Wittgenstein's Mistress

Yet another in a series of nonreviews of books of a certain genre posing as books of another genre. This one is the deceptively titled and widely acclaimed work of uncategorizable fiction (or criticism or history) by David Markson, which by the way has almost nothing to do with Wittgenstein or his mistress, in the unlikely event that he had one. Like his later novel, This Is Not a Novel, this book can be entertaining if you have no preconceptions about what constitutes a coherent narrative, a work of fiction, or a paragraph. It also helps if you're interested in art, or at least in people who make art.

Once, Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later paint the storm.
Obviously, it was not the storm itself that Turner intended to paint. What he intended to paint was a representation of the storm.
One's language is frequently imprecise in that manner, I have discovered. (p. 12)

If you're not careful, Markson's prose style will infect your own. You could start walking around composing sentences drawn directly from what is directly observable through the senses, then drawing conclusions based on what may or may not be the case with regard to something else which may or may not be connected with those observations. Then construct subsequent sentences calling into question the accuracy of the observation, the truth of the sentence, or the conclusion drawn from it. If you follow my drift. Or even if you don't.

Surely one cannot type a sentence saying that one is not thinking about something without thinking about the very thing that one says one is not thinking about.
I believe I have only now noted this. Or something very much like this.
Possibly I should drop the subject. (p. 63)

As you can see, Markson isn't just interested in art, or in artists, but in sentences and the way the mind works with them, sometimes in the most surprising ways. And being a writer, he has a particular sensitivity to both the logical sense of a sentence and the sound of it to the ear. I guess that's what kept me going in the slow trudge through this book, the way both hemispheres of my brain were working in tandem, usually going back and forth and only rarely hitting on both at once.

Once, somebody asked Robert Schumann to explain the meaning of a certain piece of music he had just played on the piano.
What Robert Schumann did was sit back down at the piano and play the piece of music again. (p. 214)

Clearly there seems to be a gap between what's actually happening and anyone's best efforts to explain it, but they keep trying, don't they. Which is the nut of the problem Ludwig Wittgenstein kept running into, as I understand it, and a lot of other very talented people, Magritte and Heisenburg and Isadora Duncan come to mind. So you might enjoy this book, if you're interested in that kind of thing. If not, there are other, more entertaining things to do, like flying a kite.