Context

Calling Wittgenstein’s Mistress “pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country,” David Foster Wallace admired how the author actually imagines what it would be like to live in the world of logical atomism. Markson’s book appears not as an illustration of a set of philosophical ideas or even a novelization of the philosopher’s life and thought, but as an original reading of Wittgenstein. Knowing this can shed a certain light on how we might learn to read Markson.

For one thing, the integration of Wittgenstein’s language into the interior language of modernist fiction is an accomplishment unique to Markson. Like most positivist thinkers early in the century, Wittgenstein inveighed against “mentalistic language”—the reality of such things as the inner monologue—as “a general disease of thinking,” and later he took a strong stand against the possibility of any “private language.” Yet Markson’s novel, written almost exclusively in the language of private thought and introspection, manages to make use of the techniques of positivism.

That the stream of inner speech is so often given to dreamers, mythical figures, and women—Tiresias, Molly Bloom as she drifts into sleep, Mrs. Dalloway on an ordinary day in London—might reinforce this tendency to regard literature and the arts as feminine and domestic counterparts to the “hard” sciences. Markson’s distinctive monologue, given to a woman who believes she is the last person on earth, is unusual in that this character—named Kate in the novel—self-consciously takes note of her own thoughts and analyzes their structure. Critics have noticed that, through this character, Markson offers a feminist rereading of history (“the things men used to do”), but few readers have taken Kate’s philosophical pretensions seriously. To be sure, Kate’s thought owes much to the literary figure of the madwoman in the attic, and Markson also has Kate repeat Samuel Butler’s thesis—congenial to the identity politics of our own decade, a century later—that the Odyssey must have been written by a woman. But this unusual character is no less the contemporary of cognitive scientists and feminist philosophers of science who, unwilling to let the bad guys have all the good words (such as “objectivity”), helped open the introspective mind to rich and precise descriptions.

No longer treating the inner life of the mind as a black box knowable only by the public and measurable behavior it produces, today many cognitive scientists regard consciousness as a kind of interior language capable of being studied, parsed, simulated, and experimented with. Markson’s character, though she studied visual arts and art history rather than the sciences, arrives at an analogous control by stripping away all “accouterments” and living as if the world was her own mental laboratory. Like Wittgenstein, who gave away his inheritance and retreated to Galway Bay in Ireland in order to write the Tractatus, and like Rene Descartes removing to a small Bavarian farmhouse in 1629, Markson’s heroine renounces a great many things before settling down to take thought. After traveling “the world” (as she imagines it) in abandoned cars and boats and spending her nights in museums burning picture frames and book pages for warmth, Kate has come to a house by a beach on Long Island, where she takes up her solitary project:

Baggage, basically, is what I got rid of. Well, things.

Now and again one happens to hear certain music in one’s head, however.

Well, a fragment of something or other, in any case. Antonio Vivaldi, say. Or Joan Baez, singing.

Not too long ago I even heard a passage from Les Troyens, by Berlioz.

When I say heard, I am saying so only in a manner of speaking, of course.

Still, perhaps there is baggage after all, for all that I believed I had left baggage behind.

Of a sort. The baggage that remains in one’s head, meaning remnants of whatever one ever knew.

Though she claims never to have read a word of Wittgenstein, Kate unwittingly enacts his philosophy through a patient and gradual discovery of complexity in the most ordinary language (the mental operations hidden in a mere “manner of speaking”) and an attention to the ways that words set limits on what can be thought. In her careful attention to the “inconsequential perplexities” that arise from the ways people use and misuse words, Kate solves every philosophical “problem” she comes up against, more or less as Wittgenstein in the preface to the Tractatus claimed to have overcome the outstanding problems of philosophy. The difference is that Markson’s character, in setting down her thoughts, makes her own cognition available for analysis, and so brings a somewhat different objectivity to introspection itself—that is, to the very area of experience that the schools of positivism and behaviorism wanted to exclude.

