THE EMPTY PLENUM: DAVID MARKSON’S WITTGENSTEIN’S MISTRESS

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.

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 (though 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, Kate 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:

I have always harbored sincere doubts that Helen was the cause of that war, by the way.

A single Spartan girl, after all.

As a matter of fact the whole thing was undeniably a mercantile proposition. All ten years of it,²⁷ just to see who would pay tariff to whom, so as to be able to make use of a channel of water….

Still, I find it extraordinary that young men died there in a war that long ago, and then died in the same place three thousand years after that.²⁸

Issues orbiting Helen & femininity & guilt mark a sort of transition in this novel & its reading. Have I yet mentioned that a notable feature of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, male-written, is that the novel’s composed entirely of the words of a female character? And it is in terms of gender & authenticity, I think, that Mr. Markson’s book becomes at once least perfect & most interesting. Most 1988ish. Most important as not just a literary transposition of a philosophic position but also a transcendence of received doctrine. Here Descartes & Kant & Wittgenstein cease being overt critical touchstones and become springboards for a flawed, moving meditation on loneliness, language, & gender.

See, Helen is “guilty” finally not because of anything she’s done but because of who she is, how she appears, what she looks like; because of the effect she has, hormonally/emotionally, on men who’re ready to kill & die over what they’re made to feel. Kate, like Helen, is haunted by an unspoken but oppressive sense that “… everything is her [own] fault.” What everything? How close is she to the Helen she invokes?²⁹

Well, first off, it’s easy to see how radical skepticism—Descartes’s hell & Kate’s vestibule—yields at once omnipotence and moral oppression. If the World is entirely a function of Facts that not only reside in but hail from one’s own head, one is just as Responsible for that world as is a mother for her child, or herself. This seems straightforward. But what’s less clear & way richer is the peculiar slant “omniresponsibility” takes when the responsible monad in question is historically passive, per- & conceived as an object and not a subject—i.e., when one is a woman, one who can effect change & cataclysm not as an agent but merely as a perceived entity… perceived by historically active testosteroids whose glands positively gush with agency. To be an object of desire (by hirsute characters), speculation (by hirsute author), oneself the “product” of male heads & shafts is to be almost Classically feminized, less Eve than Helen, responsible without freedom to choose, act, forbear. The (my) terribly blanket assumption here is that received perceptions of women as moral agents divide into those of Hellenic and those of Evian (Eve-ish) responsibility; the claim I can support is that Markson, despite his worst intentions, manages to triumph over 400 years of post-Miltonic tradition and to present the Hellenic as the more poignant—certainly more apposite—situation of women in any system where appearance remains a “picture” or “map” of ontology. This presentation seems neither pre-nor post-feminist: it’s just darned imaginative, ingenious even, and as such—despite failures of authorial vision & nerve—flies or falls on its own merits.

