Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson – travels with a solitary soul

This extraordinary book is a journey into loneliness that encompasses all the stuff of life

Kate, the narrator of David Markson’s 1988 novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress, is a world traveller. She has sailed the Aegean and the Bering Strait, and driven across Russia and western Europe. A painter, Kate has not only visited but lived in some of the world’s most famous art museums: the Met, the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Tate. She has displayed her own canvases beside Renaissance masterpieces. She has visited Hisarlik in Turkey, supposed site of Troy, made pilgrimage to a Mexican village, and poured hundreds of tennis balls down the Spanish Steps in Rome. Kate can, in theory, do whatever she wants, whenever she wants. But her absolute freedom is also a form of imprisonment, because Kate is the last person – in fact the last life form – on Earth.

Or is she? Perhaps she is mentally ill, and her solipsism symptomatic rather than literal. She has, she says, been “mad” at some point, but claims: “I can almost always make a distinction between periods when I was mad and periods when I was not.” The way certain of her recollections repeat with key details altered, the way names of her family members and ex-lovers swap and change, suggest a slippage between perception and reality, but this soon ceases to matter. Likewise, the lack of explanation for Kate being the only survivor of an unexplained calamity is unimportant. Earlier drafts of the novel included one, but as Markson revised the manuscript he decided it was redundant. Whatever else is going on in this deeply complex, immensely readable book, its great theme is human aloneness, and it is the truth of that condition, as opposed to the reality of Kate’s situation, that really matters to and for the novel.

Highly distinctive in form, Wittgenstein’s Mistress consists of a series, or better an accumulation, of mostly one- or two-sentence paragraphs. The prose echoes the aphoristic style Wittgenstein himself employed in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, although the connection many modern readers might sooner make is to tweets. For the most part these sentences comprise a flurry of trivia about artists, composers, philosophers and athletes, by turns curious, saddening and deadpan:

Once, Robert Rauschenberg erased most of a drawing by Willem de Kooning, and then named it Erased de Kooning drawing.”

“In either case, that remark about Giovanni Bellini would have naturally also had to have been made before Dürer died from a fever he caught in a Dutch swamp, where he had gone to look at a stranded whale.”

Scanning an index of the book you can see where clusters occur: around Brahms, the Iliad, Rembrandt, madness. But Kate’s focus flits so rapidly between subjects it is easy to miss the deeper structure for all the surface detail. On a first reading we are too busy being entertained, and saddened, to fully grasp the intense patterning.

The book begins in summer, and ends when the first winter snow has fallen. Kate is producing her text on a typewriter while living in a beach house on Long Island (“Jackson Pollock crashed his car into a tree, no more than ten minutes away in the pickup truck from where I am sitting right at this moment, on August eleventh, 1956”) and dismantling the house next door for firewood. We are rarely in the book’s present, however, as Kate’s narrative spirals back into her past, circling a truth she is loth to confront. Her intellectual leaps seem largely random at first, but in fact every topic she lands on is connected, cryptically or otherwise, to events she can’t entirely suppress (I won’t discuss them here, because even though the book is almost 30 years old, few enough people have read it for me to regret spoiling it). Early in the novel, for example, she remembers driving around a castle in La Mancha,

“a castle that I kept on seeing and seeing, but that I never appeared to get any closer to.

There was an explanation for not getting any closer to the castle.

The explanation being that the castle was built on a hill, and that the road went in a flat circle around the bottom of the hill that the castle was built on.

Very likely one could have driven around that castle eternally, never actually arriving at it.”

The castle, a powerful presence that recalls Don Quixote through its location, and Kafka’s final novel through its inaccessibility, is one of several images that recur throughout the book. The connection between them, and their relation to other recurring images or episodes, becomes an addictive game of deduction for the reader.

Ultimately, however, Wittgenstein’s Mistress is a journey into loneliness, and it takes the reader on that journey by generating the very aloneness it describes. One effect of reading is to make the world around us disappear, a fact Markson uses to provoke the abyssal sense of a disappeared world. With this achieved, he progressively narrows Kate’s focus on certain types of biographical fact. “One of the things people generally admired about Van Gogh,”, she writes, “even though they were not always aware of it, was the way he could make even a chair seem to have anxiety in it. Or a pair of boots”. Likewise, the most impressive element of Kate’s narrative is its ability, in David Foster Wallace’s description, to “make facts sad”. “So many lists keep on growing”, Kate writes, “and are saddening.” Markson finds the profound in trivia, and the effect of this is so powerful precisely because every life possesses its footnotes, and it is most often in them, in asides rather than signal events, that the real business of living takes place.

With Markson’s typical comedic impulse, the Van Gogh line quoted above is immediately undercut: “Cézanne once said that he painted like a madman, on the other hand”. Likewise, for some readers, Markson’s experimental work, devoid of many of the trappings of narrative fiction, is confounding. In a late interview Markson talked about an old schoolmate who chanced on one of his final four novels, books that take the methodology of Wittgenstein’s Mistress to its extreme, stripping out all but the sparsest fragments of character and event in favour of increasingly staccato and death-haunted biographical data. The two men hadn’t spoken for decades, but the classmate called Markson to tell him how baffled he was, his words finding their way into Markson’s final book, The Last Novel: “Listen, I bought your latest book. But I quit after six pages. That’s all there is, those little things?”

The joke is that over the length of a book those “little things” accrete, form pathways and sprout bridges, until they encompass all the stuff of life: birth, joy, disappointment, loss, death. Uncommon in form, Markson’s work is as satisfying in content as all great literature. And for all its difficulty, despite the fact it was rejected by publishers 55 times, and unlike many less fortunate books, Wittgenstein’s Mistress has never gone out of print. You could walk into a bookshop today, pick up a copy, and in an hour or two be there with Kate on her beach, alone together in quite another world.

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