The book that demands vs. the entertainment epoch — "Deep Nonsense" that shows what can't be said
echoes
From: The Empty Plenum: David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress
- Early text: the "INTERPRET-ME" novel, analogous to "a piece of
music that both demands and defines the listener’s movements, say, like a
waltz"; WM's "Deep Nonsense" that "manages somehow to “show” what cannot
ordinarily be “expressed.”"; all set against "our happy epoch of technical
occlusion and entertainment-marketing" and "a cattle-herd culture that worships
only the Transparent I". [the INTERPRET-ME opening + the Deep-Nonsense passage
- IJ echo: IJ as the demanding, reader-working book (endnotes, withheld
closure) that refuses the frictionless entertainment it depicts; and the
Wittgensteinian show/say distinction behind IJ's designed holes — a book that
shows what it will not say. The "entertainment-marketing" epoch Wallace
writes against here is the culture IJ anatomizes.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation