An intuitive, vaguely Platonic picture of reality is this: it is a scene in a snow globe and we humans must do our best to peer through the glass of our fallible minds and discover what reality is and how it works. Poets, so the partly apocryphal story goes, vex and distract from this project of perspicacious peering, for they offer meretricious copies of reality. Enchanted with the glass and the peering, they lose sight of the scene within, caring not so much for the “crystalline purity” of reality itself as for the incandescent opacity of human partiality.
This valorization of the contingent, of fantasy and caprice — the swimming surface of life — led Plato to expel such poets from the ideal city, and for two millennia they have been demanding and surreptitiously attempting reentry. Two methods of attack have predominated. Poets have claimed either that life itself is fundamentally aesthetic or that life requires aesthetic remediation. In Wittgenstein and Modernist Fiction: The Language of Acknowledgment, Greg Chase offers an impassioned vision of the latter. Chase’s ‘poets’ are modernist novelists — Forster, Woolf, Ford, Larsen, Faulkner, Wright, and Ellison — and the form of Platonic ideality they struggle to negotiate is Western Reason, the adamantine abstraction at the root of “the Western world’s tendency to systematically dehumanize large groups of people.” Chase enshrines the literary impulse as a kind of social failsafe. Modernist fiction devotes itself to “questions of how language might illustrate persistent failures of acknowledgment while, at the same time, effecting acknowledgment.” Its task is to “[remind] us of our shared criteria for the meanings of words … describing the world in new ways and, in so doing, revealing the world as it has always been.”
Chase selects Wittgenstein as his critical lens both because he sees Wittgenstein as exhibiting modernist tendencies in his own thought and attentiveness to form, and because “the concept of acknowledgment, as articulated implicitly by Wittgenstein and explicitly by Cavell, enables a broader reconceptualization of modernist fiction’s stance toward the referential capacities of language.” Leaning heavily on the work of Stanley Cavell, one of the first commentators to appreciate the radicality of Wittgenstein’s breach with traditional philosophy, Chase writes that “our capacity to know other subjects manifests itself via our capacity to acknowledge them. This view carries with it the implication that the problem of other minds cannot be satisfactorily discussed in the abstract: rather, we demonstrate our insights into or blindness toward other subjects through lived, embodied human experience.” Darl’s clairvoyance in As I Lay Dying, for example, dramatizes the intrusive intimacy that stems from knowing without acknowledgment. “Like Addie, Darl tends to overlook language’s more emotive functions … His unspoken connection with Dewey Dell highlights his preoccupation with acquiring epistemological knowledge of her … but he does not recognize the possibility of an alternative way of knowing her: namely, by sympathizing with her plight.”
Chapter two offers a kind of genealogy of the concept of acknowledgment, tracing (intimations of) it through Wittgenstein’s early, late, and somewhat neglected middle period during which he grew increasingly disenchanted with his prior commitment to philosophical analysis — the mining of linguistic depths for a logical essence common to both thought and reality. Chase suggests a parallel between Wittgenstein’s development and that of fiction, from the high realism of the 19th century to the modernist repudiation of verisimilitude in favor of greater self-reflexivity, scrutiny of not so much the product as the act of perception. Composed during the First World War (Wittgenstein served as a night sentry, distinguishing himself, as a military report notes, for “exceptionally courageous behavior, calmness, sang-froid, and heroism”), the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, after propounding its rigorously systematic view of meaningful assertion, turns abruptly to the significance of the unsayable. “The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time” (TLP 6.4312). Wittgenstein seems, as it were, to concoct his “picture theory” (sentences ‘picture’ states of affairs) only to undermine it (— it is a ladder meant to be kicked away, he declares at the work’s close). Chase thus concludes that Wittgenstein in this early work already was becoming “less concerned with capturing facts about the world and more concerned with acknowledging inexpressible, but nonetheless highly significant, emotional truths … Facing the reality of death on a daily basis, and watching as many of his fellow soldiers were, in fact, killed, Wittgenstein evidently came to realize the limits of language and of logic when it came to saying anything meaningful about the realities of mortality.”
