Wittgenstein’s Mistress in fiction files redux

Mar 23, 2011 Jimmy rated it it was amazing

Shelves: novel, male, truly-madly-deeply-original, my-canon, year-1980s

The protagonist, a painter, finds herself to be the last person on earth. More accurately, the last mammal, as even cats and seagulls are nowhere to be found except in bits of tape and pieces of floating ash. For years she wanders the earth alone. Looking for people in store windows. Feeding imaginary cats. Is she mad? Has she imagined all this?

That alone would've been a good premise for a novel. But Markson takes that premise as just the backdrop, the starting point for many other investigation The protagonist, a painter, finds herself to be the last person on earth. More accurately, the last mammal, as even cats and seagulls are nowhere to be found except in bits of tape and pieces of floating ash. For years she wanders the earth alone. Looking for people in store windows. Feeding imaginary cats. Is she mad? Has she imagined all this?

That alone would've been a good premise for a novel. But Markson takes that premise as just the backdrop, the starting point for many other investigations into a mind's slow deterioration (and thus, the decay of language, memory, knowledge). Meanwhile, we are reading every word she types into a typewriter from a house on a beach.

This is several years since she's been "alone". So almost everything she writes are facts and tidbits still floating around in her mind like the debris of candy-wrappers in the streets, or the El Caminos with flat tires frozen mid-bridge. Her thoughts are understandably a bit neurotic; she doubts her own memory and doubts language's ability to capture those memories:

All things considered, most likely T.E. Shaw was somebody Lawrence of Arabia once fought with in Arabia, which I do remember many scenes of in the movie.
Although when I say fought with, I should perhaps point out that I mean fought on the same side as, incidentally.
Frequently when one says that somebody fought with somebody one could just as readily mean that person was fighting against that person, as it happens.
So that when Marlon Brando and Benito Juarez were in Mexico, for instance, as in another movie I once saw, one could say that one side was fighting with the other side and mean exactly the opposite from what one means when one says that T.E. Shaw most likely was somebody that Lawrence of Arabia was fighting with in Arabia

What's also interesting about the above passage is that T.E. Shaw and Lawrence of Arabia was the same person. Often her recollections are half-formed, or mis-remembered like this. But it's not important for you to know (she never realizes herself) these errors (and I probably missed many also).

Elsewhere she talks about how two objects can be anything but equidistant from each other, whether she can say she burned down the house when not the entire house burned down, or whether she can use the same expression to describe another house that she's taking apart to burn plank by plank, whether to truly ignore the rain would mean to walk in it, which is opposite of what one would first think, etc., etc., etc..

She concerns herself mainly with these "inconsequential perplexities" and, as she quotes someone as saying, these perplexities can become the "fundamental mood of existence". Thus, her talk centers mainly around the lives of painters (Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Giotto, Rauschenberg), writers (William Gaddis, Rilke), musicians(Beethoven, Brahms, Maria Callas) and mythical figures (Helen of Troy, Clytemnestra, Cassandra).

Oh yeah, and philosophers, like Wittgenstein. Because even in not talking about Wittgenstein's ideas (she claims to have never read a word of his, just as Wittgenstein has never read a word of Aristotle, she also claims), she gets at the core essence expressed in many of Wittgenstein's "language games".

Which is: to show that much of what we know, expressed through language, is a kind of short-hand notation. When that tent is dismantled, we realize we didn't mean what we originally thought we meant. And that many of the questions we ask ourselves are basically illusions set up by words so that we think we are talking about something when in reality we aren't (like the cat that doesn't exist in this novel, but is named and given a personality, and thus exists in her mind, and on the page).

Nevertheless, the world is all that is the case.

Surely there is much more thought to be given to this topic, but as someone who has never read a word of Wittgenstein either (I've only read a biography on him, which was highly illuminating and I'm very glad I read it before reading this), I should probably not continue talking about that which I do not know. (update: read this by DFW if you want more on the philosophical side of this novel)

Lastly: though this might sound like a semantic philosophy text, it isn't. It's a highly entertaining and moving novel. There is something eerie and relatable about her predicament and her state of mind, and through these word games (though they are not games to her) she is still able to get across her personality and deep sadness. It's a truly affecting novel without pulling on your emotions too directly, but through many indirect gradations. ...more

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Oct 26, 2007 Patty rated it it was amazing

Today I was walking around the Met, thinking of her.

2013: 4 years later, I still think about this book so frequently that I feel it would be dishonest of me not to bump it up to 5 stars.

