This piece by first appeared in CONTEXT #23. To celebrate the recent release of  as part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series, it seems like the perfect time to revisit this re-reading of David Markson’s classic novel about language, memory, grief, and possibly the end of the world. 

First published in 1988—after fifty-four rejections, famously—and described by David Foster Wallace, in 1999, as one of the five most “direly underappreciated US novels >1960”—David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress has, for all that, had a remarkable first quarter-century in print. Indeed, when Wallace made his claim regarding the book’s apparent lack of an appreciative audience it had already been reprinted at least seven times. Its initial publication in May 1988 was followed by a second printing two months later, and the first paperback edition of 1990 was printed three times before a second paperback edition, with an afterword by Steven Moore, appeared in 1995. That edition was itself reprinted six times in the subsequent half-decade. Now reissued with a “new” afterword by Wallace—the piece was originally published in a 1990 issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction that included an interview with Markson together with an essay on his work by Joseph Tabbi—Wittgenstein’s Mistress must stand as one of the most widely read works of “experimental fiction” ever published in the United States or anywhere else, though of course there’s no telling how many purchased books of any kind are ever actually read.

Markson would have appreciated the point. While he bemoans the fact that his works have “sold so little” in the Tabbi interview, Wittgenstein’s Mistress troubles the idea of reading on every level—in historical/cultural and intellectual/cognitive terms, most urgently, but also with regard to the fundamental physical/material place of books in our lives. Twenty-one pages into WM (Wallace’s abbreviation), the book’s protagonist Kate comments on “[t]he queer selection” of books she had read in a certain period of her life. Markson’s own interviews are fascinating for what they reveal about his reading habits—habits that are also the subject of a blog entitled , where annotated pages of books from the author’s personal library are scanned and made available for anyone with an Internet connection to view, free of charge. However, the bibliophilic/bibliographical compulsions of the author himself and his most adoring readers are less interesting, ultimately, than the profound meditations on what might be termed the phenomenology of the Book towards which WM moves in at least one strand of its complex and at times confusing narrative development. Kate—described by Wallace as “the monadic narrator” of the novel—admits early on that she “frequently” makes up her own“fanciful private improvisations” of the works she has read. This interior (creative) rearrangement of books is mirrored, however, in her sense of the physical environment within which she dwells, her very living space:

I have more than once wondered why the books in the basement are not upstairs with the others, actually.

There is space. Many of the shelves up here are half empty.

Although doubtless when I say they are half empty I should really be saying half filled, since presumably they were totally empty before somebody half filled them.

Then again it is not impossible that they were once filled completely, becoming half empty only when somebody removed half of the books to the basement.

I find this second possibility less likely than the first, although it is not utterly beyond consideration.

In either event the present state of the shelves is an explanation for why so many of the books in the house are tilted, or standing askew. And thus have become permanently misshapen.

In this passage Markson urges the reader to consider not just the ways that books inform the minds of those who read them, but how they form a permanently movable part of the material world within which we exist. In the same way, then, that Markson’s bequest of his own library to the open shelves of the Strand Bookstore in New York City in 2010 represented a curious kind of challenge to the conventional idea of the literary archive and the process of bibliographically ordering and storing an author’s books after her/his death, so WM might be read as a text that seeks to interrogate the phenomenon of theBook in human history in terms of its manifold meanings and uses. The use of books, indeed, and the question concerning not just their utility but their possible futility is bound up with Markson’s interrogation of art more generally in WM, and whatMoore, in his afterword, describes as the novel’s simultaneously “funny” but “profound” unsettling of “traditional notions of influence and the transmission of culture . . .”

First published in the year when Barbara Kingsolver and Jonathan Franzen published their debut novels—the year also of The Satanic Verses, Libra, and The Silence of the Lambs—Markson’s seventh novel marked what Wallace called “pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country.” This was quite a claim, given the various and varied experiments in narrative published in the same year. As he later explained in great analytical and critical detail, however, WM is a novel that serves:

the vital & vanishing function of reminding us of fiction’s limitless possibilities for reach & grasp, for making heads throb heartlike, & for sanctifying the marriages of cerebration & emotion, abstraction & lived life, transcendent truth-seeking & daily schlepping, marriages that in our happy epoch of technical occlusion & entertainment-marketing seem increasingly consummatable only in the imagination.

