From Wittgenstein to Heidegger: David Markson's philosophical novel Wittgenstein's Mistress

Wittgenstein's Mistress by D. Markson, most often celebrated as a striking postmodernist achievement in regard to its poetics, is characterized in the article from the point of view of its genre as a philosophical novel that through the juxtaposition of Wittgenstein's logical positivism and Heidegger's fundamental ontology tries to solve some of the most crucial problems of modern civilization, such as human loneliness and the loss of meaning in life. The author of the article argues that the philosophical context dominates the entire concept of the novel forming the basis for its plot structure and character development. Wittgenstein's influence is most obvious in the novel's formal construction and dwelling on the aspects of linguistic philosophy but at a more general level it comes to influence the whole concept of the work through the development of such statements from Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as "The world is the totality of facts, not things" and "I am my world". Through the major part of the novel the central character remains fact-bound in her groping through her own past as well as the history of the world arts and culture, but while logic might work well in the realm of sciences it does not appear to suit the world of human relationship and ethics. The result is the character's tragic inability to overcome her loneliness and depression or to find any meaning in her ingenious compilation of facts. In order to contrast Wittgenstein's bleak reality, Markson weaves a different set of predominantly existentialist ideas into his novel, with M. Heidegger's being the most influential among them. The haunting idea of "anxiety as the fundamental mood of existence" that appears early in the novel finally leads the heroine, as well as the reader, to ponder over such universal notions as care, guilt and responsibility. Heidegger's Dasein, which the central character finds herself perplexed about in the German-written text, points to a possible solution, as it is regarded firstly as 'a having been", i.e. genuinely incorporating all the past human culture into a living person, and secondly as "being-with", i.e. always taking the other into account regardless of the physical presence of the other at the moment. The narrator in the novel, being unfamiliar with Heidegger's theoretical writing, intuitively moves the same way from formal interest in a cultural surrounding to subconscious immersion into the flow of the Being, so that her final silence, as the novel approaches its end, can be treated as a sign promising a new beginning, as the German philosopher saw it.

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