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Modernism and Unreadability

 | 
Isabelle Alfandary
, 
Axel Nesme

“At the Still Point:” Illegibility and the Poetics of Non-Reading in the Novels of David Markson and Malcolm Lowry

Mathieu Duplay

Résumé

Les romans de David Markson, au premier chef Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988), se fondent sur l’intuition que tout est toujours lisible ; mais ils se protègent contre les conséquences possibles d’un tel savoir en déployant une poétique de la non-lecture destinée à empêcher que l’expérience de la lisibilité universelle ne donne naissance au soupçon paranoïaque que tout fait sens. Sur ce point, les romans de Markson doivent beaucoup à l’exemple de ses prédécesseurs modernistes, comme le suggère la comparaison avec Under the Volcano de Malcolm Lowry.

Texte intégral

1There is no such thing as an illegible text. There is no such thing as illegibility, understood as an intrinsic property of certain pieces of writing, as an expression of their essence rather than of the specific, time-bound context in which they are received. Calling something illegible makes sense only when it is felt that one ought to be able to read it, that is to say when it is identified as an inscription of some kind; and no inscription is such that it cannot be deciphered at all: for even if all known interpretive methods fail, new ones can always be invented. To put it in terms borrowed from Nelson Goodman, all “marks” can be seen as instances of specific “characters” belonging to a notational system; all the reader needs to do is decide which of the currently available systems appears to fit the bill, and, if need be, to design a more suitable one.

  • 1 Goodman Nelson. Languages of Art. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1976, 133–4.
  • 2 Goodman, 134–5.
  • 3 Goodman, 140.

2As I walk along the beach, I pick up a stick and draw a doodle in the sand; then I inspect my work, and it occurs to me that it looks like Greek. In other words, I consider it possible to treat my doodle or each of its various segments as an instance of a Greek letter. Since my knowledge of the Greek alphabet is extremely vague, chances are that I am mistaken; yet this matters little: the possibility of identifying characters of some kind is enough to justify the assertion that my doodle can be read even if they turn out to belong to no known alphabet, and for a text to be legible, it is not essential that it be read correctly, nor indeed that it be read at all. As Nelson Goodman points out, most, not to say all, notational systems leave room for such errors.1 What matters is not that I can effortlessly tell the difference between various characters, or between what counts as a character in a given system and what does not, but that my decision is not without consequence, or, in other words, that it is made on the basis of clear distinctions between classes of which there are no joint members.2 Such distinctions are never a given; they are established by users of the notation, either by means of explicit definitions or on a purely pragmatic basis, whenever an ambiguity occurs: “we adopt a policy of admitting no mark as an inscription of a letter unless or until we can decide that the mark belongs to no other letter” (my emphasis).3 Ultimately, the reason why a mark can be seen as an instance of a certain character is that I choose to treat it as such, and, on encountering it, recognize an opportunity to engage in a little creative worldmaking.

3A similar incident occurs in David Markson’s 1988 novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress. The narrator, Kate, draws much the same conclusion from her little experiment, or rather—since sustained argumentation is not the preferred discursive mode of a woman whose relationship with philosophy is presented as illegitimate, albeit intense—her first-person account reflects a comparable experience of minimal legibility based neither on her knowledge of a given alphabet nor on her ability to formulate a correct interpretation of what lies written before her, but on her awareness of what the inscription “says” simply by virtue of being recognized as such:

  • 4 Markson David. Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1988, 57.

Now and again I have. . . made use of the stick to write in the sand with, actually.
In fact I have even written in Greek.

Well, or in what looked like Greek, although I was actually only inventing that.
What I would write were messages, to tell the truth, like the ones I sometimes used to write in the street.
Somebody is living on this beach, these messages would say.4

  • 5 Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, 7.

4Kate is concerned with what the messages “say,” not with what she intended them to convey; and what is thus “said” appears self-evident even though the letter of the messages is not subjected to interpretation, let alone correctly understood: although she wrote them herself, Kate has no privileged access to what they signify since the language she chose to write in is doubly alien to her, being both foreign and imaginary. Instead, bypassing meaning allows the narrator to perceive what the inscriptions express simply by virtue of being there: “Somebody is living on this beach.” This marks a moment of almost Cartesian self-revelation, for, when she looks at the letters in the sand, Kate finds tangible proof of her own existence as a rational being: what she sees are undeniably traces of herself, if only because no one else could have left them, and her ability to recognize a legible inscription when she sees one reassures her that she is still in command of her mental faculties, despite what she describes as a history of mental illness.5 Lego, ergo sum.

