Both Flesh and Not

by David Foster Wallace

  What keeps the title from being cute or overheavy is that Kate really is Wittgenstein’s mistress, the ghostly curator of a world of history, artifacts, & memories—which memories, like TV images, one can access but never really own—and of facts, facts about both the (former) world and her own mental habits. Hers is the affectless language of fact, and it seems less like by skill than by the inevitable miracle of something that had to be written that Markson directs our misprision in order to infuse statements that all take the form of raw data-transfer13 with true & deep emotional import.

  Kate’s spare, aphoristic style, her direct & correct quotation of “The world is everything that is the case,” and her obsessive need to get control of the facts that have become her interior & exterior life—all this stuff directs the reader to run not walk to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s 1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.14 The reason why I, who am no critic & tend to approach books I admire with all the hesitancy of the blind before walls, feel I get to assert all the flat indicatives about Kate’s plight above is that so much of WM so clearly sends one to the Tractatus for critical “clarification.” This isn’t a weakness of the novel. Though it’s kind of miraculous that it’s not. And it doesn’t mean that WM is just written “in the margins of” the Tractatus the way Candide marginalizes The Monadology or Nausea simply “dramatizes” Part Three of L’Être et le néant. Rather WM, if it is any one thing for me, is a kind of philosophical sci-fi. I.e., it’s an imaginative portrait of what it would be like actually to live in the sort of world the logic and metaphysics of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus posit. This sort of world started out, for Wittgenstein, to be logical heaven. It ends up being (I opine) a metaphysical hell; and the way its philosophic picture rasped against the sort of life and worldview Wittgenstein the man thought worthwhile was (I claim) a big motivation for the disavowal of the Tractatus represented by his masterwork, 1953’s Investigations.15

  Basically the Tractatus is the first real attempt at exploring the now-trendy relation between language and the “reality” it is language’s putative function to capture, map, & represent. The Tractatus’s project is Kantian: what must the world be like if language is even to be possible? The early Wittgenstein,16 much under the spell of Russell and the Principia Mathematica that revolutionized modern logic, saw language, like math, as logic-based, and viewed the paradigmatic function of language as mirroring or “picturing” the world. From this latter belief everything in the Tractatus follows, just as Kate’s own fetish for paintings, mirrors, & the status of mental representations like memories & associations & perceptions forms the gessoed canvas on which her memoir must be sketched. The Wittgenstein of the Tractatus chose as the paradigm of language the truth-functional logic of Russell & Whitehead’s Principia. His choice made practical sense, project-wise: if you’re going to try to construe the world from human language, you’ll be best off choosing the most perspicuous, precise type of language available—one faithful to Wittgenstein’s belief that the business of language is to state facts—as well as selecting the most direct & uncontroversial relation between a language and its world of referents. The latter, I iterate & stress, is simply the relation of mirror to mirrored; and the criterion by which to judge the perspicuity of a statement is entirely & only its fidelity to that feature of the world it denotes: q.v. W’s “The statement is a picture of the fact.”17 Now, technically, the Russellian logic that comprises language’s Big Picture consists all & only of 3 things: simple logical connectives like “and,” “or,” & “not”; propositions or “statements”; & a view of these statements as “atomic,” meaning that the truth or falsity of a complex statement like “Ludwig is affable and Bertrand is well-dressed” depends entirely on the truth value of its constituent atomic propositions—the prenominate molecular proposition is true if & only if it is true that Ludwig is friendly and it is true that Bertrand is dapper. The atomic propositions that are language’s building blocks are, for both Russell and Wittgenstein, “logically independent” of one another: they do not affect one another’s truth values, only the values of those logical molecules in which they’re conjoined—e.g., “L is cheerful or B is well-heeled,” “It is not the case that if B is wealthy then L is cheerful,” etc. Except here’s the kicker: since language is & must be the world’s mirror, the world is metaphysically composed only & entirely of those “facts” that statements stand for. In other words—the words of the Tractatus’s first & foremost line—the world is everything that is the case; the world is nothing but a huge mass of data, of logically discrete facts that have no intrinsic connection to one another. C.f. the Tractatus 1.2: “The world falls apart into facts…” 1.21: “Any one [fact] can either be the case, or not be the case, and everything else remains the same.”