It is wonderful to have the full text of Wallace’s essay “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress” available alongside WM itself, but it is important to note too , the ways in which Wallace’s essay signals interests and concerns that were as important to his own development as they were to his sense of Markson’s achievement. Moreover, it should be acknowledged that, while it is certainly a work of extremely well-informed and passionate advocacy, “The Empty Plenum” does much more than praise Markson’s novel. Wallace’s description of the “Wittgensteinian” parallels in WM are indispensable, but his essay also expresses some unease about what he calls “[q]uestions of voice, over-allusion, & ‘explanation.’”

Minor imperfections aside—and Wallace goes so far as to describe WM as “an imperfect book”—he nonetheless insists that it is important because of its “terrific emotional & political/fictional & theoretical achievement: it evokes a truth a whole lot of books & essays before it have fumbled around.” Wallace’s sense of the originality and value of WM was of course based on close engagement and comparison with a vast array of other novels, from James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) to Rebecca Goldstein’s (“really terrible”) The Mind-Body Problem (1983). Most importantly, from the point of view of Wallace’s development, WM appeared the year after he published his own first novel, The Broom of the System (1987). It must have struck the younger author (then 25, just out of the University of Arizona’s Creative Writing Program with an MFA, for what it was worth), as a profound, and uncanny, coincidence. Wittgenstein haunts both texts, formally and thematically, and in an interview also published in the Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993, Wallace described Broom as:

the sensitive tale of a sensitive young WASP who’s just had this mid-life crisis that’s moved him from coldly cerebral analytic math to a coldly cerebral take on fiction and Austin-Wittgenstein-Derridean literary theory, which also shifted his existential dread from a fear that he was just a 98.6 calculating machine to a fear that he was nothing but a linguistic construct.

It is intriguing that neither Markson nor Wittgenstein’s Mistress are mentioned in the interview, as if Wallace had completely repressed the older author’s influence on his work, even if he could not have read WM at the time of Broom’s composition(unless he was friendly with one of the fifty-four editors who rejected it, which is unlikely).

Reading “The Empty Plenum,” however, one finds echoes of Wallace’s own work everywhere in his description of Markson’s text, and not just in the ways that The Broom of the System and Wittgenstein’s Mistress engage with the ideas of the Austrian philosopher. Consider, for example, his description (in footnote 18) of the “continual reference to bunches of tennis balls bouncing all over the place,” which, he says, “made me realize tennis balls are about the best macroscopic symbol there is for the flux of atomistic fact . . .”—a note that is of profound importance in relation to Infinite Jest (1996). Or the fact that “The Empty Plenum” begins with a quotation from Stanley Cavell that refers to “looking philosophically as it were beneath our feet rather than over our heads” which might be said to echo the opening image of Broom (“Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet . . .”).

All of this is to say that in “The Empty Plenum,” Wallace provides a number of clues that are useful to understanding his own work’s development, both at the time that the essay was written and in his later fictions. His extended discussion of Markson’s constructions of gender, for example, are valuable in relation to Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), while his closing insistence that WM is “really about the plenitude of emptiness” resonates with almost all of the work produced by Wallace throughout his tragically curtailed career. Wallace’s work, of course, was also known by Markson, and a reference to James O. Incandenza towards the end of Reader’s Block—first published in the same year as Infinite Jest—is just as intriguing as Wallace’s allusions and cross-references.

Rereading Wittgenstein’s Mistress in this new edition is then an experience that challenges one to engage not just with the genius of David Markson but with perhaps one of his most astute acolytes and advocates, David Foster Wallace. While Wallace says at one point that he had “never heard of this guy Markson, before, in ’88,” one cannot ignore the profound affinities between the two authors. In his piece “Reading David Markson,” published in the first issue of CONTEXT, Joseph Tabbi (taking his cue from Wallace) insisted that WM “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.” Readers interested in this interpretation of the novel should chase up Tabbi’s piece, but new readers and re-readers of WM in this edition might also do well to explore some of the many other sources and allusions that inform the text. Markson himself suggests as much in his interview with Tabbi in his description of important engagements with a wide range of other artists and thinkers—philosophers and writers: RolandBarthes and Claude Levi Strauss but also Herman Melville, John Barth, J. P. Donleavy, Raymond Chandler, among others.They may not all have “influenced” the writing of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, but in the same way that it would be wrong to describe Kate solely in terms of a relationship she may or may not have had with Wittgenstein, it is misleading to suggest thatWM’s sole preoccupation is with the nature or function of the linguistic turn in twentieth-century philosophy.