  • 6 Defoe Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. 1719. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965, 162.

5The entire episode recalls the famous section of Robinson Crusoe in which the protagonist finds an alien footprint on the shore of his seemingly desert island.6 In spite of the obvious difference—in Defoe’s novel, the footprint belongs to one of the cannibals who visit the island, whereas Kate is the sole author of the messages—both narratives paradoxically confirm that, initially at least, the experience of reading encourages complete self-absorption. Crusoe’s account of the incident stresses, not his shock on discovering that he is not alone after all, but his fear that he may have dreamed up the whole thing, to which he responds by examining his own mental processes. Likewise, Kate’s narrative draws attention away from the past she is recounting and the future toward which she gestures each time she leaves a message in the street, to focus on the present moment and the self-knowledge it fosters; this is reflected in the syntax, as the present progressive (“is living”) suddenly becomes prominent in a context where the present perfect (“have written”) and past frequentative forms otherwise predominate. More clearly even than Crusoe’s, Kate’s narrative illustrates the empiricist contention that knowledge, even of the recent past, can only proceed on the basis of present memories and perceptions. As David Hume puts it,

  • 7 Hume David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and (...)

A man, who should find in a desert country the remains of pompous buildings, would conclude that the country had, in ancient times, been cultivated by civilized inhabitants; but did nothing of this nature occur to him, he could never form such an inference. . . . In a word, if we proceeded not upon some fact, present to the memory or senses, our reasonings would be merely hypothetical.7

  • 8 Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, 56.
  • 9 Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, 240.

6The experience of reading draws attention to the present source of all our inferences about the world; indeed, it allows us to infer that there is a world for us to know, since the world is what we make it by endowing the marks we encounter with minimal legibility. This is why the skeptical, not to say solipsistic turn characteristic of Markson’s (and, to a lesser extent, of Defoe’s) narrative does not preclude concern with the prerogatives of other minds, with the humanity of cannibals, or (in Kate’s case) with the remote possibility that someone else may come along and read her manuscript; for the lesson to be drawn from the recognition that nothing is ever illegible is not epistemological, but metaphysical: it is not about correct interpretive procedures, but about life as the primordial mode of being on which everything else is predicated, including knowledge and the skeptical objections it faces. Thus, there is a sense in which all inscriptions express an unassailable truth—“to tell the truth,” Kate obsessively repeats throughout the novel—even when they initially appear to be illegible. The same holds of texts written in correct and elegant English, for instance Wittgenstein’s Mistress; for, as Kate points out, clarity is never a given, but is a function of the individual reader’s expectations and linguistic competence. “If one understood only the Greek alphabet, what would be on these pages?” she wonders as she gazes at her own manuscript;8 to which one could answer that someone unfamiliar with the Latin alphabet might nevertheless recognize a written text, and that this minimal acknowledgement of her narrative’s legibility would already constitute a valid reading, since the novel as a whole “says” exactly the same thing as her doodles in the sand (“Somebody is living on this beach” reappears as the book’s final sentence, in the manner of a summing up).9 Everything is legible, but the value of this observation becomes fully apparent only if everything, even the most lucid prose, is read as if written by an illiterate prankster, the better to bypass meaning in an attempt to focus on the ontological implications of reading as regards the truth of the human condition.

*

7There is no such thing as an illegible text, as the encounter with seemingly indecipherable inscriptions shows. However, this does not preclude writing—by which I now mean the writing of literature, as opposed to the mere production of legible characters—from making the opposite claim and from striving to create an illusion of illegibility.

  • 10 Goodman, 152.
  • 11 Wittgenstein Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, 1953. Oxford: Blackwell, (...)

