youtubeMarkson

There’s something pathetic about the average Twitter parody account. Their creators clearly trust their senses of humor, trust they have the talent to measure up to whatever famous name they impersonate, but they have no faith that they could ever be lucky enough to make such a name on their own. So they call themselves Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler, or Bill Walton and tweet away as undiscerning followers flock.

But if they don’t create their own personalities, at least they create their own material. I did them one worse. I simply copied another person’s work verbatim: Vanishing Point (2004), by David Markson. A 191-page pastiche of anecdotes about famous artists, the novel could be mistaken at a glance for a printed and bound Twitter account. Though it began on a series of index cards and then was transferred by its 76-year-old author into manuscript on a typewriter, it feels like the perfect book for an era — and particularly a medium — devoted to quick bites of information.

The novel offers the thrills of the factoid, gossip, and high art all at once. Learn what song Langston Hughes had played at his funeral, how Laurence Sterne maximized love letters to his wife, and what connection Aristotle drew between food and the quality of a play. But also revel in the book’s often inscrutable “intellectual reference and allusion,” in its “cryptic interconnective syntax,” and in Markson’s quest to see “how little of his own presence he can get away with” in this plotless “seminonfictional semifiction.”

I discovered the novel at a thrift store during grad school and bought it on the strength of Kurt Vonnegut’s blurb. It seemed like the perfect book to dip into quickly in between studying, but I could barely put it down once I started. I was in love with it, immediately sharing it with friends and soon feeling so eager to see it spread out into the world that I both put it on a freshman English syllabus and created the Twitter account in 2012. The handle “@VanishingPoint” was taken, so I chose — confusingly but also appropriately — the title of another in Markson’s tetralogy of anecdotal works, “@ThisIsNotANovel.”

To understand how it functions on Twitter, you first have to get an idea of how this strange book functions in paperback. While all those anecdotes Markson seems to have stored away over a lifetime of reading are great, half the fun comes in between the lines: charting the connections between these tidbits and pondering the organizing principles of the occasionally-mentioned “Author” behind the book.

On page 65, he quotes Allen Ginsberg:

And then follows with Coleridge:

There’s a nice little dance there. Ginsberg does sound like a fool, but does the pairing with Coleridge imply that his foolishness is precisely what makes Ginsberg a poet? Or rather does Markson, like Coleridge, rescind the honor with the second sentence? Is Ginsberg merely a fool? Or are you the reader just having too much fun between the lines?

Later, Markson quotes Ezra Pound calling Milton “asinine” and Dryden a “lunkhead.” This is followed immediately by:

Again, it’s such a simple joy. By doing nothing more than placing one thing next to another, Markson exorcises Woolf’s self-doubts. Plucked from her diary and placed in Author’s assemblage, they instead function as a deserved rebuke to that odious anti-Semite Pound.

Or maybe not. Pound is quoted elsewhere approvingly and seems to draw his own share of misjudgment. But this effort to diagram the syntax connecting the anecdotes propels you.

Or me, at least. I started the account with hopes the daily dips into the book would help me figure out a way to teach such an odd text, but I really learned that the novel is great for Twitter for the same reason it’s not so great for college freshmen. The only thing that slowed me down when first reading the novel was the frequency of allusions which I could not place. For instance, every so often Author will simply list an address. It’s fun for a moment simply to think it through: “9 Ridge Road, Rutherford, New Jersey.” Oh right! William Carlos Williams! That one was made easier because Williams had just come up, but often it’s quite difficult. Sometimes he lets you fill in the anecdote. If you know what “Scapa Flow” means, good. If not, go to Google. Ditto “And somebody’s gotta pay the rent.” Double ditto: “sunt lacrimae rerum.”

Vanishing Point Essay illustration

My first time through, I parked myself in front of a laptop, looking up once or twice a page to google a snippet. It was exhausting. It felt less like reading than cribbing for an appearance on Jeopardy. At some point, I decided to enjoy it; I was simply going to have to remain in the dark about something every few lines. I would appreciate those elusive bits only in terms of cadences: the shift from long to short, words as punctuation, not signifiers. “Sakyamuni” needn’t leave me scratching my head but instead appreciating the part of Markson’s weave that is not thematic but simply rhythmic. This is less fun, my students explained, if you have to make such a reduction five times a page.

