Wandering through Endless Nothingness: Reading Fictional Mind in David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress

Abstract

The present article attempts to investigate David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress through the lens of cognitive narratology. To understand “the whole mind” of Kate, the protagonist of the novel, this study endeavors to explore her intermental thoughts (interpersonal relationships), intramental thoughts (inner speech), and dispositions. The central questions of the present study are: How does Kate, the major female character of Wittgenstein’s Mistress reconstruct the minds of others in her own thought, and how does her mental state is manifested in her narration of episodic traumatic memories and qualia? And how does her internal world emerge from a combination of collective minds as far as Alan Palmer’s conception of “intermental thought” is concerned? Alan Palmer’s humanizing approach to postclassical narratology, which provides the theoretical backbone of the present research, underscores the mental interactions of fictional characters and explores actions, dispositions, and interpersonal relationships. The article concludes that Kate’s internal world is constructed out of a combination of collective minds and her “intermental thoughts.”

Keywords:

• social mind
• mind in action
• intermental thoughts
• intramental thoughts
• Wittgenstein’s Mistress
• Alan Palmer

1. Introduction

The perplexity of the human mind is a central concern in the postmodern novel, specifically when it depicts the mentality of a character as trapped in a mad world. When contemporary human beings come under scrutiny in a fictional world, the way they see the world and their mental state is conveyed to the audience not only through monologues, but through actions, dispositions, and interpersonal relationships. In his seminal article “The Construction of Fictional Minds,” Alan Palmer (2002), an expert in postclassical narratology, suggests that to read and understand fictional minds as a whole, we should go beyond their internal world to place them in the context they belong to. He emphasizes “the indispensable and pivotal role of thought report in linking individual mental functioning to the social context in which it is taking place” (34). The depiction of such an interrelation is one of the primary concerns of postmodern fiction. The study at hand treats Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress as a critical locus of investigation for reading its fictional character’s minds in the light of Palmer’s conception of postclassical narratology. Focusing on such terms as cognitive narratology and fictional mind reading, it seeks to explore Palmer’s notion of the “whole mind” in the female protagonist of the novel. Also important is the discovery of the reasons that transform her from an active to a passive participant in her life. Other key terms include: “intermental” and “intramental thoughts,” dispositions, non-consciousness emotions, non-verbal consciousness, “mind in action,” “social mind,” “thought-action continuum,” and behavior.

Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988), after being rejected fifty-four times, was finally published by Dalkey Archive Press in 1988 and is known to be Markson’s masterpiece. The narrator of the novel is a fifty-year-old woman who lives all alone at a beach. She persuades the reader that she is the last creature living on the planet. She keeps herself busy by writing a book that she describes as something between a travelogue and a chronicle. Markson’s heroine doubts every single detail of her life, even though she seems quite sure about what famous artists did throughout their lives. She entertains herself by remapping their lives by possible incidents and events that might have affected them. Like comic artists, she fabricates funny stories about famous mythical characters. She longs for being a celebrity, but she knows, only too well, that she lacks what it takes to be one and that she will be forgotten soon.

David Merrill Markson (1927–2010) was an American writer who is known for his elliptical, experimental, and postmodern novels. He has invented his own specific genre. As a postmodern novelist, Markson does not pay much attention to plot development, and traditional writing techniques such as chapter divisions or even organized paragraphs. Instead, he concentrates on characterization and the flow of the mind of his fictional characters. His novels include Springer’s Progress (1977), Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988), Reader’s Block (1996), This Is Not a Novel (2001), Vanishing Point (2004), and The Last Novel (2007). According to Viljanen (2012), his works exhibit a tendency towards unorthodox outline with experimental narration and character development (2). In her “David Markson and the Problem of the Novel,” Laura Sims (2008) affirms Markson’s reputation as “a highly experimental, ‘difficult’ postmodern writer who write[s] writing instead of stories, and who aims to rebuild the novel, in form and content, from scratch” (59). In her book, Experimental Fiction: An Introduction for Readers and Writers, Julie Armstrong (2014) claims that “by reading experimental fiction, a reader’s views on story telling will be revised and they will become more sophisticated readers, ones who have the tools and vocabulary to enjoy a richer, more diverse experience of fiction, which can be very inspiring and rewarding” (6).

