What do You think about Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988)?
Okay, right up front, I read this on the basis that David Foster Wallace, who is unambiguously my literary hero, ascribed extremely high praise to this book. Foregoing any knuckle-biting self-analysis over what effect this had on my perceptions of the book I will just give my thoughts directly.First off, I think I could accept a description of this book as pretentious, self-indulgent, plotless, etc. All the usual suspects. Large swaths of its content are jumbled thoughts about painters, museums, writers, philosophers, ancient Greek mythology, and other assorted ivory tower, academic name-droppings and trivia. The book is constructed as series of single sentence paragraphs, has no breaks, no chapters. The narrator repeats the same things several times, self-interrogates with a faulty memory about what she's written, failed to mention, perhaps already mentioned, and so forth. However, there's more to it than this. To invoke a cliche about avant garde literature and experimental art more generally: this is a "difficult" book; it takes effort. It takes reading between the lines. In short, it requires patient meditation and perhaps the just-so levels of circumstance equalized just right to fully enjoy.(After the fact randomly inserted trivia: This book was rejected 54 times before being published. There's a interview with Markson at the end in my copy detailing this.)I found myself totally smitten with it immediately, before the blizzardy bursts of aforementioned "name-droppings" really kicked in. I think its very necessary to go into this book realizing that it consists of the strange, non-linear, typed thoughts of a woman who is, within the logic of the novel, the very last animal on the planet. No more humans, no more seagulls, no more cats, etc. This circumstance is not explained, at least not explicitly so. What IS explained though are seemingly random accounts of traversing the globe by her lonesome—living in famous European art museums—staying warm by burning art, artifacts, frames of famous paintings—admissions of periods of time where she was undeniably "mad"—descriptions of reading collections of ancient Greek plays and tearing out and burning each page after reading both sides in order to stay warm—sleeping in, driving and destroying and (oddly enough) nearly being killed by some of the millions of abandon vehicles she finds—discovering tapedecks set to 'Play' in said vehicles and listening to beautiful music in them—and many, many other heartbreaking, beautiful little descriptive gems of these kind of things that would transpire eventually in such a reality. The flurry of meandering thoughts about artists, writers, etc, (and the many dis/connections between them) as annoying as they sometimes became (though much of it was very interesting) really do serve as an excellent device which both obscures and sheds light upon the more fleshed out picture of Kate, our singular "protagonist"/narrator. A character whom I basically fell in love with, perhaps in a superficial way as so much of her person is obscured with the constant asides and gaping holes within the "plot"—but I recant the "superficial" there and want to replace it with the idea that I fell in love with her humanity, as cheesy as that may sound. She is the single loneliest character I've ever encountered. Her descriptions of imagining having seen a cat at the Colosseum in Rome, which becomes a motif throughout the book (like most of her thoughts, they repeat, all motif-ishly) becomes more clearly heartbreaking as they go on. She often has this emotionally detached voice, this sound of resignation, but it cracks and becomes desperate loneliness for the briefest flashes. She describes putting dozens of open cans of cat food about and being unable to tell if any has been eaten or not, though she seems know beneath her desperation and wishful thinking that there are no creatures left but her. Good grief, this book is appearing more beautiful to me upon reflecting on it right now than it was while I was reading it. Another cliche about "difficult" art: it makes for slow digestion. Thinking about it more now I realize that there are hundreds of beautiful little descriptions scattered throughout this book, cropping up amongst the scatterbrained trivia—some so beautiful that to try to describe them out of context just feels . . . wrong.I could go on giving sketches of her sketches, but I think, to somewhat relevantly quote Wittgenstein, "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."
—Joshua Nomen-Mutatio
I have to admit that I admired this much more than I enjoyed it.I admired it for its ability to do so much with so little. Markson's novel is written, as you probably know, as a sequence of short paragraphs -- often just one sentence per paragraph -- that relate the thoughts of protagonist Kate in a spare, simple, lucid style modeled (at least superficially) on Wittgenstein's Tractatus. The content of Kate's musing is, if this makes sense, spare in a way directly analogous to its style. Most of the text consists of Kate poking around in her mind, trying to remember decontextualized facts about high-cultural figures (mostly painters and composers). She frequently makes mistakes and frequently corrects herself, as though it were of the upmost importance that she get these little facts exactly right. And in fact it's hard to deny that, because the text she's writing has no explicitly stated goal.As you probably also know, Kate is, or believes herself to be, the last remaining person on earth. So I guess she considers this exercise important insofar as her memory is the last remnant of human culture, even if there's no one else around to read what she writes. But a description like "a novel about the last person on earth trying to remember what she can of human culture" doesn't call up an image that even remotely resembles what WM is like, page by page; it calls up an image of a book full of stress and overt despair, where WM is instead calm and controlled to the point of at least superficial inanity. The kind of desiccated fact-shuffling that composes the average page of WM has much more in common with some sort of bureaucratic report or technical manual than with anything one would naturally imagine if given only some pointers about "the last person on earth" etc. If there's despair there, it's under the surface, specifically under a surface that is "controlled" not just in the way a reserved person might be controlled, but in the manner of a restaurant menu or an air conditioner's instruction pamphlet.If