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English Studies Forum The Forum Reviews |
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Literature of Exhaustion David Markson. Vanishing Point. Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004. 191 pp. $15.00. By Tim Feeney, Illinois State University Though he’s calling it a novel, David Markson’s Vanishing Point isn’t. Instead it’s an assemblage of prose fragments, all of which comprise a sentence or two, or a phrase, a name or names, a single word—short, concise statements. Most relate cultural/historical trivia: quotes from and facts about artists, philosophers, composers and vocalists, writers, poets, religious figures and events (chiefly Judaic), ancient mythology, and sundry other subjects. Especially death. The book is practically a catalog of the deaths and sicknesses of the renowned and talented (often mutually exclusive terms in Markson’s books—the artists, philosophers et al. he mentions are frequently obscure to the point of nigh-extinction). It looks like this:
Its signature Aristonothos.
Caesar, asked to name the best death: A sudden one.
Visiting friends, Cyril Connolly was known to mark his place in their books with anything from a string of spaghetti to a leaf of lettuce. And to depart leaving it there.
Brahms had blue eyes. So did Abraham Lincoln.
And Hitler.
Giacomo Meyerbeer selflessly gave Richard Wagner all manner of aid at the start of Wagner’s career. For which in turn Wagner later scurrilously denigrated him in an anti-semitic pamphlet. Anonymously. (34) Close to two hundred pages of that, averaging maybe eight or nine fragments per page, so the cumulative effect is like going through a box of really erudite Trivial Pursuit cards (which also makes it that thing critics call “compulsively readable”). It’s sort of like the written equivalent of Aleksandr Sokurov’s 2002 movie Russian Ark, shot in one continuous ninety-six-minute take through St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum, in which the central figure encounters centuries’ worth of Russian history (including some of the people who made it happen) and culture (ditto). Vanishing Point’s grist is a few millennia of mostly Western history, and like the Sokurov movie, the narrator both guides the way and gradually becomes the focus of the narrative amid all of the cultural reference. Here it’s a self-referential voice, a lonely older person who seems to be approaching the end of his life and who mainly grouses against the dying of the light, facing the inevitable with nervous dignity, anger, and possibly some wry humor: Being annoyed at Aristotle for mentioning that someone once accused Euripides of having bad breath. Or does Author more likely mean being amused at being annoyed? Yet in either instance, why, still, is Author so lacking in energy? In fact why has Author now and again even caught himself taking a nap, which he cannot recall having ever done before in his entire adult life? Like his younger grandchildren, for heaven’s sake. (75-76) Author is roughly autobiographical—David Markson is elderly (b. 1927), a legendary procrastinator, an inveterate user of manual typewriters, etc., just like Author—raising the noteworthy issue of what side of the fiction/nonfiction divide the book falls on, or indeed whether we as readers even need to place it on one side or the other. There are lots of interpretive possibilities opened up by this three-way juxtaposition of the contextless cultural trivia with Author’s sparse remarks with the book’s autobiographical elements. Vanishing Point is a comment on the futility of knowledge for the sake of knowledge; futility, period; minutiae and weirdness’s centrality to everyone’s lives, even those of the great and celebrated; the great and celebrated’s similarity to the not-great and forgotten; the capriciousness of fortune and esteem; Author’s obsession with trivia being a way to stave off matters of far greater importance; the need to leave something behind, like a legacy or an impact on the culture or something, anything; death’s certainty. These are off the top of this reviewer’s head; there are innumerable other potential readings. It’s a literary toy like few others—it’s a great writerly text, in Roland Barthes’s term—inviting interpretation to a degree that most books could never begin to ask of their readers. Which makes the book’s sadness especially wrenching, so that the impossibly melancholic conclusion perhaps hits on a more personal (to both reader and writer/Author) level than one would expect. It’s ultimately a very interesting, worthwhile book. It’s also the exact same thing as Markson’s previous book, This Is Not a Novel, which is also an assemblage of fragments, some of which consist of a sentence or two, others a phrase, etc., conveying cultural/historical trivia about artists and philosophers and etc., with occasional narrative/autobiographical comments and shared themes of death and obscurity and despair, though the narrative presence in This Is Not a Novel is called Writer. And This Is Not a Novel is the exact same thing as the book that preceded it, Reader’s Block, also an assemblage of fragments, etc., with the slight bonus twist that there’s a Reader who’s attempting to write a story about Protagonist (it’s implied that both characters are essentially the same, and it’s further implied that both are more or less autobiographical). And some even argue, mostly wrongly, IMHO, that Reader’s Block is itself the exact same thing as its predecessor, Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Acclaimed by everybody, Wittgenstein's Mistress has its fragment-assemblage moments but is, in comparison to Vanishing Point and the others, more of a conventional novel (though calling Wittgenstein’s Mistress in any way conventional is to court reviewer-credibility disaster—Wittgenstein’s Mistress offers somewhat more of a linear narrative/story, and it’s more cogitative, extemporaneous, overtly philosophical, less of a recitation, and minus Vanishing Point et al.’s stanza breaks, which gives it a much different feel than those others). Regardless, we’ve seen something very, very much like Vanishing Point from Markson before. “Seen this before” is derogatory, oft spoken about the output of artists who are apparently idling in a low gear, but it’s seldom been meant quite so literally. Markson is pretty smart, not to mention a legendarily cranky guy who doesn’t suffer anyone he deems a fool gladly, so one would like to give him the benefit of the doubt on this one. (And a reviewer should tread with special care, since, the noted similarity of opinions to excretory openings aside, one of Vanishing Point’s projects is the excoriation of critical misevaluation:
