One reason WM whispers, as both a kind of classic and an interpretation-director, is that its charms and stratagems are very indirect. It’s not only a sustained monologue by a person of gender opposite the author’s, it is structured halfway between shaggy-dog joke and deadly serious allegory. A concrete example of how the prose here works appears as the second epigraph supra. Devices like repetition, obsessive return, free-/unfree association swirl in an uneasy suspension throughout. Yet they communicate. This studied indirection, a sustained error that practically compels misprision, is how Kate convinces us that, if she is insane, so must we be: the subtextual emotive agenda under the freewheeling disorder of isolated paragraphs, under the flit of thought, under the continual struggle against the slipping sand of English & the drowning-pool of self-consciousness — a seductive order not only in but via chaos — compels complete & uneasy acquiescence, here. The technique rings as true as a song we can’t quite place. You could call this technique “Deep Nonsense,” meaning I guess a linguistic flow of strings, strands, loops, and quiffs that through the very manner of its formal construction flouts the ordinary cingula of “sense” and through its defiance of sense’s posf senselimits manages somehow to “show” what cannot ordinarily be “expressed.” Good comedy often functions the same way.5 So does good advertising, today.6 So does a surprising amount of good philosophy. So, usually on a far less explicit level than WM’s, can great fiction.
The start of WM has Kate painting messages on empty roads: “Somebody is living in the Louvre,” etc. The messages are for anyone who might come along to see. “Nobody came, of course. Eventually I stopped leaving the messages.” The novel’s end involves the use, not the mention,7 of such a message: “Somebody is living on this beach.” Except use on what &/or whom? It’s probably not right, as I think I did supra, to call this novel’s form a “monologue.”8 Kate is typing it. It’s written & not spoken. Except it’s not like a diary or journal. Nor is it a “letter.” Because of course a letter to whom, if there’s no one else at all? Anyway, it’s self-consciously written. I personally have grown weary of texts that are narrated self-consciously as written, as “texts.” But WM is different from the Barthian/post-Derridean self-referential hosts. Here the conscious rendition of inditement not only rings true but serves essential functions. Kate is not a “writer.” By vocation, apparently, a painter, Kate finds her time at the typewriter thoroughly & terribly avocational. She is shouting into her typing paper’s blankness. Her missive is a function of need, not art — a kind of long message in a big bottle. I need to admit, here, that I have a weird specular stance with respect to this novel’s form as written. I am someone who tries to write, who right now more and more seems to need to write, daily; and who hopes less that the products of that need are lucrative or even liked than simply received, read, seen. WM, in a deep-nonsensical way that’s much more effective than argument or allegory’d be, speaks to why I’m starting to think most people who somehow must write must write. The need to indite, inscribe — be its fulfillment exhilarating or palliative or, as is more usual, neither — springs from the doubly-bound panic felt by most persons who spend a lot of time up in their own personal heads. On one side — the side a philosopher’d call “radically skeptical” or “solipsistic”—there’s the feeling that one’s head is, in some sense, the whole world, when the imagination becomes not just a more congenial but a realer environment than the big Exterior of life on earth. Markson’s book’s first epigraph, from Kierkegaard’s scary Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, invites & imposes this first interpretation of Kate’s bind and its relation to her “typing.”9 The need to get the words & voices not only out—outside the sixteen-inch diameter of bone that both births & imprisons them — but also down, trusting them neither to the insubstantial country of the mind nor to the transient venue of cords & air & ear, seems for Kate — as for anyone from a Flaubert to a diarist to a letter-fiend — a necessary affirmation of an outside, some Exterior one’s written record can not only communicate with but inhabit. Picasso, harking to Velázquez as does Markson to Kierkegaard & Wittgenstein, did big things for the idea of visual artworks as not just representations but also things, objects… but I can think of no lit.-practitioner (as opposed to New- or post-structural theorist) who’s captured the textual urge, the emotional urgency of text as both sign and thing, as perfectly as has Markson here.10 The other side of the prenominate 2-bind — the side rendered explicitly by WM’s opening and close — is why people who write need to do so as a mode of communication. It’s what an abstractor like Laing calls “ontological insecurity”—why we sign our stuff, impose it on friends, mail it out in brown manila trying to get it printed. “I EXIST” is the signal that throbs under most voluntary writing—& all good writing. And “I EXIST” would have been, in my ungraceful editorial hands, the title of Markson’s novel. But Markson’s final choice, far better than his working Keeper of the Ghosts, and far better than his 2nd choice, Wittgenstein’s Daughter (too clunky; deep but not nonsensical), is probably better than mine. Kates text, one big message that someone is living on this beach, is itself obsessed & almost defined by the possibility that it does not exist, that Kate does not exist. And the novel’s title, if we reflect a moment, serves ends as much thematic as allusive. Wittgenstein was gay. He never had a mistress.11 He did, though, have a teacher and friend, one Bertrand Russell, who, with his student’s encouragement, before the ’20s trashed the Cogito tautology by which Descartes had relieved 300 years’ worth of neurotic intellectuals of the worrisome doubt that they existed. Russell pointed out that the Cogito’s “I think and therefore am” is in fact invalid: the truth of “I think” entails only the existence of thinking, as the truth of “I write” yields only the existence of text. To posit an “I” that’s doing the thinking/writing is to beg the very question Descartes had started out impaled on…. But so anyway, Kate’s situation in WM is doubly lonely. After having spent years “looking” for people,12 she has literally washed up on shore, now sits naked & in menses before a manual typewriter, producing words that, for her & us, render only the words themselves “ontologically secure”; the belief in either a reader for them or a (meta)physical presence producing them would require a kind of quixoticism Kate’s long since lost or resigned.
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-transfer13 with true & deep emotional import.