Not Bedazzled by the Norten Lights: On The Literary Wittgenstein, by Not Negative Nancy

As those of you who read my contribution to the Theory's Empire event no doubt remember, what I value about the anthology is that it demands readers think about the conflicting claims of different theoretical approaches.  So I'm pleasantly surprised that Marjorie Perloff's "But Isn't the Same at Least the Same" and David Schalkwyk's "Wittgenstein's 'Imperfect Gardens'" essays in The Literary Wittgenstein work according to logically incompatible assumptions. 

Perloff argues that Wittgenstein's language is translatable because it's concerned with language being translatable.  Like Beckett, Wittgenstein's vocabulary consists of personal and demonstrative pronouns, ordinary verbs, basic nouns, and simple declarative sentences.  The result is that his work, like Beckett's, can easily be translated.  No controversies over the relative merit of the various translations of The Philosophical Investigations swirl because his quaint diction and calm style make the translator's job easy.  Thus, Perloff concludes,

Such language games will become increasingly prominent in an age of globalization where the availability of translation is taken for granted.  Poets and fiction writers, I predict, will increasingly write in what we might call, keeping Wittgenstein's example in mind, a language of translatability. (52)

There's no wrangling over the details and implications of Wittgenstein's work the way there is in the German translation of Robert Lowell's "Skunk Hour."  Here's the English:

One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars.  Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the twon...
My mind's not right.

Here's Perloff's analysis of it:

[W]hat eludes [the translator, Manuel] Pfister is Lowell's particular tone.  "One dark night," for starters, has a fairy-tale quality (as in "Once upon a time") that gives an ironic edge to the reference to St. John of the Cross's "Dark Night of the  Soul"--a quality lost in the German In einer dunklen Nacht.  In line 2, the pun on "Tudor ("two-door") Ford" disappears even though Pfister retains the absurdly pretentious brand name.  And his rendition of the third line is at once too specific and too long-winded: Lowell's casual "I watched" becames the emphatic ic hielt Ausshau, and Scheinwerfer ausgeschaltet ("headlights turned off") does not allow for the resonance of "lights" or of "turned down," which here connotes beds as well as the lights themselves. (35)

She continues in this vein for another paragraph, but you see her point: that mode of analysis that cannot be done on Wittgenstein's writing.  "Wittgenstein's propositions are by means untranslatable in the sense that Lowell's "Skunk Hour" [is] untranslatable" (36, emphasis hers).  Quoting Wittgenstein, she contends that his language has "remained the same and keeps seducing us into asking the same questions" because of its near-perfect translatability (43).  Hammered home yet?  Good.  On to Schalkwyk, who begins his essay with a discussion of the untranslatability of Wittgenstein's prose:

The statement that philosophy should be written as poetry appears in Culture and Value: Ich glaube meine Stellung zur Philosphie dadurch zusammengefast zu haben, indem ich sagte: Philosophie durfte man eigentlich nur dichten (CV 24).  Peter Winch translates this as: "I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written as a form of poetic composition."  But his formulation doesn't quite convey the sense of the original.  This is not the translator's fault, because English has no equivalent for the word dichten--an intransitive verb meaning to write poetry.  Wittgenstein is saying ... that the activities of writing philosophy and writing poetry are closely related: to philosophize is to poetize--one should write philosophy only ("nur") as one would write poetry; philosophy should be nothing other than the writing of poetry.

I'm reserving judgment on whether I prefer Perloff or Schalkwyk's account of Wittgenstein until I finish the volume and work through the Philosophical Investigations on my own--Dissertation?  What dissertation?--but what I want to stress for now is that juxtaposing these essays in the manner that Gibson and Huemer (the collection's editor) have focuses readers' attentions on the terms of the debates and the conflicting assumptions even sophisticated readers of Wittgenstein bring to his work. 

This focusing is exactly what's absent from conventional Theory anthologies: Freud is presented alone instead of alongside critics.   (Later psychoanalytic thinkers who tinker with Freud's work don't count as "critics" since they assume the validity of core psychoanalytic concepts.)  Thus far The Literary Wittgenstein performs the function of introducing me to the concepts in a critical framework which precludes the uncritical acceptance encouraged by Theory anthologies. 

And I just wanted to say that. 

Because I don't want to be thought a Negative Nancy.

Even though that would be a fair description.  (Well-deserved even.)

Comments

[Mike S]

Scott, if you don't mind me asking, how do you find the time to (a) read and (modestly) review sizable literary anthologies, (b) remain (somewhat) hard at work on that curious dissertation of yours, (c) sift through God knows how many highfalutin weblogs, (d) attend classes, and (e) lavish your wife with attention? Obviously this is none of my business, and I apologize for the brash tone of this post. But I am both fascinated and awestruck by your seemingly Herculean work ethic. I too will soon be chest deep in a swamp of seminars and papers and financial aid checks and deadlines and all else that a doctoral program in English Lit entails. And I am just curious as to how you manage. Is there even a smidgeon of time in your day for good ole procrastination? For if not, I am almost certainly doomed.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Mike, first I should say that it always looks like the person to your left has four or five more hours in their day than you do in yours. Everyone marvels at everyone else's work ethic. However, I do procrastinate productively. For instance, answering your comment has me thinking about my work ethic, which may become a future post. Or another: I read The Literary Wittgenstein when I'm struggling with my dissertation; a couple of hours doing unrelated intellectual labor often primes me to dissertate some more. Same thing with the blog. As I mentioned a while back, the progress I've made on my dissertation on a given day is coded into that day's entry: if it's about evolutionary theory, then you can pretty sure that I'm trying to jump-start my brain, to wrap it around the problems I've encountered that day, which means I haven't made much progress on the diss.; if it's random, then I've probably had an excellent day writing, so much so that I'm comfortable putting the diss. down for the night and thinking about something else entirely.

It doesn't hurt that the Little Womedievalist's also an academic and that we bring out the worst in each other in this respect. As long as one of us imagines the other's still working, we push ourselves to do the same. That we work in different rooms helps maintain the illusion of the other's productivity, and that drives us both to be more productive than we might otherwise be.

Also, I don't attend classes anymore. I'm A.B.D. and haven't sat in a seminar room in years. (I tried to this past Winter quarter, but that pesky cancer killed those plans.) I teach three times a week during the school year, but it's nto the brain-drain that comp. sometimes becomes, it's an intro. to literary journalism course in which we read New Yorker-style articles, learn 'em some basic research and reporting skills, then help them write their own New Yorker-style article.

Oh, and I'm very, very boring.

[Mike S]

Thanks for the response, Scott. Productive procrasitnation is a habit I've yet to develop. I suppose I'm just going through a bit of "am I really up to this?" Your academic background is, I can't help but notice, just a wee bit prolific, vastly more so than my own. Honors undergraduate program? Rigorous Latin studies? A.B.D. at one of the nation's most respected English departments? You've done pretty well for yourself. Not to mention the fact you've been married for how many years is it, 5, 6? Anyway, I'll stop making you blush if you get to work on that work ethic post. It would be helpful to me to know what sort of regimen you maintain. Which year of grad school was the hardest for you? Why do you feel you've "conned" your way through the first few years? I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Feel free to digress with reckless abandon.