  Mr. T. Pynchon, who has done in literature for paranoia what Sacher-Masoch did for whips, argues in his Gravity’s Rainbow for why the paranoid delusion of complete & malevolent connection, wacko & unpleasant though it be, is preferable at least to its opposite—the conviction that nothing is connected to anything else & that nothing has anything intrinsically to do with you. Please see that this Pynchonian contraparanoia would be the appropriate metaphysic for any resident of the sort of world the Tractatus describes. And Markson’s Kate lives in just such a world, while her objectless epistle “mirrors” it perfectly, manages to capture the psychic flavor both of solipsism and of Wittgenstein in the simple & affectless but surreal prose & the short aphoristic paragraphs that are also so distinctive of the Tractatus. Kate’s textual obsession is simply to find connections between things,18 any strands that bind the historical facts & empirical data that are all her world comprises. And always—necessarily—genuine connections elude her. All she can find is an occasional synchronicity: the fact that certain names are similar enough to be richly confusing—William Gaddis and Taddeo Gaddi, for example—or that certain lives & events happened to overlap in space & time. And even these fairly thin connections turn out not to be “real,” features only of her imagination; and even these are nonetheless isolate, locked into themselves by their status as fact. When Kate recalls, for example, that Rembrandt suffered bankruptcy & Spinoza excommunication, and that, given biographical data, their paths may well have intersected at some point in the Amsterdam of the 1650s, the only encounter she can even imagine between them is

  “I’m sorry about your bankruptcy, Rembrandt.”

  “I’m sorry about your excommunication, Spinoza.”

  The basic argument here is that Mr. Markson, by drawing on a definitive atomistic metaphysics and transfiguring it into art, has achieved something like the definitive anti-melodrama. He has made facts sad. For Kate’s existence itself is that of an atomic fact, her loneliness metaphysically ultimate. Her world is “empty” of all but data that are like the holes in a reticular pattern, both defined & imprisoned by the epistemic strands she knows only she can weave. And weave she does, constantly, unable to stop, self-consciously mimicking Penelope of the Attic antiquity that obsesses her. But Kate—unlike Ulysses’s legit mistress—is powerless either to knit intrinsic pattern into or to dismantle what her mind has fabricated. She ends up, here, not Penelope but both Clytemnestra & Agamemnon, the Clytemnestra whom Kate describes as killing Agamemnon “after her own grief,” the Agamemnon “at his bath, ensnared in that net and being stabbed through it.” And since no things present connect either with each other or with her, Kate’s memorial project in WM is sensible & inevitable even as it reinforces the occluded solipsism that is her plight. Via her memorial project Kate makes “external” history her own. I.e., rewrites it as personal. Eats it, as mad van Gogh “tried to eat his own pigments.” It is not accidental that Mr. Markson’s novel opens with the Genetic prepositional “In the beginning…” It is neither colorful tic nor authorial pretension that the narrator’s “irreverent meditations” range from classical prosody to Dutch oils to Baroque quartets to nineteenth-century French Realism to post-Astroturf baseball. It is not an accident (th
ough it is an allusion) that Kate has a fetish for feeding the warp & woof of tragic history into fires—she is the final historian, its tragedian and destructor, cremating each page of Herodotus (the 1st historian!) as she reads it. Nor is it cute or casual that she feels “as if I have been appointed the curator of all the world…,” living in museums and placing her own paintings next to masterworks. The curator’s job—to recall, choose, arrange: to impose order & so communicate meaning—is marvelously synecdochic of the life of the solipsist, of the survival strategies apposite one’s existence as monad in a world of diffracted fact.

  Except a big question is: whence facts, if the world is “empty”?

  Dalkey Archive Press’s jacket copy for WM describes the solipsism of the Mistress as “obviously a metaphor for ultimate loneliness.” And Kate is indeed awfully lonely, though her ingenuous announcements—“Generally, even then, I was lonely”—are less effective by far than the deep-nonsensical facts via which she communicates isolation’s meaning—“One of those things people generally admired about Rubens, even if they were not always aware of it, was the way everybody in his paintings was always touching everybody else”; “Later today I will possibly masturbate”; “Pascal… refusing to sit on a chair without an additional chair at either side of him, so as not to fall into space.” Though for me the most affecting rendition of her situation is Kate’s funnysad descriptions of trying to play tennis without a partner,19 probably the most fecund symbols of Kate’s damnation to a world logically atomized in its reflective relation to language as bare data-transfer concern the narrator’s obsession, marvelously American, with property & easements & houses. The following excerpt is condensed:

  I do not believe I have ever mentioned the other house.

  What I may have mentioned are houses in general, along the beach, but such a generalization would not have included this house, this house [unlike Kate’s own] being nowhere near the water.

  All one can see of it from [my] upper rear window is a corner of its roof.…

  Once I did become aware of it, I understood that there would also have to be a road leading to it from somewhere, of course.

