This puzzled me about WYM

[A comet crashing into Earth]

I just finished Watch Your Mouth (yesterday, I think, although my sense of the passage of time is getting a bit vague these days), and as always, I had to place trust in Handler to eventually make me see sense in things that seem odd at first. I've noticed that he does this a lot, introducing things which don't make sense, only to later reveal some piece of information that's vital to understanding that first thing; both in individual sentences and paragraphs, and on a whole-plot scale. However, there's one thing in the book I still don't feel I've had properly explained: On page 93 (the Ecco 2002 paperback edition), there's this paragraph (emphasis mine) :

He crackled in his chair. "I'm fine," he said, and the italics were lost on me - didn't I look well? - just as their musical equivalent, a sinister murmur of woodwinds to signify approaching illness, will be lost on all but the most careful of listeners, or those who have read the verbose essays in the glossy playbills - "listen for the sinister murmur of woodwinds to signify approaching illness, a hallmark of the subtle decoration in Handler's work."

The book's whole narrative device is a little messy to me already, what with the relatively complex narration and all, but I'm under the impression that the first part is Joseph's personal reinterpretation of the events of the summer in opera form, not Handler's. As far as I can tell, Handler's name isn't mentioned anywhere else in the book, and the first-person narration isn't stirred up by anything other than this. There's the possibility that Joseph's last name is Handler, but that would defeat the purpose of his last name being 'Changed for protection of the innocent' and various variations thereupon during the second part. The only interpretations I can make work is that either Joseph is accidentally letting his last name slip unchanged through the narration of the first part, or the line is a comment on the author/narrator relationship - i.e., Joseph may have written the opera, but the actual events it's based on is "Handler's work" as the author and creator of the whole story. While I believe Handler is one of the few current authors who could do something meta like that and still get published, it still seems a little far-fatched to me.

What do you say? Am I missing something entirely here?

[Dante]

Bearing in mind that it has been a long, long time since I read Watch Your Mouth: It strikes me that this particular paragraph is being particularly metatextual - a book about a hypothetical playbill for a hypothetical opera for a retrospective narrative. And it also strikes me that the use of Handler's name in this context is the most subtle detail of a passage about subtle details which will be lost on most audiences. So I think there is something going on there. Bearing in mind again that it has been years and years since I even looked inside Watch Your Mouth and that, until I looked this passage up myself, I had forgotten just how metatextual the book got, I think the admittedly somewhat hurried conclusion I would come to is that this is the farthest stretch of the book's metatextual conceit; the abstraction of the opera interpretation has gotten so detailed and so far from the actual (questionable) reality of the story itself that the narrative even abandons the pretence that "Joseph" is responsible for its composition. That's my first-looking reading, at least; someone who knows the book a little better might be able to say more about it.

[bear]

it seems about as reasonable as any other meta reference to me, although since it's in the first person, you're finding it a bit more difficult to swallow that Joseph would know about Handler's authorship than if an omniscient narrator did (almost no narrator, after all, is really supposed to be the author). it is wonderfully convoluted, though, much more so than a lot of meta references: the fictional character is talking about a playbill for an opera, both of which are fictional even in the fictional character's world, and the fictional playbill is aware that Daniel Handler is the true creator of the fictional opera within the fictional character's narration within the novel itself.