Kate, the monadic narrator of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, gets a lot of her master’s remarks wrong, too — the philosopher’s better-known words and ideas are sprayed, skewed, all over the book, from its notebook-epigraph about sand to the Tractatus’s “The world is everything that is the case” to Investigationary speculations on adhesive vs. magnetic “tape” that unequivocally summon the later Wittgenstein’s concerns over words’ “family resemblances”2 to one another. Contra Voltaire, though, when Markson’s Kate recalls lines & concepts incorrectly, her errors serve the ends not of funny propaganda but of both original art and original interpretation. Because Wittgenstein’s Mistress,3 w/r/t its eponymous master, does more than just quote Wittgenstein in weird ways, or allude to his work, or attempt to be some sort of dramatization of the intellectual problems that occupied and oppressed him. Markson’s book renders, imaginatively & concretely, the very bleak mathematical world Wittgenstein’s Tractatus revolutionized philosophy by summoning via abstract argument. It is, in a weird way, the colorization of a very old film. Though Wittgenstein’s philosophical stuff is far from dead or arid, WM nevertheless succeeds at transposing W’s intellectual conundra into the piquant qualia of lived, albeit bizarrely lived, experience. The novel quickens W’s early work, gives it a face, for the reader, that the philosophy does not & cannot convey… mostly because Wittgenstein’s work is so hard and takes so long just to figure out on a literal level that the migrainous mental gymnastics required of his reader all but quash the dire emotional implications of W’s early metaphysics. His mistress, though, asks the question her master in print does not: What if somebody really had to live in a Tractatusized world?
I don’t mean to suggest that David Markson’s achievement here consists just in making abstract philosophy “accessible” to an extramural reader, or that WM is in itself simple. Actually, though its prose and monotone are hauntingly pedestrian, the novel’s diffracted system of allusions, to everything from antiquity to Astroturf are a bitch to trace out, and the concentric circularity that replaces linear development as its plot’s “progression” makes a digestive reading of WM a challenging & protracted affair. Markson’s is not a pop book, and it’s not decocted philosophy or a docudrama-of-the-week. Rather, for me, the novel does artistic & emotional justice to the politico-ethical implications of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s abstract mathematical metaphysics, makes what is designed to be a mechanism pulse, breathe, suffer, live, etc. In so doing, it pays emotional tribute to a philosopher who by all evidence lived in personal spiritual torment over the questions too many of his academic followers have made into elaborate empty exercise. That is, Markson’s WM succeeds in doing what few philosophers glean and what neither myriad biographical sketches nor Duffy’s lurid revisionism succeeds in communicating: the consequences, for persons, of the practice of theory; the difference, say, between espousing “solipsism” as a metaphysical “position” and waking up one fine morning after a personal loss to find your grief apocalyptic, literally millennial, to being the last and only living thing on earth, with only your head, now, for not only company but environment & world, an inclined beach sliding toward a dreadful sea. Put otherwise, Markson’s book transcends, for me, its review-enforced status of “intellectual tour de force” or “experimental achievement”: what it limns, as an immediate study of depression & loneliness, is far too moving to be the object of either exercise or exorcism. The ways in which the book is moving, and the formal ingenuity by which it transforms metaphysics into angst and so reveals philosophy as first and last about feeling — these are enough for me, right now, to think of the novel as one of the U.S. decade’s best, to deplore its relative neglect & its consignment by journals like the NYTBR to smarmy review by an ignorant young Carverian.4 But add to the novel’s credits a darkly pyrotechnic achievement in the animation of intellectual history — the way WM so completely demonstrates how one of the smartest & most important contributors to modern thought could have been such a personally miserable son of a bitch — and the book becomes, if you’re the impotent unlucky sort whose beliefs inform his stomach’s daily state, a special kind of great book, literally profound, and probably destined, in its & time’s fullness, to be a whispering classic.