Reconstruction 5.1 (Winter 2005)

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The Graveyard of Genre: David Markson's Postmodern Epitaphs / Camelia Elias

Abstract: David Markson is a writer who in a series of "novels" entitled Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988), Reader's Block (1996), and This is not a Novel (2001) explores some of our basic conceptions of genre. Can we call a book of fragments a novel? Is a novel still a novel when the characters are given names such as Author, Protagonist, Reader? What are we left with, when critics resort to labels such as "novel of intellectual reference and allusion . . . minus the novel", or "seminonfictional semifiction" to categorise his texts? Through an apparently endless list of anecdotes and facts regarding the deaths of composers, authors, philosophers, etc., Markson, designs a topos of the graveyard where his fiction can rest. I intend to offer a reading of these texts as postmodern epitaphs, both evoking the tradition of epitaphic writing, and playfully subverting our expectations of this genre.

<1> Of epitaphs, says Debra Fried: "Epitaphs make us see ourselves as doubles -- perhaps incomplete or imperfect doubles -- of the dead, as living dead, as readers awaiting our epitaphs" (Fried, 1986: 617). The function of the epitaph is to perform silence. The dead's last voice, as it were. The epitaph is a false oracle, however, for the writing on the tomb is in fact an iconic double sign: on the one hand, it represents the voice of the dead, which is endowed with the capacity to say something important, final, and 'complete', and on the other hand, it activates the memory of the passer-by who seeks a truth in his own contemplation. To be reminded of one's own mortality by the 'living' voice of the dead -- Fried gives an illustrative example of an epitaph that works every time: "Prepare yourself to follow me" -- seems to have one effect only: the realization that there is nothing sacred about being dead. Epitaphs, then, can be said to mediate a profane relationship between the dead and the living. As Fried writes: "What death does to men, the style of the epitaph does to language: makes it repetitive, incantatory, static, self-righteous but stunned, unable to untie the strands of cause and effect, literal and figurative" (618). Insofar as there is an identification with the spoken-word of the epitaph, the reader finds her/himself in a state of 'expecting' to read for the literal or figurative interpretation that the epitaph elicits. What the epitaph does is repeat what the reader already knows: that as far as the dead are concerned, thought and action, writing and living, are not opposites, but fragments of opposition between the sacred and the profane, between the disembodied voice and the 'gramophone'-like plaque on which it is inscribed. While the dead go on being dead in spite of acting being living through the epitaph's performative voice, the reader goes on living in spite of the contemplative thinking about mortality.

<2> Fried further says, following Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan: "Repetition in epitaphs presents a graphic instance of the way in which 'although repetition can only exist in time it also destroys the very notion of time'. Inscribed repetitions undercut the notion of time in the same way that any monument both preserves and erases the event, person, or idea it is erected to commemorate" (621). Applied to explaining writers such as David Markson -- whose works Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988), Reader's Block (1996), and This is not a Novel (2001) will be the focus of this essay -- Fried's insight can be suggestive of a textual practice which takes a fragment out of its context in order to make that context an actual possibility in time. The fragment is thus endowed with the highest authority. However, Markson's 'stories', for instance, have no authentic relation to actual time in spite of operating with actual facts. Therefore, what we are dealing with is a case of the fragment, which, if it were to perform the truth of actual events, it would do so only at the expense of making context completely beside the point. The fragment itself, then, acquires the function of the epitaph to perform beyond the grave the 'complete' text's last rights/rites. The epitaph is thus the real existence of the complete text. Perhaps what Markson intuitively knows is not that the author must die at some point, but that the text should. Fragmentary situations which rely on the structure of the "undone", such as the one Markson creates in all his 'novels', refer perhaps to the kind of authorship that questions itself and 'undoes' itself by never asking the same question.