Mind reading as a key narratological tool in Palmer’s approach refers to the actual readers’ tendency to read fictional minds. Through mind reading, the actual reader keeps track of a fictional character’s disjointed thoughts to shape a meaningful and coherent storyline out of a narrative that keeps diverging from the main plotline. Throughout the reading process, the world of the reader blends with the fictional characters’ world and then a new world is created as the result of the readers’ effort to understand the fictional world in relation to his/her cognitive ability. Palmer prioritizes the externalist over the internalist approach to the mind. In other words, he underscores “social minds,” “intermental thoughts.” “Situated identity,” the subjectivity of others, “mind in action,” and Bakhtinian dialogics. Unlike “intramental thoughts,” “intermental thoughts” pivot around the thoughts that go beyond the mind of the individual. Palmer’s approach is mostly applicable to heterodiegetic rather than homo-diegetic narratives. For this very reason, this study with its focus on a novel that has a homo-diegetic narrator might seem an unconventional deployment of Palmer’s approach; having said that, in his Fictional Minds, Palmer (2010) acknowledges that “it is equally well known that there are always two first persons in any homo-diegetic narrative: the one who experiences the events and the one who later recounts them” (26). In this case study, adult Kate is compared with her younger self and the interrelation between her behaviors in the past and present is put under scrutiny.

The main questions the present research endeavors to answer are: What are Kate’s “intermental” and “intramental” thoughts? How do they work together to untangle the main theme of the novel? What is the purpose of Kate from all the inconsequential perplexities that she is discussing? What sort of behavioral patterns and emotional paradigms does Kate follow and why? These questions are answered in three analytical sections. “Kate’s Intermental Thoughts” sheds light on how Kate interprets people and the world around her. The second section, “Kate’s Intramental Thoughts,” deals with Kate’s personal thoughts and memories as she writes a book at a beach. This part commentates on her feelings, emotions, and chain of memories and thoughts as well as on certain patterns in her behavior. This section also connects these two parts and studies Kates mind as a “whole mind.” The last section, “Kate’s Thought-Action,” seeks to observe and elucidate the relationship among Kate’s various actions and decisions.

2. Methodology

In his introduction to Fictional Mind, Alan Palmer (2004) contends that “the constructions of the minds of fictional characters by narrators and readers are central to our understanding of how novels work because, in essence, the narrative is the description of fictional mental functioning” (12). Accordingly, to contribute to literary meaning-making through reading fictional minds (Kate’s mind in this case), the aim of this part is two-fold. One objective is to clarify what reading fictional minds means and the other is to define postclassical narratology and cognitive approaches through which fictional minds are analyzed and to explicate Palmer’s understanding of cognitive narratology. In sharp contrast with postclassical narratology, classical narratology lays emphasis on the “speech category approach,” whose scope is rather limited in the sense that it ignores or downplays social, emotional, or intellectual contexts when reading fictional mind. It implies that postclassical narratology goes beyond speech categories in its interpretation of characters’ dispositions, behaviors, or memories.

Postclassical narratology has three main subdivisions. As Lu Shao has argued in his “English Translation of Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out: A Cognitive Narratology Perspective,” they include rhetorical narratology, cognitive narratology (the most significant branch), and feminist narratology. All of these branches can be implemented simultaneously (Shao, 2020, pp. 132–133). In “Narratofictiology in the Twenty-First Century: The Cognitive Approach to Narrative Postclassical,” Monika Fludernik explains how classical narratology has developed to turn into postclassical narratology. She contends that literary theories in the twentieth century have been deeply influenced by linguistic rules. Ranging from new critics’ close reading to structuralists’ parole, critical theories were all supposed to acknowledge the autonomy of literary texts; consequently, context and everything outside the text were considered as redundant and irrelevant. Postclassical narratology, by contrast, fuses class, gender, race, contexts, and history in its textual analyses (Fludernik, 2010, pp. 924–925).

