David Wallace - Both Flesh and Not - Essays

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-transfer 13with 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 . 14The 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 s oactatus 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, 16much 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, Iiterate & 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.” 17Now, 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 ” but a 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, 18any 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 “Inof tional 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.