Except art, is the thing. Serious, real, conscientious, aware, ambitious art is not a grey thing. It has never been a grey thing and it is not a grey thing now. This is why fiction in a grey time may not be grey. And why the titles of all but one or two of the best works of Neiman Marcus Nihilism are going to induce aphasia quite soon in literate persons who read narrative art for what makes it real.
And, besides an unfair acquaintance with many young writers who are not yet Conspicuous and so not known to you, this is why I’d be willing to bet anything at least a couple and maybe a bunch of the Whole New Generation are going to make art, maybe make great art, maybe even make great art change. One thing about the Young you can trust in 1987: if we’re willing to devote our lives to something, you can rest assured we get off on it. And nothing has changed about why writers who don’t do it for the money write: it’s art, and art is meaning, and meaning is power: power to color cats, to order chaos, to transform void into floor and debt into treasure. The best “Voices of a Generation” surely know this already; more, they let it inform them. It’s quite possible that none of the best are yet among the Conspicuous. A couple might even be… autodidacts. But, especially now, none of them need worry. If fashion, flux, and academy make for thin milk, at least that means the good stuff can’t help but rise. I’d get ready.
—1988
bistre—yellowish-brown color (unpleasant underwear) bittern—wading bird like plover blepharitis—inflammation of eyelids (trailer-park out break of blepharitis) blepharospasm—spasmodic winking from eyelid muscle spasm blucher—a high shoe or half boot blue law—city law restricting Sunday activities like retail shopping, bars bolo—long heavy Philippine machete borborygmus—gurgling sounds in digestive tract boreal (adj.)—of or relating to the north, northern bort—poorly crystallized diamond used in industry bosky—having an abundance of trees, bushes, shrubs bowline—a knot forming a loop that does not slip brachy cephalic—having a short, almost round head, the width at least 80% of the length brachydactylic—having short fingers or toes brachylogy—brief, concise speech; shortened, condensed phrase and/or expression bracken—tough weedy fern that overgrows untended land brail—small net for bringing fish onto boat brattice—partition in mine; breastwork erected during siege brickbat—unfavorable remark, criticism bricolage—something (like decor) made of whatever happens to be available brioche—light-textured egg-white bread shaped into huge bun; “woman’s hair like a brioche” brisance—shattering effect of release of energy in an explosion brisket—chest of an animal / ribs and meat taken from chest of animal cachou—a pastille used to sweeten breath cacoethes—mania or irresistible compulsion cadelle—small blackish beetle that destroys grain cadent (adj.)—having rhythm or cadence caduceus—medical emblem: snakes twined around stick caducity—frailty of old age, senility Caesar non supra grammaticos—saying: “Even Caesar is not above grammar/grammarians” calando—music: gradual decrease in tempo and volume calcar—spur or spurlike projection caldera—large crater formed by volcanic explosion or volcanic collapse calenture—tropical fever once believed caused by the heat callipygian—having beautiful buttocks calumet—long-stemmed ceremonial pipe for U.S. Indians camber—slightly arched surface, like road or snow ski; setting of car’s wheels in chassis so they’re closer at the bottom than at the top camelopard—giraffe; heraldic figure that’s giraffe with curved horns camisole—woman’s sleeveless undergarment usually worn under sheer blouse cannelure—groove around the cylinder of a bullet cannula—a tube with a trocar at one end that’s inserted in body to remove fluid or dispense meds, like an IV canthus—angle formed by upper and lower eyelids meeting; see “epicanthal fold” canticle—religious hymn or chant w/o meter and lyrics from Bible cantonment—temporary quarters for troops cantrip (n.)—usually Scottish: a witch’s spell or trick; a sham or fraud or deceptive move capri pants—tight women’s slacks that go only to calves and have slit along calves; Mary Tyler Moore’s perennial pants on Dick Van Dyke Show capriole—trained horse move: jump without going forward, kicking rear legs out carina—keel-shaped ridge or structure, e.g., breastbone of bird; q.v. “carinated” carnassial—adapted for tearing flesh; “carnassial teeth”
THE EMPTY PLENUM: DAVID MARKSON’S WITTGENSTEIN’S MISTRESS
But what other philosopher has found the antidote to illusion in the particular and repeated humility of remembering and tracking the uses of humble words, looking philosophically as it were beneath our feet rather than over our heads?
—Stanley Cavell
There is nobody at the window in the painting of the house, by the way.