In the same vein, in his Herman (1997) article “Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology,” David Herman distinguishes classical from postclassical narratology. According to Him, what prompted literary critics to extend their focus to consider context as well as text in their analysis were recent developments in artificial intelligence, language theories, and cognitive sciences. He asserts that Dennis Mercadal’s classification of human knowledge into schemata, script, and frame, highlights the importance of the reader’s previous experiences or the outside-text bits of information. In his words, “cognitive scientists have studied how stereotypical knowledge reduces the complexity and duration of processing tasks bound up with perceiving, inferring, and so on” (Herman 1048). Narratologists’ interest in cognitive studies was also spurred mainly by the fact that most concepts in cognitive science are to elucidate the relation between the mind and the narrative. According to Jonas Grethlein (2015), “the concept of the theory of mind, sometimes also circulating under the label of folk psychology, was first developed by comparative psychologists who investigated the ability in primates to impute mental states to others” (257). Two of the influential scholars in the field of the theory of the mind are Alan Palmer and Lisa Zunshine (2006).

Drawing upon Grethlein’s “Is Narrative the Description of Fictional Mental Functioning?” Palmer affirms that narrative is, in fact, “the description of fictional mental functioning” (Fictional Minds 12).

In his “Social Minds in Fiction and Criticism,” Palmer (2011) concerns with social context. He emphatically asserts that “fictional mental functioning should not be divorced from the social and physical context of the story world within which it occurs” (201). He insists that the fictional world that is built by the reader is created by his/her memories and cognitive viewpoints. Referring to concepts such as “embedded narrative” and “cognitive narratives” in his works, Palmer explains how readers make sense of fictional worlds and fictional characters’ minds using their own experiences and memories, through which fictional people can be imagined as real. Fictional works should be posited within their context because like real people they are affected by their environment. Palmer is reluctant to draw a border line between a character’s consciousness and actions. On the contrary, he reiterates that they are inevitably and perpetually interrelated. The assumption is the theoretical backbone for such concepts as the “mind in action” and “thought-action continuum.” Palmer focuses more on the context rather than the text itself; it does not mean, however, that he totally ignores style and textual elements. Peter Stockwell (2011), claims that “Palmer’s distinction between intramental and “intermental thought” presentation also serves to illuminate further the stylistic notion of “mind-style,” coined by Fowler” (289). Here, “mindstyle” refers to both subjective and socially-shared ideas. Therefore, beside trying to decipher how characters interpret the world individually, it is necessary to trace their thoughts (intramental) to understand another complex agency (intermental) that has contributed to the formation of the former.

Intermental minds are proactive and as a result capable of decision-making. It differs from the intramental mind in that it contains culture and social codes. Intermental minds are shaped under the influence of intramental minds and consequently, decisions that are made by the intermental mind are rooted in the intramental mind. For Palmer, multiple divergent minds converge in the intermental mind. In contrast with “intramental thought” (private thought), “intermental thought” is collective and thus it is “a crucially important component of fictional narrative because much of the mental functioning that occurs in novels is done by large organizations, small groups, work colleagues, friends, families, couples, and other intermental units” (Palmer 427). Accordingly, our subjective experiences are a combination of intersubjective communions and “intermental thoughts”. As a result, perceiving how fictional minds function depends on knowing their social situatedness. In his “Intermental Thought in the Novel: The Middlemarch Mind,” Palmer (2005) has postulated that “it could plausibly be argued that a large amount of the subject matter of novels is the formation, development, and breakdown of these intermental systems” (427).

Furthermore, mind-reading as a key methodological tool in Palmer’s approach refers to the actual readers’ tendency to read fictional minds. Through mind reading, the actual reader keeps track of a fictional character’s fragmented thoughts to shape a meaningful and linear storyline out of a narration that keeps diverging from the central meaning. In her Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, Lisa Zunshine (2006) contends that mind-reading occurs when we as readers “ascribe to a person a certain mental state on the basis of her observable action” (6). Moreover, “mind in action” or “embedded narrative” as one of the key concepts in Palmer’s approach to the representation of consciousness describes a mind that experiences the world actively, responds to different circumstances, and is capable of decision-making. By “embedded narrative” he means

the whole of a character’s mind in action: the total perceptual and cognitive viewpoint, ideological worldview, memories of the past, and the set of beliefs, desires, intentions, motives, and plans for the future of each character in the story as presented in the discourse. (“The Construction of Fictional Minds” 40)

