wallace's attempt to both manifest and dramatize a revolutionary fiction style… in which a new sincerity will overturn the ironic detachment that hollowed out contemporary fiction towards the end of the 20th century. Wallace was trying to write an antidote to the cynicism that had pervaded and saddened so much of American culture in his lifetime. He was trying to create an entertainment that would get us talking again.

Wallace hated the toothless postmodernism and driftless irony that removed the heart from modern media in the nineties. He thought the industry of irony would become self-defeating, the satire that eats itself.

As journalist Chuck Klosterman writes in The Nineties (2022), the New Sincerity was inspired by “anxiety over the comfort of emotional uninvestment, magnified by the luxury of introspection.”

[The New Sincerity] was the belief that people should be honest about what they feel, and that consumers of art should not reward artists who use emotional estrangements as an intellectual crutch…

There’s something corrosive in all-pervasive, reflective skepticism. It’s laziness disguised as sophistication.

If the over-the-top irony of the nineties led to a disassociation that ended up in angry apathy, did Wallace’s efforts work? What does the boom-and-bust cycle of satire and romance look like for a culture?

On Tuesday, Litverse will take a walk down memory lane and remember what DFW’s lost genre really meant, what really qualifies as “New Sincerity” and why no one remembers it today.

Like reading about the nineties? Read Part 1 and Part 2 of Litverse’s “No-Context Nineties” Collection here.