IJ study archive

The Empty Plenum: David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress

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TL;DR

Wallace's 1990 essay-review of David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress — his longest sustained piece of philosophical writing on solipsism, and the archive's essay-length anchor for the wittgenstein-frame line promoted in the hf-raizman note. Wallace reads WM as "a kind of philosophical sci-fi" — "an imaginative portrait of what it would be like actually to live in the sort of world the logic and metaphysics of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus posit" — a world that "started out, for Wittgenstein, to be logical heaven" and ends up "(I opine) a metaphysical hell". Through it he stages his own lifelong preoccupations: communication as the way out of the sealed head ("“I EXIST” is the signal that throbs under most voluntary writing—& all good writing."; the Investigations' proof that language "depends on some sort of communicative community"); the head as prison-world ("outside the sixteen-inch diameter of bone that both births & imprisons them"); and — at length and on record — gender, objectification, and "crosswriting" ("Some of the fiction I try to write is in feminine voice"; "the feminization of skepticism"; "Hellenic & Evian misogyny"). It advances no theory about IJ (it predates the novel and never names it), and belongs to the Broom-of-the-System Wittgenstein moment; its bearing is preoccupation and philosophical substrate, running essay → novel.

Key claims

  • WM as a habitable Tractatus. "an imaginative portrait of what it would be like actually to live in the sort of world the logic and metaphysics of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus posit." "This sort of world started out, for Wittgenstein, to be logical heaven. It ends up being (I opine) a metaphysical hell" (raw continues with a semicolon). In the Tractatus picture "the world is everything that is the case; the world is nothing but a huge mass of data, of logically discrete facts that have no intrinsic connection to one another."
  • Writing as the signal out of solipsism. The urge to write "springs from the doubly-bound panic felt by most persons who spend a lot of time up in their own personal heads"; "“I EXIST” is the signal that throbs under most voluntary writing—& all good writing." The need is "to get the words & voices not only out—outside the sixteen-inch diameter of bone that both births & imprisons them—but also down" (raw continues ", trusting them neither…").
  • The two-sided solipsistic bind. One side: "one’s head is, in some sense, the whole world"; the other: why people who write need to do so "as a mode of communication", the reaching toward "some Exterior one’s written record can not only communicate with but inhabit." The late Wittgenstein's attack on private language — that "the existence, nay the very idea of language depends on some sort of communicative community" — is "about the most powerful philosophical attack on skeptic-/solipsism’s basic coherence since the Descartes whose Cogito Wittgenstein had helped to skewer".
  • Making facts sad. Markson "has achieved something like the definitive anti-melodrama. He has made facts sad." Kate's loneliness is "metaphysically ultimate"; her world is "“empty” of all but data".
  • Gender, crosswriting, and the feminization of skepticism. "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,”" (the comma sits inside the raw's curly close-quote). He praises and faults Markson's female voice, diagnoses "the feminization of skepticism", and finds "the same complex & scary blend of Hellenic & Evian misogyny—Helen essentially guilty as object & Eve guilty as subject, temptress." He objects that Markson "cannot, finally, himself help but objectify her" (raw continues "—i.e., by “explaining” her metaphysical condition as emotional/psychical…").
  • The book that demands. WM is an "INTERPRET-ME" novel, analogous to "a piece of music that both demands and defines the listener’s movements, say, like a waltz"; its "Deep Nonsense" "manages somehow to “show” what cannot ordinarily be “expressed.”" — set against "our happy epoch of technical occlusion and entertainment-marketing" and "a cattle-herd culture that worships only the Transparent I".

Theories & evidence

None advances an interpretive claim about an IJ crux (the essay predates the novel by six years and never names it); the IJ-bearing signal is preoccupation and philosophical substrate, carried in the CONNECTION blocks below; every connection runs essay → novel. The essay has numbered footnotes cited [fn N] (1–51) and no section numbers; prose located by essay-position descriptor. All [e-text].

