a grammar

David Markson, 1927-2010

David Markson died on June 4, 2010, at the age of 82. He was one of my few living literary heroes. He made up his own rules and broke those, too. His best works were assembled from shards of cognition, fractured insight, history as apocrypha. He muddled fact and unfact. The past had happened and been invented. The world was a paradox, existence a contradiction in terms. His books read like riddling counterfactuals, a limbo-like space of what-if and not-necessarily. Through the heartbreaking collage of his last novel, The Last Novel, the dimmest skeleton of a character emerged, lonely and broken at the end of his life, and that was all you needed. It was all you could bear. Please read him, now and for the rest of your life.

I’m not sure I can tell you anything really deep about David Markson, so instead I’m going to tell you something useful.

Maybe you’ll see obituaries for Markson, or notes on his passing, and think … hey, I should try reading something of his. And then perhaps you’ll poke around, and think … wait. His books are “experimental” and “highly stylized?” Some are just rows of short, disconnected declarative sentences on a page? One is largely just notes on how various artists died? They follow strange loops in strange and contradictory directions? They don’t exactly have what most people would recognize as “narrative” or “scenes?” Well, I’m sure they’re great and all, but that doesn’t sound like the kind of thing I’d normally —

Okay, yes, maybe it isn’t — no fiction is up everyone’s alley, leave alone something “experimental.” But here’s the thing. You know that old line, about how a good novel teaches you how to read it? Markson knows how to do that. Pick up Wittgenstein’s Mistress, and it’s hard to get off the first page without being pulled directly into his style. Here are most of the paragraphs on the first page:

In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.
Someone is living in the Louvre, certain of the messages would say. Or in the National Gallery.
Naturally they could only say that when I was in Paris or in London. Someone is living in the Metropolitan Museum, being what they would say when I was still in New York.
Nobody came, of course. Eventually I stopped leaving the mesages.
To tell the truth, perhaps I left only three or four messages altogether.
I have no idea how long ago it was when I was doing that. If I were forced to guess, I believe I would guess ten years.
Possibly it was several years longer ago than that, however.
And of course I was quite out of my mind for a certain period too, back then.

You’d like to see the next one, wouldn’t you? It’s the opposite of tough going. If anything, it’s compulsively readable, if only because once you start reading, there is no particular place where it makes sense to stop.

So that’s what I’d like to tell you, if you’re interested in reading some Markson. It won’t have to be some great labor or brain-stress or dry chopping-through. If Wittgenstein’s Mistress, for one, really is “pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country,” part of the reason why might have to do with its reminder that “experimental” does not mean the same thing as “difficult” or “burdensome” or “uninterested in the reader.” Hell, it practically shares a premise with a Will Smith movie.