In Palmer’s view, “social mind in action” refers to public physical actions and gestures that convey meaning. As already mentioned, the theory of the mind, or what Marie-Laure Ryan (2011) redefines in her “Kinds of Minds: On Alan Palmer’s “Social Minds” as “inductive reasoning” (655) is an essential concept in the present study. Generally, what has been discussed so far in detail on postclassical narratology, including Palmer’s approach to mind-reading, serves the aim of untangling the complexities of Kate’s mind and making meaning out of the whole novel. In the following pages, technical terms such as “whole mind,” “intermental mind,” and “intramental mind” are contextualized in the novel. The focus is not only what Kate says since the study also takes into account her behavioral pattern, belief infrastructure, her being influenced by other people, writers, artists, and famous people in the history of civilization.

3. Kate’s Intermental Thoughts

In “Large Intermental Units in Middlemarch,” Palmer (2010) defines the theory of intermental thought as “joint, group, shared or collective thought, as opposed to intramental, or individual or private thought. It is also known as socially distributed, situated, or extended cognition, and also as intersubjectivity” (83). He also describes intermental activity in a novel as “knowing, thinking, considering, believing, noticing, conjecturing, implying, suspecting, tolerating, hating, opposing, liking, wanting, and so on” (85). Since the narrator of Wittgenstein’s Mistress is not heterodiegetic and she barely has any interaction with other people whether in her past or present, her intermental thoughts are shown through a network of interconnections between Kate and renowned writers and artists. Kate loses her family and because of that she immerses herself in books. She keeps commenting on fictional characters rather than on her intermental relationships in her real life. Lost in her fictional world, she consistently guesses how fictional characters or artists would react in an imaginary situation or what they did in their lifetime. In another word, she prefers imaginary intermental units over real ones. In the preface of their book Understanding Narrative, James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (1994) highlight the significance of the distinction that Palmer makes between intermental and intramental thought. They claim that: “intermental thought is a crucially important component of fictional narrative because much of the mental functioning depicted in novels occurs in large organizations, small groups, work colleagues, friends, families, couples and other intermental units” (16). A relevant term here is embedded narrative, which Palmer defines as “the whole of a character’s various perceptual and conceptual viewpoints, ideological worldviews, and plans for the future considered as an individual narrative that is embedded in the whole fictional text” (Fictional Minds 15). In his “Narrative Games and Fictional Minds,” Lars Bernaerts (2014) explains that embedded narrative “means asking how characters attribute thoughts and feelings to other characters, how they construct the minds of others in their own thoughts” (308). For instance, from the colors that Vincent Van Gogh uses in his famous piece of art, Kate infers that he must have been anxious while he was painting: “even if a certain amount of the anxiety may be simply over the likelihood that the painting will not sell, of course” (172). In another intertextual case, she implicitly concludes that the person in Rembrandt’s painting is only an image in her own mind: “and on second thought the gold coins that Rembrandt’s pupils painted on the floor of his studio are exactly what I was talking about when I was talking about Robert Rauschenberg. Or rather what I was talking about when I was talking about the person who is not at the window in the painting of this house” (65).

She keeps reminding herself that she is fine and her memory issue is simply because of her age and hormones: “Even if I have no recollection whatsoever of ever having driven into Italy from the direction I am talking about. Doubtless it is partly age, which blurs such distinctions” (36). This self-defense mechanism is known as reaction formation, which according to Baumeister et al. (1998) “involves converting a socially unacceptable impulse into its opposite” (1085). It is not clear whether she cannot recall her past life or she would rather forget it; she even avoids taking a look at what she has just written since she is not willing to remember what troubled her:

Obviously, I could look back. Surely that part cannot be very many lines behind the line I am typing at this moment. On second thought I will not look back. If there was something I was typing that had contributed to my feeling this way, doubtless it would contribute to it all over. I do not feel this way often, as a matter of fact. Generally, I feel quite well, considering. (79)

Her mind is framed in such a way that it deters any deep involvement with the main events of her life. She claims, for instance, that she had snapshots of her family but she cannot remember where she put them, and then she abruptly refrains from providing any more detail: “Or, if they exist, where. Time out of mind. I have snapshots of Simon, of course. For some time one of them was in a frame on the table beside my bed. But quite suddenly I do not feel like typing any more of this, for now. I have not been typing, for perhaps three hours” (76–77). Whenever she is close to recalling some dreadful memory about the past, her mind shifts focus to shallow subjects immediately.