CONNECTION: Solipsism at essay length — the Wittgensteinian frame

  • Crux: wittgenstein-frame
  • Early text: WM as "a kind of philosophical sci-fi" — "an imaginative portrait of what it would be like actually to live in the sort of world the logic and metaphysics of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus posit"; "This sort of world started out, for Wittgenstein, to be logical heaven. It ends up being (I opine) a metaphysical hell"; and the Investigations' turn, that "the existence, nay the very idea of language depends on some sort of communicative community". [the Tractatus/PI exposition] [e-text]
  • IJ echo: The Wittgensteinian substrate the archive tracks in Wallace — Broom of the System's overt Wittgenstein structure and, in IJ, the solipsism/communication problematic and the map-vs-territory concerns (Eschaton; the samizdat). This essay is the fullest statement of the frame; it is the essay-length companion to the wittgenstein-frame sighting promoted in hf-raizman-call-it-something-i-ate.
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation (philosophical substrate)
  • Notes: [author]-grade and the load-bearing block. Routes to wittgenstein-frame. Broom-era continuity: contemporaneous with Broom of the System's Wittgenstein architecture — cf. broom-of-the-system. The Tractatus-world-as-hell reading is Wallace's own philosophical thesis (his "(I opine)"), but it is a thesis about Markson/Wittgenstein, not about IJ — hence shared-preoccupation, essay → novel.

CONNECTION: Communication vs. solipsism — writing as the "I EXIST" signal out of the sealed head

  • Crux: communication-solipsism
  • Early text: the writing-urge "springs from the doubly-bound panic felt by most persons who spend a lot of time up in their own personal heads"; "“I EXIST” is the signal that throbs under most voluntary writing—& all good writing."; the late-Wittgenstein proof that language "depends on some sort of communicative community". [the "most people who somehow must write must write" passage + the PI exposition] [e-text]
  • IJ echo: IJ's central opposition of self-enclosure to contact — the addict's and depressive's solipsism vs. the AA fellowship that works only through communication with others; the novel's anxiety that the self is sealed and that language may or may not reach across. Wallace's "I EXIST" and his invocation of the anti-private-language argument are the philosophical statement of the problem IJ dramatizes.
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation
  • Notes: Routes to communication-solipsism (absorbs solipsism-enmeshment). This essay is arguably the clearest nonfiction statement in the corpus of the solipsism-and-its-communicative-remedy problematic the slug names; a primary [author] node for that lane.

CONNECTION: The head as prison-world — "the sixteen-inch diameter of bone"

  • Crux: hal-condition (also communication-solipsism)
  • Early text: the need to get the words & voices not only out — "outside the sixteen-inch diameter of bone that both births & imprisons them"; the solipsist left "with only your head, now, for not only company but environment & world"; "the drowning-pool of self-consciousness". [the writing-urge passage + the loss-passage] [e-text]
  • IJ echo: IJ's imagery of the skull as prison and world — Hal's sealed interior (the mind that watches itself and cannot get out), the novel's recurring figure of consciousness locked inside the head; the depressive interiority (Kate Gompert; the "It"). The "sixteen-inch diameter of bone that both births & imprisons them" is, six years early, the exact figure of the head as both origin and cage that IJ's interiority runs on.
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation
  • Notes: Routes to hal-condition (the sealed-head interiority) with communication-solipsism (the enclosure the writing-urge tries to breach). IJ-side identification is interpretive, ours. Neighbor: the tennis-alone image Wallace singles out (Kate's "funnysad descriptions of trying to play tennis without a partner" [fn 19 anchor]) is a faint tennis+isolation rhyme with E.T.A. — noted, not routed.

CONNECTION: Gender, crosswriting, and objectification — an on-record Wallace datum

  • Crux: wallace-misogyny (also silenced-feminine)
  • Early text: "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,”"; "the feminization of skepticism"; "the same complex & scary blend of Hellenic & Evian misogyny—Helen essentially guilty as object & Eve guilty as subject, temptress."; the charge that Markson "cannot, finally, himself help but objectify her". [the long gender section] [e-text]
  • IJ echo: The wallace-misogyny / silenced-feminine cruxes — the critical question of how Wallace writes (and objectifies, or silences) women (Avril, Joelle, Kate Gompert). Here Wallace is on record, in 1990, thinking explicitly about male authorship of female voices, objectification, and two archetypes of "female" guilt — a documentary datum for both sides of the misogyny debate: evidence of his self-conscious attention to the problem, and a specimen of the very "guys apparently must organize & process fey mystery" framing critics indict.
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation (documentary; cuts both ways)
  • Notes: Routes to wallace-misogyny and silenced-feminine. CUTS BOTH WAYS — record it as evidence, not as a verdict: Wallace both critiques Markson's objectification of Kate ("cannot, finally, himself help but objectify her") and himself deploys totalizing gender archetypes (Hellenic/Evian). A primary [author] node for the crux; the reader should not take it as settling the question either direction (adjudication confirmed). The essay's last footnote is its own self-aware coda: "from my male p.o.v…." [fn 51].

