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Jim Elkins's Reviews > Wittgenstein’s Mistress
Wittgenstein’s Mistress
by
by
The Best Postwar American Experimental Novel
David Foster Wallace was right that this is "pretty much the high point" of the American experimental novel.
Misreadings in the reviews
One sign that a novel is successfully experimental is the number of ways it is misunderstood. What matters here isn't the science-fiction frame, in which the narrator is the last living person. Reviewers have also been distracted by the supposed erudition of the book. Erudition is relative: Canetti wouldn't have been impressed by this, or Nabokov, Sebald, Beckett, or Schmidt. It's always best to begin by discounting any incipient admiration of erudition: what matters is the expressive content of the citations, not the evidence of any particular quality of education.
In addition, Wittgenstein's Mistress doesn't address "formidable philosophic questions" as the New York Times reviewer said. It doesn't contain "profound investigations of epistemology," as Steven Moore says in his Afterword. (Why did the book need an Afterword? Is it so strange and indigestible that even an experimental press like Dalkey Archive needed to explain it?) It certainly doesn't matter that the narrator's "cultural allusions... differ from the usual ones" by placing more emphasis on anecdotes than on the work. (How could that possibly be innovative?) And the book doesn't succeed in "tempting the reader to equate Western civilization's greatest works of art and philosophy with the futile messages" the narrator leaves in the streets, hoping somehow to attract some other survivor.
Alienation and affect
I haven't found any review, except Wallace's, that sounds right. What matters here is the state of mind that is being conjured, and its fit with the linked aphorismic style. Alienation is what is at stake: from the past, from history, from culture, from the self, and from conventional forms of the novel.
Of many passages that deserve to be quoted (again Wallace is right in saying no word is wasted), here is one. The narrator has been recounting, repeatedly (without realizing she's repeating herself), the fact that the actual town of Troy was tiny.
"Even if Troy itself was disappointingly small. Like little more than your ordinary city block and a few stories in height, practically.
"Although now that I remember, everything in William Shakespeare's house at Stratford-on-Avon was astonishingly tiny, too. As if only imaginary people had lived there then.
"Or perhaps it is only the past itself, which is always smaller than one had believed.
"I do wish that that last sentence had some meaning, since it certainly came close to impressing me for moment.
"There is a great deal of sadness in the Iliad in either case, incidentally." [p. 126]
Wittgenstein
I also agree with Wallace's notion that the book is one of the better evocations of Wittgenstein's own frame of mind, including descriptions in the philosophic literature from Max Black to the last chapter of Marjorie Perloff's Edge of Irony. Markson has an uncanny ability to conjure a mental state in which a person imagines him- or herself to be the last person on Earth, a person who has been "mad" for some long, indeterminate period of time (in the novel, that is the period in which the narrator desperately searched the world for other survivors).
The book is written in short propositional sentences, as in Wittgenstein, but with complex grammatical links, implying they are all part of one enormous logical statement, as in the Tractatus. And unlike Wittgenstein, who seldom fretted about repetition or cogency over the 60,000 pages of the Nachlass, the narrator mistrusts her ability to describe, remember, and recount. She moves rapidly back and forth between propositions about states of affairs in the world and propositions about the reliability and sense of the language in which she puts those propositions (as in the transition from the Tractatus to the later work). She lives in desolate places, as Wittgenstein did, concentrating, apparently, on everyday tasks, as he must have done. There were unspeakable traumas in her past. She wants, above all, to say a few accurate things, which are indisputably true, and as in so much of Wittgenstein, she knows she fails, again and again, although, unlike in Wittgenstein, we often know just how she has failed.
Impurities
The book isn't as pure as I wished it could be: the hallucinatory, collaged pastiche of reference and ventriloquism breaks down in several different ways. In particular, Markson succumbs to the temptation to have his narrator speculate what would happen if she wrote a novel, and those pages of metafiction -- in which we are invited to remember that we're reading experimental prose on the idea of experimental writing -- don't add anything to the book's otherwise concerted and barely controlled voice. There is no need to lift the veil of the suspension of disbelief if the entire novel is about failures of belief.
In a few places, too, Markson shows off without needing or meaning to. Those passages are helped by a few places where he has his narrator say, "Perhaps I was just showing off there." But Markson himself seems to have been unaware how academic it sounds, and how unlikely it is, that a person who does not read German, on looking through a book by Heidegger, will be struck by the recurrence of the word Dasein, which is, as philosophically inclined readers know, actually crucial to the novel's sense. That really is showing off, and I take it that it's inadvertent on Markson's part.
I also think the book could have done without the very brief synopsis near the end, in which we learn facts about the narrator's family that we didn't need to know, because they don't help us understand her inexorably deteriorating mental state.
Yet the book is continually astonishing, and it is also, incidentally to its own project, one of the most provocative readings of Wittgenstein: not because it makes claims about his claims, but because -- like Bernhard, like Perloff and others -- it tests our own understanding of the mental state that could have produced his writing.
