David Wallace - Both Flesh and Not - Essays

1 Hereafter abbreviated “C.Y.”

2 These words are capitalized because they understand themselves as capitalized. Trust me on this.

3 On these, too: they are to Programs what azan are to mosques.

4 Only considerations of space and legal liability restrain me from sharing with you in detail the persistent legend, at one nameless institution, of the embalmed cadaver cadged from the medical school by two deeply troubled young M.F.A. candidates, enrolled in a workshop as their proxy, smuggled pre-bell into the seminar room each week, and propped in its assigned seat, there to clutch a pencil in its white fist and stare straight ahead with an expression of somewhat rigid good cheer. The name of the legend is “The Cadaver That Got a B.”

5 Take your pick of Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, or Richards and insert “feeling,” “freedom from phenomena,” or “relevant mental condition,” respectively, in the space provided.

1 … which succumbs to the hazard of most parody and gets the point of Leibniz’s best-of-all-possible-worlds stuff totally wrong.

2 The word Wittgenstein uses as an example of family resemblance is “game”: i.e., what do soccer, Monopoly, and solitaire, for all their differences, have in common by virtue of which they all correctly take the same four-letter predicate? [ Philosophical Grammar, pp.75, 118]

3 Hereafter abbreviated WM

4 viz. Amy Hempel, minimalist ordinaire, in the Review ’s 22 May 1988 encyclical.

5 Q.v. “Who’s on First?”

6 Q.v. Audi’s ’89 slogan for print adverts: “IT SETS THE STANDARD BY IGNORING IT.”

7 A distinction of Frege, a Wittgenstein-era titan: to mention a word or phrase is to speak about it, w/at least implicit quotation marks: e.g., “Kate” is a four-letter name; to use a word or phrase is to mention its referent: e.g., Kate is by default the main character of Wittgenstein’s Mistress.

8 Unless you can empty your head of connotation and translate the word literally from the Attic Greek — then it probably has a Marksonian poignancy no other term would have…

9 The ep. is “What an extraordinary change takes place… when for the first time the fact that everything depends upon how a thing is thought first enters the consciousness, when, in consequence, thought in its absoluteness replaces an apparent reality.”… from “The Task of Becoming Subjective” in the Postscript —maybe worth noting that the form of “change” in the Danish is accusative rather than nominative & that what Markson renders as “extraordinary” appears in some other translations as “terrible” or “of thoroughgoing fear.”

10 … maybe Beckett in Molloy …

11 He pretty obviously never could have had a daughter, either. But he did have intellectual “heirs,” and Wittgenstein’s Daughter would have Kate seem like one — too simple, linear, for so complex a character or her relations to masters. Plus “daughter,” unlike “mistress,” fails to convey the exquisite loneliness of being the linguistic beloved of a man who could not, in emotional practice, confer identity on a woman via his love.

12 … though she never says what’s true: that it was at first for a particular person, her husband, then only eventually for just anyone at all…

13 (data transferred to herself, or her self-consciousness, or to whoever may come down the pike, or to both herself and someone else, or to neither, or maybe all that’s supposed to be left here is the sand of text, awaiting tides)

14 Hereafter abbreviated Tractatus, and the equally famous 1953 Philosophical Investigations just the Investigations, as it’s known in the industry, or PI.

15 E.g., “What is the use of studying philosophy,” Wittgenstein wrote to a U.S. student while working on the Investigations in 1946, “if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc. and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life?”

16 Scholars tend to schizofy Wittgenstein, counterposing the early” W of the Tractatus and the “late” W of the Investigations, The Blue and Brown Books, and Philosophical Grammar.

17 See the Tractatus; emphasis supplied.

18 this connection-urge more fundamental and scary than the humanistic syrup of Howard’s End ’s “Only connect”: the latter refers to relations between persons, the former to the possibility of any extracranial universe at all…

19 plus continual reference to bunches of tennis balls bouncing all over the place made me realize tennis balls are about the best macroscopic symbol there is for the flux of atomistic fact…

20 pp. 88&89

21 Tractatus 1.2

22 Since I can’t find any more graceful place to stick it in, let me invite you, with this line as exemplar, to see another cool formal horizon-expansion Mr. Markson effects in WM —the mode of presentation is less “stream of consciousness” than “stream of conscious utterance ”; Markson’s technique here shares the associative qualities of Joycean S.O.C. but differs in being “directed” : at what or whom it’s directed becomes the novel’s implicit, or anti-, plot, & accounts for a “narrative movement” that’s less linear or even circular than spiral.

23 p.62

24 See William Barrett, “Wittgenstein the Pilgrim,” in The Illusion of Technique, Doubleday ’78.

25 Dr. James D. Wallace, unpublished response to his son’s cries for help with Wittgenstein’s Mistress and Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus .

26 Also true that Kate identifies closely with Penelope, Clytemnestra, Eve, Agamemnon, & particularly Cassandra, the mad prophetess who warned about armed men inside empty gifts. But Iebrets.entim thinking Cassandra’s importance is more a function of Kate’s self-consciousness about her own identification with Helen and feminine culpability, about which more below.

27 (the same period of time Kate spent traversing the ancient & modern empty worlds, flopping in museums and “looking” for people)

28 p.59, c.f. 8–9, 22

29 Evidently pretty close for readers: over half the reviews of WM when it came out misnamed the narrator Helen.

30 This is not my analogy, but I can’t think of a better one, even though this isn’t all that good; but I see the point & trust you do — it’s one of those alarm-bell issues where the narrative voice is clearly communicating to a reader while pretending not to, as in like “Lord, Cragmont, the vermilion of your MOTHER tattoo is looking even more lurid against the dead-white of your prison pallor now that the circulation’s returned to the legs you smashed trying to outrun a 74-car grain train in Decatur IL that balmy yet somehow also chill night in 1979”—“clunky” is the best analysis for stuff like this.

31 Q.v. in this respect:

After he knew that he had fallen, outward & down, away from the Fullness, he tried to remember what the Fullness had been….

He did remember, but found he was silent, & could not tell others .

He wanted to tell others that she leapt farthest forward & fell into a Passion apart from his embrace .

She was in great agony, & would have been swallowed up by the sweetness, had she not reached a limit, & stopped.

But the Passion went on without her , & passed beyond the limit .

Sometimes he thought he was about to speak, but the silence continued .

He wished to say: strengthless & female fruit .

— w/emphasis supplied, from Valentinus’s AD 199 Pleroma, part of the Neo-Platonic Gnosticism that functions as a metaphysical counterpoint to the anti-idealism of the Tractatus, & signals nicely Markson’s artistic ambivalence about whether Kate’s bind is ultimately Hellenic or Evian.