In the same interview Markson says that the “central concept” of the book was in fact “the idea of aloneness,” and it is probably true to say that it was this, even more than its ostensible engagements with linguistic theory, that attracted Wallace to Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Wallace describes WM at one point in his essay as “an immediate study of depression & loneliness [that] is far too moving to be the object of either exercise or exorcism.” This, he says, means that for him the book “transcends [. . .] its review-enforced status of ‘intellectual tour de force’ or ‘experimental achievement.’” It is easy to lose sight of these crucially important clarifications, not just in relation to Wallace’s sense of the book but of WM’s own primary motivations, as far as Markson himself saw them. Indeed it is important too to recognize the roles played by many other figures in the formation of Markson’s aesthetic, and especially poets such as Dylan Thomas and T. S. Eliot, both of whom Markson recognized as important influences. (He actually hung out with Thomas towards the end of the poet’s life, as he also explains in his interview with Tabbi.) Markson’s own poems, it has to be said, are generally awful, but if the opening sentence of Wittgenstein’s Mistress calls the Book of Genesis to mind (as Wallace acknowledges), it might also allude to the opening of Eliot’s “East Coker” (“In my beginning is my end”) or to Thomas’s early poem “In the beginning,” which includes the following verse:

In the beginning was the word, the word

That from the solid bases of the light

Abstracted all the letters of the void;

And from the cloudy bases of the breath

The word flowed up, translating to the heart

First characters of birth and death.

Wittgenstein’s Mistress challenges our sense of what the novel can be today as much as it did when it was first published in 1988. The poet John Berryman, who also knew Thomas when Markson knew him, claimed in an essay first published in 1940 that the Welsh poet’s work “extended the language and to a lesser degree the methods of lyric poetry.” The same might be said of Markson, especially in Wittgenstein’s Mistress and in the works that followed it. WM is also a book in which words are presented in such a way that one is left, in Thomas’s phrase, “translating to the heart / First characters of birth and death.” In this lies the true character of Markson’s genius as well as the significance of his inheritance for those who come after him.

Mati Unt was born in Estonia and lived there all his life. He spent his early years in the village of Linnamäe near the university town of Tartu. His life, like that of so many Estonians, was rooted in the countryside and nature, something evident in all of his works. Unt doubled as one of the most influential modernist, and latterly postmodernist, authors in Estonia, as well as being a playwright, director, and producer, staging plays at several theaters in the Estonian capital, Tallinn.

* * *

Unt made his breakthrough as an author early in life, publishing his first prose in the early 1960s while still at school, and later while studying literature and journalism at Tartu University, near the village where he was born. He belonged to the Sixties Generation, which denotes a number of Estonian writers born in the 1940s and who emerged as writers and intellectuals some twenty years later. During the years leading up to the Prague Spring of 1968, Estonian intellectuals had high hopes of a Dubãek-style “socialism with a human face.” Their hopes were soon dashed. Nevertheless, Estonia had always managed to evade the full brunt of Soviet repression and censorship.

In the 1960s and ’70s, when Stalinism had waned, key works of international literature were made available in translation to the citizens of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic by such authors as Whitman, Faulkner, Salinger, Scott Fitzgerald, Wilder, Malamud, Baldwin, Capote, Updike, Oates, Bellow, Golding, Bergman (film scripts), Kafka, Borges, Butor, and Camus. This was thanks to an unusual initiative, a weekly addition to one of the cultural monthlies where many shorter works of international literature managed to appear. In 1964, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir made a brief visit to Estonia, and even works that were frowned upon by the central Soviet authorities—such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita—were published in the Estonian language. Presumably the Soviet authorities thought that the translation of controversial works into a language used by no more than one million people could do little or no harm to the predominantly Russian-speaking USSR.

* * *

For much of his working life, Mati Unt was involved with the theater, staging plays regularly from 1981, when he became the director and scriptwriter for the Youth Theater in Tallinn. It is often thought that the Soviet Union was entirely cut off from Western theatrical trends, but this is not entirely true. During the 1960s thaw, new ideas in the theater seeped in through the Iron Curtain and from the more liberal satellite states to the Soviet Union itself. In time, names such as Artaud, Grotowski, and Peter Brook became familiar to Estonians.