This tidy tale of intellectual evolution proves fecund, as Chase subjects each modernist classic in his study to the knowing/acknowledging dialectic, concluding in each case that ‘facts’ often conceal failures of compassion, and that the foregrounding of epistemology tends to promote “exclusionary conceptions of community.” Likening Septimus Smith, the severely shell-shocked veteran in Mrs. Dalloway whose brief postwar life is a near constant hallucination, to the rationalistic Wilcoxes of Forster’s Howards End, Chase claims that “the apparent madness Septimus exhibits in the postwar world is simply an extension of the rationalist attitude he has cultivated during wartime … [H]is commitment to being “scientific” leads him to conclude that he possesses a more highly evolved mind — not that he has been traumatized by the pain of his war service and the loss of his friend.” The story Chase gives us here (and with slight variation, everywhere) is this: like Wittgenstein of the picture theory, Septimus is impelled to use reason to see through appearances, to seek out the hidden truths of those around him. He assumes that between his thinking and reality there exists an intimate metaphysical connection, a structural homology. But this dogged rationalism estranges him, locking him irreparably in his own private chamber of consciousness. He fails to appreciate his (and others’) need for acknowledgment. “Mrs. Dalloway … casts Septimus as alienated from his community by showing that he has begun to conceive of word-world relations in private, idiosyncratic ways.”
One danger of Chase’s approach is that, in his eagerness to feed texts through the prism of acknowledgment, he risks tearing the concept of acknowledgment from, in Wittgenstein’s phrase, “the language in which it is at home” in just the way that Wittgenstein suggests traditional philosophy does with words like ‘knowledge,’ ‘being,’ ‘object,’ ‘I,’ etc. The traditional philosopher asks, for example, “How do I know that this tree is really a tree? Mightn’t I be dreaming or hallucinating, or perhaps there is no external world after all?” Wittgenstein responds by asking us to consider when the words ‘I know this is a tree’ might intelligibly be uttered. Why is — what does it mean for — my knowing it (to be) in question? “To whom,” he muses, “does anyone say that he knows something?” Well, perhaps there is cause for suspicion; we are meandering through a field of mostly dummy trees and we begin to bicker. Exasperated, I exclaim, “I know this is a tree, I examined it an hour ago.” We are thus enjoined to see that when we do find a use for the words ‘I know that such-and-such,’ they do not quite serve the epistemologist’s highfalutin purpose. When we, as Wittgenstein counsels, “bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use,” they cease to point us toward some elusive hidden reality in which mind and world struggle fantastically to make unimpeachable contact. “Can one enumerate what one knows? … I believe not,” Wittgenstein cautions, “For otherwise the expression “I know” gets misused. And through this misuse a queer and extremely important mental state [i.e., that of knowing] seems to be revealed.”
Chase’s notion of acknowledgment takes shape in a similar fashion, which is to say, it is rarely clear what it would look like in the worlds of these novels — in what kinds of circumstances, what specific words, might it be offered? (Chase has almost nothing to say about style.) Yet, backed by his somewhat sentimentalized Wittgenstein — whose Philosophical Investigations he proposes can be read as “a work that chronicles the journey of a “foreigner” … seeking community and acknowledgment in a strange land” — and his assumption that literary characters call for roughly the same response as actual individuals, Chase proceeds as though acknowledgment were bedrock: the point of both emotive language and modernist stream-of-consciousness. Just as the epistemologist assumes that between any proposition and human subject, a relation of knowing either obtains or fails to obtain (I either know that this is a tree or do not know it), Chase assumes that between any two human subjects — between one person and another’s pain and suffering — there either is or is not acknowledgment. In both cases, the lurking wish is to construct idealized concepts that hover over, cataloguing and judging, the quagmire of human activity. Human finitude — limitation — is given definite conceptual shape, as though it were clear enough, only unattainable, what perfect knowledge would be; as though our ethical shortcomings were perfectly articulable, though we often, like Ellison’s invisible man, prefer to “avoid staring directly into the cruel light of day.” If only, gazing intently into a fellow being’s eyes and pronouncing candidly, ‘I acknowledge you,’ one could with an opalescent flourish give redemptive meaning to suffering, what narcotic calm might then illumine the formless channels of being and speech through which our lives vertiginously plunge.