Uncontaminated by social interactions or environmental pressures, Kate is able to focus—as did Wittgenstein—on language as a means of understanding the world. As for psychological troubles such as those which presumably led to her present solitude, it is better to accept than to explain them. Such, in any case, is the particular admixture of anxiety and resignation that discourages Kate from going back through her typescript to check a passage written the day before, when she began to feel a depression that has not yet lifted:

I have already forgotten what I had been typing when I began to feel this way.

Obviously, I could look back. Surely that part cannot be very many lines behind the line I am typing at this moment.

On second thought I will not look back. If there was something I was typing that had contributed to my feeling this way, doubtless it would contribute to it all over again.

. . . Though to tell the truth I would have believed I had shed most of such feelings, as long ago as when I shed most of my other sort of baggage.

When winter is here, it will be here.

One reason for Wittgenstein’s rejection of psychology was its proliferation of schools and experimental methods that the philosopher felt were useless “in solving the problems that trouble us,” because “the problems and methods pass one another by.” Markson actually imagines this happening by letting the sources of Kate’s undefined anxiety and depression gradually (and without warning) begin to intersect with her more factual narrative. Her decision not to look back at what she has written occurs near the start of the novel. Near the end, after remembering something said to her by her mother on her deathbed, Kate realizes that she “did not intend to repeat one bit of that just now, actually”:

In fact when I finally did solve why I had been feeling depressed what I told myself was that if necessary I would simply never again allow myself to put down any such things at all.

As if in a manner of speaking one were no longer able to speak one solitary word of Long Ago.

A withholding of speech when one comes up against the limits of language—”Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”—is the closing proposition of the Tractatus: when adopted on principle, this becomes a source not only of Kate’s personal solipsism but of the cultural reticence and epistemological caution that characterizes the empirical sciences in our century. Nevertheless, as Bertrand Russell—Wittgenstein’s first reader—pointed out, the “totality” of things that cannot be said still exists, although for Wittgenstein it exists as something mystical. Reacting against this mysticism, Russell argues in his preface to the Tractatus that any such ineffable totality “would be not merely logically inexpressible, but a fiction, a mere delusion.” That is meant as a criticism and dismissal of one aspect of Wittgenstein’s thought. Markson on the contrary discovers concrete aesthetic possibilities in such philosophical fictions.

From a cognitive perspective, one thing that positivist science and philosophy left unsaid is the way that any arrangement of logical “facts” tends to produce, in the mind of a person observing the arrangement, meanings that are larger than, or different from, their sum. This is a common enough insight in Gestalt psychologies and in more recent investigations into the constructive activity of the mind during perception—of objects as well as language units. But few novelists have made so much of the insight as Markson, in passages that, repeatedly over time, release the fragments of atomistic experience into a remarkable narrative flow. Because such meanings accrue gradually, I will need to quote a number of passages at some length, from widely separated sections of the book. Readers will have noticed a certain flatness in the isolated passages cited so far; they, too, carry a greater stylistic charge in the overall context of other, related, passages.

Continuing my focus on Markson’s reading of philosophy, I shall illustrate what I mean by citing some of Kate’s scattered references to Russell and Wittgenstein themselves. The first instance occurs in passing (like all of Kate’s observations), when the thought of a visit by Brahms to Paris reminds her of Guy de Maupassant, a Parisian, who appeared earlier in her typescript, rowing on the Seine:

How one remembers certain things is beyond me.

Perhaps Guy de Maupassant was rowing, when Brahms visited in Paris.

Once, Bertrand Russell took his pupil Ludwig Wittgenstein to watch Alfred North Whitehead row, at Cambridge. Wittgenstein became very angry with Bertrand Russell for having wasted his day.

In addition to remembering things that one does not know how one remembers, one would also appear to remember things that one has no idea how one knew to begin with.

