The everything-is-rhetoricalized metastasis — me watching you watching me — named as a tremendous engine of…
echoes
From: Bookworm — DFW on Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (KCRW, August 12, 1999)
- Early text:
[scene] Wallace's closing diagnosis: everything carries
presentation, interpretation, and sales pitch; before speaking he scans
and triages the listener's possible responses and his responses to those
responses; not since the Athenian sophists has a vibrant culture been so
saturated in performance, review, and mutual watching, and the metastasis
is in a large way a tremendous engine of loneliness [25:18, 26:09, 26:26,
26:38]. Anchored earlier by the oeuvre-wide claim that everything he
writes is about loneliness, with the book's sexual politics only a
unifying principle for it [04:35]
- IJ echo: the communication/solipsism spine oeuvre-wide;
the fiction-as-anti-loneliness program stated to McCaffery in 1993
and restated on this same program in 1996 as setting up a conversation
between human beings (silverblatt-bookworm-1996)
- Weight: shared-preoccupation