Possibly [I was not mad] before that. [When I went south] To visit at the grave of a child I had lost… named Adam.
Why have I written that his name was Adam?
Simon is what my little boy was named.
Time out of mind. Meaning that one can even momentarily forget the name of one’s only child, who would be thirty by now?33
As a matter of fact I believe it was when I went back to Mexico, that I [gessoed a blank canvas & then stared at it for a long time & then burned it]. In the house where I had once lived with Simon, and with Adam.
I am basically positive that my husband [Simon/Terry] was named Adam.34
There is no longer any problem in regard to my husband’s name, by the way. Even if I never saw him again, once we separated after Simon died.35
Although probably I did leave out this part before, about having taken lovers when I was still Adam’s wife.36
Apparently Shiite women walk swaddled & veiled in deference to their responsibility to be invisible & so keep poor barely-keeping-it-together males from being maddened by exposure to fair sexuality. I find in WM the same complex & scary blend of Hellenic & Evian misogyny — Helen essentially guilty as object & Eve guilty as subject, temptress. Though I personally find the Hellenic component more interesting & a better easement into contemporary politics, I find Mr. Markson’s vacillation between the two models narratively justified & psychologically neat. It is when, though, he seems to settle on the Evian as both character-archetype & narrative explanation — as the argument traced supra & beyond indicates — that his Wittgenstein’s Mistress becomes most conventional as fiction. It is here, too, that for me the novel falters technically by betraying its authorial presence as thoroughly male, outside Kate &/or womanhood generally. As in most cutting-edge experimental fictions, too, this
technical flaw seriously attenuates the thematics. It seems very interesting to me that Mr. Markson has created a Kate who dwells so convincingly in a hell of utter subjectivity, yet cannot, finally, himself help but objectify her — i.e., by “explaining” her metaphysical condition as emotional/psychical, reducing her bottled missive to a mad monologue by a smart woman driven mad by the consequences of culpable sexual agency, Markson is basically subsuming Kate under one of the comparatively stock rubrics via which we guys apparently must organize & process fey mystery, feminine pathos, Strengthless & Female fruit. Kate’s Fall, ostensibly one into the ghastly spiritual manifestation of a masculinely logic-bound twentieth-century metaphysic, becomes under a harsh reading little more than a(n inevitable?) stumble into alienation from the heroine’s role — her self — as mother, wife, lover, beloved. Under this reading Kate’s empty solipsism does not get to become a kind of grim independence from objectification: Kate has rather simply exchanged the role of real wife of real man for the part of nonexistent mistress of an absolute genius of objectification37 indisposed toward heterosexual union. And I found it weird that many of the female readers who disapproved things like WM’s menstruation-cues as “ringing false” nevertheless approved Markson’s provision of Kate’s ostensible “motivation,” here. Though I’m coming to accept that it’s the petrifiedly standard critical line w/r/t fiction these U.S. days: readers want stories about very particular persons with very particular qualities in very particular circumstances whose genesis must on some level be personally-historic & psychological as well as “merely” intellectual or political or spiritual, pan-human. The successful story “transcends” its thoroughgoing individuality/idiosyncrasy via subsuming the peculiarities of character & circumstance to certain broad archetypes & mythopoeia inherited from Jung or Shakespeare or Homer or Freud or Skinner or Testament. Particularity births form; familiarity breeds content. Rarely is our uncritical inheritance of early Wittgensteinian & Logical Positivist models so obvious as in our academic & extra-mural prejudice that successful fiction encloses rather than opens up, organizes facts rather than transcends them, diagnoses rather than genuflects. Attic myths were, yes, forms of “explanation.” But it’s no accident that great mythos was mothered by the same culture that birthed great history — or that Kate divides her reading- & burning-time between classical histories & tragedies. To the extent that myth enriches facts & history, it serves a Positivist & factual function. But the U.S.’s own experience with mytn snce with-making & myth-worship — from Washington & cherries to Jackson & hickory to Lincoln & logs to dime novels & West as womb & soul’s theater to etc., etc. to Presley & Dean & Monroe & Wayne & Reagan — an experience that informs & infects the very physics of reading, today — confirms that myth is finally compelling only in its opposition to history & data & the cingulum of Just the Facts, Ma’am. Only in that opposition can story enrich & transfigure & transcend explanation. Kate’s idiosyncratic/formulaic “real” past in WM isn’t weak as an explanation; it is for me weak & disappointing because it’s an explanation. Just as it would have been weak & disappointing to have “explained” & particularized Kate’s feelings of isolation & imprisonment, not via the idea that the typing hands she holds out in search of communion form the very barrier between Self & World they’re trying to puncture, but, say, by plunking her down via shipwreck on a deserted island à la TV’s Gilligan or Golding’s flylord schoolboys or the Police’s top-40 “Message in a Bottle.”