4. Kate’s Intramental Thought

Palmer’s the whole mind is attributed to not only the moods of a fictional character but also the chain of behaviors and mental states. In another article, “The Construction of Fictional Minds,” he proclaims that sometimes narrators are unreliable and consequently we as readers cannot only rely on what they write. Readers are supposed to go beyond fictional characters’ statements to fully grasp their “dispositions, beliefs, attitudes, judgments, skills, knowledge, imagination, intellect, volition, character traits, and habits of thought. Such causal phenomena as intentions, purposes, motives, and reasons for action can be either immediate mental events or latent states, depending on their self-consciousness at any particular moment” (31). According to Teemu Viljanen (2012), the narrator of Wittgenstein’s Mistress is unreliable since

Inconsistencies abound, whether Kate is talking about her present situation or the events leading up to it. Without even getting up into the physical improbability of her travels across the globe, or for that matter, her status as a sole survivor of a natural disaster, which could be accepted as fantastical elements common enough in speculative fiction, it is the way she tales the tale that casts a shadow of suspicion over her credibility. (20)

In his “Social Minds,” Palmer highlights the reason why finding thought arrangements of a fictional character is important. He asserts that “to describe the contents of fictional minds is to focus on how those minds are presented in the text. Also, the techniques that are used for fictional mind presentations will determine, to a certain extent, what thoughts are described” (205). A salient feature in Kate’s personality is that she feels trapped in her own mind; she does not know how to save herself from her mental prison and the more she struggles to keep her sanity, the more she seems to be insane. Confused, she concludes that “there is no better way of being sane and free from anxiety than by being mad” (217–218). She remarks that the whole purpose of the novel is to convey the fact that people can be alone even when they are living among many others: “Which is to say that even when one’s telephone still does function one can be as alone as when it does not” (262). She wonders: “was it really some other person I was so anxious to discover, when I did all of that looking, or was it only my own solitude that I could not abide?” (150).

She evades answering the question, but she keeps repeating that she has been all alone throughout her life, desperately trying to cope with her loneliness and traumatizing memories. Conor Kelleher and Mark T. Keane (2017) believe that “one major feature of the narrative is Kate’s repetitive turn of thought. Regularly, phrases and paragraphs are repeated throughout the novel, or the same entities, people and places are mentioned over and over again” (33). Kate repeats the same sentence about her loneliness twice—one time at the beginning of the novel when she says: “once, I had a dream of fame. Generally, even then, I was lonely” (33), and another, at the close of the novel when she emphasizes 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” (273). Ceren Turan Yalçin (2020) claims that “The novel is basically about Kate’s journey into solitude and isolation. In this journey, she is accompanied only by grief, memory and writing” (36). This prison of the mind (her intramental relationship) is not limited only to her memories about people she had interacted with or places she had visited, but it also refers to the languages, places, people, and conversations that she does not have a memory of: “moreover I have also thought about T. E. Shaw and I do not even know who T. E. Shaw was” (104).

Sometimes she hardly knows what she is talking about. She asks herself: “why do I say such things? Obviously I would have had to cross the Mississippi as well, both ways, on the same trip. Still, it appears I have no recollection of that. Or was I mad then also?” (22). She lives in a world of make-beliefs and sometimes she is baffled by her own non-sequiturs: “Now heavens. Or should I perhaps give up troubling to correct such nonsense altogether, and simply let my language come out any way it insists upon?” (163). This unconscious, or as Palmer calls it non-conscious, clinging to vague memories is mostly a habitual behavior. As Palmer (2004) argues in his Fictional Minds, “the non-conscious includes not only feelings that we belatedly become aware of and the processes involved in automatically avoiding puddles but also large and important mental events” (107). In one occasion, she concentrates on a single word which she thinks to be French. She does so probably as a way to pull herself together and return to the present world. She explains that “Such things can happen. One morning not too long ago all I could think about was the word bricolage, which I presume is French, even though I do not speak one word of French” (87).

