Existentialist Engagement in Wallace, Eggers and Foer: A Philosophical Analysis of Contemporary American Literature by Allard Den Dulk (review)

Allard den Dulk’s Existentialist Engagement in Wallace, Eggers and Foer will be of much interest to scholars of the so-called “New Sincerity,” as well as to scholars operating at the increasingly popular intersection of literature and philosophy. (Dulk’s book joins, for example, recent texts like Michael LeMahieu’s Fictions of Fact and Value and Mark Greif’s The Age of the Crisis of Man.) His project is familiar: Dulk seeks to carve out a productive subset of contemporary texts that operate to reshape the apparent chaos of postmodernism into productive action. Fittingly, Dulk turns to David Foster Wallace (largely his voluminous Infinite Jest), where he finds an influential source for younger authors Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer. Dulk’s particularly useful contribution to this conversation might be in his framework, assembled from numerous works of philosophy: Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Søren Kierkegaard, and Ludwig Wittgenstein provide the foundation in Dulk’s argument for a limited and productive use of irony, a language rooted in community, and an existentialist brand of bonding through absurdity. These ideas and strategies, suggest Dulk, can help us to move beyond the useful-to-a-point, destructive work of postmodernism (represented here by philosophers like Jacques Derrida and literary authors of endlessly ironic, “problematic fiction,” like John Barth and Bret Easton Ellis).

Dulk’s text begins with an exploration of two key problems he locates in contemporary Western life: “hyperreflexivity” and “endless irony.” Hyperreflexivity, explains Dulk, is related to “the problem of excessive self-consciousness” that “has become exacerbated and more widespread in current times” (28) due, in large part, to the lack of “a clear tradition…that orders and directs all of [our] choices” (29); the shrinking globe (resulting in the “pluralisation of life-worlds” [30]); the panic-inducing disappearance of certainty; the mediating effects of information sources like the Internet; and “the reflexive nature of the contemporary relationship” (34), endlessly interrogated for the value and “happiness that this relationship itself brings” its individual participants (34). Dulk argues that “endless irony” seems to invariably

follow from [this] problem of hyperreflexivity: a person who cannot stop thinking about himself and his possible actions, cannot or can only just barely come to conclusions and actions, let alone conclusions and actions to which he is fully committed.…Constant self-reflection leads to never being able to fully stand behind one’s actions, for one is constantly reconsidering them, and this awareness is expressed through irony: by not taking those actions seriously, not fully claiming them as one’s own.

(60)

One might be tempted to fit a figure like Dave Eggers into this camp. I recall, for example, a certain drawing of a stapler in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius labeled “Here is a drawing of a stapler.” Despite such apparently postmodernist strategies, Eggers falls into a camp Dulk calls “engaged fiction” (131) because his work is able “to speak meaningfully” on the topics of “sincerity, reality-commitment, and community” (131). (See also, on the topic of David Foster Wallace’s “revival” of sincerity in the battle against endless irony, Adam Kelly’s recent work in Post 45, “Dialectic of Sincerity.”)

The first of these topics, “sincerity,” allows Dulk an opportunity to engage with and usefully complicate the “trend” that “has been labeled by certain critics as ‘new sincerity’” (162). Dulk claims to—and does indeed—“rehabilitate sincerity” convincingly through a Sartrean view of consciousness (which “itself has no substance” [36]) as “a product of consciousness’s relations to the world” and as “aris[ing] through the individual’s choices and actions in the world” (40). The “new sincerity” that Dulk finds in Eggers, Foer, and Wallace, similarly, is an outward facing one, “shaped through choice and action…and through community and dialogue with others” (168). “Choice and action” are elaborated through Kierkegaard “on the gift and task of human...