Except art, is the thing. Serious, real, conscientious, aware, ambitious art is not a grey thing. It has never been a grey thing and it is not a grey thing now. This is why fiction in a grey time may not be grey. And why the titles of all but one or two of the best works of Neiman Marcus Nihilism are going to induce aphasia quite soon in literate persons who read narrative art for what makes it real.
And, besides an unfair acquaintance with many young writers who are not yet Conspicuous and so not known to you, this is why I’d be willing to bet anything at least a couple and maybe a bunch of the Whole New Generation are going to make art, maybe make great art, maybe even make great art change. One thing about the Young you can trust in 1987: if we’re willing to devote our lives to something, you can rest assured we get off on it. And nothing has changed about why writers who don’t do it for the money write: it’s art, and art is meaning, and meaning is power: power to color cats, to order chaos, to transform void into floor and debt into treasure. The best “Voices of a Generation” surely know this already; more, they let it inform them. It’s quite possible that none of the best are yet among the Conspicuous. A couple might even be… autodidacts. But, especially now, none of them need worry. If fashion, flux, and academy make for thin milk, at least that means the good stuff can’t help but rise. I’d get ready.
— 1988
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bistre—yellowish-brown color (unpleasant underwear) bittern—wading bird like plover blepharitis—inflammation of eyelids (trailer-park out-break of blepharitis) blepharospasm—spasmodic winking from eyelid muscle spasm blucher—a high shoe or half boot blue law—city law restricnsp law reting Sunday activities like retail shopping, bars bolo—long heavy Philippine machete borborygmus—gurgling sounds in digestive tract boreal (adj.) — of or relating to the north, northern bort—poorly crystallized diamond used in industry bosky—having an abundance of trees, bushes, shrubs bowline—a knot forming a loop that does not slip brachycephalic—having a short, almost round head, the width at least 80 % of the length brachydactylic—having short fingers or toes brachylogy—brief, concise speech; shortened, condensed phrase and/or expression bracken—tough weedy fern that overgrows untended land brail—small net for bringing fish onto boat brattice—partition in mine; breastwork erected during siege brickbat—unfavorable remark, criticism bricolage—something (like decor) made of whatever happens to be available brioche—light-textured egg-white bread shaped into huge bun; “woman’s hair like a brioche” brisance—shattering effect of release of energy in an explosion brisket—chest of an animal / ribs and meat taken from chest of animal cachou—a pastille used to sweeten breath cacoethes—mania or irresistible compulsion cadelle—small black ish beetle that destroys grain cadent (adj.) — having rhythm or cadence caduceus—medical emblem: snakes twined around stick caducity—frailty of old age, senility Caesar non supra grammaticos—saying: “Even Caesar is not above grammar/grammarians” calando—music: gradual decrease in tempo and volume calcar—spur or spurlike projection caldera—large crater formed by volcanic explosion or volcanic collapse calenture—tropical fever once believed caused by the heat callipygian—having beautiful buttocks calumet—long-stemmed ceremonial pipe for U.S. Indians camber—slightly arched surface, like road or snow ski; setting of car’s wheels in chassis so they’re closer at the bottom than at the top camelopard—giraffe; heraldic figure that’s giraffe with curved horns camisole—woman’s sleeveless undergarment usually worn under sheer blouse cannelure—groove around the cylinder of a bullet cannula—a tube with a trocar at one end that’s inserted in body to remove fluid or dispense meds, like an IV canthus—angle formed by upper and lower eyelids meeting; see “epicanthal fold” canticle—religious hymn or chant w/o meter and lyrics from Bible cantonment—temporary quarters for troops cantrip (n.) — usually Scottish: a witch’s spell or trick; a sham or fraud or deceptive move capri pants—tight women’s slacks that go only to calves and have slit along calves; Mary Tyler Moore’s perennial pants on Dick Van Dyke Show capriole—trained horse move: jump without going forward, kicking rear legs out carina—keel-shaped ridge or structure, e.g., breastbone of bird; q.v. “carinated” carnassial—adapted for tearing flesh; “carnassial teeth”
THE EMPTY PLENUM: DAVID MARKSON’S WITTGENSTEIN’S MISTRESS
But what other philosopher has found the antidote to illusion in the particular and repeated humility of rechamembering and tracking the uses of humble words, looking philosophically as it were beneath our feet rather than over our heads?
