THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN NATION:
FRAGMENT III—"MY INTELLECTUAL LIFE, PART ONE"
FOOTNOTE 11
So ends a justly famous fragment about the meaning of literature that is itself very beautiful in its "found" rhythms, however despairing in tone. The passage is taken as expressing Larsen's idea that the essential and even radical irony of literature is that only in the deepest and often non-literal senses can or does it function with any lasting effectiveness as a means of "communication"—an irony no longer perceivable to (and therefore rejected by) the "simplifiers" and other converteds. [Editor]
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