The degree of success with which Mr. Markson has here rendered the voice & psyche & predicament of a female, post-Positivist or otherwise, is a vexed issue. Some of the fiction I try to write is in feminine voice, and I consider myself sensitive to the technical/political problems involved in “crosswriting,” and I found the female persona here compelling & real. Some female readers on whom I’ve foisted WM report finding it less so. They objected not so much to the voice & syntax (both of which are great in WM in a way I can’t demonstrate except by quoting like twenty pages verbatim) as to some of the balder ways Mr. Markson goes about continually reminding the reader that Kate is a woman. The constant reference to Kate’s menses, for example, was cited as clunky. Menstruation does come up a lot, & for reasons that remain narratively obscure; and if it isn’t a clunky allusion to Passion or martyrdom then it’s an equally clunky (because both unsubtle & otiose) reminder of gender: yes, women are persons whose vaginas sometimes bleed, but repeating & dwelling on it reminds one of bad science fiction where aliens are making continual reference to cranial antennae that—were they & the narrative voice truly alien/alien-empathetic—would be as unquestioned & quotidian a fact of life as ears or noses or hair.³⁰ Personally I’m neutral on the menstruation point. What I’m negative on is the particular strategy Markson sometimes employs to try to explain Kate’s “female” feelings both of ultimate guilt & of ultimate loneliness. The “realistic” or character-based explanation is not, thank God, just that Kate’s been left in the emotional lurch by all sorts of objectifying men, psychic abandoners who range from her husband (variously named by her Simon or Terry or sometimes Adam) to her final lover, univocally called Lucien. The proffered explanation is rather that, back in the halcyon pre-Fall days when the world was humanly populated, Kate betrayed her husband with other men, and that subsequently her little boy (variously Simon or, gulp, again Adam) died, in Mexico, possibly of TB, and that then her husband left her, about ten years ago, “time out of mind,” at the same psychohistorical point at which Kate’s world emptied and the diasporic quest for anyone else alive in the world at all commenced, a search that led Kate to the empty beach where she now resides and declaims to no one. Her betrayals & her son’s death & husband’s departure—alluded to over & over, albeit coyly—are the Evian diagnosis of her transgression & metaphysical damnation; they’re presented, with an insistence impossible to ignore, as Kate’s Fall³¹ across gender, a Fall from the graces of a community in which she is both agent & object³² into post-Romantic Wittgensteinian world of utter subjectivity & pathological responsibility, into the particular intellectual/emotional/moral isolation a 1988 U.S. reader associates with men, males alienated via agency from an Exterior we have to objectify, use up, burn the pages of in order to remain subjects, ontologically secure in shield & shaft. All this stuff I find fecund & compelling, a pregnant marriage of Attic & Christian reductions of women. But the death of her son & separation from her husband are also in WM presented as a very particular emotional “explanation” of Kate’s psychic “condition,” a peculiar reduction of Mr. Markson’s own to which I kind of object. The presentation of personal history as present explanation, one that threatens to make WM just another madwoman monologue in the Ophelia–Rhys tradition, is oblique & ever artful, but still prominent & insistent enough to make it hard (for me) to blink its intent:

Possibly [I was not mad] before that. [When I went south] To visit at the grave of a child I had lost… named Adam.

Why have I written that his name was Adam?

Simon is what my little boy was named.

Time out of mind. Meaning that one can even momentarily forget the name of one’s only child, who would be thirty by now?³³

As a matter of fact I believe it was when I went back to Mexico, that I [gessoed a blank canvas & then stared at it for a long time & then burned it]. In the house where I had once lived with Simon, and with Adam.

I am basically positive that my husband [Simon/Terry] was named Adam.³⁴

There is no longer any problem in regard to my husband’s name, by the way. Even if I never saw him again, once we separated after Simon died.³⁵

Although probably I did leave out this part before, about having taken lovers when I was still Adam’s wife.³⁶

