David Wallace - Both Flesh and Not - Essays

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 Investigation ary speculations on adhesive vs. magnetic “tape” that unequivocally summon the later Wittgenstein’s concerns over words’ “family resemblances” 2to 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, 3w/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 Tractatus ized 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. 4But 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 posf senselimits manages somehow to “show” what cannot ordinarily be “expressed.” Good comedy often functions the same way. 5So does good advertising, today. 6So 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, 7of 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.” 8Kate 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.” 9The 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. 10The 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. Kates 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. 11He 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, 12she 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.