The value of a classical education,” Author quotes, is that “it enables us to look down with contempt on those who have not shared its advantages.” It’s no coincidence that someone in grad school would go gaga for this book. Nor that many of the account’s followers feature the word “writer” in their bios. There’s a clubbiness to the book. While the novel continually delights in how woefully misjudged many great artists have been, or laments how much hardship this neglect brought, their names finally survive sanctified. They have made it into the pantheon, where the mere location of their death is compelling, where the mere propinquity of their great names tantalizes:

Author presents repeated lists of artists who were school chums together at places like Eton and Harvard. They are an elite class. In a room full of people, their names endure.

Yet it’s not just glorification; it’s also aspiration. As Author weaves his waning life into this list of artists’ frequently misjudged lives and glorified afterlives, it feels like he is confronting his own postmortem, trying to fit his own life and literary career into this frame of greatness. Could the inattention to his work one day give pause? Might future people thrill to imagine his connection with other names like Cyril Connolly or Malcolm Lowry?

To see oneself in such a glorified state, it might help to see the glorified slung low, rendered trivial and familiar:

Yet even these humanizing details have a glorifying effect. There’s still something particularly compelling when it’s Eliot who is afraid of cows, Joyce who wears tennis shoes. Author shuffles along in his Adidas, distant from any future where somebody seeing his name undertaking the most banal actions could be struck with wonder.

Thus in recounting all these anecdotes, the author is not just sorting through a wider, canonical heritage but one that is also personal. Author needs something from them, even if he’s not entirely sure what.

What, in turn, would his Twitter followers need? To an extent, the account’s limited following joins him in venerating the already well-venerated. A bigger name tends to generate more action. One of the most popular tweets mentions Socrates, Jesus, and Buddha. Some re-tweeted factoids could have been related by any Twitter account. Indeed, many of the favorite ones seem like the stuff you’d get from Twitter’s hundreds of popular quotes accounts:

Other popular posts involve the epic drinking of artists or clever putdowns of critics. Their popularity seems less to do with Markson’s novel or any “interconnective syntax” than with pleasures of an assortment of fun facts easily assimilable to one’s interests.

But some other popular lines could only come from Markson:

Surely some recognize the latter lines from their appearance in Markson’s 1996 novel Reader’s Block, the former from 1988’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress. It’s Markson injecting his experience and also seeing how his work meshes with the canon. Surely others, not recalling these lines (like me), simply accord with the sentiment. Regardless, they’re putting their own stamp on it, tying it into whatever they’re feeling or want to express that day. They’re doing, although maybe not quite so exquisitely, the same thing Markson did with Woolf.

They use Markson’s work for their own purposes, even those parts I’d rather ignore. Carrying as he does so much of human cultural achievement within his head, as Author contemplates his own mortality, he also contemplates the extinction of culture. What happens when critical misjudgment is weaponized, as it was with Nazis, or with Communists, or, appearing as the book did just a few years after 9/11, with Muslims? The book returns continually to the dangers of radical Islam, with oblique and direct references to the Twin Towers and repeat mentions of atrocities committed in the name of the religion. Read generously, Author is placing Islamic fundamentalism among the other historical continuities catalogued in the book. But it often feels Islamophobic:

On January 7th, 2015, the morning of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, it happened that the following lines were the next up in the book:

Here was Markson appropriating a stray moment in On the Road to contemporary fears. Someone immediately re-tweeted the passage, apparently doing the same to his novel. Was Markson (or I) now contributing to a hotbed of Islamophobia? I checked the person’s timeline, where there was no comment on the excerpts. There didn’t need to be; they fit seamlessly into a series of tweets condemning the attacks, while also attacking religion, which the person insisted could never be moderated. I checked back occasionally over the next few hours as the account debated her views with a follower. Amid it all, I scrolled back and realized she had canceled the re-tweet. I could only assume that she no longer liked how it complemented her increasingly beleaguered arguments, but really I had no idea what her interconnective syntax was.

I waited a day to put the next one up:

The sequence works much the same on Twitter as in the book, linking to horrific terrorist acts and then softening the thought with a coincidence of nomenclature. Yet while the book quickly weaves in another theme, for the person reading his or her timeline, it was likely one odd note amid a stream of on-topic items about Hebdo. The person who had canceled the retweet the day before gave this one a favorite — no telling how it wove into her day.