Apparently Shiite women walk swaddled & veiled in deference to their responsibility to be invisible & so keep poor barely-keeping-it-together males from being maddened by exposure to fair sexuality. I find in WM the same complex & scary blend of Hellenic & Evian misogyny—Helen essentially guilty as object & Eve guilty as subject, temptress. Though I personally find the Hellenic component more interesting & a better easement into contemporary politics, I find Mr. Markson’s vacillation between the two models narratively justified & psychologically neat. It is when, though, he seems to settle on the Evian as both character-archetype & narrative explanation—as the argument traced supra & beyond indicates—that his Wittgenstein’s Mistress becomes most conventional as fiction. It is here, too, that for me the novel falters technically by betraying its authorial presence as thoroughly male, outside Kate &/or womanhood generally. As in most cutting-edge experimental fictions, too, this technical flaw seriously attenuates the thematics. It seems very interesting to me that Mr. Markson has created a Kate who dwells so convincingly in a hell of utter subjectivity, yet cannot, finally, himself help but objectify her—i.e., by “explaining” her metaphysical condition as emotional/psychical, reducing her bottled missive to a mad monologue by a smart woman driven mad by the consequences of culpable sexual agency, Markson is basically subsuming Kate under one of the comparatively stock rubrics via which we guys apparently must organize & process fey mystery, feminine pathos, Strengthless & Female fruit. Kate’s Fall, ostensibly one into the ghastly spiritual manifestation of a masculinely logic-bound twentieth-century metaphysic, becomes under a harsh reading little more than a(n inevitable?) stumble into alienation from the heroine’s role—her self—as mother, wife, lover, beloved. Under this reading Kate’s empty solipsism does not get to become a kind of grim independence from objectification: Kate has rather simply exchanged the role of real wife of real man for the part of nonexistent mistress of an absolute genius of objectification³⁷ indisposed toward heterosexual union. And I found it weird that many of the female readers who disapproved things like WM’s menstruation-cues as “ringing false” nevertheless approved Markson’s provision of Kate’s ostensible “motivation,” here. Though I’m coming to accept that it’s the petrifiedly standard critical line w/r/t fiction these U.S. days: readers want stories about very particular persons with very particular qualities in very particular circumstances whose genesis must on some level be personally-historic & psychological as well as “merely” intellectual or political or spiritual, pan-human. The successful story “transcends” its thoroughgoing individuality/idiosyncrasy via subsuming the peculiarities of character & circumstance to certain broad archetypes & mythopoeia inherited from Jung or Shakespeare or Homer or Freud or Skinner or Testament. Particularity births form; familiarity breeds content. Rarely is our uncritical inheritance of early Wittgensteinian & Logical Positivist models so obvious as in our academic & extra-mural prejudice that successful fiction encloses rather than opens up, organizes facts rather than transcends them, diagnoses rather than genuflects. Attic myths were, yes, forms of “explanation.” But it’s no accident that great mythos was mothered by the same culture that birthed great history—or that Kate divides her reading- & burning-time between classical histories & tragedies. To the extent that myth enriches facts & history, it serves a Positivist & factual function. But the U.S.’s own experience with myth-making & myth-worship—from Washington & cherries to Jackson & hickory to Lincoln & logs to dime novels & West as womb & soul’s theater to etc., etc. to Presley & Dean & Monroe & Wayne & Reagan—an experience that informs & infects the very physics of reading, today—confirms that myth is finally compelling only in its opposition to history & data & the cingulum of Just the Facts, Ma’am. Only in that opposition can story enrich & transfigure & transcend explanation. Kate’s idiosyncratic/formulaic “real” past in WM isn’t weak as an explanation; it is for me weak & disappointing because it’s an explanation. Just as it would have been weak & disappointing to have “explained” & particularized Kate’s feelings of isolation & imprisonment, not via the idea that the typing hands she holds out in search of communion form the very barrier between Self & World they’re trying to puncture, but, say, by plunking her down via shipwreck on a deserted island à la TV’s Gilligan or Golding’s flylord schoolboys or the Police’s top-40 “Message in a Bottle.”

I’m struggling to make clear, I think, that it’s this masculinely prejudiced imperfection that illuminates how important & ambitious WM is as an experimental piece of late-’80s literature. As a would-be writer I like how the novel inverts received formulae for successful fiction by succeeding least where it conforms to them most: to the precise extent that Kate is presented here as circumstantially & historically unique, to just that extent is the novel’s monstrous power attenuated. It’s when Kate is least particular, least “motivated” by some artfully presented but standardly digestible Evian/Valentinian/post-Freudian trauma, that her character & plight are most e- & affecting. For (obvious tho this seems) to the extent that Kate is not motivationally unique, she can be all of us, and the empty diffraction of Kate’s world can map or picture the desacralized & paradoxical solipsism of U.S. persons in a cattle-herd culture that worships only the Transparent I, of guiltily passive solipsists & skeptics trying to warm soft hands at the computer-enhanced fire of data in an Information Age where received image & enforced eros replace active countenance or sacral mystery as ends, value, meaning. Etc. The familiar bitch & moan that Markson’s novel promises & comes close to transfiguring, dramatizing, mythologizing via bland bald fact.

I think finally the reason I object to WM’s attempt to give Kate’s loneliness a particular “motivation” via received feminine trauma is that it’s just unnecessary. For Mr. Markson has in this book succeeded already on all the really important levels of fictional conviction. He has fleshed the abstract sketches of Wittgensteinian doctrine into the concrete theater of human loneliness. In so doing he’s captured far better than pseudobiography what made Wittgenstein a tragic figure & a victim of the very diffracted modernity he helped inaugurate. Markson has written an erudite, breathtakingly cerebral novel whose prose is crystal & whose voice rivets & whose conclusion defies you not to cry. Plus he’s also, in a way it’d seem for all the world he doesn’t know, produced a powerfully critical meditation on loneliness’s relation to language itself.

