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

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," 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: