Wittgenstein's Mistress

AFTERWORD

THE EXTRAORDINARY NOVEL you have presumably just finished reading almost didn't see the light of day. The sorry state of contemporary publishing emerges from this conversation between David Markson and critic Joseph Tabbi (from the Review of Contemporary Fiction's special issue on Markson, summer 1990, from which the second half of this afterword is adapted). With self-deprecating humor — where sputtering outrage would have been fully justified — Markson tells Tabbi that he suspects Wittgenstein's Mistress set a record for the number of rejections it received:

For years, the highest number of turndowns I'd ever heard of was thirty-six, on The Ginger Man. Then I read in that Deirdre Bair biography that Murphy had about forty-two. Ironweed had a dozen, as I recall, and I once jokingly told Bill Kennedy while Wittgenstein was going around that if rejections were any sign of quality, then mine was already twice as good as his. But then I left Donleavy and Beckett in the dust also.

JT: What sort of figure are we finally talking about?

DM: I almost hate to announce it. Fifty-four.

JT: For a novel that well thought of since? Wasn't one editor in fifty-four capable of seeing something in it?

DM: Obviously it wasn't all black and white. Oh, about a third of them didn't like it at all, and perhaps another third made it inadvertently evident that they didn't understand a word. And OK, you can't fault the totally negative responses — or the vapid ones either, since they pretty much correspond with the percentage of editors you know are C students to begin with. But it's the other third that really cause grief. I mean when the letters practically sound like Nobel Prize citations—"brilliant," "twenty years ahead of its time," "we're honored that you thought of us"..

JT: And?

DM: The predictable kicker, of course. It won't sell. Or worse, we couldn't get it past the salespeople. Actually acknowledging that those semiliterates don't simply participate in the editorial process, but dictate its decisions. God almighty.

I began corresponding with Markson in 1984, met him shortly after, and in the autumn of 1987 was allowed to read the manuscript of the novel. I loved it, and since I was just then talking with John O'Brien about joining his Dalkey Archive Press, I suggested that Markson send it there. That he did and, with no aesthetic obtuseness or commercial considerations hindering the process, the novel was immediately accepted and published the following May. It was widely and favorably reviewed, went through two printings in hardcover, then several more in paperback, and was published in England and (in translation) in Spain and France. The novel has been the subject of several scholarly essays and has become a staple of college classes in contemporary fiction (and even the occasional philosophy class). Fifty-four rejections.

At first glance, Wittgenstein's Mistress seems to have little in common with Markson's previous work — or anyone else's, for that matter. (The nearest precedent for it might be Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 story "The Yellow Wallpaper," also narrated in short paragraphs by a woman seesawing between sanity and madness, with a fertile if disordered imagination.) It has the least amount of dramatic activity of all of his novels, being (at the simplest level) the rambling meditations of a woman named Kate who seems to be the last person on earth. And yet it has the greatest amount of intellectual activity, being (at this level) one of the most profound investigations of episte-mology in literature and the best fictional illustration I know of Wittgenstein's proposition that "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."

Like all of Markson's protagonists, Kate views the world through the lenses of culture: "one does not spend any time viewing castles in La Mancha without being reminded of Don Quixote," she writes. "Any more than one can spend time in Toledo without being reminded of El Greco" (39). And like both Fern in Markson's novel Going Down (1970) and Lucien in Springer's Progress (1977), Kate has a huge fund of anecdotal material on painters, supplemented by a general knowledge of writers, composers, singers, and philosophers — often the kind of material (as Kate is the first to admit) that one picks up from such places as the liner notes on record albums, dust-jacket copy, or digressive footnotes in biographies. Kate can't remember where she learned many of these items — like the fact manuscripts of Sappho's poems were once used to stuff mummies — nor why such trivia has stayed with her all these years while more substantial matters have slipped her mind. Nor does she always remember such trivia correctly, and it is here that Markson's use of intertextuality differs most not only from his earlier work but from that of other allusive writers.

For earlier writers (and in Markson's earlier works), culture was stable and objective, an orderly accumulation of facts— names, dates, compositions, critical opinions — that could be called up by the writer (and/or his characters) as in a user-friendly data-retrieval system. In Wittgenstein's Mistress, however, culture is unstable and subjective, a fading memory of "baggage" that teases Kate with false connections, "inconsequential perplexities," and meaningless coincidences. It is a disorderly jumble where Euripides seems to have been influenced by Shakespeare, where Anna Akhmatova is a character in Anna Karenina, and where Willem de Kooning wears a soccer jersey in Giotto's Renaissance studio. Kate lives in a world of cultural relativity similar to the physical one described by Einstein and the historical one described by recent historians, who likewise have realized that history is not an objective set of facts but a subjective welter of interpretations.

Kate's attempts to order her cultural memories are often earnest, often comic: for example, the reason Euripides sounds as though he'd been influenced by Shakespeare is that she's read Gilbert Murray's Shakespearean translation of The Trojan Women; so Kate wonders if a bookstore she enters in Athens has "a Greek edition of William Shakespeare's plays. By a translator who had been under the influence of Euripides" (45). This is as funny as it is profound, upsetting traditional notions of influence and the transmission of culture while at the same time being perfectly plausible. (And note the Jack Benny pause between those two sentences; Kate has a deliciously dry wit that, like Springer's, rescues her from many potentially maudlin moments.) Sometimes it takes her several pages (and several weeks) to complete a tantalizing connection: on page 12, for example, she relates the fact that the British painter Turner once "had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later paint the storm." This reminds her of something, but she can't remember what. Then on page 83 she thinks about the scene in the Odyssey in which "Odysseus has himself lashed to the mast of his ship, so that he can listen to the Sirens singing but will stay put." Again she is reminded of something but can't say what. Finally, a hundred pages (and many weeks) later, Kate writes:

Have I ever said that Turner once actually had himself lashed to the mast of a ship, to be able to later do a painting of a storm?

Which has never failed to remind me of the scene in which Odysseus does the identical thing, of course, so that he can listen to the Sirens singing but will stay put. (189-90)

Other times the connection is never made, like the one Kate suspects exists between Lawrence of Arabia and T. E. Shaw; she comes so close so often to making the link that the reader wants to shout it out at her as though in the audience of a game show. Kate's cultural allusions also differ from the usual ones in that more emphasis is placed on the artist than on the work, especially on the kinds of personal and domestic details that are usually ignored. When she cites Maupassant, for example, it is not to allude to one of his stories but to remember that he liked to row and ate his lunch at the Eiffel Tower because that was the only place in Paris from which he couldn't see the monument. The first half of the novel is filled with such trivia, but midway Kate's references begin to take a different turn and emphasize the darker side of the lives of cultural figures, noting those who went mad, were forced into exile or poverty, who committed suicide, went blind, and so on. Here a reference to Maupassant will hint (111) and then state (234) that he ended up crawling about on all fours and eating his own excrement. "Even though the work itself lasts, of course," Kate reminds herself. "Or does thinking about the work itself while knowing these things somehow sadden one even more?" (139). A sense of futility hangs over culture and history as Kate attempts to sort all this out, tempting the reader to equate Western civilization's greatest works of art and philosophy with the futile messages Kate leaves in the street or, better yet, with the messages she leaves in sand, washed away almost before she can complete them. The culmination of this train of thought is the mournful litany near the end of the book for all those who succumbed to the Siren song of art, as destructive as it is seductive, as well as for those who were victims of more mundane miseries:

God, poor Maupassant.

Well, but poor Friedrich Nietzsche, too, actually. If not to mention poor Vivaldi while I am at it also, since I now remember that he died in an almshouse.

And for that matter poor Bach's widow Anna Magdalena, who was allowed to do the same thing….

Ah, me. If not to add poor Andrea del Sarto and poor Cassandra and poor Marina Tsvetayeva and poor Vincent Van Gogh and poor Jeanne Hébuterne and poor Piero di Cosimo and poor Iphigenia and poor Stan Gehrig and poor singing birds sweet and poor Medea's little boys and poor Spinoza's spiders and poor Astyanax and poor my aunt Esther as well..

So for that matter poor practically the whole world then, more often than not. (234-36)

This outpouring of sympathy seems to have a cathartic effect on Kate, however. Nearly two months have passed since she broke off typing the book we are reading, and some sense of balance and renewal seems to have come to her in the meantime. After the first snow falls, she is reminded of "that old lost nine-foot canvas of mine, with its opaque four white coats of gesso. / Making it almost as if one could have newly painted the entire world one's self, and in any manner one wished" (233). She seems to be doing just that at novel's end, building fires on the beach after sunset and making believe they are Greek watchfires at Troy, starting over again where it all began. Like the woman in the hypothetical novel Kate toys with writing (a metafictional version of Wittgenstein's Mistress itself, obviously), Kate has "gotten more accustomed to a world without any people in it than she ever could have gotten to a world without such a thing as The Descent from the Cross, by Rogier van der Weyden… Or without the Iliad' (232-33). The throat-constricting desolation of the novel's final lines seven pages later discourages the reader from too cheery an interpretation, but civilization seems finally to have been worth it after all. At any rate, I now couldn't become accustomed to a world without Wittgenstein's Mistress.

— STEVEN MOORE