<3> There is no such thing as a great definition of genre. From Aristotle onwards, attempts to describe works of literature in terms of their shared characteristics have been limited to few, yet fundamentally different ideas. Classical genre theory defines genre in terms of regulations and prescriptions, whereas modern genre theory attempts to avoid hierarchies, genre being a matter which can only be described, for example, by identifying a set of structures in a given work. Genre however, whether purely regulated, prescribed, or described, is performative of its own mode of existence. We could say that genre manifestations occur in two modes: monologic and dialogic. When monologic, genre assumes one of the four most agreed upon manifestations: epic, lyric, dramatic, or satiric. These four, like the monologue, are most powerful when they are indicative of an inner form. On the other hand, when genre is dialogic, in the sense that the inner form of a dramatic structure enters a dialogue, for example, with a satirical element, the inner form assumes an outer expression, such as we may have in an instance of what is called dramatic irony (Empson, 1973: 38). We have a case of dramatic irony when the narrator makes direct recourse to the reader's participation in the events, for instance when the character is portrayed in a situation which to the character her/himself seems heroic, and the reader is told beforehand that there are other solutions. The character's actions are thus rendered pathetic. And most often the reader's participation is manifested in the reaction: "how stupid, the idiot is doing the wrong thing!" At this point then we can say that genre enters a self-reflexive mode, is marked by the plurality inherent in dialogism and becomes a definition of writing which is addressed to nobody. Now, this assumption is problematic in the context where genre, although considered the most culturally and historically located of categories, is also seen as fixed in the sense that it is representational rather than performative. From Bakhtin onwards genre was extended to represent not just literary forms, but also modes of subjectivity which are seen as transformative interventions in the way genres are being systematized. Emile Benveniste's "shifters" relying on the capacity that pronouns such as "I" have to combine "conjunctions of past usage(s) with present appropriation" (Benveniste, 1971: 291) point to the fact that what is at stake is also the question of how to determine generically forms of subjectivity that are not manifested in genres which are context situated.

<4> This essay proposes to look at the type of writing that situates itself between genres, between subjectivity and speech acts, between generic history and literary representations. Such writing, I shall argue, by making the claim that it is seemingly addressed to no one, designates a non-genre that is nevertheless a genre that contains a contradictory meaning: as a topos of a graveyard for words, genre is a sublimation of its own constitution as non-generic and is thus contingent not on historical and cultural development but on their possibilities. Insofar as this kind of writing, however, still takes for granted that there is an audience, and hence purports some ideology, it would have to subscribe to a genre which is thus in a constant mode of being renegotiated, especially in the sense of laying old values to rest.

<5> In their introduction to Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre (1998), Tillotama Rajan and Julia M. Wright take issue with the "conservatism of genre" and call for a revaluation especially of Romanticism since the Romantics developed genre from a "taxonomical given into a cultural category, so as to make it the scene of an ongoing struggle between fixed norms and new initiatives" (Rajan and Wright, 1998). As Romantic literature is characterized by a concern with "generic representation" and the redefinition of literature that seems to be performative of acts of writing especially as manifested in the fragment (Schlegel), I find the criticism on the Romantic period relevant to any discussion of the performativity of genre. As Rajan and Wright write:

Genres are often seen prescriptively as a means of interpellating the subject into existing norms and hierarchies. Tzvetan Todorov, however, may well be closer to articulating the essential fluidity of the category when he argues that genres often originate as speech acts, though not all speech acts are immediately institutionalized as genres. If genres are confined to "the classes of texts that have been historically perceived as such," their classification is inevitably bound to the ideology of a society that chooses to encode only certain forms of genres. On the other hand the fact that there are uncategorized speech acts with the potential to become genres leaves a space for individual or collective intervention in existing system(s) of genre which must therefore be considered highly unstable. This situation is further complicated because the discursive and meta-discursive existence of genres do not necessarily coincide: a genre may have existed in the early nineteenth century but may not have been named until recently. Both in literary practice and in our discussions of it, genre is thus the site of a constant renegotiation between fixed canons and historical pressures, systems and individuals. (I)

<6> What is to be emphasized here is that both genre and its representation occupy a "highly unstable" position when it comes to categorizing, and that genre first occurs as a "possibility", which may include its own falling out of categories of communication especially when the latter are rendered as taxonomies. Insofar as there is such a thing as a genre which falls outside of categories of communication that define literary texts in terms of author, text, and reader, or addresser, message, addressee (Jakobson), genre can be said to perform its own failure at the level of definition while successfully being preoccupied with the question of writing itself. Genre in this sense is as profoundly historical and cultural as are the ways in which it is being systematized. However, if genre begins as a possibility transcending a certain "form" that can be conceptualized as "representation" (Lyotard), then genre can be said to perform its own history and typology. When Schlegel initiated a theory concerned with writing "literature", he proposed that the fragment be both the mode and the genre which best reflects how literature is to be both represented and conceptualized. More contemporary writers have expressed a similar concern with writing which addresses genre as a question of writing, with writing designating a specific topos from which the audience, while excluded from making pronouncements on the kind of writing at hand, is brought in a state of 'attendance'.

