Wittgenstein's Mistress (1989) by David Markson

Author:David Markson [Markson, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: prose_contemporary
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Published: 1996-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

AFTERWORD

THE 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,"

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