''[The] hip, cynical, transcendence of sentiment is ...some kind of fear of being really human.''
David Foster Wallace
''Am I crazy? Or am I just so sane I blew your mind?''
Kramer, Seinfeld
Now, I am a huge fan of David Foster Wallace (DFW, as he is fondly called by his fans). Make no mistake about it.
During a particularly trying phase of my personal searching, This Is Water (2005)--a moving thesis on the enduring relevance of compassion, empathy and the power of cultivating human connection in the process of our most mundane and ordinary engagement with the world-- rescued me from the depths of cynical despair that had fogged my perception of the world and eroded my faith in humanity.
It had liberated me from the tyranny of my own ego to rediscover optimistic and empathetic connections with a seemingly self-serving and apathetic world. It is a struggle we all must go through as sensitive individuals, every day, in every way, to avert the relentless assault of cynicism, through a conscious choice of compassion over callousness, through acts of small kindness and an unflagging exercise of charity which has nothing grandiose or dramatic about it.
It is a difficult and arduous choice indeed. To stare at the futility of existence and still to try to give it dignity and significance by ordinary, un-heroic altruism is by no means ordinary.It is no coincidence that the prophet of New Sincerity would envisage this deeply rewarding, but difficult, road to save the ego from its self-consuming excesses. It is especially relevant today, when human connections--in personal as well as political spaces--are getting destroyed fast and furiously by self-oriented thinking.
It is a pity that DFW's epiphanic wisdom could not save him from suicide three years later. Or, perhaps it was his gifted insight that precipitated this personal catastrophe?
He was so uniquely aware and alone in his wisdom, so filled with a love that no one could understand and receive, that his only way to appeal to his deaf audience was this big bang of self-annihilation. Like Cassandra, he was cursed by his gift: his prophecy was destined to be discredited. His consequent alienation was interpreted as insanity.
DFW's personal creative voice, and the school of New Sincerity in general,was an aesthetic/ philosophical reaction against the inescapable influence of Postmodern irony and its deconstructive humour that shaped American television and advertising during the 90s.
MTV, SNL, Seinfeld--the iconic cultural artefacts of the time are all unfailingly about this ironic alienation and deconstruction of grand narratives, the values and the sacred institutions of Western modernity, that gave meaning and stability to the worldview of the post-war global community up until then. David Foster Wallace felt, ''irony, cynicism, irreverence--the schticks of postmodernism are enervating the culture itself.''
If you are an auteur, you would know that irony is a notoriously difficult tone to create and sustain in a text. The sentimental trap lies in wait at every turn, in every corner. Sentiment is what guarantees an immediate and powerful connection with the audience: it hardly ever fails. A war photographer capturing a wounded and wailing child is sincere, sentimental. There is hardly anyone among his audience who will not instantly connect with its sentiment.
But this mode of creative expression operates on a level that is intellectually inert and stylistically lazy, albeit its being effective and inclusive. Its articulation is loud, obvious and unproblematic.
Now how about the same war-zone, where a faceless commoner is photographically captured in an unguarded moment, pissing on the monument of war heroes?
That is irony.
It is confrontational, subversive, irreverent; it raises quite a few hackles, on purpose; but executed honestly, it stays burnt in your memory as an unforgettable testament of war's laughable futility, cutting through the legitimising lies of nationalistic/ patriotic discourse.
It is not everyone's cup of tea. Not everyone is comfortable with its aggressive assault. And herein, burdened with this tough task, comes a person like Jerry Seinfeld: the Postmodern hero,a victim of unceasing confusion and indecision, who possesses nothing but his scurrilous postmodern irony to guide him through the baffling paradoxes of metropolitan modernity. In the process of his quest for personal fulfillment, he must dismantle the sacrosanct institutions of the modern west, complacent in the delusion of its own progress and power --Love, Sex, Family, Parents, Kids, Friendship, Religion, Success,Money, Death, and finally, his own comedy itself, he has a bone to pick with every single notion that lulls us into unquestioning sentimentality.
In the postmodern world of fragmentation, in the middle of the disintegration of traditions and values, in the absence of a unifying narrative that would give universal meaning and legitimacy to the subjective experience of the atomised individual, this devil-may-care irreverence is invaluable: when the confused inhabitant of this experience gets tormented over these inescapable gaps and conflicts, Seinfeld seems to cock a snook at the sacred myths of modernity and asks, ''really? You took that so seriously?''