<7> A most notable example is David Markson for whom writing is really reading, and the audience is contingent, here accidental. Markson does not write for the sake of the author, the text, or the reader, but for the sake of making genre a question of a performative possibility. Writing as a performative potential means having readers embody the dialogic nature of several epitaphic voices. In his "novels" Markson does not define genre, but circumstances when genre becomes the text itself, that is, literature. He employs a style which fashions his writing always as an engagement with the declarative, either in the form of what is already communicated in the words of others, or as a dialogue with another voice which mediates between the written and the spoken word. For example he writes:

There's no such thing as a great movie. A Rembrandt is great. Mozart chamber music.
Said Marlon Brando. (Markson, 2001: 148)

<8> When we read such lines, we identify the voice in the first line as that of Markson's. Three lines down, however, we realize that Markson is double voicing Marlon Brando. This is by the way an example of dramatic irony. While Markson does not tell us anything beforehand about Marlon Brando, he does get us interested in what else of the kind Brando said. And while we may not say, "how stupid", we most certainly would exclaim, "really now!" But Brando exits the scene, with Markson leading us into temptation. If double-voicing is allowed, then so must be triple-voicing. Thus, I started a section of this essay with the efficient line: "there is no such thing as a great definition of genre", ready to go through almost all of the dramatic register "genre" might have in store, no matter how ironic genre might be, nor how pathetic I would appear to you, readers, tempted to intone ironically: "Said Camelia Elias". Here then I would emphasize that writing (myself) on Markson must be seen as a playful intervention without recourse to the full array of critical literature available.

<9> For postmodern writers such as Markson, dialogism between various forms of writing, belonging to as many forms of genre, is a way of individualizing one's own style precisely as text. One of the ways for genre to achieve its performative quality, and thus let itself go ahead of structures and definitions, is to appropriate another's voice and turn it into propositions for a style which renders the text unique. Markson puts into practice the close relation between text and genre as mediated by uniqueness. Theoretically this relation has already been dealt with, quite elegantly I would say, by Michael Riffaterre. Says Riffaterre:

The text is always one of a kind, unique. And it seems to me that this uniqueness is the simplest definition of literariness that we can find. . . . The text works like a computer program designed to make us experience the unique. This uniqueness is what we call style. It has long been confused with the hypothetical individual termed the author; but, in point of fact, style is the text itself. (Riffaterre, 1983:2, author's emphasis)

<10> What is interesting in Riffaterre's definition is that while he does not distinguish between text and literariness, he does point to what the text is by saying what it is not, that it is definitely not the author. For Riffaterre, the text's uniqueness is a path the reader can walk on, this side of the extraordinary, to get to what goes beyond the text's frame into the realm of aesthetics, the other side of the extraordinary, where uniqueness is not subject to definition. Or so one likes to think. Contrary to Riffaterre, for whom literary phenomena are a question of the relation between the text and the reader, not the text and the author, Hugh Silverman's definitions of the text involve the disclosure of the author in a state of in-between-ness: "The text is in the in-between of the artwork and the artist. [...] The text embodies the disclosure, but it does not fulfill it. The text is, in a sense, a fragment of that disclosure." (Silverman, 1994:54-55)

<11> Now, the form of the fragment, in Markson's case mostly as quotations, functions as a performative definition of genre. Markson's works suggest that we ask with Markson himself operative questions related to genre, such as: can we call a book of fragments a novel? Is a novel still a novel when the characters are given names such as Author, Protagonist, Reader? What are we left with, when critics resort to labels such as "novel of intellectual reference and allusion... minus the novel", or "seminonfictional semifiction" to categorise his texts? Markson's readers are concerned with Markson's character Reader, who, while a reader himself, is acting as a protagonist. Brian Clark makes a pertinent point when he calls Markson's work, particularly Reader's Block, a case of "surphysical narrativity". He writes:

Reader, like a gomi boy or a bag lady, stumbles into territory of his own creation and finds himself defined, not as self, but as everything else. What the novel suggests is that categories such as reader and protagonist are never "I" but rather we. The form of the commonplace book, with its demonstration of a life spent reading, already gives the novel narrative movement: toward death, the end of a life of reading. But of course reading is also an act of reincarnation; or, better, the dialogue never dies, it is merely we who find our way into the conversation. (Clark, 2001: http)

