David Markson’s 1988 postmodern novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress has been hailed by no less than David Foster Wallace as “pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country”. Purportedly rejected 54 times before finding a publisher, the novel transformed Markus from a half-forgotten pop-writer^[1]his 1965 anti-Western The Ballad of Dingus Magee was adapted into a terrible Frank Sinatra flick, to an icon of American postmodernism.

Wittgenstein’s Mistress presents itself as the typed manuscript of a middle-aged artist named Kate, who appears to be the last human being on earth after some unnamed apocalyptic event wipes out the entire human race but somehow also leaves all of its buildings–including art museums–untouched.

Is she the sole survivor of a neutron bomb war? Some sort of Rapture? A global plague? (Certainly the novel landed different when I re-read it during pandemic lockdowns).

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter–she is alone. She types this manuscript not to narrate her life or leave behind a record for future generations (who would read it?), but simply to combat her immense loneliness as the last person alive.

Hence, there are no chapter divisions, no subsections, but simply a long collection of disconnected thoughts and allusions to her travels around the world–initially in a vain search for other survivors (“In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the streets,” is how the novel opens), but which instead becomes a record of her visits to the world’s great art museums, now that there’s no one else left to appreciate them.

How exactly she accomplishes this circumnavigation is never fully explained; she makes reference to rowing a boat solo across the Dardanelles for example (presumably she did the same at the Bering Strait), and of driving a series of abandoned cars across Russia, listening to whichever Classical cassette tapes were left inside by its last occupants.

She also memorably mentions spilling a barrel full of tennis balls down the Spanish Steps in Rome, of seeing the Thames river run with clear water through London for the first time in centuries, and of sleeping inside the Louvre, where she burned the picture-frames for warmth while still carefully nailing the paintings themselves back onto the walls.

At the time of her typing the manuscript itself, she is squatting at a beach house in Virginia, occasionally imagining what it may have looked like when the Greeks first landed on the beach heads of Troy–an event she seems to fixate on as the dawn of all Western art and literature, now that she’s at the end of it.

Overall, the nature of art itself becomes the central meditation of the novel–what it is, what is it for, if and how it can affect and transcend human perception. “It is easier to imagine a world without humans than a world without Mozart” is probably the novel’s most quoted line.

If you’ll indulge me, it is not hard to be put in mind of the Book of Mormon with this text. As with Markson (who was of Jewish descent, by the way, and therefore of the same lineage as Lehi), the initial Book of Mormon manuscript was produced without chapter divisions and without punctuation marks, all of which were later added by the publisher E.B. Grandon.

Also like the Markson, the Book of Mormon is fundamentally a post-apocalyptic text, written by the last surviving member of a totally destroyed civilization, one who “[has] not friends nor whither to go” (Mormon 8:5).

Perhaps most relevant, there is even extra-textual debate as to the reliability of the narrator: numerous critics have questioned whether Kate is actually the last human on earth, or if she has suffered a psychotic break and only thinks she is the last person on earth; “You will say that I am old and mad, was what Michaelangelo wrote, but I answer that there is no better way of being sane and free from anxiety than by being mad,” is the line that gets cited as possible evidence of her insanity.

Likewise, all Book of Mormon debates hinge upon whether one thinks there was a historical Mormon and Moroni who produced their post-apocalyptic record of a destroyed civilization, or if this is all a fictional account produced by the fevered imagination of Joseph Smith, Jr.

Of course this analogy is not exact^[2]no analogy ever is; Mormon and Moroni may write post-apocalyptically, but they are emphatically not the actual last living beings on Earth–Moroni especially spends the rest of his days not seeking signs of other humans but actively avoiding them, since he has good reason to assume everyone he meet would likely murder him.^[3]“For behold, their wars are exceedingly fierce among themselves; and because of their hatred they put to death every Nephite that will not deny the Christ. And I, Moroni, will not deny the … Continue reading

Moreover, Mormon and Moroni write not to alleviate their abject loneliness, but with the stated hope of being read by unnamed future generations–a hope that Kate does not share. The nature of art is as far from their minds as the gospel of Jesus Christ is from Kate’s.

But there is one more point of potential intersection between these two texts, and that is in the novel title itself: Wittgenstein’s Mistress.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher and logical-positivist most famous for his 1921 treatise Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus^[4]which title was itself an homage to Spinoza’s 1670 treatise Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. The book itself is structured as a series of succinct and austere declarative statements arranged in short paragraph form–similar to the style of Kate’s manuscript (and as is attempted in this essay). Hence the title, Wittgenstein’s Mistress.

This very unique text is organized around seven propositions:

1. The world is everything that is the case.
2. What is the case (a fact) is the existence of states of affairs.
3. A logical picture of facts is a thought.
4. A thought is a proposition with a sense.
5. A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions. (An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.)
6. The general form of a proposition is the general form of a truth function, which is: . This is the general form of a proposition.
7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

The first six propositions contain numerous sub-propositions, listed for example as 1.1, 1.2, 1.2.1, and etc. The only proposition without any sub-propositions is the final one: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Without getting into the weeds of Logical-Positivism, we can at a bare minimum note that there is something poetic, almost spiritual, in how that last proposition is phrased, which has been frequently cited in other more literary contexts.

Certainly the Book of Mormon shares the philosophic outlook of Proposition Seven; repeatedly throughout the Book of Mormon, people hear a ‘voice and . . . understand not’ (3 Nephi 11:4), are ‘baptized with fire, and . . . know it not’ (3 Nephi 9:20) and ‘hear it not’ (Moroni 2:3).

There are also the repeated laments by the Book’s polyvocal speakers as to their own weakness and failures in writing (e.g. “Neither am I mighty in writing”, 2 Nephi 33:1; “for Lord thou hast made us mighty in word by faith, thou hast not made us mighty in writing”, Ether 12:23).

That is, conversion in the Book of Mormon comes not through what the text communicates, but precisely through what it cannot–the peace of God which surpasseth understanding, the groanings beyond utterance, the still small voice that at times causeth my bones to quake within me.

These are the things that cannot be expressed by language; they must therefore be passed over in silence, even though they are still all the more present. Arguably, Wittgenstein understood this. Mormon and Moroni also understood this.

And Kate understands this–the peculiar power of that novel comes not from what’s being said, but what is not. Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must pass over in silence.