Wallace's own case against reading a novel back out of its author's biography — the "intentional fallacy" trap a…
echoes
From: Borges on the Couch
- Early text: The review argues that admiring readers are
"perpetrators (consciously or not) of the intentional fallacy", and that a
biography's governing axiom — "we can't correctly interpret a piece of verbal
art unless we know the personal and/or psychological circumstances surrounding
its creation" — is a "design flaw." The essay's closing statement is the
thesis at full pitch: "the stories so completely transcend their motive cause
that the biographical facts become, in the deepest and most literal way,
irrelevant." [¶1, ¶4, closing ¶]
- IJ echo: The reading stance the novel keeps provoking — decoding Hal's
collapse, the ending, or the Entertainment's fatality from Wallace's own
Boston recovery years and depression. Wallace's insistence that some fiction
resists this is a self-description sibling to his design statements elsewhere
(the "messing with maps" and piton remarks in the 1996 interviews).
- Weight: shared-preoccupation