Though of course any writer’s real motivations are forever occult & objects of at best lucid imagining, it’s safe to point out that the post-atomist metaphysical peripety that is L. Wittgenstein’s late Philosophical Investigations articulates philosophical concerns & assumptions so different from those of the early Tractatus that the PI amounts to less a renunciation than a kind of infanticide-by-bludgeon. For Marksonian purposes, the three important blunt instruments, near-diurnal differences between “early” & “late” Wittgenstein, concern W’s enduring obsession with language-&-reality questions. One. PI now takes as paradigmatic of the language with which philosophers ought to be concerned not the ideal abstraction of math-logic, rather now just ordinary day-to-day language in all its general wooliness & charm.³⁸ Two. The PI’s Wittgenstein expends much energy & ink arguing against the idea of what’s been called “private language.” This term is the Pragmatist William James’s, whom W, not an enemy to welcome, accused of looking forever “for the artichoke amongst its leaves.” But PI’s concern to show the impossibility of private language (which it does, pretty much) is also a terrible anxiety to avoid the solipsistic consequences of mathematical logic as language-paradigm. Recall that the truth-functional schemata of math-logic & the discrete facts the schemata picture exist independent of speakers, knowers, & most of all listeners. PI’s insistence—as part of the book’s movement away from what the world must be like for language to be possible & toward what language must be like given the way the world in all its babble & charm & deep nonsense actually is—that the existence, nay the very idea of language depends on some sort of communicative community³⁹… this is about the most powerful philosophical attack on skeptic-/solipsism’s basic coherence since the Descartes whose Cogito Wittgenstein had helped to skewer. Three. The final big difference is a new & clinical focus on the near-Nixonian trickiness of ordinary language itself. A tenet of the PI is that profound philosophical stuff can be accomplished via figuring out why linguistic constructions get used as they are, & that many/most errors of “metaphysics” or “epistemology” derive from academics’ & humans’ susceptibility to language’s pharmakopia of tricks & deceptions & creations. Late Wittgenstein is full of great examples of how persons are constantly succumbing to the metaphysical “bewitchment” of ordinary language. Getting lost in it. E.g., locutions like “the flow of time” create a kind of ontological UHF-ghost, seduce us into somehow seeing time itself as like a river,⁴⁰ one not just “flowing” but doing so somehow external to us, outside the things & changes of which time is really just the measure.⁴¹ Or the ordinary predicates “game” and “rules,” attached simultaneously to, e.g., jacks & gin rummy & softball & Olympiade, trick us into a specious Platonic universalism in which there is some transcendentally existent feature common to every member of the extensions of “game” or “rule” in virtue of which every member is a “game” or a “rule,” rather than the fluid web of “family resemblances”⁴² that, for Wittgenstein, perfectly justifies the attachment of apparently univocal predicates as nothing more or less than a type of human behavior—rather, that is, than any sort of transcendental reality-mapping. Wittgenstein by life’s end conceived meaningful human brain-activity (i.e., philosophy) as exactly & nothing more than “… a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”⁴³ The PI holds that persons must or at any rate do live in a sort of linguistic dream, awash & enmeshed in ordinary language & the deceptive “metaphysics” linguistic usage & communication among persons imposes… or costs.

The above summary is pretty crude.

But actually, so, on the surface, is Wittgenstein’s Mistress’s use & reconstitution of the PI’s seminal new perspective. Much of the overt master/mistress relation here again involves the resemblance-as-allusion [sic]. Lines in the novel like “Upstairs, one can see the ocean. Down here there are dunes, which obstruct one’s view” are conscious echoes of the PI’s “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.’ ”⁴⁴ Also heavily allusive (sometimes just plain heavy) are Kate’s prolonged musings on the ontological status of named things: she (as would we all) still refers to the house she burned down as a house, but she keeps wondering in what way a destroyed house is still a “house,” except in virtue of language-habits from time out of mind. Or, e.g., she wonders about questions like “Where is the painting when it is in my head instead of on the wall?” & whether, were let’s say no copies of Anna Karenina still extant (unburned) anywhere, the book would still be called Anna Karenina. Or marvels at facts like “One can drive through any number of towns without knowing the names of the towns.”

