The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
David Markson · a novel in one continuous typescript · Dalkey Archive Press, 1988 · scored on Markson’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Philosophical novel as monologue of grief; last-person narrative, commonplace book and comedy of misremembering in one voice
Mythos
The last human, an Eve after the end of the world; Cassandra with no one to hear her; Penelope writing and rewriting with no Odysseus to come home
Phase
An unmeasured present of typing after the world has emptied, with the past returning in fragments and the son’s death surfacing last
Presentation
Fiction; one continuous first-person typescript, with no chapters or part divisions, set as a long run of short paragraphs, many of them a single sentence; no dialogue and no dramatised scene
Register
Declarative, self-correcting and often comic, held level from the first sentence to the last
Scale
One woman, one house on a beach, and the whole Western inheritance in fragments
Governing Proposition
A woman who believes she is the last person alive on earth types, in a house on a beach, what she remembers of painting, music, Homer and philosophy, and corrects it, and returns to it, until what she cannot state, a dead son, surfaces through what she can. The wager of the novel is that a book made only of declarative sentences, assembled by recurrence rather than by story, can carry a life and a grief, and that the facts a mind alone can state do not reach what it suffers.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“In the beginning, sometimes, I left messages in the street.” The first sentence opens with the first words of Genesis and sets them against an emptied earth. Whoever leaves messages in a street expects someone to read them; the woman who writes this sentence believes there is no one left to do so. And the fourth word is a hedge. Before the sentence has reached its verb, the voice has qualified itself, and that habit, the statement offered and then doubted, will run through every page that follows.
The woman is Kate, a painter, and she believes she is the last person alive on earth. She writes on a typewriter, in a house on a beach. What she writes is the book: one continuous typescript, with no chapters and no part divisions, set as a long run of short paragraphs, many of them a single sentence. There is no dialogue, since there is no one to speak to, and no scene is dramatised. The reader holds the only document there is, and becomes, by the form alone, the one other person on earth.
The unit of the book is the declarative sentence. A fact is stated; a doubt is added; a correction is offered a page or fifty pages later. The title points to the philosopher whose Tractatus is set out as numbered propositions, and the book’s short paragraphs take up that manner: each is a proposition about the world as Kate remembers it, and the propositions do not build an argument. They accumulate. Nothing in the book moves forward except, slowly, what she knows and will not yet say.
Movement II
What Kate holds is the culture of the West, and it comes back to her in pieces: painters and their pictures, composers, Homer, philosophy, anecdotes of the famous dead. She can say that a painter painted a picture, or that Helen went to Troy. Her facts drift, return and are corrected; some are misattributed, and whether the errors are slips, jokes or the book’s argument about knowledge is left open. A mind alone with everything it was ever taught finds that what it holds has become a heap of names and stories, with no second witness to put them in order.
The Trojan matter returns throughout, and it returns as more than allusion. Kate turns over Helen, Cassandra, Achilles and the women at Troy. Her own condition is Cassandra’s inverted: Cassandra spoke and was not believed; Kate speaks, and there is no one to hear at all. She is a Penelope, too, writing and rewriting, with no Odysseus to come home. And against the first words of Genesis she stands as an Eve after the end of the world rather than before its beginning, the last human where the first once stood.
Under the Trojan figures runs a second matter. The women of the tradition, Helen and Cassandra and the women painters Kate half remembers, come down to her as names attached to men’s stories. She is a painter herself. The book does not argue the point; it lets the fragments show it, in a typescript written by the last woman alive, through whose one mind the whole inheritance passes, and in which the women of that inheritance arrive already reduced to their parts in someone else’s tale.
Movement III
Among the facts that return, some are not about the culture. There is the house down the beach that she burned. There is a son, and a grave. They enter the typescript in the same declarative voice as the painters and the Greeks, and at first they pass as the same kind of item, one more thing remembered and set down. The sameness of treatment is the method. Grief is not announced; it surfaces by accumulation, as each pass over the same facts shifts one of them a little, or exposes a confusion she had covered.
Kate can state that a painter painted a picture. She cannot state, until late and obliquely, that a child died, or that she may have broken down. The facts a mind alone can state do not reach what it suffers, and the book is built on that gap: the propositions are true, or nearly true, and none of them is the truth. The comic anecdotes and the grave of the lost child obey one law, entering the typescript in one voice, and it is because they are treated alike that the reader comes to feel the difference between them.
Whether Kate is the last person alive, or a woman in breakdown after her son’s death, is never settled. No other voice enters the book to decide it, and the undecidability lasts only because none does. The book offers no vantage outside her: there is the typescript and nothing else. Its truth about grief holds either way, since what it discloses is the condition of a consciousness alone, and on the page a mind cut off by the end of the world and a mind cut off by loss are the same mind.
Movement IV
The title names the philosopher who held that what can be said is the case, and that what matters lies outside what can be said. The book sets that frame inside a grieving woman. Every sentence Kate writes is a statement of fact, and the facts are the world as she can still say it; the son and the grave lie at its edge, where saying fails. What the title claims about her and the philosopher, the book leaves open, and the question has not closed.