8As the twin examples of Markson and Defoe suggest, writing is predicated on the knowledge of universal legibility; but this insight is terrible indeed: literature shares it with the paranoiac, whose sufferings stem from the constant suspicion that everything makes sense. Wittgenstein’s Mistress draws attention to this problem, since staving off madness, or recovering from it, is one of the narrator’s major preoccupations. As she uses the term, “madness” refers to the mental state of one who is aware not only that everything she writes is legible, but that it can be read in countless different ways as a consequence of the ambiguities which, as Nelson Goodman points out, characterize most (if not all) natural languages.10 Madwomen and philosophers alike know that, in order to read, it is not sufficient to recognize a legible inscription; reading also requires a willingness to be surprised by the unpredictable changes which beset our phenomenological apprehension of the written word, as indeed of everything else around us. As Wittgenstein puts it, “I contemplate a face, and then suddenly I notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience ‘noticing an aspect.’”11

  • 12 Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, 7.

And of course I was quite out of my mind for a certain period. . . back then.
I do not know for how long a period, but for a certain period.
Time out of mind. Which is a phrase I suspect I may have never properly understood, now that I happen to use it.
Time out of mind meaning mad, or time out of mind meaning simply forgotten ?12

9“But in either case there was no question about that madness,” Kate immediately adds. Paradoxically enough, the first step to recovery is taken when, instead of considering endless alternatives, the subject accepts once and for all the madness inherent in the act of reading and presses on. In this respect, Kate, “Wittgenstein’s mistress,” appears to heed the advice of a man for whom, contrary to received notions, philosophy begins when the thinker learns the hard way that it is best not to insist on answering every question.

  • 13 Wittgenstein, § 217, 72.

“How am I able to obey a rule?”—if this is not a question about causes, then it is about the justification for my following the rule in the way I do.
If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do.”13

  • 14 Cavell Stanley. A Pitch of Philosophy. Autobiographical Exercises. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Universit (...)
  • 15 Wittgenstein, § 133, 44.

10Ultimately, there is no point in trying to justify the way I read and write, not even by invoking accepted rules of spelling and usage—a temptation to which I cannot yield forever, as my argumentative resources are limited. Here, exhaustion is all, both the root of the problem and a providential solution. The resistance I encounter when I come face to face with seemingly illegible inscriptions eventually wears down, although overcoming it may require an extraordinary effort of hermeneutical creativity on my part. However, it is only when I feel that the endeavour has exhausted me that I finally break free from the compulsion to give reasons for the way I read and justify its infinite productivity. Up to that point, the impulse to explain may well prove too strong; it often seems perfectly sensible to wonder whether I have not misinterpreted what I just read (just as Kate worries that she “may have never properly understood” the familiar idiom “time out of mind”). It is only when I feel unable to go on that I take it upon myself to stop; and I do so on practical rather than theoretical grounds: my decision is not subject to rational anticipation since it results from a confrontation with forces that have nothing to do either with rational thinking or with the kind of compulsive ratiocination which tends to usurp its place in such situations. As Stanley Cavell points out in his analysis of this passage from Wittgenstein’s Investigations,14 to think is to submit patiently to language’s interaction with the body and its limited abilities; thus philosophy, understood as a form of therapy,15 is inseparable from a mode of autobiographical writing: it may be viewed as the account of an experimentum linguæ peculiar to the individual and heavily affected by his/her experience of physical constraints, including the complexities of sexuality and gender. This is no less true of Wittgenstein’s Mistress: this novel written by a man seeks to give voice to a woman’s experience of the female body and especially of what she calls her “periods,” an ambiguous term which, as used by her, suggests both unquantifiable, patiently endured duration (“I do not know for how long a period”) and the vagaries of the menstrual cycle, which she observes with great curiosity as it appears to defy rational prediction.

  • 16 Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, 9–10.

Am I fifty, then?
There is only one mirror, here in this house on this beach. Perhaps the mirror says fifty.
My hands say that. It has come to show on the backs of my hands.
Conversely I am still menstruating. Irregularly, so that often it will go on for weeks, but then it will not occur again until I have almost forgotten about it.16

11Like the messages Kate once left in the street, her mirror and her hands have things to “say.” What they “say” is literally what has “come” to pass—what the body must accept as time goes by, when signs of aging, once remote possibilities, finally “come to show” on the backs of her hands. What “has come” calls for no justification and, in the end, hardly needs to be named at all; deictics (“this,” “that”) and anaphoric pronouns (“it”) seem sufficient to do it justice, since the narrator is merely taking note of a fact which, to her, is indisputable, an ongoing process in which she is caught up independently of her own volition (“I am still menstruating”). Her use of the adverb “conversely” points to a logical difficulty: many fifty-year-old women no longer menstruate, hence her perplexity; unless of course the point is to suggest that Kate is an exception, and that like all such unaccountable experiences, her late menopause is the stuff of which autobiographical narratives are made. Thus, it is worth noting that she reads her age on the backs of her hands, which symbolize the body’s patient endurance even as they enable her to write: Kate best sees the backs of her hands when she is sitting in front of her typewriter—working people seldom see their hands from behind, as the writer at work well knows.

