Wittgenstein's Mistress

Wittgenstein's Mistress

first edition cover
Author	David Markson
Language	English
Genre	Experimental novel, philosophical fiction, postmodernism
Publisher	Dalkey Archive Press
Publication date	May 1988
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print
Pages	248
ISBN	1-56478-211-5 (August, 2005 Reprint Edition)
OCLC	17926827

Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson is a highly stylized, experimental novel in the tradition of Samuel Beckett. The novel is mainly a series of statements made in the first person; the protagonist is a woman named Kate who believes herself to be the last human on earth. Though her statements shift quickly from topic to topic, the topics often recur, and often refer to Western cultural icons, ranging from Zeno to Beethoven to Willem de Kooning. Readers familiar with Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus will recognize stylistic similarities to that work.

Though Markson's original manuscript was rejected fifty-four times,^[1] the book, when finally published in 1988 by Dalkey Archive Press, was met with critical acclaim. In particular, the New York Times Book Review praised it for "address[ing] formidable philosophic questions with tremendous wit." A decade later, David Foster Wallace described it as "pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country" in an article for Salon entitled "Five direly underappreciated U.S. novels >1960."^[2] Wallace also wrote a long essay on the novel detailing its connections with Wittgenstein, entitled "The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein's Mistress" for the 1990 Review of Contemporary Fiction. (In 2012, it was added to the novel as an afterword.^[3])