I have now concluded that what I believed to be a person is a shadow.
If it is not a shadow, it is perhaps a curtain.
As a matter of fact it could actually be nothing more than an attempt to imply depths, within the room.
Although in a manner of speaking all that is really in the window is burnt sienna pigment. And some yellow ochre.
In fact there is no window either, in that same manner of speaking, but only shape.
So that any few speculations I may have made about the person at the window would therefore now appear to be rendered meaningless, obviously.
Unless of course I subsequently become convinced that there is somebody at the window all over again.
I have put that badly.
—Wittgenstein’s Mistress, pp. 54–55
Tell them I have had a wonderful life.
—Wittgenstein on deathbed, 1951
CERTAIN NOVELS NOT ONLY cry out for what we call “critical interpretations” but actually try to help direct them. This is probably analogous to a piece of music that both demands and defines the listener’s movements, say, like a waltz. Frequently, too, the novels that direct their own critical reading concern themselves thematically with what we might consider highbrow or intellectual issues—stuff proper to art, engineering, antique lit., philosophy, etc. These novels carve out for themselves an interstice between flat-out fiction and a sort of weird cerebral roman à clef. When they fail they’re pretty dreadful. But when they succeed, as I claim David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress does, they serve the vital and vanishing function of reminding us of fiction’s limitless possibilities for reach and grasp, for making heads throb heartlike, and for sanctifying the marriages of cerebration & emotion, abstraction & lived life, transcendent truth-seeking & daily schlepping, marriages that in our happy epoch of technical occlusion and entertainment-marketing seem increasingly consummatable only in the imagination. Books I tend to associate with this INTERPRET-ME phenomenon include stuff like Candide, Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos, Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, Sartre’s Nausea, Camus’s The Stranger. These five are works of genius of a particular kind: they shout their genius. Mr. Markson, in Wittgenstein’s Mistress, tends rather to whisper, but his w.o.g.’s no less successful; nor—particularly given the rabid anti-intellectualism of the contemporary fiction scene—seems it any less important. It’s become an important book to me, anyway. I’d never heard of this guy Markson, before, in ’88. And have, still, read nothing else by him. I ordered the book mostly because of its eponymous title; I like to fancy myself a fan of the mind-bending work of its namesake. Clearly the book was/is in some way “about” Wittgenstein, given the title. This is one of the ways an INTERPRET-ME fiction clues the critical reader in about what the book’s to be seen as on a tertiary level “about”: the title: Ulysses’s title, its structure as Odyssean/Telemachean map (succeeds); Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem (really terrible); Cortázar’s Hopscotch (succeeds exactly to the extent that one ignores the invitation to hop around in it); Burroughs’s Queer and Junkie (fail successfully (?)). W/r/t novels like these it’s often hard to see the difference between a title and an epigraph, except for quotidian facts like the latter’s longer, overter, & attributed. Another way to invite a kind of correspondence-interpretation is to drop the name of a real person like bricks throughout text, as Bruce Duffy does in his so-called
“fictional” biography of Wittgenstein, the execrable 1988 The World As I Found It, in which, despite loud “this-is-made-up” disclaimers, Duffy brings to bear such an arsenal of historical fact and allusion that the critical reader can’t but confuse the homosexuality-crazed fictional “Wittgenstein” with the real and way more complex & interesting Wittgenstein. Another way for a novel to linearize its reading is to make an intellectual shibboleth serve a repetitive narrative function: e.g., in Candide, Pangloss’s continual “All for the best in the best of all possible worlds” is a neon sign out front of what is, except for its end, little more than a poisonously funny parody of the metaphysics of Leibniz.1
Kate, the monadic narrator of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, gets a lot of her master’s remarks wrong, too—the philosopher’s better-known words and ideas are sprayed, skewed, all over the book, from its notebook-epigraph about sand to the Tractatus’s “The world is everything that is the case” to Investigationary speculations on adhesive vs. magnetic “tape” that unequivocally summon the later Wittgenstein’s concerns over words’ “family resemblances”2 to one another. Contra Voltaire, though, when Markson’s Kate recalls lines & concepts incorrectly, her errors serve the ends not of funny propaganda but of both original art and original interpretation. Because Wittgenstein’s Mistress,3 w/r/t its eponymous master, does more than just quote Wittgenstein in weird ways, or allude to his work, or attempt to be some sort of dramatization of the intellectual problems that occupied and oppressed him. Markson’s book renders, imaginatively & concretely, the very bleak mathematical world Wittgenstein’s Tractatus revolutionized philosophy by summoning via abstract argument. It is, in a weird way, the colorization of a very old film. Though Wittgenstein’s philosophical stuff is far from dead or arid, WM nevertheless succeeds at transposing W’s intellectual conundra into the piquant qualia of lived, albeit bizarrely lived, experience. The novel quickens W’s early work, gives it a face, for the reader, that the philosophy does not & cannot convey… mostly because Wittgenstein’s work is so hard and takes so long just to figure out on a literal level that the migrainous mental gymnastics required of his reader all but quash the dire emotional implications of W’s early metaphysics. His mistress, though, asks the question her master in print does not: What if somebody really had to live in a Tractatusized world?
I don’t mean to suggest that David Markson’s achievement here consists just in making abstract philosophy “accessible” to an extramural reader, or that WM is in itself simple. Actually, though its prose and monotone are hauntingly pedestrian, the novel’s diffracted system of allusions to everything from antiquity to Astroturf are a bitch to trace out, and the concentric circularity that replaces linear development as its plot’s “progression” makes a digestive reading of WM a challenging & protracted affair. Markson’s is not a pop book, and it’s not decocted philosophy or a docudrama-of-the-week. Rather, for me, the novel does artistic & emotional justice to the politico-ethical implications of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s abstract mathematical metaphysics, makes what is designed to be a mechanism pulse, breathe, suffer, live, etc. In so doing, it pays emotional tribute to a philosopher who by all evidence lived in personal spiritual torment over the questions too many of his academic followers have made into elaborate empty exercise. That is, Markson’s WM succeeds in doing what few philosophers glean and what neither myriad biographical sketches nor Duffy’s lurid revisionism succeeds in communicating: the consequences, for persons, of the practice of theory; the difference, say, between espousing “solipsism” as a metaphysical “position” and waking up one fine morning after a personal loss to find your grief apocalyptic, literally millennial, to being the last and only living thing on earth, with only your head, now, for not only company but environment & world, an inclined beach sliding toward a dreadful sea. Put otherwise, Markson’s book transcends, for me, its review-enforced status of “intellectual tour de force” or “experimental achievement”: what it limns, as an immediate study of depression & loneliness, is far too moving to be the object of either exercise or exorcism. The ways in which the book is moving, and the formal ingenuity by which it transforms metaphysics into angst and so reveals philosophy as first and last about feeling—these are enough for me, right now, to think of the novel as one of the U.S. decade’s best, to deplore its relative neglect & its consignment by journals like the NYTBR to smarmy review by an ignorant young Carverian.4 But add to the novel’s credits a darkly pyrotechnic achievement in the animation of intellectual history—the way WM so completely demonstrates how one of the smartest & most important contributors to modern thought could have been such a personally miserable son of a bitch—and the book becomes, if you’re the impotent unlucky sort whose beliefs inform his stomach’s daily state, a special kind of great book, literally profound, and probably destined, in its & time’s fullness, to be a whispering classic.
One reason WM whispers, as both a kind of classic and an interpretation-director, is that its charms and stratagems are very indirect. It’s not only a sustained monologue by a person of gender opposite the author’s, it is structured halfway between shaggy-dog joke and deadly serious allegory. A concrete example of how the prose here works appears as the second epigraph supra. Devices like repetition, obsessive return, free-/unfree association swirl in an uneasy suspension throughout. Yet they communicate. This studied indirection, a sustained error that practically compels misprision, is how Kate convinces us that, if she is insane, so must we be: the subtextual emotive agenda under the freewheeling disorder of isolated paragraphs, under the flit of thought, under the continual struggle against the slipping sand of English & the drowning-pool of self-consciousness—a seductive order not only in but via chaos—compels complete & uneasy acquiescence, here. The technique rings as true as a song we can’t quite place. You could call this technique “Deep Nonsense,” meaning I guess a linguistic flow of strings, strands, loops, and quiffs that through the very manner of its formal construction flouts the ordinary cingula of “sense” and through its defiance of sense’s limits manages somehow to “show” what cannot ordinarily be “expressed.” Good comedy often functions the same way.5 So does good advertising, today.6 So does a surprising amount of good philosophy. So, usually on a far less explicit level than WM’s, can great fiction.