Over the past decades, Unt staged many plays of international renown by dramatists such as Sophocles, Corneille, Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Strindberg, Ibsen, Chekhov, Gombrowicz, Genet, Weiss, Havel, and Beckett, plus adaptations of Euripides and Bulgakov, many of these at the Vanemuine Theater in Tartu. One of the last plays he staged was Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker, in the provincial town of Rakvere, and before his death Unt was working on a stage adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

Mati Unt also wrote several plays of his own. As early as 1967, Unt was experimenting with the introduction of Brechtiantechniques to Ancient Greek material in his play Phaethon, Son of the Sun. Perhaps Unt’s most complex stage play was Dress Rehearsal (1977) where in Pirandellian fashion he examined the life of a Soviet revolutionary through actors on a film set performing in and discussing what is in fact a rather hackneyed adaptation. The real revolutionary, now an old man, stands around the set giving monosyllabic advice, and seems rather indifferent to the myth his life is being turned into.

* * *

Still, it is as a renewer of Estonian prose that Unt will be best remembered, at home and especially abroad. The leitmotifs and style of Mati Unt’s fiction changed little from when he first began publishing in the 1960s and was regarded as something of a Wunderkind. Unt’s prose is rooted in the mythology of everyday life, personal relationships, sexuality, and especially that of modern urban living—although the national trauma of the Soviet occupation always lurks under the surface. To this he added the deadpan humor of the eternal observer, someone who never quite succeeds in getting fully involved with other people, and yet is always present amongst them.

Unt was always interested in popular science; the most unexpected associations and references appear in his works. He was also keen on examining paranormal, esoteric, and pathological phenomena, like vampires, werewolves, cannibals, sex criminals, and those driven by obsessions and idées fixes. One critic says: “Unt’s interest in everything . . . was phenomenal. He read rapidly and much, his memory was first class and concrete, and he synthesized what he read. You could always ask him about things in many fields.”

Unt’s early novels clearly show the direction he was moving in. His first novel, Farewell, Yellow Cat!, appeared in his school annual in 1963. Here the protagonist is in an ideological battle with his aunt, a homeowner—something that was rather politically incorrect in the Soviet days. Anything harking back to bourgeois times (i.e. the 1930s of independence and the authoritarian rule of President Päts) had to be painted in a negative light. But by mentioning them at all, Unt was taking a stand.

Then came the novella The Debt (1964), which caused a literary storm. Under the edicts of Socialist Realism, Soviet literature was in those days supposed to provide models for how people should conduct their lives. Instead, Unt chose a protagonist who was having sex while still at school, and who gets a girl pregnant, something which was shocking to the hypocritically puritan Soviet society. Critic Tiit Hennoste regards this novella as Unt’s key work: “It was the first work of Estonian literature in Soviet times that caused a real scandal, and endless disputes about the behavior of the young.”

In 1970, Unt produced a Kafkaesque murder-mystery parody called Murder at the Hotel, and two years later wrote a love-triangle novella called An Empty Beach, where a young married writer has to contend with the advances made to his wife by a violinist—and which, he claimed, contains elements of self-mockery. A film version of this novella was scheduled to start shooting in late August 2005, and will continue despite the author’s death.

Under the same cover was Mattias and Kristiina, which is again about a young couple struggling against society, and who endup in a kind of Tristan-and-Isolde tragedy.

This was followed in 1975 by the novella And If We Are Not Dead, Then We Are Alive Right Now. This deals with werewolves and contains numerous references to literature on the same subject, a stylistic trait that remained constant in the rest of Unt’s oeuvre.

Unt’s most famous novel, Autumn Ball (1979), was translated into English—as well as Russian, Finnish, Swedish, and other languages—back in the Soviet era, and tells the story of six people living in apartments in the Tallinn high-rise suburb of Mustamäe, and who are destined to meet at the end of the novel: a poet, an architect who is a technocrat and futurist, a misanthropic barber, and a TV-addicted woman and her young son. Here, Unt’s coolly objective yet tongue-in-cheek style and interest in popular science came into their own. Apart from Things in the Night, this is the only novel by Unt made available in English. [Ed Note: At the time of writing, these were the only Unt titles in English. See below for a complete, current list.]

Unt’s novels and stories, as well as a few plays, were collected in two volumes in 1985, totaling some 650 pages. But Unt was not finished as an author. Some of his most significant work was still to come.

