The Markson/Wittgenstein constellation as stated aspiration — marrying intelligence and sadness; the condensed…
echoes
From: Bookworm: David Foster Wallace on A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again — KCRW (May 15, 1997)
- Early text:
[scene] He calls Wittgenstein's Mistress a magical
book — not for alternating stunt-pilot intellection with
pathos but for wedding the two — which he names as his dream, to
someday do something like that [pt2 18:17–18:33]. The condensed aphoristic
register — Zarathustra, the Philosophical Investigations, the Tao Te
Ching, really good poetry, the end of the Tractatus — is agreed to be the
higher mode, the work of a Mozart of living after decades of effort, and
he is comfortable saying he is not there yet [pt2 22:27, 25:02–25:14]
- IJ echo: the Wittgenstein-as-governing-frame reading of Wallace's
work — language, solipsism, and the limits of what can be said as the
problem his fiction keeps working
- Weight: shared-preoccupation