Wittgenstein's Mistress (30 page)

Well, because of the brushwork being fairly abstract at that point, basically.

Still, through all of this time I had been certain that I had put the painting into one of the rooms here that I do not often make use of, and to which the door is generally closed.

As a matter of fact it is a room I surely must have mentioned, since I had been equally certain it was the identical room in which I had more than once noticed a life of Brahms and an atlas.

The former having become permanently misshapen because of dampness, in fact, whereas the latter was lying on its side.

Because of being too tall for the shelf.

And with the shelf being the identical shelf that the painting was leaning against, additionally.

Nonetheless the painting is not in that room.

And for the life of me I have not been able to locate the life of Brahms or the atlas either, even though I have also looked into every other room in this house, including the several additional rooms to which the doors are likewise generally closed.

As a matter of fact I have also walked to the house in the woods behind this house, suspecting that I might have been mistaken as to the whereabouts of all three items, but the painting and the life of Brahms and the atlas do not appear to be in that house, either.

In fact the only item in that house which I remembered having ever given even a second glance, in addition to a reproduction of a painting by Suzanne Valadon that is taped to the living room wall, was a soccer shirt with the name Savona printed across its front.

Which I have now washed at the spring and am wearing as I type.

As a matter of fact I have been wearing the soccer shirt for some days.

Even if I have no idea what it is, really, about wearing the soccer shirt.

And even if I am still at a total loss in regard to that painting.

Which I may or may not have painted myself, incidentally, if I have not said.

Actually I have no recollection whatsoever of having painted that painting.

Still, ever since it turned up missing I have had the curious impression that I just could have.

Or at least that I certainly once imagined it as a painting that I might possibly paint but then did not.

Which is the sort of thing that a painter will now and again do, of course.

Or not do, rather.

But in which instance there could have scarcely been a painting for me to have lost after all, obviously.

Or would that have to mean that there might have been no life of Brahms and no atlas either, then?

Except that if there had not been any atlas how could I have once looked up Lititz, Pennsylvania, in it, on an occasion when I happened to be curious about Lititz, Pennsylvania?

And if there had not been any life of Brahms how could I have once lighted some torn-out pages from it on the beach and then tossed them into the air to see if the breeze might make them fly?

When I was trying to simulate seagulls?

Even if most of the pages happened to fall right next to me, as a matter of fact.

Because of having been printed on extraordinarily cheap paper, doubtless.

But so that there must have unquestionably once been a life of Brahms in this house.

And in which a part I always liked was when Clara Hepburn gave Ludwig Wittgenstein some sugar.

Although what I would really like to find even more than I would like to find the painting is my missing cat, to tell the truth.

Even if it is not really a cat and is not really missing, actually.

Well, being only Magritte, who used to be Vincent.

Which is to say that the tape would appear to have blown away from the outside of that broken window, being all.

Still, one had gotten to be quite fond of that frisky scratching.

Although even just to see some floating ash again would be agreeable, too.

Even if one would hardly go to the trouble to name some floating ash, on the other hand.

There is a numeral on the back of the soccer shirt, by the way.

Possibly it is a nine. Or a nineteen.

In fact it is two zeros.

Have I mentioned that I have taken to building fires down near the water, after my sunsets, incidentally?

I have taken to building fires down near the water, after my sunsets.

Now and again, too, looking at them from a distance, what I have done is to make believe for a little while that I am back at Hisarlik.

By which I really mean when Hisarlik was Troy, of course, and all of those years and years ago.

So that what I am more truthfully making believe is that the fires are Greek watchfires, where they have been lighted along the shore.

Well, that certainly being a harmless enough thing to make believe.

Oh. And I have been hearing
The Alto Rhapsody
again also, these days.

Which is to say the real
Alto Rhapsody
this time, what with all of that having finally been sorted out.

Even if it is still hardly the real one either, naturally, being still only in my head.

But still.

And at any rate it is far too chilly this morning to be fretting about inconsequential perplexities of that sort.

In fact it is far too chilly to be typing here to begin with, actually.

Unless I might wish to move the typewriter closer to my potbellied stove, some way.

