Wittgenstein, Leavis, and Literature Author(s): Cyril Barrett Source: New Literary History, Vol. 19, No.

2, Wittgenstein and Literary Theory (Winter, 1988), pp. 385-401 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/469344 . Accessed: 12/01/2011 21:08
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Wittgenstein, Leavis, and Literature

Cyril Barrett

WHEN

PREPARING Lecturesand Conversationson Aesthetics,Psyand ReligiousBelief1 I wrote, in all innocence, to Prochology fessor F. R. Leavis asking him if, as he had been a friend of Wittgenstein's, he could tell me about Wittgenstein's understanding of literature, his judgment of Wittgenstein's literary merits, and so forth. I got a courteous reply, but the usual answer: Leavis did not interfere in philosophy so why should Wittgenstein presume to interfere in literary criticism? Leavis's eccentricity was notorious, but not having met him, I thought this was rather severe, if not downright silly. Having now read his "Memories of Wittgenstein" I can understand his reply better.2 Perhaps this is a good point at which to start: a direct connection with the most unfavorable judgment on Wittgenstein and literature. Leavis's remarks on Wittgenstein tell us more about Leavis than they do about Wittgenstein. But our present concern is with Wittgenstein. Leavis smarted when Wittgenstein on one occasion told him to give up literary criticism: "When, once, he came to me and, without prelude, said, 'Give up literary criticism!' I abstained from retorting, 'Give up philosophy, Wittgenstein!' largely because that would have meant telling him that he had been listening to the talk of a dominant coterie, and ought to be ashamed of supposing that Keynes, his friends and their protiggs were the cultural ilite they took themselves to be" (RW 59).3 This passage alone tells us an enormous amount about what literary criticism meant to Leavis, what it meant for Wittgenstein, and how much they misunderstood each other.4 It may also go some way toward explaining Wittgenstein's precarious grasp of the English language. He often writes, and is recorded as speaking, phrases like a character out of Wodehouse-"you're behaving like a beast," "Gosh," and so on. It says a lot for Leavis that in the same passage he acknowledges his high respect for Wittgenstein and his admiration for him as a remarkable linguist, while recounting his irritation at having his spoken English corrected by him! The bitterest remark he can make-after a parody of the "smart fashion" and modish manner now "in at Kings," a mocking reference to "what strike some of us as Cockney vowels," and a hint of contempt that Wittgenstein should be taken in and re"I reflected, however, that the gard this as standard English-is:

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given trait of Wittgenstein's was sometimes decidedly Teutonic in its effect" (RW 59). Never having met Wittgenstein I cannot judge, but that is how it comes across to me in reports and in his writings. I have encountered Viennese of his class, and, as a Dubliner, my reaction to their estimate of standard English is similar to Leavis's of Wittgenstein's. But these are trivia. The gravamen of Leavis's account lies in the remark: "Cultivated as he was, his interest in literature had remained rudimentary" (RW 66). Rudimentary. Well. Ahrr. Yes. In a sense. It all depends on what you mean by rudimentary, donit? Well, ahrr, yes. It is clear enough what Leavis meant. He recounts that Wittgenstein used to ask him to read passages of that little-read account by Dickens of his travels in London, The UncommercialTraveller. Wittgenstein would select the portions to be read. But "I was unable," says Leavis, "to guess what it was in them that determined the choice-for he seemed to know them already." He adds, somewhat pointlessly, that Wittgenstein also knew A ChristmasCarol by heart. Then follows one of the most fatuous, ill-informed, insensitive, but in a way understandable, utterances of a sensitive, well-informed, discriminating, intelligent man of letters: "To these works his interest in Dickens, so far as I could tell, was confined, and I never discovered that he took any other creative writing seriously. It may of course be that in German the range and quality of his literary culture were more impressive, but I can't give any great weight to that possibility5" (RW 66). The "5" refers to one of the neatest footnotes I have ever come across: "5 (!)"-supplied by the editor of Recollectionsof Wittgenstein, from which I have quoted. As I have said, Leavis's "Memories" tell us far more about himself than about Wittgenstein. But that is a matter for a separate article or a chapter of a book. (Incidentally, of The Uncommercial Traveller, The to English Literature[4th ed.] says: "It contains some Oxford Companion of Dickens's best literary work"!)5 However, before abandoning Leavis there is one more item. Wittgenstein had heard of William Empson, the poet, a Cambridge man, and asked Leavis about him. Leavis's report of their conversation should be read in full; I can give the gist of it only. "I replied that there was little point in my describing them [Empson's poems], since he didn't know enough about English poetry." That was true. Wittgenstein did not know Donne, and to understand Empson's poems one has to know his Donne. So Wittgenstein demanded that Leavis read the best of the six poems in CambridgePoetry 1929. Leavis chose "Legal Fictions." When he had read it, Wittgenstein asked him to explain it. The rest of the account is near farce. After about four attempts at explanation, each time

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interrupted by Wittgenstein, Leavis shut the book and said "I'm not playing."" 'It's perfectly plain that you don't understand the poem in the least,' he said. 'Give me the book.' I complied, and sure enough, without any difficulty, he went through the poem, explaining the analogical structure that I should have explained myself, if he had allowed me" (RW 67). Incidentally, this is hardly compatible with Leavis's judgment that Wittgensteindid not take creativewriting seriously. One could almost say all that is to be said about Wittgenstein and literature-certainly the central and most important part of it-in discussing Leavis'sbrief memoir. All the ingredients are there: Wittgenstein's knowledge and understandingof literature,his attitude toward literarycriticism,his criticalmethod, and his own literaryqualities. His influence on contemporary German literature-and, indeed, English and other literatures-is another matter, into which I shall not attempt to enter here. "Cultivatedas he was,"says Leavis. And he was. In music particularly-that is a very long story. Architecture:at least he built a house, with the help of his friend Engelmann and advice from Adolf Loos. He made a reputable sculpture of his sister. In painting he was knowledgeable, if eclectic. He enjoyed the theater and the cinemaof that more later. And literature? His interest rudimentary?And remained so? is There is an element of truth in this, though "rudimentary" not the correct word to express it, at least not if it is meant in a pejorative sense, as it was by Leavis. Leavis implies that Wittgenstein did not read very much. Wittgenstein,whether intentionallyor not, gave the impression that he was a man of few books. In a sense he was. This was not because he read few, but because he thought that only a few were worth reading. These he read again and again, and mentioned incessantly.6There may have been gaps in his reading. He was unsystematic, almost casual in his reading, and when an author did not appeal to him, he did not persevere. But by any standards,judging from recorded works alone, he was a wide reader. The correct sense of "rudimentary"that might appropriately be applied to Wittgenstein'sliterary tastes would more closely relate to but "fundamental"as used in "fundamentalism," this too is not quite right. Paradoxically, it is very close to Leavis's own position-too close, perhaps. Primitiveis another word, in the sense both of unsophisticated and close to the roots of literature, to story telling. If we
consider Wittgenstein's favorite authors -Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Dickall have a deep and serious moral ens, Shakespeare, Keller-they

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content in their work and a universal appeal. One should add the Bible, but with caution. He read it constantly, in various versions, Latin, German, and English (not Hebrew, possibly Greek, though presumably his tutors did not teach him Greek since he was not able to enter a gymnasium,but went to the Realschule at Linz which specialized in mathematics and the natural sciences), and was sensitive to its literary qualities; but he didn't want to look at E. S. Bates's The Bible Designed to be Read as Literature-"I don't want some literary gent to make selections from the Bible for me" (RW 118-19).7 He was particularly fond of The BrothersKaramazov (though he is recorded as saying that The House of the Dead was Dostoevsky's greatest work) and Tolstoy's Twenty-ThreeTales (LWM 52; RW xvi). Of the former, he was especially fond of the Elder Zosima; of the latter, his favorite tales were "What Men Live By," "The Two Old Men," "The Three Hermits," and "How Much Land does a Man Need?" His most favored was "The Three Hermits." It is relevant to bring in here his somewhat surprising liking for the detective stories to be found in the magazines of Street and Smith that Norman Malcolm used to send him ("How people can read Mind if he could read Street and Smith beats me" [LWM 76; L 90-91]) and for western movies. He liked them for their moral rectitude and their structural purity. We know who the good guys and the bad guys are; there are offenses against the moral order; these are put to rights; there is a satisfactory conclusion: morally and aesthetically satisfying. He hated detective novels such as those Dorothy L. Sayers indulged in. I presume he regarded her as the female equivalent of a literary gent, and in my opinion, he would have been right. This may explain his fascination with Dickens's An UncommercialTraveller. It is full of moral tales, not, to my mind, particularly well told. (The laudatory entry in the OxfordCompaniondoes not appear in Margaret Drabble's fifth edition in 1985, a decision with which I concur, but it did deserve mention in the entry under Dickens, if for no other reason than respect for the memory of Sir Paul Harvey.) This in a small way bears out Leavis's strictures. Wittgenstein's range of appreciation in literature was limited, but not quite so limited as Leavis's-he liked Sterne, for instance, despite his seeming frivolity (RW 133-34). It was limited to prose writers of moral worth, as was Leavis's, but these are generally recognized as among the greatest there have ever been. And again like Leavis, he had little time for art-for-art's-sake, for what sounds well but means nothing, in the immortal words of a Wodehouse character apropos of Shakespeare. For him, as for Leavis, literary merit and moral worth were inextricably linked. This did not mean that moral content alone was a guarantee