<12> Here Clark characterizes the genre I would like to call epitaphic. Through an apparently endless list of anecdotes and facts regarding the deaths of composers, authors, philosophers, etc., Markson, designs a topos of the graveyard where his fiction can rest. This fiction genre, which is performative, operates with categories such as Writer, Protagonist, Reader, as appropriated categories of writer, text, reader, with Markson's Protagonist as the adopted child of Text. Writer can provide Reader with an appropriated idea of a Protagonist, who in turn is being adopted by Writer as his Text's alter-ego. Here I would argue that the relation between text and genre, literature and literariness is marked in the equation where the "I" of the text does not become a plural "we", as Clark suggested, but a graveyard topos. Insofar as there is such a genre as "writing for no one" (Gessen), this genre is necessarily performative of a narrative which moves forward in the form of fragments. It is thus not the text which is subsumed by genre. Genre itself elects the text, does the text 'in' as it were, attests to its funeral, and writes the epitaph. Genre which is determined by entering a dialogue with a voice beyond the grave, marks dialogism as a set of legitimate questions which can only be answered by other questions. For example, how does one understand the notion of a 'graveyard of genre'? Does the writing which is inscribed by the topos of the dead automatically subscribe to the epitaphic genre?

<13> The epitaph becomes a function of "writing for no one", and operates with the actualization in genre of a text written as if on nothing. This is the genre of the "nonbook". This is Not a Novel (2001) is an example which posits the as if as an actualized possibility of having nothing combine the autonomous in genre with the general in a text. Markson's novel begins with an instance of the as if as a double in his epigraph from Jonathan Swift: "I am now trying an Experiment very frequent among Modern Authors; which is, to write upon nothing." Here Markson assesses to what extent the nothing is worth investigating, as the first couple of lines in the book suggest:

Writer is pretty much tempted to quit writing. Writer is weary unto death of making up stories. (Markson, 2001: 1)

<14> What follows is a tirade on death, who died of what, where they got buried, and even more importantly, information on whether they have been worthy of the events of the day. The epitaph is in the process of emerging out of nothing. It is thus not 'nothing' that needs to be examined, but the fragments that have 'nothing' rest in peace. Says Markson:

Lord Byron died of either rheumatic fever, or typhus, or uremia, or malaria.
Or was inadvertently murdered by his doctors, who had bled him incessantly.

Stephen Crane died of tuberculosis in 1900. Granted an ordinary modern life span, he would have lived well into World War II.

This morning I walked to the place where the street-cleaners dump the rubbish. My God, it was beautiful.
Says a Van Gogh letter.

Writer is equally tired of inventing characters. (1)

<15> What can be said of the epitaphic genre? In Markson's case the narrative line concerning the question of writing can be seen as a difference between the fragment and the fragmentary. In writing the fragment Markson writes for the dead. When writing the fragment fragmentarily Markson writes for the living. When the difference between the fragment and the fragmentary is conflated, the writing is for no one. Keith Gessen has suggested that Markson's writing for no one is a dilemma which confronts the modern writer. "If you never do anything" -- Gessen asks -- "but read and write -- how can you then write about anything else?" (Gessen, 1999). While Gessen's point is significant, I would suggest that the textual space marked by the difference between the fragment and the fragmentary in the gathering of quotations, trivia, and facts, opens up a means of communication which goes beyond establishing what genre Markson's writing subscribes to. When genre is performative, when it construes itself as a graveyard for the writing which is done for no one, it defines the text as a space of imagery on which a final statement is made as a description of what limits and conditions the text in question.

<16> The idea of an epitaph fulfils the significance of the death of the author. Roland Barthes's argument for the death of the author opened a space for questioning to what extent an author's authority dies with him/her. Barthes's claim was that there is no reason to believe in the author as a point of origin, the author merely fulfilling some authorial categories. But what authorial categories can an author fulfil when he presents himself as three categories, Writer, Protagonist, Reader? What authorial categories are there at work when the writing presents itself as an epitaph for no one? Authors who choose to make their texts analogous with other texts or contexts exercise their authority beyond the grave, as it were, while authors who work with different discourses exercise an extension of their own autonomy to the margins of writing. Debates on the authority of texts, however, still revolve around the question of who dies first. But it does not occur to writers -- except for Markson perhaps -- that if the text itself dies first, then one is confronted with a whole different set of questions.

<17> And now I come to the question of the epitaph as a means for inducing the performativity of the fragment as a graveyard of genre. Insofar as authors can become authors as readers, and thus evade the possibility of dying, the writing that is produced can legitimately be called "reader's block" as a means for shifting between the writing out of memory to writing in memoriam. Markson's Reader's Block (1996) is a book made up by an assembly of, more often than not, unrelated fragments. These fragments, while playing and toiling with the idea of forwarding into focus different points of representation, make representation as such secondary to the real process at work, which is to do the text 'in', as it were. The epitaph then emerges as a text put in a perspective similar to dramatic irony. Markson's narrator, if that is indeed what it is, an author called Reader, considers writing a book.