There are numerous pieces of evidence in the novel that testify to the fact that she suffers from amnesia or memory loss. For instance, when she attempts to inform the reader that she went to her son’s grave, she fails to recall her son’s name: “why have I written that his name was Adam? Simon is what my little boy was named. Time out of mind. Meaning that one can even momentarily forget the name of one’s only child, who would be thirty by now?” (8). As another example, she cannot remember why she left Mexico and began to travel across the globe: “Well, even mad was looking, or for what earthly reason else, would I have gone wandering off to all of those other places?” (18). She is neither conscious of her surroundings during her journey, nor is she conscious of the past when she writes the novel at the beach. She claims that she is not so enthusiastic about remembering her past; yet, paradoxically she talks about one of the darkest memories of her life:

There being surely as many things one would prefer never to remember as there are those one would wish to, of course. Such as how drunk Adam had gotten on that weekend, for instance, and so did not even think to call for a doctor until far too late … Well, or why one was not there at the house one’s self, those same few days. (255)

She keeps writing about real, fictional, and mythical characters or philosophical matters, but all the while she is actually reflecting on and describing her own life. To keep depression at bay, she talks about other people and constantly utters nonsensical statements and in so doing, she deliberately disrupts and blurs her memories. She is not willing to come to terms with the fact that she has lost every single member of her family, physically and emotionally. She keeps wondering why she is keeping a record of so many irrelevant details, names, and experiences, which she cannot relate to one another: “I can think of no connection between making a pee and Lawrence of Arabia” (24).

Most of the stories that she recounts, one way or another, bear relevance to her depression. She is obsessed with mirrors, cats, books, music, and paintings and at the end of the novel, all seemingly inconsequential details and bits of information become significant and interrelated. As an example, she sees herself and her mother as unified in every mirror she looks at, especially because her mother had a mirror beside her bed: “though in fact what it has also reflected now and again is an image of my mother. What will happen is that I will glance into the mirror and for an instant I will see my mother looking back at me. Naturally I will see myself during that same instant, as well” (279). As another example, she repeats over and over that her obsession with cats is not something personal, but it turns out once again, that she is only bluffing: “Then again, I should also perhaps indicate that there is no connection between any of these cats and the cat which Simon once had, in Cuernavaca, and which we never could seem to decide on a name for at all” (151). We get to know that her cat dies when she returns to Mexico after quite a long time.

She identifies herself with Helen of Troy and also with Odysseus who wondered in foreign lands for about ten years. At the end of the novel, she says: “I have taken to building fires down near the water, after my sunsets. Now and again, too, looking at them from a distance, what I have done is to make believe for a little while that I am back at Hisarlik” (272). Here we can draw an analogy between the death of Odysseus’ dog and Kate’s cat at the end of their adventures. On Odysseus’ dog, she observes: “Actually, the part about the dog is sad, it being the dog who is the first to recognize Odysseus when he returns to Ithaca after having been gone for ten extra years after Troy but then dies” (226). Through these allusions and analogies, she tries to shake off her depression. Having said that, it is simplistic to claim that Kate’s intermental thoughts are shaped under the influence of her intramental thoughts and relationships. Intermental and intramental thoughts, as already mentioned, are interrelated and complementary. Kate’s intermental relationships encompass her relationship with intermental facts and details, which are both fictional and real. On the other hand, her intramental thoughts are affected by her intermental observations and deliberations. Circulating in her chaotic personal and social cauldron, she cannot find a way out of her dreadful life and the only solutions seems to be resorting to the world of fancy and imagination.

Despite her effort to overlook her intramental and intermental thoughts by focusing on the lives of other people, she cannot wipe out her family-related memories, which keep popping up in her mind, making her unable to recognize herself or her lost family members. Her emotions, thoughts, behaviors, and dispositions all circulate in a loop that forms the whole mind. However, her whole mind is not restricted to her mental world as it affects and afflicts her body, too. The relationship between Kate’s mind and body, or her abstract and concrete worlds, are further expanded in the following analytical section.

