09 December 2007

There is a tired debate on the extent to which a fictional work is biographical.

Are the dark chapters in such-and-such generated by the acute psychological malady of so-and-so? One best articulated by a paragraph in the DSM-IV?

That we consider these questions indicates our ignorance of the distinction between syntactic well-formedness and the Wittgensteinian maxim that it is impossible to judge a piece of nonsense.