There is nobody at the window in the painting of the house, by the way.
I have now concluded that what I believed to be a person is a shadow.
If it is not a shadow, it is perhaps a curtain.
As a matter of fact it could actually be nothing more than an attempt to imply depths, within the room.
Although in a manner of speaking all that is really in the window is burnt sienna pigment. And some yellow ochre.
In fact there is no window either, in that same manner of speaking, but only shape.
So that any few speculations I may have made about the person at the window would therefore now appear to be rendered meaningless, obviously.
Unless of course I subsequently become convinced that there is somebody at the window all over again.
I have put that badly.
— Wittgenstein’s Mistress, pp. 54–55
Tell them I have had a wonderful life.
— Wittgenstein on deathbed, 1951
CERTAIN NOVELS NOT ONLY cry out for what we call “critical interpretations” but actually try to help direct them. This is probably analogous to a piece of music that both demands and defines the listener’s movements, say, like a waltz. Frequently, too, the novels that direct their own critical reading concern themselves thematically with what we might consider highbrow or intellectual issues — stuff proper to art, engineering, antique lit., philosophy, etc. These novels carve out for themselves an interstice between flat-out fiction and a sort of weird cerebral roman à clef. When they fail they’re pretty dreadful. But when they succeed, as I claim David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress does, they serve the vital and vanishing function of reminding us of fiction’s limitless possibilities for reach and grasp, for making heads throb heartlike, and for sanctifying the marriages of cerebration & emotion, abstraction & lived life, transcendent truth-seeking & daily schlepping, marriages that in our happy epoch of technical occlusion and entertainment-marketing seem increasingly consummatable only in the imagination. Books I tend to associate with this INTERPRET-ME phenomenon include stuff like Candide, Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos, Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, Sartre’s Nausea, Camus’s The Stranger. These five are works of genius of a particular kind: they shout their genius. Mr. Markson, in Wittgenstein’s Mistress, tends rather to whisper, but his w.o.g.’s no less successful; nor — particularly given the rabid anti-intellectualism of the contemporary fiction scene — seems it any less important. It’s become an important book to me, anyway. I’d never heard of this guy Markson, before, in ’88. And have, still, read nothing else by him. I ordered the book mostly because of its eponymous title; I like to fancy myself a fan of the mind-bending work of its namesake. Clearly the book was/is in some way “about” Wittgenstein, given the title. This is one of the ways an INTERPRET-ME fiction clues the critical reader in about what the book’s to be seen as on a tertiary level “about”: the title: Ulysses’s title, its structure as Odyssean/Telemachean map (succeeds); Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem (really terrible); Cortázar’s Hopscotch (succeeds exactly to the extent that one ignores the invitation to hop around in it); Burroughs’s Queer and Junkie (fail successfully (?)). W/r/t novels like these it’s often hard to see the difference between a title and an epigraph, except for quotidian facts like the latter’s longer, overter, & attributed. Another way to invite a kind of correspondence-interpretation is to drop the name of a real person like bricks throughout text, as Bruce Duffy does in his so-called “fictional” biography of Wittgenstein, the execrable 1988 The World As I Found It, in which, despite loud “this-is-made-up” disclaimers, Duffy brings to bear such an arsenal of historical fact and allusion that the critical reader can’t but confuse the homosexuality-crazed fictional “Wittgenstein” with the real and way more complex & interesting Wittgenstein. Another way for a novel to linearize its reading is to make an intellectual shibboleth serve a repetitive narrative function: e.g., in Candide, Pangloss’s continual “All for the best in the best of all possible worlds” is a neon sign out front of what is, except for its end, little more than a poisonously funny parody of the metaphysics of Leibniz.1