The method has a cost, and the book pays it. The cumulative effect is reached well before the end, and some stretches of the middle return to the same facts without shifting anything. The device is monotone by design, and the monotony is not always paid for; the voice’s tics, the hedge and the self-correction, harden over the length. The instruments are few: one voice and one kind of sentence. Within those limits the control is exact, and the deliberate errors are placed as only a writer sure of the facts could place them.
By Markson’s own account the manuscript was refused by publisher after publisher before Dalkey Archive Press brought it out in 1988. Two years later David Foster Wallace published a long essay on it, “The Empty Plenum”, in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and the book became a touchstone for one line of American experimental writing. Markson went on to write the fragment novels from Reader’s Block (1996) to The Last Novel (2007). The book itself has stayed in print with its small press for nearly four decades.
Movement V
“Somebody is living on this beach.” The last sentence is a statement of the obvious. Kate lives on the beach; she has said so throughout. It is also a claim that a self persists: after all the facts that drifted and failed, one remains that the typescript itself proves, since somebody has been typing it. The voice that would not raise itself rises here, quietly, to a statement it does not need to correct.
The book’s heights are few and spaced, and this is the last of them. The premise carries a cold vastness, a woman alone by the sea in a world with no one else in it; the approach of grief, when the son and the grave break through the trivia, is its one warm height. Between them the voice stays level. Nothing in its surface depends on a technology or an occasion. A typewriter is its only furniture, and the book has not dated.
The first sentence began with Genesis, and the last ends on a beach with one human being on it. Between “In the beginning” and “Somebody is living on this beach” there is no story, only the slow emergence of what happened to the woman typing. The form has delivered its knowledge before the length is spent, and part of what return yields is the same mechanism seen again; but the repetitions read differently once the grief is known, and the last line turns the whole typescript upon itself: a document left, like the first messages in the street, for someone to read.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the book’s method is repetition, so the test asks which returns are required. Kate circles back to the same facts, names and corrections: a remembered painting, a figure from the Trojan War, a composer, the house down the beach that she burned, the son she lost. The return is the meaning. A mind alone can only re-order what it already holds, and each pass shifts a fact or exposes a confusion, so that the grief under the trivia surfaces by accumulation; remove the repetitions and the knowledge goes. Where the test bites is length: the cumulative effect is reached well before the end, and some stretches of the middle return without shifting anything. Necessity holds in the method and weakens in the measure.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a consciousness alone with its culture finds that culture reduced to fragments, misattributions and anecdote, and finds that the facts it can state do not reach what it suffers. Kate can say that a painter painted a picture or that Helen went to Troy; she cannot say, until late and obliquely, that a child died. The Wittgensteinian frame sharpens it: what can be said is the case, and what matters lies outside it. A second disclosure runs under the first: the women of the tradition, Helen, Cassandra, the women painters she half remembers, come down as names attached to men’s stories. Held at the bar and not above it, because much of what is disclosed is a mood of loneliness and drifting memory, and because whether Kate is alone or mad is left undecidable by design.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The register is flat by design: declarative, self-correcting, often comic. Elevation comes rarely, and it comes as a cold vastness rather than a lift. The premise itself carries a sublime of emptiness, one woman typing by the sea in a world with no one else in it. The approach of grief, when the son and the grave break through the trivia, is the book’s warm height. The last line, “Somebody is living on this beach.”, is a quiet summit, at once a statement of the obvious and a claim that a self persists. Between these the book stays deliberately level, in a voice that will not raise itself, and the heights are few and spaced.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Myth is built, and the premise is its frame. The last human is an archetype that governs every page: an Eve after the end of the world rather than before its beginning, and the first words, “In the beginning”, set Genesis against the emptied earth. The Trojan matter returns throughout as more than allusion. Kate turns over Helen, Cassandra, Achilles and the women at Troy, and her own condition, speaking with no one to hear, is Cassandra’s inverted, a prophet with no audience at all. She is a Penelope with no Odysseus, writing and rewriting. The particular stays particular: a typewriter, a beach house, a cut on a hand, a dead child. Held a tenth below the bar because much of the myth comes as material she recites rather than as structure she lives.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance: Beckett’s monologists, above all the voice of The Unnamable and Winnie in Happy Days; the philosophical aphorism; the last-man narrative of popular fiction; and, by the title, the numbered propositions of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. The turn is to make a novel of the declarative sentence alone: no scene, no dialogue, no plot beyond the slow emergence of what happened to the narrator, a philosophical form converted into the voice of a grieving woman. Beckett made the voice in the void; he did not make a novel of discrete propositions assembled by recurrence. The stake was paid: by Markson’s own account the book was refused by publisher after publisher, and it came out from a small press. Held off the top by the Beckett debt: the swerve is in the kind of sentence more than in a new conception of fiction.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes entirely. Told in the third person, Kate would be a case of delusion or a figure in a post-apocalyptic tale; told as a narrative, her loss would be a plot. The typescript makes the reader the one other person on earth, receiving the only document there is. The declarative sentence is the instrument: each proposition states a fact, the facts never add up to the truth, and the gap between them is where the grief lives. The self-corrections and misattributions are the form of memory without a second witness, and the undecidability of her solitude survives only because no other voice ever enters. Held a step below the top because the form’s knowledge is fully delivered before the length is spent.