The following year, Unt published a volume of novellas and other short texts entitled They Speak and Keep Silent. Critics talkhere of polyphony in the Bakhtinian sense, claiming that while there was the germ of this already in Autumn Ball, by now Unthad abandoned the traditional role of a narrator. These texts include the semi-theatrical dialogue of a woman and a taxi-driver; a short play about the nineteenth-century poet Lydia Koidula (see below) and the twentieth-century author of folk tales Aino Kallas; diary entries by a woman whose husband disappears without trace; and a postmodern text that comments on the translation of a poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

, Unt’s second-longest novel, and second to be translated into English, appeared as Öös on asju in 1990, and deals with electricity in all its forms: a source of urban heating and lighting, but also a dangerous and untamed force. Unt also incorporates other devices from his stock of trivia: pigs, cacti, holography, urban cannibalism, and the ever-present blocks of high-rise apartments found throughout the former Soviet Union. Things in the Night continues in the postmodern vein of They Speak and Keep Silent, being full of game playing, anarchic behavior, absence, schizophrenia, and irony. Nevertheless, there is, as in similar works from the former Soviet Bloc, a touch of light moralism in the novel. The Estonian critic Kalev Kesküla sums the work up as follows:

The novel consists of the author’s confessions, novel fragments, snatches of plays, comments on how to write a novel, poems, minutes of interrogations, letters, and quite a few quotes from popular classics. There are amusing adventures and pointless ratiocinations. From time to time, the writer-protagonist personifies the compulsive scribbler who is unable to curb his urge to write when attempting to describe electricity, who tells yarns about accidents and shops. The characters in the novel have strayed into a world where other people’s words, clichéd behavior, and serious scientific literature are jumbled up together. In its artistic radicalism, the novel is very modernist, while very postmodern in its zest for irony. The ideas that bear the novel along appear to be a fear of people and an underlying misanthropy, themes familiar from Unt’s earlier works. Here again we have the criminals, farmers who set their dogs on those wandering through the night, arctic hysteria, and cannibalism.

In 1990, the same year as Things in the Night, Unt published a second novel, . This is the usual Untian mixture of fact and fiction, and takes one of the most sacred names in Estonian literature in vain. Lydia Koidula (1843-1886) is regarded as the first Estonian woman poet of significance, and also the first poet to express an Estonian longing for independence and freedom. But Unt rather blasphemously weaves this national icon and her Latvian doctor and husband into a postmodern tale of vampires and a mysterious trip to Leningrad. While the leitmotif of Things in the Night is electricity, that of Diary of a Blood Donor is, predictably, blood.

After 1990, Unt published only one major work of fiction, but one with special international resonance. This was a documentary novel about Bertolt Brecht’s meeting with the Estonian-born Hella Wuolijoki, who later became a Communist and broadcaster in neighboring Finland, and is entitled . (The night was clearly something with which Unt had affinities.) In true Untian style, the author mixes episodes from the history of Estonia and Finland in a tale centered around World War II, including historical documents and a rather playful description of the very bourgeois and somewhat fastidiousBrecht, who would like to feel at home with the workers, but is too busy with his “alienation effect” and mistresses.

* * *

In one of a series of articles written to mark Unt’s sixtieth birthday—January 1, 2004—Ms. Marju Lauristin, who remembered him from his early days as a writer, wrote an appreciation entitled “Mati Unt’s Blogosphere.” In it she examines Unt’s last literary guise—that of a columnist in the cultural press, where he wrote short pieces that almost resembled “blog” entries, recording his comments on life on a weekly basis. Lauristin, now a professor of media studies, remembers Unt as someone   the world was “very text-centered, sound-centered, centered on the life of the mind.”

* * *

Mati Unt lies buried in the writer’s corner of the Metsakalmistu cemetery in Tallinn, where he rubs shoulders in death with many of the key figures of nineteenth- and especially twentieth-century Estonian literature, their graves all grouped together rather like those in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey—but in a more modest, truly Estonian manner. The vaults of the abbey are here replaced by the branches of trees.

Come back on Wednesday to read an excerpt from Diary of a Blood Donor.

Selected Works by Mati Unt in Translation:

Autumn Ball. Trans. Mart Aru. Out of Print.

. Trans. Eric Dickens. Dalkey Archive Press, $13.95.

. Trans. Ants Eert. Dalkey ArchivePress, $12.95.

. Trans. Eric Dickens.

Selected Untranslated Works:

Hüvasti, kollane kass! [Farewell, Yellow Cat!]. Keskkooli almanahh.

Mõrv hotellis [Murder at the Hotel]. Periodika.