<18> However, the endless gathering of information comes in the way of the actual writing process, Reader thus ending up presenting a list of themes that Protagonist would go through in the eventuality of the novel. We read Reader's records and notes, and hear from time to time his voice when Reader poses direct questions as to the possibility of writing, not a work, but a representation of a work: "Nonlinear? Discontinuous? Collage-like? An assemblage?" (Markson, 1996: 14) First and foremost, though, Markson establishes an affinity with a certain corpus of writers, mainly the Greeks of the classical period, and the continental modernists, novelists, poets, and philosophers alike. The encounter with unrelated juxtaposed fragments of biographical facts and acts makes reading a move towards performing an act of acknowledging human experience in its intertextual mode. However, I believe that Markson's work cannot be contextualized as a work of collage, nor can it be made to fit the group of well-established postmodern authors who have collage on their writing agenda, for instance Kathy Acker and William Burroughs. I should point though to the similarity between Markson's work and Burroughs's novel The Last Words of Dutch Schultz which is precisely not a collage but deals with the emblematic manifestation of the epitaph as a performative genre. Markson's repeated question throughout his work: "Nonlinear? Discontinuous? Collage-like? An assemblage?" referring to the construction of a work that would fit specific norms of genre, is a simple dismissal of all those attributes, as they are devoid in themselves of the ability to generate a topos where writing for no one would become readable independent of context. Markson's postmodernism here is more aligned with that of Mark C. Taylor (especially in Hiding (1999), a work emphasizing surface as a topos par excellence) than with that of Jameson.

<19> Markson's book produces a certain sense of familiarity as the reader is able to recognize references to works and authors of interest. These references are however contingent on the reader's participation in the realization of an absent coherence at work through the transcendent formulation of a context of the imagination, which would allow, say, for a synchronic reading of a text Markson has in ellipsis. Markson's fragments as ellipsis are indeed epitaphs to both 'complete' and 'incomplete' works he happens to refer to. For example, these fragments, while seemingly fleeting, are at closer inspection, not fleeting at all. They appear in fact to be grounded, or inscribed in a context of origin which draws on the epitaphic sense of topos.

<20> Central to Markson's voice is the voice of impersonation which lends reading visiting rights, as it were: one re-visits the site of literature where it merges with other arts. Music and painting are inscriptions reminding one that things happen. Death happens; works of art happen to live longer than their artists; writing happens even in spite of itself; questions happen. It all resonates in counterpoint, in what Markson calls a "fugue":

What has happened? It is life that has happened; and I am old.
Said Louis Aragon.

If an ox could paint a picture, his god would look like an ox.
Said Xenophanes.

Laurence Sterne's corpse was sold to a medical school by grave robbers. It had been completely dissected before someone chanced to recognize it.

How much of Reader's own circumstances or past would he in fact give to protagonist in such a novel? (12)

[...] Heraclitus did not say that one cannot step into the same river twice. One of his followers did.

Heraclitus did say that praying to statues of the gods was like talking to a house instead of to its owner, however. (23)

[...] It took eight years to sell the first printing of six hundred copies of The Interpretation of Dreams.
Perhaps one solitary mourner appearing, regularly, at one grave. Here again, a woman. Young. In fact too young to have a connection with anyone buried here that protagonist can fathom.
Or are some few of the graves more recent?

Roland Barthes died after having been hit by a laundry truck. (23)

<21> The task that Markson sets himself as a writer is obviously to ring the church bells. It is with sheer delight that one attends Markson's mass for Aragon, Sterne, Heraclitus, Barthes. The reader is given a chance to experience a sense of finality. Here, Markson's project is successful insofar as it confers to death the quality of being 'final', yet 'undone'.

