From this one of the specular vantages WM demands, Kate’s central identification with the “fact” of historical personage is with Helen of Troy/Hisarlik — the Face That Launched 1,000 Ships & the body that lay behind the Trojan War’s impressive casualty-count.26 And the vehicle for this identification with Helen is a distinctively female sense of “responsibility”: like The Iliad’s Helen, Kate is haunted by the passive sense that “everything is her fault.” And Kate’s repeated attempts at defending Helen against the charge of instigating exactly what emptied Ionia of men have a compulsive & shrill insistence about them that bespeak protesting too much:
I have always harbored sincere doubts that Helen was the cause of that war, by the way.
A single Spartan girl, after all.
As a matter of fact the whole thing was undeniably a mercantile proposition. All ten years of it,27 just to see who would pay tariff to whom, so as to be able to make use of a channel of water….
Still, I find it extraordinary that young men died there in a war that long ago, and then died in the same place three thousand years after that.28
Issues orbiting Helen & femininity & guilt mark a sort of transition in this novel & its reading. Have I yet mentioned that a notable feature of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, male-written, is that the novel’s composed entirely of the words of a female character? And it is in terms of gender & authenticity, I think, that Mr. Markson’s book becomes at once least perfect & most interesting. Most 1988ish. Most important as not just a literary transposition of a philosophic position but also a transcendence of received doctrine. Here Descartes & Kant & Wittgenstein cease being overt critical touchstones and become springboards for a flawed, moving meditation on loneliness, language, & gender.
See, Helen is “guilty” finally not because of anything she’s done but because of who she is, how she appears, what she looks like; because of the effect she has, hormonally/emotionally, on men who’re ready to kill & die over what they’re made to feel. Kate, like Helen, is haunted by an unspoken but oppressive sense that “… everything is her [own] fault.” What everything? How close is she to the Helen she invokes?29
Well, first off, it’s easy to see how radical skepticism — Descartes’s hell & Kate’s vestibule — yields at once omnipotence and moral oppression. If the World is entirely a function of Facts that not only reside in but hail from one’s own head, one is just as Responsible for that world as is a mother for her child, or herself. This seems straightforward. But what’s less clear & way richer is the peculiar slant “omniresponsibility” takes when the responsible monad in question is historically passive, per- & conceived as an object and not a subject — i.e., when one is a woman, one who can effect change & cataclysm not as an agent but merely as a perceived entity… perceived by historically active testosteroids whose glands positively gush with agency. To be an object of desire (by hirsute characters), speculation (by hirsute author), oneself the “product” of male heads & shafts is to be almost Classically feminized, less Eve than Helen, responsible without freedom to choose, act, forbear. The (my) terribly blanket assumption here is that received perceptions of women as moral agents divide into those of Hellenic and those of Evian (Eve-ish) responsibility; the claim I can support is that Markson, despite his worst intentions, manages to triumph over 400 years of post-Miltonic tradition and to present the Hellenic as the more poignant — certainly more apposite — situation of women in any system where appearance remains a “picture” or “map” of ontology. This presentation seems neither pre-nor post-feminist: it’s just darned imaginative, ingenious even, and as such — despite failures of authorial vision & nerve — flies or falls on its own merits.
The degree of success with which Mr. Markson has here rendered the voice & psyche & predicament of a female, post-Positivist or otherwise, is a vexed issue. Some of the fiction I try to write is in feminine voice, and I consider myself sensitive to the technical/political problems involved in “crosswriting,” and I found the female persona here compelling & real. Some female readers on whom I’ve foisted WM report finding it less so. They objected not so much to the voice & syntax (both of which are great in WM in a way I can’t demonstrate except by quoting like twenty pages verbatim) as to some of the balder ways Mr. Markson goes about continually reminding the reader that Kate is a woman. The constant reference to Kate’s menses, for example, was cited as clunky. Menstruation does come up a lot, & for reasons that remain narratively obscure; and if it isn’t a clunky allusion to Passion or martyrdom then it’s an equally clunky (because both unsubtle & otiose) reminder of gender: yes, women are persons whose vaginas sometimes bleed, but repeating & dwelling on it reminds one of bad science fiction where aliens are making continual reference to cranial antennae that — were they & the narrative voice truly alien/alien-empathetic — would be as unquestioned & quotidian a fact of life as ears or noses or hair.30 Personally I’m neutral on the menstruation point. What I’m negative on is the particular strategy Markson sometimes employs to try to explain Kate’s “female” feelings both of ultimate guilt & of ultimate loneliness. The “realistic” or character-based explanation is not, thank God, just that Kate’s been left in the emotional lurch by all sorts of objectifying men, psychic abandoners who range from her husband (variously named by her Simon or Terry or sometimes Adam) to her final lover, univocally called Lucien. The proffered explanation is rather that, back in the halcyon pre-Fall days when the world was humanly populated, Kate betrayed her husband with other men, and that subsequently her little boy (variously Simon or, gulp, again Adam) died, in Mexico, possibly of TB, and that then her husband left her, about ten years ago, “time out of mind,” at the same psychohistorical point at which Kate’s world emptied and the diasporic quest for anyone else alive in the world at all commenced, a search that led Kate to the empty beach where she now resides and declaims to no one. Her betrayals & her son’s death & husband’s departure — alluded to over & over, albeit coyly — are the Evian diagnosis of her transgression & metaphysical damnation; they’re presented, with an insistence impossible to ignore, as Kate’s Fall31 across gender, a Fall from the graces of a community in which she is both agent & object32 into post-Romantic Wittgensteinian world of utter subjectivity & pathological responsibility, into the particular intellectual/emotional/moral isolation a 1988 U.S. reader associates with men, males alienated via agency from an Exterior we have to objectify, use up, burn the pages of in order to remain subjects, ontologically secure in shield & shaft. All this stuff I find fecund & compelling, a pregnant marriage of Attic & Christian reductions of women. But the death of her son & separation from her husband are also in WM presented as a very particular emotional “explanation” of Kate’s psychic “condition,” a peculiar reduction of Mr. Markson’s own to which I kind of object. The presentation of personal history as present explanation, one that threatens to make WM just another madwoman monologue in the Ophelia — Rhys tradition, is oblique & ever artful, but still prominent & insistent enough to make it hard (for me) to blink its intent: