everything known only at second, third, fourth hand — "had described it only from the…"
had described it only from the perspective of the experience of performing in it, nude, and had never seen it
Context
Notkin's whole deposition is an architecture of hearsay: pinned under a lamp, she relays what Madame Psychosis told her about a lethal cartridge that Madame Psychosis herself "had never seen," about an Auteur's motives no one witnessed, about deaths no one present can confirm — knowledge only ever "believed" and always at one more remove than the thing itself. The scene is the theme's epistemology made literal, an interrogation that extracts a long chain of secondhand report and arrives nowhere firsthand, the object at the center (the Entertainment, the truth of the suicides) never directly known by anyone speaking. (The Joelle-deformity content stays her spine's / entertainment-self's.) [sweep · shared-ground entertainment-self]