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of literary merit. But perhaps Wittgenstein was more tolerant of sentimentality and banality, if the moral content was sound, as in the case of An UncommercialTraveller, than was Leavis. If so, they miss by a whisker. It is not, as Leavis suggests, that Wittgenstein was insensitive to literature. He was, as I hope will later emerge, sensitive in abundance, and far more than Leavis, who, by comparison-Cambridge born, bred, and educated-was a country bumpkin. The test, I think, is their attitude toward I. A. Richards. Leavis was his disciple and ever remained so. Wittgenstein initially had great respect for Richards's critical acumen but very little for his literary theory, and finally regarded him as totally misguided (LC 17 ff.). It is my suspicion that Leavis's unwarranted and almost paranoic opposition to Wittgenstein's attempted incursion into his precious territory of literary criticism (an intrusion comparable to someone walking inadvertently on a patch of newly-sown grass) was prompted not only because he realized that Wittgenstein was at least as good a critic as he was, and a critic in the same vein at that, but also because (most galling of all) Wittgenstein had seen through the frailty of Richards's theory on which he, Leavis, had quite unnecessarily based his critical practice. This was enough to make anyone but a saint become antagonistic, and that, in my opinion, Leavis was: antagonistic, not a saint. Wittgenstein, had he put his mind to it, could have been a better critic and would have done the "Eng. lit." job far better than Leavis did: and Leavis knew this or faintly glimpsed it as a possibility. The obvious literary theory for someone with Wittgenstein's views on literature was the one Tolstoy expounded in What is Art? He was sympathetic toward it, but he realized its absurdities. "From Tolstoy's bad theories that a work of art conveys a feeling one could learn much."8 He agreed with Tolstoy that the value of literature consisted in conveying sincere feeling and he shared Tolstoy's dislike of "intellectual," elitist art, but he did not go to the absurd length of condemning almost all the world's greatest literature, including Greek tragedy and Shakespeare, nor did he share Tolstoy's view that only Christian writings could be literature. Among the astute things he said about Tolstoy was his praise for his oblique, indirect method of conveying ideas (a judgment the reverse of Plato's): "When Tolstoy just tells a story he impresses me infinitely more than when he addresses the reader. When he turns his back to the reader then he seems to me most impressive .... It seems to me his philosophy is most true when it's latent in the story" (LWM 43).9 This, of course, ties in with Wittgenstein's philosophical view that

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the "higher"-moral, aesthetic, and religious value-cannot be expressed: it can only be shown (L 30). Hence the greatest and most profound moral and religious writings are in narrative or poetic form (or both) and are of the highest literary order. Indeed, I have been told by scholars of Scripture that a necessary condition for being rec-

ognized as a Hebrew prophet was a high level of poetic ability.

The literary theory that Wittgenstein constructed out of Tolstoy's "bad theories" is ingenious, and deserves to be quoted at length: One could call it not an expression of feeling but a feeling-expressionor a felt expression. And those who understand it vibrate in the same way and

respond to it. One could say: a work of art does not convey somethingother

than itself.Just as when I visit someone I do not want to produce this and this naked feeling in him, but first and foremost to visit him, and obviouslyalso want to be well received. want the other to feel by reading what he (felt) when writing. (CV58)
And first indeed it is downright nonsense (to say) that the artist should

Here you have a combination of expressionist and formalist theory. The paradigm of a literarywork for Tolstoy (as for Wordsworth)was a small boy going into a forest and encountering a wolf, and returning to relate the encounter in such a way as to convey his terror to the listeners. On Wittgenstein'smodel, as I understand it, the boy would not have to stir out of the house. He would construct the adventure in his imagination and recount it in such a way that the listeners would experience something similar to the terror that a small boy might experience on encountering a wolf in a forest. In other words the boy would have constructed a "feeling-expression"to which his listeners could respond and reverberate.The feeling would be, so to speak, entirely within the words he had put together. This makes complete sense to me. It combines both the obvious truth of expressionism-that art in general, and literature in particular, conveys feeling-with the no less obvious truth of formalism, that a work of art is a construction, autonomous, self-contained, and does not depend for its value on what anyone feels, will feel, or has felt. The test of literary theory, as of any other, is in the breadth of its application. Well, let's test Wittgenstein'stheory as applied to someone like Shakespeare, a big boy and strong enough to throw most literary critics. Of Shakespeare Wittgenstein says: "Shakespeare,one could say, displays the dance of human passions. He must, therefore, be objective, otherwise he would not really display the dance of human passions-rather say something about it. But he displaysit in
dance, not naturalistically" (CV 36-37). Not a bad start. He progresses further on these formalist lines: "It is not as though Shake-