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Jun 06, 2010 Moira rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2012-50-new-books-challenge, favourites

Yes, I'm giving this a star rating - five! - because it deserves it. I do need to write a review, but not right now....it'll be an undertaking. ...more

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May 07, 2009 Dan rated it did not like it

Shelves: literature, borrowed, z-2009-reads

Seemingly crazy woman saying tons of things which may or may not be true. I felt it to be an exercise in form and not one of storytelling. It has been called great and genius but I just don't see it nor care to. ...more

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Apr 19, 2009 Alex rated it really liked it

Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson

A woman who finds herself alone in the world sets down her thoughts.

On page 78 of WM(Dalkey paperback), Kate, the narrator, writes “The world is everything that is the case,” and then admits that she has no idea of what that means. The statement is a slight alteration from the opening sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “The world is all that is the case.” Wittgenstein shifted the focus of philosophy (in many minds of his generation Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson

A woman who finds herself alone in the world sets down her thoughts.

On page 78 of WM(Dalkey paperback), Kate, the narrator, writes “The world is everything that is the case,” and then admits that she has no idea of what that means. The statement is a slight alteration from the opening sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “The world is all that is the case.” Wittgenstein shifted the focus of philosophy (in many minds of his generation) from the classic search for the big truths to linguistic analysis. One thing that he wanted to clarify was how to judge if a statement was true. A statement can be meaningless or have meaning, but even if it has meaning that doesn’t mean that it’s true. In commenting on Wittgenstein’s work, the philosopher Brian Magee notes, “Not everything that’s possible is the case,” so that the world is not the case of all possibilities, but only those possibilities that are true. I think that much of the narrative of WS explores how that proposition plays out in the severest of circumstances. Kate makes meaningful statements about many things, but not all of which are true. They aren’t the case. Later she corrects the statements or tries to correct her statements, gamely (ultimately hopelessly) trying to restore the world to its case (to its truth). So, for example, on page 43 she writes, “Why did I imply it was Phidias who built the Parthenon when it was somebody named Ictinus?” On page 72, she notes, “Anxiety being the fundamental mode of existence....” She at first attributes this to Kierkegaard and then corrects it to Heidegger.” Freud, in fact, wrote something similar to this.

Or is it just that she’s a crazy old woman, whose ravings aren’t worth following? Shortly after reading WM, I ran across a review of the book, "Words in the Air: The complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell," by Colm Toibin. This is what I read, “Out of the damage done to her in childhood, Bishop produced a body of work filled with meticulous observing. In her poems she often corrected herself or qualified herself, almost as a duty or ceremony. In her first book The Map she wrote the word ‘shadows’ and then immediately wondered ‘or are they shallows.’. In The Weed, she dreamed that “I lay upon a grave, or bed,’ then had to qualify that by writing ‘(at least some cold and close-built bower);’ In The Fist, when she wrote the words ‘his lower lip,’ she had to wonder, ‘if you could call it a lip.’” The point is that all of these corrections and revisions were part of her poems (and Tolbin gives numerous other examples). And what is the thinking behind this poet’s technique? Toibin says,“... in one way a trick of making the reader trust and believe a voice...The trick established limits, exalted littleness, made the bringing of things down unto themselves into a sort of conspiracy with the reader. But it was also a way of noticing the world with something close to terror.” Bishop herself wrote of her work, “Since we do float upon an unknown sea I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way carefully; who knows what might depend on it.” Isn’t this what Kate is doing? Is she not floating on an unknown sea and is it not terrifying? Did Elizabeth Bishop inspire Markson’s Kate?

One other thing that Wittgenstein argued was that words/language meant nothing abstracted from culture, from the interaction of people. In a world without other people, Kate’s efforts to retain meaningful language (of a The World is all that is the case), will fail. All the history, all the art, become a jumble and then nothing.

Markson sets up, maintains, this thought experiment beautifully. Despite all the history, culture and art that Kate references, she remains grounded in bodily functions, frozen wash and kindling.

When we die, the world goes with us. Here’s a glimpse.
...more

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May 28, 2008 Ben Loory rated it liked it

somebody is living on this beach.

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Feb 09, 2010 Charlaralotte rated it it was ok

Shelves: read-in-2010

I didn't finish this book. A rare occurrence. At times I thought I might be able to make it through, but I found the short paragraphs and obtuse comments hard to take. Perhaps as a series of prose poems the book might have worked better. I simply didn't care enough about the main character after 40-odd pages to stick with her through the grindingly-slow unfolding of her story. Her viewpoint was quirky and amusing at times, and I did like her take on the malleability of remembrance. ...more

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Jan 23, 2011 Aaron Dietz rated it liked it

I guess while other writers are saying, “Reality is subjective yada yada,” Markson actually seems to suggest something more, that we tend to cling to static realities that don’t have much relevance anymore.

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