Wallace's anti-"death of the author" position — the ideational ground of the wraith-narrator

echoes

Early text: "For those of us civilians who know in our gut that writing is an act of communication between one human being and another, the whole question seems sort of arcane" [closing ¶]; the Gass endorsement, "this ‘anonymity’ may mean many things, but one thing which it cannot mean is that no one did it" [closing ¶]; "Barthes makes the text a shroud, and no one, not even a corpse, is holding the other end" [Hix's shroud image, mid-essay].
IJ echo: The wraith-authorship reading of IJ's narration — that a dead author (James Incandenza's wraith) is a presence in and behind the novel's telling, still meaning, still communicating. IJ literalizes the anti-death position Wallace states here: the corpse is holding the other end of the shroud; the author is dead and yet demonstrably "did it." Wallace's plain-voice conviction that writing is "an act of communication between one human being and another" is the aesthetic-ethical commitment the whole New-Sincerity / communication-over-solipsism project (and the novel's wraith machinery) rests on.
Weight: prefiguration