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speare portrayed human types well and to the extent that they would be authentic [wahr]. He is not naturalistic. But he has such a subtle hand and such an individual touch, that each of his figures is meaningful [bedeutend],and worth looking at" (CV 84). This pictorial metaphor has to be taken in conjunction with an entry in his notebooks for later that same year (1950), the last year of his life, that deserves to be quoted in full. It is to my mind not only very accurate in its description but also reveals something of Wittgenstein's classical taste: "I cannot, therefore, understand Shakespeare, as long as I am determined to find symmetry in what is entirely asymmetrical. It occurs to me that his pieces are like enormous sketches,not paintings; that they are throw-aways,from someone to whom, so to speak, everythingis permissible. And I understand how one can admire that and call it the highest art, but I myself cannot do it.-Someone who stands speechless before these pieces I can understand; but someone who admires them, as one admires something by Beethoven, seems to me to misunderstand Shakespeare" (CV 86). All one can say to this is: hard luck, Wittgenstein, but you've got it about right. Shakespeare is no Beethoven, and, among others, Richard Mervyn Hare would applaud. I happen to think that in every respect Hare is to be preferred. That may be a cultural (not merely personal) prejudice. Yet I think Wittgenstein has got it right again when he writes: "I do not believe that one can couple Shakespeare with any other poet. Was he, perhaps, rather a creatorof language than a poet? I could only be astounded at Shakespeare; never get anything done with him. I have a deep mistrust of the majority of admirers of Shakespeare. I think it is unfortunate that, in western culture at least, he stands alone, and one inevitably categorizes him falsely if one categorizes him at all" (CV 84). Finally, 1946, just after the war: "It is astonishing how difficult it turns out to be to believe what we have not eye-witnessed. When e.g. I hear the utterances of admiration of eminent persons on Shakespeare over a multitude of centuries, I can never help suspecting that there has been a convention to praise him; although I have to tell myself that it is not so. I need the authority of a Milton to convince me about the truth" (CV 48). Why Milton? Because he was, in Wittgenstein's view, incorruptible. Not all of this is original Shakespearean criticism, perhaps. As with much of Wittgenstein's thought, it is not difficult to find someone who had similar ideas before him. What is special about him, however, is what ideas he selects and rejects, and his reasons for selecting and rejecting them. If one were to discuss the (not all laudatory) points he makes, and discuss them at length with illustrations-the dance of the passions, the creation of living characters that are not

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necessarily lifelike, the plays as sketches rather than finished pictures, the handling of language (Shakespeare as a creator of it rather than a mere user of it), the overall estimate, more Arnold's Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask: thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge. than Milton's-one would have omitted little of central importance. If we turn, however, from dramatic to lyric and narrative poetry, we find him making a distinctly original contribution to literary criticism and literary critical practice. I have already alluded to it in commenting on Wittgenstein's remark that Tolstoy was most impressive when he turned his back on the reader, when the meaning is latent in the story. A good example of this is Uhland's poem "Count Eberhard's Hawthorn," which Wittgenstein regarded as magnificent. It tells the story of a German knight who went on a crusade. As he rides through a spring wood he cuts a sprig of hawthorn and sticks it in his helmet. He carries it into battle and over the seas. On his return he plants it. It grows and prospers. Every year he visits it and is delighted at its growth. When he has grown old, it has become a tree, under which he often sits, dreaming, as it rises and rustles above his head, of olden times and faraway lands. On reading this poem-which his friend Paul Engelmann, the architect, had sent him in 1917-Wittgenstein replied: "And it is like this: when one does not try to speak the unspeakable, nothing gets lost. But the unspeakable is-unspeakably-contained in what is spoken" (L letter 6, p. 7). Some time previous to this, judging from his notebooks, Wittgenstein had given much thought to the "mystical" and inexpressible, particularly in ethics and aesthetics. However, it is only fair to say that seeds of this way of thinking about art and value, the "higher," had been sown by his friend Karl Kraus. Kraus had described Uhland's poem as "so clear that no one understands it." On reading it, Engelmann tells us, it was brought home to Wittgenstein for the first time what Kraus had been saying: that poetry can produce a profound effect beyond(but never without) the immediate effect of its language. Morike was another poet in whose poems Wittgenstein found this characteristic, particularly in Mozart's Journey to Prague, especially where he describes musical effects in words-a passage, Engelmann tells us, which Wittgenstein would recite with a shudder of awe. It touched, as Engelmann says, on what for Wittgenstein was the central problem of language, "the border of the unutterable and yet some-

