But another way to look at it, the way Wallace would probably want us to, would be to say that the self-conscious formalism in Wallace’s fiction is intended to mirror our own 21^st century, postmodern-slash-late-capitalist experience of reality. Wallace’s formal experimentation mediates the reader’s experience of the text in the same way our perceptions of daily life are mediated by the representational innovations of postmodernity—the self-reflexive, the technical, the televisual, the cybernetic. As Wallace might say, his fiction attempts to replicate the way today’s reality “works on our nerve endings.”  He isn’t introducing formal constraints into his fiction for their own sake, or for the sake of wowing his readers (or at least usually not). Rather, the Midwestern wind is always already blowing. He just refuses to throw up windscreens against it. The windscreens of contemporary realist fiction—stability, linearity, univocality—create a nostalgic illusion of an unmediated world, where we live and experience our lives with narrative unity, but it isn’t honest. In fact, it isn’t really real, in any robust sense of the word. By fabricating a false narrative immediacy, realism itself mediates between the reader and an essentially mediated world. Ironically, Wallace’s avant-garde formalism, is the new realism.

And I think probably Wallace wanted his readers to work for the pleasures of his texts, to encounter difficulty, precisely because he felt that one of the grimmest symptoms of US-American postmodernity was a proliferation of pleasure-giving entertainments that asked for basically zero genuine effort on the part of the audience. Difficult prose—let’s just call it that—was a way to disrupt, disqualify, and disparage passive (and passivity-breeding) consumption of entertainment.[7]