Although what I really ought to do before doing that is to go out to the spring again, to tell the truth.

Having completely forgotten about the rest of my laundry, which is spread across various bushes.

So that by now there could very well be some new skirt sculptures out there, even.

Even if Michelangelo would not think them that, but I think them that.

And even if I will more probably leave the rest of the laundry where it is until I am feeling less tired, on the other hand.

Doubtless I will not trouble to move the typewriter, either, when one comes down to that.

Once, I had a dream of fame.

Generally, even then, I was lonely.

To the castle, a sign must have said.

Somebody is living on this beach.

AFTERWORD

T
HE
EXTRAORDINARY
NOVEL
you have presumably just finished reading almost didn't see the light of day. The sorry state of contemporary publishing emerges from this conversation between David Markson and critic Joseph Tabbi (from the
Review of Contemporary Fiction's
special issue on Markson, summer 1990, from which the second half of this afterword is adapted). With self-deprecating humor—where sputtering outrage would have been fully justified—Markson tells Tabbi that he suspects
Wittgenstein's Mistress
set a record for the number of rejections it received:

For years, the highest number of turndowns I'd ever heard of was thirty-six, on
The Ginger Man.
Then I read in that Deirdre Bair biography that
Murphy
had about forty-two.
Ironweed
had a dozen, as I recall, and I once jokingly told Bill Kennedy while
Wittgenstein
was going around that if rejections were any sign of quality, then mine was already twice as good as his. But then I left Donleavy and Beckett in the dust also.

JT: What sort of figure are we finally talking about?

DM: I almost hate to announce it. Fifty-four.

JT: For a novel that well thought of since? Wasn't one editor in fifty-four capable of seeing
something
in it?

DM: Obviously it wasn't all black and white. Oh, about a third of them didn't like it at all, and perhaps another third made it inadvertently evident that they didn't understand a word. And OK, you can't fault the totally negative responses—or the vapid ones either, since they pretty much correspond with the percentage of editors you know are C students to begin with. But it's the other third that really cause grief. I mean when the letters practically sound like Nobel Prize citations—"brilliant," "twenty years ahead of its time," "we're honored that you thought of us" .. .

JT: And?

DM: The predictable kicker, of course. It won't sell. Or worse, we couldn't get it past the salespeople. Actually acknowledging that those semiliterates don't simply participate in the editorial process, but dictate its decisions. God almighty.

I began corresponding with Markson in 1984, met him shortly after, and in the autumn of 1987 was allowed to read the manuscript of the novel. I loved it, and since I was just then talking with John O'Brien about joining his Dalkey Archive Press, I suggested that Markson send it there. That he did and, with no aesthetic obtuseness or commercial considerations hindering the process, the novel was immediately accepted and published the following May. It was widely and favorably reviewed, went through two printings in hardcover, then several more in paperback, and was published in England and (in translation) in Spain and France. The novel has been the subject of several scholarly essays and has become a staple of college classes in contemporary fiction (and even the occasional philosophy class). Fifty-four rejections.

At first glance,
Wittgenstein's Mistress
seems to have little in common with Markson's previous work—or anyone else's, for that matter. (The nearest precedent for it might be Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 story "The Yellow Wallpaper," also narrated in short paragraphs by a woman seesawing between sanity and madness, with a fertile if disordered imagination.) It has the least amount of dramatic activity of all of his novels, being (at the simplest level) the rambling meditations of a
woman named Kate who seems to be the last person on earth. And yet it has the greatest amount of intellectual activity, being (at this level) one of the most profound investigations of episte-mology in literature and the best fictional illustration I know of Wittgenstein's proposition that "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."