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how expressible" (CV 86). This links up with Tolstoy's insistence on genuineness of feeling and simplicity of expression. Though he later came to admire Tagore and would read him to philosophical meetings at Schlick's house in Vienna rather than discuss philosophy, at first Wittgenstein was unmoved by his writing. It seemed to him to come out of an icebox, contrived, rather than from his own individual feeling (LC 4). Wittgenstein's theory of art criticism is too big a subject to discuss here, but something must be said about his ideas on practical criticism and on the practice of writing. Evidence of these is scattered through his notes and lectures. He set great store by reading aloud. In reading a poem out loud its tone and meaning come across in a way that no "explanation" will convey. "A man says it [a poem] ought to be read this way and reads it out to you. You say: 'Oh yes. Now it makes sense' " (LC 4). But, of course, poetry cannot be read any old way. This raises the theoretical question, which I shall shelve here, of what is the correct way of reading poetry. In practice the short answer is: that way of reading that makes sense to the listener (including oneself). This will vary from poet to poet and even from poem to poem. For instance, there is poetry which should almost be scanned, where the meter is crystal clear, and other poetry where it is in the background and should be hidden. Wittgenstein gives an interesting example of reading Klopstock, the eighteenth-century German poet who integrated Greek meters into German poetry and even put the stress marks (~- -, and so on) in front of his poems. At first Wittgenstein read his poems in the ordinary way and "had been moderately bored." Then he stressed the meter abnormally. When he read the poems in this way, he smiled, and said to himself: "'Ah-ha, now I know why he did this.... This is grand' " (LC 4). He also made gestures to express his approval. Another technique (a commonplace in practical criticism) on which Wittgenstein laid stress was comparison or juxtaposition. He uses it in dealing with what he calls "aesthetic puzzlements." A sentence sounds queer and, at first, you do not know what is queer about it. Or it has an American sound to it. You suspect that a certain word is archaic. You can check this by looking it up in a dictionary or asking someone if the word is used today. Of course, the word might be archaic or an Americanism (or both) and not account for the queerness of the sentence, and yet this "explanation" would satisfy you. "I could point out the wrong thing and yet you would still be satisfied" (LC 20). This is the theoretical problem.

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As for the art of writing, it is clear from his published notebooks, and those unpublished manuscripts lodged at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, that Wittgenstein was preoccupied with it. Again and again the same thought, or seemingly the same thought, is expressed, in slightly different form, until he is satisfied he has expressed it as he wishes it to be expressed. Here again we find the influence of Klaus. Klaus stressed the importance of language, even of the comma. For him defects of language manifested defects of logic and ultimately moral defects (L 127). I shall return to Wittgenstein's own style. On literary writing he seems to take a Flaubertian line that is consistent with his critical stance-namely, that writing as an art form must be objective. This is well illustrated in his reflections on Engelmann's anecdote of how he found old manuscripts by his relatives and thought them so exquisite as to be worth publishing (CV 4). But when he comes to make a selection he thinks otherwise. "Nothing," says Wittgenstein, "can be more remarkable than to watch someone doing ordinary everyday things when he thinks he is unobserved." It is more remarkable than anything a poet could put on the stage. Yet we see it every day and think nothing of it. "Yes, but we don't see it in this perspective." So when Engelmann reads those letters, they are remarkable, but not art. They are a piece of Nature like any other, though we can elevate them by our enthusiasm. They are like boring snapshots. Only art can present them so that they are of interest to people other than ourselves. Indeed, we have no right to confront others with our enthusiasms, or they us. While this may be salutary advice, Wittgenstein exaggerates; artists do just what he deplores. It is only by confronting someone with a snapshot, a letter, a joke, a poem, that we ourselves can decide its artistic worth. What is correct in what he says is that we should not presume the judgment of others to coincide with our own (CV 4-5). Wittgenstein believed that literary expression should be spontaneous. If you have nothing to say, don't try to say something: just keep quiet. According to Engelmann, Wittgenstein certainly never wrote a poem, not even when every intellectually interested young person of his generation tended to try his hand, "because no poem ever occurred to him spontaneously" (L 89). Indeed, the spontaneous idea "was so decisive for him that he would only recognize a philosophical proposition of his own if it had occurred to him in the right words." It is hardly surprising, therefore, that his advice, in his notebook, to a mediocre writer is to guard against replacing a raw and incorrect expression too hastily by a correct one (CV 79). In so doing he may kill off the seedling of an idea that had some value but will now wither and no longer be worth anything.

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This is not just good advice. It has an idea behind it that is somewhat mystical, namely, that the word or expression and the idea are almost one and the same, and must come into consciousness simultaneously and spontaneously. He found it a strange confession for Kleist to make when he wrote in "Letter of One Poet to Another" that it would be most pleasing to a poet if he could convey the thoughts themselves without words. Yet toward the end of PhilosophicalInvestigations he muses on the phenomenon of choosing and finding the right word and knowing that it fits.'0 One cannot summon it from the deep. One must wait for it to come. And yet when it comes one knows it is the right word or phrase, proposition or expression. Most strange. Another thing that fascinated Wittgenstein was that in saying something of literary value one has to say new things and yet, clearly, old ones; in general you must say only the old, and yet something new. This interest in originality and tradition crops up in various forms. There is the question of keeping to a set of rules: some must be broken if there is to be innovation, but they cannot all be broken at once; otherwise, what is being done will not be understood (LC 6). But to confine ourselves to more practical matters, what Wittgenstein had in mind he expressed as follows: "You must ransack the old. But for a building" (CV 40). In other words, old materials must be used but something new must be built of them. They must not merely be reassembled. Coming nearer home, he said: "One can write in a style which is not original in form-like mine-but with well-chosen words; or, on the other hand, one whose form is original by growing new from within. (And obviously also one which is just cobbled together somehow from old pieces.)" (CV 53). Wittgenstein's own style certainly did not belong to the third class. Nor-partially-did it belong to the first class; that is to say, it did not belong to that part of it which is unoriginal in form. But, in spite of his modesty, I would want to argue that it belongs to the second-that the form is original because it grows from within. It is hard to see how the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicuscan be regarded as anything but a stylistic masterpiece whose originality of form grows from within. It is architectonic. But, whereas a Gothic cathedral is an original solution to both technical and formal problems, it conveys nothing but itself. It is magnificent. That is enough. No more is needed. The Tractatus, on the other hand, is a work of philosophy. Whether it is a work of literature or not is a matter for debate. Its thought content is beyond the understanding of nonphilosophical literary critics and students of literature who have no for-

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mal training in philosophy-and of many philosophers who have no specialized knowledge in the philosophy of logic and of mathematics. Be that as it may, its literary form is dictated by the structure of its thought and each stone, each proposition, in that edifice has been carved as carefully, and has been as well articulated with its neighbors, as the stones of a cathedral. To say of the Tractatusthat it is stylized is to utter a truism. It is in the tradition of medieval summaein which every question is presented in logical order and treated in logical fashion with divergent positions expounded and either defended or answered. Spinoza in his Ethics and some other works did something similar, but on the Euclidian each proposition to be proved with QED. This mode model-ending of exposition has, besides its clarity of exposition, a structural elegance whatever the value of its arguments. The Tractatus,though logical in its exposition, is not so repetitive in its form. It is assertive rather than argumentative. Therefore, though its divisions and subdivisions are related logically, their logical relationships are not articulated, as they are in the Summa of Aquinas or the Ethics of Spinoza. This gives them an added aesthetic charm. Thus the Tractatusbegins: 1 1.1 1.11 The world is all that is the case. The world is the totalityof facts, not of things. The world is fixed through the facts and through this, that it is all the facts."

which is reminiscent of the opening of St. John's Gospel: In the beginning was the Word, And the Word was with God, And the Word was God. Section 2 proceeds to analyze facts; 3, propositions; 4, language; 5, truth functions; 6, the form of propositions; until we come to 7, a single sentence: "Of what one cannot speak one must be silent." The structure is looser, more rhythmical, less predictable and repetitive, less classical, more "modern" than Aquinas's or Spinoza's structures. But it hangs together, leads one step by step in an ordered fashion, a solemn progress of thought. C. D. Broad described the Tractatusas highly syncopated. Wittgenstein agreed. "Every sentence in the Tractatus,"he told his friend and disciple, M. O'Connor Drury, "should be seen as the heading of a chapter, needing further exposition" (RW 159). That was what he wanted, partly because the conventional way of presenting philo-

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in dialogue or in the developed paragraph sophical ideas-whether and chapter of the treatise-did not appeal to him and did not suit his style of thinking: his thought came in bursts and was expressed in aphorisms. This is clear from his notebooks. All that needed to be written down were headings-crisp, often cryptic, assertions or questions or even exclamations. Anything more is superfluous if the reader can flesh it out for himself. In this way a great deal is gained in clarity of exposition and precision of expression. The main points in the process of thought are clearly laid out and the whole can be seen at a glance, instead of being obscured in a welter of verbiage. This makes demands on the reader. And this is another reason why Wittgenstein adopted the style. In his opinion a philosophical idea should dawn on the reader and not be shoved under his nose. Philosophically this has not been entirely successful: conflicting ideas seem to dawn on different interpreters. But from the point of view of style it is hard to deny that the form grew, original, from within. Others have used aphorisms, but none so systematically and architectonically as Wittgenstein. The PhilosophicalInvestigations, his other major work, is a different matter, but not so different as some people think. It clearly lacks the tight structure of the Tractatus, if for no other reason than that its enumeration does not move forward like shafts rising from a pier-i1, 1.1, 1.11, 1.12, 1.13, 1.2, 1.21-but more conventionally1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ... in the first part, and i, ii, iii, iv ... in the second. When Wittgenstein came to write Part II of the Investigations he was already very ill and for long stretches of time too exhausted to work. The Investigations is like Beauvais Cathedral, magnificent in overall conception, complete in part and sufficiently complete in the uncompleted part to convey some idea of what the completed work might have been like. But the Investigationscould never have been quite like the Tractatus, since Wittgenstein's attitude not only toward philososo radicalphy but toward that book in particular had changed-not ly as some people think, but in many important respects. His thought was no longer architectonic, but free-ranging within limits, requiring a different style. Ironically he thought that his new style would correct the "error" of the Tractatus, its lack of exposition. He even confessed to Drury: "Now I find I am vain about the style in which I am able to write my present book." Admittedly there are paragraphs and even units and sections that have a resemblance to chapters, but if Wittgenstein thought he was offering an exposition of his thought in anything more than bursts, he was deceiving himself. The overall effect of the Investigations is not dissimilar to that of the Tractatus.Take the following, which might have come out of Ionesco or Beckett:

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"Now I know!" What happened there?-So, did I know nothingwhen I declared now I know? You [du]are looking at it wrong. (What purpose does the signal serve?) And could the "knowing"be called an accompanimentof the exclamation? (PI II, xi, p. 218) What the Investigations lacks, but does not need, is the simplicity and rigor, the ordered structure of the Tractatus.Wittgenstein makes all this clear in his preface. The book, he tells us, is concerned with many subjects. He had written down his thoughts as "remarks," short paragraphs, some of them forming chains of thought, others involving- abrupt changes. "At first it was my intention to bring these all together, summarized, in a book whose form I imagined differently at different times. But essentially it seemed to me that in it the thoughts should progress from one subject to another in a natural and uninterrupted sequence" (PI p. ix). After several attempts, he found it could not be done. He crippled his thought if he tried to force it in one direction against its natural inclination. Then he realized that the reason for this was connected with the very nature of the investigation he had undertaken: "That is to say, it compels us to travel through a wide territory of thought, criss-cross, in all directions, hither and thither. The philosophical remarks in this book are like a lot of landscape sketches that originated from those long and tortuous journeys" (PI p. ix). Many of the sketches even had to be rejected and others made, only to be rejected in turn. But a few passable ones remained. After editing, these were assembled so that a glimpse of the landscape could be given: the book, he concludes, is really nothing more than an album. Be that as it may, its form, which again is original, not to say unique, grew from the inside, resisting all exterior interfering stereotypes. It should be noted, however, that in form it more closely resembles the plays of Shakespeare than the classical forms of Beethoven. Besides the form of these works, a word must be said about Wittgenstein's use of language, his diction. This would call for a full treatment by someone with a vastly greater feeling for and knowledge of the German language than I possess. But at least something can and should be said here. He was not a master of the English language, so far as one can judge without ever having met him. He certainly had no right to correct Leavis's English. But his handling of the German language, so far as my hold on it (far more tenuous than Wittgenstein's on English) allows me to judge, seems to me to have been masterly, if idiosyncratic. It is for that reason that I offer my

