At the end of TRANSPARENT THINGS’ Chapter 23,  Hugh returns from his memorial trek  up to  the ski hut, in semi-drizzle. Mr. R writes: “It was either  raining or pretending to rain or not raining at all, yet still appearing to rain in a sense that only certain old Northern dialects can either express verbally or not express, versionize, as it were through the ghost of a sound produced by a drizzle in a haze of grateful rose shrubs. ‘Raining in Wittenberg, but not in Wittgenstein.’ An obscure joke in Tralatition

Brian Boyd’s  annotation in the Library of America remarks “Cf. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosopichus (1921…) … “For example, I know nothing about the weather when I know that it is either raining or not raining.” Elsewhere he writes “One is inclined to say:’Either it is raining or it is not raining, or it isn’t—how I know, how the information has reached me , is another matter.’ But then let us put the matter like this: What do I call ‘information that it is raining’? (Or have I only information of this information too?)”

I confess to being a philosophical idiot but thanks to a letter to the editor in the TLS of Aug.9^th (2002), I can add a third Wittgenstein reference. Alexander Fiske Harrison in his letter “Wittgenstein and Autism” offers a quote from W. made “a few hours before sliding into his final coma”: “Someone who, dreaming, says ‘I am dreaming,’ even if he speaks audibly in doing so, is no more right than if he said in his dream ‘it is raining,’ while it was in fact raining. Even if his dream were actually connected to the noise of the rain.”

The paradox of the dream within a dream within a dream (and their relation to “reality”) is, of course, a persistent theme in VN’s work. And dreams (and sleepwalking) are important features of TT.  But why (and how) Wittgenstein?  Of course, one trigger is the name of the town ‘Witt’ which, incidentally, suggests the Germanic root meaning “to know.”  Although it may have been already pointed out, we should also take note of  “Wittenberg” as the name of  Hamlet’s university.  Like wishy-washy Hugh, Hamlet has his troubles with dreams and reality  and  suffers the loss of his love Ophelia.

This is another of VN’s multilayered subtexts. Any thoughts out there?