Too much sincerity or seriousness, too deep a commitment to empathy and connection can destroy you when the world around you does not care. DFW's sincerity destroyed him; it massively devastated his ideological peer Jonathan Franzen whose life-long battle with clinical depression was responsible for his personal neurosis and the sublime glimpses of a seething tragedy at the bedrock of human existence, which he so compellingly portrays in his art.
By contrast, Jerry lives in a world that excludes the very possibility of tragedy and sublimity. The world that he and his most adorably confused and incompetent friends occupy is one that spins around the most trivial, inconsequential and meaningless problems-- some real but most of it imagined--that assume the proportions of earth-shattering crises for its benighted protagonists who believe in their own infallible omniscience in every field of experience, to be chastised everyday, by a ruthless reality. Tragedy is impossible under the circumstances, the most heartbreaking choices and predicaments of the postmodern hero can only give rise to buffoonery,or farce.
For instance, where is the scope for tragic elevation when one is emotionally crippled over the choice of underwear?
What wisdom can come off when one is crucified by one's conscience as his mother is hospitalised after having walked in on his solitary love?
What enlightenment can help somebody who loses his sleep over the correct direction of finger movement to ensure effective foreplay, and in the heat of intimacy consults notes on the back of his hand, to this effect?
What is sublime about being devastated because a condescending waiter at an upscale restaurant denied you dinner reservation?
What redemption is expected to arrive when you are plunged into a profound existential anxiety as your favourite bakery runs out of the pastry of your choice?
None of it is elevating, or heroic, in the least; This is the sordid, the mundane, the petty, the embarrassing that are too small to be acknowledged, but too momentous, too unsettling to be accommodated by social discourse. These are the minuscule inconsistencies, the tragic ironies of everyday existence that we helplessly swallow because the cultural conventions have made them invisible. And yet, they are unavoidably enormous to whom they plague--that is you and me; the hotshot and the nobody.
Seinfeld's world is a place where traditions are dismantled, hierarchies inverted, and conventions interrogated to expose their empty core; the process then mocks us for the absurd and exaggerated seriousness we invested in them. Here, nuns abandon their cloister on the day they are to be ordained, drawn away by the 'animal magnetism' of a rather clumsy and off-kilter man with absurdly big hair and a pathetic dressing sense.
Sons prevent mothers from getting divorced, no, not because family is sacred but because he is horrified by the idea of inhabiting the same dating pool with her.
A perfect romance is ruined because the suitor is tempted to gobble up a half-eaten sandwich from the trashcan at the house of his fiancee's parents.
Here, human connections are unmade over parking spots and a budding union can fall apart, not because of hostile interference from society, but because polite compliments go wrong at the sight of a new-born infant's--no, not ethereal innocence--but aggressive ugliness: religion, family, romance, community, children, nothing is spared the ruthless ironic deconstruction, to finally reveal that no tragedy in life, if there is any, is worth more than a couple of laughs.
What all this irreverence does is that is blurs the lines between high and low, tragedy and farce, the sublime and the sordid, to point out that there isn't really any distinction between one kind of heartbreak and another; it smashes such distinctions and hierarchies to establish the compassionate egalitarianism of the ironist: we are all together in this mess and confusion, you are not alone in your unspeakable embarrassment.
One of the standard objections raised by New Sincerity against this kind of deconstructive humour is that it is not philosophically redemptive, that it does not suggest any remedy or resolution to the contradictions it exposes, the hypocrisies it debunks. And, perhaps that is the whole point of it. It does not have a remedy:
''What kind of a sick society are we living in where nice [guy] is bad?'' cries out an anguished George Costanza, the perpetually confused intellectual in the group, defeated by his never ending self doubt.
True, we no longer live in a medieval world of ''virtue rewarded'', where rewards and retributions are predictable and symmetrical to actions and choices. This is a baffling world where there is no justice. So why should there be an easy philosophical remedy to our complex and unique individual crises? Why should there be the comfort of a grand narrative when we know that they are redundant?
As life gets too hot to handle with its paralysing complexities and contradictions, as we try to live down the rejections, humiliations and indignities that are wired into the process of survival, as we lose sleep obsessively rationalising our own asymmetric responses to these insuperable dilemmas, when one choice is as bad and as disastrous as the other, suddenly Seinfeld's ironic voice sounds in our heads, ''Seriously, George? Oh please. Move on!''
Seinfeld refuses to concede seriousness to life when it does not deserve any, to rescue us from avoidable anxiety and self-pity and to make survival a little less unbearable in a world that is essentially indifferent to our suffering, and this is no ordinary wisdom.
This is wisdom of the highest order, the wisdom that makes us laugh at the hopeless world we are thrown into; to make us able to take as a joke the pathetic creatures we are forced to be.