that sounds boring, well, it often is, which is why I have a hard time saying I actually enjoyed this book. What's impressive about it is how much Kate comes alive as a character, not by some cannily chosen set of deviations from the formal strictures, but through some power of repetition and compounding. What is simply unengaging after 30 pages starts to feel, for better or for worse, like an extremely specific personal signature by page 200, for the simple reason that you have to postulate numerous things about a person to imagine them actually going on in the manner Kate does for hundreds of pages. Markson makes a voice out of raw materials that just don't seem physically up to the task, like someone building a house of air. When I started WM, Kate's sentences felt to me like the very absence of characterization itself, the sort of simple and trivially true (or trivially false) things that can be said without letting on anything interesting about oneself or one's situation; by the end of the book Kate had become, to me, one of those literary characters who is so well defined that it is difficult to convince myself that they have no life outside of the book. One of the reviewers quoted in the front of my copy says that WM is "the astonishing equivalent of Giotto's famous gesture of drawing a perfect circle freehand," and while I'm not sure that's a perfect analogy, it definitely conveys the strangeness of Markson's achievement. Like Giotto he has performed a feat that is both impressive and sort of empty, a proof of what can happen when a human artist's hand is -- perhaps unnecessarily -- forced to meet an inhumanly rigid standard.To make yet another crude analogy, Markson has succeeded at breathing in a vacuum -- but in the end he's still just breathing, which is something you and I do all the time. That is to say, I was impressed with the trick this book pulled off but in the end it's just another novel to me, and although it comes around to success the long way, the success I see in it is a conventional sort of success. It's only that long route that distinguishes it. Maybe the problem is with me here (isn't it always?). It's much easier for me to see banality in these sorts of clipped little lines than profundity (or even admirable clarity). This is not my cup of tea, and although I gave this book four stars I have to admit that the thought of going back and re-reading all of Kate's banal statements of fact about Brahams and biographies of Brahams sounds like torture to me. But then I guess Giotto's circle wasn't much to look at, either, in the end.
—Rob
It probably took me less than 20 pages to be enamored with Wittgenstein's Mistress and I turned the last page quite in awe of David Markson. What we read as the novel is an unbroken series of sentences being typed by a woman, who could be the last animal alive on the earth. One by one she pulls out little threads out of the tangled yarn that her fading and cluttered memory has become. As she unloads her intellectual baggage, she constantly corrects and contradicts herself. We see her struggle to hold on to a train of thought and connect her ideas in some manner. Many of the thoughts are repeated and re-visited, except by the time she comes back to a thought, she may be misrembering what she had said earlier. Different ideas blend into one another, time is bent out of shape, resulting in inaccurate and mixed-up facts. There are times when something which had existed only in her head takes the shape of reality that she completely believes in. She sees some broken bottles by the garbage disposal and imagines how Rembrandt could have painted that. Several pages later she informs us that Rembrandt's painting The Broken Bottles had been painted by him standing by a garbage disposal. Sometimes details from her present or past life project themselves onto learned knowledge of hers and color it with subjectivity. Within these seemingly disorganized sentences, there is an intricate pattern through which Markson brings forth the nature of memory, the close connection between imagination and our concept of reality."What an extraordinary change takes place...when for the first time the fact that everything depends upon how a thing is thought first enters the consciousness, when, in consequence, thought in its absoluteness replaces an apparent reality." - KierkegaardHer meandering thoughts on literature, art history, philosophers etc., perhaps have to do with escapism. Her ramblings are sprinkled with little tidbits of her daily life, but one rarely finds her talking about her past life or the family she once had. Slipping into madness may be the only way she can have an iota of sanity. While her being the last animal alive on the earth is an acceptable premise, there is some hint that this world may be existing only in her head. I see the possibility of this being a coping mechanism for her to deal with her son's death. Perhaps her trying to name the cat she thought she saw at the Colosseum or the tape that makes a cat-like scratching sound, is only an attempt to name the cat that her son used to have but never gave a name to. Cat was all they called it. However the dam does break at times and what it gives away is devastating. Throughout there is a sense of sadness lurking just beneath the words, that one can't shake off. Be it her trying to play tennis with herself, or her putting out cans of cat food for a cat she knows she had only imagined.In her own rambling and scatterbrained manner, she brings up many a philosophical questions. Though I am not familiar with the related works, one of the themes I did notice was about Wittgenstein's concern with logic and precise use of language. She often discusses questions of This is not a pipe variety and worries about expressing herself accurately. The novel itself could be an example of some such philosophical theme in that the literal meaning of the words you see printed on the paper won't explicitly tell you the meaning of the novel. You have to peel the layer and discover the order in disorder. It is amazing how much Markson says without putting it into words.Amidst all the trivia, philosophy and a heartbreaking depiction of loneliness, there are several beautiful scenes that leave quite an impression ... her sitting in an automobile watching Stratford-on-Avon fill up with snow, rolling hundreds of tennis balls down the Spanish steps or the transcendental view of the Parthenon in the afternoon Sun. And the ending - the first 220 pages might be worth reading just to be able to experience those last 20 pages in the light of the rest of the novel.
—Megha
