B0nnie's Reviews > Wittgenstein’s Mistress

-this is one of those novels which cry out for critical interpretation and directs it, like a waltz does in music.

-a cross between fiction, and a weird cerebral roman à clef.

-he was attracted to the book because of the title, noting it would be in some way about Wittgenstein. The title is a sort of epigraph. And an intellectual shibboleth.

-Kate the narrator gets a lot of Wittgenstein wrong. Her errors serve as original art and interpretation.

-Wittgenstein's idea are sprayed all over the book - the epigraph about sand; "The world is everything that is the case"; speculations about tape.

-the book renders the bleak mathematical world of the Tractatus. It asks the question what if somebody really had to live in that world.

-the prose is hauntingly pedestrian.

-allusions to everything are difficult to trace.

-the transformation of a philosophy to a world, reveal that philosophy is about spirit. This might explain why Wittgenstein was so unhappy.

-it is indirect, devices like repetition, return, free association, slipping sand of English, self-consciousness.

-if Kate is mad so are we.

-shows what cannot be expressed, like good comedy.

-it is not a letter, a diary or journal, or a monologue: she is shouting into the blank paper.

-the need to write is the need for an affirmation of an "Outside". I EXIST. Yet this begs the question; it only proves writing exists.

-the reader is directed to the Tractatus. It is a kind of philosophical sci-fi. It's a portrait of what it would be like to live in the world that Wittgenstein posits. A logical heaven ends up a metaphysical hell.

-the Tractatus explores the relation between language and the reality it captures. Like a mirror and the mirrored.

-Kate's textual obsession is to find connections between things, genuine connections elude her, only finds an occasional synchronicity.

-Markson makes facts sad.

-Kate makes external history her own, rewrites it as personal. She is the final historian.

-the most affecting rendition is her description of tennis without a partner.

-she has nothing left except memory, imagination the English language.

-the solipsistic nature of her reality is the same whether it's a response to it, or out of touch with it.

-at stake: ethics, guilt and responsibility. The Tractatus denied these, making Wittgenstein at odds with himself.

-Kate's central identification is with Helen of Troy and haunted by the passive sense that everything is her fault.

-Markson's idea of the female voice says more about the 1988 male received doctrine.

-Homer's Helen is guilty, because of her effect on men. This is to be "Classically" feminized, responsible without freedom to choose or act.

-in contrast to Eve.

-Markson clumsily reminds us that Kate is a woman by references to menses, like bad science fiction constantly mentioning the antennae or whatever.

-Wallace does not like the explanation of Kate's fall, the world's fall: her betrayal of her husband and son, 10 years ago at the same psycho-historical point at which Kate's world emptied. This threatens to make WM just another madwoman monologue and becomes conventional fiction.

-Eve's (Evian) betrayal of the world, alluded to over and over, coyly, a scary blend of Hellenic and Evian misogyny.

-guilty as object (Helen) and guilty as subject (Eve).

-ambitious for the late 80s. Markson has fleshed Wittgenstein doctrine into the concrete theatre of human loneliness, its relation to language itself.

-the Philosophical Investigations concern to show the impossibility of private language, and our bewitchment of ordinary language. Expressions like the flow of time, making time seem external to us.

-although the book is sometimes tiresome with all the allusions, it refines and opens up later, to a fragile weltschmerz.

-Kate's text is a desperate attempt to recreate a world by naming it, obsessively naming persons, figures, books, symphonies, towns.

-Markson communicates her extreme upset when she can’t summon facts up properly.

-it is an imperfect book because of voice, over-allusion, and explanation, but succeeds in evoking a truth, both sides of the solipsistic bind:"If I exist, nothing exists outside me / But / If something exists outside me, I do not exist."

[This quote is not in WM. It might be based on something W.J. Turner wrote].

-Kate's actions summons the final prescription of the Tractatus, loosely translated "Anybody who understands what I'm saying eventually recognizes that's nonsense, once he's used what I'm saying - rather like steps - to climb up past what I'm saying - he must, that is, throw away the ladder after he's used it." But what it's really about is the plenitude of emptiness, the importance of silence in terms of speech.