New-sincerity as fiction — naked address past exhausted metafiction
echoes
From: Octet
- Early text: the sincerity solution: "you’d have to be 100%
honest. Meaning not just sincere but almost naked. Worse than naked—more
like unarmed. Defenseless."; the reader-question "‘This thing I feel, I
can’t name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?’"
[PQ9]; the anti-irony diagnosis: metafictional self-reference "in the late
1990s, when even Wes Craven is cashing in on metafictional self-reference,
might come off lame and tired and facile" [PQ9]; the being-liked trap:
"there is no quicker way to tie yourself in knots and kill any human
urgency in the thing you’re working on than to try to calculate ahead of
time whether that thing will be ‘liked.’ It’s just lethal." [PQ9]
- IJ echo: IJ's project of writing past irony to something that can move
a reader without being seduced or ironized — the same anti-EUP ethic "The
Nature of the Fun" states in nonfiction (fiction as a way 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" — cross-source span, gated
against [local source]). "Octet" is that ethic
dramatized: the writer choosing defenseless sincerity over safe irony.
- Weight: restatement / ars-poetica (oeuvre-scoped)
- Early text: "it’s perilously close to ‘Do you like me? Please
like me,’" — the naked address as the last interpersonal taboo [PQ9].
- IJ echo: IJ's self-consciousness about its own relation to the reader
(the demanded reader-work, the refusal to be a frictionless Entertainment)
— the writer's being-liked anxiety is the maker's-side counterpart to the
Entertainment's seduction.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation (oeuvre-scoped)