David Wallace - Both Flesh and Not - Essays

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.’ ” 44Also 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 attribute 45; 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 aonsis writ 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, 46renders 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 exist 48

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 un attainability 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” 49it 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.” 50This 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 idea 51; 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

carnelian—pale to deep red / reddish-brown carnet—book of postage stamps caryatid—architecture: a supporting column sculptured into a draped woman Casanova de Seingalt—full name of Casanova the lover casuistry—specious or excessively subtle reasoning intended to rationalize or mislead casus belli—provocation or excuse for war catabolism—break down of complex molecules into simple ones catadromous—living in freshwater but migrating to sea to breed; could say of a guy who goes to Florida or CA to have debauches as a catadromous guy catalase—enzyme that causes hydrogen peroxide to decompose into water and oxygen catalpa—type of Midwest tree w/long pods catamenia—menses catamite—boy who has sex with a man catamount—mountain lion cataplasm—poultice catenary—inverse parabolic; imagine curve of wire hung by endpoints (phone wires) catkin—drooping, non-petaled flowers as in willows, birches, oaks celadon—pale to very pale green celiac(adj.) — pertaining to abdomen or abdominal cavity cellar ette—liquor cabinet cenacle—a clique or circle, especially of writers; small dining room on second floor cenotaph—monument erected to dead person whose remains are elsewhere cerements—burial garments certes(archaic adv.) — certainly, truly chamfer(v.) — to bevel, cut the edge off; “chamfered,” “chamfering” (the chamfering on wood edge, etc.) chamfron—armor for medieval horse’s head charcuterie—sausage, bologna: processed meat stuff, or a deli proffering such stuff charnel—repository for bodies; related to death in general: “a charnelodor” chemotropism—movement or growth of organism in response to chemical stimulus chenille—fabric cords of silk or cotton, used for embroidery, fringing, bedspreads, rugs cheval glass—a long mirror mount ed on swivels in a frame chinch(n.) — bedbug chine—backbone or spine of animal / cut of meat including the backbone chivvy(v.) — to vex or harass with petty attacks chlamydia—also causes conjunctivitis in cattle and sheep chloasma—patchy brown skin discoloration on woman’s face caused by hormonal changes, usually pregnancy chromo—prefix meaning color: “chromoplast” cicatrix—area of nasty scar tissue cinerarium—place for keeping ashes of a cremated body cinnabar—red pigment gotten from mercury ore circumvallate(adj.) — surrounded by a rampart citrine—light to moderate olive color clabber—curdled milk; to make (cloud) motions resembling curdling clarkia—show plants w/lovely blossoms clathrate—having a latticelike structure: e.g., clathrate foliage clement—good (w/r/t weather) clepsydra—ancient device that measured time by marking the regulated flow of water through a small opening clerestory—upper part of wall containing windows to supply natural light to building clerisy—the literati; educated people as a class clevis—two-holed fastening device not unlike “hasp” and “staple” clinometer—device for measuring slope, angle of elevation… used in surveying ch surveystrong>cloaca — sewer or latrine clochard—tramp, vagrant