Metafiction, as an end in itself, reveals the bare surface-ness of things but does so without endeavoring to look past the surface for meaning; it can’t even come up with a good reason to peak around the corner much less violently puncture the surface to see if there’s something beneath it. We see the seeds of this myopia in Barth: lost in a literary and literal funhouse, little Ambrose—the protagonist of “Lost in the Funhouse,” who is also kind of a stand-in for Barth—cranes his neck in a futile effort to see the endless iterations of his own reflection in the “mirror room,” only to find his own head perpetually “in the way.” It’s this kind of pointless fascination with recursion and multiplicity for its own sake that got Ambrose lost in the first place. His head isn’t in the way of his reflection; if anything the obverse is true. In the worst metafiction, says Wallace, irony is the “song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage,” a sycophantic paean to the very constraints placed on literature by the conditions of postmodernity, which, while bitterly criticizing the state of affairs, admonishes (as naïve) those who hope for or advocate change.[12]
Wallace’s objective in Westward was to figure out how serious writers of literature might continue to produce fiction about what it means to “be a fucking human being” despite the postmodern consensus that a world endlessly mediated by unstable systems of signs which only ever refer pointlessly back to themselves—and in which irony and cynicism (the twin shibboleths of postmodern sophistication) are made ends in themselves—renders such humanist aspirations not only futile but also passé, uncool, and unforgivably naïve. Wallace takes aim at postmodern ironic cynicism, defining it as a simultaneous symptom and proximate cause of millennial American culture’s allergic reaction to any whiff of what used to be called ‘sincerity.’[13] Ironic posturing is an allergy, Wallace’s work suggests, which precludes the writing of fiction that addresses itself to the old unfashionable truths, fears, and desires that have united humankind in shared trepidation and hope since time immemorial. Worst of all, it’s a sickness that necessarily isolates us from one another—a lonely crowd, united only by our shared, smirking acknowledgment that those bonds born of mutual anxiety are long lost and forgotten.
[12] Now we’re getting into some serious Jamesonian Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism territory—postmodernism, not as a set of avant-garde artistic tactics but as an all-permeating worldview that binds rebellious aesthetic innovation to commercial and consumer culture, reflecting and enabling the subordination of liberatory politics to global neoliberal hegemony. That sort of postmodernism.
[13] Symptomatically-significant scare quotes here, still somehow necessary, a punctuational safeguard against the inevitable sneeze of ironic destanciation, both Claritin® and Kleenex® to the pollen of the genuine.