<22> In Reader's Block Markson sets up relations that are analogous to both writing and dying. Following, quoting, ghosting, and hosting the "undone" formulae of Wittgenstein, Markson's practice of writing is a performance of epitaphs in the form of 'undone' fragments to 'complete' texts. Markson undoes himself, and thus raises himself to the level of the creative and imaginative critic. "The world is my idea" (11), says Markson/Wittgenstein performing rituals of textual appearance, genuineness, truth and sacrality, marvellous inconsistency, funerary finality. It can be contended that for Markson, the construction of the fragment in the epitaphic sign forms and follows a cortege behind the complete text's final way. Telling us about Aragon growing old, and nothing else about Aragon's writing is a way of re-inventing Aragon's work in absentia, for we know it exists. Markson's narrating voice in the fragment about Barthes is similar to a prayer, which, one likes to imagine, is said by the one leading the cortege. One also likes to think that the prayer involves words on a corpus Christi incognitos, as it were, words which go beyond the representation of memento mori, and yet inform the "interminable undecidibility" that the deconstructive move from representation to representation posits. On this relation Karen Mills-Courts writes in a relevant passage in her work Poetry as Epitaph:

This movement opens up a text to the "the danger itself". This danger is death: . . . abyss that Derrida calls the death of presence and the death of meaning that must accompany the death of voice. In this situation the critic is, like Eugenio Donato's Baudelaire, "constituted by an accumulation of memories, an archeological museum of fragments of the past, haphazardly juxtaposed, each a synecdochal textual representation ordered by the accidental metonymic accident of proximity". And, as Donato points out, the count less than their emblem, the pyramid, . . . collection of memories which we are now in a position to read as the symbol of linguistic representation itself.... [The critic] then, being nothing more than a set of representations, is reduced to a cemetery containing nothing but funerary monuments. (Mills-Courts, 1990: 7-8)

<23> The significance of Markson's work lies in its concern with the possibility of representing in the work both the author and the critic, yet without making recourse to either of them. Insofar as Markson poses questions in an inverse order, the critic and the author appear in a perspective which inscribes voice within an economy of representation. It is not Donato's perspective, in which the critic is the warden of the churchyard, nor Mills-Courts's perspective in which voice is endangered and must settle with accompanying the "death of presence" and the "death of meaning". Markson's approach to the text is by saving it from itself and its appearances. It is neither criticism, nor the text, nor the author, that are subjected to Markson's questions, but the mutual relationship between them which puts emphasis on the fragment as a unique form of literariness. For Mills-Courts, for example, it is criticism that fulfils the characteristics of finality in death, whether textual or otherwise. Criticism is raised above "voice" and is turned into a principle for epitaphic functioning. Here she says:

Criticism becomes the epitaph of epitaphs. Nonetheless, we can experience the "death" of voice, of the "principle of intelligibility," the loss of this kind of significance, only by conjuring its "afterlife" as an echo that inhabits the inscription that points to its loss. We understand the death of "presence" by virtue of a maker that "presents" and "describes" its loss through a peculiar reincarnation of presence in the form of the voice of meaning. This too is epitaphic. (8)

<24> Now, Markson's work is remarkable for its mediation between the author and the critic, the author's death and the author's function, as he creates an intimate canon of literary theory which is made up of quotations in the image of Wittgenstein. Not of Wittgenstein's thought to be sure, as it would mean to create a 'world, and what is the case' as insignificant, but Wittgenstein's style which seems to be ever commanding, "prepare yourself to follow me". Relations of epitaphic representation are posed in Markson's works as questions to the text and the premises behind it. "Wittgenstein, it is you who are creating all the confusion!" (Markson, 2001: 141), 'he', the 'character' named Writer, exclaims in This is Not a Novel going on to trace in the words themselves the meaning of having incompatible, yet juxtaposed fragments of deaths, natural and not so natural. And while these words seem to inaugurate their writers, they nonetheless usurp the authority of their writers. Markson's epitaphic fragment is the complete text's undone doing. The writers, painters, musicians, and other artists whose deaths and mishaps Markson refers to are all there not to form an entire oeuvre -- a literary canon, monographs or otherwise -- but to inform the fragmentary in the fragments which Markson finds worthy of his own work. These fragments elect the ceremonial master. Examples abound.

<25> This is Not a Novel rejoices in planning the funeral ritual over writers with whom we find affinity and correspondence. The book's record of registered suicides, madnesses, antisemitics, has only one point: to go nowhere, while still "getting somewhere" as Markson himself puts it. As the dead person goes nowhere, yet occupies a space both in memory and in the ground, so does Markson's 'novel'. While it goes nowhere, in the sense that there is neither character development, nor climax, it progresses through style. It cuts the reader's need to the bare epitaph, found in a triple-voice. One finds one suited for Laurence Sterne:

And who are you? said he. -- Don't puzzle me, said I.
Says Tristram Shandy, VII 33. (12)

<26> In between one passes by other mentioning of some other 'passing' as well as passing remarks on Writer's agenda:

A novel with no intimation of story whatsoever, Writer would like to contrive.