  • 17 Cavell, 14–5.
  • 18 Cavell, 15.
  • 19 Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, 190. Baseball When the Grass Was Real, a book in which the journa (...)
  • 20 Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, 190.

12If, as implied above, Wittgenstein’s Mistress practices a form of “pedagogy” similar to Wittgenstein’s,17 its target can only be the reader, who is invited to prove no less patient and to accept, as if “exhausted of reasons,”18 the encounter with an inscription which “occurs” without cause or explanation. Such is indeed the upshot of an episode in which the novel warns about the perils of an approach to reading which allows itself to be guided by the wish to “justify” what is written. In her house, Kate finds books left behind by the previous occupants: “In addition to the life of Beethoven, which is called Beethoven, there is also a book called Baseball When the Grass Was Real” (95). This enigmatic title puzzles her until she understands what sports-minded readers probably knew right from the start—that it is an allusion to artificial grass, commonly used in baseball stadiums since the mid-1960s.19 Kate’s self-confessed naivety is highly amusing; however, the real point concerns the book’s title, which, however arresting, does not serve to lure a potential audience, but on the contrary functions here as a metonymy of a text destined to remain unread: Kate understands her mistake not because she finally opens the book to see what it is about, but when she discovers a carton in the basement containing “grass that is not real.”20

13This attitude holds the key to a poetics of non-reading which would seem to be inseparable from the author’s principles of composition, since David Markson appears to follow much the same method when he is at work on a manuscript. When I interviewed him in September 2008, he observed that he no longer really reads books, but prefers to skim them in search of “odds and ends” which he then uses in his next novel:

  • 21 Markson David. Personal interview, 4 September 2008.

I pick these books clean—. . . I’m constantly buying things that I can use, letting the books pile up on my wall only to sell them again later—books where I could find these odds and ends, anecdotes, or quotes; and in most cases I skim them. So I have actually said to people, about this problem of not being able to read fiction, I don’t know whether I write the way I do because I can’t read, or I can’t read because of the way I write.21

  • 22 Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, 16.

14Even though he insists that this is a relatively recent phenomenon which began after Wittgenstein’s Mistress was written—Markson’s next novel, Reader’s Block (1996), is the first one to consist exclusively of fragments borrowed from a wide range of unread or partly read books—he admits that the impulse to saturate his fiction with heterogeneous “pieces of intellectual trivia” was already present when he wrote his first book in 1959. Thus, intertext is everywhere in Markson’s novels, as almost everything they contain was borrowed from other sources; however, this impressive mass of background documentation appears curiously irrelevant, as Markson claims to have no more than a passing acquaintance with it. As a result, the relationship between the published text of his novels and their sources remains a matter of purely private interest to the writer; the concealed references form a kind of autobiographical record inaccessible to all but himself and a few intimates, as indeed do some highly, albeit misleadingly, explicit allusions—for instance, he told me that the only reason why the Mexican poet Marco Antonio Montes de Oca is mentioned by name in Wittgenstein’s Mistress is that he wanted to pay homage to a friend. Therefore, readers of Markson’s novels need not wonder about the meaning of allusions whose textual relevance is dubious, and each time they identify a well-known source, one more item is added to the ever-growing list of books they need not bother to (re) read. Markson’s fiction is characterized by its encyclopedic ambitions, yet the attempt to keep a universal record of human culture leads to an auto-da-fé of cataclysmic proportions since all previous texts are thereby rendered useless, a mass of accumulated “baggage” to be thrown into the fire, as Kate disposes once and for all of the Greek tragic writers,22 making them truly illegible at last.

*

  • 23 Camelia Elias. “The Graveyard of Genre: David Markson’s Postmodern Epitaphs,” Reconstruction 5.1 (W (...)

