Wittgenstein's Mistress - David Markson

Certain questions would appear unanswerable.

The narrator of this book is a woman who seems to be the last living thing on the planet. (There is some ambiguity as to whether she's nuts, though not as much as the jacket flap seems to proclaim.) After years roaming the globe, she's settled into a house on a beach and started tapping out her thoughts on a typewriter, which is what you end up reading. As such, the thoughts are meant to seem spontaneous, as if she is simply putting ideas down on paper as they come to her. It's a cute conceit, and she manages to be pretty charming, at times, and a little obsessive compulsive at others.

I had several problems with the book. First and foremost was that I had trouble reconciling the fact that, while the narrator's thoughts are meant to be spontaneous, supposed to seem to bleed together in imitation of how a person might think were they simply writing down each fleeting idea that occurred to them at any given time, it's clear that there is a guiding intelligence ordering the ideas, creating resonances and echoes, and generally composing the whole thing. It seems absurd to say this of this book, but it seems unbelievable. Or, rather, it would be better to say I didn't buy it.

That being said, the book is enjoyable. As I said above, Markson made an interesting narrator. It's easy to sympathize with her; she's all alone in the world and she seems to have had suffered some sort of tragedy when the world was still normal. And her descriptions of her experiences in the world after all the living things have disappeared show a wry and creative mind at work. For example, she lives in the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a while, taking down the paintings and separating the frames from their canvases, to burn, and nails the canvases back in their original places on the wall; she drives from city to city, getting in random cars, driving them until the gas runs out, and then finding another to continue on her pointless journey; she rolls tennis balls down the Spanish Steps; basically, quirky ideas of what one would do were the world an empty playground and you had absolutely nothing to do--you'd fuck around.

The narrator also alludes to many famous people, both ancient and contemporary, as well as works of literature, classical music, and a lot of paintings. This is what I liked about Reader's Block, and it was why I was interested in reading this book (Markson first wrote WM, and then ended up writing four more novels in a similar style--heavy on the allusions, packed with short, precise sentences), and while I got the same feeling of edification from this book as Reader's Block (due in great part to the constant allusions), I felt that Reader's Block was a better book.

Of course, there is the matter of the title, and the dreaded Wittgenstein. For that, I refer you to David Foster Wallace's review of the book, from an issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction (which you should subscribe to if you don't already!). To be honest, I really can't stand DFW's prose, so I only read enough of it to get an idea of what he's saying, and it basically confirms two things that I had already thought: a) Wittgenstein's Mistress is a very ambitious, intelligent book and b) it's not a successful work of fiction.

I guess what I struggle with generally, and with this novel in particular, is the idea that an idea perfectly executed can result in an imperfect book. When I first finished the book, I felt rather irritated, partly because of a severely limited understanding of Wittgenstein, and partly because the book had left me feeling quite empty. (Perhaps that was the point.) But I don't doubt that Markson has, with this book, fleshed out a convincing novelistic take on the idea of utter loneliness as an emotion that has nothing to do with other people, or that the state of feeling alone in the world would not be greatly exacerbated by literally being alone in the world. There is an aching poignancy to the narrator's predicament, and to her probing, with short, seemingly effortless yet incredibly precise statements, to achieve an accurate description of her emotional state, be it madness or pure sanity.

Maybe--and in this, I have no idea, given that I have only a vague, third-hand understanding of Wittgenstein's life and philosophy--Markson has shown how a person living Wittgenstein's philosophy would behave and go insane (which is what I gather DFW was saying in that essay). Certainly, in Correction, that was the impression I got. But I think in this respect Bernhard's book is the better one, because it doesn't seem as contrived. At its worst, Wittgenstein's Mistress is a thought experiment heroically attempted. At its best it's a novel which fails because of the rigid confines of the experiment. Or something like that.

I'm not sure if that makes sense, though I would, in closing, say that you should definitely give Markson a try. Also, apologies for the length of the post.