presumes that the only possible relation between language and the world is denotative, referential. In order for language both to be meaningful and to have some connection to reality, words like “tree” and “house” have to be like little pictures, representations of little trees and houses. Mimesis. But nothing more. Which means we can know and speak of nothing more than little mimetic pictures. Which divides us, metaphysically and forever, from the external world. If you buy such a metaphysical schism, you’re left with only two options. One is that the individual person with her language is trapped in here, with the world out there, and never the twain shall meet. Which, even if you think language’s pictures really are mimetic, is an awful lonely proposition. And there’s no iron guarantee the pictures truly “are” mimetic, which means you’re looking at solipsism. One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.
This, the first option,76 is where Wallace’s hideous men live. Trapped alone in language. The questions in those interviews (represented by the letter Q) are not only formally “missing” from the conversations, their respondents have internalized them. These men anticipate all questions and also their own expected answers and also the responses they have already concluded these answers will receive. In fact, all exterior referents have been swallowed up by language and loop back into the self. In this spiral, other people simply can’t exist. “You” has become just another word, encased in quote marks, and the results are hideous indeed.
Take the control freak in B.I. #48, whose only possible relationship between self and other is a verbal contract, in which you never hear from the second party. This is a man who likes to say to a woman, after a third date, and “without any discernable context or lead-in that you could point to as such”—How would you feel about my tying you up? But the casual tone is a deception, the question not even really a question:It is important to understand that, for there even to be a third date, there must exist some sort of palpable affinity between us, something by which I can sense that they will go along. Perhaps go along {flexion of upraised fingers to signify tone quotes} is not a fortuitous phrase for it. I mean, perhaps, {flexion of upraised fingers to signify tone quotes} play. Meaning to join me in the contract and subsequent activity.
From the prim specificity of the vocabulary and syntax to this habit of encasing in “quote marks” any ambiguous moment—he’s unbearably controlling. And whatever he claims, there’s never any real sense of “play,” because there is never any way to look past the referents to the other players. Despite all his verbal prowess, we learn nothing of the women; they remain faceless, nameless, featureless, their sole distinction whether they are “hens” or “cocks”—that is, whether they will submit or not. This strange terminology (he calls it “the aptest analogy”) is borrowed from the “Australian profession known as {flexion of upraised fingers} chicken-sexing,” by which the gender of a bird is ascertained merely by looking at it and naming it: hen, hen, cock, cock, hen. Naturally, he has a gift for it: he can identify a “hen” or “cock” before they are aware of what they are themselves. But then, he has the words for everything. He understands that he is compelled to “propose and negotiate contracted rituals where power is freely given and taken and submission ritualized and control ceded and then returned of my own free will.” He controls both the meaning of the act itself (“I know what the contract is about, and it is not about seduction, conquest, intercourse, or algolgagnia”) and its psychological root cause. (“My own mother was . . . erratic in her dealings with, of her two twin children, most specifically me. This has bequeathed me certain psychological complexes having to do with power and, perhaps, trust.”) Not only this: he is sufficiently self-aware to know his language (another legacy of his mother, a psychiatric case worker, natch) is “annoying, pedantic jargon.” He can “read” both the women’s words and their silences (“You are, of course, aware that social silences have varied textures, and these textures communicate a great deal.”) He can even tell real shock from false:Hence the fascinating irony that body language intended to convey shock does indeed convey shock but a very