David Foster Wallace
''Am I crazy? Or am I just so sane I blew your mind?''
Kramer, Seinfeld
Now, I am a huge fan of David Foster Wallace (DFW, as he is fondly called by his fans). Make no mistake about it.
During a particularly trying phase of my personal searching, This Is Water (2005)--a moving thesis on the enduring relevance of compassion, empathy and the power of cultivating human connection in the process of our most mundane and ordinary engagement with the world-- rescued me from the depths of cynical despair that had fogged my perception of the world and eroded my faith in humanity.
It had liberated me from the tyranny of my own ego to rediscover optimistic and empathetic connections with a seemingly self-serving and apathetic world. It is a struggle we all must go through as sensitive individuals, every day, in every way, to avert the relentless assault of cynicism, through a conscious choice of compassion over callousness, through acts of small kindness and an unflagging exercise of charity which has nothing grandiose or dramatic about it.
It is a difficult and arduous choice indeed. To stare at the futility of existence and still to try to give it dignity and significance by ordinary, un-heroic altruism is by no means ordinary.It is no coincidence that the prophet of New Sincerity would envisage this deeply rewarding, but difficult, road to save the ego from its self-consuming excesses. It is especially relevant today, when human connections--in personal as well as political spaces--are getting destroyed fast and furiously by self-oriented thinking.
It is a pity that DFW's epiphanic wisdom could not save him from suicide three years later. Or, perhaps it was his gifted insight that precipitated this personal catastrophe?
He was so uniquely aware and alone in his wisdom, so filled with a love that no one could understand and receive, that his only way to appeal to his deaf audience was this big bang of self-annihilation. Like Cassandra, he was cursed by his gift: his prophecy was destined to be discredited. His consequent alienation was interpreted as insanity.
DFW's personal creative voice, and the school of New Sincerity in general,was an aesthetic/ philosophical reaction against the inescapable influence of Postmodern irony and its deconstructive humour that shaped American television and advertising during the 90s.
MTV, SNL, Seinfeld--the iconic cultural artefacts of the time are all unfailingly about this ironic alienation and deconstruction of grand narratives, the values and the sacred institutions of Western modernity, that gave meaning and stability to the worldview of the post-war global community up until then. David Foster Wallace felt, ''irony, cynicism, irreverence--the schticks of postmodernism are enervating the culture itself.''
If you are an auteur, you would know that irony is a notoriously difficult tone to create and sustain in a text. The sentimental trap lies in wait at every turn, in every corner. Sentiment is what guarantees an immediate and powerful connection with the audience: it hardly ever fails. A war photographer capturing a wounded and wailing child is sincere, sentimental. There is hardly anyone among his audience who will not instantly connect with its sentiment.
But this mode of creative expression operates on a level that is intellectually inert and stylistically lazy, albeit its being effective and inclusive. Its articulation is loud, obvious and unproblematic.
Now how about the same war-zone, where a faceless commoner is photographically captured in an unguarded moment, pissing on the monument of war heroes?
That is irony.
It is confrontational, subversive, irreverent; it raises quite a few hackles, on purpose; but executed honestly, it stays burnt in your memory as an unforgettable testament of war's laughable futility, cutting through the legitimising lies of nationalistic/ patriotic discourse.
It is not everyone's cup of tea. Not everyone is comfortable with its aggressive assault. And herein, burdened with this tough task, comes a person like Jerry Seinfeld: the Postmodern hero,a victim of unceasing confusion and indecision, who possesses nothing but his scurrilous postmodern irony to guide him through the baffling paradoxes of metropolitan modernity. In the process of his quest for personal fulfillment, he must dismantle the sacrosanct institutions of the modern west, complacent in the delusion of its own progress and power --Love, Sex, Family, Parents, Kids, Friendship, Religion, Success,Money, Death, and finally, his own comedy itself, he has a bone to pick with every single notion that lulls us into unquestioning sentimentality.
In the postmodern world of fragmentation, in the middle of the disintegration of traditions and values, in the absence of a unifying narrative that would give universal meaning and legitimacy to the subjective experience of the atomised individual, this devil-may-care irreverence is invaluable: when the confused inhabitant of this experience gets tormented over these inescapable gaps and conflicts, Seinfeld seems to cock a snook at the sacred myths of modernity and asks, ''really? You took that so seriously?''
Too much sincerity or seriousness, too deep a commitment to empathy and connection can destroy you when the world around you does not care. DFW's sincerity destroyed him; it massively devastated his ideological peer Jonathan Franzen whose life-long battle with clinical depression was responsible for his personal neurosis and the sublime glimpses of a seething tragedy at the bedrock of human existence, which he so compellingly portrays in his art.
