But this also misses the point. Non-naïve non-cynicism—in other words, informed sincerity—was the basic conceit of the old realism, which Wallace has taken pains to suggest we can’t simply go back to. (Remember the wind.) In some important sense, Wallace feels he has to write the way he does.[16] And as readers, we have no choice but to view literature (and the world) cynically, to see and question the codes that construct our versions of reality. And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We can probably agree that unquestioned belief has a pretty thoroughly soiled reputation in this country. The challenge, however, is to allow ourselves to be naïve despite our refined critical acumen, to betray surprise, to encounter and acknowledge beauty, to know that despite all we know, we don’t know all that much.

  We can carry this further. As Umberto Eco observed, the postmodern attitude does not permit a man who loves “a very cultivated woman” to simply say “‘I love you madly,’ because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland.” So instead he must say, “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.” This distanciation, however, is not merely a requisite acknowledgment of the lover’s situatedness in a textually-constituted reality. Rather, I think, it implies a sort of counter-intuitive over-investment, on the lover’s part, in the meaningfulness of certain concepts, the trueness of certain truths. It is the postmodern cynic who most believes in Love—and its comparably unfashionable companions, God, Virtue, Authenticity—because to use the word, without all the hedging and mediating and self-undermining, would simply mean too much.[17]