I’m struggling to make clear, I think, that it’s this masculinely prejudiced imperfection that illuminates how important & ambitious WM is as an experimental piece of late-’80s literature. As a would-be writer I like how the novel inverts received formulae for successful fiction by succeeding least where it conforms to them most: to the precise extent that Kate is presented here as circumstantially & historically unique, to just that extent is the novel’s monstrous power attenuated. It’s when Kate is least particular, least “motivated” by some artfully presented but standardly digestible Evian/Valentinian/post-Freudian trauma, that her character & plight are most e- & affecting. For (obvious tho this seems) to the extent that Kate is not motivationally unique, she can be all of us, and the empty diffraction of Kate’s world can map or picture the desacralized & paradoxical solipsism of U.S. persons in a cattle-herd culture that worships only the Transparent I, of guiltily passive solipsists & skeptics trying to warm soft hands at the computer-enhanced fire of data in an Information Age where received image & enforced eros replace active countenance or sacral mystery as ends, value, meaning. Etc. The familiar bitch & moan that Markson’s novel promises & comes close to transfiguring, dramatizing, mythologizing via bland bald fact.
I think finally the reason I object to WM’s attempt to give Kate’s loneliness a particular “motivation” via received feminine trauma is that it’s just unnecessary. For Mr. Markson has in this book succeeded already on all the really important levels of fictional conviction. He has fleshed the abstract sketches of Wittgensteinian doctrine into the concrete theater of human loneliness. In so doing he’s captured far better than pseudobiography what made Wittgenstein a tragic figure & a victim of the very diffracted modernity he helped inaugurate. Markson has written an erudite, breathtakingly cerebral novel whose prose is crystal & whose voice rivets & whose conclusion defies you not to cry. Plus he’s also, in a way it’d seem for all the world he doesn’t know, produced a powerfully critical meditation on loneliness’s relation to language itself.
Though of course any writer’s real motivations are forever occult & objects of at best lucid imagining, it’s safe to point out that the post-atomist metaphysical peripety that is L. Wittgenstein’s late Philosophical Investigations articulates philosophical concerns & assumptions so different from those of the early Tractatus that the PI amounts tothi> amoun less a renunciation than a kind of infanticide-by-bludgeon. For Marksonian purposes, the three important blunt instruments, near-diurnal differences between “early” & “late” Wittgenstein, concern W’s enduring obsession with language-&-reality questions. One. PI now takes as paradigmatic of the language with which philosophers ought to be concerned not the ideal abstraction of math-logic, rather now just ordinary day-to-day language in all its general wooliness & charm.38 Two. The PI’s Wittgenstein expends much energy & ink arguing against the idea of what’s been called “private language.” This term is the Pragmatist William James’s, whom W, not an enemy to welcome, accused of looking forever “for the artichoke amongst its leaves.” But PI’s concern to show the impossibility of private language (which it does, pretty much) is also a terrible anxiety to avoid the solipsistic consequences of mathematical logic as language-paradigm. Recall that the truth-functional schemata of math-logic & the discrete facts the schemata picture exist independent of speakers, knowers, & most of all listeners. PI’s insistence — as part of the book’s movement away from what the world must be like for language to be possible & toward what language must be like given the way the world in all its babble & charm & deep nonsense actually is—that the existence, nay the very idea of language depends on some sort of communicative community39… this is about the most powerful philosophical attack on skeptic-/solipsism’s basic coherence since the Descartes whose Cogito Wittgenstein had helped to skewer. Three. The final big difference is a new & clinical focus on the near-Nixonian trickiness of ordinary language itself. A tenet of the PI is that profound philosophical stuff can be accomplished via figuring out why linguistic constructions get used as they are, & that many/most errors of “metaphysics” or “epistemology” derive from academics’ & humans’ susceptibility to language’s pharmakopia of tricks & deceptions & creations. Late Wittgenstein is full of great examples of how persons are constantly succumbing to the metaphysical “bewitchment” of ordinary language. Getting lost in it. E.g., locutions like “the flow of time” create a kind of ontological UHF-ghost, seduce us into somehow seeing time itself as like a river,40 one not just “flowing” but doing so somehow external to us, outside the things & changes of which time is really just the measure.41 Or the ordinary predicates “game” and “rules,” attached simultaneously to, e.g., jacks & gin rummy & softball & Olympiade, trick us into a specious Platonic universalism in which there is some transcendentally existent feature common to every member of the extensions of “game” or “rule” in virtue of which every member is a “game” or a “rule,” rather than the fluid web of “family resemblances”42 that, for Wittgenstein, perfectly justifies the attachment of apparently univocal predicates as nothing more or less than a type of human behavior—rather, that is, than any sort of transcendental reality-mapping. Wittgenstein by life’s end conceived meaningful human brain-activity (i.e., philosophy) as exactly & nothing more than “… a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”43 The PI holds that persons must or at any rate do live in a sort of linguistic dream, awash & enmeshed in ordinary language & the deceptive “metaphysics” linguistic usage & communicatimul communon among persons imposes… or costs.
The above summary is pretty crude.
But actually, so, on the surface, is Wittgenstein’s Mistress’s use & reconstitution of the PI’s seminal new perspective. Much of the overt master/mistress relation here again involves the resemblance-as-allusion [sic]. Lines in the novel like “Upstairs, one can see the ocean. Down here there are dunes, which obstruct one’s view” are conscious echoes of the PI’s “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.’ ”44 Also heavily allusive (sometimes just plain heavy) are Kate’s prolonged musings on the ontological status of named things: she (as would we all) still refers to the house she burned down as a house, but she keeps wondering in what way a destroyed house is still a “house,” except in virtue of language-habits from time out of mind. Or, e.g., she wonders about questions like “Where is the painting when it is in my head instead of on the wall?” & whether, were let’s say no copies of Anna Karenina still extant (unburned) anywhere, the book would still be called Anna Karenina. Or marvels at facts like “One can drive through any number of towns without knowing the names of the towns.”
A little of this narcissistic echo goes a long way, and Markson is sometimes unkind, allusively, on the surface. Again, though, the mistress like the master invites you/me down: what’s ponderous on the first pass opens up later. It’s toss-offs like the last just above that are most interesting as invitations, less allusion to a genius than gauzy prefigures of Markson’s own meditations about & around some of the themes dominant in PI. What first strikes one as heavy or ponderous refines itself after time into a fragile note of resignation — i.e., weltschmerz as opposed to naïveté or hubris — in most of Kate’s speculations on the way a name tends to “create” an object or attribute45; albeit on the other hand a twinge of envy whenever she countenances the possibility of things existing without being named or subjected to predication. Why this battle occupies Kate & engages the reader has partly to do with the actual ethical pain that we may assume filled the long silence between the Tractatus and PI, but it’s also attributable to an original & deeply smart exploration by Mr. Markson of something that might be called “the feminization of skepticism.”