15David Markson insists that he has few, if any, affinities with so-called “postmodern” aesthetics, despite some critics’ claims to the contrary :23 although he was an early champion of The Recognitions (1955), he dislikes William Gaddis’s later novels, especially Agapë Agape (2002), and, when asked to name his favorite poets, he immediately mentions Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Butler Yeats and Federico García Lorca, all of whom figure prominently in the Modernist canon (interview). Regardless of his professed literary tastes, the poetics of non-reading which characterizes his fiction is, if not an invention of Modernism, then at least one of its mainsprings, as he suggests when he states that he would never have written as he does unless he had been encouraged by the example of such predecessors as Malcolm Lowry, the early William Gaddis and, to a lesser extent, James Joyce (interview).

16A paradigmatic example of the procedure later systematized in Wittgenstein’s Mistress indeed occurs in Chapter XII of Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), when the Consul leafs through the letters sent by his ex-wife Yvonne moments after they are providentially returned to him:

  • 24 Lowry Malcolm. Under the Volcano, 1947. London: Picador, 1993, 344.

—“Do you remember to-morrow?” he read. No, he thought; the words sank like stones in his mind.—It was a fact that he was losing touch with his situation . . .24

17This seemingly absurd question becomes crystal-clear some time later when the Consul again picks up Yvonne’s letter after a lengthy interruption:

  • 25 Lowry, Volcano, 345.

“Do you remember to-morrow? It is our wedding anniversary. . . I have not had one word from you since I left. God, it is this silence that frightens me.”25

18As ever, legibility turns out to be a matter of context, a function of the very “situation” in which the Consul at first chooses to take no interest, much as he deliberately runs away from Yvonne. In this particular instance, “context” really means a fictional intertext, that is to say the rest of Yvonne’s letter, destined to be left unread by the Consul, and therefore inaccessible to the reader whose sole access to what she wrote is through the protagonist’s unwilling eyes.

  • 26 Lowry, Volcano, 346.
  • 27 Barthes Roland. Fragments d’un discours amoureux, Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 1977, 211.
  • 28 Lowry, Volcano, 345–6.
  • 29 Lowry Malcolm. Letter to Jonathan Cape, 2 January 1946, Collected Letters. Sherrill E. Grace ed. Vo (...)

19As he reads on, the Consul begins to suspect his ex-wife of more or less consciously quoting from the letters of Heloise and Abelard.26 Ironically, this explicit reference to a further intertextual source—a real one, this time—provides him with another reason not to read the rest of Yvonne’s correspondence. She professes her love for him, yet the narrative implies that the self-consciously “poetic” language in which she does so strikes him as utterly lacking in originality, as if she were merely glossing on other writers’ achievements. In addition, her strategy betrays a self-conscious mastery of English prose which no doubt saves her from indulging in what Roland Barthes calls the “obscene” exposure of personal feeling,27 yet is lacking in spontaneity and therefore casts doubt on her sincerity. When the Consul chooses not to read Yvonne’s all too elegantly written letter and thereby makes it temporarily illegible to others, he restores what is painfully missing from it, namely the obscenity of unadulterated emotion; at the same time, he allows readers to sense, beyond the reach of the written text, the unspeakable presence of feelings so raw that words, however appropriate, can only betray them. The question “Do you remember to-morrow?” is made to stand for this linguistic impossibility; thus, it acquires the poetic resonance so obviously missing from Yvonne’s laboriously sentimental prose28—if, that is, poetry is understood to consist in an awareness of language as a precariously unified whole on the brink of explosion: “poems often have to be read several times before their full meaning will reveal itself, explode in the mind, and it is precisely this poetical conception of the whole that I suggest has been, if understandably, missed [by the firm’s reader],” as Lowry wrote to his publisher Jonathan Cape.29

  • 30 Lowry, Volcano, 344.
  • 31 Lowry, Volcano, 355.
  • 32 Lowry, Volcano, 223.