Like all of Markson's protagonists, Kate views the world through the lenses of culture: "one does not spend any time viewing castles in La Mancha without being reminded of Don Quixote," she writes. "Any more than one can spend time in Toledo without being reminded of El Greco" (39). And like both Fern in Markson's novel
Going Down
(1970) and Lucien in
Springer's Progress
(1977), Kate has a huge fund of anecdotal material on painters, supplemented by a general knowledge of writers, composers, singers, and philosophers—often the kind of material (as Kate is the first to admit) that one picks up from such places as the liner notes on record albums, dust-jacket copy, or digressive footnotes in biographies. Kate can't remember where she learned many of these items—like the fact manuscripts of Sappho's poems were once used to stuff mummies—nor why such trivia has stayed with her all these years while more substantial matters have slipped her mind. Nor does she always remember such trivia correctly, and it is here that Markson's use of intertextuality differs most not only from his earlier work but from that of other allusive writers.

For earlier writers (and in Markson's earlier works), culture was stable and objective, an orderly accumulation of facts— names, dates, compositions, critical opinions—that could be called up by the writer (and/or his characters) as in a user-friendly data-retrieval system. In
Wittgenstein's Mistress,
however, culture is unstable and subjective, a fading memory of "baggage" that teases Kate with false connections, "inconsequential perplexities," and meaningless coincidences. It is a disorderly jumble where Euripides seems to have been influenced by Shakespeare, where Anna Akhmatova is a character in
Anna Karenina,
and where Willem de Kooning wears a soccer jersey in Giotto's Renaissance studio. Kate lives in a world of cultural relativity similar to the physical one described by Einstein and the historical one described by recent historians, who likewise have realized that history is not an objective set of facts but a subjective welter of interpretations.

Kate's attempts to order her cultural memories are often earnest, often comic: for example, the reason Euripides sounds as though he'd been influenced by Shakespeare is that she's read Gilbert Murray's Shakespearean translation of
The Trojan Women;
so Kate wonders if a bookstore she enters in Athens has "a Greek edition of William Shakespeare's plays. By a translator who had been under the influence of Euripides" (45). This is as funny as it is profound, upsetting traditional notions of influence and the transmission of culture while at the same time being perfectly plausible. (And note the Jack Benny pause between those two sentences; Kate has a deliciously dry wit that, like Springer's, rescues her from many potentially maudlin moments.) Sometimes it takes her several pages (and several weeks) to complete a tantalizing connection: on page 12, for example, she relates the fact that the British painter Turner once "had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later paint the storm." This reminds her of something, but she can't remember what. Then on page 83 she thinks about the scene in the
Odyssey
in which "Odysseus has himself lashed to the mast of his ship, so that he can listen to the Sirens singing but will stay put." Again she is reminded of something but can't say what. Finally, a hundred pages (and
many
weeks) later, Kate writes:

Have I ever said that Turner once actually had himself lashed to the mast of a ship, to be able to later do a painting of a storm?

Which has never failed to remind me of the scene in which Odysseus does the identical thing, of course, so that he can listen to the Sirens singing but will stay put. (189-90)

Other times the connection is never made, like the one Kate suspects exists between Lawrence of Arabia and T. E. Shaw; she comes so close so often to making the link that the reader wants to shout it out at her as though in the audience of a game show. Kate's cultural allusions also differ from the usual ones in that more emphasis is placed on the artist than on the work, especially on the kinds of personal and domestic details that are usually ignored. When she cites Maupassant, for example, it is not to allude to one of his stories but to remember that he liked to row and ate his lunch at the Eiffel Tower because that was the only place in Paris from which he couldn't see the monument. The first half of the novel is filled with such trivia, but midway Kate's references begin to take a different turn and emphasize the darker side of the lives of cultural figures, noting those who went mad, were forced into exile or poverty, who committed suicide, went blind, and so on. Here a reference to Maupassant will hint (111) and then state (234) that he ended up crawling about on all fours and eating his own excrement. "Even though the work itself lasts, of course," Kate reminds herself. "Or does thinking about the work itself while knowing these things somehow sadden one even more?" (139). A sense of futility hangs over culture and history as Kate attempts to sort all this out, tempting the reader to equate Western civilization's greatest works of art and philosophy with the futile messages Kate leaves in the street or, better yet, with the messages she leaves in sand, washed away almost before she can complete them. The culmination of this train of thought is the mournful litany near the end of the book for all those who succumbed to the Siren song of art, as destructive as it is seductive, as well as for those who were victims of more mundane miseries: