without ever having to risk himself.
*
Language is communal. It is not possible to have a wholly private language. This is the theory put forward by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations, a rebuttal of Descartes’s notion of the lonely self, trapped in the prison of the body, uncertain that anyone else exists. Impossible, says Wittgenstein. We cannot think without language, and language is by its nature a public game, both in terms of acquisition and transmission.
But despite its shared nature, language is also dangerous, a potentially isolating enterprise. Not all players are equal. In fact, Wittgenstein was by no means always a successful participant himself, frequently experiencing extreme difficulty in communication and expression. In an essay on fear and public language, the critic Rei Terada describes a scene repeated throughout Wittgenstein’s life, in which he would begin to stammer while attempting to address a group of colleagues. Eventually, his stuttering would give way to a tense silence, during which he would struggle mutely with his thoughts, gesticulating all the while with his hands, as if he was still speaking audibly.
The fear of being misunderstood or failing to generate understanding haunted Wittgenstein. As Terada observes, his ‘confidence in the stability and public character of language coexisted, it would seem, with a dreadful expectation that he would himself be unintelligible’. He had a horror of certain kinds of language, in particular ‘idle talk and unintelligibility’; talk that lacked substance or failed to produce meaning.
The idea that language is a game at which some players are more skilled than others has a bearing on the vexed relationship between loneliness and speech. Speech failures, communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, mishearings, episodes of muteness, stuttering and stammering, word forgetfulness, even the inability to grasp a joke: all these things invoke loneliness, forcing a reminder of the precarious, imperfect means by which we express our interiors to others. They undermine our footing in the social, casting us as outsiders, poor or non-participants.
Though Warhol shared many of Wittgenstein’s problems with speech production, he retained a typically perverse fondness for language errors. He was fascinated by empty or deformed language, by chatter and trash, by glitches and botches in conversation. The films he made in the early 1960s are full of people failing to understand or listen to each other, an investigative process that sharpened with the arrival of the tape machine. The first thing he did with his new wife was to make a book, entitled a, a novel, composed entirely of recorded speech; a celebratory tour de force of idle and unintelligible language, around which loneliness hovers like a sea mist.
Despite the declaration of the title, a isn’t a novel in any ordinary sense. It isn’t fictional, for a start. It doesn’t have a plot and nor is it a product of creative labour, at least not in the way that term is ordinarily defined. Like Warhol’s paintings of inappropriate objects or wholly static films it defies the rules of content, the terms by which categories are assembled and maintained.
It was conceived as an homage to Ondine, Robert Olivo, nicknamed the Pope, the irrepressible speed-queen and greatest of all the Factory’s supernaturally gifted talkers. Charming and unstable, he appeared in many of Warhol’s films of the period, most notably Chelsea Girls, in which he can be seen flying into one of his notorious rages and slapping Rona Page twice around the face for calling him a phoney.
Ondine was a quicksilver presence. A photograph taken around the time of a’s taping catches him in a rare moment of stillness, out in the street, head turned to confront the camera – a handsome man in aviators and a black t-shirt, his dark hair falling in a quiff over his eyes, an airline flight bag slung over his shoulder, his mouth in the characteristic pout-cum-smirk that Warhol describes in POPism as being ‘pure Ondine, a sort of quizzical duck’s mouth with deep smile lines around it’.
The original plan was to follow him for twenty-four hours straight. Recording began in the afternoon of Friday, 12 August 1965, but after twelve hours and despite copious consumption of amphetamines Ondine began to flag (‘you have finished me off’). The remainder was taped later, in three sessions over the summer of 1966 and one in May 1967. The twenty-four cassettes were then transcribed by four different typists, all of them young women. The pool comprised Maureen Tucker, later the drummer in The Velvet Underground, Susan Pile, a student at Barnard, and two high school girls. They approached their task in a variety of ways, some erratically identifying speakers and some failing to distinguish between voices at all. None were professional typists. Tucker refused to transcribe swear words, while one of the girls’ mothers threw away an entire section, horrified by the language.
Warhol insisted that all these errors be preserved, alongside the many infelicities of transcription and spelling. As such, a is resistant if not actively antagonistic to the production of understanding. Reading it is confusing, amusing, baffling, alienating, boring, infuriating, thrilling; a crash course in how speech binds and isolates, conjoins and freezes out.
Where are we? Hard to tell. In the street, in a coffee shop, in a cab, on a roof terrace, in a bathtub, on the phone, at a party, surrounded by people popping pills and playing opera at full blast. Everywhere is the same place really: the empire of the Silver Factory. But you have to imagine the interiors. No one describes their location, just as in a conversation one doesn’t stop to itemise the elements of the room in which it’s taking place.
The effect is like being shipwrecked in a sea of voices, a surf of unattributed speech. Voices in the background, voices vying for space, voices drowned out by opera, inconsequential voices, unintelligible garble, voices running into one another: an endless barrage of gossip, anecdote, confession, flirtation, plan; language taken to the threshold of meaning, abandoned language, language past the point of caring, language disintegrating into pure sound; OW-UH-mmmmm. I dunno what the wor dis. Oooooo-mmm-mmm, through which the voice of Maria Callas perpetually seeps, itself gloriously deformed.
Who’s talking? Drella, Taxi, Lucky, Rotten, the Duchess, DoDo, the Sugar Plum Fairy, Billy Name, a parade of cryptic, unstable nicknames and noms de plume. Do you understand or don’t you? Are you in or out? Like any game, it’s all about belonging. ‘The only way to talk is to talk in games, it’s just fabulous,’ Ondine says and Edie Sedgwick, disguised as Taxi, replies: ‘Ondine has games that no one understands.’
People who can’t keep up, who slow the flow, are cast literally to the margins. In one of the most disturbing sequences, Taxi and Ondine are joined by a French actress, whose repeatedly ignored interjections are placed on the far side of the page, away from the main stream of conversation, the text shrunken to denote the tiny tininess of an ignored voice, caught in the echo chamber of exclusion. Elsewhere, the talk is of who deserves to stay inside the charmed circle of the Factory. Elaborate rules are drawn up, protocols of expulsion developed. Society as centrifugal force, separating the elements, policing division.
But speaking, participating, is almost as terrifying as being ignored. Warhol takes the desire for attention – to be looked at and listened to – and sharpens it into an instrument of torture. ‘I’m making love to the tape recorder,’ Ondine says towards the end of his marathon of speech, but from the very beginning he also keeps begging to stop, asking over and over how many more hours he has to fill. In the john: ‘No, oh Della, please, I, I, my . . .’ In the bathtub: ‘may I ask you in all fairness – this is no private . . .’ At Rotten Rita’s apartment: ‘Don’t you hate me Drella, by this time? You must be so disgusted with putting that thing in my face . . . Please shut it off, I’m so horrifying.’
Putting that thing in my face: there’s certainly something sexual about Warhol’s behaviour: stripping Ondine down, encouraging him to ejaculate a torrent, to spill his secrets, to dish the dirt. What he wants is words – words to fill or kill time, take up empty space, expose the gaps between people, reveal wounds and hurts. He says very little himself beyond a reticent, repetitive litany of Oh, Oh really? What? (In 1981, by which time he’d become considerably more fluent, even chatty, one of his first superstars called him on the phone. He immediately fell back into the old stuttering speech, telling his diary: ‘The dialogue was straight from the sixties.’)
Towards