Both Flesh and Not: Essays

by David Foster Wallace

  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:

  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 b
ecomes 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.”

  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” o
f 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.”