These novels carve out for themselves an interstice between flat-out fiction and a sort of weird cerebral roman à clef.

the piquant qualia of a lived, albeit bizarrely lived, experience

a sustained error that practically compels misprision

A distinction of Frege, a Wittgenstein-era titan: to mention a word or phrase is to speak about it, w/ at least implicit quotation marks: e.g., "Kate" is a four-letter name; to use a word or phrase is to mention its referent: e.g., Kate is by default the main character of Wittgenstein's Mistress.

flouts the ordinary cingula of "sense"

the conscious rendition of inditement not only rings true but serves essential functons

[...] "I EXIST" is the signal that throbs under most voluntary writing--& all good writing. [...]

The other side of the prenominate 2-bind--the side rendered explicitly by WM's opening and close--is why people who write need to do so as a mode of communication.

Scholars tend to schizofy Wittgenstein, counterposing the "early" W of the Tractatus and the "late" W of the Investigations, The Blue and Brown Books, and Philosophical Investigations.

Mr. T. Pynchon, who has done in literature for paranoia what Sacher-Masoch did for whips, [...]

her objectless epistle "mirrors" it perfectly

The basic argument here is that Mr. Markson, by drawing on a definitive atomistic metaphysics and transfiguring it into art, has achieved something like the definitive anti-melodrama. He has made facts sad. For Kate's existence itself is that of an atomic fact, her loneliness metaphysically ultimate. Her world is "empty" of all but data that are like the holes in a reticular pattern, both defined & imprisoned by the epistemic strands she knows only she can weave. [...]

Her world is "empty" of all but data that are like the holes in a reticular pattern

range from classical prosody to Dutch oils to Baroque quartets

of the survival strategies apposite one's existence as monad in a world of diffracted fact

the neurasthenia of Descartes's Meditations

[...] what's less clear and way richer is the peculiar slant "omniresponsibility" takes when the responsible monad in question is historically passive, per- and & conceived as an object and not a subject--i.e., when one is a woman, who can effect change & cataclysm not as an agent but merely as a perceived entity ... perceived by historically active testosteroids whose glands positively gush with agency. To be an object of desire (by hirsute characters), speculation (by hirsute author), oneself the "product" of male heads & shafts is to be almost Classically feminized, less Eve than Helen, responsible without freedom to choose, act, forbear. The (my) terribly blanket assumption here is that received perceptions of women as moral agents divide into those of Hellenic and those of Evian (Eve-ish) responsibility [...]

because both unsubtle & otiose reminder of gender)

this community being nothing other than sexual society as limned by the males who scripture & epic

history & data & the cingulum of Just the Facts, Ma'am

weltschmerz as opposed to naïveté or hubris

But recall to this abstraction's ambit prenominate stuff