The schizophrenic text: a reading of Wittgenstein’s Mistress

Abstract

The narrator in David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988) is a woman who claims to be the last person in the world. She sits in a house with her typewriter, telling her memories about what happened before and after her being alone, mixing imagination and recollections with interpretations of various works of art and literature representative of our culture. Giving no clues or evidence about her situation, she is engaged in reflections and misconceptions that reflect some themes investigated by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, such as language, the nature of knowledge, and the relationship between language and reality. Entangled in a complex web of intertextuality, Kate has only language to establish her relations with the reality around her, so as to break with a near solipsism, tracing a connection, even if slender, between her inner world and that which surrounds her. The traces of schizophrenia that she presents evoke what Louis A. Sass refers to as the mistakes made by philosophers who engage in a metaphysical search, which Wittgenstein calls the "diseases of the intellect". Among these we have the exacerbation of subjective experience, a paradoxical oscillation between inner and shared reality, and a perplexed sense of the self as being everything and nothing at the same time. This research aims at analyzing such issues as presented by the narrator in the light of Sass’ study and through the philosophy of Wittgenstein, addressing both aspects of the text, the solipsist and the schizophrenic possibilities.