David Wallace - Both Flesh and Not - Essays

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 objectification 37indisposed 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 mytn snce with-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 tothi> amoun 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. 38Two. 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 community 39… 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, 40one not just “flowing” but doing so somehow external to us, outside the things & changes of which time is really just the measure. 41Or 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” 42that, 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.” 43The 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 & communicatimul communon among persons imposes… or costs.