I wonder what they think the sea’s like, said Turner. (12) So it’s entirely possible that Markson, an accomplished literary artist, knows exactly what he’s doing with the publication of a third volume of allusive, collage-like, experimental quasi-nonfiction, or whatever you want to call Vanishing Point, and that he’d go apoplectic at this reviewer for not catching all of Vanishing Point’s subtleties and taking the time to come to an understanding of what he’s trying to do, what the book is finally all about. Not to mention the fact that every review of This Is Not a Novel (2001) this reviewer’s read says nothing about the book being the exact same thing as Reader’s Block (1996)—it’s usually referred to as a companion volume, or something similar, and some reviewers seem almost apologist about the close resemblance between the two. So Markson seems to have a core following whose readings are so finely calibrated that the two books really are different for them, or else they find something so valuable in his work that they’re willing to overlook the obvious repetitiveness, which is fine. Markson might have a hard time convincing everyone else, though. Any writer—any artist, statesman, sports star, any cultural figure—basically anyone—attracts differing opinions as to their worth, but Markson seems to inspire especially fervent opinion both for and against, some of it weirdly personal. Check out the headlines of readers’ reviews of his books on Amazon (not exactly the most nuanced source of critical writing, but still), and you’ll see this phenomenon in full bloom: “Unspeakably magnificent,” “This book recommended to me is a literary wanna be” [sic], “An inert book,” “The best piece of American fiction in ten years,” “5 stars not enough,” “Not even sad, just pathetic” (this from a smug prick who finds it somehow pertinent to point out Markson’s financial standing and who “can’t conceive of a lazier way to manufacture a book than Markson has come up with here”—it might be an easy way of writing, but it sure can’t be easy to research and assemble one of these things, plus unless he’s personally loading the paper and inking the presses Markson isn’t manufacturing anything), and so forth. It’s trite to suggest that such polarity often indicates something interesting, but ill-advised critical judgment is also among Vanishing Point’s many subthemes— There are no English critics of weight or judgment who consider Mr. Joyce an author of any importance. Said Edmund Gosse, two years after the publication of Ulysses.
Who can plow through such stuff? Added George Moore. [55] —and such divided opinion, at least in Markson’s case, is indeed a sign that something’s worth noticing, if only to see whether or not it’s worth the spittle of its detractors or the sweaty palms of its fans. Or some of both, depending on the book. Yet Markson, though well praised in literary/academic circles, isn’t anything like a household name, unless that household is full of particularly well read English professors. Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Markson’s most successful experimental work (The Ballad of Dingus Magee, made into a movie starring Frank Sinatra in the title role [!], and Going Down, both comparatively straightforward novels, made it to mass-market paperback, so they’ve probably sold more), is currently its publisher’s best-selling book, and even it doesn’t approach the numbers sold by lots of other respected experimental writers. Markson’s got what they call a small but devoted following, and unless Shoemaker & Hoard really give it their promotional best, it’s likely that that small but devoted following is going to be about the book’s only audience. That small but devoted following has also probably read Reader’s Block and This Is Not a Novel, which means that the people most likely to read Vanishing Point are also the people most likely to have read something very similar from Markson twice before. Markson’s risking core-reader puzzlement or annoyance by publishing a new book that so closely resembles its forebears, and this reviewer can’t begin to decide whether this is brave or insane. But it’s possible that this reviewer’s assertion of Vanishing Point’s redundancy is wrong, or that the book isn’t actually as redundant as it seems on the surface, or it’s possible that the book’s redundancy is in fact deliberate and that this reviewer didn’t think to explore the reasons why Markson’s done it. E.g., the book might be the third part of an experimental nonfictive trilogy—Markson’s Ark—about the fading ability, artistic and otherwise, that attends old age. One gauge of this theory is the relative recognizability of the references in Vanishing Point compared to those in This Is Not a Novel, whose references are in turn more accessible than those in Reader’s Block: the aging Author/Markson has grown tired or incapable of unearthing obscure trivia and is settling for something less abstruse. There’s also the semi-fact that Author/Markson has written the exact same book three times in a row: more than anything else, Vanishing Point may be about the inescapable impulse to create (create = giving rise to something more permanent than oneself; a kind of displaced act of biological reproduction), regardless of one’s power to do so, or even after that power has long since dissipated; the book is a manifestation of the struggle against artistic impotence. Thus the book’s central issue may be that of its very publication: what is this book doing on store shelves at all when there exists two other nearly-exactly-the-same books by the same author? Which itself is a frustrating and potentially fascinating question. Id est, some of the most interesting readings of Vanishing Point are extratextual, because Vanishing Point’s text is so similar to what Markson’s written before, though what Markson’s written before is very, very interesting, so Vanishing Point should be just as interesting and worth reading as the earlier This Is Not a Novel and Reader’s Block, since it’s the exact same book and so succeeds artistically to the exact extent that This Is Not a Novel and Reader’s Block do, though Vanishing Point’s redundancy casts shadows over its positive assessment, unless that redundancy is by design, in which case Help, my head. In a midcareer “postface” published in the Review of Contemporary Fiction (from 1990, six years before Reader’s Block but two and a half decades after Dingus Magee, in which there’s a ruminative paragraph devoted to the banal fates of some of the American Old West’s most notorious figures that reads very much like Vanishing Point and This Is Not a Novel and Reader’s Block), Markson writes, “And apropos of virtually nothing at all, it happens that Ludwig Wittgenstein attended the same school in Linz that Hitler did, and at the same time. All of one’s sundry aesthetic motives in abeyance for the moment—isn’t that sort of thing just plain fun to be able to toy with?” (RCF 10.2, 129). It is, but it’s conflicted, complex fun, which makes it more troublesome than fun usually is. And this, paradoxically enough, probably means that it’s literature.
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