  Yet for the life of me I was not able to locate the road, and for the longest time.…

  In any case my failure to locate the road eventually began to become a wholly new sort of perplexity in my existence.20

  It’s of course tempting, given the critical imposition of Wittgenstein as referent & model & lover, to read Kate’s loneliness as itself an intellectual metaphor, as just a function of the radical skepticism the Tractatus’s logical atomism itself imagines. Because, again, whence and wherefore the all-important “facts” that, for both Wittgenstein & Kate, the world “falls apart into”21 but does NOT comprise? Are facts—genuine existents—intrinsic to the Exterior? admitting of countenance only via the frailties of sense-data & induction? Or, way worse, are they not perhaps perversely deductive, products of the very head that countenances them as Exterior facts & as such genuinely ontic? This latter possibility—if internalized, really believed—is a track that makes stops at skepticism & then solipsism before heading straight into insanity. It’s the latter possibility that informs the neurasthenia of Descartes’s Meditations & so births modern philosophy (and with it the distinctively modern “alienation” of the individual from all wholes natural & social). Kate flirts with this Cartesian nightmare repeatedly, as in:

  What happened after I started to write about Achilles was that halfway through the sentence I began to think about a cat, instead.22

  The cat I began to think about instead was the cat outside of the broken window in the room next to this one, at which the tape frequently scratches when there is a breeze.

  Which is to say that I was not actually thinking about a cat either, there being no cat except insofar as the sound of scratching reminds me of one.

  As there were no coins on the floor of Rembrandt’s studio, except insofar as the configuration of the pigment reminded Rembrandt of them.23

  The thing is that the painted coins that fooled Rembrandt, & Rembrandt, & Achilles, too, are all just like “the cat” here: Mr. Markson’s narrator has nothing left except “sounds of scratching”—i.e., memory & imagination & the English language—with which to construct any sort of Exterior. Its flux is that of Kate’s own head; why it resists order or population is attributable to the very desperation with which Kate tries to order & populate it: her search’s fevered pathos ensures dissatisfaction. Note that by page 63, after the shine of metaphysical scrupulousness has faded, Kate goes back to talking about the unreal cat as real. The big emotional thing is that, whether her treatment of linguistic constructs as existents is out of touch with reality or simply an inevitable response to reality, the solipsistic nature of that reality, as far as Kate’s concerned, remains unchanged. A double-bind to make Descartes, Shakespeare, & Wittgenstein all proud.

  Still, as I read and appreciate WM, more is at stake for Kate in countenancing the possibility that her own “errors” are all that keep the world extant than questions of metaphysics or even of madness. Kate’s pretty sanguine about the possibility of insanity—admits she’s been mad, before, at times, “times out of mind.” Actually, what are finally at stake here seem to be issues of ethics, of guilt & responsibility. One of the things that putatively so tortured Wittgenstein in the twenty years between the Tractatus and the Investigations was that a logically atomistic metaphysics admits exactly nothing of ethics or moral value or questions about what it is to be human. It’s history that Wittgenstein the person cared deeply about what made things good or right or worthwhile. He did things like volunteer for the Austrian infantry in 1918, when he could & should have 4F’d out; like give his huge personal inheritance away to people, Rilke among them. A deadly serious ascetic, Wittgenstein lived his adult life in bare rooms devoid of even a lamp or coccyx-neutral chair. But it was no accident that the Tractatus, very much the product of the same Vienna that birthed “… two of the most powerful & symptomatic movements of modern culture: psychoanalysis and atonal music, both voices that speak of the homelessness of modern man,”24 nevertheless itself birthed the Vienna Circle & the philosophical school of Logical Positivism the Circle promulgated: a central tenet of Positivism being that the only utterances that made any sense at all were the well-formed data-transferring propositions of science, thus that considerations of “value” such as those of ethics or aesthetics or normative prescription were really just a confused mishmash of scientific observation and emotive utterance, such that saying “Killing is not right” really amounts just to saying “Killing: YUCK!” The fact that the metaphysics of the Tractatus not only couldn’t take account of but pretty much denied the coherent possibility of things like ethics, values, spirituality, & responsibility had the result that “Wittgenstein, this clearheaded & intellectually honest man, was hopelessly at odds with himself.”25 For Wittgenstein was a queer sort of ascetic. He did deny his body & starve his senses—except not, as with most monkish personalities, simply to enjoy a consequent nourishment of the spirit. His big thing seems to have been denying his self by denying, through his essays at philosophical truth, the things most important to him. He never actually wrote anything about the exquisite tensions between atomism & attendant solipsism on the one hand & distinctively human values & qualities on the other. But, see, this is exactly what Mr. Markson does in WM; and in this way Markson’s novel succeeds in speaking where Wittgenstein is mute, weaving Kate’s obsession with responsibility (for the world’s emptiness) gorgeously into the character’s mandala of cerebral conundrum & spiritual poverty.

  From this one of the specular vantages WM demands, Kate’s central identification with the “fact” of historical personage is with Helen of Troy/Hisarlik—the Face That Launched 1,000 Ships & the body that lay behind the Trojan War’s impressive casualty-count.26 And the vehicle for this identification with Helen is a distinctively female sense of “responsibility”: like The Iliad’s Helen, Ka
te is haunted by the passive sense that “everything is her fault.” And Kate’s repeated attempts at defending Helen against the charge of instigating exactly what emptied Ionia of men have a compulsive & shrill insistence about them that bespeak protesting too much: