![]() ![]() This is one reason Wittgenstein is so important to Nelson, but another is that he, like she, loved colour. Where it is philosophical, it borrows from a form of writing perfected by early twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose books suggest order because their propositions (or mini-arguments) are numbered but whose writing subverts that order because the argument posited in one proposition is often reversed in the next, a method Wittgenstein called “pulling the rug out from under the reader.” The experience is destabilizing but also intimate: his reversals allow his readers to think with him. Three forms inspire Bluets: the philosophical tract, the lyric poem, and the autobiography. Yet what could be more invented than a life story that reads like a novel? Bluets doesn’t invent that way: its inventions are wilder, wiser (and more true) than that. Empathy is based on trust, they say, and inventions are lies. ![]() To hear the mass media speak of it, the mere suggestion of embellishment, never mind invention, disrupts the hopeful economy of memoirs in which a writer bares their soul and the reader feels less alone. ![]() Maggie Nelson’s Bluets takes aim at one of today’s most beloved forms of writing-the autobiography-coyly challenging the genre’s attachment to truthful stories of the self and the form thought best to convey them: that of the realist novel. ![]()
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