And with no characters. None. (2)

Plotless. Characterless.

Yet seducing the reader into turning pages nonetheless. (3)

[...] Actionless, Writer wants it.

Which is to say, with no sequence of events.

Which is to say, with no indicated passage of time.

Then again, getting somewhere in spite of this. (4)

[...] Indeed with a beginning, middle, and an end.

Even with a note of sadness at the end. (4)

[...] A novel with no setting.

With no so-called furniture.

Ergo, meaning finally without descriptions. (5)

[...] A novel with no overriding central motivations, Writer wants. (6)

[...] Writer sitting and/or talking to himself being no more than renewed verification that he exists.

In a book without characters.

As noted, not being a character but the author, here.

We are and we are not.
Said Heraclitus.

Even with innumerable obvious likes and/or dislikes and central self-evident preoccupations.

[...] Knowledge is not intelligence.
Heraclitus additionally said. (82)

[...] Laurence Sterne's realization roughly a third of the way through Tristram Shandy that the book lacks a preface.
Whereupon he inserts one right where he is. (106)

[...] Laurence Sterne died of pleurisy, after years of lung hemorrhages. (128)

[...] Writer incidentally doing his best here -- insofar as his memory allows -- not to repeat things he has included in his earlier work.
Meaning in this instance the four hundred and fifty or more deaths that were mentioned in his last book also. (147)

[...] Roman Jakobson in opposition to a novelist, namely Nabokov, teaching literature at Harvard:
Should an elephant teach zoology?

Arnold Schoenberg and George Gershwin were tennis partners.

John Donne. Anne Donne. Undone. (149)

[...] Words, words, words. (165)

<27> Markson's performative enumeration of "words, words, words", others' words, ends in a gathering of voices whose sound is similar to the writing on the cenotaph. The epitaphic fragment answers the question, "what is a fragment" in a wholesome voice representative of the words of the imagination. In postmodernist writing the fragment is manifested as a history which is impossible without a theory. In other words, the fragment as text in history does not exist as a textual content (form) unless it is rendered as form (content) in a specific discourse. This epitomizes in fact Markson's contribution to the postmodern discourse which uses a modern voice (à la Pound and Joyce) to dismiss the collage or what in modern discourse went by the name of "incompatible juxtapositions". (Aragon, Tzara, Cioran)

<28> Thus, one cannot stop using words, in the sense of quoting, in the same manner as one cannot stop turning pages. Markson's intimations become one's accompanying mistresses. Of course, before Markson wrote Reader's Block (1996) and This Is Not a Novel (2001), he wrote Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988). There the narrator, Kate, a middle-aged woman, seemingly the only person left on earth, initiates what for Markson became the genre of the dead novel. Or the death of the text. The complete text, that is, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Without any governing fragments, ruins, and other detachments. Markson's contribution to the construction of the fragment proceeds from assuming that the complete text is a text without questions. A good text should travel among quotations and pose questions. Throughout Wittgenstein's Mistress, Kate is an example of the Wittgensteinian mode of questioning without being either affirmative, or propositional. All the questions in the book become a mode of putting themselves in a perspective which is inscribed within a hypothetical, yet certain framework. The question is a perspective that language sees itself through. Therefore there can be no complete texts. There is no such thing as a great complete text. Only musings, such as Kate's:

Once, Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later paint the storm. Obviously, it was not the storm itself that Turner intended to paint. What he intended to paint was a representation of the storm.

One's language is frequently imprecise in that manner, I have discovered. Actually, the story of Turner being lashed to the mast reminds me of something, even though I cannot remember what it reminds me of. (Markson, 1988: 12)

<29> Turner becomes Odysseus's epitaph. What Markson achieves in his work is ground the concern with defining the fragment in the form of an epitaph to a once 'complete' text, or more precisely here a defined text, and thus redeem writing from itself. That is to say, by creating a corpus of fragments which seem to perform the function of quoting themselves among themselves, Markson assumes for himself the task of the critic who has no tasks, but who indeed fulfils the function of producing a body of literature which has the effect that imagination ought to have on/for a theoretical level. Markson converges to the horizon of perspective, both the modernist concern with defining via style the difference between the fragment and the fragmentary, as well as the postmodernist concern with the same difference, yet expressed in a concern with hypothesizing definition that is based on predication. For postmodernists, the fragment does not seem to exist unless it is named something else other than itself, unless it performs genre.