2012, revised 2024
David Foster Wallace was right that this is "pretty much the high point" of the American experimental novel.
Misreadings in the reviews
One sign that a novel is successfully experimental is the number of ways it is misunderstood. What matters here isn't the science-fiction frame, in which the narrator is the last living person. Reviewers have also been distracted by the supposed erudition of the book. Erudition is relative: Canetti wouldn't have been impressed by this, or Nabokov, Sebald, Beckett, or Schmidt. It's always best to begin by discounting any incipient admiration of erudition: what matters is the expressive content of the citations, not the evidence of any particular quality of education.
In addition, Wittgenstein's Mistress doesn't address "formidable philosophic questions" as the New York Times reviewer said. It doesn't contain "profound investigations of epistemology," as Steven Moore says in his Afterword. (Why did the book need an Afterword? Is it so strange and indigestible that even an experimental press like Dalkey Archive needed to explain it?) It certainly doesn't matter that the narrator's "cultural allusions... differ from the usual ones" by placing more emphasis on anecdotes than on the work. (How could that possibly be innovative?) And the book doesn't succeed in "tempting the reader to equate Western civilization's greatest works of art and philosophy with the futile messages" the narrator leaves in the streets, hoping somehow to attract some other survivor.
Alienation and affect
I haven't found any review, except Wallace's, that sounds right. What matters here is the state of mind that is being conjured, and its fit with the linked aphorismic style. Alienation is what is at stake: from the past, from history, from culture, from the self, and from conventional forms of the novel.
Of many passages that deserve to be quoted (again Wallace is right in saying no word is wasted), here is one. The narrator has been recounting, repeatedly (without realizing she's repeating herself), the fact that the actual town of Troy was tiny.
"Even if Troy itself was disappointingly small. Like little more than your ordinary city block and a few stories in height, practically.
"Although now that I remember, everything in William Shakespeare's house at Stratford-on-Avon was astonishingly tiny, too. As if only imaginary people had lived there then.
"Or perhaps it is only the past itself, which is always smaller than one had believed.
"I do wish that that last sentence had some meaning, since it certainly came close to impressing me for moment.
"There is a great deal of sadness in the Iliad in either case, incidentally." [p. 126]
Wittgenstein
I also agree with Wallace's notion that the book is one of the better evocations of Wittgenstein's own frame of mind, including descriptions in the philosophic literature from Max Black to the last chapter of Marjorie Perloff's Edge of Irony. Markson has an uncanny ability to conjure a mental state in which a person imagines him- or herself to be the last person on Earth, a person who has been "mad" for some long, indeterminate period of time (in the novel, that is the period in which the narrator desperately searched the world for other survivors).
The book is written in short propositional sentences, as in Wittgenstein, but with complex grammatical links, implying they are all part of one enormous logical statement, as in the Tractatus. And unlike Wittgenstein, who seldom fretted about repetition or cogency over the 60,000 pages of the Nachlass, the narrator mistrusts her ability to describe, remember, and recount. She moves rapidly back and forth between propositions about states of affairs in the world and propositions about the reliability and sense of the language in which she puts those propositions (as in the transition from the Tractatus to the later work). She lives in desolate places, as Wittgenstein did, concentrating, apparently, on everyday tasks, as he must have done. There were unspeakable traumas in her past. She wants, above all, to say a few accurate things, which are indisputably true, and as in so much of Wittgenstein, she knows she fails, again and again, although, unlike in Wittgenstein, we often know just how she has failed.
Impurities
The book isn't as pure as I wished it could be: the hallucinatory, collaged pastiche of reference and ventriloquism breaks down in several different ways. In particular, Markson succumbs to the temptation to have his narrator speculate what would happen if she wrote a novel, and those pages of metafiction -- in which we are invited to remember that we're reading experimental prose on the idea of experimental writing -- don't add anything to the book's otherwise concerted and barely controlled voice. There is no need to lift the veil of the suspension of disbelief if the entire novel is about failures of belief.
In a few places, too, Markson shows off without needing or meaning to. Those passages are helped by a few places where he has his narrator say, "Perhaps I was just showing off there." But Markson himself seems to have been unaware how academic it sounds, and how unlikely it is, that a person who does not read German, on looking through a book by Heidegger, will be struck by the recurrence of the word Dasein, which is, as philosophically inclined readers know, actually crucial to the novel's sense. That really is showing off, and I take it that it's inadvertent on Markson's part.
I also think the book could have done without the very brief synopsis near the end, in which we learn facts about the narrator's family that we didn't need to know, because they don't help us understand her inexorably deteriorating mental state.
Yet the book is continually astonishing, and it is also, incidentally to its own project, one of the most provocative readings of Wittgenstein: not because it makes claims about his claims, but because -- like Bernhard, like Perloff and others -- it tests our own understanding of the mental state that could have produced his writing.
2012, revised 2024
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Reading Progress
October 9, 2012
– Shelved
October 12, 2012
– Shelved as:
american
Started Reading
May 18, 2024
–
Finished Reading