CONNECTION: The book that demands vs. the entertainment epoch — "Deep Nonsense" that shows what can't be said

  • Crux: book-as-entertainment
  • Early text: the "INTERPRET-ME" novel, analogous to "a piece of music that both demands and defines the listener’s movements, say, like a waltz"; WM's "Deep Nonsense" that "manages somehow to “show” what cannot ordinarily be “expressed.”"; all set against "our happy epoch of technical occlusion and entertainment-marketing" and "a cattle-herd culture that worships only the Transparent I". [the INTERPRET-ME opening + the Deep-Nonsense passage
    • the close] [e-text]
  • IJ echo: IJ as the demanding, reader-working book (endnotes, withheld closure) that refuses the frictionless entertainment it depicts; and the Wittgensteinian show/say distinction behind IJ's designed holes — a book that shows what it will not say. The "entertainment-marketing" epoch Wallace writes against here is the culture IJ anatomizes.
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation
  • Notes: Routes to book-as-entertainment (art that demands vs. entertainment that engages). Sibling of bfn-fictional-futures's engaging-vs-demanding argument and bfn-nature-of-fun's anti-seduction ethic. The show/say gloss on the novel's designed holes is interpretive, ours (neighbor designed-holes, not routed).

Themes

Wittgenstein (Tractatus vs. Investigations; the world as fact; private language) · solipsism and its two-sided bind (skepticism of object and of self) · writing as communication out of the sealed head ("I EXIST"; the "sixteen-inch diameter of bone") · loneliness and depression made metaphysical ("He has made facts sad") · gender, crosswriting, and objectification (Hellenic vs. Evian guilt; "the feminization of skepticism") · the demanding book vs. the entertainment-marketing epoch · Broom-era Wittgenstein continuity.

Cross-references

  • hf-raizman-call-it-something-i-ate — the promoted wittgenstein-frame sighting; this essay is its essay-length companion, the fullest Wallace statement of the frame.
  • broom-of-the-system — the contemporaneous Wittgenstein novel (1987); Broom-era continuity for the solipsism/private-language material.
  • bfn-fictional-futures and bfn-nature-of-fun — the demanding-book / anti-entertainment ethic; same batch.
  • The wallace-misogyny / silenced-feminine material of the novel (Avril, Joelle, Kate Gompert) — this essay is Wallace on record about male authorship of female voices.
  • gc-ep033-allard-den-dulk-philosophy — the archive's philosophy-of-Wallace source (Wittgenstein/solipsism in the oeuvre).

Notable passages

Prose by essay-position; footnotes [fn N]. All [e-text]. (The three opening epigraph blocks are attributed to Cavell / Markson's novel / Wittgenstein and are NOT Wallace's prose.)

  • "an imaginative portrait of what it would be like actually to live in the sort of world the logic and metaphysics of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus posit" [mid]
  • "This sort of world started out, for Wittgenstein, to be logical heaven. It ends up being (I opine) a metaphysical hell" [mid]
  • "“I EXIST” is the signal that throbs under most voluntary writing—& all good writing." [the writing-urge passage]
  • "outside the sixteen-inch diameter of bone that both births & imprisons them" [same]
  • "the existence, nay the very idea of language depends on some sort of communicative community" [the PI exposition]
  • "He has made facts sad." [the anti-melodrama passage]
  • "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,”" [the gender section]
  • "the feminization of skepticism" [same]
  • "Hellenic & Evian misogyny—Helen essentially guilty as object & Eve guilty as subject, temptress." [same]