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transliterations rather than rely on the polished translations of his approved translators. I do not say this in any spirit of rivalry, merely to show that an alternative is possible. To quote his own phrase, he as often as not hits the nail on the head with a clear, concise, and telling expression. His expressions were often colorful, vivid, and imaginative-"pain manages to get a foothold here, whereas before it was all, so to speak, too smooth," or "What is your aim in philosophy?-To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle" (PI I,??284; 309). Sometimes his imagery can be amusing-we don't call a person musical because he says "Ah!" when music is played "any more than simply we call a dog musical if it wags its tail when music is played" (LC 6). Wittgenstein did not shrink from using colloquialisms if they expressed his thought better than conventional philosophical language. Indeed he eschewed philosophical language, which hinders thought by interposing itself, or, worse, often passes for thought. How his colloquialisms sound to a German speaker I cannot tell. I fervently hope they do not sound as his English and American colloquialisms sound to me. On this Leavis was right, though Wittgenstein's use of "beastly" smacks more of the Drones Club than of Bloomsbury. All of this deserves lengthy, though not too solemn, examination from both a literary and philosophical point of view. From the literary point of view, to determine (among other things) to what extent he manipulated the German language, exploiting unusual usages, and to what extent he bent or forged it to his purposes. From the philosophical point of view, to determine how it served his own philosophy in particular and philosophy in general. Important questions arise here. If, as seems obvious to me, Wittgenstein was a literary genius, of whatever grade, should other philosophers attempt to imitate him? On the other hand, if his way of presenting philosophical ideas is an indictment of the conventional method-I say "if": it is by no means clear that it is-how can (or could) the conventional method be "improved"? It is comfortable for those who are not geniuses. Moreover, which style should we adopt-the classical, Tractatusstyle, or the Shakespearean, Investigations style? There are dangers either way. But, to return to literature. Throughout his notes and lectures Wittgenstein said many interesting things about the theater, about tragedy in particular, about the "happy ending," about the epic, about masks, indeed about the ways in which literature reaches out into the other arts and how they relate to it. I just note this: there is no space in which to discuss these remarks, even superficially.

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But the little that has been said above has, I hope, laid forever to rest Leavis's suggestion that Wittgenstein's interest in literature had "remained rudimentary." Apart from anything else, he numbered among his friends in Vienna, besides Kraus, the whole circle connected with Die Fackel which included Otto Weiniger, Trakl, the Zweigs, and Rilke. Not the company for a literary dud. Leavis might have been surprised, were he to have paid heed to it, by this testimony by Engelmann, who clearly understood Wittgenstein's earlier philosophy: "The sphere of intellectual life in which I gained most through Wittgenstein's influence ... is that of literature" (L 82).
UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK NOTES 1 Lecturesand Conversationson Aesthetics,Psychologyand Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Oxford, 1966); hereafter cited in text as LC. 2 F. R. Leavis, "Memories of Wittgenstein," The Human World, No. 10 (1973), 66-79; rpt. in Recollectionsof Wittgenstein,ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford, 1984); hereafter cited in text as RW. 3 This response is repeated when he adds: "(I thought) the easy aggressiveness of the injunction was the consequence of frequenting the Bloomsbury milieu in which he was 'Ludwig' to Keynes and company" (RW 65). 4 For its insight into Leavis's misjudgment of Wittgenstein and his feeling on the matter, the passage that follows deserves to be quoted in full: "he couldn't in any case imagine that criticism might matter intellectually." As everyone knows, Leavis did an enormous amount to establish English literature as a serious subject in its own right without having to resort to such support as Anglo-Saxon could lend (like a poor song and dance artiste who resorts to stripping in order to revive the flagging attention of her audience). The passage continues with such pomposities as: "a great creative work is a work of original exploratory thought," "philosophers are always weak on language" (!), and "his unmistakable genius as hardly more relevant to my own intellectual concerns than a genius for chess" (RW 65-66). 5 The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 4th ed., ed. Sir Paul Harvey (Oxford, 1967), p. 845. A 6 Norman Malcolm, in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Memoir (Oxford, 1958) (hereafter cited in text as LWM), recounts that Wittgenstein "had read The BrothersKaramazovan extraordinary number of times." This could mean that he had read it no more than twice. 7 Paul Engelmann, in discussing Wittgenstein's enthusiasm for the Vulgate version of the Bible, remarks: "in contrast with versions such as the German and Greek (the Hebrew original he was unable to read)," which implies that he must have been taught or taught himself to read Greek. See Engelmann's memoir in Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, With a Memoir, ed. B. F. McGuinness, tr. L. Furtmfiller (Oxford, 1967), hereafter cited in text as L. 8 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. Von Wright, tr. Peter Winch (Oxford, 1980), p. 58; hereafter cited in text as CV. Here, as with the Investigations(n. 10) and the Tractatus (n. 11), I am using my own transliterations of Wittgenstein's original text, while citing the standard translations.

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9 According to Plato, The Republic 3.394: "Poetry and fiction fall into three classes. First, that which employs representation only, tragedy and comedy, as you say. Secondly, that in which the poet speaks in his own person; the best example is lyric poetry. Thirdly, which employs both methods, epic and various other kinds of poetry" (translation by H. D. P. Lee [Harmondsworth, 1955], p. 133). 10 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., tr. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York, 1958), Part II, par. xi, pp. 218-20; hereafter cited in text as PI. 11 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, tr. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London, 1961), ? 1-1.11.