Except a big question is: whence facts, if the world is “empty”?
Dalkey Archive Press’s jacket copy for WM describes the solipsism of the Mistress as “obviously a metaphor for ultimate loneliness.” And Kate is indeed awfully lonely, though her ingenuous announcements—“Generally, even then, I was lonely”—are less effective by far than the deep-nonsensical facts via which she communicates isolation’s meaning—“One of those things people generally admired about Rubens, even if they were not always aware of it, was the way everybody in his paintings was always touching everybody else”; “Later today I will possibly masturbate”; “Pascal… refusing to sit on a chair without an additional chair at either side of him, so as not to fall into space.” Though for me the most affecting rendition of her situation is Kate’s funnysad descriptions of trying to play tennis without a partner,19 probably the most fecund symbols of Kate’s damnation to a world logically atomized in its reflective relation to language as bare data-transfer concern the narrator’s obsession, marvelously American, with property & easements & houses. The following excerpt is condensed:
I do not believe I have ever mentioned the other house.
What I may have mentioned are houses in general, along the beach, but such a generalization would not have included this house, this house [unlike Kate’s own] being nowhere near the water.
All one can see of it from [my] upper rear window is a corner of its roof….
Once I did become aware of it, I understood that there would also have to be a road leading to it from somewhere, of course.
Yet for the life of me I was not able to locate the road, and for the longest time….
In any case my failure to locate the road eventually began to become a wholly new sort of perplexity in my existence.20
It’s of course tempting, given the critical imposition of Wittgenstein as referent & model & lover, to read Kate’s loneliness as itself an intellectual metaphor, as just a function of the radical skepticism the Tractatus’s logical atomism itself imagines. Because, again, whence and wherefore the all-important “facts” that, for both Wittgenstein & Kate, the world “falls apart into”21 but does NOT comprise? Are facts — genuine existents — intrinsic to the Exterior? admitting of countenance only via the frailties of sense-data & induction? Or, way worse, are they not perhaps perversely deductive, products of the very head that countenances them as Exterior facts & as such genuinely ontic? This latter possibility — if internalized, really believed — is a track that makes stops at skepticism & then solipsism before heading straight into insanity. It’s the latter possibility that informs the neurasthenia of Descartes’s Meditations & so births modern philosophy (and with it the distinctively modern “alienation” of the individual from all wholes natural & social). Kate flirts with this Cartesian nightmare repeatedly, as in:
What happened after I started to write about Achilles was that halfway through the sentence I began to think about a cat, instead.22
The cat I began to think about instead was the cat outside of the broken window in the room next to this one, at which the tape frequently scratches when there is a breeze.
Which is to say that I was not actually thinking about a cat either, there being no cat except insofar as the sound of scratching reminds me of one.
As there were no coins on the floor of Rembrandt’s studio, except insofar as the configuration of the pigment reminded Rembrandt of them.23
The thing is that the painted coins that fooled Rembrandt, & Rembrandt, & Achilles, too, are all just like “the cat” here: Mr. Markson’s narrator has nothing left except “sounds of scratching”—i.e., memory & imagination & the English language — with which to construct any sort of Exterior. Its flux is that of Kate’s own head; why it resists order or population is attributable to the very desperation with which Kate tries to order & populate it: her search’s fevered pathos ensures dissatisfaction. Note that by page 63, after the shine of metaphysical scrupulousness has faded, Kate goes back to talking about the unreal cat as real. The big emotional thing is that, whether her treatment of linguistic constructs as existents is out of touch with reality or simply an inevitable response to reality, the solipsistic nature of that reality, as far as Kate’s concerned, remains unchanged. A double-bind to make Descartes, Shakespeare, & Wittgenstein all proud.
Still, as I read and appreciate WM, more is at stake for Kate in countenancing the possibility that her own “errors” are all that keep the world extant than questions of metaphysics or even of madness. Kate’s pretty sanguine about the possibility of insanity — admits she’s been mad, before, at times, “times out of mind.” Actually, what are finally at stake here seem to be issues of ethics, of guilt & responsibility. One of the things that putatively so tortured Wittgenstein in the twenty years between the Tractatus and the Investigations was that a logically atomistic metaphysics admits exactly nothing of ethics or moral value or questions about what it is to be human. It’s history that Wittgenstein the person cared deeply about what made things good or right or worthwhile. He did things like volunteer for the Austrian infantry in 1918, when he could & should have 4F’d out; like give his huge personal inheritance away to people, Rilke among them. A deadly serious ascetic, Wittgenstein lived his adult life in bare rooms devoid of even a lamp or coccyx-neutral chair. But it was no accident that the Tractatus, very much the product of the same Vienna that birthed “… two of the most powerful & symptomatic movements of modern culture: psychoanalysis and atonal music, both voices that speak ab that sof the homelessness of modern man,”24 nevertheless itself birthed the Vienna Circle & the philosophical school of Logical Positivism the Circle promulgated: a central tenet of Positivism being that the only utterances that made any sense at all were the well-formed data-transferring propositions of science, thus that considerations of “value” such as those of ethics or aesthetics or normative prescription were really just a confused mishmash of scientific observation and emotive utterance, such that saying “Killing is not right” really amounts just to saying “Killing: YUCK!” The fact that the metaphysics of the Tractatus not only couldn’t take account of but pretty much denied the coherent possibility of things like ethics, values, spirituality, & responsibility had the result that “Wittgenstein, this clearheaded & intellectually honest man, was hopelessly at odds with himself.”25 For Wittgenstein was a queer sort of ascetic. He did deny his body & starve his senses — except not, as with most monkish personalities, simply to enjoy a consequent nourishment of the spirit. His big thing seems to have been denying his self by denying, through his essays at philosophical truth, the things most important to him. He never actually wrote anything about the exquisite tensions between atomism & attendant solipsism on the one hand & distinctively human values & qualities on the other. But, see, this is exactly what Mr. Markson does in WM; and in this way Markson’s novel succeeds in speaking where Wittgenstein is mute, weaving Kate’s obsession with responsibility (for the world’s emptiness) gorgeously into the character’s mandala of cerebral conundrum & spiritual poverty.