The start of WM has Kate painting messages on empty roads: “Somebody is living in the Louvre,” etc. The messages are for anyone who might come along to see. “Nobody came, of course. Eventually I stopped leaving the messages.” The novel’s end involves the use, not the mention,7 of such a message: “Somebody is living on this beach.” Except use on what &/or whom? It’s probably not right, as I think I did supra, to call this novel’s form a “monologue.”8 Kate is typing it. It’s written & not spoken. Except it’s not like a diary or journal. Nor is it a “letter.” Because of course a letter to whom, if there’s no one else at all? Anyway, it’s self-consciously written. I personally have grown weary of texts that are narrated self-consciously as written, as “texts.” But WM is different from the Barthian/post-Derridean self-referential hosts. Here the conscious rendition of inditement not only rings true but serves essential functions. Kate is not a “writer.” By vocation, apparently, a painter, Kate finds her time at the typewriter thoroughly & terribly avocational. She is shouting into her typing paper’s blankness. Her missive is a function of need, not art—a kind of long message in a big bottle. I need to admit, here, that I have a weird specular stance with respect to this novel’s form as written. I am someone who tries to write, who right now more and more seems to need to write, daily; and who hopes less that the products of that need are lucrative or even liked than simply received, read, seen. WM, in a deep-nonsensical way that’s much more effective than argument or allegory’d be, speaks to why I’m starting to think most people who somehow must write must write. The need to indite, inscribe—be its fulfillment exhilarating or palliative or, as is more usual, neither—springs from the doubly-bound panic felt by most
persons who spend a lot of time up in their own personal heads. On one side—the side a philosopher’d call “radically skeptical” or “solipsistic”—there’s the feeling that one’s head is, in some sense, the whole world, when the imagination becomes not just a more congenial but a realer environment than the big Exterior of life on earth. Markson’s book’s first epigraph, from Kierkegaard’s scary Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, invites & imposes this first interpretation of Kate’s bind and its relation to her “typing.”9 The need to get the words & voices not only out—outside the sixteen-inch diameter of bone that both births & imprisons them—but also down, trusting them neither to the insubstantial country of the mind nor to the transient venue of cords & air & ear, seems for Kate—as for anyone from a Flaubert to a diarist to a letter-fiend—a necessary affirmation of an outside, some Exterior one’s written record can not only communicate with but inhabit. Picasso, harking to Velázquez as does Markson to Kierkegaard & Wittgenstein, did big things for the idea of visual artworks as not just representations but also things, objects… but I can think of no lit.-practitioner (as opposed to New- or post-structural theorist) who’s captured the textual urge, the emotional urgency of text as both sign and thing, as perfectly as has Markson here.10 The other side of the prenominate 2-bind—the side rendered explicitly by WM’s opening and close—is why people who write need to do so as a mode of communication. It’s what an abstractor like Laing calls “ontological insecurity”—why we sign our stuff, impose it on friends, mail it out in brown manila trying to get it printed. “I EXIST” is the signal that throbs under most voluntary writing—& all good writing. And “I EXIST” would have been, in my ungraceful editorial hands, the title of Markson’s novel. But Markson’s final choice, far better than his working Keeper of the Ghosts, and far better than his 2nd choice, Wittgenstein’s Daughter (too clunky; deep but not nonsensical), is probably better than mine. Kate’s text, one big message that someone is living on this beach, is itself obsessed & almost defined by the possibility that it does not exist, that Kate does not exist. And the novel’s title, if we reflect a moment, serves ends as much thematic as allusive. Wittgenstein was gay. He never had a mistress.11 He did, though, have a teacher and friend, one Bertrand Russell, who, with his student’s encouragement, before the ’20s trashed the Cogito tautology by which Descartes had relieved 300 years’ worth of neurotic intellectuals of the worrisome doubt that they existed. Russell pointed out that the Cogito’s “I think and therefore am” is in fact invalid: the truth of “I think” entails only the existence of thinking, as the truth of “I write” yields only the existence of text. To posit an “I” that’s doing the thinking/writing is to beg the very question Descartes had started out impaled on.… But so anyway, Kate’s situation in WM is doubly lonely. After having spent years “looking” for people,12 she has literally washed up on shore, now sits naked & in menses before a manual typewriter, producing words that, for her & us, render only the words themselves “ontologically secure”; the belief in either a reader for them or a (meta)physical presence producing them would require a kind of quixoticism Kate’s long since lost or resigned.
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