5. Kate’s Thought-Action Continuum

The notion of decoding action statements into consciousness statements might be misleading if it gives the impression that the intimate and complex connections between thought and action can be fully grasped as many statements in fictional narratives refer to both of them at the same time. As Palmer (2004) argues in his Fictional Minds, “the term the thought-action continuum is introduced to draw attention to the fact that the distinction between thought and action in fictional texts is not as clear-cut as narrative theorists have assumed” (15). Kate’s mood, thoughts, and feelings initiate and modify her actions. Her imbalanced mentality, anxiety, depression, and loneliness are simultaneously rooted both in her thoughts and actions.

In a moment of epiphany, she realizes that she has always been alone in her life. Loneliness makes her act passively and as discussed in the previous section, she occupies herself with insignificant details concerning the lives of famous people, even though she knows that the details she reviews are insignificant: “not knowing that there was a second copy of the identical book, with all of the pages still in it, still here in the house? Doubtless, these are inconsequential perplexities” (88). As Fatemeh Shahnavaz (2020) claims in her thesis, In The Presence of Absence: The Obscure Object of Melancholia in The Narrative of Flaubert’s Parrot and Wittgenstein’s Mistress, “Behind the often evident, emotional confusion, a complex psychological process is at work, which requires mourners to reexamine their identity in the wake of death or loss” (2). Similarly, in her article, “The Limits of Language as the Limits of the World: Cormac McCarthy’s and David Markson’s Post-Apocalyptic Novels,” Paulina Ambrozy (2015) contends that “life in the post-apocalyptic world in which the dominant experience is that of fear, social upheaval, alienation, and loss” (63). This implies that it is only rational to fear, lose, and feel alienated as the result of living in a post-apocalyptic and empty world, like the one Kate lives in. In her thesis, titled The World in Singing Made: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Tiffany L. Fajardo (2015) ascribes Kate’s boredom and passivity to her depression: “it is her depression that causes her to cease typing and which leads to her initial thoughts about anxiety as the fundamental mood of existence” (49). She grapples with anxiety throughout the novel and she frequently describes her occasional physical pains and her usual frowning face: “I do fret now and again, if fret is the word, over an arthritic shoulder. The left, which at times leaves me moderately incapacitated” (24). As a possible way out, she tries to remember only the things that make her feel better: “What I am talking about is thinking about things from as long ago as before I was alone, obviously” (258). However, the more she struggles to deny her past, the more she gets entangled in it and as a result, she becomes even more anxious.

As another possible solution, she engages herself in absurd acts and habits; for instance, she wears fourteen watches with different alarms, though sometimes she mistakenly enumerates them as seventeen. She enjoys destroying things, especially by setting fire to things she used to like. After she returns to Mexico, for months she looks for a painting in her old house and when she finally finds, it, she destroys it immediately. She cannot possibly think about re-constructing destroyed houses or taking care of someone whom she might find in earth. Nor can she think of the prospect of living in a peaceful land. She only imagines destroying the remaining materials in a post-apocalyptic environment and mourns the death of her family members.

She leaves messages on the beach or on walls, even though she obviously knows that nobody would read messages: “Actually, nothing that I wrote was ever still there when I went back in any case, always being washed away” (63). Some of her other absurd habits are: maneuvering her wheelchair, aimlessly riding in a pickup truck, and making fire along the beach. Kate’s inexplicable habits are rooted in her anxiety, depression, and loneliness, and as her mind grows more chaotic, her habits become more unusual. Eileen Joy (2013) has asserted that

In all of Kate’s narrative waywardness, there are not some threads tying things together: there are continual returns to certain subjects: her dead son, for example, the imaginary cats, her previous (or is it her present?) “madness,” and her former life as a painter, but perhaps the one subject she returns to most often is Helen of Troy, someone who shares her status as a woman left stranded on a beach after her world has ended. (220)

Like Helen of Troy, Kate loses her protected world and feels “stranded” in a hostile land, that is why she sinks in the past and her memories and frequently recalls certain objects (like mirrors) and certain people (her son, in particular). Her mentality is characterized by sense of loss, loneliness, and alienation and her actions are marked by passivity and doubt. In other words, her thoughts and her actions are on the same continuum, echoing and intensifying each other and constantly forcing her to deny obvious facts and fantasize possible worlds.