Three other items leading to and away from this brief narrative unit are worth mentioning: the theme of teachers and pupils occurred a page or so earlier, in her recollection of a trick that Rembrandt’s students used to play on the impoverished artist—painting florins on the studio floor. “Doubtless,” Kate thinks, “Brahms was once a pupil, also.” This theme of continuity between generations is picked up later, when for example Kate traces an imaginative family relation between Rembrandt and Willem de Kooning, or when she notes that Russell in his nineties could recall his grandfather recounting memories of the death of George Washington. The third item is that de Maupassant eventually went mad, “even more mad than Van Gogh,” as noted roughly a hundred pages later. Soon thereafter, returning to Brahms (not for the first or the last time), Kate recalls that the composer was “known for carrying candy in his pocket to give to children when he visited people who had children.” Kate realizes that such details often escape the biographer no less than the abstract philosopher, but they are nonetheless the texture of life:

Certainly nobody writing such information would have put down that one of the children to whom Brahms now and again gave some of that candy might very well have been Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Perhaps I have not mentioned that one of the children to whom Brahms now and again gave some of that candy might very well have been Ludwig Wittgenstein.

On my honor, however, Brahms frequently visited at the home of the Wittgenstein family, in Vienna, when Ludwig Wittgenstein was a child.

Thinking of Wittgenstein, she wishes he were around to help her to find the source of a sentence that keeps running through her head. “The world is everything that is the case,” is what she had typed—the first sentence in the Tractatus. Certainly her own methods and Wittgenstein’s solutions pass one another by!

But in the meantime, in the absence of expert advice (or any human contact at all), Kate is quite able on her own to create other connections and arrive at independent conclusions. She may not have read Heidegger’s essay on the Van Gogh painting of a pair of peasant boots, but she does “know” that “Heidegger once owned a pair of boots that had actually belonged to Vincent Van Gogh, and used to put them on when he went for walks in the woods.” Almost immediately she realizes she may have got that wrong—the boots may have belonged to Kierkegaard!—but her mistake doesn’t keep her from making further speculations, several dozens of pages later, concerning Van Gogh’s footwear:

There would appear to be no record as to which particular paintings Van Gogh painted while wearing the old socks that Alfred North Whitehead later used to put on when he went for walks in the woods near Cambridge, on the other hand.

Although another thing I have perhaps never mentioned is that Ludwig Wittgenstein actually used to carry sugar in his pockets, when he went for walks near Cambridge himself.

The reason he carried the sugar being to give it to horses he might see in fields while he was walking.

On my honor, Wittgenstein used to do that.

This method of proliferating connections in such a way that problems and solutions pass one another by at every juncture is not only a believable portrayal of a well-stocked mind working in isolation, it is also wildly entertaining and of significant narrative interest. Certainly such a procedure holds more aesthetic interest today than the conventional development from a novel’s beginning through the multiplication of middle possibilities to an eventual settling upon one or two well-defined solutions, as the featured character comes into a stable identity and assured position in society. Kate’s character, and her mind, disintegrate by the book’s end. Her conclusions are in every case unlikely but somehow exactly right, as are her mental revisions of the outcomes of narratives by famous authors. Indeed, with the disintegration of her personal identity and the fragmentation of memory into a set of atomic elements, comes the possibility of recombining these elements in new ways, such that they possess cognitive meaning rather than mere narrative inevitability.

Certainly it is possible to speak of the disintegration that precedes such meaning in the terms of deconstruction, which was still in ascendance when Markson’s novel appeared in 1988. I myself recently likened the book’s branching structures to the hypertext forms that emerged in the early nineties. But there is another model, somewhat nearer perhaps to Markson’s philosophical sources and continuing commitments to print literature, offered by Wittgenstein’s older colleague, Willard Quine. Remarking on the construction and reconstruction of science earlier in this century, Quine said that such transformations placed every experimental thinker in the position of a mariner who must rebuild his boat, plank by plank, while staying afloat on it. Quine’s figure may well have been in Markson’s mind when he had Kate “dismantle” a house, or rather those boards that remain after much of the house has been destroyed by fire. A dismantling, not a deconstruction: on this view the novel, like contemporary explorations in cognitive science, can be seen as rebuilding the traditional structure of epistemological inquiry, as it takes shape in a solitary mind and a singular imagination.

CONTEXT is a triquarterly publication intended to create an international and historical context in which to read modern and contemporary literature. Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary community.

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