Having declared that language is ultimately self-referential, Barth has also affirmed that novels themselves, because they do not refer directly to a knowable reality, unavoidably refer instead to other novels. This latter idea directly informs his essay "The Literature of Exhaustion," discussed at greater length in chapter 1. Briefly, Barth argues that all the advances in novelistic technique introduced by the modernist masters—from stream-of-consciousness to spatial form—were originally designed to provide a more accurate access to reality. Now that "reality" is understood to be nothing more than a construct of language. Since all literary conventions have been "exhausted" from overuse and have been undermined by recent theories concerning the relationship between language and the world, the postmodern novel would employ literary conventions self-consciously, thereby warding off the "death of the novel" by writing novels that dramatize that death. The end result would be a fiction that overcomes exhaustion by dramatizing it. Or, as Barth explains, "An artist may paradoxically turn the felt ultimacies of our time into material and means for his work—paradoxically, because by doing so he transcends what had appeared to be his refutation, in the same way that the mystic who transcends finitude is said to be enabled to live, spiritually and physically, in the finite world."'

I am reminded of the book's timeliness every time I teach it to 21st century undergraduates. Though they are properly dazzled by its mixture of high-tech literariness, pop-culture savvy, and story-telling brio, they are frankly bewildered by the book's urgency and sense of mission, Wallace's authorial adversaries are as obscure to them as Kierkegaard's battle with Danish Hegelians is to the rest of us. For them the 1980s is a comical decade of bouffant hairdos, pastel suit jackets, and conspicuous consumption. Hence it takes some doing to convey to them how diametrically opposed to all of that was the era's prevailing literary ethos, which, in violent counter-reaction to the fabulist excesses of the 19760s and 1970s, embraced austerity and restraint, concreteness and cynicism, brevity and banality. Writers like Richard Ford, Anne Beattie, Bobby Ann Mason and, most importantly, Raymond Carver reclaimed realism from the bad rap it had gotten from Barth and Barthelme, and the growing guild of grad-school fiction writers quickly followed suit--and who could blame them? After all, the Dirty Realist short story, with its emotional obliqueness and less-is-more ethos, was tailor-made for the graduate workshop, not to mention the university-sponsored literary magazine. Minimalism ruled, and Carver was king.