Under the Net is a classic English novel by Iris Murdoch. In the story, one of the main characters has the manuscript of a novel he had been translating from French go missing. The fictional novel-within-a-novel is called Le Rossignol de Bois-- in English: The Wooden Nightingale.
Equally important is that Murdoch entitled her novel Under the Net as a reference to a passage from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, more commonly known as the Tractatus, or TLP. The "net" in question that people are under is "the net of discourse"-- primarily, the structures of language and other systems, such as scientific theory and philosophy, that people use to make sense of the world.
So, we have a visual reference in S1 to Under the Net, a novel that has a novel within it that has Nightingale in its title, which is what Crowley and Aziraphale call the cant, or cryptolect/hidden language, that masks their speech from outsiders, and this novel to which Good Omens visually referred? It also references Wittgenstein, whose writing on language in the Tractatus is the most enduring of his work, to a point that if you are referring to this then what you are also really referring to is this particular, famous quotation:
"The limits of my language means the limits of my world."
To many, what Wittgenstein was saying here are two truths that can very much co-exist: that there are limits to language when it comes to its ability to express the full range of human emotion and experience-- that it cannot ever fully succeed in doing that-- but, also, at the same time?
That the more adept a person becomes with words-- the more a person works to deepen their knowledge of language, to expand their vocabulary and broaden their understanding of etymology? The more their world opens up and the more full their experience of life will be.
Wittgenstein's quote is about how words are nowhere near sufficient to fully explain the human experience but, at the same time? Words are also everything, and a person with limited understanding of words? Is a person with a limited life. Not a surprising thing for a story about the human experience that is as in love with language as Good Omens is to reference-- especially alongside a reference to the Nightingales.
In the late 1960s, Wittgenstein's quote was part of a famous art exhibition series at The Smithsonian called Great Ideas of Western Man. The artist Herbert Bayer made a painting inspired by the quote that became the signature piece of the exhibition and a very famous work in its own right. Good Omens definitely took inspiration from this painting and, within its story? It definitely has a big fan in logophile Crowley-- as it inspired the design of his old flat.
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