6. Conclusion

The present research has been an attempt to read Palmer’s understanding of postclassical cognitive narratology and fictional minds into Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress. The objective was to realize how Kate reconstructs others’ minds in her own thoughts and how her mental state is projected in her narration of episodic traumatic memories. Palmer’s approach in exploring fictional minds, which is grounded on such key terms as actions, dispositions, and patterns of thoughts of a fictional character, makes connections between thought and action on the one hand and memory and imagination on the other. Other relevant notions, developed by Palmer, include: the whole mind, the social mind, mind in action, embedded narrative, and intramental and intermental thoughts. Palmer declares that minds of readers and fictional characters are interconnected. As depicted in “Methodology,” he considers fictional minds as the continuation of human minds. In addition, for understanding a character’s mind, we should not limit ourselves to his/her voice; to read fictional minds, we must go beyond interior monologues and study patterns of behaviors, actions, and dispositions. In “Cognitive Science, The Thinking Mind, and Literary Narrative,” Uri Margolin postulates that “the fictional presentation of cognitive mechanisms in action, especially of their breakdown or failure, is itself a powerful cognitive tool which may make us aware of actual cognitive mechanisms, and, more specifically, of our own mental functioning” (278). It implies that there is an underlying similarity in the cognitive mechanisms of all of us and Kate’s consciousness reflects how the consciousness of human beings actually works. In Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Markson renders a complex and multi-layered narrative that exposes the dialogical nature of human perception and mentality, suggesting a new psychological and intellectual view of human beings and the limitations and complexities of the world.

As far as Palmer’s notion of “the whole mind” is concerned, it has been argued that although Kate denies her mental imbalance, she feels deeply depressed, alienated, and lonely. Her intermental thoughts keep suppressing realties. In “Kate’s Intermental Thoughts,” it was discussed that her “imbedded narratives,” predominantly deal with famous writers, artists, and philosophers instead of her familial issues and a lucid image of her personal life. She keeps establishing odd connections among unrelated objects and people, and the process she gets drifted further and further away from basic facts. Due to her confusion, passivity, and uncertainties, she looks more like an alien from another planet than a human being, and at the end of the novel, she is more helpless and disoriented than ever.

In “Kate’s Intramental Thoughts,” we explained that Kate travels across the globe without any clear purpose and sinks into futile and destructive actions as part of her defense mechanism in getting over her depression. To calm herself down, she sets fire to every object that reminded her of her family or her past. Instead of coming to terms with the realities of the present time, she distracts herself by mythological stories or people who lived in the past; in doing so, she reconstructs a parallel world for herself, where she feels secure and confident.

In “Kate’s Thought-Action Continuum” it was contended that Kate’s personal experiences, thoughts, and actions are interconnected. Traumatized and depressed, Kate clings to inconsequential perplexities and details and gives in to inaction. Her usual negative facial expressions, physical pains, boredom, and passivity are all spurred by her troubled thoughts. Torn by denial and pain, she grudgingly admits that anxiety is simply “the fundamental mood of existence.” The mental paralysis which entails the realization that she cannot possibly find anyone to share her life with pushes her deeper and deeper into the past. Caught between a bleak future and a painful past, sometimes she gets vengeful and destructive, burning or breaking everything she can find, and sometimes she wastes her time by doing absurd things like writing about irrelevant things on the beach. The memories that she tries hard to push back find their way out as existential crises as there is no way she can shake off the chains of her past social life. Kate’s intramental and intermental thoughts are interrelated; her thoughts are shaped by her previous experiences and her previous experiences in turn give birth to new thoughts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maryam Rabti

Alireza Farahbakhsh is an associate professor at, and a member of the board of education, of University of Guilan, Iran. He received his Ph D in English Literature from the University of Sussex, England, in 2004. He has published numerous articles in domestic and international journals as well as several books on English language and literature, and he also has supervised quite a few successful postgraduate dissertations. He is particularly interested in current debates on narratology, feminist and gender studies, and cultural studies.

Alireza Farahbakhsh

Maryam Rabti is from Iran. She received her M. A. degree in English Language and Literature from University of Guilan, Iran, in Aug 2022. The article “Wandering through Endless Nothingness: Reading Fictional Mind in David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress” is extracted from her M. A. thesis. Now she is working as a teacher and translator. The areas of her interest are Cultural studies, Narratology, Psychology, Philosophy and Art.