Armed with this panacea, this not-so-everyday acknowledgment, Chase can arrest the decomposition of experience wrought by both war and modernist experimentation, taming Septimus into a kind of conceptual tragedy, as though he were laboring under fatally mistaken ideas and intellectual commitments (Wilcoxian rationalism). If only he knew that he needed acknowledgment, he would not suffer so. It seems to me, however, that this is to fight fire with fire, reason with reason, as though acknowledging one’s war trauma were something one could simply choose to do. Here are Septimus’s final words: “He did not want to die. Life was good. The sun hot. Only human beings — what did they want?” Chase concludes that Septimus “has been cut loose from the “we” of mainstream liberal community,” that he “recognizes that his purportedly powerful intellect has been unable to solve the problem of other minds … maintain[ing] his restrictively rationalist attitude” to the very end. But Septimus does not recognize anything, least of all the philosophical problem of other minds. His suffering and alienation are rooted beneath the level at which talk of reason, belief, and motivated behavior makes sense, and what Woolf seeks to exhibit, I would suggest, is not one who has “begun to conceive of word-world relations in private, idiosyncratic ways,” but one for whom the empirical world has drifted out of focus — one for whom ordinary conceptualization has lost its point.
Indefatigably committed to showing how literature can “effect acknowledgment,” Chase cannot accommodate language whose meaningfulness is destabilized upstream of political rupture. Political community, on his reading of Wittgenstein, safeguards meaningful communication, supplying “our shared criteria for the meanings of words.” Linguistic isolation is necessarily political in nature. Leaving aside the merits of this view, it is not Wittgenstein’s. “That (what you do) will be love in the child’s world,” Stanley Cavell writes, “and if it is mixed with resentment and intimidation, then love is a mixture of resentment and intimidation, and when love is sought that will be sought.” The kind of sociality in which meaning is embedded is by no means inclusive or just. The difficult reality is that hatred presupposes mutual intelligibility just as much as compassion. Wittgenstein does not offer acknowledgment as compensation for imperfect knowledge of other minds. And to the extent that something like acknowledgment does play a fundamental role in his thinking — and as I have suggested, such theoretically-charged concepts are at odds with his method of attending relentlessly to particular uses of language — it informs, not merely our relation to other minds, but also our relation to our own minds. Wittgenstein’s project is not ethical in the straightforward sense that Chase wants it to be. His critique of privacy — of skeptical withdrawal — is not so much a cautionary tale against failures of acknowledgment as an attack on the very idea that our inner worlds are like private books or private films — fundamentally hidden from others — to which we alone have access. This, Wittgenstein contentiously proposes, is a philosophical, and deeply human, fantasy; and it is not what we ordinarily mean when we speak of thinking or feeling.
But because Chase takes Wittgenstein to be opposing acknowledgment to knowledge — “while it may be true that we do not know with certainty whether … people really are in pain … ignoring their expressions of internal sensations means acceding to an overly defeatist form of skepticism” — he cannot escape the picture of interiority as essentially private, though acknowledgeable, and consequently, he fails to consider the ways in which withholding acknowledgment — and all the vast spectrum of responses from indifference to cruelty to rote nicety — equally form the soil in which meaning grows. It is, of course, morally tempting to suppose that there is some imperative or destiny written into the fabric of our speech and intelligence that impels the creation of an ideal, perfectly inclusive society, and to assume in Marxist fashion that literature reflects the social contradictions that will ultimately defeat themselves on the road to a better world. But this is to imprison literary language in a dream of history. And it is to drastically simplify the exquisite texts Chase examines.
The radicality of modernist stream-of-consciousness very often consists in depriving speakers of intersubjective context. By prying open their characters’ heads and exhibiting the language of consciousness directly, modernist writers encourage a view of the mind as a profoundly unique place, ever so different and distant from the outer world in which individuals speak, act, and interact. Undoubtedly, this is true — what goes on in my mind is distinct from what goes on in the world — but Wittgenstein suggests that it may be true in a rather subtler sense than we are inclined to suppose. And modernism’s unremitting fascination may stem in part from literature’s power to endlessly mislead (— from our power to endlessly mislead ourselves). Perhaps then, Plato was right after all to ban the poets. And perhaps secretly fueling Chase’s study is the desire to discipline these irresponsible poets—that they might find a humble home in the ideal city.