Titillating anecdotes, intriguing quotations, and even terrorist fears all mesh nicely with one’s daily stream. Their source does not. Author repeatedly pops in to mention his flagging energy or his shopping needs, and, quite reasonably, these tweets rarely draw attention. They probably sound as dull as it does when any other account you follow tweets about mundane stuff. Yet when you’re reading the book, perhaps a bit starved for narrative, these appearances are always special. Even as Author experiments to get away without character, you work to flesh out as much character as possible. And so you’re especially intrigued by those moments that seemingly live only in the recesses of Author’s brain:

It’s ignored on Twitter, but whenever Author returns to this image in the novel, you perk up. You’re trying to piece things together. You run to Google to see if you can source the memory. (You can’t.) This is Markson reckoning with the divide between the public canon and private artistic experience. Maybe it’s an image he’s never put into print; maybe it’s from some obscure source that hasn’t entered the (searchable) canon. He has been affected by these ablutions; you’re frustrated by them. You rack your brain or look for a deeper connection. In the surrounding text on Twitter, you just move on to what somebody else has to say.

Twitter gives followers the text, but, as with any account, they decide which parts to elevate. If this account is a Menardian reinscription, its novelty comes not from the life and circumstances of the re-author, but from those of the text’s random readers. The authentically novel parts of the novel are ignored, while the factoids it presents are turned, a second time, into private statements. Who knows what any given re-tweeter is making of “Nobody comes. Nobody calls”? Who is even able, amid the stream, to notice the interconnecting themes? To whom is the experience of this account anything like the experience of that book?

More prosaically, is this copyright infringement? Is this the same thing as that? (Is it fair use, when the uses are spread out over 2,170 tweets across four years?) In copying passages over to Twitter, I tended not to use my book but available pages from Google Books, screen-capping well over half of the novel across repeated visits. There, you can come close to experiencing the book as constructed, albeit only for about ten pages per visit. But it’s safe to say nobody was getting anything like such an experience of the book via this account. Twitter’s analytics show that maybe a third of the account’s followers viewed any given tweet. People could scroll through the account’s history, but they wouldn’t, and the site cuts it off after a while anyway. Twitter is a medium that refuses its past. Almost nobody reads completely through what happened on their feed while they were away. Even dragging up and linking old tweets like I did above is the sort of thing that is considered ethically dubious.

If it’s true that the medium is the message, then this Twitter account isn’t a copy. It might be the same text, but in disallowing a full immersion in its interconnective syntax, the novel ceases to be a novel. Its content is denatured by its form. The book is great for Twitter — you can stop and Google because you’re already on a computer — but Twitter can’t carry the essential unsaid that makes Vanishing Point special. You might follow the connections that run back-to-back, but not those carried across dozens of pages. For that you need to succumb to a single voice in a medium that — for all its powers of celebrity — always subsumes individual voices.

But this subversion of the novel might also be a perfect tribute to it. Earlier, we saw how Author recasts Woolf’s words for his own larger purposes. This process of appropriation becomes even more pronounced later on, as Author seeks to take from the vast store of culture and steal a bit for himself. Shortly before the novel’s close, as Author focuses more insistently on death, he writes:

He decides it is of a piece with “all the illimitable complications of Einstein’s cosmic Oy, vey” and “personally endows it with — a terminal desolation and despair.” Here he is not injecting the private into the public as with the lonely woman at the toilet, but wresting something from the public. He arrogates the right to personally endow meaning over part of the oldest text in Western literature.

It is in this way that the book is and isn’t like the Twitter account. Twitter skirts over and re-enacts the book’s central struggle. It allows the author to be erased as a person and as a creator — to fall behind those greater names. Yet, as Author’s stamp is erased, it also gives the account’s readers the chance to place their own stamp on his materials, however quietly. They rewrite it, tear the book into fragments much like Markson started with, and assemble them into their own making. The Twitter text is fundamentally different from the codex version. It lacks the lifeblood of the book — Markson’s interconnective logic. But then, like a blood donor offering a full transfusion, it is able to impart that life to it anew.

“Go, litel bok,” Author tweets on the last page of his novel. He’s inscribing himself on the foundational writer of English literature, knowing, like Chaucer in the preface to Troilus and Criseyde, he has no control over where his work will lead next. Readers are wily. Fame is capricious. William Blake, Edmund Spenser, and Nikolay Gogol can die paupers. John Berryman’s writing samples can be rejected. Even Anne Frank’s diary can be disregarded. There’s no logic to reputation, past, present, or future, so why not just imprint yourself on a reputation already established? Speak through another’s experience, voice, talent — hope to join with it to taste of something that history tells you can likely never be yours, no matter how hard you try. And hope also that somehow a little bit of you will get entwined in that greatness, that your obsessive attention to names above you will somehow pull you up with them.

Andrew Heisel is a writer who lives in New Haven and has written for The Awl, Electric Literature, Slate, Vice, the LA Review of Books, Jezebel, and The Washington Post. You can follow him on Twitter here.


 
 
Become a Patron!

This post may contain affiliate links.