Third of Three Proposals: Toward Reconciling a Poetics of Ignorance with a Frankenstein-like Poetics

Continued from:

First of Three Proposals: Toward a Poetics of Ignorance

Second of Three Proposals: Toward a Frankenstein-like Poetics

1.0 The advent of the Internet is itself a kind of Frankenstein—it tore the curtain to the temple of knowledge. The web is the New Tower of Babel, and in effect, the ultimate (the final and most foreboding) Frankenstein for literature and language.

1.1 This ultimate Frankenstein ended the monopoly of access and acquisitions of information formerly dominated by such archons (archangels) as government, bureaucracy, academe, mass media. Now that the literary Holy of Holies is transparent––light shines in and out of its temple and altar.[1]

2.0 Because the writer cannot convey pure doubt, he must instead convey pure ignorance (a kind of “unknown unknown”) about certain book-parts.

2.1 A book made of other books implies that the writer possessed some amount of prior innate knowledge (gnosis) of those book-parts which constitute the final book as a whole.

2.2 A writer does (must) doubt the book-parts before him are yet alive and have yet to exist as a whole––hence the writer has no doubt that he is the one obligated to vitalize the book-parts sitting before him into a whole “new book.” Hence the writer has no doubt that he must quicken, reanimate these book-parts.

2.3 Were our three proposals already accepted and implemented, David Foster Wallace would’ve written a 300-page novel with 900 pages of notes (accessible only electronically), instead of the vise versa found in his Infinite Jest (1997).