A little of this narcissistic echo goes a long way, and Markson is sometimes unkind, allusively, on the surface. Again, though, the mistress like the master invites you/me down: what’s ponderous on the first pass opens up later. It’s toss-offs like the last just above that are most interesting as invitations, less allusion to a genius than gauzy prefigures of Markson’s own meditations about & around some of the themes dominant in PI. What first strikes one as heavy or ponderous refines itself after time into a fragile note of resignation—i.e., weltschmerz as opposed to naïveté or hubris—in most of Kate’s speculations on the way a name tends to “create” an object or attribute⁴⁵; albeit on the other hand a twinge of envy whenever she countenances the possibility of things existing without being named or subjected to predication. Why this battle occupies Kate & engages the reader has partly to do with the actual ethical pain that we may assume filled the long silence between the Tractatus and PI, but it’s also attributable to an original & deeply smart exploration by Mr. Markson of something that might be called “the feminization of skepticism.”

Which is probably a bad term to start throwing around in this late inning, since it requires definitions & so on; this is already pretty long.

But recall to this abstraction’s ambit prenominate stuff about Helen & Eve & Cassandra & the Tractatus, plus the longly discussed second half of the double bind that cingulizes solipsism: radical doubt about not only the existence of objects but of subject, self. Kate’s text, acknowledged within itself as writing, is a desperate attempt to re-create & so animate a world by naming it. The attempt’s desperation underlies her near-anal obsession with names—of persons, personages, figures, books, symphonies, battles, towns, & roads—and it accounts for what Markson communicates so well via repetition & tone: Kate’s extreme upset when she can’t remember—“summon,” “recall”—names well enough to make them behave. Her attempts at ontology-thru-nomination are a moving synecdoche of pretty much the whole history of intellectual endeavor in the whitely male West. She, no less than was Wittgenstein, or Kant, or Descartes, or Herodotus, is writing a world. The ingenious poignancy of Markson’s achievement here is that Kate’s modernly female vantage, in conspiracy with the very desperation that underlies her attempt at worldmaking,⁴⁶ renders her project doubly doomed. Doom 1 is what’s evoked on surface: skepticism & solipsism: i.e., that there is no “world” to see itself mirrored in Kate’s text is unhappy enough. But in WM Kate’s memoir itself is “written in sand,” itself subject to the “deterioration”⁴⁷ & dry rot that is such a dominant recurring image in the loops of recollection & assembly here.

I’m going to shut up right after I make this idea clear. I’m pretty sure Wittgenstein’s Mistress is an imperfect book. Questions of voice, over-allusion, & “explanation” get to be aside, though, because of the novel’s terrific emotional & political/fictional & theoretical achievement: it evokes a truth a whole lot of books & essays before it have fumbled around: (at least) for the modern female—viz. the female who understands herself as both female & modern—both sides of the solipsistic bind:

If I exist, nothing exists outside me

But

If something exists outside me, I do not exist⁴⁸

amount to the same thing—damnation to ghostliness among ghosts, curating a plenum of statues, mistaking echoes for voices. And, too, here both binds force on the subject just what her own dramatic predicament forces on Kate: a kind of parodic masculinization, one in which the Romantic Quest for the Absent Object, a desire for attainment w/r/t which unattainability is that desire’s breath & bread, replaces an ability to be-in-the-world as neither center nor cipher, neither all-responsible nor impotent, part of one great big Family Likeness. Markson’s Kate’s sudden loss of interest in roads once she’s found them & data once she’s “mastered”⁴⁹ it is just as clunky & imperfect & human & real as say Stendhal’s rush to wind up The Charterhouse of Parma the minute Fabrizio finally nails Clelia…. And Kate’s valuation, finally, only of what’s unsaid, unread—burning pages once she’s read them, jettisoning family once she’s “responsible” for them; probably even fueling her epistle with the doomed/delicious knowledge that it’s headed toward nothing—summons perfectly, again, the terrible & moving final prescription of the master’s Tractatus. This, loosely translated, is “Anybody who understands what I’m saying eventually recognizes that it’s nonsense, once he’s used what I’m saying—rather like steps—to climb up past what I’m saying—he must, that is, throw away the ladder after he’s used it.”⁵⁰ This passage, like most of W, is only indirectly about what it’s really about. It whispers & plays. It’s really about the plenitude of emptiness, the importance of silence, in terms of speech, on beaches. Markson nails this idea⁵¹; Kate’s monograph has the quality of speechlessness in a dream, the cold muteness urgency enforces, a psychic stutter. If it’s true her ladder goes no place, it’s also true nobody’s going to throw either book away. The end. 7 January ’90. Pax.

—1990