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence first, over thirty-eight years. The book has drawn a real and continuing criticism: David Foster Wallace’s essay of 1990, readings in the study of Wittgenstein and literature, of post-war experimental fiction and of gender, and a cult of return among writers. Its questions stay open: whether Kate is the last person or a woman in breakdown after her son’s death; what the burned house was; whether the misremembered facts are errors, jokes or the book’s argument about knowledge; what the title claims about her and the philosopher. The repetitions read differently once the grief is known. Held in the low eights because the scholarship is narrow, the book is more often read once than returned to, and part of what return yields is the same mechanism seen again.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The field is the American novel of the late 1980s. The intrinsic force is high: the book showed that a novel could be built from isolated declarative sentences, assembled by recurrence rather than narrative, and still carry a life and a grief, a real reorganisation of what the novel’s unit can be. What holds it below 8.0 is reach, which is narrow, delayed and largely asserted. Delayed reach is credited at a discount, and reach that runs through Markson’s own later fragment novels, from Reader’s Block (1996) to The Last Novel (2007), is not credited to this one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Wallace’s essay “The Empty Plenum” (1990) made the book a touchstone for one line of American experimental writing, and the fragmentary novel and essay of the following decades are often traced to it, a lineage asserted by writers more than documented.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Survival is weighed over thirty-eight years, on what is shown. The text survives whole, as published, and has stayed in print with its small press for nearly four decades, which is itself evidence for a book that was nearly not published. Nothing in its surface depends on a technology or a topical occasion; a typewriter is its only furniture. Presence is the charge: the book lives among writers, in courses on experimental fiction and in a devoted readership, not across the culture, and it is not widely translated or taught beside the novels of its decade. Survival shown is real and narrow, and the axis does not score what the book is foreseen to become.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on Markson’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the single sentence and its placing. Each sentence is plain, and the comedy is in the timing: a fact stated, a doubt added, a correction offered a page or fifty pages later. The voice holds for the whole book without a slip into a register that is not Kate’s, and the deliberate errors are placed with a control only a writer sure of the facts could manage. The recurrences are ordered so that grief surfaces by degrees rather than by announcement, a craft of ordering more than of style. Charged: the device is monotone by design and the monotony is not always paid for; the voice’s tics, the hedge and the self-correction, harden over the length; and the range of instruments is narrow, one voice and one kind of sentence.
Score: 8.5 / 10
One law governs the whole: a mind alone states facts, and the facts drift, return and fail to reach what matters. Take the two most distant elements, the comic anecdotes of painters and composers and the grave of the lost child. They obey the same law, entering the typescript in the same declarative voice, and it is the sameness of treatment that discloses the grief. The cultural range is very wide, from Homer to the modern painters, and all of it falls under the one rule. The law is never broken: no second voice enters, no scene is dramatised, and the ambiguity of her solitude is kept to the last line. Held at this figure because narrowness is not coherence: the event-range is one woman on one beach, and the law is tested across references more than across worlds.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on what the book holds. Consciousness, fully: a single mind in grief, in memory and possibly in madness. Culture, as the whole Western inheritance in fragments: painting, music, Homer, philosophy. The family, in the dead son. The natural order, in the beach, the weather and the sea. Art and its making, since she is a painter. Love and its loss. The orders are integrated, not listed: each passes through her solitude. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the premise excludes: the state, labour, society and history as lived are absent by design, since there is no one else, and the sacred appears only as myth. A low mark on a solitary form describes the form.
Score: 7.1 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 8.8, then The Swerve at 8.7. A form that makes the reader the one other person on earth, and declarative sentences whose gap from the truth is where the grief lives; and a novel made of the declarative sentence alone, a philosophical form turned into the voice of a grieving woman, at the cost of near non-publication.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.1, held by what the premise excludes: the state, labour, society and history as lived are absent by design, since there is no one else, and the sacred appears only as myth. Among the counted axes, The Sublime at 7.7: a register flat by design, whose heights, the approach of grief and the last line, are few and spaced. Next above it, Pressure on Tradition at 7.9: a real reorganisation of the novel’s unit, with a reach that is narrow, delayed and largely asserted by writers.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on two axes: The Swerve at 8.7 clears the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment and The Imperishable meet it exactly at 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 falls a tenth short and Pressure on Tradition at 7.9 six tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.7, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.1. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.3, stands below it as well.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, published by Dalkey Archive Press in 1988. It is scored as one novel, a single continuous typescript, as published. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Markson’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the first sentence and its first three words, and the last sentence. David Foster Wallace’s essay “The Empty Plenum”, in The Review of Contemporary Fiction (1990), is cited as the record of the book’s reception and is not part of the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the page count, the number of publishers who refused the manuscript, the particulars of Kate’s travels and of her past, and which painter or composer comes on which page, are not given.