By contrast, Jerry lives in a world that excludes the very possibility of tragedy and sublimity. The world that he and his most adorably confused and incompetent friends occupy is one that spins around the most trivial, inconsequential and meaningless problems-- some real but most of it imagined--that assume the proportions of earth-shattering crises for its benighted protagonists who believe in their own infallible omniscience in every field of experience, to be chastised everyday, by a ruthless reality. Tragedy is impossible under the circumstances, the most heartbreaking choices and predicaments of the postmodern hero can only give rise to buffoonery,or farce.
For instance, where is the scope for tragic elevation when one is emotionally crippled over the choice of underwear?
What wisdom can come off when one is crucified by one's conscience as his mother is hospitalised after having walked in on his solitary love?
What enlightenment can help somebody who loses his sleep over the correct direction of finger movement to ensure effective foreplay, and in the heat of intimacy consults notes on the back of his hand, to this effect?
What is sublime about being devastated because a condescending waiter at an upscale restaurant denied you dinner reservation?
What redemption is expected to arrive when you are plunged into a profound existential anxiety as your favourite bakery runs out of the pastry of your choice?
None of it is elevating, or heroic, in the least; This is the sordid, the mundane, the petty, the embarrassing that are too small to be acknowledged, but too momentous, too unsettling to be accommodated by social discourse. These are the minuscule inconsistencies, the tragic ironies of everyday existence that we helplessly swallow because the cultural conventions have made them invisible. And yet, they are unavoidably enormous to whom they plague--that is you and me; the hotshot and the nobody.
Seinfeld's world is a place where traditions are dismantled, hierarchies inverted, and conventions interrogated to expose their empty core; the process then mocks us for the absurd and exaggerated seriousness we invested in them. Here, nuns abandon their cloister on the day they are to be ordained, drawn away by the 'animal magnetism' of a rather clumsy and off-kilter man with absurdly big hair and a pathetic dressing sense.
Sons prevent mothers from getting divorced, no, not because family is sacred but because he is horrified by the idea of inhabiting the same dating pool with her.
A perfect romance is ruined because the suitor is tempted to gobble up a half-eaten sandwich from the trashcan at the house of his fiancee's parents.
Here, human connections are unmade over parking spots and a budding union can fall apart, not because of hostile interference from society, but because polite compliments go wrong at the sight of a new-born infant's--no, not ethereal innocence--but aggressive ugliness: religion, family, romance, community, children, nothing is spared the ruthless ironic deconstruction, to finally reveal that no tragedy in life, if there is any, is worth more than a couple of laughs.
What all this irreverence does is that is blurs the lines between high and low, tragedy and farce, the sublime and the sordid, to point out that there isn't really any distinction between one kind of heartbreak and another; it smashes such distinctions and hierarchies to establish the compassionate egalitarianism of the ironist: we are all together in this mess and confusion, you are not alone in your unspeakable embarrassment.
One of the standard objections raised by New Sincerity against this kind of deconstructive humour is that it is not philosophically redemptive, that it does not suggest any remedy or resolution to the contradictions it exposes, the hypocrisies it debunks. And, perhaps that is the whole point of it. It does not have a remedy:
''What kind of a sick society are we living in where nice [guy] is bad?'' cries out an anguished George Costanza, the perpetually confused intellectual in the group, defeated by his never ending self doubt.
True, we no longer live in a medieval world of ''virtue rewarded'', where rewards and retributions are predictable and symmetrical to actions and choices. This is a baffling world where there is no justice. So why should there be an easy philosophical remedy to our complex and unique individual crises? Why should there be the comfort of a grand narrative when we know that they are redundant?
As life gets too hot to handle with its paralysing complexities and contradictions, as we try to live down the rejections, humiliations and indignities that are wired into the process of survival, as we lose sleep obsessively rationalising our own asymmetric responses to these insuperable dilemmas, when one choice is as bad and as disastrous as the other, suddenly Seinfeld's ironic voice sounds in our heads, ''Seriously, George? Oh please. Move on!''
Seinfeld refuses to concede seriousness to life when it does not deserve any, to rescue us from avoidable anxiety and self-pity and to make survival a little less unbearable in a world that is essentially indifferent to our suffering, and this is no ordinary wisdom.
This is wisdom of the highest order, the wisdom that makes us laugh at the hopeless world we are thrown into; to make us able to take as a joke the pathetic creatures we are forced to be.
