The anti-seduction ethic — wanting readers to love the work vs. wanting to *fool* them
echoes
From: The Nature of the Fun
- Early text: "you love the infant and want others to love it, but
that means you hope others won’t see it correctly."; "You want to sort of fool
people: you want them to see as perfect what you in your heart know is a
betrayal of all perfection."; "Onanism gives way to attempted seduction, as a
motive."; and the alternative Wallace chooses — to "tell the truth instead of
being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you
will be maximally likable." [mid-to-late essay] [e-text]
- IJ echo: IJ's self-conscious refusal to be the Entertainment it
describes — the novel built so as not to be a frictionless, maximally
pleasurable, will-dissolving artifact (the anti-closure design; the demanded
reader-work; the samizdat as the thing fiction must not become). The essay
states the compositional value directly: the temptation is to seduce the
reader into loving a "perfect" object; the discipline is to refuse it.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation (thematic counter-value)