<30> Markson, however, is a postmodernist writer who puts the fragment into a perspective which elongates it, as it were. This is the epitaphic perspective. What Markson does for the text is provide it with a condition for the possibility of looking at itself as a dead text. As a dead text, whose voice emerges through the epitaph, the text poses its own questions as to what makes it a literary matter. Every epitaphic question becomes its own answer, to paraphrase Debra Fried. Thus the text is, because it has an epitaph. In this perspective, the epitaph provides the fragment with an identity which replaces the text in which the fragment itself appears with what is unique and extraordinary. It is the voice of the epitaph which makes the unique decipherable. The epitaph speaks for itself.

Speeding the Reading

<31> For Markson, the construction of a complete text is contingent on the fragment insofar as the writing process is based on gathering fragments of facts and information with which the writer's imagination engages. Conversely, leaving the fragments to themselves, as it were, presenting them as an assemblage engages the reader's imagination. The assemblage is Markson's matrix for the "nonlinear", "discontinuous", and the "collage-like" truth of the fragments which complete themselves in accordance with how far the reader's imagination can stretch itself.

<32> When recognizing the writers for whom Markson writes imaginary epitaphs, one follows Markson's going ahead of the epitaphic perspective. When coming across names one has never heard of, one invents stories about Markson's following behind the epitaphic perspective. The truth of Markson's text, then, is not interpretable in apparence, but in lieu of apparence, namely in perspective. This perspective combines the emergence of an 'idea' of a complete text, which the reader is able to imagine against the background of Markson's fragments, with the fragments that prompt imagination in the direction of completeness. In other words, this perspective is epitaphic, as the epitaph's function can only be actualized, or fulfilled, in perspective; or in the perspective which reading posits, one could contend. Hence, Markson's art goes ahead of itself as a text by writing imaginary epitaphs in a way which appears to celebrate, but actually refuses to follow the reading practice of such critics as Harold Bloom. Bloom's reading speed, which is presented to appear to be something of a fright, something one must beware of, something one must guard oneself against, is lampooned:

Harold Bloom's claim to The New York Times that he could read at a rate of five hundred pages per hour.

Writer's arse.

Spectacular exhibition! Right this way ladies and gentlemen! See Professor Bloom read the 1961 corrected and reset Random House edition of James Joyce's Ulysses in one hour and thirty-three minutes. Not one page stinted. Unforgettable!

[...] What's this? Can't spare an hour and a half? Wait, wait. Our matinee special, today only! Watch Professor Bloom eviscerate the Pears-McGuinness translation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus -- eight minutes and twenty-nine seconds flat! Guaranteed. (Markson, 2001: 130-132)

<33> The epitaph goes ahead, and the reader follows. It is this act of following, where Markson follows others by being ahead of them, ahead of their death, so that they will follow him, follow Markson's epitaph on them, which thus 'completes' the picture of how fragments are defined, how genre is defined. What we read is a topos, a graveyard of genre, when we read his epitaphic fragments. What does Markson do with his fragments, one would like to ask, apart from preparing himself to follow, as the epitaph dictates? Perhaps guard himself against the influence of others, or else welcome it. Welcome to Writing. Read in Peace.

Works Cited

Bakhtin, M.M. (1986) "The Problem of Speech Genres". Speech, Genres and Other Late Essays. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press

Barthes, Roland (1995) "The Death of the Author". Authorship -- From Plato to the Postmodern. Seán Burke, ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

Benveniste, Emile (1971) Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press

Burroughs, William (1970) The Last Words of Dutch Schultz. Cape Goliard

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Fried, Debra (1986) "Repetition, Refrain, and Epitaph". EHL. Vol. 53. Issue 3. (pp. 615-632). Johns Hopkins University Press

Gessen, Keith (2001) Writing for No One [On line] http://www.kraus99.com/english/noone.htm

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Lyotard, Jean François (1994) Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. Stanford: Stanford University Press

Markson, David (1988) Wittgenstein's Mistress. Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press.

---. (1996) Reader's Block. Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press

---. (2001) This Is Not a Novel. Washington, DC: Counterpoint

Mills-Courts, Karen (1990) Poetry as Epitaph -- Representation and Poetic Language. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press

Rajan, Tilottama and Wright, Julia M., eds. (1998) Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Riffaterre, Michael (1983) Text Production. New York: Columbia University Press

Schlegel, Friedrich (1991) Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

---. (1957) Literary Notebooks 1797-1801. Toronto: University of Toronto Press

Silverman, Hugh J. (1994) Textualities: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction. New York and London: Routledge

Taylor, Mark C. (1997) Hiding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

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