20An experience of this kind is by definition of a temporal nature; it requires a certain amount of advance preparation (a corpus must have been compiled—in the present instance, letters must have been sent, received, then forgotten and rediscovered, so that they can strike the Consul as at once familiar and mysterious, not unlike a dimly remembered classic); and it cannot last for ever, for there always comes a time when legibility is restored. However, the poetic experience itself happens in a flash; it has no perceptible duration, interferes with the reader’s sense of temporal succession and creates an overwhelming sense of disruption.30 Time is suspended thanks to a sudden change of perspective whereby the protagonist-reader suddenly realizes that, far from moving along with the flow, he has been standing still while the rest of the world revolved around him; likewise, language is viewed as if from outside, as the Consul suggests: “Veo que la tierra anda; estoy esperando que pase mi casa por aquí para meterme en ella. . . . I learn that the world goes round so I am waiting here for my house to pass by.”31 I normally feel at home in language, but the poetic experience reveals it to me as if I were an outsider; hence presumably the choice of a foreign tongue. This experience is virtually identical to riding in the Ferris wheel aboard which, in Chapter VII, the Consul realizes that everything except himself is in a state of constant agitation: “On terra firma the world continued to spin madly round; houses, whirligigs, hotels, cantinas, volcanoes: it was difficult to stand up at all.”32

21The Consul’s sudden insight into the true state of things is accompanied by a profound sense of relief, in which I as reader am invited to share. Seeking to regain his sanity, he embraces the uncontrolled multiplicity of a world where strangeness prevails; this allows him to savour his release from the normalizing impulse to which the surrounding crowds are in thrall. In order to accomplish this goal, he must first step aside and watch the world go by as if he were no longer a part of it, a withdrawal both symbolized and effected by the poetics of non-reading to which he commits himself. Likewise, when faced with seemingly illegible words—for instance, a Spanish sentence inserted into an English novel—I no longer have to rise up to the challenge; I am at liberty to adopt the detached posture of the sage or poet who wisely comments on the agitation that surrounds him (“. . . to spin madly round”). In doing so, I merely respond to Lowry’s modernist pedagogy, which he shares with his contemporary T.S. Eliot or, indeed, with David Markson, his friend and spiritual heir:

  • 33 Eliot T.S. “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets. 1944. London: Faber, 1959, 15.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.33

Notes

1 Goodman Nelson. Languages of Art. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1976, 133–4.

2 Goodman, 134–5.

3 Goodman, 140.

4 Markson David. Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1988, 57.

5 Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, 7.

6 Defoe Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. 1719. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965, 162.

7 Hume David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. 1748. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, 45–6.

8 Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, 56.

9 Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, 240.

10 Goodman, 152.

11 Wittgenstein Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, 1953. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, 165.

12 Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, 7.

13 Wittgenstein, § 217, 72.

14 Cavell Stanley. A Pitch of Philosophy. Autobiographical Exercises. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, 14–5.

15 Wittgenstein, § 133, 44.

16 Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, 9–10.

17 Cavell, 14–5.

18 Cavell, 15.

19 Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, 190. Baseball When the Grass Was Real, a book in which the journalist Donald Honig interviews major players of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, is regarded as a classic in sporting circles. Honig Donald. Baseball When the Grass Was Real. 1975–6. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993.

20 Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, 190.

21 Markson David. Personal interview, 4 September 2008.

22 Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, 16.

23 Camelia Elias. “The Graveyard of Genre: David Markson’s Postmodern Epitaphs,” Reconstruction 5.1 (Winter 2005): http://reconstruction.eserver.org/051/elias.shtml.

24 Lowry Malcolm. Under the Volcano, 1947. London: Picador, 1993, 344.

25 Lowry, Volcano, 345.

26 Lowry, Volcano, 346.

27 Barthes Roland. Fragments d’un discours amoureux, Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 1977, 211.

28 Lowry, Volcano, 345–6.

29 Lowry Malcolm. Letter to Jonathan Cape, 2 January 1946, Collected Letters. Sherrill E. Grace ed. Vol. 1. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995, 500.

30 Lowry, Volcano, 344.

31 Lowry, Volcano, 355.

32 Lowry, Volcano, 223.

33 Eliot T.S. “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets. 1944. London: Faber, 1959, 15.

Auteur

Université Charles-de-Gaulle—Lille III
Mathieu Duplay is Professor of American Literature at the University of Lille in Northern France, where he also teaches English-language philosophy. After devoting his doctoral dissertation to Malcolm Lowry’s fiction, he has done extensive research on the novels of William Gaddis and, more recently, of David Markson, whom Lowry considered as his spiritual heir. Mathieu Duplay is the author of Le Scandale de l’écriture, a book-length study of Carpenter’s Gothic by William Gaddis (Paris, Éditions Ellipses, 2001) and is Literature Editor of the French Journal of American Studies (Revue française d’Études américaines).

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